A Marked Man (9 page)

J
ohn said, “That’s ridiculous!” and slammed his hand down on the top of his desk, making the standish jump. “To convict a man on the perjured evidence of a clerk frightened for his position and the word of rich man who’ll do anything to keep his daughter from wedding a poor one—”

“I suspect Lieutenant Coldstone would remark that you’re making a bit free with the burden of proof as to Mr. Fluckner’s motives—”

“Damn the burden of proof!” John pulled off his wig and hurled it against the opposite wall of his study. “You know, and I know—”

“And the Provost Marshall does not know.”

“Does not wish to know, you mean!” Red-faced with wrath, John looked around him, as if seeking something else small enough to fling that wouldn’t leave the books in the shelf splattered with ink or sand. Abigail fished in her pocket and handed him her pocket memorandum-book. He flung it with a satisfying smack. “Damn the man!”

In the hallway behind her, Abigail heard the faint creak of the kitchen’s door-hinge: Johnny, Nabby, and Charley pressing close to hear their father in his wrath. Young Mr. Thaxter, standing by his own small desk in the corner of the study, looked far less sanguine, despite nearly two years of dealing with his employer’s rages.

“Lieutenant Coldstone says he will try to wangle the appointment as Harry’s defender himself, but he may not succeed.” She crossed the little study, retrieved John’s wig and the faded little Morocco-leather notebook, and placed both on the corner of the high desk at John’s elbow. “If the Tribunal appoints an officer from the garrison at Halifax, he will almost certainly share the prevalent opinion that any Bostonian will lie about the whereabouts of any other Bostonian—”

John swept the wig up and hurled it again, followed at once by the memorandum-book.

“—so whatever evidence we manage to locate about the actual killer had best be of a solid rather than a verbal nature.” Early in their married life John had sometimes been moved to hurl teacups, but Abigail’s practice of gluing them back together and serving him his tea in them had gradually broken him of this practice: in any case the boycott against tea had made the entire point moot.

“Is there any chance you might put off your journey to Haverhill? Even a day—”

John hesitated, looking at the notes on his desk with an uncertainty that told her this wasn’t the first time he’d considered doing exactly that. “I had rather not, Portia,” he said after a time. “The husband of my client there has cast her and her children out of his house, claiming her to be a whore, and the children not his own; if her suit against him fails, she will have nothing to live by. She seems to me an honest woman, and there are rumors that ’tis the husband who wishes to put her away and marry a neighbor lately widowed: an ugly story. If the weather holds cold like this, I should be home on Monday.”

“That will do.” Abigail laid her palm to his cheek. “Any woman bringing suit about a man’s misdeeds before a jury of men needs all the help she can get. Mr. Thaxter and I will do what we can. Still, if on your way north you hear word of”—she unfolded Coldstone’s description of Cottrell—“
A fair, well-looking gentleman, of small stature, with a long nose and a cleft to his chin. Blue eyes and a fair pigeon-wing tie-wig; a stone-gray greatcoat of four capes, top boots, and a gray- or snuff-colored coat and breeches beneath. Yellow waistcoat, silver basket-weave buttons, gold signet ring on his left little finger
. Possibly last seen in pursuit of a woman,” she added drily, and went to retrieve notebook and wig once again.

“I shall make a note of it.” John fetched back his wig, brushed it off, and set it on the corner of the desk again. It was the same color as his close-cropped hair, and dressed simply, yet when he wore it—to Meeting or to visit friends and family—Abigail always felt him to be slightly in disguise. A lawyer, a writer, an arguer of politics and the rights of Englishmen . . . but not the husband and father, lover and friend she had loved since the age of fifteen.

