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Freeman returned to his table.

The widow said, “Your Honors, I shall pay Emery Verley eight pounds in the interest of removing Alice Cole from such hell as she has suffered in his home. But I wish it marked down by your clerk that I would otherwise not compensate this man for his sins any more than I would compensate you for your own.”

The chief justice leaned forward and spoke to the clerk, no doubt forbidding him to mark down any such thing. Verley turned and smiled at Alice, even said something to her, but Alice didn’t trouble to listen. His words were nothing. He was nothing.

The widow and I will take you home.

B
y the time they exited the courthouse the late-day shadows had begun to descend; only then did Alice realize it was stifling and must have been, no doubt, since morning. She’d never in her life felt so run out of everything: strength, breath, understanding. If the carriage hadn’t pulled up at once she might have sat down on the steps and slept the night there; she didn’t know anymore how to work her feet or lungs or mouth or ears. She got into the carriage somehow; the widow climbed in and slumped across from her; Alice attempted to say the words
thank you
, but either said them twenty times or none. The widow babbled a string of words back at her, half enraged, half exuberant; the name Verley ran through them, but Alice no longer cared to give the subject of Verley any more of her than he’d already claimed; he might haunt her nights yet, but in daylight he was now erased from her slate like a misspelled word.

After a time Alice surfaced from her stupor to realize that the carriage hadn’t moved and, in fact, Freeman wasn’t in it; he stood on the courthouse steps, talking to a man who flung his arms about in agitation, first pointing in a southerly direction, then at the sky, and then to his neck. At length Freeman broke free and slid onto the seat next to Alice; Alice prepared another attempt at
thank you
, but before she could push it out Freeman called to the driver, “Hanover Square!”

“Hanover Square!” the widow cried.

“Did you not hear the man? They’ve got Oliver in effigy, hanging from a limb at Hanover. They’ve closed the shops, and a mob’s gathered.”

“Oliver?”

“Andrew Oliver, the new stamp agent. Our lieutenant governor’s brother-in-law.”

He turned to Alice, smiled. “Well, child—”

Alice opened her mouth to say her thanks and burst into tears. Laughter. Tears. She threw her arms around Freeman and laughed and cried, soaking his coat; he put an arm around her and patted her back, fumbling out his handkerchief, his white handkerchief; he wiped her face and his coat in turns.

“Now, now. Here, now. I did nothing, you know. You did it all by standing there. You and the widow. I only wish I’d been able to secure your freedom…. Here. Here, now.” He removed his arm and plucked her hands from his neck as he’d done once before, but gentler now. He poked his handkerchief into her palm. He turned to the widow and began to talk of stamp agents. Effigies. Mobs.

Alice sank back against the seat, abruptly alone. She was so very tired, and yet she felt she might leap out of the carriage, run all the way to the wharf, and fly from the wharf to Satucket with only a lift of her arms. Oh, she understood well enough that she wasn’t free as Otis and Freeman would call her free, but that had been their dream; her dream had been to get shed of Verley and return to Satucket, indentured or no. She wondered how the widow could afford eight pounds to give to Verley and then remembered one of the words Freeman had whispered to the widow:
loan.
He would loan the eight pounds, and the widow would pay it back out of the saved wage she no longer had to pay Alice. Alice did the sum and determined it shouldn’t take more than a year for the widow to repay the loan; after that she wouldn’t have to pay Alice until the remaining two years of her contract had run down. It would work to the widow’s advantage; it could even be said to repay some of the debt Alice owed for her care and kindness. It could even be said that Alice could count herself freed twofold.

But oh, the slowness of the carriage! Oh, this Hanover Square, this effigy, this dawdling mob! Alice could see them as the carriage funneled from Marlborough Street into Newbury, pressing forward as they pressed forward, until they reached the crossing with Essex and Frog where the crowd spread out like a spilled pitcher of cream. The widow and Freeman leaned out of the carriage to get a better look; Alice stayed as she was until the widow pointed and cried, “There!”

Alice looked out. Ahead of them sat an enclosed green, sheltered by a pair of huge elms; from the branches of the largest tree hung a pair of grotesque forms, one in the shape of a man, the other in the shape of a boot with the figure of the devil rising from it.

“So they blame Lord Bute too,” Freeman said.

