A Marked Man (28 page)

Was this something she could ask him in her note, and would he respond?

The rain increased, hammering the black, wet roofs of the town, driven sidelong by the northeast wind. As she chucked wood onto the fire after dinner, while John brought in bucket after ice-cold bucket of water to heat for the family baths, Abigail wondered how Harry was faring in that dank and icy cell. Both Billy Knox and Lucy, she knew, had tried to get food, books, and clothing to him, and had had them sent back. Had the Provost Marshal let him keep even what she’d brought him?

A dark shape crossed the wavering gray curtains of the rain, loomed by the back door. Abigail hastened to open it and saw that it was Philomela. “I can’t stay but a moment, Mrs. Adams,” said the girl, “and such an uproar as there is, over this shooting, and Mr. Fluckner claiming ’twas only to be expected with traitors going unpunished everywhere in Boston, and Miss Lucy—” She shook her head, and held out a note. “But Miss Lucy said that you would want to know this, m’am.”

O
n those nights when John knew he must rise betimes, to be ready to take to the road the moment there was light enough in the sky for the ferrymen to make out the crossing to the mainland, he could fall asleep quickly and sleep like the dead.

Abigail wasn’t sure what woke her in the small hours of Monday morning. The rain that had hammered Boston through Sunday morning had gradually lightened, though the wind remained strong—but she was used to the sounds the house made on windy nights.

Something in her dream, then? A troubling dream about sitting at David Fenton’s bedside, listening to his whispered ramblings. Only sometimes it wasn’t the servant who lay dying in that dark and chilly attic room above the Governor’s house, but Lieutenant Coldstone, very young and vulnerable-looking without his wig. Folded notes littered the blanket all around him, all of them in her own handwriting: she kept opening and reading them, looking for the one she had actually written, filled with a despairing sense that even if she found it, she could not prove the others had not been written by her as well. If she failed, they would send her to Halifax to be tried and hanged, unless she betrayed John and her children, her sisters, and her parents. . . . The ship was at the dock, waiting for her, dark masts swaying in the wind, rigging creaking—

She heard something in the house below her and knew it was the cover being slammed on the well in the cellar.

Her eyes opened to the inky darkness of their curtained bed.

John’s breathing was slow and deep and utterly peaceful at her side. A restless sleeper at the best of times, she wanted to reach across and shake him out of sheer annoyance.

Messalina
, she thought. Whoever had invented the phrase
graceful as a cat
had never seen Messalina hunt.

But even as her mind framed the thought, she knew it wasn’t the cat.

The fire had been banked; the bedroom was glacial and dark as Erebus. Yet in nearly two years of residence, Abigail had learned the exact number of steps that would carry her to its door, and that door’s exact relationship to the bed. Charley had been barely a year old when John had bought this house, and Johnny only four. At such ages there were nightmares beyond the power of a mere older sister to hold at bay. Charley especially was prone to them, and within the first weeks here Abigail could traverse the house from the room where she slept with John—and in those days tiny Tommy as well—to that shared by the other children, in utter darkness.

She gathered up candle, striker, flint, and slipped into the hallway, where she stood listening for a time in the darkness. No sound from the children’s rooms. In any case, something about what had wakened her—if it had been a sound that had done so—had said to her,
Deeper in the house
.

In the hallway she stooped to strike light, where the new tiny brightness wouldn’t wake John (
as if the Last Trump would wake John
. . . !). When she stood, she knew what was wrong. The candle-flame leaned, ever so slightly, to the left, toward from the tight, square spiral of the stair. It straightened almost at once, but Abigail knew every chink and draft and crochet of the house. The door at the bottom of the stair never fit quite right, especially in the winter; in the daytime, when there was coming and going from the kitchen, close it how she would, there was always a whisper of a draft.

There was a window open downstairs.

