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and a respectable goodwife from Boston—that her listener was a Loyalist to whom the name of her husband’s notorious cousin was anathema.
    “No, Sam Brooke,” she extemporized hastily. “A neighbor of mine on Queen Street. An elderly gentleman who once—I suspect—had a great deal to do with the smuggling trade and may very well have known Mistress Pitts in her old age.” She felt like kicking herself, because of course Sam Adams was precisely whom she meant. Three-quarters of the Sons of Liberty were mixed up in smuggling to one degree or another. Why put yourself in danger of an Admiralty noose, if it weren’t to avoid paying the King’s taxes on this, that, and the other, every time the King decided one of his friends needed a job as a special revenue collector?
    Abigail had frequently deplored the fact that wily Cousin Sam seemed to be on a first-name basis with half the wharf-rats in Boston Harbor. But on this occasion , she thought, he might as well do some good . . .
    If he wasn’t packing to get himself out of Boston, she reflected grimly, before the King’s vengeance—whatever it was going to be—for the tea came ashore.
    Whatever it was going to be, it was almost certainly going to involve a warrant for Sam Adams’s arrest.
    What broke her sleep every night for weeks—and had caused her to warn her fourteen-year-old servant-girl, Pattie, and John’s clerk, Thaxter (not Horace but his—and Abigail’s—esteemed cousin), to stand ready to take the children to Uncle Isaac’s house at the first sign of trouble—was not knowing how far beyond Sam the arrests would spread.
    And what the Sons of Liberty would choose to do about the situation.
    She picked up the two letters again and realized that the window light had faded to the point where they were difficult to read. “Good Heavens, it must be getting close to sundown,” she said in alarm. “If I’m to be back to Boston—”
    “Aunt Abigail, mea culpa—”
    “Dash it, where’s that lazy buck Diomede?” Fairfield sprang to his feet, strode toward the kitchen. “He’ll have the chaise harnessed for you before a fly can wash his little hands, m’am—”
     
     
    I n fifteen minutes Abigail was being assisted into an extremely elegant English chaise outside the Golden Stair, with bows and thanks and assurances that Horace would be permitted neither food, drink, nor sleep that night until he’d finished a verbatim copy of Mrs. Lake’s disgraceful document. In twenty, she was clinging to the brass rail of the vehicle as it bowled sharply along through the slanted evening sunlight on the road to Charles Town. Like most Virginians, young Mr. Fairfield favored spirited horseflesh, but Diomede—a big-shouldered man in his fifties—was a skilled and careful driver: Abigail was disconcerted and exhilarated by the speed, but never frightened.
    When Diomede apologized for the pace—“But for a fact, m’am, we’ll be fortunate to make the ferry before it closes down”—she felt encouraged to ask him, was he himself familiar with the countryside hereabouts?
    “Not like a native, m’am,” he said, in a deep velvet bass. “I came up with Mr. Fairfield in ’70, and he’s a personable young gentleman, as I’m sure you’ve observed. The year before last, when there was such a to-do about that revenue ship that went aground in Rhode Island and was burned by smugglers claiming to be against taxation, Mr. Fairfield formed up a company of gentlemen loyal to the King—the King’s Own Volunteers, they call themselves—and so he’s widely known from here to Medford and always being invited to stay at this house or that. Mr. Charles Fairfield—Mr. George’s father—gave me instructions to make sure that he kept to his book.”
    The valet smiled as he reined in to let an oncoming wagon pass in the narrow road where it swung around the base of Prospect Hill. “But it’s true also that so far as I can see, the reason a young gentleman goes