A Marked Man (11 page)

W
hat will become of her children?” John asked, when Abigail returned to the house, full of tea-cakes and speculation. “So far as I know, not even a dealer will pay as much as two shillings for a two-year-old that will only be underfoot and a burden ’til he’s seven or eight—”

“She,” corrected Abigail. “Marcellina, and the babe is Stephen. Mrs. Barnaby is looking after them. No woman in the household has given birth recently, so she’s spoon-feeding the poor mite on gruel and cow’s milk, and getting no thanks for it from Mrs. Fluckner.” As she returned with him to the kitchen—where Pattie, contrary to Abigail’s express instructions when she’d left for the Common that morning, was doing the ironing beside the warm Hell-mouth of the hearth—she saw in her mind again the servants’ hall of the Fluckner residence, to which Mr. Barnaby had escorted herself, Lucy, and the protesting but incurably inquisitive Mrs. Sandhayes to see the orphans.

Someone had tied little Marcellina by the leading-strings of her dress to a table-leg, to keep her from interfering with the work of the sewing-women and the maid, who there, too, had been doing ironing. Only at the Fluckner house, this involved the full panoply of goffering-tools, three different grades of starch, and irons narrow and wide, laid out on a rack above the hearth-coals, tempting to tiny fingers. Mrs. Barnaby—half her husband’s age and pretty as a kitten—had been mending one of Mrs. Fluckner’s lace-trimmed chemises, with tiny Stephen laid on a pillow at her side.

Children who, as John said, were worth nothing to anyone—except, by all accounts of everyone in the household, to their mother. “Spent every spare moment she had making dresses for them,” Mrs. Barnaby had said, reaching a careful finger to touch the sleeping infant’s cheek. “And Miss Lucy so kind, as to give her worn-out chemises and such to be made over into dresses for them—and talking her mother into doing the same. She’d never have gone away from them. Never.”

“I told Lucy I’d write to my father,” Abigail said to John, kneeling by the big kitchen sideboard where Tommy—also affixed by the leading-strings—raised joyful arms to be liberated and lifted. “He can surely find a family in Braintree or Weymouth who can be trusted to care for them, if they can be bought from Fluckner—”

“You speak as if you’re certain their mother is dead.” John opened the drawer of the sideboard, drew out a folded note. “There are other reasons that a woman could be ‘distrait’ or ‘beside herself ’—fear is the one that springs to my mind the quickest—that would drive her from her home and her children, always supposing your Mrs. Sandhayes isn’t correct and the woman wasn’t simply in a state of sickened horror to find herself with child by a man who’d raped her. This came for you just after you’d left. You’re right,” he added thoughtfully. “It is odd.”

“Well, I’ll take oath she wasn’t pregnant, with a baby still at breast.” Abigail straightened with her son in her arms, and unfolded the note. “The idiot,” she added dispassionately, after a quick perusal of that lovely Italianate script.

“As if anyone in Boston would tell a British officer anything about anyone’s movements, if he came asking.” Abigail folded up the sheet, set Tommy down, and took out her pastry-board. “And now of course if I go inquiring for a slender little fair-haired fellow with a cleft chin and the remains of a black eye on Saturday morning, both ferrymen will leap to the astute conclusion that I’m hand in glove with the British and give me a second helping of what he got. Drat the man!” She edged past John into the pantry, scooped out flour from the barrel there into a bowl, and gathered the lard-crock from the kitchen’s chilliest corner. “Perhaps if I inquire after Mr. Howell’s horse and ask the men who’d be on duty late in the afternoon when he’d have been coming back—”

“If he went,” pointed out John, and caught her for a firm kiss before turning back to the hall and his study. “The man could as easily have had a lady-friend in the North End as across the river.”

“Then why rent a horse?”

“Perhaps his toenail had become ingrown while he was in Maine, and he didn’t feel able for walking.”

Abigail threw a dishrag at him as he ducked through the hall door, to Charley and Tommy’s crows of delight.

But after she’d got the vegetables chopped for a rabbit pie, and the dried herbs that her mother-in-law sent her every autumn from her garden in Braintree pounded up, and caught Tommy twice as he attempted to toddle out the back door and freeze to death in the yard—Abigail took coarse paper from the sideboard drawer and wrote neatly in kitchen-pencil,

S
am’s reply came on Thursday afternoon.

As one of Boston’s busiest lawyers, John was one of the few who rode the circuit of all the colony’s courts: from New Bedford up to Newburyport, west into the backcountry as far as Worcester, and on up into Maine. Unlike many of Boston’s lawyers, he came from a relatively poor family. Though his younger brothers still in Braintree sent the produce of the family farm—barrels of flour and apples, cider, corn, and potatoes—with three sons (so far) to educate and a daughter to whom he hoped one day to make a suitable marriage-portion, John would take whatever work was offered, wherever it might be.

