Boston rose up ahead of them with the late-summer sun, striking Alice as a grander thing than it had appeared in her childhood, perhaps because her memories of London had drifted so far and faint behind. But as they wound their way around the islands and up to the great long wharf Alice noted things that had certainly escaped her before, if they’d been there at all: the hulking British man-of-war anchored off the point; the row of warehouses like tall, multiwindowed dovecotes lining the far side of the wharf; the skeleton of a ship in dry-dock, waiting for rigging and sails before it could be set free; and so many carriages, carts, people, noise. Mackerel! Oysters! Cod! Fresh in this morning!

The ship itself carried its own noise: the beat of the sailors’ shoes across the deck, the rattle of the block, the creak of mast and boom, the snap of stagnant sail being secured. Nate attempted to move close to Alice, but the widow and Freeman were likewise too close for anything like private speech. She read something like panic in his eye until she heard him speak with Freeman over where each planned to stay in town; there Nate winked at Alice. He would know where to find her.

People and barrels began to spill off the ship together, and Alice lost Nate. Freeman had moved ahead to secure a carriage, but before he could do so he was accosted by a tradesman, a man he appeared to know, who spoke to him long and feverishly, his arms waving in a westerly direction. After a time Freeman broke away from the man and hailed his carriage. The trunk was loaded, Alice and the widow were loaded, Freeman climbed in behind and gave his order to the driver: “School Street.”

“School Street!” the widow cried.

“I must see Otis.”

The carriage reeled into the knots of well-dressed and ill-dressed people, a greater knot of the latter than Alice had remembered from her last brief passage through town: a mix of workingmen and boys, apprentices, what seemed a great lot of sailors. She peered through the crowd for Nate but couldn’t see him. The sun being low didn’t help her, either blinding her or turning all she looked at into rusty shadows, reminding her of her long-ago struggle to make out her father’s shape in the wagon as it drew away. Had it been this very street where she’d last seen him? Had she come again through another circle? Alice looked wildly around her. She saw boarded-up buildings, brand-new street signs on all the corners, new even since her flight the year before; she couldn’t recognize her past here.

The carriage whirled down King Street, a wide, inviting avenue crowned in the distance by a stately brick building whose corner facades were decorated with the gold lion and unicorn of the royal crest. Freeman pointed. “The Town House.”

The carriage swung past the Town House onto Corn Hill, then onto School Street. It stopped in front of an elegant house that somehow frightened Alice and seemed to give Freeman pause as well; he sat in the carriage and sent the driver up to the door. A Negro servant appeared and disappeared; the door blew back wide, and a great, looming giant of a man leaped down the steps toward the carriage.

A whale, Alice thought, looking at him, a suited and shod whale, but as the man drew closer and she saw his startling eyes she changed her mind. Not whale, but eagle.

“Freeman, by God,” the man cried. “I’d have conjured you if I could! And Widow Berry!” He grasped the widow’s hand, kissed it, and helped her down onto the cobbles. Freeman and Alice followed.

“I’ve just landed,” Freeman said. “I ran into Edes at the wharf. He tells me there are plans.”

“Plans! What good are plans when you put them in the hands of a mob? ’Tis all Sam Adams’s doing, you may be sure of it. He’s called out McIntosh and his Pope’s Day gang. A mess of cudgel boys who wouldn’t know a Stamp Act if it bit them. Add to them the bankrupt shipwrights and sailmakers and soap boilers and braziers with naught to do but look for someone to blame—”

“Edes spoke of a peaceable assembly.”

“He may speak as he likes. When the pot boils the scum arises.” Otis turned to the steps, still talking, eyes dancing wildly, as if struggling to follow his own thoughts. A woman appeared in the open door, as handsome a woman as Alice had yet encountered, but to Freeman’s greeting, “Good day to you, Mrs. Otis,” she lifted a silky hem and turned back into the darkness in silence.

Otis laughed. “She knows your politics, sir, and dislikes them as much as mine. Take heart that she denies you naught but her company at the tea table; for me, alas, my sacrifice extends to another piece of furniture entirely.” He pointed up the stairs and laughed again. As he turned around his eye fell on Alice; fooled by the laugh, she was surprised to meet up with such grimness.

“So this is the girl?” he asked. “This is our famed Alice? I understand all, my friend. All and more. And now you come to town to wait on the court at Suffolk?”

“We do.”

