A Marked Man aam-2

by Barbara Hamilton

  She frowned and halted, the wind lashing the heavy folds of her cloak. “Mr. Thaxter . . .”

  Absorbed in his own thoughts, he’d gone on a few steps and now turned back hastily. “M’am?”

  “There are no theaters in Boston: there never have been.”

  He missed her point. “No, m’am, of course not—”

  “Then what are actors from Bridgetown doing here?”

  Thirteen

  John was home when she and Thaxter reached the house chilled and tired from a day’s long ride and out of temper that Abigail had not been there to greet him. It wasn’t until supper was over that he recovered his good humor enough to relate the facts, as he’d gathered them, of his case in Haverhill: Mary Teasel’s prickly independence of spirit that had alienated most of the men who would sit on her jury, Ham Teasel’s irruption into the local inn one night to seize John by his coat-lapels and promise him a beating out of hand if he continued to meddle in what ain’t your business.

  “Good Heavens, John, what did you do?” Abigail asked, alarmed, and John turned a little pink in the lamplight.

  “Oh, just leaned to the side to put him off balance and hooked his foot.” For all his verbal pyrotechnics when out of temper, John was not a violent man, and she could tell that the thought of something that even came close to a tavern-brawl scratched his touchy dignity. “By the time he got to his feet again the innkeeper’s brother and nephews were on him and put him outside, but I shall have to watch myself, when I go back up for the trial at the end of the month.”

  Still, with one thing and another, it was breakfast the following morning—mellowed with the fresh bread that she’d tucked into the oven just before bed—before he asked after the events of her week and heard what Matthias Brown and the Heavens Rejoice Miller had had to say about Sir Jonathan’s activities on his return from Maine. “That note that was waiting for me when I came in yesterday evening—when you, sir, were so high-handed as to suggest that my wifely duties ranked above the call of my country’s need—”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  She mouthed a kiss at him. “Well, the note was from Lieutenant Coldstone, saying he’s arranged to meet Thurlow Apthorp at four this afternoon at the Pear Tree House”—she produced the communication from her apron pocket—“and would the both of us care to join them there and see what there is to be seen?”

  “Good Lord, woman, why didn’t you speak of this last night?”

  She paused with raised eyebrows in the act of handing Johnny his coat—at six, the boy refused all assistance in dressing and preparing himself for school—and returned, “Because I know better than to poke at a snarling bear, sir, for fear of getting my hand bit.” Johnny also had reached the age of refusing maternal kisses as “babyish,” so waited patiently while she kissed Nabby and straightened the girl’s cap and cloak, then held out his hand to be gravely shaken by both his parents.

  “Acquit yourself well at school, son,” instructed John.

  “And keep your sister’s hand,” Abigail added, though she knew her son would dispense with this badge of infancy the moment he and Nabby were out of sight of the front door. Besides, Nabby would fall back to walk with her friends, and Johnny dash ahead to run with his.

  But knowing how busy were the town’s ice-slick streets in the first flush of daybreak, she couldn’t leave the words unsaid.

  As soon as the children were out of the kitchen, John rose from his chair and put both arms around Abigail’s waist from behind. “I shall bite you, m’am, and to good purpose.” Smiling, she held up her hand to him to let him do so, stepping apart from him with the skill of long practice as Charley came charging into the room, with Pattie—leading Tommy—at his heels.

  John helped her with the dishes, then retired to his study when Thaxter arrived, to sort through the conflicting stories and rumors about the conduct of the Teasels, and parse out what should be done about the half dozen other Essex County cases that would be decided at the same session. Only after the kitchen was clean, and Abigail had swept and mopped and dusted abovestairs—not that any house could be kept clean of soot-smuts and the smell of smoke, in the shut-up months of winter—and sent off a note via Pattie to Dr. Warren and another to Paul Revere, did she return to her husband’s study, to finish her report on what she had put together of Sir Jonathan’s nature and activities.

