A Marked Man (26 page)

“No, please come in.” With a rush of gratitude for Thaxter’s unimaginative presence, Abigail straightened her back and stepped aside to let them pass. “You must be freezing, all of you. Lieutenant Coldstone—”

“Is unconscious, m’am.” The artillery officer hesitated before crossing the threshold, but the crowd was growing thicker, and the wind streaming in from the bay was sharp as broken clamshells. “He has been taken to the Watchhouse on the Common. The regimental surgeon has been sent for.”

Thaxter ushered them into John’s office, his matter-offactness putting the men in the position of ordinary clients. Mistaken rather than sinister. As he did so, she whispered, “Who did you send?”

“Jed Paley, on that spitfire mare of his. They should catch him no matter how far he’s got.”

“What happened?”

“I was at the jail when the town herd-boys ran in looking for the constable. They were shouting that someone had murdered a lobsterback in the Common—one of them said that a note from you was in his hand.”

“Even a Whig surgeon would not assassinate a British officer if he were brought in to care for him, you know,” Abigail pointed out to the artilleryman and removed her apron. “Not with all of you looking on. Would you gentlemen care for some hot cider? Or have you orders not to let me out of your sight? Ah, Pattie—These gentlemen have come to arrest me for setting an ambuscade to murder Lieutenant Coldstone this morning. I’m pleased to say I did not succeed.”

“Mrs. Adams was with me all the morning,” announced the girl, with commendable promptness.

“No, dear, you’re forgetting that I went down to the wharf an hour ago, to send the Lieutenant a note,” Abigail corrected her. “Which must be still on its way to Castle Island—”

Unless the boat capsized in this weather.
Had Abigail been a swearing woman, she would have done so at the thought.

“Miss Clarke.” The senior of the two constables held out the note to Pattie. “Is this your mistress’s hand?”

“No, sir,” stated Pattie, before she unfolded the paper.

“But ’tis very like,” said Abigail.

The girl looked at the paper, uncertain about admitting anything, then nodded. “Yes, m’am.”

“Mr. Thaxter,” said Abigail, “is there a way that I can go to the Watchhouse to see how Lieutenant Coldstone does, without prejudice to my cause or the construction placed upon my action that ’tis an admission that I’m submitting to arrest? I—Oh, Mr. Revere, thank goodness!”

All the men turned, as Paul Revere—who had come in as usual through the kitchen—appeared in the study door. The artillery officer scowled—evidently familiar with his name—but the constables greeted him as an old friend and thrust the incriminating evidence into his gloved hand.

“It reached Lieutenant Coldstone on one of the last of the provision boats yesterday,” said the senior man, whom Abigail recognized as one of those men long active in ward politics in the town. “His sergeant says they came ashore at Rowe’s Wharf on the first boat—”

“Sergeant Muldoon is with him?” broke in Abigail, relieved, and the constable nodded.

“The Lieutenant left Muldoon in the Mall near the work-house and crossed the Common toward the Great Elm alone, with the words to the effect that the note said nothing of another’s presence. Sergeant Muldoon said the Lieutenant had almost reached the elm when he heard a shot and saw the Lieutenant fall. He ran toward the place. He said he did not notice anyone fleeing and had no idea from which direction the shot came. But the Powder-Store is somewhat less than two hundred yards from the elm, at the top of a hill, and that hill, and the copse at its foot, would have covered a single attacker’s retreat.”

“Good shooting, whoever he is,” Revere commented. He went to the desk, and from the top of one of the neat stacks of correspondence there took a letter that Abigail had written to John some weeks ago, when he was at a trial in Worcester. “You generally sign yourself
A.A.
, do you not, m’am?”

“It is my usual signature. Sometimes I’ll sign
A. Adams
, but not as a common thing.”

Revere held out both papers to the senior constable. “See how the line widens at the tail of the
g
,” he said, “where the forger tries to imitate the curve of Mrs. Adams’s hand, and where the
g
in
great
stands isolated from the
r
? Mrs. Adams’s hand connects it there, and there. The shape of the tail is completely different, too, as you will notice.”

