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I wonder what they would have done if they’d found him home.
Very well, perhaps Alice did know this. He wouldn’t have hurt that man, Andrew Oliver, and he wouldn’t hurt her. She’d asked him not to touch her and he hadn’t. She’d asked to be let go and he’d let her go. Which was all very fine, but it didn’t erase the fact that she
must
go. Now. So Alice thought, but even as she thought it she was settling back against the cushion, Nate’s arm was coming around her. She could feel his cheek against her forehead, his other arm coming around. She thought
How good this feels.

Slowly, muscle by knotted muscle, her body gave over, her mind gave over; she let go of the long, long day and closed her eyes.

SHE WOKE THINKING
herself behind the woodpile at Dedham, waiting for Mr. Morton’s household to waken. She opened her eyes, saw her knees poking up under her skirt, and a pair of man’s knees beside them. She leaped up and was out of the carriage before Nate had gotten his limbs in order, but he scrambled after her.

“I must go.”

“No, Alice.
No.
Please. You see how the sky lightens? ’Tis so near morning now. If we go to my rooms and pack up my bag it will be time to go to the wharf. We can’t risk going back to the inn for your things; we’ll buy new when we get there. I’ll have ten and six after our passage.”

Ten shillings sixpence. To start a life on. Alice reached up and touched Nate’s face, the whiskers a whole night older than the last time she’d touched them, rougher now. She said, “I don’t go back because I ‘must.’ I consent to go back. He saved me from hanging. He freed me from Verley. If you knew how he took care of me at Barnstable—”

Nate drew back, looked at her. “
He?
Why is it always
he
you talk of?”

“And the widow. Of course I mean the widow too.”

“No, Alice, I don’t think you do. I think you mean him alone, and I think I know why you mean it. You said it to me that night I woke you at my grandmother’s. You said to me, ‘Mr. Freeman knows about night meetings.’ It
was
Freeman, wasn’t it? Freeman and you! Freeman’s child! My father said so, all the town said so, they said why else would he work so hard for you for no pay? But I said no. And then I came to see you in gaol and there you were alone with him, and such looks as you gave him! But after the trial, after what he said happened to you, after what the widow said, I thought…why, I believed them! And now look at you!” He stepped close to her, gripped her face, turned it to the gaining light. It flamed, she knew it. He said, “Look at you! I knew it when he tried to chase me off that night; I knew it when I gave him the letter for you. I could see it in him as I see it in you now! All this ‘I must go back’! You go back to Freeman is what you do!”

Alice thought to stop Nate, to tell him how wrong he’d got it, but instead she stopped herself. How wrong had he got it? The part about the child. This she must deny, for Freeman’s sake if not her own, but after that…oh, after that! What wasn’t true? The fact that Nate had said it out loud before Alice had even said it to herself made it no less true.

But Alice couldn’t say that to Nate. She could only say what she owed.

“My master got my child on me before I came here. Mr. Freeman hasn’t touched me.”

Nate said, “You may trust in it, he will. Come, I’ll take you back to him.”

T
he waterfront came awake as they walked, shutters creaking wide, cartwheels grinding over the stones, gulls starting up their disagreements over pilings. The town seemed altered since the events of the night before—sharper, more dangerous.
I wonder what they would have done if they’d found him home.

Nate walked just ahead of Alice, not fast enough to lose her, not slow enough for her to catch him up. They turned onto King Street; Alice took an extra skip and caught him by the sleeve. “The inn’s just there. You’d best go back now.”

He didn’t stop or speak; he swung around and broke off down the street at a run—the boy who’d torn to bits a stranger’s warehouse and home, then held her in perfect stillness the whole night through. She watched him as far as the turn, thinking of the night of the frolick, of how she’d understood then that she might call him back or let him go as she willed; she wondered if she could call him back now. But to what purpose? He was bound for Pownalborough, Alice for Satucket. And yet she was taken by surprise at the lurch in her gut the minute she lost sight of him, as if he’d been erased from the earth; as if the earth had already shrunk in his absence.