  “According to our fine lads from Maine, Cottrell kept himself much to himself while he was there,” she said. “He went once to Georgetown Island, to confer with Mr. Fluckner’s agent there, but he habitually went about with a couple of Mr. Bingham’s hired men for escort. Eli Putnam—who, Mr. Revere tells me, is in hiding with Ezra Logan out on Hog Island—has further reported that there wasn’t the smallest whisper of scandal about Cottrell while he was there. Evidently either he didn’t fancy the ladies of Maine, or they didn’t fancy him.”

  “It doesn’t sound like that’s ever stopped him before,” sniffed John.

  “Perhaps they weren’t helpless enough. Or maybe the black eye Miss Fluckner gave him served him as a reminder every morning when he looked in the mirror.”

  “Hmm.” John settled back in his chair and with his penknife scraped a thin paring from the edge of his quill-tip to adjust the flow of the ink. “And nothing from Miss Fluckner herself?”

  “A quite remarkable list of every dance that was played at His Excellency’s ball that night, the order in which they were played, and the men Miss Fluckner danced with, delivered yesterday by Philomela. Mrs. Sandhayes’s tally of who was in the cardroom when—if the woman keeps count of other peoples’ aces the way she recalls who was present around the table, she must be an absolute demon at vignt-et-un—is rather less complete, I gather because she had promised not to let Miss Fluckner alone to face Sir Jonathan and kept returning to her side.”

  “Little realizing that neither had a thing to worry about,” muttered John, “because the guest of honor had the best of all possible reasons for being late to his own ball. Has a vessel come in to take Harry to Halifax yet?”

  “Not yet.” Abigail prodded the study fire grimly and hung the poker back on its hook at the side of the grate. “Not in weather like this. John—Mr. Fenton spoke yesterday of seeing some actors who had been in Bridgetown at the same time as Sir Jonathan here in Boston. Does that sound as odd to you as it does to me? What would actors be doing in Boston?”

  “On their way to Halifax, perhaps?”

  “But there’s nothing in Halifax. Certainly not a theater. Only the shipyard and some troops and the local fishermen, who wouldn’t lay out half a copper to see the Antichrist defeated on Judgment Day. The last few weeks of February—before Cottrell left and Mr. Fenton took sick—were extremely cold but quite clear. They would not have been forced to put up here because of bad weather. Would not actors have gone rather to New York or Philadelphia?”

  “You’re right.” John laid down his pen. “ ’ Tis odd. I’ll be at the Green Dragon tonight”—he spoke the name of the tavern where the Sons of Liberty often met in the evening, sometimes only to drink ale and talk politics in the long upper room, sometimes for darker purposes—“I’ll ask Sam and Revere if they can find out who these men were, and when they left town. Did Fenton speak to them, did he say?”

  Abigail shook her head. “It didn’t strike me as curious until after I’d left him. But I think he’d be agreeable, for me to see him again.”

  “Do that,” said John. “Ask him when he saw them—it has to have been sometime before he took sick on the twentyfourth—and if he spoke to them. God knows, Sam has informants all along the waterfront, and if there’s a tavern-keeper on the docks that’s a Loyalist, I’ll—I’ll leave you and marry him. Sam can learn, quick enough, if these actors were still in Boston on the fifth. ’Twill give me something to say to him when he begins to pester me about what we’re to do to keep young Knox from being sent to the gallows.”

  By dint of concentrated exertion, Abigail had the beds ma
de, at least some of the mending done, and dinner ready at three when Nabby and Johnny came in from school and John emerged, ink-boltered and cranky, from his study. Thanks to Abigail’s message to Revere, when Lieutenant Coldstone knocked at their door promptly at four, he was followed by a gaggle of stevedores and layabouts who presumably had instructions to keep freelance patriots from molesting him and Sergeant Muldoon. Coldstone looked as annoyed about this as Johnny did when Abigail told him to hold his sister’s hand, but the last thing anybody needed at this point, Abigail reasoned, was for a British officer to be beaten up in the street.

