A well-formed and outgoing military officer, Bester had no trouble finding a place at a table in the crowded tavern. His friends were calling for ale for him even as he cast off his cloak, hanging it on a peg by the door. He moved across the room, through boisterous clusters of men, to be offered a pipe as he sat at his friends’ table in a cloud of smoke and noise hovering over the tavern room. He had hung his uniform coat up with the cloak and now become just one of the many men in the room in a billowy white cotton shirt, navy blue britches, and gray stockings. He wasn’t just another man in the room, though. He was particularly well put together, his black hair tied off with a ribbon at the back of his head, rugged and dark facile features strikingly marked by hazel eyes, a muscular torso, and well-turned thighs and calves. He stood a full head above most of the men in the room and outweighed them as well, although he would be described as solid rather than heavy. He could wrestle any man in the tavern to submission and all there recognized that he could. He’d done so for sport on many an occasion, wrestling only in his britches and showing the curly black matting of hair on his chest and arms. He was truly a man’s man and in his prime.

He also had a nature that most men in the colonies didn’t have—and even fewer willingly revealed. He was attracted to other men rather than women, and at this particular moment he was in great need of release. Thus it was that he was particularly observant when his mug of ale was delivered by a tavern boy—not a boy, really, a young man—although all servers in taverns were called boys. This one was one Bester had not seen in Fraunce’s Tavern before. He was sure he would have remembered seeing him before, as just the sight of this one set Bester’s juices going.

The young man was sandy haired and slim. He was considerably younger than Bester and yet looked to be in his majority—which, in itself, piqued Bester’s interest. . . . A charge went through Bester’s body as the ale was delivered, because their hands touched in the transfer of the mug and the young man looked down into Bester’s eyes and the rugged soldier caught the unmistakable smile of interest. . . .

Bester immediately felt himself starting to go hard, but when he looked up again, the young man was gone. He hadn’t gone far, though. He had returned to the bar to pick up more mugs of ale and he was distributing them around the tavern. But he kept looking back in Bester’s direction, and despite the conversation at the table on the status of the British presence and of various colonial leaders’ calls for a break with Britain, Bester found himself frequently picking out where the young, lithe, sandy-haired server was in the large, smoke-filled room.

He saw that the young man did keep looking back at him, but he noticed that the server also was listening intently to the conversations at the tables in the small groups of men standing about, as if he was gleaning as much of what was being said as he could. This disturbed Bester a bit. He had moved into a conversation at his table about the capabilities and ranges of the cannon in the nearby battery at the tip of Manhattan, but seeing the interest being displayed by the tavern boy, he bit off what he was going to say next. . . . He went silent, hoping that those in conversation at his table wouldn’t notice that he had clammed up.

Going silent, though, permitted more attention to go to observation, and it became increasingly evident the tavern boy was eyeing him and conveying an invitation. When, after looking meaningfully in Bester’s direction, the young server moved to the back of the tavern room and then into the beaded-curtain-covered doorway of a corridor leading to the back of the building, Bester excused himself on the excuse of the call of nature and followed through the door.