Each blow that his father gave with the folded leather reins seemed to make him calmer, his eyes growing less frantic and his speech less angry. Marcus had learned long ago not to cry while his father beat him, not even when his legs were covered with excruciating welts. Tears only made his father more desperate to exorcise Marcus’s demons. Usually Obadiah kept going until Marcus collapsed with pain. Then Obadiah took to the taverns, moving from one to the other until he collapsed, too, in a drunken heap.
It was after one of those beatings, while Obadiah was still out drowning his sorrows, that Marcus had packed a pail of food and the family almanac that outlined the towns on the Boston road so that he could mark his progress, and started walking east.
By the time Marcus reached Cambridge, Harvard Yard was buzzing like a hornet’s nest. The college had been emptied of its students, and militia from all over New England now occupied their rooms. When the college halls were filled up, the soldiers erected tents outside without much concern for their relationship to one another, the cobblestone streets, the lampposts, or the flow of sewage. The result was a makeshift encampment, crazed with narrow footpaths like the cracks in old crockery that wended their way between the flapping sheets of canvas, linen, and burlap.
Marcus entered the tent city and what had been a steady hum of activity became a din that rivaled the pounding of British artillery. Regimental musicians roused the inexperienced soldiers for the coming battle with a steady beating of their drums. Dogs, horses, and the occasional mule barked, neighed, and brayed. Men freshly arrived from towns as far away as New Haven to the south and Portsmouth to the north discharged their weapons at the slightest provocation, sometimes deliberately and more often accidentally.
Marcus was following the scent of burned coffee and roasted meat in search of something to eat when a familiar face turned toward him.
“Damn.” Marcus had been spotted by someone from back home.
Seth Pomeroy’s shrewd eyes settled on him, dark and deeply set over prominent cheekbones divided by a sharp nose. The Northampton gunsmith’s forbidding expression proclaimed that this was not a man to meddle with.
“MacNeil. Where’s your gun?” Pomeroy’s breath was foul—there was a decayed tooth in the front of his mouth that wiggled when he was angry. Tom Buckland wanted to pull it, but Pomeroy was adamantly opposed to dentistry, so the tooth was destined to rot in place.
“My pa has it,” Marcus replied.
Pomeroy thrust a musket at Marcus, one of his own and much finer than Grandfather MacNeil’s old blunderbuss.
“And does your father know you’re here?” Pomeroy asked. Like Mrs. Buckland, Pomeroy knew that Obadiah ruled his family with an iron fist. Nobody did anything without his permission—not if he valued his own hide.
“No.” Marcus kept his responses to a minimum.
“Obadiah isn’t going to like it when he finds out,” Pomeroy said.
“What’s he going to do? Disinherit me?” Marcus snorted. Everybody knew the MacNeils didn’t have a penny to bless themselves.
“And your mother?” Pomeroy’s eyes sharpened.
Marcus looked away rather than answer. His mother didn’t need to be part of this. His father had pushed her out of the way when she tried to stop their last argument, and she’d fallen and injured her arm. It still wasn’t healed, not even with Tom Buckland’s salve and the ministrations of the doctor from Hadley.
“One of these days, Marcus MacNeil, you’re going to find someone whose authority you can’t wriggle out from under,” Pomeroy promised, “but today isn’t the day. You’re the best shot in Hampshire County and I need every gun I can get.”
Marcus joined a line of soldiers. He filed into line next to a gangly fellow about his age wearing a red-and-white-checked shirt and a pair of navy breeches that had seen better days.
“Where you from?” his companion asked during a momentary lull in the action.
“Out west,” Marcus replied, not wanting to give too much away.
“We’re both country bumpkins, then,” the soldier replied. “Aaron Lyon. One of Colonel Woodbridge’s men. The Boston boys poke fun at anyone who lives west of Worcester. I’ve been called ‘Yankee’ more times than I can count. What’s your name?”
“Marcus MacNeil,” Marcus said.
“Who you with, Marcus?” Lyon rooted around in a pouch at his waist.
“Him.” Marcus pointed at Seth Pomeroy.
“Everybody says Pomeroy is one of the finest gunsmiths in Massachusetts.” Lyon produced a handful of dried apple slices. He offered some to Marcus. “Picked last year from our orchard in Ashfield. None better.”