  The impromptu bodyguard fell back when she and John, cloaked and scarfed to the eyes, emerged from their front door, but she was conscious of them trailing at a distance as they followed Treamount Street to the Common.

  Thurlow Apthorp—a youngish man whose name Abigail recognized as connected with real estate speculation both here and in the countryside around Cambridge—met them on the ill-graveled drive. “I sent word to Mr. Elkins—both here and at his accommodation address—of your request to see the house, sir.” He bowed to Coldstone, then, upon the officer’s introductions, shook hands with John and bowed over Abigail’s hand. “It is Mr. Elkins who has leased the house, for a year at fifty shillings the quarter. He gave me to understand that he travels a good deal, and there would be long periods when he would be away and the house locked up.”

  As they walked up the drive, Abigail reflected upon how Apthorp—a scion of the great merchant family—simply ignored Sergeant Muldoon, as he would have ignored one of Thomas Fluckner’s footmen, or a tree-stump if one had happened to be near the place where they met. Like they were just faces in a painting, Mr. Fenton had said of his master’s treatment of himself, of servants, of the workers at inns . . .

  Of utterly no account.

  What had Cottrell made of the rough and grubby Matt Brown cornering him at the local tavern in Maine and threatening him with mayhem, not about a woman—which Cottrell was clearly used to—but about the land that was the only thing these men and their families had? Had he written to Hutchinson about that confrontation? To anyone?

  Was that something that he considered simply part of the cost of getting ahead in the world, along with informing on smugglers not useful to his interests, putting men off their farms, and paying off the families of girls he’d seduced?

  He was what he was, Fenton had said, with the same resignation Abigail had schooled herself to feel about her mother’s blindness where her brother was concerned. Let me be that I am, and do not seek to alter me.

  The house smelled damp and faintly moldy. After the wind outside, the atmosphere within felt heavy and still. A trace of smoke seemed to cling to the walls, but nothing like the stuffy reek of a house that has had candles and fires burned in it day in, day out since November. “Who is this Mr. Elkins?” John asked, as Thurlow Apthorp led them into the wide central hallway—an open well up to the second floor in the English fashion, and impossible to heat—and thence right into a small but handsomely furnished drawing room.

  “A London gentleman, well-off it seems, seeking to establish trading connections here in Boston.” Apthorp shook his head. “Myself, I think the man’s a fool. After what happened with the tea-ships, this town will be fortunate if the King doesn’t close the port entirely to teach its more violent spirits a much-needed lesson.”

  “Did you tell him so?” inquired Coldstone.

  “I did. He only shrugged, and said he’d take the house in any case, and have a look about. I’d have thought—” He frowned. “I’d have thought there was something smoky about the fellow—a French agent, maybe—except he had letters of introduction from half the planters in Bridgetown, men my uncle has had dealings with for years.”

  “Bridgetown in Barbados?”

  Abigail’s glance touched John’s, then Coldstone’s, as the young officer asked the question. Like them, she felt herself come alert, as if at the sound of a foot on the stair of a dark house reputed empty.

  Unaware of this quick and silent communion Apthorp nodded and led the way into the dining room. “This is the only room he had furnished up properly. Even the bedroom’s got merely the bed in it, and a washstand . . .” The men passed through the length of the drawing room after him. Abigail lingered for a moment in the doorway to the central hall, wondering what it was that she smelled—or almost smelled—in the place. The trace—the thinnest whisper—of mortal sickness: vomit and blood-laced human waste. She looked around her at the double-high room, eerie with curtaining shadows. The doors on either side of the hall opened into chambers whose windows were shuttered, leaving the hall itself drowned in dimness, as if the gloom had settled like water into its lower half. A wide stair rose straight along one wall to a sort of gallery above, off which doorways opened into other chambers. These, unshuttered, admitted the day’s gray pallor secondhand into the upper portion of the hall. A window above the door itself shed some light, but the effect was depressing and rather disconcerting, as if someone had read a book on the fashions that the English preferred in their houses without thinking through what would be needed to make the design livable here in another land. If one shut those upstairs doors, it would turn the whole of this hall into a gloomy pit.

