Chapter Two
BOSTON
Massachusetts Bay Colony
There is never enough time in the haze of nursing and swaddling. In truth, time passes like a quick-fingered thief through
a mother’s memories and best-laid plans. Nabby was barely two years old when her little brother John Quincy was born, and
then came Susanna. Five years had passed in a blink, my husband’s legal practice was thriving, and all three of my children
were toddling across the floorboards of our new house in Boston. We’d moved to the city so John could be near the courts,
and we’d grown comfortable in our lodgings, with a view of the harbor and proximity to Bowes’s bookshop.
Boston’s air often stank of rotting fish, emptied chamber pots, and other refuse, but I’d grown accustomed to it. That and
the clacking coaches, clucking chickens, criers, and chapmen. But the exciting pulse of so much to do and so many people to
see compensated for these drawbacks.
The real trouble with Boston was the rising menace of British regimental soldiers and their clashes with colonists over taxes
on paper, glass, and tea. Even now, from the window, as I prepared a tray of chocolate for my husband, I could see soldiers
banging on my neighbor’s door to force their way in. For British soldiers claimed the right to search homes without warrant.
They’d actually attempted it at my door not long ago.
John had come roaring down the stairs, demanding an explanation for the intrusion. Upon seeing him, the officer looked confused.
“We’re to search the abode of Mr. Adams.”
My husband crossed his strong arms, exposed by rolled shirtsleeves. “I am Adams. Mr. John Adams, esquire.”
The soldier flushed. “We must’ve mistaken the address.”
John had peered down his nose with the imperiousness of a magistrate. “You were perhaps looking for my cousin Samuel?” When
the soldier lingered in embarrassed silence, John could not pass up the opportunity to needle him. “Well, you shouldn’t be
searching his house either. Not without a proper warrant. Unless, of course, you mean to furnish me with yet another profitable legal case.”
The soldiers withdrew, for my husband’s threat was not idle. Defending colonists against government abuse had become his specialty
and now furnished him a good living. Visitors sought him night and day.
But tonight the visitor who occasioned the tray of chocolate was the very same cousin who had occasioned British soldiers
to bang upon our door. At that time, I knew Sam Adams only slightly. He was a gaunt figure radiating Puritanical piety whose
intense gaze and reflexively contrarian ways sometimes put me ill at ease. It wasn’t the contrarian so much—that was an Adams
family trait—as it was the aggression accompanying it that jangled my nerves.
As it did now when I overheard Sam say, “All you do is write about British abuses, John. You don’t do anything about this tyranny.”
“That’s unfair,” my husband snapped. “What I do is ensure you and your rabble-rousers have protection of the law. Did I not force the Crown to drop its case against Hancock?”
He meant the Crown’s seizure of John Hancock’s merchant ship under charges of smuggling—a charge my husband defeated in court,
though he believed the man to be guilty as sin. But the prominent and wealthy Hancock had been singled out for punishment
because of his political beliefs. Which my husband simply could not abide.
Of course, neither could he abide the tactics of the mob, egged on by Boston’s Sons of Liberty.
Five years ago, a group of angry colonists had hanged a tax collector in effigy from the Liberty Tree—a large stately elm on the corner of Essex and Orange Streets where colonists gathered to protest the Stamp Act.
Once the effigy was hanged, they stomped it, beheaded it, and held a funeral for it to intimidate that official to resign.
It was rumored that Samuel Adams had instigated this intimidation, and I believed those rumors. One could not argue, however,
against the effect. The tax collector did resign. Others followed suit all over the colonies, rendering the Stamp Act unenforceable.
But now new taxes on imports like tea had been passed, and Sam wanted my husband to do more with the Sons of Liberty to protest
them.
From my place by the entry—not knowing whether I should knock and take the chocolate in—I watched my husband rub at his temples.
“I support the boycotts. You won’t find a leaf of British tea in this house. But your methods, Samuel.”
Sam all but crushed his damp tricorn hat in a tightening grip. “I cannot be held to account for what the mob does.”