Otis came down a step until he stood on the same plane as Alice. “I see a scar on the cheek. How reads the law? ‘If any man smite out the eye or tooth of his manservant or maidservant or otherwise maim or much disfigure him, unless it be by mere casualty, he shall let them go free from his service and have such further recompense as the Court shall allow him.’ Would we call her ‘much disfigured’? Not on any other cheek, perhaps, but on this one…. Is there any other marking?”

Freeman pointed to Alice’s hand. Otis bent low. “Would you allow me, please, miss?”

Alice held out her hand, and Otis picked it up, as if he were to kiss it as he’d kissed the widow’s. His hand felt warm and chill at once, as if heart and nerves had met together in the tips of his fingers. He turned Alice’s hand over, flexed her palm as far as he could, extended each thumb and finger, took up the other one. “The scarred hand doesn’t extend to quite the degree of the other; could we call it ‘maimed’? Indeed, you might make the case. You might indeed make the case. The scars, the reduced efficiency…at any rate, ’twould be a thing worth testing.”

Otis dropped Alice’s hands, snapped upright. “And why do I keep you standing here in the damned street? Come in. Come in. Freeman, we’ve much to discuss, you and I. I hear talk they would put you up for the legislature. We need you there now, sir, above all others. We must argue reason over riot, a peaceable resistance over a bloodletting; I beg you, my friend, to join us.”

He turned from Freeman to the widow. “And you, madam. ’Tis your skillful hands this province needs, not some bloody trampling feet of a Pope’s Day gang. Let them keep to November and Guy Fawkes! Or would they like to raise him from the dead now, and this time help the papists blow up Parliament?” He laughed again. They stepped into the hall, Freeman and Alice following, but as soon as Alice had planted her second foot inside the door an elderly woman in homespun appeared, separated Alice from the others, and brought her to the kitchen.

The first thing Alice noted was that the political divide in the household stretched into the kitchen as well; the housekeeper sent a servant with a pot of real Bohea tea up the back stairs with the Negro while she carried another pot smelling strongly of sage to her master and his guests in the downstairs parlor. Alice followed the woman as far as the door, listening to the rise and fall of Otis’s nervous, fiery voice: Sam steps wrong with this one…. Degrades the cause…Talks independency…The madness of it…Lawless rabble…Bedlam…I fear it, sir…. I fear it….

If Freeman got a word in, Alice couldn’t pick it out. She returned to the table and the cup of tea the woman had left her; she hadn’t dared hope for and, in fact, barely yet believed what her nose had told her: Bohea. Alice sat and sipped and attempted to make some sense of what she’d heard. Here she was, at James Otis’s kitchen table, the man she had heard so much talk of, the man who had stood up before the legislature and challenged the laws of Parliament, and what did he talk of now? Fear! Of a Pope’s Day gang! A little parade of boyish mischief makers, or so they had always been at Dedham.

But now Alice could hear the low, steady rumble of Freeman’s voice, almost like a lullaby, as if he were attempting to settle his friend to sleep. Otis’s voice came back, softer now, and once or twice Alice heard the widow’s clear note. Once she heard Otis’s voice rise in wild laughter, break, and fade.

It seemed a long time before the servant reappeared and fetched Alice to the front hall, where the two men and the widow now stood before the door. Alice peered at Otis; the whale had disappeared, and so had the eagle. Alice had once seen a weasel suck the innards out of a hen’s egg, and that was what Otis resembled now: not the weasel but the hollowed-out egg. He kissed the widow’s hand again, mumbling an amputated, “Pleasure…too long,” but even that rang empty.

Once they were under way in the carriage the widow attempted some banter about the non-importation plan implemented by Otis’s wife, but Freeman would accept no diversion. He leaned silently into the corner of the carriage, his face well shadowed. After a time he burst out, “Did you know the governor once called Otis ‘as wicked a man as lives’? Did you know he once said that the troubles in this country take their rise from and owe their continuance to that one man? Well, he’d best look now and see the friend he has in him!”

The widow exchanged a look with Alice. “I might understand Mr. Otis better than you do, Mr. Freeman,” she said. “He believed his reasoned argument over the sugar would prevail, and not only did it not prevail, the stamps came. Next here comes Adams, with his gangs and his talk of independency, and poor Mr. Otis, who was happy enough to twist the cord, now stands back aghast at the idea of cutting it completely. He thinks, surely he must think, What will happen if we cut it? Will we end with Mr. Adams and his mob ruling the province? Will it all end in havoc?’ And so he grows cautious. He thinks again. He contemplates which is the lesser evil: King George or King Adams. And I for one think such contemplation, while perhaps serving ego as much as politics, is to his credit. And our benefit. My grandson’s benefit. I would see Nate someday standing before the justices engaged in educated argument, not lying dead on some bloody Boston cobblestones.”

