A Marked Man (6 page)

Abigail wasn’t at all sure she wanted to do it. The grand-daughter of one of the oldest merchant clans in the colony, she knew everything about tonnage, bills of lading, and where to hide cargoes from the excise men, but being on the water made her joints ache within minutes and even the shortest voyage rendered her queasy. Nevertheless, she clasped John’s gloved hands in her own and said, “All will be well, Mr. Adams.”

“If we gets back by afternoon, all’ll be well.” Ezra Logan, who brought in firewood and butter from the north side of the bay in the
Katrina
three market-days per week and smuggled illegal cargoes of French molasses on the other three nights, shaded his eyes to consider the clouds that barred the morning sky. “Squally weather comin’ in.”

He took the basket from Thaxter, then the larger bundle of two striped woolen blankets, of the sort the British fur companies traded with the Indians. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Adams. I’ll have her back safe, ’fore the first sign of chop.” He cast loose the lines, and poled the
Katrina
’s nose from the end of the dock; the deck-boy swung the foresail yard around to catch what light wind there was. Thaxter, who wasn’t a much better sailor than Abigail, unfolded one of the blankets and laid it around her shoulders, then settled himself on the bench at her side to stay out of the way of Logan and the boy, shivering in the icy spray. Much as Abigail detested the British troops that for five years now had been stationed in Boston, as they approached the low gray shape of Castle Island—two and a half miles out in the iron waters—she felt a throb of sympathy for them. The Crown may have dispatched them to suppress the colonists’ demands for their rights as Englishmen, but that didn’t make the damp, freezing brick barracks they had to live in any more endurable in the bitter season.

The camp was quieter than it had been the last time she’d come ashore here, in early December. During the confused days after the tea-ships had first docked, when Boston’s bells had tolled day and night to summon in from the countryside the armed mob whose presence had made the so-called Boston Tea-Party possible, many Loyalists, including the Fluckners, had come out to the camp for protection. Most had returned to Boston, but a number of the Crown’s clerks and officers, Abigail was well aware, had chosen to remain.

Coming ashore she observed that the grubby village of tents, sheep pens, horse-lines, and makeshift shelters occupied by soldiers and camp-followers that had sprung up around the fort’s walls in those days had shrunk almost to nothing, smaller even than its summer and autumn dimensions. When Abigail and Thaxter were admitted through the fortress gate, smoke clawed her eyes from campfires and Spanish-style braziers set up even in the corridors, where soldiers, camp-servants, and laundresses huddled for warmth. The central parade-ground, glimpsed through the windows, had acquired a ring of lean-tos around its walls, clinging to the brick as if for warmth. Everywhere wood was stacked; in the corridors, shirts and drawers hung to dry, frozen hard. The smell of cooking, of dirty wool, of men and women too cold and too crowded to bathe, nearly choked her.

Lieutenant Coldstone, Assistant to the Provost Marshal, rose when they were shown into the cubbyhole that he shared with two other military clerks; the fireplace there was the size of Abigail’s breadbox back on Queen Street and the so-called blaze there wouldn’t have melted the ink in the standish. “It happens that Mr. Knox is a cousin of mine,” Abigail replied to his lifted eyebrows, after Thaxter had requested an interview with the prisoner. “I’ve brought him some things from his poor dear mother.”

“Have you, m’am?” Coldstone bowed. The wintry pallor of his face and the marble white of his wig turned his dark eyes even darker, in features as delicate as a girl’s. “She must be most concerned for her son.”

“Dreadfully,” said Abigail. “’ Tis only her age and illness that have kept her from bringing them herself.”

“Those, and the fact that the lady has been dead since 1772. I am afraid, m’am, that there is no facility at present where you might speak to Mr. Knox, save in his cell. The late cold weather has driven even the hardiest of the men indoors, and we are severely crowded at the moment.”

“’ Tis quite all right.”

The Lieutenant drew off the writing-mitts he had been wearing, donned stouter gloves, and took a cloak from the peg on the wall. He opened the room’s other door, to admit men’s voices and a renewed fug of smoke from the cubbyhole beyond, and called, “Sergeant Muldoon? Please take Mrs. Adams’s things. This way, m’am, Mr. Thaxter.”

