Page 3 of King's Man

His throat closed around the words, eyes filling with tears. Blinking them away, he finished dressing in silence. And in silence he made his way downstairs, avoiding the front door. Sam followed, and they stopped in the kitchen amid the scent of drying rosemary. How he’d leave, Nate couldn’t fathom, and for a few slow ticks of the clock they stood and gazed at each other in agonized silence.

“There was a time,” Sam said roughly, “when you’d leave by the front door, when you weren’t ashamed of our friendship.”

Not shame, never that. But exasperation and dread and a terrible aching regret that balled up into impossible frustration. “I just wish you could see that history is with us, Sam. Our cause is just. It’s right. And we will prevail. I wish you’d join us.”

Sam straightened, his expression changing from sorrow to something colder, harder. It made Nate shiver. “I wishyoucould see that tearing down the law and raising up a mob risks every liberty you claim to defend. And I wish your committee could understand that I have a right to voice my opposition to this damned war, and that myopiniondoesn’t make me a traitor.”

Those were his parting words. Nate had no answer they hadn’t rehearsed a hundred times. They would never agree, and more arguing was futile.

Opening the door, he stepped out into the sticky heat of the afternoon and walked through Sam’s neglected kitchen garden to the dusty road beyond. He looked back once and saw Sam standing in the shadow of the doorway watching him leave.

Neither said goodbye.

Chapter Two

Two months later — October 24th, 1778

Rosemont, Rhode Island

“Tanner! Tanner, wake up!”

Heart rabbiting in his chest, Nate sat bolt upright in bed. It was pitch black. The darkest hour of the night. And someone was battering at the front door of his lodging house.

“Tanner!”

Stumbling downstairs, he wrenched open the door. John Reed stood outside, the portly old gentleman wearing his coat over his nightgown and no wig beneath his hat. In the moonlight, his skin looked waxy and sick. “My God,” Nate said with icy dread. “What’s happened?”

“It’s Sam.” Reed gripped Nate’s arm, grim as death. “They’ve gone up to his place, a whole crowd of them.”

Nate’s stomach pitched. “Holden?”

“They marched right past my house — thirty, maybe more. I couldn’t see enough to count. But Holden was up front. Urging them on.” His grip on Nate’s arm tightened. “They were ugly, Nate. Ugly.”

Yes, they would be. With the British camped so close, Rosemont had been seized by terror for the past two months. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll…”

What? What the devil could he do? Amos Holden was no friend of his. Always a self-important prick, he’d become the very image of Sam’s swaggering demagogue since he’d made himself head of the Committee of Safety. And he’d always been suspicious of Nate’s defense of Sam.

And what’s Hutchinson to you, Tanner?What makes him so different from any other traitor who refuses to defend his country? Or is it because you and he are suchparticularfriends?

The truth was that Nate had grown afraid of Amos Holden. He was the sort of man to ferret out trouble if he got its scent, or to invent it if he didn’t, and God knew Nate and Sam had plenty of trouble to find. So Nate had stayed silent and Holden’s braggadocio had grown bolder. Tonight, Nate feared the consequences of his silence would be realized, and the thought turned his stomach.

“Go home,” he told Reed. “I’ll deal with this.”

Racing upstairs, Nate wrenched open the drapes to dress by moonlight instead of wasting time lighting a lamp. Throwing on his clothes, he shoved his feet into his boots and ran out of the house, passing Reed as he too hurried towards Sam’s house. Nate wasn’t surprised the old man refused to hide at home; Sam was almost a son to him. John Reed wouldn’t turn his back on him, despite Holden’s threats.

The streets of Rosemont were quiet — it must be long past midnight — but up ahead Nate could hear the distant clamor of angry voices, and the sound raised the hair on the back of his neck. This had been brewing for weeks. Like a storm sitting far out at sea, he’d watched it draw closer day-by-day. Inevitable as winter.

Sam’s house lay on the outskirts of Rosemont, a fine brick building first constructed by his grandfather and improved upon by his father. Much bigger than Sam needed, now that there was only him left. And Amos Holden had long regarded it with covetous eyes.

Nate’s lungs started to burn, breath billowing in the chill fall night, his feet stumbling over ruts as he ran. He fell once, skinning his palms, picked himself up and kept going despite the sharp twinge in his ankle. From ahead, came the flickering dance of flame — torches, to light the way. And to intimidate.

Holden’s rabble were already outside Sam’s house, a rough arc of people crowding around the front door. Wild with panic, Nate shouldered his way through the crowd, every face familiar: James Adams, the blacksmith, Abe Milton who owned the bakery, the O’Keefe brothers, all six of them. And several of their wives, by the looks of things. Neighbors, all. Friends, once. But angry now; angry and afraid.

“Let me pass,” Nate demanded as he pushed forward. “Let me see —”

He stopped dead when he reached the front, choking on his own breath.

Sam knelt on the ground outside his front door. He was half dressed, in breeches and a shirt — Nate had an unbidden, agonizing image of him dressing in fright as the mob surrounded his house — and his hands were tied behind his back. His feet were bare.

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