A Marked Man (4 page)

“ ’ Tis a bad business, Portia,” said John quietly, when after helping his children disengage themselves from scarves and cloaks, pattens and overshoes, he drew Abigail aside into the corner of the kitchen near the hearth. “The man who was killed—”

“Was the King’s Commissioner, Sir Jonathan Cottrell.” Had she been a Papist, Abigail reflected, she would have owed her confessor a few Paternosters for the smug relish she felt at the look on John’s face. She supposed she could only throw herself on the mercy of the Lord, if sin there was in her enjoyment of her husband’s realization that he wasn’t the
only
member of the Adams family who could pull oxen out of that particular pit. “Which would account for the Provost Marshal’s interest in the matter. Thomas Fluckner’s daughter sought me out to ask my help with finding the killer. She and her chaperone were apparently at a ball at the Governor’s last night when the man was killed—”

“Did Miss Fluckner mention that it was her engagement to Cottrell, which was to have been announced at the ball?”

Abigail raised her brows. No wonder Mrs. Sandhayes had looked coy. “I should dearly like to have been there to see them try it. The girl appears to have an understanding with Harry Knox.”

“Ah,” said John. He helped her off with her cloak and spread its heavy folds over one of the wooden settles that flanked the kitchen fire. “Well, that explains a great deal.” On the opposite settle, Nabby and Johnny had already spread their cloaks, and the thick wool steamed gently in the heat. The advancing morning had not lessened in the slightest degree the previous night’s cold; as Abigail dumped the fire-box’s coals back onto the hearth and set the box ready for that afternoon’s ration after dinner, she shivered at the thought of another three hours in the freezing sanctuary. Rail thin and unhealthy as a girl, Abigail had never, in her thirty years of New England winters and long sermons, grown used to the discipline of attending to the Lord’s Word in the bitter season.

Charley and Tommy, who had spent the morning in their usual Sabbath pastime of listening to Pattie read to them from the Bible while they fidgeted, scurried at the heels of their older brother and sister to set the table: anything being preferable to “playing quietly” and refraining from the “profane” toys of the rest of the week. John followed Abigail into the pantry to help her bring in the cold roast pork cooked yesterday, mush, sweet potatoes and molasses, and the minute quantity of milk that Semiramis and Cleopatra had only just begun to provide again as they freshened after the winter’s drought. “They’ll have taken Harry out to Castle Island, won’t they?” she added quietly, and John nodded.

For a moment they regarded one another in apprehensive silence.

After the Governor’s request for troops to “keep order” some three years ago had resulted in those troops opening fire into a crowd of civilians, it had been agreed upon that, though Boston would remain garrisoned by a regiment of the King’s forces, it would probably be better if those forces were not brought into daily contact with mobs stirred up by the Sons of Liberty. As a compromise, the Sixty-Fourth Regiment now occupied Castle Island, a brick fortress in the bay that had been built during the most recent French War. Since the dumping of the tea into the harbor in December, contact between the Bostonians and the much-outnumbered redcoats had been very limited indeed.

But Abigail—and every man, woman, and child over the age of five in Boston—was aware that Colonel Leslie was only biding his time. A man taken up for the murder of the King’s Commissioner would not only be imprisoned on the island: there was every likelihood he would not be tried in Boston at all. Like a smuggler, he would be taken before an Admiralty Court of three Crown judges and no jury at the British naval base in Halifax, three hundred miles from the sort of inflammatory pamphlets that Harry had spent most of the night printing up.

And despite John’s having defended the troopers who fired into the mob at the so-called Boston Massacre back in ’70, with his involvement in the Sons of Liberty an open secret, there was a very good chance that if he went out to the island to speak with Harry Knox, he would not be permitted to return.

She asked worriedly, “Will you send Thaxter to see him?”

Thaxter was John’s clerk.

“I suppose I must.”

