When she left him she told him to rest indoors as long as he liked.

Usually a spy’s job is slow and tedious, but in all professions there are windfalls. Sometimes God bestirs Himself in His majestic boredom and smiles. So it was with Jonathan; the answers dropped into his lap without the slightest effort on his part. He knew the layout of the house. He knew George was going to be in it. So he approached the silver-framed picture on the desk. He shut his eyes as he sat down. When he opened them again he was staring, as he’d known he would be, into the face of Alvah Stoke himself.

TWO

Wednesday morning

REVOLUTION

1

It was painfully apt, that painting of the American Revolution on George’s wall. Immaculate cream-colored tights and a fairytale battlefield: these don’t matter, not really. What does matter is that Jonathan Carrick’s first war in life, like his country’s, was revolutionary. Alvah Stoke was a major force in the ancien régime he fought; the infantry, you might say, if not the Republican Guard. Alvah was one of Sweetbrier’s first settlers, not the very first – an honor that rests with Benbow Wikin, whose store lies moldering alongside the road to this very day. There was a time, starting just before 1850, when ‘Benbow Wikin’s General Store & Post Office’ was all there was to Sweetbrier. My story begins fifteen years later, just months after the Civil War ended. By this time, the town had grown into a proper town – saloons, undertaker, lawyer’s office, barber, and rival grocery that imported cheese from New York. The Overland Sentinel, the same old grab-bag that proposed a party on Senator Stoke’s lawn, opened its offices then. Farmers and their wives came to town every Saturday morning. The boardwalk bustled: calico dresses, pigs, horses, chickens, and even some of the Indians who managed to survive the massacres going on in the countryside nearby.

One Saturday in September of 1865, Alvah Stoke sought out Benbow Wikin in the backroom of his General Store & Post Office.

‘I want to buy a boy,’ Alvah said.

This is the beginning of all that follows.

‘What for?’ Benbow asked.

‘Want to work him.’

Benbow, who sold practically anything anyone might want, shifted some goods around on his counter. ‘That’ll cost you money,’ he said.

Alvah said nothing.

‘Prices for boys ain’t strictly official,’ Benbow went on. ‘No harm in starting low.’

Alvah said nothing.

‘You got to let people know, though,’ Benbow said, nodding. ‘I’ll give you a hand with the ad.’

The Overland Sentinel was already the typical small-town newspaper that it remained for its entire lifetime: crude type, cheap paper, headlines that scream the resolutions of ladies’ clubs and the nuptials of local clods, she with heavy jaw and dull eyes, he with pimples and sloping brow. When gossip was slim, only then, only to plump itself out in a bad week, the Overland Sentinel touched on the Indian wars and sometimes on the spread of the railroads, although this was long before the Midwest Pacific even planned its route through Sweetbrier.