Chapter One
brAINTREE
Massachusetts Bay Colony
When I was first with child, revolution was not yet even a fever dream glistening on the perspiration of my brow. As the world
came into bloom that spring—my belly as swollen with possibility as the buds on the trees—my worries were decidedly smaller:
my mother was being overbearing.
“Lord have mercy,” said my sister Elizabeth as she watched me waddle down the road. “Mother will give me an earful when she
learns I permitted you out and about in your condition, Abigail.”
“Permitted me?” I asked with exasperation. My wedding was six months past—surely enough time to be treated as a grown woman
of twenty who might come and go as she pleased. “I couldn’t bear to miss another market day,” I said, huffing and puffing
past farmers as they bundled asparagus and radishes in their carts.
“I could’ve done the shopping for you,” Elizabeth chirped, her lively eyes on the Middle Parish Meeting House, with its plain
white walls and steeple—more modest than the one our father, Parson Smith, presided over in Weymouth. “Mother sent me to make
sure you rested.”
“I don’t need rest,” I argued, striding a little faster to prove it. “I need fresh air and exercise.”
I’d been too long cooped up at my husband’s farm by the lingering snows. Soon enough, I’d be confined by my lying-in until
the child was born. So, I welcomed the muddy half-hour walk to the town center, past stone walls, smoking chimneys, swaying
willows, and a salt breeze that hinted at the sea.
It was not, of course, the pervasive scent of the ocean I knew from my seaside childhood home.
Whereas my native Weymouth was fish and ships, sailors and traders, my husband’s native Braintree was more earth and plows, farmers and millers.
Nevertheless, I was determined to embrace this place as my own, for it was where my child would soon be born.
And I still had much to do to make ready.
On this market day, chickens clucked from nearby cages while pigs snuffled in their pens. Children played chase amongst stalls
whilst apron-clad women perused goods at leisure, baskets looped over their arms. But I had a list of rather specific things
to buy.
My husband needed paper. We were also in need of candles, soap, tea, sewing pins, and swaddling for our forthcoming child.
My mother-in-law had already provided a cradle, not to mention a pap spoon and frilly little caps for the baby’s head—all
things my own mother protested as bad luck.
As often as not, it ends in tears, my mother had warned, for as a parson’s wife she had often prayed with grieving mothers who had lost their babes in childbed.
Which is why you need to be especially careful, Abigail, with your frail constitution . . .
I was the smallest of my siblings, standing no taller than five feet. My mother had always fretted over me, driving me mad
with her prognostications that I might die every time I took a sniffle. She thought me too weak to be out of her sight. And
perhaps it was this over-solicitude that made me such a rebellious child.
As a girl with a rambunctious and giddy disposition, I fled my good mother’s authority at the slightest provocation, stealing
upstairs to my father’s library to lose myself in books that described fascinating places across the sea that I longed to
visit.
Wanderlust, my mother said, was not fit for a clergyman’s daughter.
Nevertheless, I often ran away from the parsonage to take long walks on old trails, my skirts snagging on bayberry bushes,
my mood buoyed by the salty scent of the nearby sea. So much did I love nature that friends called me Diana, after the maiden goddess of the hunt. And family warned that I risked turning out to be a very bad woman unless my parents chose a strict husband to tame me.
Of course, in the end, I chose my own husband: John Adams, a country lawyer nine years my senior, whose money now jingled
in my coin purse. And noticing the rare relish with which I intended to spend it, my sister said, “Well, don’t blame me if
Mama or your Mr. Adams is cross with you for going marketing in your state.”
“Never fear,” I said, entering the general store. “My good man trusts me to do as I think best.”
Which was the reason I married him.
Inside the store, my neighbors gossiped in the rows between barrels of salted fish, jars of spices, and sacks of flour. Some
stared too openly at my swollen belly, and under their scrutiny, Elizabeth murmured, “At least let me carry your basket for
you.”
“I’m perfectly capable of managing on my own,” I said airily, never guessing how often I would, in the future, be called upon
to prove it.
At present, I was concerned with the dwindling supply of paper behind the counter.
“People are buying it in a panic,” the shopkeeper told me. “But once that tax is imposed, they’ll need to pay for a stamp
on anything official, so it won’t help them to hoard paper.”