The crowd shifted, closed in, tightened around the figures in the tree. Alice was forced to acknowledge that she’d never seen such a mob, two thousand at least, and being fed yet from all four corners of the crossroads: mariners, tradesmen, and some that looked more like gentlemen but with workmen’s long breeches and leather aprons thrown on. This was no Dedham Pope’s Day gang.

As Alice watched, the blade of a knife flashed in the sun above the effigy of Oliver, and the figure came tumbling down. A ready-made funeral bier was raised, the effigy laid on, the bier hoisted onto thick shoulders, and a procession began, the crowd falling in behind the bier in neat, solemn rows. Freeman ordered the carriage to follow.

“Where on earth do they plan to go?” the widow asked.

“The Town House, or so Griffin told me. The governor’s council sits there now, discussing what action to take over these effigies, this mob.”

The carriage crept along, the street ahead full of men and shadows of men, stretching too far now for Alice to see them all. As they neared King Street the procession slowed to a near standstill, and the carriage with it.

“Best to walk from here,” Freeman said. He paid the driver, and they disembarked, Freeman taking each woman by an elbow and guiding them down Water Street onto Pudding Lane and so around to King. They stepped into King Street and moved toward the inn, but Freeman kept turning his head, looking behind, and so Alice looked too. The procession had come into King Street and now surrounded the Town House. The bier was lifted up before the windows of the council chamber, and three great
huzzahs
arose from the crowd; Alice felt it rumble in the ground under her feet like the pulse of a great beast with four thousand legs; she looked at the pale faces now lining the council chamber’s windows and wondered if they felt it as she felt it, as if the power had drained from the building above into the street below.

Someone cried out “Oliver’s stamp house!” And the cry moved through the mob. It surged down King Street toward them, no longer solemn, no longer in neat rows. Freeman stepped back into Pudding Lane, the widow with him, but Alice slipped her arm loose, stepping farther into King Street. She thought she’d seen Nate Clarke’s brightly pale hair near the front of the crowd. She heard Freeman call behind her, “Alice!” She heard an answering call from up ahead, “Alice! Alice!” She looked back, but already the edges of the crowd had obscured her view of Freeman. She looked ahead and caught sight of Nate again, the pink face topped by damp hair, but there the crowd was on her, sucking her in like quicksand, dragging her away from Freeman. She watched Nate’s shoulders beating back and forth like wings as he worked his way through the bodies toward her; Alice tried to stand her ground, ignoring the elbow here, the hip there, until Nate washed into her like a drift log on the crest of a wave—up in the air, down. He gripped her by both arms.

“Alice! What are you doing out here?”

“We’ve just come from the court!” she cried. “I’m free of him!” And so it seemed at that minute exactly why she was out there, why she’d loosed herself from Freeman and stepped into the street to find Nate, why Nate was there, why the whole crowd was there: Alice was free of him. Indeed, Nate grinned as if his cheeks would split. He picked her up into the air but set her down at once as the crowd surged. He caught her by the hand. “Keep fast!”

The crowd swept them down King Street, shrinking or growing at each crossroads as some of the better-dressed men drifted home and rougher ones joined in, men with axes, brickbats, clubs. The cry went round and round: “To Oliver’s wharf! To the stamp house!”

The great beast moved into Kilby Street and onto the dock, surrounding a half-built brick warehouse. The axes and brickbats came out; the crowd surged again and began to attack the building. Once the first timbers came loose others picked them up and began to swing them; Alice felt the cool breeze against her sweaty palm as Nate dropped her hand and thrust himself into the mob to swing a timber of his own. Alice stood in amazement as within five minutes the warehouse was taken down to the ground.

The air lay thick with brick dust and the whoops of hot, sweat-slicked men. They swarmed over the pile of bricks, scavenging what pieces of wood they could find. Another cry went up: “To the fort hill!” The crowd surged again, the men shouldering as many timbers as they could carry.

Nate returned to Alice, collected her hand, and pulled her with him after the mob. The flush on him wasn’t just from the heat, and there Alice understood that Nate hadn’t been pulled into this scene by accident, that he was part of it, and unless Alice chose to fight her way through the strange streets alone she had no choice but to follow along.

The crowd streamed down the road and onto another whose sign proclaimed it Oliver Street; Alice didn’t like the look of that name. The mob still carried the effigy of the stamp agent, lying on his funeral bier; did they hope to exchange the stuffed man for the real one? They rolled up to a fine, big house, neatly fenced, with well-laid-out gardens, and soon a play began, the effigy removed from the bier and beheaded while others picked up stones and hurled them through the house windows. Nate dropped Alice’s hand a second time, picked up a stone, and hurled it; glass exploded and fell; he picked up another stone.

