A Marked Man (24 page)

“Bathsheba,” corrected Lucy, ignoring her mother’s admonitory glare.

“Bathsheba, of course! Brain like a sieve, Mr. Hartnell is forever telling me—How very extraordinary that she would run away like that, you’re always so kind to your Negroes, Hannah. Positively spoil them,
I
say—” She laughed, as if her own observations were always the height of wit. “Well, it’s very kind of you, for all that, seeing that the children go to a good home, poor brats. I am
terribly
fond of children, you know, Mrs. Adams. My own are the heartbeat of my life, you may ask any of my friends—”

Mrs. Sandhayes nodded, although she had imparted to Abigail on other occasions that her friend was unhesitating in her choice of her own convenience and pleasure over that of any of her children, having dispatched every one of them back to England for schooling at the earliest possible moment.

Abigail said, “Indeed,” and continued into the split second that the other woman was drawing breath to expand on the topic, “but I have the theory that she may in fact be in hiding. Mrs. Sandhayes said that she seemed upset and frightened on the day before she fled. I understand that you had been out with Mrs. Sandhayes that day, and she has told me
how much
your observations are to be trusted—”

Not, in fact, a lie
, she comforted herself.

“Did you see anything, on that Friday when you were out, that seemed odd to you? Out of the way?”

In the far (and coldest) corner of the room, where Philomela sat sewing with the dark-haired, diminutive girl whom Abigail guessed had to be Mrs. Hartnell’s Gwen, Abigail was conscious of quick movement. She turned her head to see Gwen look up and swiftly meet her eyes. Then, as quickly, the girl bowed her head again over her work. But Abigail knew she was listening.

“You remember, Caroline,” prompted Mrs. Sandhayes. “It was the day we went down to Merchant’s Row, and you found that astonishing piece of French lace, for truly
dagger-cheap
, and the pink satin shoes with the paste buckles—”

“Yes, yes, yes, of course!” cried the other woman. “How could I forget?”

“We were simply
hours
in that warehouse, and in the shops on the wharf,” said Mrs. Sandhayes. “Afterward I was half-froze and my feet felt as if I’d been bastinado’d, but I wouldn’t have traded for anything, you know.” And she smiled.

“No, no! Such a
delightful
day!”

“When you came back to the carriage,” said Abigail, wondering how even Mrs. Sandhayes’s devotion to fashion and “good society” could compensate her for even an hour of this woman’s conversation, “did Bathsheba seem upset or distressed in any way?”

“I don’t think so.” Mrs. Hartnell frowned uncertainly. “And surely—”

“But we didn’t leave them with the carriage, dear,” put in Mrs. Sandhayes. “Remember? We knew there would be a great many things to carry.”

“Of course!” Mrs. Hartnell broke into a smile. To Abigail, she confided, “
Dear
Hannah has been
so
generous, making sure poor Margaret has had a servant to go about with her. Really, not everyone would be so considerate of a guest.” She smirked happily, and Abigail was conscious of the sudden, slight rigidity Mrs. Sandhayes’s smile, at the reminder of her condition—and of the fact that for three months she had been living on Thomas Fluckner’s charity. “
How
she can have managed on the ship from England I can
not
imagine—”

“My dear, I lost the use of my legs, not my hands or my voice.” The thinnest touch of acerbity speared through the habitual sweetness of the Englishwoman’s tone. “It isn’t only servants who are willing to help a woman who is having trouble carrying her luggage.”

“Yes, but when one hasn’t a sou, one finds even the
greatest
gentlemen are so much less obliging,” responded Mrs. Hartnell blithely, and Abigail could not suppress the reflection that the chaperone was being paid back for some of her remarks in Philomela’s presence about the moral character of the servant class.

“So Bathsheba and Gwen were with you, pretty much, all that morning?”

“Indeed they were.”

“And you saw nothing amiss in Bathsheba’s behavior.”

Mrs. Hartnell frowned, more as if trying to decide why anyone would notice a servant’s behavior in the first place, than to recall what it had been on a day over three weeks ago.

