A Marked Man (21 page)

“Not to speak of.”

Even had Mr. Buttrick not warned her, when he led her and John through the servants’ hall and up the backstairs, that Dr. Warren had pronounced the man beyond help, Abigail thought she would have known at the sight of him that he was dying. Under a sheen of sweat, his face was swollen almost unrecognizably from the man she’d spoken to only Monday evening, and in the daylight the progress of the jaundice had turned his flesh nearly orange. His voice was barely a whisper. When she took his hand—puffy with dropsy, though the wrist above it was wasted from the starvation of long illness—it felt chill and limp, like a dead man’s hand already.

“Mr. Buttrick said you had a thing or two you wanted yet to ask,” Fenton prompted her after a moment. “Don’t fret after me, m’am—happens to everyone, I’ve heard tell. His Excellency sent his pastor in, for me to make my peace—” He managed a crooked grin in spite of the pain. “Leastwise I know now for certain there’s no danger of meetin’ His Nibs when I gets to the other side. I know which way
he
went. How’s things look for your friend?”

“Unpromising,” said Abigail softly. Beyond the unceiled slant of the roof, the wind flung handfuls of sleet upon the shingles. “When last we spoke you mentioned actors from Barbados—What were they doing in Boston? Surely it’s a strange place for actors to come?”

“Oh, Palmer said he’d got word his sister, who’d run off two years ago with a sea captain, was now in Boston, and he was in search of her. A sad tale, but not so unusual. I’ve heard its like a dozen times. Cassandra, her name was—”

“You spoke to him, then?”

“Lord, yes. Had dinner with him and his lady friend at the Spancel.”

“When was this? How long before Sir Jonathan left for Maine?” she added, realizing that there was a good chance Mr. Fenton was no longer aware of how long he himself had been lying here ill.

“Just the day before. I’d packed most of his kit. He was off that evening for a meeting with these great friends of Fluckner’s about yet another claim that had popped up about these lands in Maine, one that none of ’em had ever heard of before. He was in a rare taking over it. Fellow’d have to be tracked down and bought off, he said—I knew he wouldn’t be in until late. Mr. Palmer walked into the Spancel just a few minutes after me, with his woman on his arm, and asked, was it true we was stayin’ in the Governor’s house, and would the folk there know about this fellow Jellicoe who was supposed to have run off with Cassie? One thing led to another. You know how it is, when you scrape acquaintance, not knowin’ anyone in the town.”

“It must be a lonely life, traveling,” said Abigail softly.
You know how it is
, he had said, and yet she didn’t. It came to her that she had never lived anywhere where she had not had family and friends already waiting for her when she arrived. Even when she and John had first moved to Boston from Braintree, the whole tribe of Quincy, Tufts, and Smith cousins and uncles and aunts had all been waiting to greet her, not to speak of half a regiment of Boston Adamses. She thought of Lieutenant Coldstone, crossing the Atlantic in a troop-ship—of all those men on Castle Island—coming to this strange country where they knew no one and where they were automatically loathed . . .

“You gets used to it.” Fenton’s breath caught with a stab of pain, and his hand closed hard on hers for a moment. “And you learns. I’d seen Palmer on the stage, an’ here and there about the town—Bridgetown’s about the size of a market-village back home—but never to speak to: very grand, he was. Yet cast him adrift, and he was glad enough of seein’ any face he knew that he bought me dinner and a couple good glasses of ale.”

“Did he say how long he was staying in Boston?” John asked, and Fenton shook his head.

“Long as it took him to learn whether his sister was here or not, I reckon. They’ll be gone by now.”

“Did your master ever speak of a man named Elkins? Toby Elkins?” asked Abigail. “’Twas his house that Sir Jonathan visited on the day he returned.”