Alice turned around and stepped into King Street. She thought of what Freeman might say when he saw her returned, what his face might look like. She thought of what might happen next.
The widow and I will take you home.
But what then? Freeman hadn’t touched her, that was true. But was the thing Nate had said also true?
You may trust in it, he will
. Alice had roused Freeman’s flesh once; she knew this because she’d felt it with her own fingers. And she suspected he might have removed his hands from her swollen breasts something faster than he’d managed to. There was that on the one side, and on the other side a shameless, stubborn woman, who, if she loved him at all, loved him less than she loved her house. And, even Freeman must admit this, she was growing old.

These were the thoughts that comforted Alice as she walked along King Street. She passed the Customs House, the Exchange Tavern, a pair of flat-front houses, a row of shops just opening. The inn sat ahead. The door swung open, and Freeman stepped out as if she’d willed him, but the widow came after him and stood in the open door. The widow, always! Alice stopped where she was and slid into the long morning shadow of the building next to her to watch and listen, as she’d done so many times before.

The widow said, “What time was it you checked Nate’s lodging?”

“Midnight, or near to. The rioters had just disbanded.”

“Best go back there first, then. We last saw her with him; he’s our best clue. I’ll wait here and send someone after you if she comes.”

Freeman turned to check his watch with the aid of the new-slanting sun. The widow lifted a hand and rested it on the back of his coat, a gesture Alice recognized, or something like, as the one Freeman had used against the widow’s closed bedroom door. Undesired, one of the marked passages out of Freeman’s book of Shakespeare came back at her:
By my troth, my lord, I cannot tell what to think of it but she loves him with an enraged affection.

Alice turned away, not thinking where to go as much as where not to go; she didn’t want to go into the inn; she didn’t want to see the widow so fresh from such a scene.
Could
the widow love him? No.
No.
Not as Alice could. Not as Alice did. Alice would never put a dower right above such a man. The widow didn’t know how to love; she knew only how to humiliate and shame.

Alice had begun to walk, and without realizing it she had walked, again, toward the water; having no better plan at hand she continued all the way to the wharf and walked out onto it. She passed the
Betsey,
in the early stages of preparing for its departure for Satucket; she passed another ship, the
Anne,
with all the bustle on deck of a ship just arriving; she passed another ship, the
Doyle,
undergoing a similar but more advanced procedure to the one on the
Betsey
. She saw no ship called the
Boston,
although she hadn’t expected to see it; according to Nabby it had sailed the day before. As Alice passed the
Doyle
she heard one of the crew make mention of Maine; was this the ship Nate would take to the Kennebec? He wouldn’t have had time to get all the way to his rooms, pack his bag, and return to the wharf; if she lingered there she would no doubt meet up with him as he arrived. Would he argue again that she come with him, or was he done with her, having returned her, as he believed, to Freeman?

The passengers on the
Anne
began to disembark; Alice stood and watched them with no other purpose in mind than to see if she might find her seven-year-old self among them. A pair of aged men, a youthful couple, a middle-aged man alone, an older couple, another couple with two near-grown boys, all passed Alice without causing her to turn her head, but when a large family surged down the gangway toward her, making the usual kind of family clamor, it drew her attention. Each parent held a small child in its arms, despite the woman’s being heavily gone with another one; the two next smallest children were held fast in the whitened fingers of a pair of older siblings. As Alice watched, a sturdy, red-haired boy just into his men’s pants broke loose of his sister and careened drunkenly down the ramp toward a seagull alighting on a piling. The bird saw its danger and left its perch, madly beating its wings to lift itself over the water out of the boy’s reach; the boy’s eyes followed it up and up, but his feet still pumped along below, unmindful of the dock’s edge approaching.

