T
hey didn’t get the note until morning.
Before darkness fell Sunday evening, the whole of the neighborhood had been called into service: Tom Butler the cooper and his two sturdy apprentices, Ehud Hanson the shoemaker, Uzziah Begbie and his wife, Gower the blacksmith down the street . . .
No one had seen a sturdy fair-haired little boy, not even quite four weeks from his fourth birthday . . .
Please, dear God
, Abigail prayed soundlessly as she walked along Cornhill toward Milk Street,
please let him see his fourth birthday. Let us all see his fourth birthday . . .
The streets were Sabbath-quiet—
Thank you, God!
—without the carriages and cart traffic of the weekdays, without the cattle being herded along and the barrows, drays, flocks of chickens and geese that rendered the cobbled, crisscrossing ways so confusing for a tiny child.
He’ll have set off for Aunt Eliza’s
, Abigail told herself as she walked,
and gotten distracted by something else—
the handsome lawn of the Governor’s house or horses being harnessed to take some fashionable “worthy” to church. In this part of Boston, at least, if a stray child was found wandering—even one of the ragged little urchins from the North End waterfront—someone would take him or her in, would ask, “Where do you live, dearie?” and if no answer was forthcoming would keep an eye on the street for a distrait dark-haired woman in her blue go-to-church gown looking up every alleyway, around every tree . . .
Eliza and Isaac Smith were horrified. Eliza and Abigail searched the garden, and Young Isaac—for all his usual talk about not profaning the Sabbath—instantly put on his hat and went out to search in the streets round about, returning only when darkness was settling over the town to offer to walk Abigail home. “Of course we’ll send and let you know . . . We’ll have Cuffee outside in the street watching for him . . .”
“And poor Johnny thinks ’tis his fault,” said Abigail, as she and Young Isaac—still so-called though he was twenty-five years old and had his own church and congregation—made their way along Cornhill arm in arm. “Nabby was watching the younger boys and Johnny got into some kind of quarrel with her—as children do, with their rivalries over books and toys and slate-pencils. John came out of the front of the house and adjudicated the conflict, and by the time anyone looked round, Charley was gone.”
“He can’t have got far,” opined Isaac firmly, despite the fact that his mother’s house on Milk Street was far from Queen Street by anyone’s stretch of the imagination and no one seemed to think that Charley had any other destination. And then—giving himself the lie—“Would he have found his way to the Common?”
Abigail looked up. Dark had fallen, and above the black jumble of rooflines, stars shone clear and glittering, like diamonds. The moon was in its last dwindle toward darkness. “
Why
?” she asked. “Your mother’s house is nearer—”
“Would he have known that?” reasoned the young parson. “He could simply have gotten lost. And if he grew frightened, it could easily be that he’d hesitate to speak to a stranger . . . and there are few about the streets of a Sunday between dinner and dark.”
“True,” said Abigail, as they passed the tall brick tower of the Old Meeting-House and turned up Queen Street. “But Charley isn’t the least shy of strangers. When he gets hungry, he’ll turn to the first friendly looking stranger he meets to ask him to lead him home. And he knows he lives in—”
She broke off, seeing the men moving about the alleyway that led to the back of the house. She quickened her steps, almost snatching up her skirts to run. When she got close, she saw that in addition to her neighbors, there were four or five of the North End roughnecks whose assistance Sam could habitually call on if so be he needed a Tory’s shopwindow broken or—for instance—a mob to storm the Governor’s house . . .
Paul Revere was in the kitchen, talking to John. “—almost certain, ’twas the same woman,” he was saying. “I’ll tell Sam to get his men out onto the Common, though I cannot imagine Charley wouldn’t walk up to the door of the first house he came to and knock on it, asking to be taken home—or given part of their dinner on the spot, more like—”
“You’ve heard nothing, then?” Abigail’s glance went from her husband to her friend. “Did Sam send you?”
