Pattie got up to put more hot water in the teapot. Bess had brought a quarter of a brick of good Dutch East India Company oolong, respectably smuggled and ambrosial after many months of coffee and sassafras.

“He’s always seemed so respectable,” lamented Abigail encouragingly.

“There’s a good many men in this town who seem respectable,” chimed in Hannah. Like her mother, she didn’t seem particularly put out by this fact. Abigail wondered if she guessed about her father and Surry.

The picture emerged of a man of lusty appetites, of quick temper, of sharp acumen where money and business were concerned; a man disinclined to keep rules where they interfered with what he considered his rights as a man, whether those rules were laid down by the Crown or the Congregation. He had many cronies, and made friends easily; was on good terms with one of his daughters, but the other two tended to be bitter over his way of life. His one son had gone to sea, and had been taken from his uncle’s ship off Barbados, and pressed into the British Navy. Steps had been taken to get him out, but he had died before he could return home.

Abigail asked, “When was this?” no longer wondering at the man’s dedication to the cause of rights for the colonists.

“Three years ago?” Bess paused in her sewing—baskets of sheets, shirts, the children’s clothing lay on the big kitchen table between them, the eternal work of a household. Abigail didn’t wonder at it, that Mrs. Tillet had pressed poor Rebecca into servitude to keep up with extra stitching for money. “Sixty-nine, maybe? I remember he vowed then that he’d mend his way of life—that was the same year there was trouble with the elders of the Congregation. But it takes great strength, to alter the way a man lives. The hunger for the old ways grew on him, I guess.”

“If he’d left Boston, he might have stood a better chance of mending his ways,” remarked Hannah, bringing two of the work-candles close, so that she could thread up a needle by their light. “Here, if a man wants to make a change, he has to almost abandon all his friends. If he was out in Essex County, it would take a deal of trouble to find gambling houses and bad women.”

“He would only have ended up seducing his neighbors’ wives.” Bess turned a shirt right-side out, to inspect a darn. “But you may be right. He went back, in any case. I suppose only knowing that it was just a few minutes’ walk, to the Mermaid or the Queen of Argyll, was too much for him. Especially if he didn’t really think there was anything wrong with what he was doing in the first place.”