Crow Hollow (25 page)

“Either way, they must stop you,” she said.

“Quite.”

Prudence found this glimpse into the minds of their enemies a fascinating exercise. Those villains would be scheming to keep their crimes hidden. What would they do?

“Knapp has had plenty of time to guard the main highways,” she said. “We’ll face certain ambush if we go back on either one. So you mean to travel to Gloucester and take the coastal road south?”

James smiled. “We’re not taking the road. We’re going to hire fishermen to sail us into Boston Harbor from behind.”

“Oh. Yes, I see.”

“I told the innkeeper we were moving to Gloucester to live near your elderly father. So he has hired me a coach. Would it raise suspicions if we had him drop us in Salem instead? We’ll sail from Marblehead.”

He tapped his finger on the map at the town of Salem, which was midway between Boston and Gloucester up the coast. Marblehead was only a few miles east on its own small peninsula. And it was, indeed, a fishing town. The rules were lax in such places, the men a mix of English, Scottish, and even Portuguese and Irish. Often single young men, quick to do shifty work for a bit of silver.

There was only one problem.

“Reverend Stone’s brother is the minister in Salem.”

James frowned. “Oh?”

“They are a stiff, dour-faced congregation. They will take note of strangers, and if I’m spotted, I’ll be recognized. I’m well known in Salem. And when the minister hears, he’ll send word to his brother in Boston.”

James studied her face. “You’re no longer certain, are you?”

“My brother-in-law is an honorable man. My sister is forever true. They would never betray me.”

“Then explain your predicament. If you are correct, either reverend will be quick to offer us aid.”

How certain was she? At the moment, not very. To imagine her own family, the husband of her flesh-and-blood sister, turning on her was sickening. And Stone was a man of God. Surely, he could not be implicated in this wickedness.

“I am not certain,” she admitted at last.

His expression was sympathetic, but neither did he seek to change her mind. “Then we’ll ride straight for Gloucester and leave aside Salem and Marblehead. ’Twill give Cooper an extra day to raise help, if it is coming.”

“James,” she said. “Are all men false at heart?”

“No,” he said. “Most men are honorable.”

There was no room in Mary’s undersized cot, so Prudence slept in the bed with James, once more with her body against his. He put his arms around her but didn’t touch her intimately. She was glad he did not. She was confused already, and under his strong touch, his skin and clothing smelling of soap, his face freshly shaved, she would have given herself to him again. And that would only confuse her more.

James soon fell asleep, but Prudence’s own thoughts wouldn’t stop churning. To get her mind off Laka and her awful wailing when Mary had been wrenched from her arms, Prudence imagined what Knapp would do, worked through his stratagems for ensnaring them before they reached Boston.

But even supposing they reached Boston safely, what then?

She’d spent so much time working through what their enemies might do that she’d given little thought to how James intended to bring justice to Knapp and Fitz-Simmons. And her brother-in-law, too, she thought gloomily. Anne would be destroyed.

Why would the reverend do it? He was a Godly man, one of the most prominent and honored ministers in New England. Perhaps only Increase Mather was more respected. And Stone received a just income from the congregation. He had no need of money. Knapp and Fitz-Simmons, yes; they had emerged from the war with newfound wealth and power, and now she knew how they’d done it. But Reverend Stone?

But what other explanation could she find for him poisoning Peter Church? There was nobody else in the house with the means or the motive. Neither Knapp nor Fitz-Simmons had access to the house or its food supplies. Not to mention that whoever did it must have poisoned a single meal at a time, not the entire food stock of the family, because nobody else had fallen ill.

Suddenly, she knew.

Prudence shook James. “Wake up. I know.”

“Hmm? What?” He sounded groggy, not yet fully awake, but he sat up, yawning. “What do you know?”

“I know how Peter was poisoned.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
O
NE

Every muscle in James’s body tensed as the ship eased into Boston Harbor. He half expected to see Samuel Knapp at the head of an armed militia, waiting to slap him in irons and carry him swiftly to the gallows. That was if the little beast didn’t simply gun James down as soon as he set foot on the wharfs. But there was no suspicious gathering along the waterfront, only men about their work.