Abigail sometimes wondered whether the success of her marriage with this driven, vain, overly erudite man owed something to the width of her own interests. While she missed him sorely while he was away—both in bed and around the kitchen table in the evenings—she was never bored. There were too many books in the world, too many newspapers, too many interesting friends . . . completely aside from the fact that nobody could be bored who had four such enterprising children as Nabby, Johnny, Charley, and Tommy.

She occupied herself on Wednesday with enquiries between Prince’s Street and the Winissimet Ferry after
a fair, well-looking gentleman, of small stature, with a long nose and a cleft to his chin . . . etc.
and learned what she had always suspected, that most people were far more preoccupied with making shoes or sewing shirts or chasing after their own errant children at ten thirty on a Saturday morning than they were with passersby. In the afternoon, after taking another basket of bread, cheese, cider, and clean shirts to Harry’s brother Billy for dispatch to Castle Island, she wrote letters to her mother and sisters—busy, gossipy Mary and the lovely and studious Betsy—and, when Nabby and Johnny returned from school, with sorting the household laundry preparatory to the gargantuan nuisance of boiling and soaking that night, before washing on the morrow. Fitful squalls had flickered over Boston on Wednesday, rain freezing to sleet, but Thursday dawned clear, windy, and brutally cold. By the time the last of the rinsed and wrung-out sheets had been hung over the lines in the yard, the first shirts and shifts and baby-clouts had frozen solid. She, Pattie, and Nabby had just cleared up after dinner, and she was settling with the mending when the children came dashing in from the yard in a skirl of mud, and Johnny gasped in passing, “Ma, something’s going on!” as they pelted through the kitchen to the hall that led to the street door.

Abigail called, “
Don’t
go out!” as she sprang up to stride after them. Four years ago, at nearly this hour of the spring evening with the snow still on the ground, she’d heard the shouting of men in the street, even as she heard it now when her son yanked open the door. She’d heard shots fired, had run from the house they’d had in those days in Brattle Street and around the corner, to see blood black on the snow in the twilight, bodies lying where they’d fallen under a haze of powder-smoke—

Even with lingering daylight still in the sky, the jeering voices of a mob caught her with a twinge of dread.

She caught Charley by one shoulder, Tommy by his trailing leading-strings, and looking down Queen Street saw the men: jostling, shouting, throwing ice-balls and rocks.

Coming toward the house.

She drew her children into the house, shut the front door, and unhurriedly returned along the passage to the kitchen to collect her cloak and pattens. At the same time Pattie hurried in from the yard: “Mrs. Adams, ’tis Lieutenant Coldstone, I think—”

She wrapped a scarf around her neck. “Yes, I know. Keep the children inside, please.” At the market that morning she’d heard all manner of rumors about what vengeance the King was going to take on the rebellious Massachusers for dumping his precious tea, and violence hung in the air like the whiff of powder-smoke. It would be too easy for someone to start shooting. Johnny and Nabby were sensible children, but they were still terribly young.

She stepped into the street.

Lieutenant Coldstone was indeed walking up Queen Street from the direction of the customhouse, with the burly Sergeant Muldoon at his heels. A dozen men followed them, layabouts from the wharves, mostly—Abigail judged by their rough coats and ragged breeches—and prentice-boys who should have been at their work. One man hurled a snowball at Coldstone, which shattered in a way that told Abigail that there’d been a rock inside it. By the state of his long military cloak, she surmised it was far from the first. Sergeant Muldoon had a musket—shouldered—and was glancing about him, ready for an attack but with no evidence of panic. Somebody shouted “Lobsterback!” and somebody else yelled something a great deal worse.

Abigail strode quickly toward them and held out her hands. “Lieutenant Coldstone, what a pleasant surprise! Were you coming to see me?”

A man yelled, “Tory whore!” and Abigail was gratified to see another of the ragged group grab him by the shoulder and explain to him who exactly she was. The others were already falling back to a respectful—but still visible—distance.

“I wanted a word with you, m’am, yes.” Though his voice was impassive, Coldstone bore himself as if he’d just swallowed his own ramrod.

“I do apologize for my townsmen.” Abigail led the way back up Queen Street toward her door, where she could see Pattie looking out and holding the children back. “I fear that as sailing-weather improves, everyone is counting the days until the King’s message—whatever it is going to be—arrives. Some of the most shocking things are being said and believed.”

“Your countrymen are well to be anxious, m’am. I know not what Parliament’s reaction will be to such wanton defiance and destruction of property, but I suspect—and you must know also—that the actions of the Sons of Liberty will be regarded as a test case in dealing with rebellion in the colonies. And I am sorry to say,” he added, as he bowed Abigail across her own threshold, “that the issue serves only to cloud what might or might not have happened in Governor’s Alley Saturday night.”

“Sergeant Muldoon.” Abigail turned back on the doorsill. “You shall simply freeze to death if you stay here on the doorstep. Might he be permitted to go around the back to the kitchen, Lieutenant? There’s no need for him to remain on the street, is there?”

Coldstone glanced at the men who had now taken up loitering stances all along Queen Street, and said stiffly, “None, m’am.”

Muldoon saluted her as he disappeared down the passageway between the Adams’ house and the Butlers’ next door.