The stairwell door opened: Revere and Dr. Warren emerged. Warren went to collect their coats from the chair beside the desk—Of course, Abigail noted wrathfully, the puddle of rainwater beneath the window has been mopped away with everything else. Revere moved to close up a hinged niche in the paneling that Abigail had not seen before, close to the fireplace in the room’s darkest corner. A secret niche—empty now, but Abigail could see how a paper or two, dropped by someone standing before it, could easily whisk through the kitchen door.
Rebecca’s hidey-hole for unwritten poems—and incriminating lists.
“When you first came in here,” said Sam quietly, “you didn’t take anything, did you? Other than the list that you brought me?”
Exasperated, Abigail replied, “John has always told me that if you want a hope of solving a crime, never remove or alter anything from its scene until you’ve had a chance to examine everything there.”
“Well, the next time someone’s murdered in the house of one of the Sons of Liberty,” retorted Sam, “we’ll have John talk to the Watch . . . if he deigns to be in town for the occasion. In the meantime, when you were here this morning, you didn’t happen to see a brown ledger, about so big—” His hands sketched a quarto-sized rectangle, about half the size of the green-backed household ledger that still lay on the corner of Rebecca’s desk. “It would have ‘House hold Expenses’ written on the cover.”
“And I collect,” said Abigail, “it does not contain anything to do with the cost of candles and flour?”
There was another silence, as the men looked at one another. Then Sam nodded toward the niche as Paul fiddled shut its catch, and his heavy jaw set hard. “The rest of the papers in there had mostly to do with Rebecca’s pamphle teering, and her sources of gossip within the British camp. But the brown ledger held the names of our men in the British camp—and the ciphers we use to communicate with them and with the Committees of Correspondence in Virginia and elsewhere. If those fall into the British commander’s hands, we’re all going to be in a great deal of trouble.”
Four
“ orHeaven’s sake, woman, don’t march out of here as if you were leading a troop of dragoons!”
Half past nine striking from Old South Meeting-House. Abigail—who had simply put her head out the rear door to ascertain whether Queenie was in the Tillet kitchen—could see no sign of activity in the house, but the sounds of passing footsteps, of sailors shouting to one another in Fish Street, of peddlers and stevedores along the wharves, came clearly to her. She drew back inside, where Sam, Revere, and Dr. Warren clustered nervously behind her.
“Give me the count of three hundred. That should give me time to go around to the shop, and ask the boys if Queenie or that scullery girl is there, and draw them out of the back of the house. You can empty the water and the rags into the outhouse as you go out, and I’ll keep them talking for a while, before we come back here and find the body. I’ll try to have Queenie with me when I—”
“No!” Sam’s big hand flinched in a shushing gesture. “We go to Hazlitt’s first. Then we call the Watch.”
“ ou really think that mother of his would have let Mrs. Malvern through the door?” Revere asked, a few minutes later, as the four of them made their way along Middle Street trying to look like people out pursuing their lawful business.
“A woman crying for help, on a pitch-black night, in the pouring rain?” By his disbelieving frown, Abigail deduced that Dr. Warren hadn’t heard Lucretia Hazlitt on the subject of Babylonian harlots who deserted honest husbands in order to seduce her innocent son. “For that matter, why wouldn’t Mrs. Malvern have simply run to the nearest watchman—?”
“Perhaps because it was pitch-black and pouring rain,” replied Sam, “and the nearest watchman was huddled next to the common-room fire at the Sheep and Lamb—”
“At midnight?” protested Warren—who obviously thought that all taverns along the Boston waterfront obeyed the city ordinances about closing times.
Sam and Revere gave him glances that pitied his naïveté. They crossed the Mill Creek on its little bridge, the waters low now on the slack tide, though when the tide was running it could make a respectable enough torrent to turn the water mill that reared up to their right. Abigail couldn’t keep herself from glancing down at the gray stream and tried to put from her mind what this street would be like on such a night as last night had been, with every house shuttered tight and the rain hammering down, no starlight, no moonlight, only the rush of the tidal flow in the stream to guide a woman groping in the darkness.
“ other, I’m quite sure that Deacon Curtin has heard every one of the arguments for Mankind’s Salvation by good works,” Orion Hazlitt was saying as Sam and Abigail entered his tiny shop.
His mother neatly sidestepped the gentle hand that he put out, and planted herself before the customer, whose face was growing alarmingly red. “Forgetting those things that are behind, the Apostle says, and reaching forth unto those things that are before, I press toward the mark.” Still dazzlingly beautiful, for all the silvering of the raven hair beneath her house-cap, Lucretia Hazlitt shook a finger at the elderly man whom Abigail recognized as one of the Deacons of New South Church. “Now, if the truth revealed unto the Apostle had been, I sit still, knowing that God hath already saved me without the slightest stir on my part toward salvation, would he not have said, I sit still, knowing—”
“Please.” Hazlitt took his mother’s hand, began to lead her toward the shop’s rear door, which led, Abigail knew, into an even tinier “keeping room.” These little kitchen-cum-parlors backed most Boston shops whose upper floors housed the shopkeepers’ families. His strained smile did nothing to change the outraged deacon’s glare, but he tried anyway. “My mother doesn’t always know what she is saying.”
“So I should hope,” retorted the man drily.
“I know without some hypocrite roarer to tell me, my son, that Faith without Works is dead—”
“Exactly so, Mrs. Hazlitt.” Abigail stepped neatly to Mrs. Hazlitt’s other side, and took her hand. “Yet, m’am, I have wanted for a long time to ask you, how do you reconcile what the Lord said to Ezekiel, about my comeliness that I had put upon you . . . ?” Though Abigail loved few things more than she loved a good discussion of well-reasoned theology, she knew she wasn’t going to get one from Mrs. Hazlitt. She hoped, as the widow poured an excited torrent of Scripture, personal visions, and the revelations of her own favorite pastors over her, that Sam would conclude his questioning of Orion promptly and come to her rescue.
And the part of her mind that wasn’t silently protesting the view of God the Eternal Tally-Keeper—silently, because Mrs. Hazlitt never permitted anyone to interrupt the flow of her revelations and opinion—raised a disbelieving eyebrow and asked, Sam?