The Stamp Act recently passed by Parliament had been received here in the colonies with such outrage that I could not think
they’d really go through with it. So I said, “Well, Mr. Adams hopes it will not be imposed, as he believes the Stamp Act to
be unconstitutional.”
As the town’s foremost rising lawyer, my husband had drafted the so-called Braintree Instructions, which registered the sentiments of the town against the tax.
My husband was now writing a series of essays for the Boston Gazette arguing that the measure was fundamentally different from taxes upon us that Parliament had levied before. Which was why
he needed the paper . . .
But before I could buy any, the shop door bell jingled and Dr. Cotton Tufts entered wearing a powdered wig, dark coat, and
cravat turned askew.
The good doctor was a kinsman on my mother’s wealthy Quincy side—younger at thirty-one years old than he looked—and he set eyes upon us right away. “Abigail! Elizabeth. What a surprise to see you young ladies this afternoon.”
“Is it truly a surprise, Cousin Cotton?” I asked, entirely exasperated, for I could think of little reason he’d ride out from
Weymouth unless he’d been sent by my mother. “Have you much doctoring business in Braintree?”
Dr. Tufts smirked, turning to Elizabeth. “Oh, your sister is cross. I know it, because when Abigail is in a pleasant mood
she calls me Uncle Tufts. And when she’s vexed with me it is Cousin Cotton.”
“I am not vexed with you,” I said. I was vexed that my mother had summoned so many physicians, so unnecessarily, while I was in my adolescence. And
now it appeared my marriage would not stop her.
But I had always liked Cotton Tufts, because I’d known him as a young man so single-minded in his pursuit of knowledge that
he sometimes forgot to remove his fingers from the books he was studying before he closed them. I was fond of teasing him,
and with a similar fondness of teasing me he now said, “I’ll have you know, Mrs. Adams, that the duties of a country doctor
take him sometimes quite far from home. Not unlike your husband, who, if your dear mother is not mistaken, is riding circuit
this week to dispense the benevolence of the law.”
This was as much of an admission as Cousin Cotton would make that my mother had indeed sent him to find and check on me. I
could only wonder how many stops he’d made before finding me here. “So, how are you coming along, Abigail? Any pains or concerns
about your pregnancy I ought to know about?”
My younger sister gasped at the audacity and impropriety of such a question posed in public, but I only arched an amused brow.
“None I’d discuss in a shop!”
One always had to remind the deceptively severe-looking doctor about convention. There seemed too little room in his big brain
for propriety or the trifles of public appearance. Stifling the urge to neaten his messy cravat, I added, “In any case, the
midwife would not appreciate your meddling.”
“They never do,” he admitted. “Nor do I like to meddle in women’s business. Nevertheless, you lack your older sister Mary’s wide birthing hips and—”
“My good sir,” I interrupted, easily able to imagine my older sister’s mortification to have her hips so publicly spoken of.
At this, Dr. Tufts seemed to regain his senses, and now, as if we were still girls under his care, he sought to reward our
indulgence with confections. He motioned at some candy jars and purchased sugared orange peels for me and nut brittle for
my sister.
When we thanked him, he lowered his voice to say, “As things progress, Abigail, if something should go wrong, promise to send
for me.”
“I shall,” I said, popping a candied orange peel into my mouth. But I wasn’t going to send for him. I wasn’t going to need
to. I reassured myself that I’d come through the forthcoming trial of childbirth and prove to everyone that I was stronger
than they knew.
At that moment, I noticed another patron at the other end of the counter. It was my neighbor, the Widow Copeland, with tears
in her eyes as she tried to comfort her little five-year-old daughter Patty with a squeeze of the girl’s hand.
“I’m sorry, madam,” the shopkeeper was saying, offering back her paper currency. “I cannot accept it.”
She’d offered old colonial bills—now suspended by Parliament. We could no longer issue money here in Massachusetts, and few
businesses now accepted it as legal tender. But the poor woman pleaded. “It was my husband’s pay when he fought in the war
between His Majesty and the French. It was good enough to induce him to give his life for king and country.”
“But it isn’t worth—”
“You men start these wars,” she interrupted, angrily swiping at her eyes. “Then you leave women to carry the burden alone.
I’d starve and die in dignity if I had only myself to think about. But I’m a mother. I have to find a way to live for my children, even if it means kneeling in front of all your customers to beg that you take
the money my husband earned protecting shops just like yours.”