A Marked Man (12 page)

“Thank you again for keeping me apprised of your interviews with the coachmen,” added Abigail, leading him into the parlor. Pattie, God bless her, had kindled the fire there and entered a few moments later with a tray bearing two cups and a pitcher of hot cider, and bread-and-butter for Abigail’s guest. “Did you come to town to do more of them? I appreciate your visiting, but you needn’t have. ’Twould be silly of either of us to deny how risky it is.”

“I came across principally to arrange for Sir Jonathan’s trunk and portmanteau to be taken out to Castle Island, and to speak to Mr. Fenton, who still lies sick at the Governor’s house. I also wished to have another look at the alley behind the mews in daylight and return to you this.”

He set on the small parlor table the covered basket he had been carrying, and Abigail saw it was the bundle of food, linen, and
Don Quixote
that she’d handed Billy Knox that morning. “Colonel Leslie has forbidden the prisoner to receive further gifts, fearing—he says—clandestine communications.”

“About what, for Heaven’s sake?”

“If we could anticipate all schemes devised by those who seek to foment rebellion,” Coldstone replied stiffly, “we would have little need for a regiment here, m’am. I regret to say that none of today’s enquiries yielded information, and it occurred to me that you may have learned something from Miss Fluckner or her chaperone about events at the Governor’s ball that might have escaped the host.”

“Not yet.” Abigail settled back again in her chair. “Though Miss Fluckner and Mrs. Sandhayes assure me that they will gossip their way through the parlors of every other guest that evening and learn what they can of who might have absented themselves from the ball at ten or eleven in the evening—I doubt we can place Sir Jonathan’s death much later than that, on account of the heat of the body—or whether anyone in Boston hated the man enough to kill him.”

“Other than the Sons of Liberty?” enquired Coldstone politely. “Or the man whose sweetheart he attempted to ravish the morning of his departure?”

“Possibly a friend of the maidservant he attempted to ravish in her own room in the Fluckner house?” returned Abigail. “The one who disappeared? He seems to have made a habit of that sort of behavior.”

“He did.” Coldstone’s voice was suddenly dry and flat. “He was known for it. My mother would not have him in our house.”

“You knew him?” Abigail regarded him in startled surprise. And yet, she thought, Lieutenant Coldstone came from the same class of society that Sir Jonathan Cottrell did, the English gentry whose landed wealth and sense of social responsibility formed the backbone of government and society in the home country. They were the men who were elected to the House of Commons, the magistrates who enforced its laws in thousands of England’s villages from Land’s End to Hadrian’s Wall, the officers who commanded her armies, and the churchmen who were given livings whether they deserved them or not. They knew one another, married one another’s daughters to their sons, attended the same plays and salons, patronized the same modistes and bootmakers. Rich or poor, they sent their sons to the same schools, where they learned to write with Coldstone’s elegant hand, to speak with his clear diction, to wear clothes with a certain style—even if they were refurbished like Margaret Sandhayes’s gowns, or put on, as Coldstone had put on his crimson uniform, because the family had not the money or the influence for him to do otherwise.

Of course their families had moved in the same circles.

“I did not know him personally, as I was at school when he was obliged to leave the country.”

“Was there a scandal?”

“Of sorts. A girl hanged herself.” The savagery in his voice was all the more shocking because it was not raised above his usual soft conversational tone. “It would have raised no eyebrows, except that she wasn’t a servant. A number of people cut him after that and he went to the Continent for some years, but of course such things do get forgotten, particularly if the man in question is a friend of the King’s. My mother knew him. If you will pardon me, the recollection played a part in the immediacy of my suspicion of Mr. Knox. But it is equally likely that another outraged husband or brother or sweetheart did the office, or that the crime was connected with the absence of the memorandum-book from his pocket.”

“It was not in his luggage, I suppose?”

“No. Nor in his room at the Governor’s.”

“Did his luggage contain a journal or daybook of any sort, recording where he went in Maine?”

“Nothing. Not even notes. His regular daybook of expenses he left at the Governor’s. Mr. Fenton says that his master’s memory for such things was quite good, and he would frequently go for a week without making any notation, then tally up all the preceding expenses at once. His luggage did contain letters of introduction to Mr. Bingham at Boothbay, and to another agent of Mr. Fluckner’s on Georgetown Island, further along the coast. Both letters bore the appearance of having been unfolded, handed about, and read, as is to have been expected.”

“Please don’t tell me,” sighed Abigail, “that we’re going to have to pursue enquiries into Maine at this season.”

The afternoon was darkening, and as she genuinely liked Lieutenant Coldstone, when he rose to go, Abigail went to the kitchen and donned cloak, scarves, shawls, and pattens to accompany him as far as the wharf. The mob that had followed him from the Governor’s would still, despite the cold, be waiting in Queen Street, and while they might have orders from Paul Revere not to lay a hand on the two British soldiers, she wouldn’t have wanted to wager on the chance that they’d protect them if others tried.

Sergeant Muldoon, his red coat off and his musket placed carefully in the pantry where none of the children could get at it, was helping Pattie fill the lamps at the big worktable in the kitchen, while Johnny and Nabby, instead of doing their lessons, were listening to the sergeant’s tales of camp and transport and fighting the French. At Abigail’s appearance in the doorway the children dived back into their books and slates; Pattie and Muldoon scrambled to their feet. “I trust you’re not corrupting my son?” Abigail inquired.

“No, m’am. I doubt I could,” he added with a grin, “with all his da’s already havin’ him read of what the Romans got up to! Lord, think of a boy that age, able to write Latin and all.”

“Young Mr. Adams brought you a note from Mr. Sam.” Pattie produced a folded paper from her apron pocket.

