Seated on a tree stump, wrapped in her own cloak and Coldstone’s, too, and shivering as if her bones would shatter, Abigail looked quickly up at him.

“God made me what I am,” he repeated softly. “But I chose to fight for our rights.” He looked across the torchlit clearing, to where Coldstone knelt, talking to Rebecca. “Please tell her that.”

“Would you wish me to ask her,” said Abigail, “if she will speak to you?”

Men carried Bargest’s body out of the broken little house. There was no time, nor a horse to spare, to bear him back even as far as Salem with them, and there was no knowing whether the Gileadites would themselves return to bury him before the vermin of the woods came to feed. Coldstone had brought six men in all—enough to provide protection but by no stretch of any Patriot imagination a threat of armed force—and two of them stood on either side of Hazlitt, watching the darkness all around them with frightened eyes.

After England’s tame fields, Abigail thought, the woods of America must seem primeval beyond description, and what they’d seen recently—both in Boston and here in the hinterland—could not have been reassuring.

Across the clearing by torchlight, Coldstone pressed Rebecca’s hand, and helped her rise. Exhausted as her friend was, Abigail guessed that she would be capable of coming up with a convincing explanation of why Perdita Pentyre would have come to her house at midnight, without the slightest reference to the Sons of Liberty or insulting pamphlets about the British on Castle Island.

Orion said, “Thank you, Mrs. Adams, but no. I don’t want to upset her, and I know she would never understand. Only Mother—” He stopped himself, and turned his face away. His hands were bound behind him but Abigail guessed that the blood on his shirt-cuffs was his mother’s. “Only Mother truly understood that I don’t want to be what I am,” he finished quietly. “I wish she hadn’t seen me. Not because she’d tell, but because . . . Her good opinion . . .”