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Back The Ninth Daughter
Chapters (37)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. Twenty-six
  30. Twenty-seven
  31. Twenty-eight
  32. Twenty-nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty-one
  35. Thirty-two
  36. Thirty-three
  37. Thirty-four

The colony must support the mother country, the Tories said: timber and wheat, potash and salt fish. Unnatural mother, who forbids her children to outgrow their leading-strings! She could almost hear Rebecca saying it, on one of dozens of nights during the six months she’d lived with her and John after leaving Charles Malvern, sitting with them at the kitchen table at the white house on Brattle Street, while John “cooked up” his letters, articles, protests under a dozen different names. What would you or any of your neighbors say of Abigail, sir, if she tried to keep Nabby or Johnny from learning to walk, to run, to one day take their place in the world of grown women and men? And John had grinned at her and dipped his pen in the standish (that had been imported from England—the ink, too!) and had said, That’s good . . . I’ll use that.

Her mind chased the thought back. Rebecca, still with Charles then, had been in that same kitchen with her in March of ’70, when shots had rung out in the snowy twilight. It was Rebecca who’d stayed with the children—Johnny had been three at the time, Nabby almost five—when Abigail, great with another child, had gone to the end of Brattle Street, and had seen the dead of what had come to be called the “Boston Massacre,” and the dark gouts of blood on the trampled snow.

Her second daughter—her poor, fragile Suky—had died, barely a year old, only the month before the Massacre. It was Rebecca who had comforted her, talked with her so many nights in that kitchen, when John was away at the distant courts or meeting with the Sons of Liberty—to Rebecca she had been able to say what she would not say to John for fear of opening the wounds of his own raw grief. When Charley was born at the end of that May after the Massacre, Rebecca had been there to care for the other two, and had stayed on until nearly October, before finding rooms of her own in the maze of crowded boardinghouses and tenements in the North End.

And now she had fled—Where? As she passed North Square Abigail almost turned her steps to Revere’s house, knowing it was there that Rebecca would go, but if Rebecca for some reason had not, then Revere would be at his shop. In any case—