A Marked Man (38 page)

Lucy flung herself into his arms, lice, jail-filth, and all, and buried her face in his shoulder. “Oh, Harry!” And was enfolded in a massive embrace and a blissful and reeking kiss.

“What happened, Nab?” asked John, taking her hand to lead her into the kitchen. “Miss Fluckner has been back and forth three times this afternoon, and Pattie was only able to tell me—and her—that Mrs. Sandhayes was here, waiting for you . . . and knows nothing further of what befell. But it appears that your Lieutenant Coldstone has put the teapot under seal . . .”

“I hope you left it so!”

“Good Lord, yes! The cups as well, which were set aside with a note from him to be left precisely
in situ—
”

“I knew I could trust my Lysander.” Despite seasickness and fatigue so great she felt almost faint, Abigail managed a smile as John tucked a loose strand of her disordered hair behind her ear. “The Lieutenant—and he is not
my
Lieutenant—will undoubtedly arrive in the morning to impound pot, cups, tea, and all, and test them for poison. Lucy, dearest”—she turned back in the doorway—“perhaps you had best return home and inventory everything Mrs. Sandhayes left behind her before Lieutenant Coldstone gets there. I’m sure a look into her trunks will be instructive.”

John’s face, which had been smiling, turned suddenly sober as he loosened the arm which he’d put around her waist: “What’s this?”

Abigail felt her side where his hand had been, just beneath her lowest rib. There was a short, straight gash in her bodice where Mrs. Sandhayes’s bullet had passed, the edges of the cloth, and the sturdy corset beneath, charred with powder.

Charley turned to Johnny with reprehensible smugness and announced, “We had ’n
adventure
!”

Quietly, Abigail agreed, “To be sure we did.”

 

 

M
orning brought a note from Lieutenant Coldstone, by the hand of Sergeant Muldoon, begging her pardon for the inconvenience and requesting that the sealed teapot be turned over to the bearer, along with the contents of each teacup, placed in separate clean jars and labeled, as well as she could recall, as to which cup had been Mrs. Sandhayes’s and which Abigail’s guest had poured out for her.

Abigail—who knew quite well which teacup was her own because it had for years been slightly discolored—obeyed the instructions with care, and sealed up the clean herb-jars, with labels signed by herself, John, and Sergeant Muldoon as witnesses. John remarked, “’ Tis the act of a man who knows he has a case.”

Calling that afternoon on Lucy Fluckner, she was greeted by Mr. Barnaby’s stilted assurance that,
Miss Fluckner is unable to receive callers, m’am
, and was intercepted in half a block by Philomela, wrapped hastily in her mistress’s red cloak. “I doubt you’ll ever be welcome in the house again, m’am, begging your pardon,” panted the servant. “Mr. Fluckner is in a fearful taking, to the point that I’m actually worried—I’ve never seen a white man turn that color! Mr. Knox has asked for Miss Lucy’s hand in marriage, and Miss Lucy says she’ll have him or none.”

“Hardly the best time to make the request, of course.”

Philomela half smiled. “M’am, meaning no disrespect, there will be no best time for that, not if everyone were to wait ’til Judgment Day. Miss Lucy said to tell you that we went through Mrs. Sandhayes’s luggage and room last night, and found her trunk had a false bottom. Beneath it were a man’s things—boots, coat, waistcoat, wig—and nearly five hundred pounds in sovereigns, all of it British, such as we found in Sheba’s room. There were bottles and packets there, too, of what Miss Lucy said was probably poison. And there was this.”

She held out a slim roll of drawing-paper, which, unfastened, displayed the image of an extremely pretty girl of about Lucy Fluckner’s age. The sketch was a rough one, only shadowy suggestions marking the cloud of hair and the lace of her chemise, but the vividness of her smile was captured there for all time, the dancing light in her eyes. Around her throat was Margaret Sandhayes’s Medusa cameo. On another part of the page the artist—whoever it had been—had sketched a blocky little church-spire and part of a churchyard, labeled St. Onesimus’s. A scribbled note in one corner marked the date: June 1765.

Margaret’s only weakness
, Coldstone had said. For one instant, Abigail seemed to hear the giggles of two irrepressible sisters, over the parson’s mispronunciation of
concupiscence
.

And a little of her rage at the woman turned to sadness, as she understood.