The captain, a one-eyed man named Blunt, gave the orders to brail up the gaff mainsail to cut their speed as they maneuvered through the taller ships at anchor.

Blunt’s was a stout little dogger with a square rig on the mainmast and a long bowsprit out front, displacing perhaps a dozen tons. It had a crew of six and had been readying to head out to Georges Bank for an extended fishing trip when James hired her to take a detour south to Boston. The ship was small enough to hide among the larger pinnaces and brigantines in the harbor, yet not so small so as to look out of place coming in off the open sea.

It had been three nights and four days since Tictok had left them north of Haverhill and only two weeks since James had first eased into Boston harbor aboard the
Vigilant
with Peter Church. Yet so much had changed.

“Do you have enough to pay Blunt the rest of your debt?” Prudence asked. She held Mary in her arms, the girl staring wide-eyed at the town rising above them.

Before leaving Gloucester, Prudence had dyed her raven hair with henna, leaving it a reddish auburn. Such disguises were readily available among the smugglers of Cape Ann. With her hood up and most of her hair covered with a head rail, dressed in different clothing, and carrying a child, he doubted she’d be recognized if she kept her eyes averted. James was another story—he expected that there were men in Boston with his description in their heads and a few pieces of silver in their filthy palms.

“Aye, and two shillings to spare,” he said.

A few minutes later, when they’d paid Blunt and the dogger had been tied against the pier, James and Prudence came warily down the gangplank. Still nothing to arouse suspicion. James forced the tension from his body as he led Prudence and her child off the pier to solid ground.

Mary buried her head in her mother’s shoulder. She wouldn’t yet talk to James, but she had succumbed to Prudence’s patience and tender caresses. Her English was improving day by day. He guessed she would forget her Abenaki and Nipmuk just as quickly, which was a shame.

“You’re sure the General Court will be in session?” he asked Prudence. “It is still Christmastide.”

“Popery and pagan festivals do not put aside the General Court. The committee of land and deeds meets on the final Friday of the month, whether the governor is present or not.”

“With good fortune, Governor Leverett will have returned from Hartford. If not, if the deputy governor is holding court in his stead, it will be a good sight more difficult. Fitz-Simmons will not surrender without a fight.”

“Be careful, James.”

“I am a very careful man.”

“You won’t confront them alone. You must not.”

“I will do my duty to my sovereign. If Cooper has fallen, or is false, I’ll have no other choice.”

She opened her mouth as if she were going to argue, but then she nodded. “You do your duty, and I shall do mine.”

They looked at each other for a long moment, then Prudence glanced around, as if afraid of prying eyes, before leaning in to kiss him quickly on the mouth. When she came away, she was blushing in a way that was all the more endearing.

Holding Mary in her cloak, Prudence made her way swiftly up the dirt alleyway into Boston Town, toward her home. When she was out of sight, James gathered himself and moved down the muddy alley that led to the shanties, fishmongers, and alehouses along the waterfront. Now that the coast had thawed with the shift in the weather, it smelled damp, of rotting piers and fish guts.

The Windlass and Anchor was a disreputable-looking place, the green paint on the door battered and flaking, the windows few and tiny. Greasy smoke trailed up from the chimney, and two bearded fellows with bad teeth stood out front with tankards of grog in hand. They eyed him through narrowed eyes, as if sizing him up for a quick knockdown and purse grab.

James returned a steely gaze and swept back his cloak to show his dagger, now at his belt. The men stepped aside and let him in.

The interior was dark, smoky, and cramped. It smelled of cheap pipe smoke and stale body odor. There were furtive glances from the sailors and stevedores crowding around tables, but as soon as they got a good look at him they turned back to their business, which seemed to be dice and cards. Those men out front, he realized, had not been considering robbing him. They were lookouts, ready to give the warning should the city watch of Boston come aiming to crack down on gambling.