While trying to recall whether she habitually connected her
g
’s to their parent words or not—or whether these so-called
proofs
were in fact just slips of a badly cut pen—Abigail reflected that had that difference not existed, the sharp-eyed silversmith would have found any of a dozen others. He was a man used to looking for details, but it was a lawyer’s riposte, one that she—and Revere—had seen John use any number of times to parry an enemy’s attack by throwing doubt upon the evidence. By the constable’s frown of concentration—and his slow nod—she could see that it worked.

“Might we go to the Watchhouse?” she asked. “Lieutenant Coldstone is my friend . . .” She bit back the words,
And I trust there are enough of you gentlemen to prevent me from murdering him on sight
. Knowing the constables, they would undoubtedly take her seriously and arrest her on the spot.

 

 

T
he Watchhouse that stood at the foot of the Powder-Store hill was barely larger than Abigail’s bedroom, a single whitewashed chamber with stone walls and a fireplace that wouldn’t have kept a bowl of gruel warm. The Common, a quarter mile north to south and twice that end to end, was a bleak and desolate place once the sun went down, and the open fields beyond it, over the slopes of Beacon Hill, largely deserted. The Hancocks and Olivers and Apthorps who held the great houses along Beacon Street wanted to make sure that in the event of trouble that their own servants couldn’t deal with, there would be constables within call.

As if the winds had whirled away Thursday’s strolling ladies and kite-flying children, the town pasture lay nearly empty under the scudding morning sky. The town cows, left in charge of the youngest and lowest-ranked herd-boy, were being slowly brought up from the other side of the meadow, and all the older herd-boys had already joined what amounted to a scattered crowd that milled about the Watchhouse. It was the usual Boston Mob, Abigail noted: prentice-boys and dock-laborers, and men who looked like tavern-servants. The eyes and ears of the Sons of Liberty . . . and of the smuggling-bands operated by half the merchants in Boston.

A number of these individuals were shouting insults and throwing stones and frozen cow-dung at the stolid red-clothed form of Sergeant Muldoon, who stood before the Watchhouse door with his musket at his side. One or two hooligans broke off at the sight of the artillery officer who had accompanied the constables to Abigail’s door, but the presence of a woman with them seemed to act as a deterrent to anything but shouts of “Fucking lobsterback!” and “Murdering pigs!”

“Excuse me a moment, m’am, gentlemen.” Revere strolled over to them. The shouting ceased at once, and the little knots of men and boys retreated. Some moved off around the hill, or into the brushy copse at the hill’s foot, but Abigail could feel their presence, like a tension in the air.

Muldoon kept his eyes very properly on the copse but spared a glance at Abigail as she came to his side; blue eyes troubled at the sight of her. “I shall want to speak with you later, Sergeant. Is that permitted, Constable?”

Rather than coming anywhere near the Watchhouse, Revere moved off, pacing the distance between the infamous copse and the Great Tree. Abigail knew why but considered the caution unnecessary. Did he
really
think the artillery major, unsupported by troops, would be such a fool as to attempt to arrest him in the teeth of the mob?

Lieutenant Coldstone had been laid on the table before the fire in the little building, with a third constable beside him on one of the room’s battered benches. This man jumped to his feet as Abigail and her party entered. “He’s still breathin’, sir—” He was an elderly man, with an accent of Ireland and a palsied quiver to his hands. Abigail couldn’t imagine what help he’d have been had the layabouts—or the murderer himself for that matter—decided to rush the place and finish what the unknown assassin had begun. “I can’t wake him.” The room stank of blood, rum, and the burned hair that presumably the old man had used as makeshift vinaigrette. Someone—Muldoon?—had covered Coldstone with the young officer’s military cloak, to which had been added one of the constables’ greatcoats.

Abigail said, “Open the shutters,” which had been closed, presumably out of fear that the crowd would break the grimy glass. Compliance by the constables with this request didn’t help matters much. The windows were small and set high. Given the general dimness of the morning, not a great deal was visible in the gloom. Every lantern the Watchhouse possessed had already been lighted and pressed into service around Coldstone on the table, giving his body the curious appearance of some arcane sacrifice laid on an altar. His wig, smeared with mud, lay on one end of the bench. In the frame of his short-cropped pale hair his face seemed white as bleached wax, his brows—which normally appeared rather mouse-colored—now almost black by contrast. Under the cloak his coat had been pulled off his left shoulder and arm, and his shirt cut away and torn up to make a dressing.