Alice leaped. She scooped the boy into her arms and backed away from the dangerous edge, holding him as fast as she’d ever held a goose while plucking; the boy reared back to see who had captured him, and at the shock of the strange face he set in to bellow. Alice put him down but kept tight hold of his wrist until the mother could come up, the jouncing babe in the mother’s arms already joined in the wailing. The mother thrust the babe at Alice and grabbed up the boy. “Thank you, thank you! Oh, Tully, you bad boy!” She smacked the seat of his breeches, which curiously made Tully leave off his wailing. The rest of the family circled around, the father taking his turn to chastise Tully and the sister who’d unleashed him.

Alice walked away from the commotion, jiggling the babe; she began to sing the old song of the bird on the cradle. To her amazement, the babe quieted. She turned toward the group and saw that the father had set the child he’d carried into the same little hands that had just let loose of Tully. Alice counted six children in all, not finely dressed but not poorly either, and as neat and clean as any sea voyage could leave them, which meant they all stood in need of some attention to their person.

The man came up and held out his arms for the babe. Alice handed it over. The child wasn’t above a year, she guessed, but whether girl or boy she couldn’t determine. The man said, “Thank you, indeed, miss.

I am indebted.” He reached into his pocket, but his eye flew back to his wife and the boy she struggled to pin against her big belly, causing him to fumble the coin out of his pocket and into Alice’s hand without looking. A sixpence, and no doubt more than he intended, but when he was able to glance down and see what he’d done he made no correction. Some coin to spare, then. He walked back to his family, his hand cupping the child’s head in what appeared to be an oft-used gesture, so naturally did his fingers take the curve of the child’s skull. As he neared the group he raised his voice in a more cheerful version of an ox driver’s gee-haw. “Come along, now, come along! Only four blocks to home!”

Home.

Alice tried to imagine such a family’s home but could only make out the widow’s all over again.
The widow and I will take you home.
Again Alice pictured her return to Satucket and settling back into the widow’s house, but again, she had some trouble with the image: the smiles that wouldn’t meet all three together. The widow’s and Freeman’s, yes. Alice’s and Freeman’s, yes. The widow’s and Alice’s, yes. But all three together? Why wouldn’t they go back as they’d been?

Because they weren’t as they’d been.

Alice pictured herself at her wheel, watching more secret looks, watching more touches like the one she’d just walked away from outside the inn. She pictured herself watching and waiting and wishing for…what? For what Nate had promised would happen if she returned to them. For a man to do a thing that would make him no longer what she wished him. For misery to descend on a woman whose courage and kindness had brought Alice out of the greatest, blackest hole. For of course the widow loved Freeman. How could she not love such a one?

The father had tapped and prodded his children into formation. He drew back alongside his wife and took Tully from her arms, exchanging the burdensome boy for the lighter child, but even with that lessening of her load the woman needed a minute to steady herself before she set off.

There would be other Verleys in the world; Alice knew this. But surely there must be other Freemans, other Widow Berrys. The family set off down the wharf, past the
Betsey
, past the
Doyle
, toward King Street, where the gold unicorn and lion, the symbols of the English crown, gleamed atop the Town House. They reached King Street and turned left, into Kilby Street, past the red and gray pile that had once been stamp agent Oliver’s warehouse. Alice followed them.

October 19, 1765

M
r. Rufus Dolbeare and his brother Joseph blew into the keeping room with the wind, talking as they came. Mr. Rufus Dolbeare brushed the wet leaves off his boots and into the fire, making the fire hiss and sizzle; his brother dropped into the chair with a brief nod at Alice; neither gesture slowed their gabble. Alice handed her apple peeler to the oldest Dolbeare girl, Sukey, and got up to look into the cradle, thinking she’d heard the babe begin to fuss, but if it had, it had done so while it slept. Alice left the cradle, turned to the cupboard, took down a pair of mugs, and filled them from the beer barrel. October had come in cold and wet and stayed so; Alice might have preferred a cup of tea, but for the Dolbeare men it would be beer and nothing other.

