A Marked Man (34 page)

“That there was a conspiracy afoot, I will readily believe,” said Revere, as Abigail drew breath to protest. “That this Elkins murdered the woman Bathsheba, and paid off an out-of-work actor who knew Fenton by sight to hail him at a tavern and then put poison in his food, I accept—”

“I think they were one and the same man. And I believe the Sandhayes woman is in on it—”

“It changes nothing, Mrs. Adams.” He leaned toward her, strong brown fingers outspread on the stained diagram before her. “We have deduced a conspiracy but proven nothing. Nor can we prove anything until we have something in hand that will connect any of these people—whether they are two or three or even all one and the same—with the death of Sir Jonathan Cottrell on the night of the fifth of March. Until we can do that, we can do nothing—except get Harry away from Castle Island at the soonest possible moment, before the wind dies down, cost what it may. And that,” he concluded softly, “is what we need to do.”

Pattie tapped softly at the parlor door: “Mrs. Adams?”

Abigail rose and opened it halfway. “Get the children their dinner, and just put aside a little for me, if you will, please,” she said. “We shall be here a time.” Closing the door, she returned to the table, and for the next hour, she went over her visit to the Castle, step by step: guards, corridors, right turn, left turn. Cells, doors, windows. Revere made notes on the edges of the cartridge-paper, which was, Abigail saw, already laced with them. He must have worked up descriptions from smugglers, farmers, laundrywomen over the years that British troops had occupied the island—Abigail had one friend that she knew of who had made a regular study of the place, for the benefit of the Sons of Liberty. She heard Thaxter’s voice in the hall as he returned from his own dinner, heard the clunk of John’s office door shutting, and knew the afternoon was getting late.

Half closing her eyes, she made herself see again the corridor leading to Harry’s cell, the window’s size and height, the lock on the door. A craftsman himself, Revere had a good eye and a good memory for the tiniest of details: Who had the cell key? Where was it kept, in Coldstone’s office? Did the window of Harry’s cell have shutters? Bars? Glass? Could a man of Knox’s substantial frame get himself through it? (Abigail thought not.)

As the description took shape and Abigail studied the calm, dark face bent above the map opposite her, she thought,
He’s going to lead the party in himself.

“You say we mustn’t let Harry be taken for trial to Halifax,” she said, when Revere was done, “lest being found guilty, he turn King’s Evidence rather than hang. Yet how much do you multiply their captives—multiply those who will face that same choice—if you carry through with this plan?”

The silversmith paused in rolling up his paper and grinned. “Then we mustn’t let ourselves be taken, must we?”

Nabby and Johnny had already finished cleaning up after dinner when Abigail and the Sons of Liberty passed through the kitchen. Both glanced up from their schoolbooks and slates at their mother’s face, and hesitated to speak to her as she walked her guests to the door into the yard. Neither Charley nor Tommy were so discreet, and neither approved of their mother’s preoccupation with matters that did not concern themselves. Tommy flung himself against the leading-strings, wailing, as Charley—free—clung to her skirts. Abigail couldn’t keep from smiling and ran a hand through Charley’s curls. But her eyes were somber as she bade Sam and Revere good afternoon.

“When shall this take place?” she asked softly, and Revere began to reply, but Sam cut him off.

“We haven’t decided.” For a man as friendly and gregarious as Sam quite genuinely was, he kept matters concerning the Sons of Liberty tight-shut in some battlemented corner of his mind. “With no moon in sight, ’tis a challenge at the best of times, even were we not going out against an inshore gale. ’Twill be soon.”

He turned away, but there was a flicker of grimness in his eyes, an anger, that made Abigail touch Revere’s sleeve: “
Do
you believe me?” she asked. “That there was a conspiracy—a very well-planned one—to . . . to
surround
Cottrell and run him to earth? Else why try to kill me? Why lure Lieutenant Coldstone ashore, where he could be shot at?”

“That could have been anyone,” pointed out Revere, with half a grin. “I think you could even get Sam to take a shot at an Assistant Provost Marshal, if he could be sure there was no way he would be connected with the crime. You think Elkins—or Palmer—was the one who entered the house Sunday night?”

“I’m sure of it. I marked him—”

“You did well,” said Revere. “It gives us another—What? Three days? Four days?—in which we can prove the connection, before the marks fade.” Turning his head, he studied the mottled dark roof of the evening sky above the houses, listened to the moan of the wind in the tangle of yards and alleyways that made up this close-built heart of the town. “Whether the wind will hold that long, God knows.” He donned his hat in order to lift it to her and, pulling his scarf close about him, hastened across the yard to where Sam waited in the passway, the stray whirls of the wind, even in that protected spot, tearing at the smoky stream of his breath.

Three days
, thought Abigail, as she turned back toward the kitchen.
Four days. If the wind holds . . .

Her younger sons clutched triumphantly at her skirt, as if they knew—she reflected bitterly—how signally her investigation had failed.

Palmer is a dark man and Elkins is tall and fair. And Margaret Sandhayes is somewhere in between them. Put a gray wig on his head—as Sam did for Hev Miller—and a patch on his eye, and all anyone will see is the gray hair and the eye patch.
What had she said, only days ago?
Money, and poison, and people disappearing . . .

But I knew him.
That shocked twinge of recognition that had lanced through her as she’d seen the poisoner’s face in candlelight would not leave her mind.
I saw him and I knew him.

Abigail halted in the door of the icy pantry and stood for a moment, looking across the table where Charley was attempting to get the attention of Johnny and Nabby away from their slates. Johnny shoved his little brother impatiently—Charley shoved back, making the chair he stood on tilt perilously . . .

