A Marked Man (3 page)

Nabby’s eyes were closed. Abigail nudged her sharply. Johnny, on the far side of the little girl with the fire-box on the floor between their feet, was reading his father’s Bible. As a Christian, Abigail knew she shouldn’t countenance such inattention to the sermon, but at least it would improve his command of the language. Not every six-year-old could manage those archaic phrases.

“When Cain in his sin cried out before God,
My punishment is greater than I can bear,
God’s punishment of Cain was not death, even though he had murdered his brother, but exile, that he might learn of his punishment what it was like to have no brother forever and to be afraid . . .”

Who would Harry have had the opportunity—or the desire—to harm? He was a loyal friend, but his only family was his younger brother; and these days, Harry was far more likely to talk his way out of trouble than to resort to violence. Besides, if he’d cracked a thief or burglar over the head with a poker, the charge would be manslaughter, and his captors, the local Watch, not the Provost Marshal.

For the British military to be involved, the crime had to be one that touched the Crown. And in these times—given that Harry and his Grenadiers had been among the men who’d stood guard at Griffin’s Wharf in December to keep the British tea-ships from unloading their cargoes—the only crime Abigail could think of that would involve arrest by the Provost Marshal would be treason.

That being the case, was Harry’s arrest only the first, with more to come?

Abigail shivered, and not simply because yesterday’s snow lay thick in Brattle Street outside.

“We bear the stain of our deeds on our foreheads, or on our right hands, as the Book of Revelation teaches us:
Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me
,
saith the Lord God
. Think you, before you accomplish any deed for your own willfulness or pleasure,
What mark will this leave upon me
? Some there are, for whom the mark obscures the whole of their faces, so that those who behold them see only that mark, and could not say,
This man is dark or fair, or comely or otherwise
, but only,
This man bears a mark
. . .”

Last night
, thought Abigail. Last night Harry was supposed to be printing pamphlets in the basement of his shop on Cornhill, leaflets concerning the assault of a girl in Dorchester by two British soldiers who had crossed to that little village from their island camp to buy wood. These pamphlets, leaflets, and broadsheets appeared in taverns from Philadelphia to Maine, and westward deep into the backcountry, carried by the Sons of Liberty and trumpeting to all that the King’s efforts to tighten his hold on the colony were not merely a matter that concerned a few merchants in Boston or which townsmen would run for office. In many cases, Abigail was quite well aware, these incidents of violence between civilians and soldiers were either wholly fictitious or blown wildly out of proportion, though this assault had at least actually happened. John had written the original broadside, and by the time Sam had edited it and turned it over to Harry for printing, it was guaranteed to put men in a frame of mind to fight—

Was the murder charge simply a screen? Did the British really suspect that Harry had a printing press hidden in his cellar, one that they weren’t keeping an eye on the way they kept an eye on the
Gazette
and the
Spy
and the various other printers in town?

“For each deed leaves its mark, and God can read all of them upon our faces and in our right hands. And we cannot know which of these marks is the sign of the Cross, and which the number of the beast . . . Which, the Evangelist tells us, is the number of a man, and of the deeds of a man and not a beast. How can we know that what seems right to us, what seems natural, is not natural at all in the eyes of God? How can we know that what we seek will not mark us before those all-seeing eyes as those who have turned away from God, and from man, and from our own families, in pursuit of fleshy shadow?”

You wouldn’t leave us, if you were a slave
, Nabby had asked that morning,
and leaving us was the only way you could be free?

Was that in fact what that Negro Woman, twenty-three years old, well-spoken and rather freckled
,
had done?

Abandoned a two-year-old child and a baby at breast—tiny orphans who would be sold off for a dollar or two to spare Thomas Fluckner the cost of raising them—to seek her own liberty? What mark would
she
bear before the eyes of God who knew everything?

And what mark would Sam and John and Revere and all those others bear for putting the affairs of politics and rebellion before the commandment that the Sabbath should be kept holy?

Any trace of heat had long ago faded from the fire-box at their feet. Vainly, Abigail wiggled her frozen toes. In the next pew, despite the discreet muffling of several layers of quilted petticoat, Abigail heard the thin tinkling of Mrs. Hitchbourne using what the French called a
bourdaloue
: a small, portable chamber pot named after a French bishop given to notoriously long sermons. Such devices were frowned upon in New England—Abigail had long disciplined herself to drink nothing at Sunday breakfast and had taught Nabby likewise—but in a fashionable church like Brattle Street, there were always those less fastidious in their observances than they should be.

She saw Johnny catch Nabby’s eye and giggle, and Abigail reached across to pinch the boy’s arm.

“How many seek out the Mark of the Beast for themselves, without which
no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name
? So consider your desires and whether they are worth the consequence. Is anything worth God’s punishment of exile, and vagabondage, and living as Cain lived on through the rest of his mortal span,
out from the presence of the Lord
? A man may say that it is permitted to do ill that good may come of it—but consider what mark that ill might leave upon our foreheads and our right hands. How can we do good in the sight of the Lord God, if the doing of it will transform us into the Servants of Ill? Will mark us, ourselves, with the Mark of the Beast that considers naught but the urgency of his own desires and claims them as good only because they seem good to him?

“
I had planted thee a noble vine
, saith the Lord,
wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?
”

“Mama,” asked Johnny, as they retreated up the aisle at last, “if the Lord put the Israelites into the hand of the Midianites because they sinned, why did the Lord then help the Israelites slaughter the Midianites later? Weren’t the Midianites doing just what the Lord told them to do?”

