A Marked Man (5 page)

“Oh, dear me, I
completely
forgot.” She laughed, the silvery sweetness accompanied by a dismissive wave. “The
notorious
tea
fracas
! Don’t tell me you subscribe to the boycott, Mrs. Adams? La, such a to-do dear Lucy makes of it, and all just to annoy her Papa, as girls will—especially girls whose Papas insist they marry dreadful little snirps like Sir Jonathan,
nihil nisi bonum
and all that, of course . . . Please do read Miss Lucy’s letter.”

The outer note enclosed a thicker inner packet, sealed but unaddressed. A blotted scribble implored:

William Shakespeare, Abigail reflected, had a great deal to answer for.

“The poor child.” Mrs. Sandhayes heaved a deep sigh. “I positively weep for her, but of course one understands one can’t have one’s daughter marrying a bookseller. But I’ll swear the boy is no fortune hunter.”

“Of course he isn’t!”

“No
of course
about it, my dear Mrs. Adams.” Mrs. Sandhayes took a sip of the chamomile tea, politely suppressed a grimace, and set the cup aside. “Mr. Fluckner’s ships, cargoes, and property in Boston are worth a hundred and twenty thousand pounds if they’re worth thruppence, not to speak of proprietary rights to over a million acres in Maine, wherever
Maine
is”—she laughed again, dismissively—“once the title is confirmed. It has a very
French
sound, don’t you think? And say what you will about the French, they may be our enemies and Catholics and all that, but they cut a dress in a way that no Englishwoman ever could, not if she lived to be a hundred. I had a mantua-maker in London—”

“And I’ll swear”—Abigail returned to the subject under consideration—“that Lucy hasn’t formed an attachment to Mr. Knox simply to disoblige her father.”

“What? Oh, dear, no.” Mrs. Sandhayes folded her lovely hands. “I think that’s why dear Lucy was so taken with Mr. Knox: because they’d met half a dozen times, and talked of books and battles and horses and dogs, before Harry ever knew who she was or that the man who won her should be rich for life. That he was taken with
her
, she said, and not with her dowry, which is a great deal more than could be said about Sir Jonathan Cottrell. It was really very sweet.”

“’Twill be a good deal less sweet if Harry is taken for a military trial in Halifax and hanged for it,” replied Abigail grimly. “Was Sir Jonathan wealthy?”

“My dear Mrs. Adams, the King does not have penniless friends.” Disconcertingly after her babble of mantua-makers and fashionable preachers, a flash of worldly wisdom glinted from the Englishwoman’s green eyes. Even with the last of the evening light fading from the windows, and the gentler glow of candles and the parlor hearth concealing the details of the day, Abigail could see that however fashionable the cut of Mrs. Sandhayes’s clothing, the fabric itself was faded, and the lace and ribbons that decked her bony bosom either clumsily refurbished or repaired. At the meeting-house that morning Lucy had spoken of her chaperone as her social equal, her mother’s “friend who is staying with us,” but now it occurred to Abigail to wonder if this were not simply a polite fiction. Had Mrs. Sandhayes delayed borrowing her hostess’s carriage to deliver Lucy’s message until a time when she knew that the light would be kinder to a gown that had seen better days? The pearl earrings and the Medusa-head cameo at her throat were old and probably valuable—this was a woman who wouldn’t wear trash. But they were also the jewelry she’d had on earlier in the day.

“It’s surprising,” the woman went on, “the number of people who subscribe to the belief that just because a man has a respectable fortune, he isn’t going to pursue a woman with a larger one. I use the word
pursue
advisedly,” she added drily. “Sir Jonathan adhered to the Kiss-Me-Kate School of wooing and seemed to think that a girl of Lucy’s boisterous temperament would find violence of conduct as well as sentiment appealing.”

Abigail’s thoughts snapped back from consideration about who it was who might have left Margaret Sandhayes penniless, and said, “Toad.”