Abigail nodded, understanding John’s tone rather than his words. Young John Thaxter was steady, intelligent, and cool-headed in such emergencies as were likely to arise in either the courtroom or in the Adams’ kitchen where he’d taken so many of his meals over the past year or two: he would, John often said, make a fine lawyer. He was observant, articulate, and assiduous about double-checking facts. Neither John nor Abigail had ever been able to quite put their fingers on what he lacked, but they both knew it was something. Perhaps only the cynicism that comes from a decade of riding Massachusetts court circuits in the backwoods.

Whatever it was, it was in John’s eyes as he looked at her.

“Might I go?”

“What, disguised as a boy?” His chuckle was affectionate, admiring, but a chuckle nonetheless. “
A young doctor of Rome; his name is Balthazar
,” he quoted Shakespeare’s description of Portia’s alter ego from
The Merchant of Venice
.
“I never knew so young a body with so old a head . . .”

“And Balthazar won her case,” pointed out Abigail.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Not serious?”
Abigail drew herself up in burlesque indignation. “
Not serious
about visiting my poor, wretched cousin in that horrible jail and taking him a few paltry comforts? After Mr. Thaxter’s kindliness in offering to escort me?”

“The Provost Marshal is never going to believe that
my wife
or any person named Adams is making a call on a man suspected of seditious activities solely for the purpose of giving him clean stockings.”

“I’m surprised at you, John Adams, making assumptions about what another man might be persuaded to believe.” She spooned butter from the little crock that had been brought up from the cellar—nearly rock-hard in the cold despite the fact that she’d set it near the door into the kitchen—and collected the milk-jug from the warmest corner of the pantry. The thin skin of ice would melt off it after only minutes in the kitchen’s warmth.

“The most they can do is forbid me to see him and make me sit on a bench for an hour in the cold while Thaxter asks his questions. They’re certainly not going to clap me in a dungeon and send you a note demanding you come alone and unarmed to some deserted spot, you know.”

“I suppose not.” John grinned, and followed her back into the kitchen, platter of pork in his hands. “I should dearly love to see them try, though. If they forbid you to visit Mr. Knox, dearest Portia, I daresay you might improve the idle hour by paying a call on your friend Lieutenant Coldstone.”

Abigail’s smile widened in return. “My thought precisely, dearest Lysander.”

He set down his prosaic burden and kissed her hand at the old courting nickname. Lieutenant Jeremy Coldstone of the Provost Marshal’s guard was the officer charged, last November, with arresting John for the murder of Colonel Leslie’s mistress, and from that inauspicious beginning, respect and liking had grown up between Abigail and that stiff-backed young servant of the Crown. Sternly, Abigail disciplined her thoughts against a twinge of regret as she poured warmed cider from the hearth-kettle to a pitcher, and John gathered the children to table. It would be the Sabbath until bedtime tonight, so she would be unable to bake fresh bread to carry across to Castle Island as a gift for Coldstone, whom she knew was at the mercy of Army food-contractors: a pity. The goodwill was cheap at the price. And Harry, of course, would appreciate it, too.

She gave herself a mental shake, and turned her thoughts resolutely back to the morning’s sermon and the questions the Reverend Cooper had raised about the Mark of the Beast, and conversation over dinner reverted to Sabbath thoughtfulness.
If keeping the Sabbath holy were easy, God would not have needed to enshrine it in Eternal Law.
When John sent a note to Cousin Sam, however, requesting that transportation to the island be arranged in the morning with one of the smugglers who worked for fellow-Son John Hancock, Abigail scribbled a quick message for Lucy Fluckner, postponing their own meeting until Tuesday, when at least the delay would result in some information to impart. Officially there was no post in Boston on Sundays, but there was no harm in asking the next-door neighbor’s prentice-boy if he would happen to be walking that way this evening on his return from Meeting.

She, John, and Pattie returned to the meeting-house that afternoon with righteous hearts and proper attitudes.

The short spring evening, however, brought a knock on the front door and a resumption of Abigail’s career as a Sabbath-breaker.

She had at least the comfort of knowing that she wasn’t the only one in the household engaged in violating the Lord’s Commandment—if comfort one could take in such a reflection—because on their return from the afternoon service John had been greeted by a note from wily Cousin Sam, followed closely by the man himself: was John agreeable to conceal two boxes of the pamphlets Harry had been printing last night and several pieces of the frame of the press itself, which Paul Revere, indefatigable Sabbath-bender and
bricoleur
, was going to dismantle that night?