She thought—and later could not believe she could have been so stupid—only that in barring the shutters, Pattie had been hasty. There was one in the kitchen whose bolt never fit quite right into its slots. Just as it had simply failed to occur to her that anyone could or would attach scandal to her friendship with the extremely comely Lieutenant Coldstone, it never crossed her mind that a window would have come open in the middle of a very windy night due to anything but accident. What she should have done, she knew in hindsight, was to go back into her room immediately and fetch John, dawn departure or no dawn departure.

What she did was descend to the kitchen, soundless as a ghost in her quilted blue nightgown, and cross to the window in question—which
was
open, shutters and casement both—and reach out to pull the shutters closed.

She didn’t know what made her turn. Messalina, she later thought—the cat came bolting out of the pantry, fleeing for the hall door, which Abigail had left open behind her . . . Turning, she saw in the almost total gloom the unmistakable shape of a man standing in the pantry.

Her start gave her away, and her first instinct—always her downfall—was to cry, “Here!” almost as if, like a disobedient child, he would surrender.

Instead he rushed her. He covered the distance with snake-strike speed, and Abigail—at first immobilized with shock—snatched up the nearest object to hand—a chair—and swung it at him with the whole strength of her back. He dodged, lunged, and Abigail had time only to think,
I’ve seen him before
—when the candle was struck from the table where she’d set it, and strong hands grabbed her shoulders, swung her in the darkness. Abigail twisted, grabbed at the man’s head—felt her hands seize an ear and heard the hiss of agonized fury in the second before she was slammed to the floor on top of the chair.

She cried out with pain, and then, belatedly, screamed at the top of her lungs. Somewhere upstairs she could hear John shouting “Nab? NAB—!!” and she screamed, “MURDER!” because it was easier than screaming
Burglary
! And she didn’t think of it and was in too much pain in her ribs, her knee, her head. She could hear her burglar blundering and scrambling close by—trying to find the window—and she screamed again, hoping to get not only John but Tom Butler from next door. It was too dark to see anything, but she felt the cold and smelled the wind when the burglar succeeded in slamming open the shutters, and she heard the splat when he got through the window and fell.

I hope he’s broke his leg . . .
Then she heard his footfalls slap-slap-slap on the mud of the passway, and out to Queen Street.

John flung himself through the kitchen door, and she shouted, “I’m all right! He’s gone!”

John had a candle and a stick of firewood held like a club, and was already halfway to the window. He wheeled, dropped to his knees at her side. “Nab—”

“I’m all right.” This wasn’t entirely true. She felt like she’d fallen out of a tree, in more pain than she’d been—with the exception of childbearing—since her own childhood, and she fought not to weep for fear it would frighten him. He caught her up in his arms, and she heard more footsteps pattering upstairs, followed by the caroming of slight bodies off the stairwell walls and Pattie’s cry, “Johnny, no!” and then a wild clatter: Johnny had obviously come downstairs armed.

“You’re bleeding.” John caught her hand. Pattie brought another candle into the room and, with commendable presence of mind, went straight to the candle-box and set a dozen on the table beside which Abigail and John sat, next to the felled chair.

Abigail looked at her hand. There was blood under her nails. “I think it’s his.” With John’s hand beneath her arm she got unsteadily to her feet, and the children—who had hung back in shocked horror at the sight of their mother sitting on the floor, bruised and disheveled in her robe—flung themselves on her, Charley and Tommy bursting into loud tears.

There was of course no question of anyone getting to bed that night. John listened to her account of the robber with a detached attention that Abigail found far more comforting than repeated assurances of thankfulness that she’d taken no hurt, interrupted almost at once by the arrival of Tom Butler from next door and both his apprentices, armed with a pistol and a very fearsome hammer. He was succeeded almost at once by Ehud Hanson—a shoemaker who lived on the other side—his younger brother, and his formidable wife, also armed; the Watch arrived minutes later. While Abigail was assuring them all that she was well (“And get those children to bed, Pattie, please—”), John checked the drawer of the sideboard in which the household cash was kept. “He didn’t get that, in any case,” he remarked, and disappeared into his study, emerging almost at once with the report that nothing there seemed in the slightest disturbed.