His protest seemed far too glib. His clenched hands might not do the tarring and feathering, but his words often inspired
these deeds. And now my husband pointed out, “If they’re not your methods, neither do you decry them.”
Sam rose to pace by our fire. “What other means do people have to resist unconstitutional acts? We have no representation
in Parliament—”
John broke in to say, “Unpropertied men of England have no representation in Parliament either.”
Nor the women, I thought.
But Sam simply turned and skewered my husband with that zealot’s gaze. “You don’t believe that is a justification, John.”
“No,” my husband admitted. “I believe there should be no taxation without representation, and that if we allow ourselves to
be treated as if we have fewer rights than an Englishman in London, we do a great disservice to ourselves and to our children.”
On that note, I cleared my throat and brought in the now lukewarm chocolate, interrupting them with cheery talk of friends
and family. Sam asked after our youngest, Susanna—little Suky. She’d been sickly, and Sam expressed concern. “I’ll pray for
you and your little girl, John. May she soon be in better health.”
In the weeks to come, Sam continued to rile up Boston against the unfair taxes, yet a tax on our tea remained. And to make sure we paid it, British soldiers ran drills in the snowy streets, shouting:
“Fix Bayonets!”
“Shoulder Firelocks!”
“Present Arms!”
It was dispiriting to see soldiery in our streets. They were not here, as they claimed, to protect the public. They were here
to intimidate, subjugate, and force our obedience to unpopular laws at the point of a musket. And their shouts tested my nerves.
I had a household to manage and children to care for. How could I do it with this racket—and the threat it was meant to represent—outside
my door?
“March! Halt! To the Right! About face!”
On tiptoe, peering out the frosted window, four-and-a-half-year-old Nabby asked, “Mama, shouldn’t we tell the soldiers not
to wake the babies?”
Nabby fussed over her siblings—two-and-a-half-year-old Johnny and thirteen-month-old Suky. My oldest considered herself too
grown now for an afternoon nap but knew her sick little sister needed rest. I, too, feared the soldiers would wake my babies,
and abandoning my sewing with a soft thump into the basket, I snapped, “Someone certainly should have a stern word with those
lobsterbacks.”
I immediately regretted calling them lobsterbacks, because Nabby tended to parrot me, and if her father heard us using that
derogatory term, he’d be wroth.
Well, he’d simply have to forgive me, for I was heavy with another one of his children, swollen at the ankles, and in a terrible
mood—made worse by the lack of good tea, for I only pretended to enjoy the herbal liberty tea we patriot wives brewed. At
our sewing circles—between snippets of gossip and more serious talk of how we might resist British tyranny—we traded satchels
of these herb teas around, claiming we no longer missed the real stuff.
But miss it, I did, especially the further my pregnancy progressed. I pinched the bridge of my nose against the headache brewing
there when the shouts of the soldiers finally awakened my little Suky, who started to cry.
Rushing to her, I found Suky red in the face, her cry raspy. Poor sickly child. The previous summer, upon the advice of Dr. Tufts, I’d taken her back to Braintree to escape the city’s foul vapors, but
nothing gave her comfort. Now I scooped my wailing littlest girl from her cradle and kissed her forehead, which was warm against
my lips. “Fetch me a wet cloth, won’t you, Nabby?”
Nabby was already quite dependable, just like my sister Mary had been at her age. Perhaps the oldest child is ever thus . . .
I wanted to send for Dr. Tufts, but he was too far distant in Weymouth. So, reluctantly, I sent for Dr. Joseph Warren. He
was reputedly a fine doctor—but personally, I mistrusted that a man so good-looking could also be a serious man of science.
Moreover, I preferred a doctor to be a good deal older than Joseph Warren’s twenty-eight years.
But with Suky so sick, I had little choice, and I was relieved when the smooth-cheeked Dr. Warren arrived promptly to examine
her with both thoroughness and a gentle hand.
Alas, his diagnosis was grave.
“A pleurisy,” Dr. Warren declared.
“Is it as dangerous as your expression leads me to fear?” I asked.
