Bunker Hill

included Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Robert Treat Paine. But they still had a problem. When it came time to make their report to the House of Representatives, Leonard would instantly know that he had been tricked. He might even succeed in blocking their efforts to elect representatives to the Continental Congress. He must not attend the meeting of the House on Friday, June 17. But how to get him out of Salem?
    Paine had an idea. The Court of Common Pleas was to sit in Taunton on Tuesday, June 14. He would convince Leonard that the two of them should attend that session with the understanding that they would get back to Salem in time “to attend all important business.” So on Saturday, June 11, the two lawyers set out on the fifty-five-mile journey to Taunton. A week later on Saturday, June 18, they were on the road back to Salem when they heard the news that forever ended their friendship.
    With Leonard out of the way, the committee had been free to make their report, but not before a motion was heard to clear the galleries and lock the House chamber doors. By this time Gage had gotten word that something treasonous was afoot, and he immediately dispatched the provincial secretary Thomas Flucker with a proclamation dissolving the General Court. Finding the door locked, Flucker had no choice but to read the proclamation from the courthouse steps, a brief two-sentence directive that ended with the words, “God Save the King.” By that time, the House of Representatives was in the midst of approving the delegates for the First Continental Congress. Samuel Adams and the other committee members were jubilant, and that night a celebratory dinner was held in Boston at the home of Dr. Joseph Warren on Hanover Street.
    —
    Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prostitutes on aptly named Damnation Alley, to his good friend the tubercular Josiah Quincy. He was so frequently asked to visit the sick—even on a Sunday, when the normally busy streets of Boston were almost completely deserted—that he’d chosen a pew at the Reverend Samuel Cooper’s Brattle Street Meeting opposite a side door, “for the prevention of disturbance when abruptly called on for medical aid.” He had what doctors call “the touch,” that ability to put patients at ease—a particular challenge in the eighteenth century, since many of the accepted medical treatments of the day did more physiological harm than good.
    Warren’s portrait by John Singleton Copley presents a man with gray-blue eyes; a full, sensuous mouth; and an aura of vivacious engagement. According to one account, “The ladies judged him handsome,” and his first child seems to have been conceived well before he and his wife, Elizabeth Hooten, just seventeen, were married. Elizabeth died in 1772, and by the spring of 1774 Warren, thirty-three, was one of the most eligible widowers in Boston. The night after the election of the delegates to the First Continental Congress, amid a euphoric assemblage of the city’s leading patriots, Warren may have struck up the romantic relationship that was to be the most important of what remained of his abbreviated life.
    Warren recorded in his ledger book that just the month before he had seen a patient named Mercy Scollay. Thanks to a poem that appeared in a magazine edited by Isaiah Thomas, publisher of the notoriously radical newspaper the
Massachusetts Spy
, we have reason to suspect that Scollay was at Warren’s house on June 17.
    Mercy Scollay was thirty-three and dangerously close to becoming a spinster. She was later described by a Warren family member as “a woman of great energy and depth of character.” If the painting by Copley that has been associated with her is indeed Mercy Scollay, she had penetrating and intelligent eyes and an ironic twist to the mouth, not unlike that of her forceful father, John, who was also painted by Copley, and as chair of the town’s selectmen was about to lead Boston through some of its most difficult days.
    In a prefatory paragraph to a poem that appeared in the June 1774 issue of the
Royal American Magazine
, Isaiah Thomas