“As you generally walked in the lead”—Mrs. Sandhayes smiled—“except of course when you so kindly took my arm in the crowds—I doubt you’d have had much chance to observe poor Bathsheba. Gwen, my dear—” She raised her voice slightly and beckoned Gwen Pugh from her corner, while her friend went back to feeding tidbits to Hercules, who all this time had been sitting happily on her lap and drooling into a hundred shillings’ worth of point lace.

“This is Mrs. Adams,” she introduced kindly. “And she is trying to discover what might have happened to Bathsheba. Do you remember the Friday Mrs. Hartnell and I went down to Hutchinson’s Wharf together? The last morning Bathsheba went out with us, before she ran away?”

The girl—who seemed to be in her early twenties, and was small and dark and rather shy—replied hesitantly, “I don’t remember clearly, m’am.” The coffee brown eyes went from Mrs. Sandhayes to Mrs. Hartnell, then swiftly, briefly touched Abigail’s before lowering to the carpet again.

“You do remember that Bathsheba seemed upset and forgetful, though? Mislaying things and missing the way walking back to the carriage?”

“Yes,” responded the girl obediently. “Yes, I do.”

“But she didn’t say what was troubling her?”

“No, m’am. That she didn’t.”

“And you didn’t see anyone speak to her, or give her anything, did you?”

“No, m’am.” Given the firm tone of the Englishwoman’s voice, it would have been astonishing, thought Abigail, had the girl had the courage to say anything else.

Rather vexed at this high-handed appropriation of what was supposed to be her investigation, Abigail asked, “Would you say that you were friends with Bathsheba, Miss Pugh?” and the maid looked up again, as if startled to be asked anything about her feelings at all.

“Yes, m’am. Bathsheba, she was all right. She told me who was the best tooth-drawer to go to, when I’d cracked my tooth on—”

“Gwen, I’m sure Mrs. Adams does not need details of your dental history,” laughed Mrs. Hartnell. “Really, the things servants will come up with if you encourage them!” Gwen’s cheeks colored, and she looked down in shame.

“Did Bathsheba ever speak to you,” asked Abigail gently, “of anyplace she would go—or anyone she would go to—if she were frightened, or in trouble? Was there anyone in Boston, or in the country round, that she had whom she trusted?”

“Mr. Barnaby, m’am,” said the girl promptly.

“’ Tis quite true,” put in Mrs. Fluckner. “Barnaby is very much the father to all the servants, which is of course as it should be. And speaking of servants—”

“That will be all, Gwen,” dismissed Mrs. Sandhayes. And the discussion of the enormities of the lower classes flowed over the tea table like an inexorable river. Abigail settled back and sipped her peppermint tea (on which both Mrs. Fluckner and Mrs. Hartnell had twitted her, as if standing against the King’s monopoly were some mental maggot or hobbyhorse), dissatisfied and troubled and very well aware that Mrs. Hartnell had told her very little, and Gwen, nothing at all.

Which was odd, given that most people were delighted to talk about events, particularly events connected with murders, disappearances, and conspiracies.

Or did Caroline Hartnell—like Margaret Sandhayes—simply consider her a provincial busybody?

Abigail’s eyes went back to the portrait of Hannah Fluckner—which could have been the depiction of any twenty-year-old girl some eighteen years ago—and then, troubled, to the two maidservants sewing in their corner. And so doing, her gaze crossed that of Gwen Pugh, and she saw in the girl’s dark eyes the wretched uncertainty of one who had lied, and knew she lied . . .

. . . and yet dared not speak the truth.

The maid turned her eyes quickly away.

Mrs. Sandhayes chirupped, “More tea?”

T
o lie about one’s activities is scarcely evidence of a conspiracy to murder a man she doesn’t know,” John remarked, when Abigail told him the tale of her morning call over dinner. “The woman might simply have been meeting a lover—”

“The two of them were in it together,” insisted Abigail. “Rather, I should say ’twas the Sandhayes woman who did the lying, for Caroline Hartnell quite clearly hasn’t the brains to find her way back from the outhouse if she ventures forth without a guide.”

