“And if he forged the note, Mrs. Malvern would not have been still awake,” responded John thoughtfully. He set the fire-shovel back in its place. “What time are the Tillets expected back, my Portia?” he asked, using the name they had used in their letters during courtship: she Portia, he Lysander, like heroine and hero of a classical romance. “Do you feel able for a half-mile walk, to see what the Watch have left of Sam’s handiwork? Or would you rather rest?” he added, scrutinizing her face more closely. “You look—”

“I look like a woman ready to faint away in your arms,” replied Abigail briskly. “Yet in either case my conscience would not let me rest, after what I’ve done to poor Pattie this morning—and burdened her with entertaining that young lout of an Irishman . . .”

“Oh, m’am.” Pattie dimpled shyly from the table where she was scrubbing potatoes. “Sergeant Muldoon meant nobody harm. Not even Mr. Adams, I daresay. You go,” she added. “Mrs. Malvern may even have come back, if what happened there didn’t drive her into brain-fever, so that she’s forgotten who and where she is.”

“If she’s forgotten,” said John softly, putting on his wig again while Abigail took off her apron and stepped into her pattens in their corner by the door, “’tis a curious thing that none of her neighbors found her wandering and reminded her.”

By this hour, Fish Street was a lively confusion of carts and drays coming up from the docks, of pungent smells and the clattering of hammers: shoemakers, coopers, smiths in silver and iron. The North End—technically an island, if you counted the little Mill Creek as a branch of the ocean—was a crowded jumble of rich and poor, of the mansions of merchant families and the tenements offering lodging to those who sailed on their vessels, of tangled alleyways and unexpected courts and yards. Shop signs and laundry, boat builders, hatters, soap makers, and taverns packed shoulder to shoulder like passengers in a too-small coach as they had been for over a century. Among the waterfront taverns and warehouses the smugglers operated, bringing in cognac and linens and tea from France and Holland in flagrant disregard of the British Crown’s stringent trade regulations; gangs of thieves, too, pilfering goods from the tall English ships and slipping them out almost at once on the numberless tiny coastal traders that brought in hay and firewood, oysters and butter, from a thousand little towns along the coast. It was among the artisans, stevedores, and laborers of the North End that the Boston mobs arose, ready to hammer down Tory doors or launch themselves into bloody battle with the South End boys during the riotous celebrations of Pope’s Day.