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we need is an endangered maiden who is true heiress to the treasure, though I reckon Mistress Pitts was very well able to take care of herself. How much do your friends know, or guess?”
    Horace shook his head. “What they know is only that I went to visit friends and was found unconscious in a ditch the following morn. What they guess . . .”
    His brow furrowed, and for a moment the boyish face with its pasty adolescent spots and its too-large nose seemed, suddenly, that of the man he would be. “Weyountah has taxed me, two or three times, with questions. He guesses I wasn’t telling the truth, and he’s seen that I’m afraid. George . . .” He grinned affectionately. “I’m sure George took him aside and told him that if I’d had the red blood in me to go off—er—drabbing, and ended up drunk in a ditch, I’d be the better not to have some praying Indian chasing after me for the details. They put it about that I was sick—”
    “’Tis what Mr. Ryland seems to have thought.”
    “Well, he’s the Fellow in charge of this hall, so if word of any of this reached his ears, he’d have to report it, you see. And he’d really rather not know.”
    Abigail raised her brows. “He seems to me a most honest man—”
    “Oh, he is! Amicus humani generis. He does most of the work in George’s troop—the King’s Own Volunteers—if the truth be known. But by the same token, he knows that if George gets sent down, that’s the end of the Volunteers. Quod verum est and all that, of course . . . but what Dr. Langdon doesn’t know won’t harm him.”

Three

    W hen George Fairfield returned after his Greek lecture (“Lord, how am I supposed to know the difference between Ajax son of Telamon and Ajax son of that other fellow?”), Abigail could easily understand the glow of hero worship in her nephew’s eyes when he spoke his friend’s name. Long-limbed and handsome, the young Virginian had the instinctive air of command that came—Abigail guessed—from ordering black slaves around for most of his life, and the exquisite manners acquired in a society where impressing landowners more wealthy than oneself (or their relatives) was the only way to advance one’s family’s fortunes.
    Yet he had great kindness and an instinctive sense of justice. Over dinner at the Golden Stair Tavern on the Common (“Madame, God would send me to Hell if I obliged you to eat the food they serve in the Hall!”) during a lively argument about how far democracy ought to be permitted in the government of each colony, he argued not from Locke or Rousseau (“Good Lord, m’am, I couldn’t tell the one from t’other if they were both to offer me a hundred pounds!”) but from the men he’d met in the backcountry beyond his father’s plantation. “You can’t put men like that in charge of making the laws of the colony, m’am! First thing they’d rule is that it’s perfectly fine for them to close off the lands the Indians hunt on and chop them up into farms to sell to new immigrants, and then to shoot any Indian who tries to stop them.”
    Since Abigail had met hundreds of such men in Boston—particularly since the beginning of John’s involvement with the Sons of Liberty—she was hard put to find an argument against this. “Just because a man owns no property doesn’t mean he’s a self-seeking savage . . .”
    “No, m’am. But in my experience, it means he’s likelier to be than a man who’s had an education—”
    Yet when Uzziah Begbie—as democratic a soul as one was likely to meet in all of Massachusetts Colony—came in seeking her, Fairfield beckoned him to the table and bade the innkeeper’s wife bring beer and another plate, and asked him all about his carrier business and were the roads as terrible when one went west as they were in Virginia?
    “He acted as protector to me when first I came to Harvard,” said Weyountah to Abigail, under cover of this dialogue, “though he was only a year before me. No one