 

 

I
f Mrs. Sandhayes followed Sir Jonathan across the whole of the ocean on purpose to kill him,” asked Pattie later, as she was clearing up after dinner, “why did she come
here
to do it? Could she not have done so just as easy in Barbados?”

Abigail, gathering up the remains of the pork pie, glanced across at John and raised her eyebrows. She guessed what the answer might be but was curious as to how he would see the matter.

“Bridgetown isn’t much of a place,” said John. “I suspect she thought society too small on the island, and herself too noticeable. Perhaps the opportunity simply did not present itself. By the time she reached the island, Cottrell may have already had orders to go on to Boston, and Margaret Seaford thought her chances for not only killing him, but getting clean away, were better in a larger city, with all the continent to flee to if need be. Does that sound right to you, Portia?”

“It does,” said Abigail. “But I had thought also, that while she was forming plans to accomplish her vengeance in Bridgetown, word reached them both of the dumping of the tea. She had acquired Palmer as a tool by that time—a means of duplicating Cottrell’s appearance so as to tamper with the apparent time of her victim’s death—but whether she knew at that time that New England winters get cold enough to preserve a man’s body, I don’t know. She certainly could have,” she added thoughtfully. “Heaven knows we’re known for it. And while she couldn’t have known she would find a house with a well in its cellar, that isn’t the only fashion in which a body could be frozen, by any means.”

“Yes.” Pattie frowned, and spread towels on the table to do the dishes. “But she couldn’t have known Sir Jonathan was going to Maine, or that he’d get engaged to Miss Fluckner.”

“She didn’t,” Abigail agreed. “Thank you, John—” She stepped back as he settled the basin, then drew near the rag and the gourd of soft-soap. “But even a moderately intelligent woman could have figured out that given Cottrell’s mission here—and the fact that Boston is known to be crawling with men who hate the King—’twould be surprising if the man weren’t murdered, and the Sons of Liberty could take the blame. As indeed one did.”

“And she’d have let an innocent man die.” Pattie shook her head wonderingly. She was, Abigail reflected, really very young.

“That is the Mark of the Beast, Pattie,” said John, “that the Reverend Cooper spoke of: the conviction that one’s own cause is sufficiently righteous to justify crimes against the innocent. Once a man, or a woman, takes that mark on the forehead—their thought—and their right hand with which a person acts, their hearts are altered, and it becomes very hard for them to go back to what they were. As I think our friend Mrs. Sandhayes will learn.”

Abigail had not thought to see the Lieutenant—nor hear the results of his search of the Mill-Pond and the river—for several days, but as she and Nabby were drying the last of the dishes, a knock sounded on the front door. As Pattie hurried out into the hall, John said, only half in jest, “And if that’s a squad from Colonel Leslie come to arrest you after all—”

“Lieutenant Coldstone, m’am.”

“You may let Mr. Knox know,” he told her, “that he need have no further concern for his position vis-à-vis the law, in the matter of Sir Jonathan Cottrell’s death. Thurlow Apthorp has identified the coat and waistcoat that Miss Fluckner found hidden in Margaret Sandhayes’s luggage as belonging to the so-called Toby Elkins, and in the pocket of the coat we found Sir Jonathan’s missing memorandum-book. The final entry was dated the twenty-first of February, the day before his intended departure for Maine. Moreover, when we brought up the body of Androcles Palmer from the Mill-Pond, Sir Jonathan’s signet ring was in his waistcoat pocket.” In the chilly pallor of the spring evening—lingering bright in the parlor window—he looked tired to death, and haggard, as if his strapped and bandaged arm was paining him. Though it was clear to Abigail he’d cleaned his boots (or had Sergeant Muldoon clean them) before appearing on her doorstep, flecks of marsh-mud clung to his snow-white trousers in places, and to the sleeve of his crimson coat.

“And did you find Bathsheba’s body?” asked John. It was the first time John had come to join one of Abigail’s conferences with Coldstone in the parlor: generally, since the dumping of the tea, when the British officer came to the house, it was the signal for John to disappear. If the Lieutenant had any instructions regarding John’s arrest for sedition, he didn’t mention them. Perhaps Colonel Leslie knew no redcoat with a prisoner would make it back to the wharves, particularly after Harry’s arrest had caught the Sons off-guard on a Sunday morning. Perhaps, after a long, cold day on the marshes, Coldstone was simply too tired to try.