“Well, to be perfectly accurate, my
dear
Mrs. Adams,
weasel
would be
le mot plus bon—
though it is not a terribly nice thing to be saying about either toads or weasels, poor things. A little spindle-shanked fellow with a voice like a mouse at the bottom of a barrel and a nose like one, too, always aquiver for what would benefit him. Or for a well-turned ankle, I’m afraid, though he managed to convince Mr. Fluckner of his respectability. Do you make this marmalade yourself? You colonials are positively
astonishing
!
Please
tell me the oranges were smuggled from Spain! I
must
be able to write my friends in Bath and tell them I’ve supped on smuggled goods with a patriot who refuses tea on political principle! La, I shall be the
envy
of Abbey Crescent!”

“Was Miss Fluckner aware that her father was going to announce her engagement to Cottrell at the Governor’s ball?”

“Dear, me, yes, and such an uproar as there was over it! With Miss Lucy vowing one moment she wouldn’t go at all, and the next, that she’d slap Sir Jonathan’s face before all Boston and spring up on a chair and denounce him for a blackguard, and Mr. Fluckner bawling at the top of his lungs he’d throw her into the street for a disobedient trull, and her poor little sisters crying! Like a bear-garden, it was! I suggested that the best thing she could do would be to speak to her host about the matter when they arrived, for the dear Governor would know better how to get ’round Mr. Fluckner than poor Lucy, and he’d never have permitted the announcement in his house against her will, you know.
Such
a gentlemanly man—not at
all
what one expects in the colonies—and
perfectly
good
ton
! Shocking, how the lower orders here have treated him!”

“Perhaps they don’t care for the spectacle of every paying position in the colony being handed to members of His Excellency’s family.”

“I don’t see what business it is of theirs.” Mrs. Sandhayes frowned. “Though come to think of it, that’s just what Lucy is always saying.” She considered the matter for all of about a second and a half with the expression of one trying to make out an inscription in Chinese, then shrugged. “Well, however it was, the Governor, I understand, agreed to intercept Sir Jonathan the moment he stepped into the house and speak to him—”

“I thought Sir Jonathan was the Governor’s guest?”

“And so he was.” The tall woman’s hand strayed toward the teacup, then she glanced at its despised contents and returned the hand to her lap. Because of the boycott on British tea—and the truly shocking expense of the Dutch tea that Mr. John Hancock and others smuggled in defiance of the King’s efforts to control colonial trade—Abigail had poured out warmed cider for John and Sam rather than break the Sabbath by the making of coffee, but with water kept hot in the kitchen boiler, a tisane was also possible. Peppermint and chamomile were poor substitutes for bohea and oolong, as far as Abigail was concerned, yet annoyance flashed through her at her guest’s politely veiled contempt. “But Sir Jonathan had been gone for ten days in Maine—Where
is
Maine?”

“’ Tis the northern district of the colony that borders on Canada,” Abigail explained. “’ Tis where we get most of our ship timber from. There’s very little there beyond that. Why Sir Jonathan would go there to search for ‘rebels and traitors, ’ as Lucy said, and not return ’til the very eve of his own engagement-party—”

“But without Sir Jonathan’s journey to Maine, there would be no engagement-party, you see.” The chaperone cocked her head, beaky as an absurdly crested bird’s in the elaborate rolls and poufs of her heavily powdered hair. “Apparently there’s some sort of question about title to part of the lands, and Sir Jonathan had agreed, when he returned to England, to speak to the King about settling it in Mr. Fluckner’s favor, if Mr. Fluckner agreed to the match with Lucy. But Sir Jonathan insisted upon seeing the lands—since a portion of them will comprise the bulk of dear Lucy’s marriage-portion—to see what he’d be up against, I daresay. It seems there are tenants living on them that nobody wants there, what are they called? Oh, I know
—squatters
! Such names you people do come up with!” She laughed again delightedly, but Abigail settled back in her chair, cradling the creamy queens-ware teacup and thinking.