He plainly despaired of telling me, “Many children die of this ailment because there is nothing to treat it save a mix of
lime, sugar, and distilled cordial water. Failing that, a potion of Maredant’s Antiscorbutic Drops, which I do not have and
cannot get.”
“I have only two withered limes in the larder,” I said desperately. “But sugar and cordial water I have aplenty. Will that
do?”
He nodded. “I’ll mix it for you.”
While I rocked my crying baby, the good doctor squeezed the limes into the cordial water with sugar. Then he lowered himself
into my rocking chair, took my baby into his arms, and dabbed at her lips with a cloth soaked in the concoction.
How grateful I was to Dr. Warren for trying to ease my child’s pain and for the tenderness with which he treated her, staying
with us even when he was already late to attend another patient.
When he finally left, Nabby tried to coax her sister to suck the lime cordial from her fingertips. But our hearts sank when little Suky would not take even a drop.
Meanwhile the drilling continued outside my window. “March! Halt! To the Right! About face!”
I could take no more and sent our maid to ask the sergeant if he might leave off for another day so my sick baby could rest.
But no sooner did my maid poke her head out the door to interrupt the drill than was she accosted by rude hoots and whistles,
and propositioned by impertinent British soldiers who offered to bed her for a wage.
“Count yourself fortunate we don’t take you,” a jeering soldier shouted. “And the dinner from the table of your mistress afterward.”
I heard their cruel laughter even after my maid slammed the door and pressed her back against it, breathing hard.
Scoundrels! How I burned with offense. “Mr. Adams will hear of this when he returns and will certainly speak to their superior officer.”
But when would my good man return? John was not yet a rebel and revolutionist, but he increasingly spent time in taverns discussing
the news of the day and was often late in coming home. By dusk I grew frantic, for the baby was listless in my arms. I felt
death’s grip on her. Oh, how I wished for my mother, whose over-solicitousness for my health I now understood. Mama knew better
than I did how to tend to an ailing child. And I now despaired that she was so far away . . .
As the candle burned down, I continued to rock poor Suky in my arms, tears streaking her burning cheeks. Her cries exhausted
her, her fingers too weak to grasp mine. Our maid fed the other children and put my little boy to bed. But Nabby stayed at
my side, her face pressed to my belly even after sleep carried her away.
She was still with me when John finally shuffled in, snow dripping from his tricorn hat, looking consternated to find his
three girls in the dim candlelight of the parlor.
By then Suky no longer cried. Each of her stuttering baby breaths was a struggle. And one look at my grim expression seemed
to tell John that we must resign ourselves to the worst.
Wordlessly, he took a sleeping Nabby into his arms and carried her to bed before returning to me with the family Bible.
My husband was the son of a deacon, and I was the daughter of a parson, so it was natural that we should look to God for the salvation of our baby girl.
We prayed together; we prayed and prayed for baby Susanna until our voices were nothing but hoarse whispers and choked sobs, for the baby’s breaths slowed, shallower and shallower each time.
Susanna died in my arms that night.
When she passed, a wild, almost inhuman, sound of agony escaped me. Clutching her lifeless little body to my heart, I felt
a madwoman with sobbing grief. I wished to run into the snowy street and rend my garments.
It was only John, holding us both against his chest, who kept me still and sane and anchored with the solid weight of him.
“Our other children need us,” he whispered tearfully, reminding me with a hand on my pregnant belly that such grief could
endanger the life there, too. “They will learn from us how to meet life’s most painful misfortunes.”
We must bear up for them, he meant.
Soon dawn would break, and we’d have to tell Nabby and Johnny that their sister had gone to heaven. So, I somehow composed
myself, letting numbness overtake me as I looked down at my dead child.
Thirteen months. That was all the time that dear little soul lived on this earth. Just long enough to come into an awareness of herself and
the love of her parents. The pain of bringing Susanna into this world was infinitely less than the pain of seeing her pass
back out of it. It was the wrong order of things, to outlive a child.
But as our house went quiet and still with mourning, the soldiers continued marching outside—muskets at the ready. And that
was unnatural, too.