Freeman said nothing. The carriage reversed its route past the Town House and continued no great distance before stopping in front of a flat-faced, two-story brick house with no kind of sign to identify it. The driver removed the trunk and deposited it in front of the building; Freeman got out, paid the driver, and lifted the knocker on the door. A woman dressed in homespun pulled open the door and greeted them with a curtsey; Mr. Freeman called her Mrs. Hatch; she didn’t appear to know the widow. She pointed Alice to the kitchen and led Freeman and the widow up the stairs.

The kitchen was bustling, or so it appeared, for the room was small for the number of people within it. A girl as black as a charred stump sat dressing a fowl; a young man in a tradesman’s apron stood unwrapping a collection of pewter spoons from a flannel cloth and laying them on the table; a boy who looked to be about five worked at filling a kettle from a water bucket he could barely lift off the floor. The black girl saw Alice, wiped her hands on her apron, and walked to a small door at the back of the room, where she stood waiting. Alice followed. The girl led Alice into a small, windowless shed attached to the kitchen, pointing to the pallet along the far wall. “That you,” she said, the accent of Africa still on her. “Sleep there.”

Alice didn’t want to sleep there. The shape of the room reminded her of her room at Verley’s; the lack of windows, the pallet on the floor, reminded her of the Barnstable gaol. Alice took one step, two, until she reached the bed; she dropped her sack on it and backed up again to stand near the door.

She heard the widow’s voice behind her. “I want the girl who came with us. What have you done with the girl who came with us?” The widow appeared in the shed door, looked around, and said, “You’re to sleep with me. Roll up your pallet and come.” Alice did as she was ordered, wondering as she did so who had given the order—the widow herself or the man who had stood surety to deliver her safe to the Suffolk courtroom.

The widow’s room was neat and well enough fitted with a bed, a chest, a chair. The widow pointed to the floor on the far side of the bed, and Alice laid the pallet down. She looked out the window and saw the Town House steeple, along with a large swath of King Street below.

The widow pulled off her cap, dropped it onto the chest, and sat heavily on the bed. “I dislike travel,” she said. “More and more with each addition to my years. Floundering about someone else’s house. Unable to get a simple cup of tea when I wish it. Attempting to beat some life into a worn-out bed tick. Lying awake all night listening for a strange step on the stairs.”

“You’ll find no worn-out bed tick here,” Freeman said from the open door. “And if you wish a cup of tea, you need only appear in the parlor downstairs. As to a strange step on the stairs, it will likely be mine. I’d a message waiting for me that Mr. Verley’s lawyer should like to meet me upon my earliest convenience; I think I’d best seek him out now.”

An odd deafness settled over Alice’s ears; either that or utter silence fell at that moment over the room and the street below. After a time she heard the widow say, “Would you consider this invitation to bode well or ill?”

“I think well,” Freeman said, but at the same time he gave Alice a look so full of gentleness that the words brought her no comfort; why should he think her in need of such a look now?

Freeman left them. The widow said, “Shall we see if the Hatch kitchen can brew up something less foul for tea than Otis’s, or should you prefer to rest?”

A belated cowl of guilt dropped over Alice, one she hadn’t felt while sipping the fine Bohea at Otis’s. She said, “I’d prefer a rest, madam.”

The widow left, and Alice returned to the window. Pockets of men idled about in the street below. Alice spied Freeman among them, distinctly tall and purposeful, the neatness of his queue and the whiteness of his stock standing out against his surroundings. As Alice watched he appeared to slow his step and turn his head left and right, as if to listen to the rumblings of the men as he passed through; whatever he heard seemed to stall him, for which Alice was glad, for she discovered she was loath to have him pass from her view. At length he picked up his original speed and rounded the corner by the Town House; Alice retreated from the window. She lay down on the pallet and closed her eyes, feeling it a promise to the widow to do so, but with no thought of sleep. She listened to the town noise, so different from the noise of Satucket: a steady drone of voices broken by the occasional shout, the rattle of the cart wheels, the whoosh of the carriages, the stray toll of bells. I think well. Or ill. She thought of the words Otis had quoted, apparently from some book of laws, or rather she thought of one word Otis had quoted: free. Of late the word had meant being set loose from the gaol, not being hanged. This free that Otis spoke of was another thing.