And saw the look that passed between the two men, that turned her blood to water in her veins. “I came on another matter,” Revere said. “Sam heard today that the corpse of a woman whom he believes might be this Mrs. Lake you spoke of—the one who kidnapped your cousin Horace—”
“She didn’t precisely—” Abigail hesitated on the denial, realizing that, effectively, that was exactly what had happened. And then, as the silversmith’s words sank in, “Corpse?”
“A couple of boatmen”—by which Abigail knew he meant
smugglers—
“found her washed up on the rocks of Bird Island, where the river’s current sets around with the tide. She was well-dressed, they said, and dark-haired. They said they’d heard from Munn in Charles Town that a woman thereabouts had disappeared.”
“Mrs. Morgan,” said Abigail softly. “The owner of—”
“Good Lord, not La Fata Morgana?” Revere almost laughed—he clearly knew what Mrs. Morgan was known to be—but sobered at once. “Well, I’ll be . . . She’s William Chamberville’s mistress, isn’t she? One of our dear Governor’s in-laws—”
“Was she drowned?” Abigail recalled uneasily the glimmer of the river through the trees past the foot of Moulton’s Hill. “The house isn’t far from the river—”
John shot her a sharp glance; Revere barely raised an eyebrow. But he only said, “No, not drowned. Her throat was cut.”
W
hyever Revere had come to the house, he wasted no time in sending one of his men to fetch Sam, and by midnight—when Abigail finally went to bed—every smuggler, rope-beater, and out-of-work apprentice in the Sons of Liberty was moving about the streets of Boston, lantern in hand, searching for Charley. Katy went out with them. Pattie remained with Abigail to comfort Nabby’s guilty tears and Johnny’s even more excruciating stoic wretchedness: “’Twas only his way, my Hercules,” whispered Abigail, gathering her eldest son against her side as they sat together on the settle and stroking his baby-fine fair hair. “You know how he is. If it hadn’t been you and your sister, he’d have gone for the door next time one or the other of you buckled your shoe or went to the backhouse—” She said it to make them giggle, which they did. “’Tis just how Charley is right now, always wanting to be off exploring. You remember how you were, Johnny. How you had to follow Ben Clayford and his brother when they went fishing, and you climbed out the window of your room to do it—”
“I was a baby then,” protested the six-year-old. “All the more, I should have been watching Charley, and not giving in to my ill-temper and sinfulness.”
Nabby, on her other side, clung to Abigail’s arm and began to cry softly again. “If something hasn’t happened to him,” she whispered, “they’d have found him by now.”
This, Abigail knew, was perfectly true.
And it was also perfectly true that there were a thousand places within a quarter mile of Queen Street where a wellmeaning, inquisitive boy only-just-three-weeks-short-of-four could come to terrible and irrevocable grief.
The Long Wharf. Endlessly fascinating, and extending close to a half mile out to sea: ships, boxes, coils of rope. Wet boards slippery and slanting. Mysterious ladders extending down to the cold beryl black chop of the water.
Merchant Street, every shop and warehouse shut up and secretive-looking on the late Sabbath afternoon: cellar-doors, stacks of barrels, piles of crates that could easily fall unheard by any, pinning a little boy underneath.
In the other direction the Common, whose grassy open spaces might tempt the boy to explore further. Yet if he’d gone to the Common, what harm could he come to—?
In her mind she saw the men, nevertheless, traversing the dark rise of the ground toward Beacon Street, where the lamps of Mr. Hancock’s elegant house shone against the slope of the hill.
The Mill Pond—
Abigail closed her eyes in prayer that she couldn’t even phrase. Then she said, “Come. ’Twill do you no good, nor Charley either, to have you sitting up and making yourselves sick just because he’s been goose enough to get himself lost. The moment he’s brought back—and you know he’ll be brought back and have his hide well tanned by his father for worrying us all!—I shall wake you and fetch you down.”
“Might Johnny sleep in with me and Tommy,” whispered Nabby, “’til Charley comes back?”
Pattie carried the sleeping Tommy up to the small room at the end of the hall, and Johnny and Nabby snuggled in together in the girl’s narrow bed, like two doleful little ghosts in their white nightrails. Abigail held them and sang to them and reassured them, though neither felt much like hearing a story. When she left them, by the light of her single candle she still saw the glimmer of their open eyes.
