A Marked Man (36 page)

A
bigail slashed, kicked, and struck out with the knife that was still in her hand. An Irish voice swore, “Mother o’ God!” and what Abigail realized was a man’s cloak was pulled clear of her head. Somewhere—outside?—she could hear Tommy screaming, and the kitchen was filled with smoke and the smell of wet ashes and brick.

Lieutenant Coldstone, her neighbors Tom Butler and Ehud Hanson, and three extremely rough-looking men who looked like rope makers—presumably, Abigail reflected, the Sons of Liberty who’d followed Coldstone from the wharf—were raking together the pile of firewood, over which someone had dumped the contents of the kitchen water-jar. The Lieutenant’s left arm and shoulder were strapped tight in a sling, and his face was nearly as white as his wig with the exertion.

Abigail gasped, “Where’s Tommy?”

Sergeant Muldoon, kneeling at her side sucking the blood from his slashed hand, said, “He’s outside with Miss Pattie, m’am, and fine as thruppence . . . Beggin’ your pardon for handlin’ you so, m’am, but your skirt had caught.”

“Did you catch her?” Abigail seized Muldoon’s arm, and the young man lifted her to her feet as if she’d been a ten-year-old girl. Staggering, she looked down and saw that yes, the whole right side of her skirt-hem was burned away, the petticoat beneath charred. She had neither seen nor felt a thing. “Margaret Sandhayes,” she added, as Muldoon and Coldstone helped her to the back door, beside which not only Pattie but Charley sat on the log bench, Pattie cradling the sobbing Tommy in her arms. Tommy reached out for his mother, howling in terror. “Only I think her true name is Seaford . . .”

“Margaret Seaford?” said Coldstone.

“The girl Sybilla’s sister? She told me the sister’s name was Alice . . .”

As the words came out of her mouth, Abigail felt like kicking herself, because of course the woman would have told her the dead girl’s sister was called Helen of Troy rather than Margaret. A woman who had patiently counterfeited lameness to make others assume she could not be a killer would not have committed the mistake of giving her rightful name.

It seemed to her that every neighbor for blocks of Queen Street swarmed the yard, and that a dozen more of Sam and Revere’s rougher henchmen were coming in and out of the kitchen, clearing out the wet wood and the few chairs that had been aflame.

Coldstone reached out suddenly to lean against the wall beside her, and she caught at his sleeve, even as she pressed her weeping son’s head to her shoulder. “She poisoned Cottrell,” she said quickly. “Not the night he was found, but ten days earlier, the day he was to leave for Maine—and got Palmer to take his place. The body was kept down the well in the cellar of Pear Tree House. Frozen, like pork in the pantry, so the death could not be traced to her—”

“She told you this?”

“She told me she poisoned Cottrell, for what he did to her sister. I’ll take oath on it—”

“You shall have to. Sergeant, go to the Battery, get as many men as they can spare—if”—Coldstone added, glancing about him a little grimly at the incipient mob in the yard—“these gentlemen will permit it . . .”

“Ben!” Abigail stretched out a hand to a man she recognized. Ben Edes, who printed the
Boston Gazette
, was dressed as if for a rough day’s hunting, or for the street rowdiness of Pope’s Night. Ink still blotted his hands. “Ben, go with the Sergeant, make sure no one hinders him, or the soldiers he brings—”

“Why trouble the King’s good servants, Mrs. Adams, Lieutenant?” Edes cocked a wise, dark eye at Coldstone. “If you’re able to make an arrest of the—woman, is it?—who did this to Mrs. Adams, we’re all the
posse comitatus
you’ll need.”

Coldstone’s upper lip seemed to lengthen with his disapproval, but Abigail said, “He’s right, Lieutenant . . . There, there, sweeting,” she added, as Tommy, sensing himself ignored, began to howl again. “ ’ Tis well, Mama’s here—And don’t trouble going back to the Fluckners’. Margaret Sandhayes will have headed straight from here to the wharves, for whatever ship is leaving for England with the tide.”