“You must have surprised him just as he entered and was looking his way about.” John disappeared into the pantry and came out again with a pitcher of cider, which he poured into the smallest of the pots on the hearth to heat. Abigail, on the settle next to the hearth—Pattie had stirred up the fire—started to rise, then sank down again with a wince. Even sitting for a short while had stiffened bruises she hadn’t known she’d acquired. Distantly, she could hear the clock of the Brattle Street Meeting-House striking four.

Mrs. Butler had put in her appearance by this time, semi-dressed and with her hair hanging in a braid, and while Abigail was reassuring her in her turn that she was well and stood in no need of assistance, John disappeared again, to come back downstairs a few minutes later dressed, wigged, and carrying his saddlebags. “
Will
you be all right?” he asked, after he’d tactfully but firmly shoved the cooper’s well-meaning wife out the door. “Nab, forgive me—”

“No, you have thirty miles to ride—”

“Were I not sure that my client has spent the past three days in the town jail, I would stay, but I cannot, Nab. If it rains again, God knows how long ’twill be—”

“No, of course you must go! Wherever her children are, you know no one in town will be caring for them, if all are saying their mother’s a murderess. I’m bruised, ’tis all. ’Tis as if I fell down the stairs.” She opened her mouth to begin,
I didn’t want to tell you before others, but I knew the man
.
I’ve seen him, I know it . . .

Then she thought of the child Marcellina, and tiny Stephen fretfully sucking at the spouted milk-cup held for him by Mrs. Barnaby, and of how the world treated the children of paupers. The sooner John got to Haverhill, the better for those unknown offspring of his client.

She closed her lips again.

The light of a single candle, darkness and confusion . . .
Had
she seen her assailant before? She groped in her mind, trying to recall where, and couldn’t even be sure that her impression was an accurate one. The prominent chin, the long nose emerging from beneath the shadow of his hat, the dark brows: a fleeting sensation of recognition, based upon what? One of the loafers around the Watchhouse yesterday? Someone passing in the street?

It was nearly time to do the milking. The herd-boys would be blowing their tin trumpets in the street before long. Gently rejecting Pattie’s offer of assistance, Abigail went upstairs and dressed, and came down again to find John and the children devouring a scratch breakfast of the last heel-ends of Friday’s bread, and the cider that he now poured steaming from the kettle.
Baking tonight.
“I shall be home Wednesday,” John promised, and went out to the stable with her, saddling Balthazar while she and Nabby milked. “Thursday at latest.”

Then he was gone, and in spite of herself, Abigail felt a shiver of dread, watching him ride away through the first chilly dimness of the wind-lashed dawn.

Thaxter arrived. He and Johnny did the stable chores before the two older children left for school. When they were gone and Thaxter settled in John’s office to copy documents, Abigail sank down onto the settle again, with the queer shakiness of exhaustion. Just after the burglary, she had felt clear-headed and strong:
What’s the matter with me now? I’ve dealt with worse. Those Roman matrons one reads about could defend the city’s walls in the morning and bake bread in the afternoon without turning a hair.

“Are you sure you don’t want to lie down a little, Mrs. Adams?”

She looked up with a start, to see Pattie standing beside her.

“I can clean the kitchen, and get the bread started, and get you up in time to get the dinner begun, if you feel able for it. You don’t look any too well.”

“Maybe I will rest a little.” Abigail got to her feet, and flinched in earnest. She turned toward the stairs and then stopped, something tugging at her mind—“Tommy,” she said, shocked, “what have you got there?”

Though it was quite obvious that what Tommy had there was a dead mouse. She and Pattie reached the boy in a couple of strides, though he tried to duck back into the pantry with his prize.
Messalina
, thought Abigail . . .
Did our visitor last night dodge back into the pantry and interrupt her at her kill
?