A Marked Man (17 page)

“Ground’s frozen hard.” Paul Revere hacked at the surface of the driveway with his bootheel as they approached from the lane, which maps optimistically designated as George Street. “I doubt it’s taken a track in the past two weeks.”

“The heavens be praised for small favors,” remarked Abigail. “I should hate to try to approach the house if the mud
wasn’t
frozen. This drive doesn’t look as if it’s been graveled in years. Yet there’s a knocker on the door,” she added, as they reached the shallow granite steps. “Curious.”

“A cheat and a come-on,” declared Revere, after several minutes’ hammering with the ornamental brass hand—unpolished, Abigail noted, and beginning to tarnish. The steps beneath their feet were muddied with tracks, coming and going; a slatternly note on so elegant a façade. “A lure for the unsuspecting and a snare for the foot of the curious.”

“Yet the house itself is well maintained,” she observed. “The shutters have been painted recently. So has the door.” She moved to the edge of the step, studied the first of the ground-floor windows on that side, all shuttered tight. “Were the windows shuttered when Cottrell came here, Mr. Miller?”

“They were, m’am.”

“So you would not have been able to see it, had there been a light on inside or not? Had you not,” she added, “been otherwise occupied after it grew dark.”

He grinned a little shyly. “No, m’am. Matt—!” he added, as his comrade stepped forward, jerked hard on the handle of the door, and dealt the green-painted panels a brutal kick.

Matt Brown shrugged, as if breaking and entering were something one did every day to the houses of witch-festering Tory bastards. “Just thought I’d try.”

Further evidence of occasional usage rather than habitation was forthcoming when they circled the house. A small heap of soiled straw, frozen solid, lay outside the locked stables. “In this cold it’s hard to tell whether someone was here Monday or Tuesday,” remarked Revere, cracking at one of the rock-hard balls of dung with his heel. “Neither this nor the straw looks to be much older than last week, that’s for certain. None of it’s fresh.”

“So it could be from Cottrell’s horse on Saturday.”

“Easily.”

Abigail turned and looked back at the rear of the house. Closed as tightly as the front, it nevertheless had not the appearance of a place long deserted. There was a small wood-pile beside the kitchen door, nothing like the cords of logs stacked in the shed at home. She asked Miller, “Did you get a look at Cottrell’s visitor?”

“Not well, m’am. He moved brisk, like a young man. Dark cloak—dark gray or maybe dark blue—gray scarf, and bundled up good. Leaped off the horse rather than eased off, if you take me, and led him into the yard like he owned the place.”

“Led him
himself
?”

“Cold as ’twas, you couldn’t let a horse stand.”

“So you didn’t see who let him in?”

Miller shook his head.

Revere muttered, “I’ll wager it was Cottrell himself who opened the back door. It doesn’t sound like there was a servant in the place.”

“Fenton being sick, of course,” Abigail replied thoughtfully. “I wonder, though—Mr. Miller, Mr. Brown, I thank you more than I can say for your observations. As it happens, I’m acquainted with the Provost Marshal’s assistant—”

Both culprits looked startled and awed, and as Revere had done, Abigail put on her wisest face and tapped the side of her nose, as if to say,
I would tell an’ if I could
. . .

“Mr. Adams has eyes and ears everywhere,” she said. “On our next meeting, I’ll find out for certain what they know. Until then, gentlemen . . .”

Shortly before dinner, Young Paul Revere—at thirteen turning into a sturdy, dark, second edition of his father—arrived panting with a note in the silversmith’s neat hand:
No word in any livery stable of a dapple horse rented to a young man in a gray scarf Saturday 5th inst. Pear Tree House (as it is called) owned by Thurlow Apthorp.

This information Abigail copied onto a square of note-paper, together with the statement:
I understand from reliable witness that this is where Sir Jonathan Cottrell went between his arrival Saturday morning and at least sunset of the day of his death
. From the little money-box on the sideboard, she took two silver pieces of eight and gave them to Young Paul, to take the message to Apthorp’s Wharf and make sure it was sent across to Lieutenant Coldstone on Castle Island.

