“ ’ Tis not a conviction I’d like to try to get in court,” mused Thaxter, scribbling away in his memorandum-book.
“Possibly not,” Coldstone agreed. “Yet until you produce an eyewitness of the scene described who has provably no connection with either the Sons of Liberty or any of Boston’s less political smuggling rings, I fear that we are left with the facts as they stand and with no alternative to Mr. Wingate’s story. Mr. Knox’s young brother, I understand, has been in Cambridge this past week, only returning on Sunday—not that his testimony would serve to acquit Mr. Knox, unless they slept in the same room, and even then might not be believed.”
“Surely,” said Thaxter after a pause, “if Cottrell were assaulted and murdered a dozen yards from the Governor’s stables, someone would have heard an outcry? Or seen him lying there? How far from the stable gate was the body discovered?”
“About twenty feet from where Governor’s Alley ends in Rawson’s Lane,” said Coldstone. “Sir Jonathan lay facedown in frozen mud and had clearly been dead for many hours. His flesh was quite cold. Myself, I would have said that he died of the cold rather than of the beating. His extremities were nearly purple with it despite gloves and boots, and the abrasions on his face did not suggest blows hard enough to be fatal. Yet he had clearly been thrashed: a fate often incurred by men who attempt the virtue of other men’s sweethearts.”
“Thrashed, yes,” said Abigail softly. “Murdered—not so often. Even what could be construed as an attempt at rape is more likely to result in a man’s cork being drawn than his life ended—and it seems to me that Miss Fluckner herself took a hand in that.”
Coldstone’s seraph lips twitched in something perilously like a grin. “It’s true that I’ve seldom seen so comprehensive a ‘mouse,’ as the street-urchins call it. Yet a man may set out to thrash another and leave him lying alive in the mud, and his victim may still be dead of cold in the morning.”
“Who found him?” asked Thaxter.
“Governor Hutchinson’s stable boys, when they opened the mews gates. They thought he might have been a late-departing guest from the previous night, ran to him and turned him over, and recognized him at once. The coachman, Mr. Sellon, ordered him brought into the coach-house, hoping against hope that he might be revived with brandy by the tack-room fire. He had, of course, been long dead, though owing to the extreme cold he was not stiff. Sellon sent for Governor Hutchinson, who immediately sent for us.”
“And you just as immediately arrested Mr. Knox?” concluded Abigail.
“When a man is killed,” replied Coldstone primly, “it is difficult to keep one’s mind from leaping back to the phrase, I will kill you like a dog. The stablemen all informed me of Mr. Knox’s threat the moment I arrived, and seemed to take Knox’s guilt as a given, particularly as Miss Fluckner had been at the ball the previous night, and word had gone around that the engagement was to have been announced.”
Abigail said, “Hmmm,” and Lieutenant Coldstone poured her out another cup of coffee. In the hall outside the doorway, the voices of the cubbyhole’s two other occupants, Stevenson and Barclay, could be heard, protesting Sergeant Muldoon’s dogged insistence that himself was after talking with a couple of mainland folks over Sir Jonathan’s murder—
“Rot, Sergeant, I’ll bet he’s got a woman in there.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Bet you he’s snabbled all the tea and the sugar, too—”
Thaxter asked, “When did the last guests leave?”
“Shortly after two. The alley is a narrow one, but Rawson’s Lane is barely wider, unpaved, and in nasty condition this time of year. When sent for, the carriages went around by School Street to the mansion’s front door, so the body could have been lying where it was found as early as nine or ten, when the latest arrivals came in. At that time the lanterns around the gate were taken in and the alley would have thenceforth been quite dark.”
“And I take it the tavern frequented by the footmen and grooms is in School Street rather than Rawson’s Lane?”
The corner of Coldstone’s mouth twitched again at her deduction that such a thing existed, and he replied, “The Spancel, yes. I have made arrangements to question the coachmen and footmen of all the guests over the next few days, but I assume that had any encountered Sir Jonathan’s body that night they would have notified Mr. Sellon, if no one else. Sir Jonathan was clothed as he had been that morning at the wharves, and his watch, his silver penknife, and English coin to the value of nearly ten pounds were found on his person. The only things missing were his gold signet ring and the memorandum-book that he usually carried . . . a book that contained his findings here in Boston regarding smuggling and the Sons of Liberty, and whatever notes he may have taken while in Maine.”
Abigail glanced up again at that, and the dark gaze that met hers was impassive, watching her take in the implications of this fact. But after turning the whole of what she had heard over in her mind, she said, “It began to get light at five. Is seven hours sufficient for a man’s body to turn quite cold? When my Grandpa Quincy died, I recall he was laid down on the cooling-bench for quite twenty-four hours. And at slaughtering-time on the farm, the pigs and calves are hung up for many hours before the heat goes out of the meat.”
Thaxter—a city boy—looked a trifle disconcerted at these matter-of-fact speculations on the logistics of mortality, but Coldstone nodded. “A small man like Sir Jonathan would cool more swiftly, I think, particularly on such a night. He cannot have encountered his killer much sooner than nine, or even in darkness the commotion of the beating would surely have been glimpsed at the far end of the lane by the latecomers.”
“Could he have been killed elsewhere?” suggested Thaxter hesitantly.
“The thought occurred to me,” said Coldstone. “But why? Why take the trouble to bring a beaten corpse, obviously murdered, to a place where it will be discovered, when with very little trouble it can be disposed of in the river or the harbor? In fact it did cross my mind that he might have been moved, because I saw no sign of postmortem lividity in the face or chest, but quite frankly, as cold as it was, I’m not sure there would have been any.”
