To Abigail, the tight-tangled alleys and narrow, anonymous rights-of-way that made up the North End always smacked more of the village Boston had been a hundred and fifty years ago, than of the thriving colonial city it had become. In fall and spring, the bustle and variety in the crowded streets went to her head like a glass of wine: book-shops, silversmiths’, the closeness of the wharves with their tall ships; the smells of sea salt and pine. In the stench and heat of summer, with pigs and chickens and the occasional milk-goat blocking the narrow alleys, she invariably felt a longing for the green quiet and fresh food of Braintree, and today—with winter closing in, and the bells of the city tolling, and an edge of violence in the air—it seemed to her that here in this cramped islet could be found the concentrated solution of the worst of what Boston was.

Boston was a seaport town: sailors, both coastal and deep-water, were to be seen everywhere. The tenements that crowded these narrow streets housed them in their hundreds and—cheek-by-jowl with them—the chandler ies, slopshops, and harlots that made up their world.

Boston was a wealthy town: Amid the crumbling squalor of dockside poverty, handsome brick mansions reared, where merchant families had held land for generations while the neighborhood decayed around them. Up until eight years ago, Governor Hutchinson had resided here with his family, in a splendid house up the hill from his wharf. Then in ’65—enraged by Britain’s arbitrary decision to tax everything printed, from bills of lading to playing cards—rioters had gutted the building, burned the Governor’s painstakingly collected library of the colony’s oldest documents, and driven his family out into the night. The family lived in Milton now, in the countryside, and the Governor, when in town, had a newer and larger brick mansion on Marlborough Street close to the Commons. The Olivers—relations of the Hutchinsons and the Governor’s appointees to the most lucrative colonial posts—had a house on the North End as well, but as Abigail passed it, she noted that its shutters were up, and the knocker taken from its door.