Mr. Joseph Dolbeare accepted his mug from Alice and beamed at her like Tully when she soothed him with a piece of apple dipped in honey. Mr. Rufus Dolbeare came up to the cradle and leaned over. He had a soft, sad face that only lightened when he gazed at his wife, or, as now, when he looked on one of his children. He said, “How does it today?”

“Quite well, sir,” which was to say the babe had got over its colick and slept so long that Alice had woken it twice to make sure it breathed yet.

Mr. Joseph Dolbeare had paused long enough for his brother to make his familial inquiry, but now he took up as he’d left it; all politics of course, as it was every evening. The August fourteenth actions of the Boston mob had been imitated up and down the coast, Rhode Island being the quickest to ignite with the hanging of effigies of its own, but New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and New Hampshire had since followed the Boston example, not of the fourteenth of August but of the fifteenth, when they brought the stamp agent to the same tree where his effigy had hung, now called the Liberty Tree, and forced him to resign his office. The royal governor in the Massachusetts colony, along with the governors in the other colonies, had attempted to find other stamp agents willing to accept what now looked a most dangerous position, and failed in each instance.

The debate had now turned, as Otis had predicted, from points of law to points of battle; around the Dolbeares’ fire Alice heard the talk of armed resistance, of independency. She also heard talk of Otis. He had been chosen to represent the colony in a Stamp Act congress, soon to meet in New York, the first such assembly of representatives from all the colonies. The significance of such a gathering was not taken lightly by the Dolbeares, nor, Alice imagined, would it be taken lightly by king or Parliament. Alice wondered if Otis feared it as much as he’d feared the mob; if so, he would have a fine dance to perform as one of its representatives.

The second oldest Dolbeare girl, Keziah, came rushing in from out-of-doors carrying a bird-spattered sheet that had been left out on the grass to dry, with a howling Tully stumbling behind her. Alice listened to Keziah’s story of the troublesome boy and what appeared to be a justifiably angry goose, put a salve on Tully’s pecked cheek, and collected the sheet for rewashing; there the babe did wake and needed changing of a dirty napkin. Next Mrs. Dolbeare came in with the two remaining boys, who were captured by their uncle and tossed in the air until the smallest puked up his dinner sausage. Alice mopped the floor and put the little boys to filling the kindling box, which meant as many sticks on the floor as in the box; when Alice finished sweeping up, Mrs. Dolbeare asked her to run to Dock Square for some honey for their supper.

The Dolbeares didn’t live far from the square, but whenever Alice was sent on such an errand she took the slightly longer route past the water; despite the wind and chill the sight of it thrilled her as ever. As she walked she took in sea and sky and wharf and shops together; she wouldn’t have said she looked with any particular purpose, or that she looked for one thing over another, until she spied the
Betsey.

Alice had lived in Boston with the Dolbeares for two months and had walked at least six times to the market square and back as her employers requested; never had she seen a ship from Satucket village or a passenger who might have recognized her. The
Betsey
sat tied up along one of the smaller wharves used for long-term berthing; Alice recognized the neat box of its stern, the sweet lift of its bow, the bright trim; she might almost have said she recognized the smell of Satucket on her. She walked slowly toward the wharf and past, but she saw no one about the ship at all, its sails tightly furled and the deck cleared of any cargo. She turned and walked back the other way toward the Dock Square, stopping again as she came even with the
Betsey.

