A Marked Man (27 page)

“As I have explained to all those gentlemen in the Watchhouse,” sighed Abigail, “I had nothing to do with it. But someone went to a good deal of trouble to see to it that the British think I did. I’m beginning to know how poor Harry feels! Now
that
,” she added, shading her eyes and looking in the direction of the other end of the Mall, “will be the surgeon.”

Several of the assorted stevedores, layabouts, smugglers, and such, appeared as if by magic from the copse and the hillside as the three crimson-coated riders drew near, but there was not even shouting. The absurdly young officer saluted Muldoon and left his escort on guard outside; John—no coward but no fool, either—stepped back and nodded in the direction of the copse at the foot of the hill.

Abigail shook her head. “You go,” she whispered. “I’ll be all right.”

“There’ll be trouble, if they try to arrest you—”

“They won’t try to arrest me. They haven’t a leg to stand on—and if I know Mr. Revere, reinforcements are already on their way.”

When she reentered the Watchhouse, the youthful surgeon was examining the wound by the clustered light of the lanterns, but at least, Abigail reflected, he didn’t suggest that his patient be bled, puked, or given emetics to regulate the balance of his bodily humors.

“We should get him to the camp before I attempt to remove the ball,” he said, straightening up at last. His speech, like Coldstone’s, was that of the gentry class: Abigail wondered if his parents, like the Lieutenant’s, had not been quite able to afford professional training for their son and so had apprenticed him to an Army surgeon instead. Looking around him, he registered a moment’s surprise at the sight of a woman in the place, then stepped over to her and bowed. “Lieutenant Dowling, m’am, at your service . . . Can you tell me, if there is some herb—some poultice that the local midwives use—as a sovereign for cleansing a dirty wound, or as a febrifuge? I have often found these old remedies to be of great use, but unfortunately I only know them for the Indies.”

“Willow-bark tea will bring down a fever,” Abigail began.

The artillery officer broke in, “Really, Lieutenant Dowling, do you think that’s wise?” And in a lower voice, “’ Twas this woman who lured Lieutenant Coldstone into the trap! Her husband is the head of the Sons of Liberty!”

Exasperated, Abigail snapped, “Mr. Adams is nothing of the kind! You’re thinking of the
other
Mr. Adams—”

And in a thread of a voice, Lieutenant Coldstone added, “’ Tis true.” His hand stirred toward her. “Mrs. Adams—”

“Hush,” said Abigail. “Lie quiet. They’ll be taking you back to the camp—” For the soldiers that young Lieutenant Dowling had brought with him now entered, with a makeshift litter of poles.

Coldstone shook his head. “My sergeant—?”

“Is well,” said Abigail. “The shot was meant for you.” She stepped close, avoiding the soldiers as they prepared the litter. “I sent you no note, Lieutenant. That is, I
did
send you a note, but ’twasn’t the one you received: that was a forgery.”

“What news?” he murmured. “
Shocking news
, you said—”

She bit back her protest that she’d had nothing to do with that particular communication, and only said, “I shall tell you later, Lieutenant. All is well for now.” She laid her hands over his and through both pairs of gloves could still feel how cold his flesh was. “But I must have your permission to see you—” She glanced at the artillery officer, who was frowning at her in a way that presaged future welcome by the authorities in the camp.

Coldstone nodded. Encouragingly, Lieutenant Dowling bent over him and said, “It will all be well, Mr. Coldstone. Beyond the loss of blood there is no mortal hurt.”

He started to withdraw, with a sign to the soldiers to proceed, and Abigail laid her hand on his sleeve. “Pray, sir, tell no one that.”

“I beg your pardon, m’am?”

Her glance went to the artillery officer, to the constables, calling them close. “Please, listen to me, gentlemen. Tell no one that Lieutenant Coldstone’s hurt is not mortal.” And, when they looked at her blankly: “Do you not see? A trap was laid for him, by whom we know not. Nor do we know when they will strike again, or how. Let no one see him—”

“Really, Mrs. Adams!” exclaimed the artilleryman. “In the safety of the camp—”

“As few as may be, then . . . and myself.”