“We did,” said Coldstone, and by the way he said
we
, Abigail guessed he and Muldoon had had plenty of help from the Sons of Liberty. “Because iced water is in fact somewhat colder than ice itself, the body, though waterlogged, is not decomposed at all; there was no question of her identity. She bore no mark of violence, so we must assume her to have been lured to Pear Tree House and poisoned as well.”

“That would have been on the day she disappeared, would it not?” asked Abigail. “That was the day that Miss Fluckner slipped away from her guardian to meet Mr. Knox.”

“Given her father’s anger over that,” mused John, “no wonder nobody asked Mrs. Sandhayes’s whereabouts.” He glanced across at Coldstone, sipping the coffee that Pattie had quietly brought in on a tray. “Was Palmer poisoned as well?”

“Mr. Palmer,” said Coldstone, “had been shot through the body, at so close a range as to burn his clothing.” For a time he was silent, gazing at the last of the spring sunlight in the parlor window, his good hand stretched to the warmth of the fire.

“Was he as like Sir Jonathan Cottrell as all that?” asked Abigail curiously. “Or is it no longer possible to tell?”

“That I do not know. I suppose the only ones who saw both of them in life were Cottrell’s valet Fenton and Bathsheba. And Margaret Sandhayes herself, of course.”

“So what will happen now?” asked Abigail at length. “Who handles a murder done in the colonies, if the murderess flees to Britain? Can a letter be sent—?”

“What happens now?” There was a chill note of anger in the young officer’s voice, and his features had the look of a Praxiteles statue that has bitten into a lemon. “Nothing, Mrs. Adams. ’Tis not only Colonel Leslie who has learned to distrust Boston witnesses. Were I to send the depositions from you, and Mr. Adams, and Mssrs. Brown and Miller, and all the others to a British Court, do you really think any English magistrate would so much as read them? A barrister’s clerk could tear them to pieces in minutes.”

Abigail stared. “But it wasn’t only Cottrell she killed! The woman murdered Fenton, and Bathsheba, and Palmer in cold blood—”

“An actor and two servants.” Coldstone shook his head. “Colonel Leslie will write to Whitehall, and I shall send the facts of the case to my friends in Bow Street, for all the good it is likely to do. But if Margaret Sandhayes is taken at all, I doubt she will even be tried. And for that,” he added bitterly, “you may thank the politics of this country, and the late actions of defiance that your townsmen have chosen to pursue.”

“May we thank those actions, Lieutenant?” John leaned his shoulder against the chimney breast. “Or the
re
action of your government
to
those actions? My experience—and my studies in the histories of empires—lead me to conclude that it takes two to make a quarrel. Justice is justice, and does not—or should not—read the political newspapers.”

Coldstone sighed and looked aside. “You are right, sir. And I speak in anger that a woman who caused so much harm—not to speak of putting a bullet through my shoulder—should escape in the smoke and confusion of a general insurrection.”

“I doubt she will escape.” John bent to the fire and tonged up a coal for his pipe. “Like Hamlet’s mother, her punishment must be left to Heaven . . . as indeed the Queen of Denmark’s was, and was speedily accomplished nevertheless.” Red reflection flickered deep in his eyes. “I suspect in time Margaret Sandhayes will bring other punishment upon herself, through acquiring the habit of thinking that she can kill with impunity . . . even as the man she pursued had come to feel that he could rape without penalty. Rather than sacrificing all for vengeance, she took a great deal of trouble to make sure that she could return to England unprosecuted, but I doubt she will find it quite so simple as she thinks, to return to her old life, with the Mark of the Beast on her forehead and her hand.”

“What does one do, I wonder,” murmured Abigail, “when one has lived for something for eight years, striven toward it without thought of anything else . . . and then achieved it. She was a brilliant strategist, but it seems to me that she turned the whole of her life into a psalm of vengeance for her sister. Where does one go from there?”

“I have often wondered the same,” replied the officer, “about your patriots, Mrs. Adams.” He turned his pale blue eyes to John’s face, rubbed unconsciously at his aching arm. “Have you, Mr. Adams, or your cousin, or Mr. Knox, or Mr. Revere, or any of those others, even thought about what sort of world you would create, or
can
create, if you teach your followers—and yourselves—that violence is the best answer to a political question? Can those who learn this lesson do other than continue to perpetuate it by force rather than law?”