A Marked Man (7 page)

Thaxter grinned. “And I’ll just take notes, shall I, m’am?”

Harry’s story was a simple one. In the fall of the previous year he had become friends with Miss Lucy Fluckner. She would come into his bookshop on Cornhill, and sometimes they would talk there—about ancient Roman battles and Harry’s personal passion for artillery—for as much as an hour, while her mother and schoolgirl sisters shopped among the various emporia along Hancock’s Wharf. It was all perfectly innocent. There was never a time his visitor was without her maid, by which he guessed she was a well-off merchant’s daughter.

“She told me her name was Lucy Andrews,” said Harry. “From
Pamela
, you know. I didn’t guess it at the time, of course—lots of people really
are
named Andrews—and you know, I just didn’t think about it. We’d play chess, though we never could finish a game all at one go. Sometimes she’d send me little notes during the week, about what her next move would be, and I’d give Philomela notes in reply.” By the time he’d guessed “Lucy Andrews” was in fact the daughter of one of the richest merchants in New England, they were well and truly on the way to being in love.

They would meet on the Common. Lucy loved to watch Harry’s militia company, the Boston Grenadiers, drilling on Saturdays, and unlike many gently bred maidens of her class, she was perfectly capable of saddling her own horse. Sometimes she came with a groom, sometimes without one: in any case she’d generally send him off to a nearby tavern. “I daresay it’s why old Fluckner finally got the Sandhayes woman to stay with them as chaperone. That was right after Cottrell came to town and began to hobnob with Mr. F. I think they wanted someone more than a servant to keep an eye on her. The woman rides like a Cossack, you know, if you but get her into one of those English sideways ladies’ saddles and a horse that’s been properly trained. I think, myself, they were afraid Lucy would elope.”

“Would you have?” asked Abigail, curious.

Harry stood silent for a moment, wrapped in the second blanket, his head a little bowed in thought. His hard upbringing, Abigail knew, had left this young man with a strong sense of propriety, not from any innate punctiliousness but from cruel experience of what happened to those who violated society’s rules. He had grown up in poverty—in his silence she read his knowledge of what would be Lucy’s lot if she defied her father too far.

At length he said softly, “M’am, I simply don’t know.” Lucy had spoken to Harry a number of times of Sir Jonathan’s high-handed assumption that she could not keep herself from falling in love with him, an assumption that had progressed from knowing glances and unwanted touches on shoulder, back, arm to cornering her here and there in her father’s house, when her parents would archly leave them together alone.

“And it wasn’t only Miss Fluckner,” he added grimly. “He was one of those men who seem to believe that servant-girls choose to be so because they’re lusty, not because they’re poor—even those who never chose their condition at all. Lucy told me that when he called, he would accost the maids in the halls or in empty parlors and kiss them, or worse, the randy little brute. He’d told her father she was already halfway in love with him but wouldn’t admit it, at least not to her father—which unfortunately Mr. F. could readily believe, since he already thought her political views were adopted just to vex him. She and I were to meet on the Common on that Thursday morning—the twenty-second—out beyond the Powder-Store—that round stone tower on top of the hill,” he added, with a glance at Lieutenant Coldstone. “It’s nearly a quarter mile from the nearest house, and there’s a sort of copse of brush at the foot of the hill. At that hour of the morning and as cold as it was that day, we knew there would be no one about.”

“Was Mrs. Sandhayes with her?” asked Abigail. “Or Philomela?”

Harry shook his head. “She said in her note that she had to meet me alone. She’d just learned about the Maine scheme, she told me later, and that her father was expecting Sir Jonathan to arrange things with the King in exchange for a share of the land as Lucy’s dowry. Well, Sir Jonathan got wind of it and was at the meeting-place before either of us, waiting in the brush at the foot of the hill. He seized Lucy—Miss Fluckner—and—well—” Harry glanced aside, his mouth suddenly tight. “Attempted to caress her,” he finished in a stifled voice. “I’m pleased to say she blacked the fellow’s eye for him. I suppose I should have waited for her to tell her father of it. Fluckner may be a Tory and a cheat, but I shouldn’t like to think he’d have pushed the match on his daughter in the face of—of behavior like that. I didn’t think of it at the time, though.”

