A Marked Man (35 page)

Abigail was silent, regarding that beaky, over-painted face, the red mouth set and the green eyes filled with an expression of chagrin. She asked, “By Palmer?” and Margaret Sandhayes nodded. “Or Elkins, if that was his name—or was it Tredgold?”

Pattie’s footfalls reverberated dimly from upstairs, trailed by Charley’s toddling steps. Tommy, tied by his leading-strings to the leg of the sideboard, left off trying to undo the knots and stood up, holding out his arms for his mother: “Mama!”

“Who? Oh, the Seaford girls, yes.” Mrs. Sandhayes shook her head. “To be honest, Mrs. Adams, I don’t know. Your lovely handmaid said I might wait for you in the parlor—?”

“Mama!” crowed Tommy urgently.

“Of course.” Abigail kissed the boy, stood again—Tommy began at once to wail his protests—and picked up the teapot and her guest’s half-drunk cup and saucer. In the parlor a lively fire had been kindled to warm the room. A second cup, pristine, sat on the tray beside a small plate of gingerbread. God bless Pattie, for thinking of everything.

“I had this”—from her pocket, Mrs. Sandhayes drew a folded sheet of paper, which she handed across the small table to Abigail—“last night. Brought to the back door as usual by a boy picked at random off the wharves—at least, the whole time I knew Mr. Palmer, if that was in fact his name, it was never the same boy.”

“Last night?” Abigail unfolded it.

Mags,
it said, in a sprawled and jagged hand
, sorry to do this, my dearest dove, but the time has come for us to part. There’s a man come forward, that says he saw me follow Sir J from the wharf to the house, and I can’t risk staying. Thank you for all the help you’ve given. Perhaps we’ll meet again. A thousand kisses—A.P.

Abigail looked up, frowning, as her guest poured her out a cup of the yellowish chamomile tea.

“You must be frozen.” Mrs. Sandhayes pushed the plate of gingerbread nearer. “Did you make this gingerbread, my dear? I used to make a fair gingerbread myself.” She sighed, bitter and weary, and sipped her tea. “I thought—Well, I’m well served, I suppose, for believing the man.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That Cottrell had
—ruined
, I suppose the novelists would say—his sister . . . though I suppose it is stretching the truth a bit, to speak of
ruining
an actress. She was caught with child, and being very young and inexperienced, I suspect she let matters go a little too long before she took steps to resolve the matter, and the long and the short of it was that she died.” The Englishwoman’s hand strayed nervously to the black Medusa cameo at her throat, rubbing it, as if it were a talisman of some loss of her own. “She was the only person he had ever cared about, he said, and it enraged him that no one would so much as chide the man for his deed. I was angry for his sake, and for hers—but more than that, I’m ashamed to say I . . . I simply enjoyed being part of a conspiracy.”

“Why you?” asked Abigail. “What part had you to play, if you’d never exchanged a word with Cottrell?” She set the note down, groped for the teacup, and picked it up.

Raising her eyes, she saw—for one instant only—the intent-ness with which Mrs. Sandhayes watched her, before the other woman turned her eyes away.

Arrested by that expression—coldly eager and almost inhuman—Abigail’s glance went to Mrs. Sandhayes’s own half-empty cup and she thought,
She cannot abide chamomile
.

And then, as if she’d opened a box and seen all the events stored there like game-tokens:
She came to Boston sometime after Christmas, at the same time as Androcles Palmer, and Sir Jonathan Cottrell . . . From where
?

She put the cup to her lips, raised it as if drinking, her lips pressed tight shut, and tried through a surge of panic to remember what Lieutenant Dowling had said about oleander’s deadliness. She set the cup down and immediately rested her chin on her hand as she studied the note, in such a way as to unobtrusively wipe her lips . . .

The paper on which the note was written looked like the same kind used in the Fluckner household. The ink, too: blue black with a good color to it, not the thinner sort used by John for drafts and documents of little importance. She was conscious of her heart pounding, of a shivering coldness rushing through her body.
If EVERYTHING she has said is a lie . . .

Raising her eyes again, she became aware that Mrs. Sandhayes had changed the way she dressed her hair. No one—no grown woman that she knew, certainly no woman with the slightest pretension to fashion—wore her hair to cover her ears. The schoolgirl curls that the chaperone had induced to cluster around her face, hanging down from the more fashionable side-rolls of hair, were grotesque in the extreme, but grotesque in a different manner than the woman’s usual swagged fantasias of poufs and powder. As if her eyes had changed their focus, it seemed to Abigail that she could see through the gaudy makeup, to the severe—almost masculine—bone structure of the face, the strong chin and long nose . . .

She said, in a tone of surprise, “What on earth did you do to your ear?”

Mrs. Sandhayes’s left hand jerked toward that mass of curls, and as she touched them, Abigail saw that indeed the lobe of the ear was scabbed as if recently torn. With swift deliberation she raised her teacup to her tight-sealed lips again, made the pretense of drinking. Anything to put Mrs. Sandhayes off her guard—to put her at ease and make her think the danger is already taken care of—

Her visitor was watching her now with narrowed eyes, though her laugh was as empty and sparkling as ever. “Would you believe it, when I was dressing these silly curls—Did you ever see anything so foolish? Yet I understand they are all the rage now in London!—I caught the comb in my earring, a silly girl’s trick—”

“Oh, heavens—” Abigail made herself laugh, too, then drew a deep breath, pressed a hand to her bosom. “You must—forgive me. I feel suddenly queer—”
What are the symptoms of oleander poisoning?
“Pattie—” She staggered to her feet, and Margaret Sandhayes, with not the slightest effort to reach for her walking-sticks, sprang up like a panther, rounded the table, seized her by the arm, and shoved her back into her chair with one hand, and produced a pistol from her pocket with the other.

