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us.”
    She half expected the young Virginian to object at the mention of Paul Revere’s name, but he’d clearly never heard of the man in his life. Like most people outside of Boston, George Fairfield’s knowledge of the Sons of Liberty was limited to Sam Adams and James Otis (who hadn’t been able to be active among them for years, poor man) and some of their more spectacular exploits, like sacking the Governor’s house, destroying shops, and dumping $92,000 worth of tea into the harbor.
    Instead he declared, “And I am going to do the obvious and have a look around the ladies of the surrounding countryside to see who might be Mrs. Lake.”
    To which Weyountah laughed, “Why does it not surprise me that George is going to look around among the ladies?”
    “Dash it, man, the woman wasn’t just made up out of mud for the occasion. She has to have come from someplace, chaise, coachman, and all.”
    “For that matter,” said Weyountah thoughtfully, “where would this Mrs. Lake—or whoever she really is—have gotten a text in Arabic, or Arabic lettering, to copy from? The only scholar in Harvard who had any Arabic texts at all was old Reverend Seckar, and Horace got all of his when he died.”
    “And lucky thing he did,” said Fairfield. “Poisonous old screw was going to leave them all to the College and stick his poor wife and sister without a bean. You got a few too out of that lot, didn’t you, Weyountah?”
    “Are you also a scholar of Oriental languages?” inquired Abigail—though why a young man who’d been born in a two-room wigwam in the woods of Rhode Island shouldn’t have as much of an interest in the wisdom from another portion of the world as one who’d been born thirty miles away in a two-room farmhouse in the woods of Massachusetts, she didn’t know, once she thought of it.
    The Narraganset shook his head. “No, natural science,” he said. “Astronomy, chiefly, but really anything I can get my hands on. The books Mrs. Seckar was selling off were ruinously old and of little use, given the advances that have been made in the studies of things like atmospheric vapors and air and water pressure. I’ve begun correspondence with Mr. Franklin,” he added, naming a little shyly the foremost scientist and philosopher in the colonies. “He’s been good enough to recommend me to the Royal Society in England, which has been of enormous assistance. There’s so little over here.”
    “So little of anything,” sighed Horace wistfully.
    “Which brings us back,” declared Fairfield firmly, “to where we started. Where would that Arabic text have been copied from? Who would have written a document like that in Arabic , for the Lord’s sake—”
    “Obviously,” said Abigail, “someone who knew Arabic writing and was using it as a code to keep a record of a disgraceful encounter—I assume for purposes of blackmail.”
    “Would Henry Morgan care if everybody on the Spanish Main knew he was having a—um—Latin lesson”—Fairfield hastily interpolated a euphemism, having clearly, for the moment, forgotten that Abigail was a respectable matron and his friend’s aunt to boot—“with someone by the name of Jezebel Pitts? I don’t imagine Mistress Pitts would mind. Besides,” he added, “they’ve both been dead for years.”
    “The principal activity Governor Morgan was practicing with Mistress Pitts,” Abigail reminded him starchily, “is called, without going into Latin, conspiracy to commit embezzlement . . . and given the fact that it involved assistance from pirates, it probably would be considered treason as well by an Admiralty Court. Reason enough to justify hush-money to someone, I’m sure, even if they did not manage to lift any actual gold. But as Mr. Fairfield so justly points out, both parties have been in their dishonored graves for decades. Sam might know . . .”
    “Sam—Adams?”
    Abigail remembered too late—just as Fairfield had forgotten that she was an aunt