He folded his heavy arms and looked aside once more.

Softly, Abigail said, “And there was always the chance that if she’d told her father, Sir Jonathan would simply say she was lying. How serious was this
caress
?”

Harry kept his gaze fixed resolutely on the window, a heavily barred slit set high in the wall with nothing visible beyond it but indistinct gray sky. “Very serious.”

“You believe in other words he intended to dishonor her, as a means of forcing her consent?”

“I think so, yes. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“And in this frame of mind,” said Thaxter, after short silence, “you went to the Governor’s house and intercepted Sir Jonathan when he returned?”

“I did, yes. I thought he’d have come in already. Lucy—Miss Fluckner—fled from him on horseback and met me on my way to our meeting-place and told me the whole, much more in anger than in sorrow—” His mouth quirked in sudden grim amusement at the remembrance of that big-boned, bossy, black-haired girl fizzling over with wrath at the seducer whose eye she’d just blacked rather than melting in tears of shock and shame. “I’m afraid I lost my head a bit. Mr. Thrisk—the Governor’s butler—told me Cottrell hadn’t come in yet, so I went to the end of the alley there behind the mews and waited for him.”

“And pulled him off his horse,” said Abigail softly. “And told him that if he ever touched or spoke to Miss Fluckner again, you would kill him like a dog. Was that where you lost your scarf?”

Harry shook his head. “That was later,” he said. “Lucy—Miss Fluckner—got away to meet me a few mornings later. It was bitterly cold. God knows what old Fluckner said to poor Mrs. Sandhayes when he found out Lucy’d given her the slip again, but since that time she’s stuck to Miss Fluckner like a burr.”

“And Saturday night?” asked Thaxter.

Harry sighed. “I was home, asleep, in bed, by myself. Good God, am I to be hanged because I wasn’t with a mistress? My brother had ridden across to Cambridge with a delivery; I closed up the shop early, for there was no one in all afternoon, and I was not feeling quite well. I do take cold easily and felt the rest would do me good.”

If he’d been up all night Saturday night working his printing press, reflected Abigail, and concealing the boxes of pamphlets about the shop and his rooms above it, he had probably looked suitably haggard when he’d emerged on Sunday morning and walked straight into the arms of the Provost Marshal’s men. “I will attest to his taking cold easily, Lieutenant,” she affirmed in her most motherly tones.

Coldstone eyed the stout six-footer with understandable skepticism.

“They go straight to his chest,” she admonished in a tone of reproach. “His brother and I had a fearful time with him last winter.” Harry nodded and did his best to look frail.

Coldstone said politely, “Indeed? Then your gift of blankets is doubly appreciated, to be sure. If you have finished, Mrs. Adams—I mean, Mr. Thaxter—perhaps it would be well if we did not promote yourself taking cold. Sergeant Muldoon will have prepared coffee, and with luck lieutenants Stevenson and Barclay will be about their business elsewhere in the camp, and we can have the office to ourselves long enough for me to inform you of my own findings concerning Sir Jonathan’s activities between his return from Maine on Saturday morning and being found dead in an alley twenty hours later. I am sorry Mr. Adams was not able to cross here himself.”

I’ll wager Colonel Leslie was even sorrier
. “He has a case to prepare for the Assizes in Haverhill next week that demanded his attention,” replied Abigail, more or less truthfully—John did have a case and would undoubtedly burn a great deal of whale-oil tonight in making up for the time he was spending this morning stowing boxes of seditious pamphlets and fragments of Harry’s printing press behind the trunks in the attic. “Mr. Knox—”

“Harry.”

“Harry. Don’t worry.” She extended her hands, took his in hers. Though he was only six or seven years her junior, she felt toward him a sudden protectiveness, as if he were a son or a nephew. “We’ll see justice is done.”

“For justice to be done,” replied Coldstone drily, “it must first be defined, m’am.”