You couldn’t turn seafaring types into good Puritans—that much was universally true. Although James noted, looking around, that other constant of such places—women showing too much skin and too much interest in strange men—was notably absent from the Windlass and Anchor.

“You have a sharp look about you, friend,” a man said in a low voice.

James turned, resisting the urge to snatch out his dagger. A short man with a piercing gaze and blackened teeth grinned up at him from the rough chair in which he slouched.

“Perhaps you are searching for something,” the man continued. “Company, perchance, in this dark place. The winter nights are long and cold.”

Ah, here it was. They kept the women in the back rooms, out of sight of the enforcers of morality. You could sweep cards into your cloak quickly enough, palm your dice and coins, but hiding women was another matter. That men still managed to smuggle in and hide strumpets in this dangerous corner of Christendom must have taken imagination. But he supposed the rewards equaled the risks.

“No. I come for ale and a pipe. Nothing more.”

“I see.” The man sounded disappointed.

James was fighting his own disappointment. There was no sign of Cooper, or of Joseph McMurdle, the Scotsman who was head of His Majesty’s service in New York. Assuming James could recognize the man—it had been several years now.

That meant he was alone. He grabbed an empty chair and dragged it into the corner farthest from the hearth. There, he hoped to stay unnoticed for a stretch while he turned over matters in his head. Better to save his last few precious coins than waste them in a place such as this. But the barman found him at once, and shortly he ended up changing one of his last two shillings for small coins and ended up with a tankard of beer.

The weaselly fellow with the bad teeth hadn’t stopped watching him. A few minutes later, the man came up, grinning, and stood there while James stared off in the other direction.

“Well, then?” James asked sharply at last, without turning. “What do you want, man?”

“She’s a pretty half-breed lady from Martinique. Good teeth and a nice bottom.”

“I don’t want your confounded, poxy whore. Now leave me alone.”

The man’s grin spread. “Why, Master Bailey, I’d heard you were a man of healthy appetites.”

The fellow had put him off his guard, and James whipped his head around at the sound of his name before he recognized the feint for what it was. He smoothed over his face, but too late.

“I don’t know that name. My name is Clyde.”

“I thought it was you. Quickly, now. Your friends are waiting in the back room.”

“Friends?”

“From New York. Come, there are others watching this place.”

James rose to his feet and followed the man toward the back door. The man winked at one of the tables of dice players, and the men sneered at James with knowing looks and lewd suggestions. One man cupped a hand and thrust his index finger in and out. Laughter.

James didn’t trust the shifty man who led him out of the room, so he kept his hand inside his cloak as he followed him down a hallway and then up a set of rotting, half-broken stairs. If this was a trap, if they’d tortured Cooper and now meant to murder James in a back room, he swore he’d sell his life dearly. First the pistols, then the knife.

The man threw open the door. There, to James’s surprise, was a comely young mulatto woman. She wore kohl around her eyes and a beeswax lipstick so scarlet that it gave her mouth a wide, obscene appearance.

“What the devil?” he started to say, turning toward the shifty fellow to demand he be let back downstairs.

Laughter came from the far corner of the room. Two men sat on a long sea trunk holding pistols, which they were swabbing out and cleaning. One was Cooper. The other, he recognized after a moment, was McMurdle.

“Why, you ruddy scoundrels,” James said, but he was delighted.

The two men shook his hand heartily, and Cooper slapped him on the back. James glanced again at the woman.

“That is Marianne,” Cooper said.

“Pleased to meet you,
monsieur,
” she said in a French-tinged accent and held her hand out in the dainty fashion of a fine lady.

“She isn’t a whore,” McMurdle added quickly.

“Not when I can help matters, no,” she said.

McMurdle explained. Marianne was a spy in the West Indies, where England had long cast a covetous eye on rich colonies like Guadelupe and Martinique. They were more valuable, in their way, than the whole of New England. And the French were notoriously loose-lipped when it came to boasting to beautiful women, which Marianne most assuredly was.