Alice had thought often of the people she had left behind at Satucket; in truth, her sleep was chopped to bits with them. It had happened so fast, her decision to follow the Dolbeares, and from there it had happened even faster. Mrs. Dolbeare had stopped and started more than once in her walk down the wharf, the burden of even the smallest child too much for her in her condition; Alice had caught up and offered to carry the child until they reached their destination. To the natural inquiry of her own destination Alice had been able to answer in honesty that she looked for work, and there removed Nabby’s letter from her pocket, adding the smallest of white lies about the sudden death of the Mrs. Story mentioned in the letter. Before they’d completed a block Sukey had managed to pick up a nail in her shoe, and John to lose his hat; Alice removed the nail and recovered the hat, all with the babe on her hip; somewhere over the next few blocks it became understood that Alice would keep with them until Mrs. Dolbeare had come through her travail. A few days later Mrs. Dolbeare delivered the colicky infant, but then spent two weeks in her bed with afterpains and delirium. By the time Mrs. Dolbeare returned to her kitchen Alice had fitted herself so essentially into the household that no one had yet raised the subject of her leaving.

Soon after settling in at the Dolbeares’ Alice had begged pen and paper of Mr. Dolbeare and written the widow a letter. She told the widow she was safe and that she would remain until her death ever grateful for all the many kindnesses the widow and Freeman had bestowed. She began the next sentence:
The reasons for my leaving,
but cross-hatched over the words, incapable of sorting her thoughts and laying them down; she would have liked to write the letter over but didn’t want to ask Mr. Dolbeare for another costly piece of paper. She ended by wishing the widow well, and promising to send her the eight pounds as soon as she could save it. She’d contemplated sending the four pounds she’d received from Nabby, which still hung safe and heavy in the hem of her bodice, but felt too little confidence in the security of her position to risk it. Alice signed the letter,
With the greatest esteem and the humblest yet most whole-hearted affection, Alice Cole.
She put no return address on it.

Mr. Dolbeare had reported to Alice that he’d put the letter safe on a ship bound for Barnstable; Alice asked the name of the ship and was told it was the
Hannah
, a name Alice didn’t know.

But here, two months later, sat the
Betsey.
Alice continued to stand, staring at the ship, and after a time she saw life: the old, familiar, square-built shape of the shipmaster, moving with steadiness but no great nimbleness along the rail to the bow, where he began to knock at something with a mallet. Alice remembered her first sight of him on the same deck more than a year ago; she remembered his kindness in overlooking her stolen passage, his willingness to testify at her first trial. She remembered too his question to the widow on her return from the trial at Barnstable.
Girl’s come through all right, has she?
Who else in all the village had asked such a question? She wouldn’t count it against him that he’d never waited for an answer.

Alice stepped onto the dock, approached the
Betsey
. No welcoming gangway stretched from wharf to deck, but the tide had dropped and the ship’s rail sat near level with the dock’s surface. Alice made no effort to step down onto the ship uninvited; she waited, and after a time the shipmaster straightened his bent back, swung wide, and saw her. Oh, all the things Alice had learned by now to read in faces! Or was it just this particular face, opening and emptying all its secrets in its first glance at her? Alice could read them off as she could read the ads in Mr. Dolbeare’s almanac: surprise, confusion, amazement, concern, and then, yes, gladness. Over it all he was glad to see her.

“Why, ’tis Alice!”

“Good day, sir.”

He took a long study of her, from hair ribbon to shoes, then held out a hand to help her across the gap of water, over the rail, down onto the deck of the
Betsey.

“Why, I must say you’re looking well! So well indeed! And I daresay there’s some I know who’ll be happy to hear it!”

Would they? Alice didn’t think she’d said it out loud, but it was all she wished to know on this earth:
would they?
She must have spoken, of course, or else Shubael wasn’t the man of little perception she’d once believed him.

But there his face changed into something more like a shipmaster’s. “You’ve caused unhappiness, young lady,” he said, “and a good deal of worry, to those I hold dear to me. To those who don’t deserve it, I might add, and from you especially.”

“I’m greatly sorry for—”

“You needn’t say it to me.”

Alice stood silent.

“And you owe someone some time, as I understand it.”

Alice nodded.

“So here lies the question: should I or should I not truss you up, toss you back in that locker, and haul you home to Satucket?”