The crowd swarmed again, this time toward the top of the fort hill, and another pantomime began: the effigy stomped on, or “stamped” as the cry made it, the wood from the warehouse stomped on, a fire kindled out of the confiscated timbers, and the effigy tossed on. Torches sprang up against the growing darkness, and it seemed to Alice that with the dark the little order that remained now disappeared. The more respectable in the crowd had most all drifted away, but Nate did not; Alice dared not.

The mob swung back again in the direction of Oliver’s house, looking for something more to burn; they tried to enter through the door, but it was bolted. Stones, brickbats, axes, came out a second time; any windows that had survived the stones didn’t survive these weapons, nor did the doors, or the fence surrounding the garden. Some of the crowd began to chant for Oliver, but even the greatest fool on earth would have had fair warning to flee before now; all they managed to capture were chairs, tables, looking glasses, wainscoting, everything handed along a line of chanting men and fed into the fire on the hill. As the flames stabbed higher into the night sky it seemed to Alice that the power the crowd had captured at the Town House burned away with the flames. Who would heed the authors of such rashness, such violence, now? Nate had carried his own share of wood to the bonfire, but when he returned to Alice’s side the flame in him seemed to have died down, as if a like thought struck him. Or was it the law that cooled him? He pointed. “The governor. With the sheriff.”

As Nate recognized them so did the crowd, but unlike Nate, the sight of the law didn’t give them pause. The stones still flew, but in a new direction now. Nate held a broken chair-back in his hands, but he loosed his fingers and let it slide to the ground. The governor made a brief attempt at speech but no doubt saw the futility of words against stones; he scrabbled away into the darkness with the sheriff behind.

Nate seemed in an instant run out, exhausted. He said, “Come,” and took up her hand, led her down the hill. He smelled of sweat, smoke, rum—a different boy than the one she’d touched at Satucket. He cut into a narrow street without a street sign, and then another, and another. The houses thinned. They came to a low stone wall surrounding nothing but black space, and Nate helped Alice over it. Against the black Alice made out a distant house and barn, and nearer, what appeared to be an old carriage, sloping down in back over a broken axle.

Alice said, “I must get back. They’ll be worried,” but Nate had already climbed into the carriage, collapsing against the musty cushions. He said, “We have to talk, Alice. To plan for Pownalborough.”

Alice hesitated. She had no idea of going to Pownalborough, but neither had she any idea where she was; nor did she care to face the dregs of the mob straggling homeward all across town; she needed the boy to take her back to the inn. She stepped up into the carriage and sat down.

Sweat. Smoke. Rum.

After a time Nate said, “I wonder what they would have done if they’d found him home.”

Alice said, “I don’t like to think. Nor do I like to think how I worry Mr. Freeman. He set me loose from Verley this day, and this is how I pay him. I must go.”

Nate jerked around. “Oh, Alice! I forget! You’re free now!”

“Not free altogether. The widow bought my time. I go back with them on the morrow.”

“The ship for the Kennebec leaves on the morrow!”

“I must serve out the widow’s time.”

“You ‘must’? There is no such ‘must’ now, Alice. A law, an indenture, none of it requires your obedience unless it speaks to a natural justice. When did you agree to slave your life away to fill another’s pocket? What right has anyone to lay claim to what’s yours unless you consent to it? It isn’t the widow’s time, it’s your time. Come with me. You must come with me!”

He had worked himself back into the fire. Alice could feel his body heating up and dampening with sweat, and then a most strange thing happened.
He
began to tremble. He twisted toward her and put his arms around her, drawing her tight against him, as if, contrary to the evidence in his skin, he were cold and needed to draw some heat from her. Oh, Alice could know that need! She could know that trembling! She let her arms circle him, pressing her hands flat against his back, that back she had wondered about in Satucket, and found it just the perplexing mix of hard and smooth she had imagined. He stopped shivering. He found her face, turned it, kissed her. She smelled the rum and drew back. She didn’t know this boy. She attempted to pull away, and after a brief tightening of his grip he released her without a struggle. He said, “Never in my life would I hurt you, Alice. You must know this.”