He looked as if he had something else to say about that, but Coldstone whispered, “Let it be as she says. She is right.”

“Enough now, sir.” Lieutenant Dowling stepped forward again, a trifle diffidently, and signed again to the soldiers. “We must take you across to the island, before the gale freshens further. Mrs. Adams—” He turned to her as the men began, with the competence of those who’ve handled the wounded on the field of battle, to shift Coldstone over onto a litter. “Is there one in Boston who deals in these herbal simples you’ve spoken of? In the islands it was the Negro midwives, and one had to go to the slave-dances to find them—”

“I shall make up a packet for you,” she said, “and have it sent across before the day grows dark. I grow them myself, and dry them—my mother, and my mother-in-law, send others across from our family farms.” She flinched, as a cry was wrung from the patient when they settled him on the litter, and she turned to take his hand again. “Remember, when they carry you out, to do your best to look like a dying man, sir,” she instructed briskly, and Coldstone managed the flicker of a smile.

“Endeavor—to convince . . .” His fingers closed weakly around hers. “News,” he said. “What was it?
Shocking
—”

She shook her head, “Later,” she said. And then, when he gripped her hand as she tried to draw it away: “The name of the girl who hanged herself over Cottrell. What was it?”

“Seaford.” His eyelids slipped closed again. “Sybilla Seaford.”

“And her sister?”

Breath and consciousness went out of him with a sigh.

I
f the would-be killer were watching, Abigail knew it would be better to have herself taken out of the Watchhouse surrounded by constables, as though she were under arrest. But she could think of no way to do this without having the rabble attempt to rescue her—certainly she could think of no way to convince the harassed artillery officer to go along with the charade. The soldiers who manned the British batteries at either horn of the mile-wide crescent of Boston Harbor seldom emerged from behind the palings of their garrisons, and with good reason. Vastly outnumbered, it would not take much of a confrontation for someone to start shooting . . .

It was all Harry would need, she reflected a moment later, when he came before the Admiralty Court—

No.
She thrust the thought from her mind.
We can’t let it go so far. One way or the other, we cannot let him be taken aboard the
Incitatus
. . .

But as she followed the stretcher-party out the door of the Watchhouse, she could think of no way of stopping the event.

Coldstone had promised he would try to be appointed for the defense. She shivered as she looked down at the young man’s waxen face. And shivered again at the thought that the would-be killer was a good enough shot with a rifle to hit a man at nearly two hundred yards—

—and that Lieutenant Coldstone might not have been the man’s only target.

Fortunately, the Common was the widest space of open ground in Boston, and the only possible cover—the copse of brush at the bottom of the Powder-Store’s unkempt hill—had been thoroughly overrun with prentice-boys, ruffians, and smugglers, and probably thoroughly searched by Paul Revere as well.

She saw she had been right, too, in her guess that Revere would send for reinforcements the moment two other soldiers appeared on the scene. The mob formed a loose ring around the little cluster of stretcher-bearers, constables, and soldiers, at a distance of about twenty yards: idly loafing, looking about them as if they had by coincidence all decided at once to take a walk on the Common that morning. But many of them carried cudgels, or the short clubs used by the men at the ropewalks for beating cable; some openly bore guns. She knew that they’d stay with the shore party down to Rowe’s Wharf.

“ ’ Twill be a savage crossing for poor Coldstone,” she murmured to John, who came forward out of the ring of men, leading his borrowed horse, as she fell back from the stretcher-bearers. “But I suppose if we were to offer Lieutenant Dowling the spare room in which to remove the bullet, and to keep the Lieutenant there to recover, that artillery captain would suffer an apoplexy.”

“As would Cousin Sam,” returned John. “Not to mention every one of our neighbors, when I ride out for Haverhill Monday morning. Will you never cease being a scandal, woman?” he asked, with a grin at Abigail’s shocked expression. “For a good Christian you’ve a surprising innocence of heart.”