John spooned Indian pudding onto the plates as Johnny passed them to him. “Nor does she need brains,” he replied. “Mrs. Hartnell is wealthy. Her husband is a member of the General Court and a friend of the Governor, and her friendship assures that Margaret Sandhayes will not be treated in this town as the charity case that she is. No, you shall not have more molasses, Charley—that is all the molasses that a boy of your years should eat.” He turned from his middle son—who knew better than to argue the point—back to Abigail.

“We are in large part as people treat us, Portia. The difference between a woman who accompanies a wealthy young lady about town to keep would-be suitors at a distance, in trade for a roof over her head and a pittance of money, and a woman who does precisely the same thing as a kindness because she is a guest of the young lady’s family is—incalculable. And the difference lies entirely in whether that woman is welcomed by the family’s friends or is regarded by them as a very intelligent servant.”

“But for a woman of Mrs. Sandhayes’s intelligence to participate in a cheap intrigue—”

“So far as I’ve been able to ascertain,” John said, “Margaret Sandhayes came to this town this winter with very little beyond a respectable wardrobe and a couple of letters of introduction: nothing to live on or by. Yet she’s a proud woman and obviously of good family. She would readily admit that Philomela and Barnaby are intelligent . . . and I daresay she would rather die than be regarded as their equal.”

“There is no shame in it.”

“There is no shame in it for
you
,” John replied. “Nor for your sisters, nor any of the women you know, because Massachusetts is not like England.” He finished his corn-pudding and rose, Nabby springing to her feet and gathering up the plates while Tommy in his raised chair—quick to observe his mother’s preoccupation with her conversation—gravely applied palmfuls of molasses to his own cheeks.

“We demand the rights of Englishmen, in Parliament and before the King, but we are not like them,” John went on. “ ’ Tis what they don’t understand. We know in our hearts—men and women both—that we can always find some honest work that will feed us, even if it be breaking flax in some backcountry farm. ’Tis not the same in England. We forget that.”

“How do we go about finding the truth, then?” Abigail folded her napkin, her thoughts far beyond the warm kitchen and the bright, icy slant of the evening light upon the wall. “We have no idea how long until the
Incitatus
sails, but it can’t be more than a day or two. And all we have learned is who
couldn’t
have had to do with Cottrell’s murder—a formidable list of the ‘best people’ in the town”—she drew out the several amended tallies put together by Lucy and Mrs. Sandhayes—“plus the two men who had the best cause to thrash him, whether or not he froze to death afterward. Three men, I should say, counting Harry. Thomas Boylston Adams!” she added, suddenly aware of her youngest child’s experimentation with molasses as facial decoration and hair restorant. “If this is the purpose to which you put your molasses, you shall have no more of it!”

“I’ll take his, Mama, please.” Charley stood up on his chair in his anxiety to be heard. “I promise I won’t put it on
my
hair!”

There was a pause in the adult conversation, as Abigail cleaned up her son while Johnny, Nabby, and Pattie cleared the table, put the leftovers in the pantry, spread towels, and poured water from the boiler for the washing-up. Thaxter, returning from his mother’s house, dropped the afternoon post on the sideboard and said, “One from Haverhill, sir. It looks like Mrs. Teasel’s hand,” and this John read while Abigail led the cleaning-up, then bundled the older three children up tightly for an excursion to the Common.

But her mind was on the
Incitatus
, lying at anchor off Castle Island with its white sails folded like a Death Angel’s wings; on Margaret Sandhayes’s firm determination to avoid the impropriety of interviewing the servants of people socially useful to herself; on the shadowy cavern of the front hall of the Pear Tree House and the trace of stink lurking in its gloom that whispered like a trapped ghost,
Someone died here
. . .

John said, “Damn.”

Abigail looked up.