“And I,” said Abigail, preceding him down the hall to the kitchen where Pattie was checking the contents of the Dutch-oven dinner, “shall see what Miss Fluckner and Mrs. Sandhayes can tell me about who was at the Governor’s ball who might have made the occasion to slip out and intercept Sir Jonathan upon his arrival . . . provided Miss Fluckner can steal away from her father’s house tomorrow.” She put on a clean apron, opened the door of the oven beside the hearth, and held her hand just inside for a count of two or three; the fire she’d begun that morning before leaving for Castle Island had settled to darkly throbbing coals, and the oven felt right for bread. “If nothing else,” she went on, closing it and turning to the warm corner of the hearth where the covered loaves were rising, “I may learn more about the woman Bathsheba.”

“Who? Oh, the young Negress who disappeared.” John perched on a corner of the big worktable. “You think she knew something of it?”

“I haven’t the smallest idea.” Abigail fetched the shovel, opened the oven again, and moving swiftly, transferred the coals back to the hearth. “It could be happenstance that she walked out of her master’s house—leaving behind her two children too young to do without a mother’s care—two days after the departure of a man who made attempts on her virtue . . . a man who was beaten to death upon his return to town.” She caught up the whisk, swept the ashes from the bricks. “But I should like to learn more of the matter if I can.”

“I daresay.” She turned to get the loaves from the table, found John just behind her, the risen, rounded dough ready on the peel in his hands. She smiled at him, stepped back—for a lawyer and a scholar, John had a wide streak of farmer in him . . . and a little element of housewife, too. He shuffled the loaves deftly off the peel and into the oven, where they would bake slowly for the remainder of the evening, filling the kitchen with an incomparable scent.

“But ask Miss Fluckner as well where her suitor went in Maine and whatever she can recall of her father’s dealings with the tenants on the land. I’ve heard it said that the chief reason Fluckner needs clear title is so that he can put the tenants off the land—men who’ve been farming there for two generations—and bring in German settlers who’ll pay more for the privilege of freezing while being robbed.” With a neat gesture, he dropped the peel back into its place on its pegs, turned back to her with a grave wariness in his eyes. “My experience has always been that of all the things a man will kill for, land is ever close to the top of the list.”

 

 

A
bigail had expected Lucy Fluckner to be accompanied only by Philomela on her walk to the Common the following morning. But when she caught sight of the girl’s bright red walking-cloak among the elms of the Mall that bounded the Common’s eastern side, she was surprised to make out the tall, swaying form of Mrs. Sandhayes at Lucy’s side. “My dear Mrs. Adams, I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to assist at a romance for a thousand pounds!” replied that lady, smiling, when Abigail tactfully inquired whether the icy wind was not too bitter for her. And, reading Abigail’s true concern, which had little to do with the weather, she added, “My physicians insisted that exercise will eventually strengthen my limbs—and indeed, I get about much more handily than I did! So I welcome every step. Did you convince the authorities to let you visit Mr. Knox?”

“How is he?” demanded Lucy. “Did you give him my message? He isn’t—they didn’t”—her face suddenly changed as she fought a shiver of dread from her voice—“they didn’t put him in
irons
or anything, did they?”

“They did not,” said Abigail briskly. “Nor is he in a common cell with the camp drunkards and troublemakers, but in a little room—a
very
little room, rather dank and cold, but he has blankets and his greatcoat—by himself. I took him food and a book—”

“Oh,
thank
you!
Bless
you!”

“—and slipped your note between its pages, and I shall see Mr. Thaxter goes across tomorrow with more. But,” she added, cutting short the girl’s next rapturous exclamations, “matters are worse than we knew. Did Mr. Knox lend you a scarf of his recently? Red and yellow—”

“The one I knit for him.” Lucy nodded, black curls bouncing in the frame of her scarlet hood. “Saturday a week ago, when I sneaked away and got poor Margaret into such trouble with Papa . . .” She threw an apologetic glance at her chaperone. “We met at the burying-ground, and I’d slipped out so quickly I forgot to bring a scarf of my own, and he lent me his, because I was nearly freezing. Does he want it back? I think it’s in my drawer, or maybe I left it in the pocket of the cloak I had on that day—”