“That’ll be the
Saturn
,” put in a huge, unshaven laborer unexpectedly. “They’ve been loaded and ready this week at Wentworth’s Wharf, and Captain Nesbitt wearing out the deck-planks pacing to be off.”

“Some one of you—Jed,” she added, turning to one of the prentice-boys whom she knew. “Run to Burrough’s Wharf and tell Eli Putnam on the
Magpie
sloop to be ready to sail in ten minutes—”

Tommy, as if sensing that the next event would be his forcible detachment from the mother he adored in the midst of this confusion and pain, tightened his grip on Abigail’s dress and hair. Only then did she become aware that her hair had come unraveled from beneath its cap, with thick dark waves hanging over her shoulders and back; and she looked around at Pattie, knowing she would indeed have to abandon her son.

Of all these men—including Lieutenant Coldstone and Sergeant Muldoon—only she would be able to recognize Margaret Sandhayes.

And without testimony against Margaret Sandhayes, the one who would be leaving on the tide would be Harry Knox.

Tommy whimpered, “No—” as Abigail gently tried to pry his tiny hands loose. “Mama—”

She could scarcely blame him—had John been present, she reflected,
she
would probably have clung to
him
and whimpered as well.

“Here,” said Muldoon, “we can take the boy along, can’t we? Poor tot’s had grief enough for the day, wi’out havin’ his mum leave him again.”

“Me!” added Charley, running to catch Abigail’s charred skirt as she rose. “Me!”

So it was that Sergeant Muldoon carried the ecstatic Charley on his shoulders in the midst of the mob that followed Coldstone and Abigail down to Wentworth’s Wharf, and Abigail bore Tommy, his blue eyes wide with delight. At some point during the walk from Queen Street to the long waterfront, Paul Revere joined the mob and nodded a friendly greeting to Lieutenant Coldstone, whose crimson coat, like Abigail’s clothing, bore the marks of the fire.

Abigail handed him the note that Pattie had given her just before the mob left the house
—I found this in the knife-drawer, m’am, and I don’t know how it got there, for I’d left it on the sideboard for you . . .

The note was from Dr. Joseph Warren.

“Lieutenant Dowling is a good man,” remarked Lieutenant Coldstone, when Revere passed the message to him in turn. “Yet he was very young when he began his apprenticeship in Army surgery, and that, in the West Indies, where he would have no opportunity to observe the effect of cold such as New England’s upon bodies that had been subsequently frozen. I daresay the duskiness he remarked in the corpse’s hands and feet came not from freezing, as he surmised, but from the body’s having been hanged down the well. From the hook that supported the wine-chest, I presume.”

“Was there the mark of a rope beneath the arms?” asked Revere.

“She’ll have padded it,” replied Abigail, unhesitatingly. “And made sure to carry the rope away with her, when she finally pulled the body up. By taking it on Mr. Howell’s horse to the head of Governor’s Alley in the small hours of the Sunday morning, she unimpeachably proved herself to be at the ball—in the presence of at least two hundred witnesses—when the death
must
have occurred . . .”

“Even had anyone thought to ask if her crutches—or her name—were genuine,” mused Coldstone. “Not considerations which occurred to me, I must admit.”

“Why would they have? She kept Bathsheba’s body in the well, too, for a time, though the water hadn’t frozen then. If you drag the Mill-Pond, Lieutenant, and the marshes west of the Common, I think you shall find beneath the ice the body of the actor Androcles Palmer, and probably that of a young Negro woman named Bathsheba. Palmer bore enough of a resemblance to Cottrell to pass for him for ten days in Maine, among men who had never seen the real Cottrell. He lacked only the black eye Cottrell had acquired on the day of his supposed departure. Perhaps I should have realized his behavior there was uncharacteristic—he refused to steal a kiss from a milkmaid even when it was practically forced upon him—but I didn’t. I only thought he was too afraid of Mr. Fluckner’s irate tenants.”

“Whereas I daresay,” put in Revere, “he was far too afraid of Mrs. Sandhayes. I’d be. If the woman knows what a scruple is, she hides the knowledge well.”