She’d heard all her life about the Maine squatters, and the cat’s cradle of lawsuits, chicanery, and looking-the-other-way that entangled the relationships of the dozen or so Great Proprietors who’d managed to get claim to those cold inhospitable forests to the north. Various Proprietors had brought in tenants to settle the land—mostly the Protestant Irish who’d originated in Scotland—and treated them, as far as Abigail could ascertain, like medieval peasants, to be robbed both of their rental and their lands depending on where negotiations were among the Proprietors themselves, and nobody outside the charmed circle of the very rich Boston merchants really had any clear idea of who had legal title to which portions of Maine’s broken coast.

So Thomas Fluckner wanted to beat the other Proprietors to the post with a clear title newly granted by the King, did he?

And was willing to trade his eldest daughter’s happiness to get it.

She poured herself a little more tisane. “And
did
His Excellency manage to intercept Sir Jonathan before the engagement was announced?”

“Good Heavens, no!” Mrs. Sandhayes regarded her in surprise, as if she suspected Mrs. Adams hadn’t been properly keeping up with the affair. “Sir Jonathan never arrived at all! He got off the boat from Maine that morning, and the next time anyone saw him, he was lying facedown in the mud of the alley behind the Governor’s mansion, frozen through.”

“Frozen?” Abigail frowned. “The Provost Marshal finds a man
frozen
in an alley and concludes that Harry Knox must have had something to do with it?”

“Of course!” exclaimed her guest. “Because of the quarrel, you know. Last Thursday week, the day Sir Jonathan left for Maine, Sir Jonathan went riding with Lucy on the Common and offered her intolerable insult! Fleeing him she encountered Mr. Knox, and Mr. Knox—after quite properly escorting her home—repaired at once to lie in wait for Sir Jonathan in the lane behind the Governor’s stables, in the very place where the body was found this morning! When Sir Jonathan came riding in, Mr. Knox pulled him off his horse practically in the stable gateway and shouted at him in front of the entire stable staff that if he—Sir Jonathan—dared speak to Miss Fluckner again, he—Mr. Knox—would ‘kill him like a dog.’ Oh, dear, look at the time!”

Mrs. Sandhayes groped for her canes, and laboriously—with the first expression on her face that Abigail had seen of anything besides a vapid and condescending cheer—got herself to her feet. “I absolutely swore upon the Testament that I wouldn’t be late to Caroline Hartnell’s loo-party, and here I am forsworn and my immortal soul is in peril—I daresay the City Fathers would tell me, as much from playing loo on the Sabbath as for broken vows . . . Well, never mind. I have kept you”—she propped her cane against her pannier, extended her hand to grasp Abigail’s with strong warmth—“away from your family for an unconscienceable time, not to speak of making those poor lovely horses stand all this time in the cold street . . .”

She hobbled with surprising swiftness along the hall, Pattie springing out of the kitchen to wrap her in the heavy velvet layers of her worn cloak. “Thank you so very much for the marmalade, Mrs. Adams—delicious! I dare swear I couldn’t make a marmalade myself if you held a gun on me! Well, I’m off to endanger my immortal soul at loo—
Is
it still the Sabbath? Or does it end at sunset here?”

As she swayed and lurched out into Queen Street, with the Fluckner coachman—for whose frozen feet, Abigail reflected, she hadn’t spared a thought—springing down from his box to help her, Abigail glimpsed, at the edge of the lamplight, a couple of the young men whom she recognized as Sons of Liberty, waiting until the carriage pulled away. One carried a big box of seditious pamphlets, the other, a couple of pieces of what was clearly Harry Knox’s printing press.

Paul Revere—and wily Cousin Sam—had evidently taken sunset as the definition of the Sabbath, for today, anyway.
And that done, wherein lies the difference between defense of one’s country, and silver-loo?

A
re you sure you wish to do this?” John handed Abigail’s marketing basket—crammed to bursting with bread, butter, candles, cheese, apples, and clean linen that fifteen-year-old Billy Knox had brought for his brother that morning—to Thaxter and helped Abigail down into the skiff
Katrina
, which bobbed gently among the clots of ice at the end of Wentworth’s Wharf.