Again Fenton shook his head. His face twisted, and Abigail found a spoon on the little table and poured a measure of the laudanum into it. “Another,” whispered Fenton, when he’d drunk it. “If you please—the pain catches me . . .” After the second dose he seemed to sink deeper into the bedclothes, like a wrecked ship settling. He whispered drowsily, “Thank ’ee, m’am. It’s good not bein’ alone.”

When Fenton had sunk into opiated sleep, John and Abigail slipped silently from the room and in silence walked back to Queen Street. Though it was only midmorning, Abigail felt strange, as if it should have been night when she sat beside the dying man. Had he family back in England? she wondered. How would anyone find out where to write to them, to tell them their son—brother—uncle—was gone? It crossed her mind to think of John, in his long and frequent travels, riding for days sometimes on the muddy roads in the western woods to one county court or another: out to Worcester, up to Haverhill, through those deep primeval forests untouched since God called them into being.

If he were taken sick
, she thought, looking sidelong at that blunt, round face, that burly shape in the bundle of his cloak . . .
If he were taken sick, would anyone there know to write to me
? The thought of such a letter turned her cold inside.

John, too, was deep in thought as they walked, though his mind followed other roads, for in time he said, “No Elkins. I wonder if Sir Jonathan spoke of the man to your friend Miss Fluckner, or to that blithering gooseberry of hers. He doesn’t sound the man to tell his business to a woman . . .”

“It may not have been business.”

John raised his brows.

She shrugged. “Mr. Elkins may have been a professional procurer, for all we know . . . It certainly doesn’t sound as if Cottrell indulged himself much in Maine.” Her voice turned dry. “It would fit with everything else we’ve heard of the man.”

“In that case, would not Elkins have arrived with a young lady?”

Abigail shook her head. “Would he? I have no idea how such matters are arranged.”

“They aren’t,” said John. “Not in Boston, anyway—at least not on so opulent a scale. Yet I find it curious,” he added softly, “that there
is
a young woman missing . . . a young woman, moreover, upon whose virtue Cottrell made at least one attempt and possibly more. It answers nothing of how and why Jonathan Cottrell died . . . but I would very much like to know where the woman Bathsheba was during the eight days between her disappearance and Cottrell’s return.”

He turned down the little passway that led from Queen Street into the yard behind the Adams’ house, narrow and muddy and smelling of the two cows that traversed it twice a day to be led out and grazed on the Common. In general, John—or Thaxter, if John were out of Boston—would rake out the cowhouse in the afternoon, just before the town herd-boy brought the cattle down Queen Street for the children of their various owners to fetch in for the evening milking. This morning, however, having put off the start of his day’s work thus far, as soon as they came indoors, he kissed Abigail and went upstairs to change clothes, while Abigail herself shed her pattens and donned apron and day-cap to start preparations for dinner. “There’s two notes for you, m’am,” reported Pattie, coming into the kitchen with a broom and duster in hand and Charley and Tommy at her heels.

One, from Lieutenant Coldstone, simply reported that Mrs. Klinker of the Man-o’-War knew nothing of Mr. Elkins save his occasional visits to retrieve or dispatch mail, a convenience for which he paid her fivepence a week and had done so since the first week of January.

The other, from Dr. Joseph Warren, requested the favor of an interview, when it would be convenient.

She sent a note via one of Tom Butler’s prentice-boys next door, and the young doctor himself arrived that afternoon, just as she, Nabby, and Pattie finished mopping down the kitchen after dinner. John, who liked an after-dinner pipe once his portion of the cleanup was done, rose from the hearthside settle and held out a hand to the slender young man: “God bless you for seeing to that poor servant, Warren. Good Lord, what is it that he’s contracted? That’s no
grippe
. . .”

“Nor is it,” said Dr. Warren quietly. “It’s what I wished to speak of to you.” His clear gray eyes touched Abigail, included her in the statement, and the three of them moved to the fireside corner, away from where the tactful Pattie was settling the children to their lessons at the table.