“He has it,” said Abigail grimly. “Or, rather, the Provost Marshal has it. A Mr. Wingate made a special journey out to Castle Island with it on Sunday afternoon, with the information that he saw Harry emerge from Governor’s Alley at three o’clock Sunday morning—your father having sent him back to collect a forgotten wallet from the Governor’s after the ball—”

“The liar!” Lucy stopped in her tracks, mouth momentarily ajar with shock. “Oh, the
blackguard
!” She made a move as if she were about to run all the way to her father’s countinghouse, cloak flying, and throw herself at him in rage, then whirled back to face her companions with her face twisted with disillusion, betrayal, and dread. “Oh, how
could
he!”

“Dearest—” Mrs. Sandhayes laid a hand on her young charge’s shoulder. “Now, you know he must have done so at your father’s behest—”

“Well, of course he did! Because he’s a cheat, that’s why . . . About five years ago he borrowed a little money out of my father’s strongbox without telling him about it—” She pursed her lips, pulling herself back from her rage, and her blue eyes filled with sudden tears. “I shouldn’t speak badly of him, because it was when his wife had their last child, and both she and the baby were so sick . . . But Papa caught him putting the money back, you see. So if he were to dismiss him, you know it would be without a character—”

“La, child, your Papa wouldn’t do such a thing!”

“He would.” Lucy sighed, and wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist, like a child. “Just as he’d think to send Harry’s scarf over to the Provost Marshal, with that ridiculous story about a wallet, only to get Harry into trouble.”

“And so we must get him out of trouble,” said Abigail stoutly. “Come, shall we walk? And you must tell me all about Saturday night, in as much detail as you can recall. There must have been a great deal of comment when he did not appear at a ball to announce his own engagement.”

“My dear Mrs. Adams, like hurling a grenado into a dovecot!”

“Well, it was supposed to be announced at dinner,” said Lucy. “And
of course
Papa had arranged to have me seated next to Sir Jonathan, or where Sir Jonathan would have been sitting had he been there. I caught Governor Hutchinson first thing, as he received us in the hall, and begged him for a word, and told him that whatever Papa had said, I
would not
marry the man, and he arranged to have my place changed at the table.
That
set everyone talking, and Papa looked ready to have an apoplexy, but at least I didn’t have to sit next to his empty chair. And of course, no one would say things in front of me—”

“They did before
me
,” reported Mrs. Sandhayes, limping gamely along the frozen gravel of the walk on Lucy’s other side. “La, the rumors that flew about the cardroom! That Sir Jonathan had heard you’d jilted him and had walked out of the Governor’s house—that you’d told His Excellency some terrible tale about that
charming
Sir Jonathan and had
obliged
the Governor to eject him—that Sir Jonathan had discovered that your Papa was about to cheat him over the Maine lands, which really belonged to Mr. Gardiner—”

“They do not!” Lucy protested.

“That’s not what Felicity Gardiner says.”

“Felicity Gardiner’s a—Well,” said Lucy. “Anyway, His Excellency kept sending servants to ask in the stables, had Sir Jonathan arrived yet? He even sent a footman down to the wharf to see if Mr. Bingham’s boat had come in from Maine as it was supposed to, and he brought word back that yes, Sir Jonathan had debarked that morning and gone off no one knew where, without sending word or anything.
That
set the cat among the pigeons! And everyone kept staring at me and whispering behind their fans—”

“They weren’t whispering about
you
at that point, my dear.” Mrs. Sandhayes raised her kohl black eyebrows. “I suppose you’re aware by this time, Mrs. Adams, that Sir Jonathan’s appetites would have shamed a rabbit in the brambles. I don’t doubt—and neither did anyone at the Governor’s that night, I assure you—that he had a sweetheart somewhere in town, for whom he’d been pining all those days in Maine. Not that he wasn’t perfectly capable of trying to get up an intrigue or two in the Penobscot or the Kennebec—lud, what names you Americans think up! But then I understand the women of the province tend to be of the granitey, Gog and Magog variety—”