A Marked Man (23 page)

“Of course you do, dear child.” Margaret Sandhayes took a lurching step toward the girl, propped one cane against her panniers, and put her arm around Lucy’s shoulders. “Just because you want to take someone and shake some sense into their heads doesn’t mean you don’t love them . . . And just because they’re acting like a complete
booby
doesn’t mean they don’t love you. It will work itself out, child—” She shifted her position a little, which caused the propped stick to fall; Abigail caught it neatly, before it struck the frozen path. “Come,” she said. “Let’s go up to the top of Beacon Hill, as long as we’re out here. You’ll feel better.”

Together, the four women left the bare trees of the Mall and made their way by those frozen and houseless lanes to the top of Beacon Hill, to see the whole of the bay spread like a world of blue black diamond beneath their feet, pricked with a thousand flecks of white and tufted with islands: violet, gray, and brown. Below them on the Common, children launched a kite on the cold sea breeze; their voices skirled shrill as birds, as the boatless sail whipped and whirled aimlessly, then swooped suddenly upward, as if it had all at once discovered what it meant to be able to fly free.

“A ship!” cried Lucy, pointing, and there she was: black hull, white sails, floating among the islands with breathtaking lightness. She fished in the deep pocket of her cloak for a spyglass. “You don’t think it’s word from the King, finally, do you?” She sounded excited rather than scared. “About the tea? About what’s going to happen?”

Even before she could focus the glass, however, Mrs. Sandhayes replied softly, “It’s early for that, child. No, I think this must be the
Incitatus
, up from the Indies, on its way to Halifax.”

P
arting, Lucy promised to write to Mrs. Hartnell the moment she got home. “I
beg
of you, be discreet, child,” pleaded Mrs. Sandhayes. “You have no
idea
what the
slightest
breath of scandal can do to your reputation—”

“Oh, pooh! Everyone says terrible things about Belinda Sumner behind her back and yet she’s received everywhere—”

“Belinda Sumner is married,” said Mrs. Sandhayes firmly. “And don’t expect too much of Caroline Hartnell. She’s stupid as an owl and wouldn’t see a conspiracy if twenty cloaked Venetians surrounded her with daggers.”

So much
, thought Abigail,
for “dear friendships” among the Tory gentry of the town
.

But the Fluckner fortune, even if it attracted parasites like Sir Jonathan Cottrell and caused Lucy’s father to look askance at the suits of honest tradesmen, had its uses. Soon after dinner Philomela knocked diffidently on the back door of the Adams’ kitchen, with a note from her mistress saying that the stylish matron—wife to one of Boston’s wealthiest ship-owners—would pay a “morning call” at Milk Street the following day.

“She’ll have Gwenifer with her,” promised Philomela, as Abigail refolded the note and tucked it into one of the drawers of the kitchen sideboard. “She won’t stir from the house without her.”

“That scarcely gives the poor girl time to do her work, does it?”

“I shouldn’t think so, m’am, no,” replied the young woman, with a noncommittal politeness that some of her so-called social betters, Abigail reflected, could do well to imitate.

“Is she so frightened of the outside world?”

“I don’t think so, m’am. Sheba told me that Mrs. Hartnell and other friends of Mrs. Fluckner have all heard that no English lady will go out without a maidservant to lend her consequence.”

“Consequence indeed.” Abigail sniffed. “Yet I suppose it spares me the awkwardness of letting Mrs. Hartnell know that it’s her maid I need to speak to, rather than her all-important self. Was Bathsheba a friend to this girl Gwen, then?”

“They were friendly.” Philomela gave the matter a moment’s thought. “Bathsheba used to be Mrs. Fluckner’s own maid, you see, before she had Marcellina, so when Mrs. Sandhayes came to stay with us, Mrs. Fluckner would have Bathsheba go about with her, for that same reason—which was very kind of her, toward Mrs. Sandhayes, but very hard on Sheba who had only just had Stephen. But Sheba would say, there’s no cloud without silver lining, because Mrs. Sandhayes was very generous with her tips—”

“How so, if she’s not a wealthy woman?”

Philomela sank her voice and glanced toward Pattie, who was drying plates at the table. “She cheats at cards, m’am.”

Abigail said, “Ah.”

“So in any event,” Philomela went on in a more normal voice, “after Mrs. Hartnell took up Mrs. Sandhayes, Sheba and Gwen were much thrown together, and you know how it is. Unless a woman takes against you for some reason, you do fall into friendliness with those you see often, do you not? When they would go about together, down to the wharves, or take Mrs. Hartnell’s carriage out into the country, then Sheba and Gwen would sit up on the box with the coachman, which sounds finer than it actually is,” added the girl with her faint, quick grin, “when the weather is as it was in February. Sheba said she and Gwen used to share cloaks and hug together sometimes to keep warm.”

“Hmm.” Abigail dipped into the little jar of hard money on the sideboard for a tip.

The uncovering of Bathsheba’s strange hoard had served to remind her that other servants in that household might be saving up their tips and perquisites, too, in the hopes of building some defense against the misfortunes of the world. And perhaps, she reflected, that was exactly how Margaret Sandhayes viewed her cardsharping.