“’Tis not some kind of tropical fever?” asked John worriedly, keeping his voice low. “I’ve heard of a jaundice like that in the Caribbean. The man was recently in Barbados, and indeed the night before he was taken sick had supper with an actor from Bridgetown—”

“Except that he had no fever,” said Warren. “He had supper with a man he’d known in Barbados—had his master known him?”

John shook his head.

“And half a day later, he was taken sick,” continued the doctor softly. “So that he could not accompany his master to Maine, nor be at Hancock’s Wharf to meet him when he returned. What does that sound like to you?”

John said nothing. His eyes went to Abigail’s, then returned to their friend.

Abigail said, “You’re not saying he was poisoned?”

“The symptoms sound precisely like certain mushroom poisons I have read of,” said Warren quietly. “They’re slow-acting and slow to begin their action—an advantage when someone doesn’t want to be associated with the onset of the symptoms. Had not this man’s master been murdered, the idea would not have crossed my mind at all. But Fenton’s illness seems mightily convenient for it to be simply jaundice and
la grippe
. It might be well,” he added, “to find this actor from Barbados with whom he supped, and learn if he was as ignorant of Sir Jonathan’s affairs and company as Mr. Fenton seemed to think he was.”

’
T
is a long way,” said Sam Adams thoughtfully, “from guessing the servant was poisoned, to finding who it was that thrashed the master and left him to die of cold in a ditch. That distance is longer still, if this British colonel has the word of a good, rich Tory’s dogsbody about who was seen near the alley late that night and a conveniently dropped scarf to back him up.” He knocked the ash of his pipe into the kitchen fireplace, a stone archway considerably larger than that of Abigail’s more modern kitchen on Queen Street, and smiled his thanks as Bess, plump and graying, brought in coffee from the pantry for those gathered around her hearth. Wind howled eerily in the hollow of the chimney overhead. Sleet spattered on the gray windows like a rain of stones.

Paul Revere said, “I take it you want us to locate this Palmer.”

“It shouldn’t be difficult.” John leaned forward to tong a coal from the fire and applied it to the bowl of his own pipe. He was crowded cozily against Abigail on the old-fashioned settle that flanked the fire. “An actor’s a rare bird in these climes. He’ll have caught someone’s attention.” Sam’s house on Purchase Street—one of the most venerable in Boston—in which he had been born, was constructed in the antique style, so that the whole northern wall of what had been old Josiah Adams’s original “keeping room” was wrought of stone, with the fireplace so great that Bess knelt inside it to do the cooking. The settles were built along the fireplace’s rough stone inner walls, and afforded draft-free, if rather smoky, seats on afternoons like this one, with a sudden gale driving in off the bay.

“Indeed he did,” agreed the silversmith. “At least, if he’s the same who was at the Horn Spoon in Ship Street, back in at the start of the New Year.”

“Can you confirm that?” asked John. For her part, Abigail felt no surprise that Palmer was already located. The Sons of Liberty, in its way, had grown out of the less formal network of gossip, friendships, and ward-level political alliances that had existed in Boston since time out of mind. In a community where a good third of the men were involved in the smuggling trade, people kept an eye on who was coming and going in the town, and people talked: to wives, to brothers, to friends met in taverns—those same taverns where men of compatible politics would meet after supper, in order to feel themselves a part of the greater community before going home to their wives and their beds. The women whose husbands ran the waterfront taverns—or who ran them themselves—talked, too: to sisters, to friends met at the market or outside the church. An actor from Barbados would be noted and commented upon (“Lord, the buttons on his waistcoat all covered with paste diamonds, ’twould fair blind you across the room!”), even as, these days, any outspoken Tory who seemed to be powerful or connected with the Army would be duly mentioned to Sam or Revere or Hancock or Ben Edes or any of the other men who made up the inner circle of the Sons.

The Sons of Liberty took good care to know who came and went in Boston.

“You wouldn’t know if he’s still there?” inquired Sam, and Revere shook his head.