“So far as anyone can tell, they’ve got no one watching the bookshop,” Sam said, as he guided John out of the kitchen and down the short hall to John’s study at the front of the house. By
anyone
, Abigail assumed he meant any of the prentice-boys, layabouts, and stevedores out of work who constituted the eyes and ears of the Sons of Liberty in Boston’s narrow streets.
And men pride themselves on not being “gossipy” like women!
“We’ll have the pamphlets out of there and the press broken down by midnight, and if it
does
occur to the Provost Marshal to get a man in to search the cellar, he’ll find nothing but
Caesar’s Commentaries
and quires of stationery for his trouble—”

Presumably
, thought Abigail as she returned to the kitchen to pour cider and lay out a plate of yesterday’s gingerbread for the men,
Sam has decided to take the Sabbath as ending at sunset
. . .

What mark—she could not keep herself from wondering— would this decision about where the boundaries of the Lord’s Day lay leave on Sam’s head and hand and heart, once the goal of political representation for the colonies in Parliament was achieved? Would the Sons of Liberty disband then? Or would they begin to turn on one another, as the ancient Romans did? Or on anyone they perceived as an enemy to whatever the new order was?

And in that case—

“Mrs. Adams?” Pattie, who was standing at the front door even as Abigail stepped out of the study into the hall again, turned, and beyond her Abigail saw a cloaked form on the threshold in the dusk. “A lady here to see you.”

“My
dear
Mrs. Adams!” As Pattie stepped aside, Mrs. Margaret Sandhayes limped into the hallway, paused to prop one of her gold-headed canes against her pannier, and this time—second encounter being obviously ground for a promotion—extended her entire hand instead of the cool two fingers as before. “I am
desolated
to interrupt you at this hour, but
dear
Lucy warned me—at the same time that she
begged
me to bring you this—that you Puritans spend the
entire day
in Church on Sundays. Is that
true
? Doing
nothing
but listening to the minister prose on about God and holiness? How very extraordinary—but very morally uplifting and good for the character, I’m sure.”

She smiled and held out a thick-folded packet of paper, crusted everywhere with blots of sealing wax into which a seal of a flying bird had been hastily squished. An equally impatient hand had scrawled
Mrs. Adams
across the front.

“Won’t you come in?” Abigail nodded to Pattie and stepped back to open the parlor door.

“Well, just for a moment, thank you so much.” In a vast rustle of petticoats Mrs. Sandhayes shed her cloak into Pattie’s hands and preceded Abigail into the parlor, her panniered skirts—a style worn by only the wives of the wealthiest merchants in the colonies—swaying uneasily with her lurching stride. “Of course I should attend more regularly
—Dear
Hannah Fluckner tells me that the minister at King’s Chapel is
dazzling
, and so handsome, too, for a man of his years, and with a beautiful voice. I always think a Man of the Cloth
must
have a beautiful voice, don’t you?
So
much more important than all that dusty Bible-quoting! Yet vestries over here
never
seem to think of that when choosing them, or even offer training in elocution or rhetoric at seminaries, which makes it such a
bore
for the poor parishioners.”

She settled in the chair beside the fire and propped her canes beside her, her movements suddenly graceful: as she removed her gloves, Abigail noticed the length and pale beauty of her well-cared-for hands. “And God forbid if there’s some perfectly simple word that he habitually mispronounces, like
concupiscence
, which dear Dr. Ellenbrough at St. Onesimus’s always pronounced
con-cuppy-since
, and I’m afraid we girls would start giggling and could not stop ourselves—Why, thank you,” she added, as Pattie came into the parlor with a tray: softly steaming teapot, small plates of bread, marmalade, fig-paste, and soft cheese. “How very kind of you, m’am! Such a freezing night as it promises—” Mrs. Sandhayes broke off, started back for a moment as Abigail poured out the un-Sabbatical tea: “
Chamomile
?”

“Would you prefer mint?” Abigail inquired serenely. “I know some people think mint is rather everyday.”