“And you think officers in service to the Crown are capable of that?” She turned back to the young bookseller. “One more question. You say Cottrell would ill-use the servants in Mr. Fluckner’s house. Did he ever attempt liberties with a woman named Bathsheba? A young woman, light-skinned, with two children—”

Harry made a face. “Lord, poor Sheba! At least Philomela could stick close to Lucy. The man could scarcely steal kisses from the maid with her mistress looking on. Bathsheba is a sewing maid, m’am, and often by herself—has anything been heard of her?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said Abigail. “I find it odd that she would leave her children behind her—odder still, that she would choose to disappear
after
Sir Jonathan left for Maine. I’m rather curious to know why.”

I
take it,” remarked Abigail, as Lieutenant Coldstone poured out coffee for herself and Thaxter in the cramped cubbyhole of his office, “you think as little as I do of this business of,
I happened to find his scarf in the lane
?” The office wasn’t appreciably warmer than it had been an hour ago, and neither Lieutenant Stevenson nor Lieutenant Barclay appeared to have refilled the wood-basket before departing, but after Harry’s cell, the dank little chamber seemed a paradise of comfort. Abigail perched on Lieutenant Barclay’s high desk-stool, and set her cup among the account-books he had left behind him.

“Regrettably,” returned Coldstone, “what I think has no bearing on the matter. My apologies that I have no milk to offer you, m’am, and only muscovado sugar. Sugar of any sort is most difficult to obtain.”

“I can recommend you a very good smuggler to obtain as much of it as you’d care to use, straight from the West Indies,” offered Abigail, and tonged a small lump of the sticky brown substance into her cup. “I’ve always considered it a shocking waste of energy, to ship it to England and then trans-ship it back here, only so that the King’s friends can make money off transport fees and import duties.”

“I have, of course, no opinion on the subject,” responded Coldstone politely. “Yet I would be pleased to have your sugar-purveyor’s name.”

“Frederick North, wasn’t it, Thaxter?” Abigail named the Chancellor of the King’s Exchequer who was responsible for the tea-tax and much of the Crown’s fiscal policy toward the colonies. “Something like that. Surely Colonel Leslie can’t believe that a clerk who owes the whole of his living to a wealthy merchant isn’t going to tell whatever lie his master instructs him to? Or is there some other reason that Colonel Leslie would like to send Mr. Knox to Halifax and put a rope around his neck?”

Her glance crossed the young officer’s, and he nodded, not pretending that he didn’t understand what she meant. “Naturally, should Mr. Knox feel moved to turn King’s Evidence against whomever he can think of in Boston who might be connected with the Sons of Liberty—or with John Hancock’s smuggling operation, which in Colonel Leslie’s eyes amounts to the same thing—it would affect the verdict of the Tribunal. Colonel Leslie is not being arbitrary in this matter, m’am. Mr. Knox is a known associate of men believed to be involved with traitors; information concerning traitors is what Sir Jonathan came to the colony to obtain.”

“Why don’t you just arrest my husband, then, or Sam Adams, or Mr. Hancock, and put a pistol to their heads, if you think you’ll get information under threat of death?”

“Because neither your husband, nor Sam Adams, nor John Hancock was so unwise as to shout
I will kill you like a dog
to a man who subsequently was found dead. Would you like to hear details of Sir Jonathan’s arrival Saturday morning, insofar as we have been able to ascertain them? I fear that the day is turning blustery, and would not wish to detain you longer than is necessary.”

As if on cue, wind snarled in the chimney, and Abigail, glancing swiftly at the chamber’s small window, saw to her dismay that the bars of cloud visible that morning in the eastern sky were changing rapidly to scudding fragments of gray racing in from the east and north. At the same moment the chimney sneezed out a quantity of gritty smoke. Abigail coughed and managed to say, “Yes, thank you, Lieutenant—I apologize for my ill temper. But Mr. Knox is a friend of mine, and I promise you, he would not harm a fly. I presume you’ve obtained Mr. Fluckner’s version of what Sir Jonathan was doing in Maine?”