“As I remember the scandal,” said Coldstone quietly, “the Seaford girls’ parents were dead; Sybilla was ten years younger than her elder sister, who raised her as a mother would. According to my mother—who knew the family—Margaret Seaford was a woman of iron will and strong character. Her single suitor had been engaged to her for eight years, without bringing matters to a conclusion, at least in part because Sybilla could not endure it that another would share her sister’s love. Sybilla was Margaret’s only weakness, my mother said; but the attachment was a weapon that cut both ways. Margaret would not share Sybilla’s love with a suitor, either, and the girl was”—he hesitated, like a man seeking a word—“ripe, I suppose one could say, to be seduced by a man observant enough to play upon her desire to rebel against her sister’s domination. This at least was my mother’s judgment of the matter,” he added, a sudden self-consciousness cracking his usual calm façade, as if speaking of his mother in this crowd of jostling hooligans on Boston’s wharves would bring her before them.

“Your mother sounds like a woman of discernment,” said Abigail gently.

“I have always found her so. Damn,” Coldstone added, as they came around the corner of Benning Wentworth’s countinghouse and stood at the head of the wharf beyond. A couple of dockhands were coiling ropes at the far end; a porter rolled a barrel out of one of the warehouses that lined the inner end, in the obvious expectation of another ship’s later approach. Beyond the wet black platform, stretching a hundred yards into the bay, green black water pitched and chopped with the high, outgoing tide.

“Can we catch her?” Revere pointed to the white spread of the
Saturn
’s sails, just coming even, Abigail calculated, with Bird Island, two miles out in the harbor channel.

“The
Magpie
’s said to be fast,” Abigail replied.

“I reckon we’ll see if that’s true.”

 

 

T
he tide was running strong out of the harbor, but the wind blew from the south rather than the west. The
Saturn
, a square-rigged two-master of some six hundred tons, had been built to carry quantities of furs, tobacco, and potash in safety to the Mother Country, not for speed. The
Magpie
’s slimmer build and sloop rigging caught even the contrary wind and drove her forward like a galloping horse. Abigail clung grimly to the rail as the first chop of the wind-driven channel hit the ship . . .
I WILL not be sick
. . .

“We’ll have ’em, m’am.” Matthias Brown dropped from the rigging to the deck beside her, as graceful among the ropes as he was toadlike with land beneath his moccasins. “Don’t you worry.” He cast a glance, askance, at the British officer who stood beside her and the stolid redcoat sergeant who sat a little distance away on a coil of rope, one arm around Tommy and with the other arm firmly keeping Charley between his knees. Both boys were pale with excitement—Tommy in fact looked a little ill—but neither had allowed himself to be fobbed off with
Now, Mama will be back soon
. . . when they’d made it all the way down to the wharves with what they both knew perfectly well was one of Uncle Sam’s mobs.

At least half the mob—Edes and Revere among them—had crowded onto the sloop, competently assisting young Eli Putnam, Hev Miller, and Matt Brown in setting the sails. They now clustered the bow, watching as the distance between them and the
Saturn
imperceptibly lessened. “Wind’s comin’ around,” someone remarked, and against the dark chop of the sea, white sails unfurled like clouds from the merchantman’s masts.

“We’ll have ’em,” Miller echoed his cousin’s words. And to Abigail, “You’re saying that wasn’t Cottrell who came to Maine at all?”

“I don’t think so, no.” Abigail clung steadfastly to the nearest line and kept her eye on the sails ahead, grimly pushing away the nauseating dizziness of seasickness that swept her like the heaving waves. “I think what happened was this: probably after considerable searching, Margaret Seaford encountered a man who could pass himself off as Sir Jonathan Cottrell. Whether this happened in England or on the Continent or in Barbados itself, I don’t know, but she’d clearly built up a reserve of money by that time and had certainly been keeping track of where Sir Jonathan was stationed in his service to the King. I suspect, but I’m not sure, that at some point she had announced her intention to murder Sir Jonathan in revenge for her beloved sister’s death—or that someone who knew the story remarked on it, when she took up the study of poisons. I see no other reason that she would have taken such pains to prove that she was nowhere near him when he was killed—”