“Might I ask the Provost Marshal’s reasoning, in treating this matter as a military one?” Thaxter’s breath puffed white as they passed a window, turned a corner down a hall that seemed to have been converted into a laundry-room, wood-store, and nursery for the ragged little camp children who ran to and fro underfoot like cocky rats. “As I understand the accusation, it rests upon the presumption that the crime was a crime of passion: a young man in love shouting threats at the older man who offered insult to a girl.”

“That is one way of looking at it,” agreed Coldstone. “But one seldom finds that passion retaining its heat for ten days, then lying in wait to do murder once the object of its ire came back into range again.”

“I suppose that depends on the degree of passion,” remarked Abigail, “and the magnitude of the ire.”

“As you say, m’am.” They turned down another corridor, and Coldstone returned the salute of the guard who stood at attention next to a tiny brazier and stingy fire just beyond the corner of a short corridor. “But if the young man is a member of an organization whose stated purpose is to encourage disobedience to the Crown and the victim a servant of the Crown in lawful pursuit of information about that organization, then the crime becomes not passion but treason. And as such, it enters the domain of military law.”

They descended a few steps to a sort of anteroom, stacked in its corners with trunks and barrels: Flour? Apples? It was impossible to tell by the smell because even in the cold, the room stank like a privy, and from the door at one side came the desultory murmur of men’s voices, and now and then, the soft clank of chain.

“I had no idea the Boston Grenadiers encouraged disobedience to the Crown,” said Abigail. “And here I thought their stated purpose was to wear handsome uniforms and foregather in the Bunch of Grapes on Saturday afternoons!” She stepped back as Coldstone took the torch from one of the wall-brackets that burned close to the other locked door, trying to keep from shivering not only with the cold, but with the smell of hopelessness in this place, the sense of trapped despair. “And whatever the criminal’s intent, if Sir Jonathan’s body was found first thing Sunday morning by the Governor’s stable hands, it would follow that he was killed sometime late Saturday night. While Mr. Knox may not be able to prove himself
Alibi
at that time, I doubt that you or I or indeed the working half of the population of Boston could do so, either.”

“No, indeed, Mrs. Adams.” Coldstone held the torch aloft for the guard, who had followed them in from the corridor, to shift the heavy bar that closed the second, nearer door, and to find and turn the iron key. “But though Mr. Knox was arrested on the presumption of a crime of passion alone, yesterday afternoon an eyewitness came forward who saw him emerging from Governor’s Alley at shortly after three o’clock that morning, only hours before the body was found. Please excuse me, m’am.”

He stepped through the door; Abigail heard him say, “Mr. Knox?” within, and saw the flare of the torchlight on the unplastered brick walls. The room had not, to judge by the judas in the door, been completely dark before. Both it and the common cell across the vestibule appeared to have windows, for which she thanked Heaven even as she glanced in alarm at Thaxter, then in startled enquiry at Sergeant Muldoon. That young man—whom John had once described as a mountain walking about on legs—returned her look with a grimace
—I haven’t the faintest idea, Mrs. A—
and shook his head, even as Coldstone reemerged from the cell, and signed them with a bow to precede him inside.

Henry Knox was sitting on the low cot that was the cell’s single item of furniture—the single object that the tiny chamber was capable of containing, in fact. There wasn’t even a latrine-bucket, only a hole in the brickwork of the floor from which noxious vapors emerged to make the whole room reek of sewage. Harry rose at once and held out his hands to Abigail, saying, “My dear Mrs. Adams, please forgive me for getting myself into a situation that obliges you to come here—and thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”

As his plump, powerful hands gripped hers he glanced across at the three red-coated soldiers still grouped in the cell door, and went on, “And I swear to you, m’am, I didn’t actually
get myself into this situation
at all! I don’t know what witness this officer is talking about. I was in bed and asleep,
as I’ve told these gentlemen any number of times
.” His blue gray eyes met Abigail’s urgently as he said this, and she nodded, congratulating him silently on his good sense. Though any number of the Sons of Liberty would be perfectly happy to corroborate any tale Harry wished to concoct, Abigail could only shudder at the thought of the logistics necessary to coordinate a convincing story.

Much better to follow Aristotle and stick with the plausible that could not be proven, rather than come to ruin pursuing firmer proof that ultimately wouldn’t hold up.

“Never mind that for the moment,
Cousin
Harry.”

He started a little at the claim of kinship but nodded in his turn.

