A Marked Man (31 page)

And in the back of her mind she heard John’s voice—
Would you really? Though your soul were damned for it
?

Abigail didn’t know.

 

 

I
t was far too late for Captain Dowling to cross from Castle Island that evening, but Lucy Fluckner appeared only an hour after the arrival of a hastily scrawled note requesting the favor of an interview etc., etc. Bearing all the lamps that could be gathered, she followed Abigail upstairs to the attic where the jetsam of the well had been laid out to dry. The shawl was still wringing-wet and discolored, but the girl’s face grew grave as she viewed it. “That’s Bathsheba’s,” she said quietly, and glanced back at Philomela, her blue eyes sick with grief. “It used to be mine. There’s where I tore it climbing over the palings by the stable, and see where the fringe has been burned? I caught it in the bedroom candle. It’s Bathsheba’s.” Her gaze went to Abigail’s. “She really is dead, isn’t she?”

Abigail said gently, “Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf will look after Marcellina and the baby.” For Lucy had brought her the news that while all else had been going forward that day, the farmer Silas Greenleaf had arrived to take the two children back to Weymouth with him, for a childhood of hard farmwork and regular meals, until they should be old enough to be set free. “But us finding her shawl there in that house proves that her disappearance is after all connected with Cottrell’s death, somehow. Think, Lucy. What
could
she have learned about Cottrell? What
could
she have seen?”

“Could Sir Jonathan have dropped, or left behind, some token or paper when he attempted to force himself on Bathsheba in her room?” Lucy—whose imagination of the scene had clearly been influenced by certain well-defined genres of fiction—glanced back at her maidservant, as the women left the attic and descended the ladderlike stair to the bedroom floor. “Something she found later?”

“That told her what, m’am?” responded the black girl. “She said nothing of it to me. Nor of seeing him later, nor of any message sent to her from him.”

“But she was upset, shaken up, the day before she disappeared,” the girl pressed. “You said she burst into tears in the public street, Margaret.” As they reached the bottom of the flight, she turned appealingly to Mrs. Sandhayes, who had insisted on being helped up the narrow stairs from the hall, but whose lameness had met with defeat at the second ascent. “If it was something that fell or rolled, and she only found it later, or a letter that whisked under the bed—”

“Now, you know as well as I do, m’am,” Philomela corrected softly, “how tidy Sheba was about her room. That time when Mr. Cottrell followed her up to her room was five days before he left Boston. Nothing would have lain on the floor, even under the bed, for that long.”

“Could she have found out something about this Mr. Tredgold?” persisted Lucy, holding out her arm to help her companion down the twisting, narrow stair to the hall.

“Who?” Mrs. Sandhayes frowned.

“Mr. Tredgold. You remember me asking Fanny Gardiner about poor Miss Seaford, and you saying that her sister had killed herself . . .”

“Good Heavens, you don’t think a man would wait all these years to wreak his vengeance, like some hero of a Venetian melodrama? Thank you, dearest—” She took her sticks, which Abigail had carried for her, and hobbled painfully to the parlor fire. Pattie and Philomela disappeared together down the hall to the kitchen, whence Pattie returned a few moments later with a tea-tray of gingerbread and gooseberry tart.

“He might have needed time to gather up money for his pursuit,” opined Lucy. “I think a man whose beloved killed herself for grief never
would
forget, nor forgive . . .”

“My dear—” Margaret Sandhayes raised her painted brows, and her long, rather square mouth tightened into a bitter line queerly at odds with the girlish brightness of her maquillage. “I think as time goes on, you’ll learn that a man who needs to spend a couple of years gathering money to pursue revenge upon a friend of the King’s, whose friends are all in a position to help the bereaved suitor to preferment in the law or the Church or some other useful profession, generally comes to the conclusion that vengeance is best left to Heaven, long before he’s saved half the cost of passage to Spain or wherever it was the odious Cottrell fled to.” She took a piece of gingerbread, broke it in half, lifted the cup of chamomile tea to her lips, and then set both down with a grimace.

“It’s a rare man who will sacrifice his
entire
life
—all
his affairs—for the pleasure of bringing to justice a blackguard whom the King has already forgiven for his peccadilloes. Men simply have not the necessary concentration of mind.”

Lucy bristled. “Harry would avenge me. Whatever the cost!”

“Indeed he would.” Mrs. Sandhayes folded her hands. “Harry is different from all other men.”

“What was her name?” asked Abigail, since Lucy appeared on the verge of some very unwise assertions. “Sybilla Seaford’s sister, the one on whose behalf this Mr. Tredgold is or is not seeking revenge?”

“Alice? Alisound?” Margaret Sandhayes shook her head. “Something with an
A
, or maybe it was Juliana. Something like that. The scandal was supposed to be quite nasty while it lasted, but these things never do last, you know. We were living in Bath at the time, and Mama did her best to keep the details from me, though I was quite old enough to hear them. But then, our family never did move in the highest circles, and poor Mama got all her gossip secondhand. I think it far more likely that whoever it was who waited for Sir Jonathan at the end of that alley on the night of the ball, he had a fresher grievance than poor Mr. What’s-His-Name and had not sailed two thousand miles in the dead of winter to appease it.”

 

 

W
ith this, Abigail was more than a little inclined to concur, particularly in light of what she knew about the behavior of men when confronted with preferment and privilege. John frequently derided the somewhat far-fetched premise of her favorite novel—Richardson’s
Pamela
—on the grounds that no man would put himself through the social contortions undergone by the sinister Mr. B—in pursuit of the blameless heroine, but lying in the curtained darkness of her bed listening to the wind howl, Abigail reflected that this was not really the point of the book. More telling than the interior wrestling-match between love and lust was the behavior of those whom Mr. B—coerced into complicity with his will: the parson who, needing a way to make a living in a country overcrowded with impoverished parsons, chose B—’s patronage over moral imperatives; the servants who would sooner assist their master in raping an unwilling girl rather than lose the only means of making their own livings.