If something hasn’t happened to him, they’d have found him by now.
She leaned her head back against the hard wood of the fireside settle, staring into the silky whispers of light as they played over the embers.
He didn’t start his running away until I left him at Eliza’s
, she thought.
Because ’twas only then that he was old enough and strong enough to get far? Because ’twas only then that he realized that a world of delight existed in her garden, which our pokey little yard could not approach in wonderment?
Because ’twas only then that his mother would leave him with Pattie and Katy while she swanned off to Cambridge in quest of mysteries and justice?
Admit it, Portia
, she told herself, knowing it for the truth of her heart and hating herself.
YOU have supped with the Devil in meddling with justice that is John’s work—a man’s work. You revel in “seeing through the riddles of criminal conduct,” in being “a veritable Alexander . . .”
She closed her eyes.
And this is what has come of trying to take a man’s part.
Her whole soul cried out in anger at this view, repeated to her throughout her childhood by her mother and aunts. She knew herself capable of more than just bearing children and washing baby-clouts . . .
It CAN’T be God’s intent . . .
Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also
, the Scripture said.
Your treasure should be here, in this house, with your children.
She could almost hear her mother saying it. And in her heart of hearts, she knew that the house was not where her treasure lay.
I am what I am! God made me what I am!
A woman, her mother’s voice replied.
God made you a woman, with a woman’s lesser part to play.
“
Who can find a virtuous woman?
” the Psalmist asked, “
for her price is far above rubies
.”
Who can find her indeed, if she’s left for Cambridge for the day to look for pirate gold?
“The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her . . .”
. . .
and should be able to have faith that she won’t mislay his children.
“She will do him good and not evil, all the days of her life.”
Abigail could almost see her mother, a tall stern woman and extraordinarily beautiful, despite the tightly pinned daycap on her raven hair and the trim dark simple dress of a minister’s wife. Long hands like a queen’s, roughened and reddened by laundry diligently done each Tuesday and not pushed off until some later date, by dishes washed, by floors swept. A beautiful alto voice reading the verses of Proverbs to her three too-intelligent daughters:
She worketh willingly with her hands . . . She riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household . . . She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vinyard . . .
Abigail’s heart protested furiously,
A man’s life is at stake
. . .
A dozen mens’, or a hundred, depending on that wretched Commissioner or whoever the King is sending that keeps John up all the night planning and organizing what can be done . . .
But that is not your business, Abigail.
She could almost hear her mother saying it.
The Scripture might proclaim,
She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy—
But her mother would say—and she was right, Abigail reflected in agony—that the first duty of a woman was to her children, and her second to her husband, whose children she must guard while he went and had all the peril . . .
And the excitement and the intellectual sharpening that went with it.
She felt the guilt like a physical pain, an ache in her side where Charley would curl himself up against her when, worn out with the mischiefs of a three-year-old, he would come back to her, cling to her, knowing she would keep him safe.
And she hadn’t.
She woke up cold, her neck aching where her head had tipped sideways, the kitchen dark around her. The faintest glow of the unbanked hearth rimmed the pans on their hooks, the queens-ware dishes on their shelves, made copper mirrors of Messalina’s wide, demented eyes. She had dreamed of arguing with John—shouting at him through iron bars that separated them,
You left them! You left them, and you left me!
knowing he would be taken away to Halifax, tried by a military court, and hanged for treason. Knowing that it was somehow her fault.
For a time she listened in the stillness, wondering what it was that had waked her. Then she rose slowly, stiffly, to stir up the fire again. Not long after that John and Thaxter came in, their voices muffled in the yard, calling out to others, thanking them . . . arranging a meeting by the Mill Pond as soon as it grew light.
“You didn’t find him,” she whispered, when the men came in, and John gathered her in his arms. She clung to him, trembling, trying to shove away the last stains of her dream out of her mind. Feeling in the rhythm of his breath the degree of his own dread and pain.