“We can’t know what the Lord asked the Midianites to do,” explained Abigail, who had never been quite comfortable with this particular aspect of Predestination herself, “or how to do it.” She tucked Johnny’s scarf more tightly around his throat and over his head, thankful that both her children took after John in their sturdy strength. Poor Arabella Butler next door had just lost her three-year-old son, a fragile child she had vainly nursed through measles, fevers, sweats, and croup, and whose loss had left her desolate. “Perhaps the Midianites overstepped their instructions.” That’s what came of letting a critical, too-intelligent six-year-old get his hands on the Holy Writ.

“Yes, but if God knows everything from the beginning of Time, wouldn’t He have known the Midianites would oppress the Children of Israel that cruelly—?”

“Mrs. Adams—”

Abigail turned gratefully to meet the three women silhouetted against the queer snow-light of the doors that led from the vestibule to Brattle Street outside. The one who had spoken stepped forward, pushing back her cardinal red hood to reveal herself not a woman but a girl of sixteen: black-haired, blue-eyed, stout, and dressed in a vivid and stylish polonaise of mustard-colored silk that made her stand out among the sober dark garments of the congregation like a macaw in a chicken-run. “You may not remember me, m’am, but I’m Lucy Fluckner—”

“Of course I remember you.” Abigail smiled at the girl and held out her hand. “And Philomela—?”

Miss Fluckner’s maidservant curtseyed: slender as Miss Fluckner was buxom, quiet as Miss Fluckner was bossy, she had been, some three months before, the target of a religious madman whom Abigail had been instrumental in trapping. The third woman, older than either of the others, was still gazing about her with the precise expression of a schoolgirl at a raree-show, as if she couldn’t quite believe the Spartan plainness of the church vestibule or the somber garb of its inhabitants. When Lucy Fluckner introduced her—“Mrs. Sandhayes, Mrs. Adams”—she propped one of her canes against her wide, whaleboned panniers and extended two fingers only, in the manner of English ladies. “
Well
, I wouldn’t have believed it, m’am! Do this many people
really
come out on a morning like this to be told they’re all going to
Hell
?”

Abigail opened her mouth to snap a retort, but recalled that that was the deserved destination predicted by the Reverend Cooper for at least seven-eighths of the world’s population, past and present, if not more. So she merely gestured about her, at her neighbors crowding to shake the pastor’s hand, and replied, “As you see, m’am. I understand that in England, those who aren’t destined for Heaven don’t wish to know it,” and Mrs. Sandhayes laughed, a light, cheerful sound like shaken silver bells, which caused the grimmer stalwarts of the congregation like Fearful Perkins and old Mr. Gilbert to turn their heads and glare.

“Mrs. Adams, I came to beg your help.” Lucy drew back from the group around the outer door and back into the sanctuary, where the minimal heat from the small fire-boxes of coals brought by each family on so bitter a morning had managed to raise the temperature a degree or two during the course of the service. “And Papa would
flay
me if he knew I’d come to you, and throw poor Margaret”—she nodded toward her chaperone—“out in the street for letting me do it, because she’s supposed to keep me out of trouble, but you were so brilliant in helping Philomela . . . Really she was, Margaret. She can help us if anyone can.” She turned back to Abigail. “There’s been a murder.”

Several things seemed to click into place in Abigail’s mind, filling her with a sense of shock and dismay. “The slave-woman?”

Lucy stared at her, taken aback.

“Your father’s slave-woman. The one who disappeared—”

“Bathsheba? Has she been found?” Her dark brows puckered in swift consternation. “Why do you say she’s dead?”

“I’m sorry,” said Abigail quickly. “I thought—” She shook her head, trying to collect her thoughts. “Forgive me. Who is it who was killed?”

“Sir Jonathan Cottrell. The King’s Special Commissioner—”

“And your fiancé.” Mrs. Sandhayes, who had been leaning on her canes and gazing around the sanctuary with the bemused expression of an explorer contemplating a grass temple on Otaheite, gave her an arch wink.

Lucy flushed a dark pink, not with maiden modesty, but with anger. “He was
not
my fiancé,” she snapped.

“’ Tis not what your father thought, my dear.”

“My father could marry him, then.” The girl turned back to Abigail with a little flounce. “Sir Jonathan was sent last year by the King to collect evidence about where the Sons of Liberty—‘Rebels and Traitors,’ he called them, but that’s who he meant—were getting their money from. He’d been staying with Governor Hutchinson all last month, which was where he met Papa, and he was found dead in the alley behind the Governor’s house early this morning: horrible! And they’ve arrested . . .”

Again she colored, and this time there was no mistaking the blush. She turned her head aside, a startling display of timidity in a girl Abigail knew was ordinarily as straightforward as a runaway goods-wagon.

“They’ve arrested a—a friend of mine for it,” she finished shyly, in a voice that Abigail had never before heard her use. “And you’ve got to help us, Mrs. Adams. Help me, I mean—Help
him
. Help Harry.”

“Harry Knox.”

Lucy raised her eyes, brimming with the transformation of a bossy girl’s first love. “Harry Knox.”

S
ince even the presence of a maidservant and a chaperone would not have protected the marriageable daughter of the wealthiest merchant in Boston from gossip for long—at least not from the gossip of the wives of other wealthy merchants—to say nothing of consideration for the Fourth Commandment and her family’s dinner, it was agreed that Abigail would present herself at the Fluckner mansion on the following morning to hear all the details. She found John at home, but Sam and Revere both gone. Sam’s wife Bess shared Abigail’s attitude about Sabbath dinner and attendance at
both
church services on Sundays: it was all very well to pull an ox out of a pit on the Sabbath, as the Lord had said, but one needn’t take the whole day at it. Sam, to do him credit, was not one to put even the Sons of Liberty before God’s Law unless he really had to. And though Paul Revere might have inherited a greater carelessness about Sabbath-keeping with his French blood, Abigail knew him well enough to know that having missed the first service at the New Brick Meeting-House, he would not miss the second.