Would
a man, confronted with the suicide of his beloved, risk his own livelihood—and the inevitable countervengeance of the King’s so-called justice—to commit murder when that royal justice had officially ignored what was, in effect, a moral rather than a legal offense? John’s powerful sense of duty had taken him away from her side tonight—and in her heart she prayed he wasn’t still out on the road between Salem and Haverhill somewhere, with the sleet flying about his ears. She could not imagine any respectable hero in a novel choosing his responsibility for making a living for his family—not to mention getting his client out of jail and making sure her children weren’t consigned to a cellar someplace—over staying on guard against an unspecified threat at home.

The lives of the Christian martyrs—the tales of the ancient Romans—abounded in incidents of desperate selfimmolation, different in kind from the obsession of which the Reverend Cooper so often spoke.
The Mark of the Beast that considers naught but his own desires . . .

The dead King says to Hamlet,
Leave thy mother to Heaven
, before his son goes on to destroy himself, his beloved, his mother, and his best friend in the obsessive quest for vengeance, leaving his leaderless country to the mercy of a foreign usurper.

In the morning, head heavy with sleeplessness, Abigail did her marketing, then turned her steps toward the Old North Church, where young Robbie Newman let her into the little outbuilding that had been turned into a combination jail and hiding-place for Matt Brown and the Heavens Rejoice Miller. Sam had brought her up-to-date on the story that the two Mainers had been told, about how unsafe it was for them to leave Boston yet and how the
Magpie
—in reality safely berthed at Lynn—had fled back to Boothbay, with promises to return in a week or maybe two . . .

In the meantime, the two fugitives had plenty to eat, ample gossip from every Son of Liberty with a few hours to spare, and enough seditious literature on hand to bring an empire down in flames. Abigail went over with them again every word and action of the deceased, either witnessed by the cousins or relayed to them by gossip: Had Cottrell ever spoken of a man named Toby Elkins? A woman named Sybilla Seaford?
(As if any man would give a moment’s thought to a seduction eight years in the past . . .)

She felt the nagging certainty that these men held the key to finding Cottrell’s killer, if she could but ask them the right question. Yet like a key mislaid
—In a drawer? On a shelf?
—it eluded her. Was there any woman in Boothbay that Cottrell was supposed to have seduced or insulted? Or the rumor of one?

“Not even the rumor, m’am,” affirmed Miller. “Right from the first, he kept his nose indoors.”

“Even Hilda Sturmur couldn’t get a rise out of him,” added Brown helpfully. “And she’s had every man around Penobscot Bay behind old Bingham’s barn.”

“Bingham? The man Cottrell stayed with?”

Both men nodded. “Hilda’s old Bingham’s milkmaid.”

Brown added with a grin, “They say even Bingham’s bull turns tail in panic when he sees Hildy coming—” and got a sharp elbow in his side from the marginally more respectable Miller.

“That is, no, m’am,” filled in Miller, and took a long pull of the cider Abigail had brought them. “Why seduce someone in the village when Hildy Sturmur was there and willing, and she was just beside herself not to manage him while he was there.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t have boasted of it—”

“Oh, no, m’am. Hildy’s not
that
kind of girl.”

Abigail blinked, wondering exactly what
that
kind of girl was considered to be, in Maine.

“But she complained of him to my sister Levvy—”

“Levi?”

“Leviathan. Hildy complained to Levvy that Cottrell wouldn’t so much as look her in the eye. Most people think Hildy had her eye on that gold ring he wore on his pinky, though she never did manage to get it off him. Myself, I think it was just the challenge that she likes.”

“
Challenge
,” said Brown wisely, “is
not
what Hildy Sturmur likes.”

Maybe not
, Abigail reflected, as she turned her steps homeward along the crowded wharves. But challenge was the farthest thing from what, under normal circumstances, any female would have faced, living in the same household as Sir Jonathan Cottrell.

Was the man that frightened? she wondered, holding her cloak tight around her against the gray howl of the offshore wind. Frightened even in Maine, where he was reasonably certain Harry Knox would not have pursued him? Did that fear have anything to do with the telltale nail-holes in every door that communicated with the central hall of the Pear Tree House—doors bolted to confine someone or something in the central hall, as if in a pit?

Was it fear of the disgruntled Mainers themselves that made him so radically change his habits? Or something—or someone—else?

T
he note that awaited Abigail in the kitchen upon her return said simply,

He must have crossed—in weather like this!—as soon as ’twere light enough to do so
. Guilty as she felt about abandoning poor Pattie yet again to doubled morning chores (“Don’t you
dare
do the beds or the dusting for me! I shall deal with them when I return if it means working ’til sunset!”), Abigail felt still more responsible for leaving that earnest young surgeon stranded in the garrison house at the foot of Fort Hill, particularly as the day was worsening again. She set the fish and the ducks she’d bought in the pantry-shed to stay cold, checked that Tommy was dry and firmly affixed to the sideboard, and that Charley hadn’t hidden any of Johnny’s belongings in any of his usual places, warned Pattie to keep a close watch against dangers unspecified, kissed both little boys, and set forth again, taking the long way to the small cluster of barrack huts so as to stop in Purchase Street and obtain the company of Sam’s servant-woman Surry. Though it was Abigail’s repeated contention that in America—unlike in England—a woman could walk anywhere unmolested, she drew the line at venturing into even a minor group of British soldiers alone.