W
hen Paul Revere had brought Abigail home from the Common that Monday morning, it was to find that firstly, Pattie had completely disobeyed her orders and had made the beds, and was in the process of fixing bubble and squeak for the family dinner, and secondly, a note had arrived from Lucy Fluckner, enclosing one from her father’s butler Mr. Barnaby.

The late hour at which the fashionable ate their dinners gave Abigail sufficient time to make a blancmange—assisted by Nabby, when the girl and her brother had returned from school—and to let it cool sufficiently in the icy pantry to be of a proper consistency at half past six, to be carried to the invalid. “I think it would be horrid,” Nabby said as they took turns stirring the steaming mix of slowly thickening sugar and cream, “to be sick in a foreign country, and not know anyone, and have to accept charity from someone else’s servants.”

And Charley, watching from the other side of the table with the expression of a starved orphan stamped on his round-cheeked rosy face, added hopefully, “I’d thank God and pray, if someone brought
me
a blancmange.”

Though it took all the little cream that Cleopatra and Semiramis were producing these days, Abigail made four small extra portions of the tender white dessert, to be ready for the children’s supper that night. Bad enough, she reflected, viewing the cat scratches on the boy’s nose, which had recently been added to the faded remains of last Sunday’s black eye, that John was forever riding off to Salem or Worcester or Haverhill, without them having a mother, too, who put her self-perceived “duties” ahead of listening to their lessons and being there to put them to bed.

Thaxter walked with her to the Governor’s. Abigail had met the King’s representative in the colony briefly, upon exactly two very formal occasions, and since her business was with Cottrell’s servant and the brother-in-law of Thomas Fluckner’s butler, she and the clerk entered the property through the mews gate rather than the porter’s lodges and front door. As they picked their way along Governor’s Alley, she could not help looking for the spot where, according to Coldstone’s chart, Sir Jonathan Cottrell’s body had lain. There was very little to see by the light of Thaxter’s lantern: the muddy ground had been cut to pieces with hooves and carriage wheels, ruts and marks refrozen by half a dozen nights. Yet Abigail could not keep herself from turning, as she and Thaxter passed between the orange blobs of light shed by the gate lanterns, to see for herself how far their light
would
carry.

And was forced to conclude that a mountain of slaughtered rhinosceri could have lain in that spot, at any hour after full darkness, without detection, let alone the mere dark little bump of a small and slender man.

A German maidservant let her and Thaxter in through the back door, and led them downstairs to the half-basement servants’ hall. It was as large as the one at the Fluckner mansion, whitewashed, blessedly warm from an ample fireplace and redolent of cooking-smells and the tallowy odor of work candles. As they entered, two men rose from the long central table to greet them

One—small and trim except for a round little paunch—Abigail assumed to be Mr. Buttrick, the governor’s steward and husband of Emma Barnaby’s sister.

The other, tall and slender and quietly dressed, was—Abigail realized with a start as she drew near enough to make out his proud, scholarly face in the candlelight—His Excellency the Governor himself. “Mrs. Adams.” He made a graceful leg exactly as if she were not related to one of the men who’d encouraged a mob to sack his previous dwelling a few years before. “Welcome to my house. Mr. Buttrick tells me you’re here to visit poor Sir Jonathan’s manservant—a blancmange?” he added, his eye falling on the pewter dish she carried, and he smiled, with great and genuine charm. “How extremely Christian of you, m’am.”

“If I’m here to put the poor man on a gridiron about his late master,” returned Abigail, drawn in spite of herself to the Governor’s serene ease of manner, “the least I can do is bring him something, poor soul. This is Mr. Thaxter, my husband’s clerk.” The two men shook hands, and the little gentleman in the striped waistcoat was introduced, as Abigail had suspected, as Barnaby’s brother-in-law Mr. Buttrick.