Alice heard the widow return, but she didn’t open her eyes. After a time she heard a heavier boot on the stairs. She leaped up. The widow sat perched on the edge of her bed; Freeman came into the room and folded himself into the chair in silence.

“Speak, sir!” the widow cried. “Well or ill?”

Freeman lifted his eyes to Alice. What was it there, the old sadness, or a new? He said, “We must leave it to Alice to decide well or ill. It would appear Mr. Verley grows a conscience; either that or he grows nervous as he nears the hand of justice. He’s offered to release you from his service, Alice, his pair of conditions being that you be returned to Mr. Morton to serve out the remainder of your time there and that we file no countersuit against him. Apparently your first master has long repented letting you go, and Mr. Verley now wishes to repay his original kindness by returning you to him. While admitting no ill treatment of you he nonetheless forfeits any time penalties on account of your running away, and this is perhaps the greatest advantage to the offer. In addition to serving out the two years remaining on your contract you must make up the one year that transpired during your absence, but this is to be expected as a matter of course; in the ordinary way of things the court could, in law, order seven times that in penalty for running away. And I’m sure you see the further advantages to the offer. You need not go before the court; you need not run the slightest risk of a return to Mr. Verley; in fact, you need not distress yourself by seeing Mr. Verley at all.”

“But what of Verley?” the widow cried. “What punishment for Verley in this scheme?”

“Mr. Verley loses Alice’s time.”

“He loses her time! He loses her time?”

“We must think of it in practical terms. Had Alice sought recourse within the terms of the law, notifying the constable of the alleged abuse—”

“A constable who is no doubt Verley’s brother or uncle or cousin. And what is this talk of ‘alleged abuse’? Do you forget what you saw?”

“I speak only to a point of law. The abuse has not been proven and, indeed, it would be near impossible to do so to such degree as might justify a countersuit. We give nothing away there. In addition, although I’ve every confidence of successfully making Alice’s present defense, there is nevertheless the risk of events unforeseen. Here is an alternative to risk, and as such it must be presented to Alice; it must be left to her to choose.”

Alice said, “Mr. Otis made mention—”

“Yes, he did. And perhaps an Otis might turn a hangnail into a disfigurement, but I’ve no such confidence in my skill. ’Tis the rare case indeed where a master is ever charged with the crime of physical abuse against a servant without a witness present. The abuse may be evident, but how to prove it occurred at the master’s hand?”

“And you call this justice,” the widow said. “You sit before this child and call it by that name.”

“My dear widow, you mustn’t obscure the advantages for Alice in this offer of Mr. Verley’s. She serves out her time in a place where she was well treated, by her own admission, and for three years only. At the end of that time Mr. Morton will free her and she may go out and earn a wage. With this plan Alice may avoid returning to court—”

“An advantage which grows on me each minute. Very well, Alice, you’ve heard Mr. Freeman describe Verley’s magnificent offer of nothing, and as I imagine you’ve more sense than I, you’ll see how it serves you. Now, then, what say you?”

Alice did see how it served her, and yet she sat blinking at the widow and Freeman, full of barely captive tears. She could wonder at her misery, at her foolishness. Little more than a year ago she’d wanted nothing better than to return to Mr. Morton. He hadn’t helped her when she’d run to him, it was true, but neither had he harmed her, and if she thought back over the years she’d spent with him she could summon nothing but kind looks, honest care, attention beyond her deserts. In fact, her dream of a comfortable life for herself had never gone past finishing out her time and staying on with Mr. Morton at a wage. Where had that old idea of comfort gone? Had life with the widow taught her a better one? Had she been so great a fool as to take Freeman’s words The widow and I will take you home as meaning they would keep her there? As she was naught but servant to Mr. Morton, so she was naught but servant to the widow and Freeman, with the added difference that her time wasn’t theirs and never had been. Nor was it hers for three more years. And if she’d been so foolish as to spend a short minute taking Otis’s fantasies as fact, Freeman had now made it clear she should no longer do so. So what were her choices? To work for a Morton or to face a Verley, to face a chance of being returned to Verley. What choice, then?

Alice turned to Freeman. “I’ll go to Mr. Morton.”

The widow stood up and walked out.