The shorter man with the bad teeth was named Vandermeer, a Dutchman with an English mother, who worked carrying goods up the Hudson River between Manhattan and Fort Frederick and spying on the Dutch towns along the way. Now that New York was firmly in English control yet again, his was a sleepy post.

Cooper told of his own adventures. After escaping the woods, he’d nearly been ensnared on the road south from Springfield. Only a warning from a friend when he reached Windsor told him that riders were searching for him on the road ahead. His friend loaned him a horse, and Cooper bypassed the highway and arrived in Hartford, where he made contact with their other spy. This was an old man named Patterson, who provided resupply and information but nothing more. Cooper was almost to New York when two men tried to ride him down. They’d chased him for nearly twenty miles before he came into Dutch country, and here the two men giving pursuit had turned around. From there, it was a simple matter of making contact with McMurdle in Manhattan and arranging for a return to Boston.

As Cooper told his story, and James in turn relayed his own tale of time among the Abenaki, Marianne scooted the men from the sea trunk and changed her clothing, seemingly unashamed to be doing so in front of four men. She stripped out of her petticoats until she stood in her small clothes, then took a long linen strip and used it to bind her breasts flat. She pulled on a man’s shirt, a jerkin, breeches, and a cloak. She pinned her hair up and pulled a cap over it. Finally, she used a rag to wipe the face paint away, and with a change to her posture she had somehow transitioned from a beautiful woman to a dusky, smooth-faced young man.

If one got too close, or spotted her in daylight, one would see through the ruse. But at night, she could pass for a fifth man.

Even so, five people did not seem enough to confront Knapp and Fitz-Simmons as they met with the General Court. James had hoped for eight, maybe even a dozen men in total, but according to McMurdle, the old New Amsterdam spy apparatus had been almost completely dismantled. The Dutch were more concerned with their profits than with resuming control of the colony, and England had proven happy to continue the existing trade. As a result, the other men in His Majesty’s service had been sent to Quebec, Florida, the West Indies, even Mexico. They’d been fortunate in their timing as Marianne’s ship was in port, resupplied and ready to sail. Otherwise, they’d have been only four.

“It took little persuading for Captain Dupont to stop in Boston instead of sailing back to France,” Marianne said. “The justification to his crew is to add furs to the indigo we’re smuggling from Martinique back to England, but really it was because I wanted to see Boston on a whim. Or so Dupont believes.”

Marianne had a charming accent, and McMurdle seemed enamored of her. Indeed, James had caught his old confederate stealing glances at the young woman while she dressed. Something Cooper had said about the operation in Manhattan caught James’s attention.

“Then there were only the two of you in the whole of New York?” he asked.

“Soon to be only one,” McMurdle said. “Vandermeer will stay. Marianne and I will continue north to Quebec. The Crown has designs on Canada.”

James had his doubts about McMurdle’s motives. It took so long for information to pass back and forth across the ocean that agents of the Crown had a certain autonomy, following their own instincts until called on for specific purposes. Yet how much of this Quebec scheme was in service of the Crown, and how much in service of a beautiful woman? Rather more of the latter than the former, James suspected.

“I am glad to hear it,” James said, “but there are other reasons to maintain strength in New York besides the Dutch. It’s a den of smuggling. Ships of every nation pass through her port. And a good deal of information comes with it.”

“Aye, if you care for that sort of tedious business. No adventure, no excitement.”

A little less excitement sounded like a welcome change at the moment, James thought. Still, he was captain of these men until given instructions to the contrary, and he wanted McMurdle in Manhattan until he had a chance to return to London to clarify. The man wouldn’t like the orders; James determined to wait until this business was finished before delivering them.

“It must be nigh on sunset,” James said. “You have a sword for me too? Good. Let’s get prepared.”

“Clarify your intentions,” Cooper said.

“The moment it’s dark, we move on the General Court.”

A worried look passed over the man’s face. “And then?”

“And then I intend to arrest the seditious government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”