“I fear poor Fenton may not yet be in a condition to appreciate the work you put into your offering,” the Governor continued, as he led his guests toward the servants’ stair, which ascended, like a secret spine, through the whole height of the building. “Dr. Rowe has bled him almost daily, and though he claims to see improvement, poor Fenton is still extremely weak.”

As the German cook took the blancmange from Abigail’s hands to set aside in the cold pantry, Abigail saw the woman glance at Hutchinson’s face with a sidelong look—
What? Anger? Disapproval?
As if words unsaid were tightening those heavy lips. But she only curtsied and backed away. Buttrick fetched a branch of candles from the table and bore it ahead of them up what felt like a thousand cramped, wedge-shaped little stairs.

David Fenton occupied a room among the neat little cubicles in the Governor’s attic, allotted to his servants and those of his guests: stifling in the summertime, Abigail guessed, and freezing tonight. Like the room at Fluckner’s in which Bathsheba had shared her narrow cot with her children, its walls consisted of lath and plaster slapped up between the struts and queen-posts of the roof, and its illumination by day would have come from the single dormer now shuttered against the cold. A candle on a mended table provided a modicum of light and a tremendous amount of smoke as the wind that moaned outside whispered and tugged at the flame. By the look of the wick, nobody had been up here for hours. It would smell, too, were the cold and stuffy air not thick with stenches worse by far. She wondered if the sick man could hear rats scratching among the rafters, if he woke in the night.

He didn’t turn his head when the door opened, but she saw the gleam of his moving eyes.

“Mr. Fenton?”

As Buttrick brought the other candles closer, Abigail caught her breath, shocked at the appearance of the patient on the bed. Dr. Rowe, whoever he was—and by his name he was a member of one of that elite circle of merchant families that ruled Boston—deserved to be horsewhipped, if he had continued to bleed a man in this state.

“Mr. Fenton, my name is Mrs. Adams. This is Mr. Thaxter, my husband’s law clerk. Mr. Buttrick said you were willing to speak with us, but if you’re tired now, we can return another time.”

“Quite all right, m’am.” It was almost surprising to hear the soft words coming out of those cracked, unshaven lips. “Don’t know what I can tell you, but if it’ll save some poor bloke a scragging, I’ll let you know what I can. Is there water in that pitcher, m’am?”

There was only a spoonful. Buttrick took the vessel, and he and Governor Hutchinson bowed themselves from the tiny room. Abigail made a silent vow, as Thaxter brought her up the single rush-bottomed chair, to have a few words with His Excellency on the subject of Dr. Rowe when she was finished here.

“We will all be most grateful for whatever you can tell us.” Abigail pulled her cloak tight around her. “And I apologize for troubling you like this. But yes, young Mr. Knox—who is accused of killing your master—is likely to be tried by an Admiralty Court in Halifax for the murder, and he had no more to do with killing Sir Jonathan than I did.”

“I dunno, m’am.” A ghost of a smile flickered at the corner of the man’s mouth. “You look as if you’d do a fair job of murder yourself if you had to, beggin’ your pardon.”

She said, “Go along with you, sir,” but smiled in return. “The trouble is that Mr. Knox cannot
prove
he was in bed and asleep like a decent workingman, and so we are obliged to find the true culprit, if we are to keep his head out of the noose. I shall try to be as brief as I can.”

Mr. Fenton moved his fingers a little, as if to say,
It’s all one, m’am
. But his brow tweaked for a moment, and she heard his breath catch as if at the pinch of some inner pain.

“Did your master ever visit a house on the far side of Beacon Hill while you’ve been here? It stands by itself, beyond the edge of the settled buildings of town, near the Common? Do you know who lives there?”

“No, m’am, that I never knew.” He glanced past her, to where Thaxter sat on the floor with the branch of candles at his side, scribbling in his commonplace-book. “’Course, he was often out and about without me. Often he’d ride out from town into the countryside. It was his job, after all, to learn what he could of where the troublemakers in town was gettin’ their money from, for paper an’ print an’ rum for the mob.”