Abigail turned her coffee-cup round in its saucer, seeing in her mind the towering, bulky shape of Thomas Fluckner, as she had seen him here and there about the streets of Boston during the few years that she and John had lived in the town. A bosom-bow of the Governor’s and the recipient of any number of favors from the Crown; a King’s Commissioner himself and a member of that elect, golden circle of merchants and Great Proprietors, who twenty years ago had induced the then-royal governor to give them all those acres of land in Maine and build forts against the Indians on it at public expense, in trade for a share in the profits. It was expected that any of Fluckner’s daughters would marry a Hutchinson or an Oliver, a Bowdoin or an Apthorp, and keep the lands that would be theirs within that privileged group.
Nobody would welcome a bookseller who read too many of his own books and printed up broadsheets decrying Crown monopolies in his basement.
“And nothing of where Sir Jonathan went after he rented this horse of Mr. Howell’s? If he rented a mount to ride to the ferry, which lies in that direction, he must surely have returned by sunset, when the town gates close, and after that he must have been in town somewhere, between sunset—say, six o’clock—and ten, which I think must be the latest he could have died. Where could he have ridden, if he took the Charles Town Ferry, in order to be back before the ferry ceased to operate?”
She glanced at Thaxter, who had relatives in Lynn. Her own knowledge of the territory north of Boston ended five or six feet on either side of the Salem Road.
The young man frowned doubtfully. “At this season, he might reach Cambridge.” He didn’t sound as if he thought it a likely possibility. “Horse and man would tire very quickly in cold like Saturday’s. Of course, the countryside is thickly settled up, you know. He may just have gone visiting—er—Well, he could have had
a sweetheart in any of a hundred farms . . .”
Coldstone moved his head a little, and for a moment, Abigail had the impression that he was about to crack his self-imposed calm and make some remark about the victim.
“Has he been in these parts before?” she asked. “Miss Fluckner indicated that he came down from Halifax late in December, but is this the first time he’s been in the colony? How would he have known how long to give himself, or where to go, if he took the ferry to the mainland Saturday?”
“Before Halifax, Sir Jonathan spent two years in Barbados,” replied Coldstone, in tones chillingly correct. “Prior to that he was about five years in Spain, upon the King’s business. Yet had he thought it worth his while, he would have learnt the ways of the countryside hereabouts quickly enough. And so might others have learnt where he was likely to go, so that they could close up their shops in good time and wait close to the ferry for his return.”
Abigail set down her coffee-cup with a clink. “To be sure, what does a man need to do to witness that he sought his bed at an honest hour because he felt poorly?”
“Cough now and then.” Coldstone folded his long-fingered hands upon his knee. “Which the guards assure me Mr. Knox has not once done in the thirty-some hours he has been in his cell.”
“I’m pleased to hear he’s feeling so much better,” responded Abigail promptly. Drat the man . . . “So to the regiment of problematical Mainers whose wives and sweethearts Sir Jonathan has spent the past ten days debauching, we might add any farmer or villager between here and Lynn, wives and sweethearts ditto—without coming anywhere near Sir Jonathan’s missing memorandum-book or Harry Knox’s unfortunate decision to get an unobserved night’s sleep.” She stepped down from the tall stool on which she’d sat and readjusted her scarves—the only outer garments of full-out protection against the weather that she’d been even slightly tempted to loosen the entire time she had been in the fort. “If you would be so good as to tell me, Lieutenant Coldstone, what it is that I and my husband and Harry’s friends need to discover in order to convince Colonel Leslie of Harry’s innocence, I would very much appreciate it. Because as it is, we’re put in the position of proving a negative, difficult even without the Colonel’s hopes that Mr. Knox may accuse others of sedition—in which he is not involved—in an effort to save his own skin, or Mr. Fluckner’s objections to seeing his daughter marry a man who is of no social use to him.”
Coldstone, who had risen when she did, stood before her for a moment without replying, without giving the slightest indication that he heard his two office-mates arguing with and harassing Sergeant Muldoon in the corridor, or the sharp clatter of weapons-drill in the parade-ground. Abigail wondered whether Harry could hear these camp-noises in his cell, and how long it would take him to read The Persian Wars, and whether this would distract his mind from the thought of the twenty minutes or so that it took a man to strangle, once he had been hoisted on the gallows.
She looked up at Coldstone’s face, cold as a marble angel’s. The servant of the King, whose job was defined by the crimson uniform he wore: first serve the King, then seek Justice . . .
Provided, as he had said, one could define the word.
What did he hear, or think about, as he lay at night in this dank brick fortress set in the midst of the ocean, waiting for word to come from his master about how to punish rebel colonists for defying the King’s commands?
At length he said, “If you would be so kind, m’am—What you can discover is who else might have seen Sir Jonathan after his debarking from the Hetty on Saturday morning, and who in Boston might also have wished to do him harm. Mr. Knox’s defense is based upon the proof of a negative and I cannot do anything about that, and for that I am sorry. However much I am dissatisfied with the case against Mr. Knox, Colonel Leslie finds little amiss in it. My superior officer, Major Salisbury, has instructed me to draw up an accusation. When the Incitatus arrives here from Jamaica next week, unless some new evidence is found, Mr. Knox will be taken to Halifax and tried before an Admiralty Court for conspiracy and treason.”
Six
John 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 husban
d 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.
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