“
Honi soit qui mal y pense
,” she retorted.

“Then shame upon the whole length of Queen Street, because
mal pense
is precisely what everyone will do . . . and
does
, given your penchant for making friends with handsome British officers. Besides,” he added, clearly enjoying her outrage at the thought that anyone would read scandal into her meetings with Coldstone, “you’d never separate that sergeant of his from him, and what would we do with the man? Let him sleep in the kitchen? Then there’d be trouble from one end of the town to the other, about British troops being quartered upon civilians—”

They followed the litter-bearers down Winter Street and past the Governor’s house on Marlborough Street, men and women coming out of homes and shops to gawk—and some to join the mob. Abigail saw Revere and Ben Edes—the publisher of the
Gazette
—and young Robbie Newman in the crowd, and at one point thought she glimpsed Cousin Sam. But the Sons of Liberty had no intention of permitting another Massacre. The four soldiers clustered more tightly together but did not break their disciplined step, and in the whole of the company, no one shouted.

There was only a low murmur, like bees when a hive swarms. For her part, Abigail felt uneasily conscious of the number of upper windows they passed between, and as the houses thickened on either side, she walked closer to John.

“I’m sorry you had to return.”

“It couldn’t be helped. I’d hoped to have Sunday there to walk about and see the town, but if I leave at first light Monday, ’twill be the same.” Abigail reflected guiltily that had the weather worsened today, while he was on the road, he would have had the choice of passing the Sabbath at some point in between. Now he had lost that leisure, and the thought of obliging him to do thirty hard miles, in so rough a gale, in order to reach Haverhill on Monday was as bad as the thought of poor Lieutenant Coldstone being tossed and thrashed on a military launch between Rowe’s Wharf and the island camp.

“I would stay here if I could, Nab. Yet I fear they’ll have put Mrs. Teasel in the town jail, and God only knows where and with whom her children will be disposed—”

“I’ll be well, John. You know Sam will keep an eye on things.” Privately, given the spattering of rain and sleet that began as they detached themselves from the mob and made their way along Cornhill to Queen Street, Abigail was just as glad John had returned. The rain was sweeping in from the north and east, and would have made the road even as far as Salem a nightmare. By Monday it might be easier.

Or impassable.

“Pattie’s making dinner,” announced Nabby, hugging her mother as the family entered the kitchen. “Stew and Indianbread—Did the constables arrest you, Mama? Shim Walton says they did. He said they’d take you over to the Army camp, and if Papa came back and tried to get you out, they’d arrest him, too—”

“As you see,” smiled Abigail, “I was not taken over to the Army camp, and your father is perfectly safe and will be going to Haverhill on Monday. No one is arresting anyone.”

“But that Lieutenant was murdered,” said Johnny, with a six-year-old’s ghoulish anxiety not to be cheated of at least a little bloodshed. “Was he not?”

Abigail started to say,
Of course not
, and then considered how much information the Sons of Liberty—and perhaps others—gleaned from the tales told by children in the streets. She said, “We won’t talk of it now, Johnny. Help your Father with—Is that Mr. Paley’s horse you borrowed to ride back on, John? Pattie, I cannot thank you enough—” She stripped off her cloak as she said the words, put on her apron and house-cap.

While John fretted and reviewed with Thaxter all the details of the Teasel case that had to be dealt with, Abigail made up a packet of willow-bark and Saint-John’s-wort, yarrow and coral bells, for young Lieutenant Dowling, but guessed that no one would be crossing to the island this afternoon. As she packaged up the mild-smelling simples, she found her thoughts returning to Braintree, where her sister-in-law and John’s redoubtable little mother—a widow now on her second husband—had grown these things and sent them on to her. Closing her eyes, she felt for a moment that she could reach out and touch not only the warm summer afternoons on the farm there, but the peace of a world separated from Boston’s politics, Boston’s grime, and Boston’s violence. What were the analogous plants in Barbados, she wondered, that young Lieutenant Dowling sought out the Negro midwives to buy?