“Bullet’s lodged, sir—m’am—” The elderly constable divided a doubtful glance between his commander, the artillery officer, and Abigail. “Bled somethin’ horrible, he has—”

Thaxter bent over to look, and said, “Damn,” and Abigail put in, “I hope some of that rum that I smell was used to cleanse the wound?”

“’ Twas, m’am,” affirmed the elderly constable. “I did a trifle of work with the surgeons, back durin’ the war.”

“Who knew about the message that you sent Lieutenant Coldstone, m’am?” asked the officer, speaking for the first time.

“No one,” insisted Abigail. “That is, the message I sent was not the one that he received last night. I sent mine first thing this morning and doubt that it has reached Castle Island even yet. And in it I asked merely that he might name a place and time for our interview, in some public place, as my husband is from—Lieutenant!” As she had spoken, her hand had been on Coldstone’s wrist, feeling for the swift, thready pulse; so it was she felt his arm move, even as she heard the agonized intake of his breath. “Give me that rum.”

The elderly man pressed it into her hand. Coldstone coughed on the sip she gave him, and turned his face aside, a sentiment for which she could scarcely blame him. “Can you hear me, Lieutenant?”

His eyelids flickered, and he nodded. The Watchhouse door opened and yet another constable entered, carrying—Abigail was delighted that someone had shown this much sense—a couple of blankets, obviously fetched from the town Almshouse at the end of the Mall—and a number of billets of firewood.

“Did you see anything of the man who shot you?” Abigail asked, and the artillery officer stepped up beside her, with the air of one who would have put her bodily out of his way, if he could have.

“One of the damn Bostonians learnt Mrs. Adams had sent for you,” he said, leaning over Coldstone, “and lay in wait.”

Abigail opened her mouth to protest yet again, then shut it. The man clearly had his own ideas of what had happened, and it would be useless to argue.

“You lie quiet, sir. You’ve taken no mortal hurt. We’ve sent for the surgeon—”

Abigail backed away and slipped through the door. Thaxter was talking softly with Muldoon; Paul Revere was nowhere to be seen. Muldoon asked, “How is he, m’am?”

“That artilleryman says the Lieutenant isn’t mortally wounded—Who is he, anyway?”

“Him? One of the officers at the South Battery. When himself went down a couple of the herd-boys came runnin’, an’ one went to fetch the Watch whilst t’other helped me get the Lieutenant here. The constables must’ve gone for the nearest officer they could think of. Before we even tried to shift him I packed the wound with everythin’ I could lay hand to—” Abigail noticed for the first time that Muldoon was missing his neckcloth. “But he’s lost a fair river of blood. What was it made you send to ask for a meetin’ here, m’am, if you don’t mind me askin’? There’s not someone watchin’ your house, is there?”

Abigail explained for what felt like the dozenth time that she had had nothing to do with the message that had brought Coldstone to the Common, then asked, “Where was he shot from? The bushes below the Powder-Store?”

“Got to be, m’am. ’Tisn’t an inch of cover that would hide a man any closer. And further off, Robin Hood himself couldn’t hit at the distance, not if he had a telescope and a magic gun from the King of the Fairies.”

“And of course anything resembling tracks would have been trampled out by this time by Sam Adams’s pet mob—”

The sergeant took his eyes off the little knots of men still moving about in the vicinity long enough to give her a quick grin. “Wouldn’t be no tracks anyway, m’am. The ground’s like flint. Well, here’s someone in a hurry,” he added, as a horse burst at a clattering canter from the bare trees of the Mall. “Let’s hope ’tis the surgeon—”

“It isn’t, though.” Abigail shaded her eyes. “It’s Mr. Adams.”

How she knew it at this distance she wasn’t sure—he was riding a horse unfamiliar to her—but sure enough, when he came a little closer, she identified the caped gray greatcoat and mud-spattered top boots. She lifted her arm to wave, and he drew rein beside her and flung himself from the saddle to catch her in his arms. “Nab, are you all right?”

“I’m well—”

“I can’t leave you for half an hour before you’re arrested—and for murdering a British officer—!”