At first Tom had been hurt, then angry. The third day, he’d decided to treat the whole business as a joke; out of sight of his brother, he had laughed.

But finding employment in Boston proved to be no laughing matter. Whether he had a bad reputation, or whether Eliot had been busy warning everybody about him, he could find no encouragement from any of the merchants he knew. Evidently, if he remained in Boston, life was going to be difficult.

He also wondered if his father had made any provision for him in his will. But when he asked his brother, and Eliot told him, “Only under certain conditions, which you do not fulfill,” he had no doubt that his brother was telling the truth.

So what was he to do? Should he return to London? Eliot would probably pay for his passage, if that would remove him permanently from Boston. But it irked him to be run out of town by his own brother.

Besides, there was still the other consideration that had brought him here.

The Duke of York’s fleet remained in Boston harbor. The commander was making a show of attending to the Duke’s affairs in Boston. But a conversation with a young officer had soon confirmed what Tom had suspected all along. The fleet was going down to New Amsterdam, and soon. “If the Duke can take New Netherland from the Dutch, he’ll be master of an empire here,” the officer told him. “We’re carrying enough cannon-balls and powder to blow New Amsterdam to bits.” The King of England’s assurance to the Dutch had been that amusing monarch’s favorite tactic: a brazen lie.

And if this was the case, then the opportunities for a young Englishman in the American colonies were about to improve. It would be foolishness on his part to return to England now. What he needed was a plan.

The idea came to him the next day. Like many of Tom’s ideas, it was outrageous, but not without humor. He’d met a girl he remembered, in a tavern—a girl of no good reputation—and talked to her for a while. The day after that, he returned to talk to her again. When he told her what he wanted, and named the price he’d pay, she laughed, and agreed.

That evening, he spoke to his brother.

He started with an apology. He told Eliot that he felt repentance for his past misdeeds. This was greeted by silence. Tom then explained that he wanted to settle down, no matter how humbly, and try to lead a better life.

“Not here, I hope,” his brother said.

Indeed that was his plan, Tom told him. And not only that, he thought he’d found a wife. At this news, Eliot had gazed at him in blank astonishment.

There was a woman he had known before, Tom explained, a woman who had also led a less than perfect life, but who was ready to repent. What better way of showing Christian forgiveness and humility than to save her?