Abigail moved to cross the room, to break up the inevitable tussle
—Just what the lad needs, another black eye when his last one’s barely been gone a week . . .

She stopped beside the table and stood for a moment, very still.

What was it Coldstone had said to her, in that dank little cubicle of his, the morning after Sir Jonathan Cottrell’s body had been found?

“Thaxter,” she called, and walked to the doorway of the hall, catching Charley as he did, in fact, overset the chair.

Her husband’s clerk put his head through the office door.

“Thaxter, dear, I’m desolated to ask it of you at this hour”—she set her middle son on his feet and kept a firm grip on his hand—“but could you get your coat on and take some messages for me? You can go straight to your mother’s after, but I think these really need to be sent tonight. Pattie—” She looked around, but Pattie had gone scampering out the back door, which had not closed properly, to catch Tommy before he made it across the yard to the passway to the street.

“Nabby, hold on to your brother until I get these notes written, and then Charley, yes, you shall have a story . . .”

One note was to Lieutenant Jeremy Coldstone on Castle Island.

One was to Lucy Fluckner.

And the third was to Dr. Joseph Warren.

A
bigail jerked to wakefulness and lay with pounding heart.

Blackness.

Silence.

Was it a sound?
She saw again the open window in the kitchen on Sunday night, the dark form against her candle’s feeble glow, the dead mice beside the barrel of contaminated flour . . .

What had waked her?

A shutter banging?

A footfall?

She slithered from under the blankets and out through the curtains, shuddering in the cold, which seemed deeper and more intense than it had for two weeks now. Wrapped herself in her wool robe, scuffed slippers on her feet. Padded, silent as breath, to the door of her room and opened it, feeling rather than seeing the change of air in the dark of the hall. She’d dreamed of Paul Revere, of Dr. Warren, of other men she knew—dreamed of John, though she knew he would never undertake anything so mad-brained as what Sam proposed . . . Dreamed of them rowing across the choppy water of the bay, headed under pitch-black cloud-cover for Castle Island and death.

Was that what she had heard? Shots, cries . . . Impossible, across three miles of open water.

She was halfway to the stair before she realized that what had waked her was not sound, but stillness.

The wind had died.

 

 

H
er candle-flame burned straight upright in its lantern when she crossed the yard two hours later, at the first crowings of Arabella Butler’s rooster. The new moon had set already, behind the breaking clouds. Thin starlight showed her her own breath.

Their Majesties—as she sometimes called Cleopatra and Semiramis—blinked sleepily at her as she entered the cowhouse, waked before their usual time but accepting of it. Abigail was a poor sleeper and often rose at such an hour to do the milking and start her work rather than waste another three-quarters of an hour in bed in an unprofitable quest for further sleep. Their eyes flashed gold at her in the dark; the thick smell of hay was deeply comforting.

First light saw her hastening along Queen Street, when in other houses the kitchen-fires were just being lit. The market-square looked queer in twilight this early, without the booths and barrows she was used to seeing on Mondays and Thursdays. But life was stirring along the quays, as men called back and forth among the fishing-boats and warehouses
—Maybe we’ll get down to Charleston this time . . . Looks to be clearing . . . Jaysus, we’ve had the hold filled for a week! If we’re caught in harbor again, Cap’n’ll have a seizure
. . .

At Castle Island they’d be loading the
Incitatus
.

Paul Revere was eating breakfast when she rapped at the kitchen door.

Just the sight of him as Young Paul opened the door for her—the shutters in the front of the house were not yet taken down—flooded her with relief, like a benediction: “You didn’t go.”

“Blasted smugglers were taking a cargo across to Lynn with the boat—!” His dark eyes fairly glittered. “And now—”

“Now I think I know at least a part of what happened,” said Abigail. “At least enough to make an argument for the Provost and Colonel Leslie. But I must get word across, and quickly—what time does the tide go out?”

“It won’t turn ’til near noon.”

“Good,” said Abigail. “Will you come with me to Old North? I need to speak to our brave boys from Maine.”

 

 

M
atthias Brown was still asleep when Revere and Abigail crossed Sun Court to the church; Hev Miller was helping Robbie Newman take down the shutters on the vestry, and explaining in intense detail just why his mother’s way of cooking canvasback duck with woodchuck-fat was superior to and more healthful than the Boston way, not meaning any disrespect to Mrs. Newman . . .

He listened to the question Abigail put to him and shook his head. “No.”

“Had he any remnant of it? Any mark whatsoever?”

“No. I don’t see how he could have gotten one,” the Mainer added. “The man wouldn’t have put up a fight if you’d walked up and spat in his face. Is there a chance Matt and I might be getting back to Boothbay, now the wind’s turned to the north?” he added, looking over at Revere. “Matt and I took a turn along Ship Street yesterday, and I’ll swear we saw the
Magpie
, tied up at Burroughs’s Wharf—”

Revere glared at Robbie, who made a helpless gesture: “I couldn’t see the harm in it—”

“A few days more,” promised Abigail. And to Revere, “’Tis no matter, in fact ’twill help. Can you go find it there, and ask young Mr. Putnam if he’ll take us across to the Castle, the moment the tide turns? I shall be at the wharf at half past eleven—”

 

 

S
he had hoped to find notes from Dr. Warren, or Lucy Fluckner, or both, upon her arrival at her home at half past eight. Instead, when Abigail entered the kitchen she was startled to see Mrs. Sandhayes rise awkwardly from the table. “Please forgive me, Mrs. Adams, for calling at such a horrifying hour,” she said, holding out her hand. “I must speak to you. I have used you dreadfully—as I find that I have been used myself.”