That quickly Alice smelled it, not just the imagined whiff off the sails but the real thing, as if she stood that minute in the widow’s dooryard: salt flats, pine pitch, fresh-cut hay, the juice off the cider presses. But so too could she smell something more cloying, almost rank: all the bad will she must surely have left there.

Alice turned her back on the shipmaster, picked up the hem of her bodice, and opened the seam with her teeth. She drew out Nabby’s four pounds, whirled around, and held them out to the shipmaster. “If you would give this to the widow, sir. ’Tis but half I owe, but if you would tell her, please, the rest will come as I earn it.”

The shipmaster stared at her in amazement. “You stole eight pounds from her on top of it?”

“No! Oh, no! Mr. Freeman loaned it to her, so she could buy my time from my old master.”

Which meant, of course, that she had stolen it.

The shipmaster said, “’Tis my brother’s eight pounds, then?”

Alice nodded.

The shipmaster stood looking down at the money, no doubt thinking how many more pounds it could be said Alice owed his brother. But when he looked at Alice again something seemed to have amused him. He said, “Might as well pay himself, then,” and funneled the coins into his pocket. He studied Alice some more. “I must say, you look in health.”

“I am, sir. And yourself?”

“No worse, no better.”

“And the widow and Mr. Freeman. Are they well?”

“The widow! Hah! Never better! And my brother a year younger each time I see him!” He stood looking at Alice some more. “Which brings me to the question of whether or no I should shut you up in that locker. Considering all things together, I might let you go, on one condition only. You must tell me where you reside and something of your situation; while you’re about it you might throw in where you came by four pounds sterling to toss about like bread crumbs.”

Alice told him. He made no remark about her shortened version of the four pounds but said, “This Dolbeare doesn’t mind your lack of paper?”

“He believes me to be free.” But there Alice thought: Did he? Or had he, like Freeman, sensed her status, and unlike Freeman, felt free to take advantage? Mr. Dolbeare paid her two pence a day beyond her keep and care, something far short of her wage at the widow’s.

There the shipmaster seemed to run out of questions and no doubt stood waiting for Alice to go, so he could return to his mallet, but Alice couldn’t bear to leave without asking the rest of her questions. She said, “Would you tell me, sir, if the widow continues with her textile manufacture?”

The shipmaster snorted. “She does. Her changed circumstance doesn’t change her. Her granddaughter Bethiah does her spinning now.”

The granddaughter Bethiah. The impish girl who had hung so on her brother.

Her brother.

Dared she ask it? “I wonder, sir, if anyone hears news of Nate Clarke.”

“Why, yes indeed. I delivered his grandmother a letter from the college not a week ago.”

“From the college?”

“He sent a letter for his father too, but that one wasn’t quite so well received. A slight overrun in the matter of expenses.”

“At the college?”

“He’d damaged one of my brother’s books and wished to replace it. The choice of book didn’t please his father overmuch, either.”

No, thought Alice, it wouldn’t—a book that no doubt preached a higher law than that of a father. Or a parliament.

But Nate, at the college!

The shipmaster shifted his weight and looked at the sky; Alice realized she’d stood there dumb for too long. She said her good-bye and left the wharf with her mind in a storm, returning to the square to make her purchase, or she must have done, for when she arrived at the Dolbeares’ she carried the pot of honey.

Mr. Dolbeare stood alone in the yard, peering up at the rolling gray clouds. “The wind shifts,” he said. “I believe we’ll have some fine weather on the morrow. They’ve been cooped up too long; I’ve a mind to hook up the cart and take them appling at my brother’s orchard. What say you to that, Alice?”

Alice could remember only another day of appling, the sudden feel of life in her womb, her crumbling under the weight of it. Ever since that day the sight of apples had brought her stomach to her throat and her pulse to her temples. Perhaps she could claim an even greater illness and stay home. That course settled in her mind, she said, “I think it a fine idea, sir.”