  “. . . wanted a place to meet with gentlemen—in the timber trade, I believe he said,” she heard Apthorp’s rather light voice echo from the dining room. “But I never heard of him doing it . . .”

  Abigail knelt for a closer look at the carpet. English, with a looped pile, and probably thirty shillings. It showed a little wear and some caked mud, as far as she could tell in the dingy gloom. But there was no sign that a man had died upon it—something which she knew would be difficult to hide. The oak floor elsewhere in the hall was clean as if recently mopped.

  She got to her feet as the men reentered through the door at the back of the hall and followed them into the unfurnished parlor and the bare-shelved library on the left side of the front door. “What did Mr. Elkins look like?” she asked, and Apthorp frowned.

  “An average sort of young chap,” he said at length.

  Abigail bit her lip to keep from saying, Can you be less specific? and Lieutenant Coldstone—evidently long used to winkling information from those not used to describing others—inquired, “Thin rather than fat?”

  “Oh, thin, I should say.”

  “Tall rather than short?”

  “Tall,” said Apthorp promptly, though at an inch or so under her own height, Abigail reflected, the man would probably describe Lieutenant Coldstone as tall . . .

  “My height?”

  Apthorp’s frown deepened. He’d clearly never even thought about it. “I should say so, yes.”

  “Taller?”

  “Maybe a little taller—”

  “Or shorter?”

  “A trifle.”

  “Dark or fair?”

  “Fair. Well, his hair was always powdered, you know. Dark brows, I think.”

  “Dark eyes or light?”

  “Light.”

  Except for the difference in the height he had just described Sir Jonathan Cottrell, or Lieutenant Coldstone, or Dr. Joseph Warren, or the Heavens Rejoice Miller for that matter if one wanted to stretch the point. Abigail followed the men up the stairs. “If you thought to yourself what a fool Mr. Elkins was being for proposing to set up as a merchant,” she said, “he must have rented the house later than December.”

  “Seventh of January,” said Apthorp. “He arrived on the Lady Bishop, from Bridgetown. Myself, if ’tweren’t for the cost of the thing, I’d have said—Well . . .” He glanced apologetically at Abigail.

  Abigail sighed inwardly, and said, “Excuse me just one moment, gentlemen, I seem to have mislaid my handkerchief. Please do go on . . .” She stepped out of the bedchamber into which he’d led them—the only one furnished in the house, and that, as he’d said, only with a washstand and an uncurtained bed. She heard their voices murmur as she moved about the hollow sq
uare of hall at the top of the stairs—like a viewing-gallery of the hall below—off which all the bedchambers opened, putting her head through each door in turn. The empty rooms smelled strongly of damp plaster and mold. Not even the smell of mice, nor their furtive scurry. Clearly, no one had had anything resembling food in this place for years.

  As Apthorp showed them up into the attics, John fell back to her side to whisper, “His private theory was that it was the sort of thing a very wealthy man might rent in which to rendezvous with a mistress.”

  “Catch me, John, I think I’m going to faint with shock.”

  “Any New Englander—and I don’t care how rich he is—would faint with shock at the thought of paying fifty shillings the quarter for a house this size in which to meet a woman now and then, when he could get a perfectly serviceable room and bed at the Queen of Argyll down by the wharves for ten-pence for the evening with the woman thrown in gratis.”

  “Then our Mr. Elkins was clearly willing to pay the difference for one thing that he would have here, that he would not have at the Queen of Argyll.”

  John nodded, as they emerged into the dense gloom of the attic, empty and icy and echoing as Apthorp, Coldstone, and Muldoon walked its length with candles held high and showing nothing but last summer’s cobwebs. “Solitude,” he agreed.

  Fourteen