The money seemed to remind Philomela as well, for she turned upon the threshold, and said, “I wanted to thank you again, Mrs. Adams, for arranging with your father and Mr. Greenleaf to buy Sheba’s children. Mrs. Barnaby told me this morning that Mr. Greenleaf had offered for the pair of them—”

“’ Tis nothing,” said Abigail. “If ill has indeed befallen to their mother, they’ll at least have food and a roof above their heads. I know Silas Greenleaf. He is an honest man who will give those children their freedom when they’re of age to seek their own fortunes, and he’ll not split them up. Whyever that money was offered to Bathsheba, it will have been used for the reason she took it: to save them.”

 

 

M
rs. Caroline Hartnell!” murmured Pattie, profoundly impressed, when Philomela had gone and Abigail returned to the kitchen table. Johnny and Nabby had carried the clean dishes to the sideboard and were bringing out their schoolbooks and slates. “What shall you wear tomorrow, m’am? I can curl your hair—”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” retorted Abigail, settling herself on the other side of the table with the household daybook, where she could reach the inkwell that stood between the children. “And I shall dress as I do for Meeting, in my best bib and tucker. I don’t curl my hair for Meeting, and I’m certainly not going to give a morning call more time and attention than I do a morning spent with God.”

“Why are they called morning calls, if they take place after noon?” inquired Nabby, raising her blue eyes from
The Pilgrim’s Progress
.

“Because women are silly, and live in sloth and sin,” Johnny proclaimed. “Rich ones, anyway,” he added quickly, seeing Abigail’s eyebrows lift. “All they think of is their dogs and their dresses.”

“I rather think,” corrected Abigail mildly, “that ’tis because dinner used to be eaten at noon . . . and people used to get up just after midnight, to be about their morning’s business, isn’t that so, John Quincy?”

The boy nodded importantly and returned to his Latin while Abigail unfolded and perused again the notes that had been waiting for her when she’d returned from her rendezvous with Lucy and Mrs. Sandhayes that morning.

Abigail folded the notes, turned them over and over in her hands:
Drat those wretched actors
.
Changed their names and moved their goods across the street or down two doors
—that portion of Ship Street boasted more taverns than the rest of Boston put together
—and how could we tell
?

The thought returned to vex her the following day, when—properly gowned in dark, well-cut wool and wearing, as she had said, her best bib and tucker—she sat drinking peppermint tisane in the Fluckner drawing room, making conversation with Hannah Fluckner and contemplating again the portrait of that sweet-faced lady in her youth. A pity, Abigail reflected, one could not acquire decent miniatures of such lesser personalities as the elusive Mr. Elkins or Androcles Palmer, to show to innkeepers who might never have heard the names but might well recognize the faces. Not that the miniatures would be an invariable help, she amended, returning her eyes to the portrait with a certain amount of regret. When the portrait’s original asked her politely, “A penny for your thoughts, Mrs. Adams,” she said, “I was only thinking what a shame it is, that no one in New England seems to be able to paint faces that look anything like the actual people.”

“La, I protest, Mrs. Adams!” cried Mrs. Hartnell. “’Tis a fine, big portrait, and very handsomely done! Mr. Stanley—the man who painted it, and such a very gentlemanlike man he was!—did one of me, in my green and white satin—Do you remember my green and white satin, Hannah? La, such a
crack
as we thought it, with those great dowdy panniers—”

Abigail listened politely to the subsequent description of various recollected toilettes, but it was clear to her that it had never crossed the minds of either woman that the business of a portrait was to portray not the cost of the sitter’s clothing, but those individual differences of eyebrow and chin and lip that distinguished the rather saturnine Margaret Sandhayes from the fragile and flighty Caroline Hartnell.

Neither pretty; both fairish rather than fair; both slender rather than beefy of build. Even as portraits missed the differences of feature, the fashionable layers of paint and powder blurred them, concealing the natural hues of complexions as well as their flaws under white lead and cochineal. How
could
you describe a woman, she reflected, if the main thing you saw about her was not her face, but the elaborately curled, puffed, and swagged white meringue of powdered hair that surrounded it? A describer would fix first on,
One lady was a cripple, the other two were sound
, and then
perhaps
might notice,
One lady had a tiny tricorn hat pinned to the summit of her coiffeur, the other two had silk flowers
. Certainly this was how Margaret Sandhayes had remembered those who came in and out of the cardroom and the ballroom:
the gentleman in the violet waistcoat, the lady with the coiffure Aux Rêves Sentimentales
. . . Only later had Lucy’s scribbled hand filled in the names. Even those who did notice features might only say “big nose,” which could describe either the Hartnell aquiline or the Sandhayes inquiring beak. And in fact, Abigail suspected, only people like John, who were used to analyzing faces, would consciously register that the uncomeliness of feature common to both women stemmed from large noses at all, or that one had a chin that was far too weak for beauty, the other, far too strong.

Mrs. Hartnell concluded her breathless and extended account of her most recent shopping-trip and turned to Abigail at last. “Now, dearest Margaret tells me you’ve taken an interest in that sweet little Bethlehem girl—”