The walking-sticks clattered unheeded to the floor.

“If you’d drunk oleander, you would be retching your heart out by this time.”

Abigail forced herself to look away from the pistol, and up into Mrs. Sandhayes’s face. “Is oleander what you gave to Jonathan Cottrell?”

“Oleander is swift,” said the Englishwoman quietly, her pistol never wavering. “I did not wish him to die swiftly.”

At her words, Abigail saw with sudden and terrible clarity the square front hall of the Pear Tree House, like a great square well with doors to the rooms around it: west, east, north, and the front door facing south. Saw the telltale holes where bolts had been put on every door that would provide escape, upstairs and down.

She gave him the poison, got him into the
hall
. . .

If he’d tried to mount the stair, she had only to retreat into one of the chambers, which communicated with each other and were all locked in their turn.

A chill went through Abigail at the deliberateness of it.

As deliberate as the poisoning of a whole household, when it looked like one member of it was getting close to the truth.

As deliberate as killing the servant in order to make sure no one met the
Hetty
at the wharf and saw that the man who got off was not, in fact, Sir Jonathan Cottrell.

Sandhayes nodded at the cup. “Drink it.”

“What did you use on him?” asked Abigail conversationally, though her heart was racing so that the tips of her ears felt like they were on fire. “Not death-cap mushroom, like poor Mr. Fenton, surely—Put that pistol down, m’am, you know perfectly well you can’t shoot me.”

“Can’t I?” Mrs. Sandhayes raised her brows.

“Well, you can’t very well go claiming to Pattie that I fell over and died of sickness if I’ve got a bullet-hole in me—”

“I won’t have to,” replied the Englishwoman. “All I’ll have to do is scream for Pattie, and she’ll come rushing downstairs and through that door. I can crack her skull with the butt of it while she’s bending over you. And unless you drink what is in that cup, Mrs. Adams, I assure you that after shooting you, and disposing of the helpful Pattie, I will then cover my tracks by setting this house afire, and leave your little sons upstairs to burn.”

Abigail stared at her, open-mouthed in shock. “And that is what Sybilla would have wanted you to do?” she asked after a time.

“Don’t name her to me.” The older woman’s eyes flashed with a cold green light. “You know nothing about it.”

“I know what I’m hearing,” replied Abigail. “Listen to yourself, woman! You honestly feel you can simply kill a man—”

It was Mrs. Sandhayes’s turn to stare. “Listen to
your
self, Mrs. Adams. You honestly think that the man who raped a sixteen-year-old girl for his own amusement—only it was not rape, but murder, when she found she was with child—should walk away
free
? Or are you just like the men whose company you so clearly prefer? It’s perfectly all right to burn the hide off a man with boiling tar, or to thrust his wife and children into a life of poverty and ignorance by destroying his shop or ruining his business in the name of politics, but for actual
justice
—for the redress of human wrongs—you have little time.” She shifted as Abigail glanced toward the door, brought the pistol up closer. “Besides,” she added after a moment, “that isn’t poison in that tea—or whatever it is your girl gave me. It will make you sick and then put you to sleep for twenty-four hours, until I am well away from Boston. That’s all. I just need time.”

No
, thought Abigail.
What you need is an open road back to England, and to the family and the life you left . . . something you won’t have if there’s ANYONE who understands how you poisoned a man on the night you were at a ball in plain sight of two hundred people.

She took a breath, and made her shoulders relax as if in acquiescence; turned her face slightly away. Her hands were shaking so badly she wasn’t sure she’d be able to grip anything.
You can do this . . . you can do this . . . O God, help me do this . . .
She was aware of her adversary close at her elbow as she turned back toward the table, of the pistol against her side.

“Did Cottrell know it was you?” she asked, and Mrs. Sandhayes sniffed.

“After he’d drunk it I told him. Before—How would he have recognized me? He never spared a glance for me whilst he was seducing my—”

In what she hoped was a single movement, Abigail hurled the tea from the cup into Mrs. Sandhayes’s face, ducked sideways, and swept her leg with all her force at the other woman’s feet. Their petticoats tangled, Mrs. Sandhayes staggered, and the gun went off with a noise like the break of doom in the little parlor. Not even sure if she’d been hit or not, Abigail grabbed a leg of her chair and hurled it at her assailant, tripped as her petticoats snarled in the other chair, and took a kick in her side as she fell that left her gasping.

Trying to roll to her feet she heard the other woman’s steps in the hall, racing for the kitchen—

Abigail sprang up, fell against the wall, dimly conscious of the clatter of Pattie’s feet on the stair and a jumbled crashing from the kitchen.

Tommy screamed.

Abigail jerked open the kitchen door and smoke poured out into her face. Her first terrified impression was that the whole room was ablaze—her second, knowing that there hadn’t been time for such fire to take hold, was of a dozen small fires where the logs from the hearth had been hurled into the room, against the table, the chairs, the sideboard where Tommy was tied.

The back door was open, but Abigail saw nothing of that in that moment, only the burning wood under the sideboard and the fire licking greedily up. She flung herself to her knees beside her hysterical son, “Stay still!” she commanded, which of course the terrified child didn’t, as she ripped and wrenched at the long cloth tapes. She sprang up, half choked on the smoke swirling around her, wrenched open the knife-drawer, seized the first blade that came to hand.

She heard Pattie scream and had the confused impression of someone behind her as she slashed through the leading-strings, half turned as hands grabbed her
—I thought she’d gone—

She barely got a glimpse of the man who flung her to the floor, before she was smothered in darkness.