They were silent for a moment. Then she clenched her soft hands and stiffened her mouth. “I’ll have to go just as I am,” she said, and tried to walk again. Again she fell.
Kitty helped her up and led her to a chair. “Sit down, Sally Rose,” she said gently. But Sally Rose could not sit down.
“I guess it’s no use,” she murmured, reluctant, almost tearful. “You’ll just have to go and tell Gerry I’m sick, or something. Tell him to come back tomorrow night. I’ll surely be there.”
Kitty hesitated. She didn’t know quite why. Was it because Gerry was British and she disapproved of the British? Or was it a deeper, stranger thing—a sort of foreboding? A fear, and yet an eagerness, too.
“Are you sure you want me to, Sally Rose?” she asked.
Sally Rose stamped her foot, or tried to, then writhed as a whalebone jabbed her. “Of course I do,” she cried. “Go quickly, do, and come back and tell me what he has to say. Then we’ll have to get the shears and cut me out of this thing. Oh Kitty, go now!”
And so it was that Kitty Greenleaf slipped away to Charlestown’s old graveyard that night to meet her country’s enemy, her cousin’s exciting young man.
An eerie little wind was blowing through the town that night, a warm wind, and it had the tang of sea salt in it, and the heavy sweetness of the new mown hay on Bunker Hill. It ruffled Kitty’s hair and cooled her hot face as she walked through the empty streets, past the Two Cranes, the courthouse, and the meeting house with its tall white spire rising against the dark. Few of the windows were lighted, but down by the docks she could hear the familiar cry of the watch, and over the bay the lights of Boston shone out bright and clear. It was hard for her to remember that Boston was no longer a friendly town.
When she reached the graveyard she felt her way along the low wall that protected it from the street. Shadow lay thick about the grassy mounds inside, and crooked elm boughs meeting overhead shut out the thin glow of the starlight. There was no moon.