January–February 1780

After Asa left, the snow fell and fell.

Day and night. Night and day. Never stopping. The flurries of white constant.

Numbing.

By Christmas week, the drifts lay five feet deep, making tunnels of the streets and keeping everyone indoors, but even indoors we found no reprieve from the cold. The rivers froze the traffic of ships, but the ice hadn’t compacted enough for sleds to cross them with firewood. With no fuel to live or cook by, we had to turn to scavenging. One day, we warmed our hands by burning timber from old ships. The next, by burning fence pickets and barn siding. And we were the fortune ones. In some parts of the city, Maggie told us, people were even burning animal fat to stay warm.

But staying warm wasn’t our only challenge. The city’s storehouses were mere weeks from being emptied of food. With no victualing ships in sight, it appeared we’d soon freeze and starve. In such harsh conditions, even New York’s unstoppable social scene suffered. No one wanted to venture out. With the heart of the British army in the south, my intelligence gathering came to an abrupt halt.

“The hardest winter,” people began to call it. And we were nowhere near the end of it.

While Lucy and Aunt Nora spent the days darning stockings, shirts, and petticoats, I tucked Asa’s letter between the pages of a book and read it. A dozen times. A hundred. I read it till I knew the curves and loops of every letter. Till I’d memorized each sentence. Till I found myself whispering none but yours to myself at breakfast. At church. At dinner. In bed.

It was a phrase for dreaming. A phrase that opened a door just wide enough for my imagination to slip through and escape. After years of plunging into thick volumes by Milton, Voltaire, Andrews, and Pope, I found myself leaping into the sea and cutting through water, Mercy right beside me. Pacing over white sand as waves clear as glass washed over my bare feet.

My imagination grew stronger by the day, till it was as colorful as the world was colorless. I traveled to Versailles and had long garden walks with Marie Antoinette. I stepped into the pages of Evelina, bringing my friends along so they could meet her. I became a pirate as wicked as Edward Teach. A pickpocket more cunning than Jenny Diver.

I knew such flights of fancy were dangerous. I had a family and friends. I had Duncan. Nothing good could come of imagining other possibilities. But I couldn’t leave the house, nor could I spy. Nor could I ask Asa what he’d meant by none but yours.

So I allowed myself to dream.

“We are failing him,” Townsend told me one Wednesday in late January.

Him was General Washington. Code number 711, according to the sheet Anna Strong had passed to me. For the past weeks, I’d had nothing to report. Not a thing. Even Townsend’s information had slowed to a trickle, so we often found ourselves discussing what we already knew.