T
he
Magpie
was a thirty-five-foot sloop, Jamaica-rigged, that badly needed a coat of paint. Among the tall oceangoing vessels of the harbor it blended in, like a shabby idler in a crowd, but Abigail picked it out at once as she crossed the icy black planks that joined Scarlett’s Wharf with the higher ground along Ship Street. Somebody on board had built a fire in the little galley. Smoke trickled from the cabin’s half-open door, snagged and whipped away by the wind that tore at Abigail’s cloak and cut through the quilted jacket, skirt, and petticoats beneath.

“You know a man’s poor, when he’s living on water in weather like this.” Paul Revere hunched his shoulders and kept one steadying hand on Abigail’s elbow against the force of the squalls, the other hand being engaged in holding on to his hat.

Abigail could only nod agreement, so tightly were her teeth clenched to keep them from chattering.

One truly knew one’s friends, she reflected, on evenings like this: after escorting Coldstone and Muldoon to Rowe’s Wharf, she’d walked along the waterfront to North Square in the fading twilight and knocked at the door of the tall, narrow Revere house. The silversmith, God bless him, had not inquired why she wanted an escort to Scarlett’s Wharf, which lay only a few yards beyond. He’d only laid aside his pipe, kissed his wife and his numerous offspring, and gotten his coat.

He called out now, “Ahoy the
Magpie
!” as he held out his hand to help Abigail up the gangplank. The boy who appeared in the low cabin doorway was well in keeping with the vessel and with everything Abigail had heard about the inhabitants of Maine: unwashed, glum, his shaggy hair drooping in his eyes, he was dressed in castoffs that would have embarrassed a scarecrow.

“You’d be Eli Putnam?” Revere enquired briskly. “We’re looking for Mr. Miller or Mr. Brown.”

The boy’s eyes widened with alarm and he whirled like a hare seeking its burrow. Only Revere’s quickness kept the boy from slamming the cabin door behind him. Revere got a shoulder and a thigh into the aperture and leaned his weight on the door as the youth struggled to shut it. “Don’t know nobody by that name,” the boy shouted out of the smoky murk below.

“Are you the master of this vessel, then?” demanded Revere.

The boy, confused, said, “Yes.”

“Don’t be daft, son.” Revere leaned his weight on the door and heaved it open, leaned in to catch the youth by the arm before he could disappear down the hatchway. “You’ve no more beard than my baby daughter and a vessel this size needs a crew of two at least. Did Miller follow Cottrell down from Boothbay?”

“Matt Brown made him!” blurted the boy. “You ain’t magistrates, are you?”

“Don’t be a dunce,” said Revere good-naturedly. “Do we look like magistrates? My name’s Revere. This is Mrs. Adams.”

The boy’s dark eyes got bigger still. “Like Sam Adams?” he whispered.

Abigail nodded, since this was technically true. John and Sam shared a great-grandfather, who had doubtless spent the past decade rolling over in his grave at the thought of Sam’s politics. “We need to speak to Mr. Miller or Mr. Brown,” she said.

“That’s just it, m’am—mister,” said the boy. “I dunno where they be. Come down,” he added belatedly, and gestured down the nearly pitch-black gangway. “There’s a bit of a fire. You’ll be froze up here, stiff as a pig in the shed. I got tea,” he added. “I mean smuggler tea, not Crown tea. And rum.”

“What did your friends want with Cottrell?” asked Revere, once the three of them were crowded knee-to-knee in a cabin barely the size of Abigail’s pantry. “What did he get up to in Maine?”

“He were lookin’ about, sir. Everybody down east said they’d teach him not to fool with Maine men. But he kept cautious. Kept indoors at night and got old Bingham to send a man with him when he went about. Quimby, that owns the public house, said we’s not to harm him, though the boys was all for showin’ them Proprietors here in Boston they can’t pull us about and put us off our land. But it’s hard to put Matt off a plan when he’s got one. Matt took it in his head that if every man the Proprietors send up got his head broke, pretty soon they’d decide not to send any more men, and he says Quimby’s a coward that’s read too many books and newspapers.”

“And is that what Cottrell said he’d do?” asked Abigail. “Turn you off your land?” Someone had clearly been cheated on the tea—about a soupspoon’s worth of crumbles and dust at the bottom of a decades-old box. The brew it yielded was grayish and utterly flavorless, and judging by the cautious way her companion sipped his rum, the contents of his cup was either just as bad or murderously strong or both.

“They been sayin’ it at the public house for months,” said the boy Putnam. “How after we fought the Indians and cleared the land, it wasn’t really that Dunbar feller’s to let in the first place, and Mr. Fluckner or Mr. Bowdoin or Mr. Apthorp or one of them others, they’re going to clear us all off.” He pushed back the hair from his eyes for the tenth time: a thin boy, the skin of his face reddened and darkened from a short lifetime at sea, his fingers—where they showed beyond roughly knitted mitts—calloused and knotted already with work. Some of John’s strangest tales of his legal journeying involved men and women he’d encountered in that cruel and stony land, Scots and Germans clinging to unyielding acres, fighting Indians or trading with them until many of them were very like the savages themselves, barely knowing God’s name and with only the sketchiest notion of His Commandments. The hard work broke men without giving them enough to feed their families; the sea from which they took the bulk of their living was a cold and greedy creditor who demanded from every family a son or a husband or a brother every few years.

It isn’t just about tea
, Abigail thought,
and it isn’t just about taxes
. Looking into the boy’s eyes in the near-dark of the little cabin, she saw again Mrs. Fluckner’s smiling lace-decked portrait on the wall and the liveried footman bringing in a tray of cakes for Mrs. Sandhayes to slip to the lapdog. And suddenly, she understood Sam.
It’s about the fact that men who’re friends with the King can do this to men who’re not friends with the King.