Forever Ashley by Lori Copeland Read Free Book Online Page A

on,
praying that she would wake up and be done with this ghastly dream!
    Boston in 1775 was an awesome spectacle. The gathering
twilight bathed the bustling town in a mellow coral glow as the horse galloped
through narrow, winding dirt streets. The odor of fish hung heavily in the air,
and Ashley could hear the muffled throb of ships laying at anchor in the
harbor.
    Gazing about her in bewilderment, she found the skyline
flat, not the Boston she knew. The flurry of activity was far removed from the
midtown traffic to which she was accustomed. She could see candles being lit
inside quaint brick homes, and men carrying lanterns strode alongside the road.
    To the right lay the harbor where she saw a tubby British
vessel with a hornlike head projecting from its bow. A smaller American craft,
built mainly for fishing and coastal trade, bobbed beside it in the water.
Ashley noticed the American ship had fewer square sails and more of the handy
fore and aft sails, which hung parallel to the keel.
    Shouts suddenly drew her attention. Two ruffians were
engaged in a fistfight where a crowd was gathering. Street vendors ignored the
rowdy cutpurses as they went about crying their wares.
    Ashley turned, gaping over her shoulder at what appeared to
be a pickled pirate’s head perched upon a pole for exhibition. As she grasped
Aaron tighter about the waist, she felt him urge the horse into a faster gait.
    Curiosity mixed with wonder, astonishment, and apprehension
made her head swivel like a top as she took in the sights and sounds of
eighteenth-century Boston.
    Ships were being unloaded at the docks and freight wagons
rumbled past, carrying what few goods were allowed to the merchants. Recalling
history again, Ashley knew the ships contained everything from turtles to
chandeliers. In 1775 the port of Boston had been closed to all commerce since
June 1 of the year before, until the city paid for the tea that the colonists
had dumped into the harbor. The tea had been worth thousands of dollars. The
boycott had been a great sacrifice for the colonists, for it meant that they
had to do without a great many things they’d thought necessary for living.
    Ashley suddenly wondered if Aaron Kenneman had been involved
in the Boston Tea Party. She sat up straighter, about to ask him, then didn’t.
Paul Revere and the others had accused her of being Gage’s spy, and the
question would only arouse more suspicion. General Thomas Gage, she remembered,
was the new governor and commander-in-chief of the British forces in North
America, and he was assigned the task of enforcing the Boston Port Act.
    Aaron was most likely one of the colonists who formed a
provincial congress at Concord to govern Massachusetts. That congress, she
knew, would force Gage’s raid on colonial military supplies in Lexington and
Concord within a few days.
    She closed her eyes. This was absolutely the most absurd
dream she’d ever had. Why couldn’t she be dreaming that Hugh Jackman and Daniel
Craig were fighting over her, and, out of desperation, Mel Gibson kidnapped
her, then rushed her off to the Hawaiian Islands for a life of paradise?
    Instead she found herself riding on the back of a horse
behind an American patriot in the eighteenth century, only days before Paul
Revere’s famous ride to warn the colonists that the British were about to
attack.
    They emerged from the harbor area and entered the main part
of town. The air was putrid there. Gutters ran the lengths of the street,
forming open sewers. Slops and human filth had been tossed out the windows into
the gutter, and droves of wild hogs wallowed in the muck and fed on garbage
left to rot in the passageways between houses.
    Ashley gasped as a man almost ran into the horse, another
man close behind him.
    “Thief! Thief!” the second man shouted.
    The horse darted around the man, forcing Ashley to grab hold
of Aaron’s coattail to avoid being dumped into the slimy muck.
    “Cutpurse,” Aaron murmured more to