“We’ve brought you food—please don’t tell me they’re feeding you what the troopers get, knowing some of the contractors for it—and blankets—”

Muldoon brought the basket forward, and Harry gathered the blankets to his bosom with the fervor of a mother reunited with her child. Harry Knox was a young man comfortably padded by nature, like a somewhat rotund whale, but the cold in the cell was fearful. Had he not been taken on his way to church, as Sam had said, and thus wearing his greatcoat and gloves, Abigail reflected with an uneasy glance at the single filthy blanket on the insalubrious cot, he probably would have frozen in the night as surely as his purported victim.

“I’ve also brought you a book,” she added, turning the basket a little so that her own body, and Thaxter’s, interposed for a moment between its contents and Coldstone. As she opened the volume of Herodotus that she’d brought, she slipped the unaddressed note from Lucy between its pages. Harry met her eyes again, startled, then colored slightly in the torchlight.

“Thank you, m’am—Cousin Abigail,” he remembered to add. “That is of more worth to me than all the rest put together.” His gloved hands closed briefly around hers again. Then he straightened and turned back to Coldstone. “But as to this man who says he saw me, it is simply not true. I despise the Governor and his friends and wouldn’t go near his house on a wager, much less at three o’clock in the morning. Who was this man?”

Coldstone’s voice was dry as withered grass. “His name is Millward Wingate; he lives in Lindal’s Lane. Last night was clear, though extremely cold as it has been these two weeks, and the moon set late. Mr. Wingate claims that he was passing the lane called Governor’s Alley at three, having been sent to the Governor’s house by his master to claim a wallet that his master had left there at the ball. He says he recognized you clearly—”

“That isn’t true!”

“Moreover,” Coldstone went on, “he says that he found on the ground when you had passed a red and yellow scarf, knit of silk and wool—”

Harry’s mouth fell open with shock.

“Have you such a scarf?”

“I—Yes. But—”

Into his silence, Abigail inquired, “And who is Mr. Wingate’s master?”

Without change of expression, the Lieutenant replied, “Thomas Fluckner. I will add,” he added, “that I personally attach less significance to this evidence than does Colonel Leslie, who considers it damning.”

“Oh, that’s good!” said Abigail hotly. “That’s very good! You establish Admiralty Courts in Halifax because you claim not to trust Massachusetts witnesses, yet when a Massachusetts man speaks against someone you wish to convict, then you’re perfectly ready to believe him!”

“Let us begin our discussion by defining precisely who is meant by ‘you,’ Mrs. Adams.” Coldstone bowed. “
I
have established no courts because it lies beyond my jurisdiction, as Assistant Provost Marshal of the Regiment, to do so, whether I wanted them or not. And if
I
, as Assistant Provost Marshal, have a crisis of trust concerning the testimony of Massachusetts witnesses, perhaps it comes from hearing so very many of them swearing to events that I personally know to be untrue. May I?” He gestured toward the blanket. “I’m sure Mrs. Adams will be more comfortable sitting down, and I will not answer for the state of her dress once she sits on that bed—”

“Oh, of course! Absolutely!” Harry unfolded one of the blankets, and together he and the officer spread it over the cot.

As he conducted Abigail to sit, Coldstone continued, “
Personally
, I consider Mr. Knox as likely, or as unlikely, to have murdered Sir Jonathan as I did before this helpful employee of Mr. Fluckner’s was—ah—moved to come forward. I have little data for any suppositions at the moment, but I prefer to begin any line of enquiry with evidence untainted by lies. Mr. Knox, perhaps you would like to tell Mrs. Adams—I mean, of course,
Mr. Thaxter
—of the events of last Thursday week, and of Saturday night. That will be all, Farquhar, Muldoon,” he added, glancing back at the two men still in the doorway. “I shall be quite safe here. Muldoon, perhaps you’d like to prepare some coffee for Mrs. Adams and Mr. Thaxter, when we return to my office?”

“Yes, sorr. Thank you, sorr.”

The door clanged shut.

Abigail folded her hands. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” she said. “I apologize for my outburst. I deeply appreciate your confidence—and your commitment to the truth, which is rare in any place, at any time. Mr. Knox, before you go into what happened Thursday night, would you tell me about yourself and Miss Fluckner? I mean,” she added guiltily, “tell Mr. Thaxter—”