Those Who Love [antikvár]

BOOK ONEA PURITÁN IN LOVEiS h e sat in the center of the bed she shared with her older sister Mary, slim legs tucked beneath her, enjoying the early October sunlight as her hand moved across the letter paper. There was a French escritoire in a corner of the room next to her crowded bookcase of volumes from England but she preferred placing a blotting pad and inkwell on the dark tufted spread, writing vivaciously as the autumnal sun warmed her face and shoulders. Outside the window that faced the hills she could see her young brother Billy feeding his rabbits and geese, moving grace-fully among them as he made quiet conversation.She turned her eyes back to the letter she had just received from her cousin Hannah Quincy, who had married Dr. Bela Lincoln and was liv-ing at Hingham. She read a line from Hannah:"Teli one of your sparks to bring you to see us."She chuckled, two pleasant-timbred notes low in her throat."You bid me teli one of my sparks . . . to bring me to see you," she wrote. "Why, I believe you think they are as plenty as herrings, when alas! there is as great a scarcity of them as there is of justice, honesty, prudence and many other virtues."There was ample reason for the popular Hannah to imagine that her cousin Abigail, nearly seventeen, would be surrounded by admirers. Cer-tainly Hannah had been: Richard Cranch, now engaged to Mary, had been an interested visitor to the comfortable Colonel Josiah Quincy home backing on Massachusetts Bay; John Adams, the young lawyer from Braintree, had been there so frequently that, when he stopped visiting, the countryside rumored that one of them had jockeyed the other.