A Marked Man aam-2

by Barbara Hamilton

  “Alice? Alisound?” Margaret Sandhayes shook her head. “Something with an A, or maybe it was Juliana. Something like that. The scandal was supposed to be quite nasty while it lasted, but these things never do last, you know. We were living in Bath at the time, and Mama did her best to keep the details from me, though I was quite old enough to hear them. But then, our family never did move in the highest circles, and poor Mama got all her gossip secondhand. I think it far more likely that whoever it was who waited for Sir Jonathan at the end of that alley on the night of the ball, he had a fresher grievance than poor Mr. What’s-His-Name and had not sailed two thousand miles in the dead of winter to appease it.”

  With this, Abigail was more than a little inclined to concur, particularly in light of what she knew about the behavior of men when confronted with preferment and privilege. John frequently derided the somewhat far-fetched premise of her favorite novel—Richardson’s Pamela—on the grounds that no man would put himself through the social contortions undergone by the sinister Mr. B—in pursuit of the blameless heroine, but lying in the curtained darkness of her bed listening to the wind howl, Abigail reflected that this was not really the point of the book. More telling than the interior wrestling-match between love and lust was the behavior of those whom Mr. B—coerced into complicity with his will: the parson who, needing a way to make a living in a country overcrowded with impoverished parsons, chose B—’s patronage over moral imperatives; the servants who would sooner assist their master in raping an unwilling girl rather than lose the only means of making their own livings.

  Would a man, confronted with the suicide of his beloved, risk his own livelihood—and the inevitable countervengeance of the King’s so-called justice—to commit murder when that royal justice had officially ignored what was, in effect, a moral rather than a legal offense? John’s powerful sense of duty had taken him away from her side tonight—and in her heart she prayed he wasn’t still out on the road between Salem and Haverhill somewhere, with the sleet flying about his ears. She could not imagine any respectable hero in a novel choosing his responsibility for making a living for his family—not to mention getting his client out of jail and making sure her children weren’t consigned to a cellar someplace—over staying on guard against an unspecified threat at home.

  Is it madness, that throws away ALL?

  The lives of the Christian martyrs—the tales of the ancient Romans—abounded in incidents of desperate selfimmolation, different in kind from the obsession of which the Reverend Cooper so often spoke. The Mark of the Beast that considers naught but his own desires . . .

  The dead King says to Hamlet, Leave thy mother to Heaven, before his son goes on to destroy himself, his beloved, his mother, and his best friend in the obsessive quest for vengeance, leaving his leaderless country to the mercy of a foreign usurper.

  Yet could Hamlet have turned aside, knowing what he knew?

  In the morning, head heavy with sleeplessness, Abigail did her marketing, then turned her steps toward the Old North Church, where young Robbie Newman let her into the little outbuilding that had been turned into a combination jail and hiding-place for Matt Brown and the Heavens Rejoice Miller. Sam had brought her up-to-date on the story that the two Mainers had been told, about how unsafe it was for them to leave Boston yet and how the Magpie—in reality safely berthed at Lynn—had fled back to Boothbay, with promises to return in a week or maybe two . . .

  In the meantime, the two fugitives had plenty to eat, ample gossip from every Son of Liberty with a few hours to spare, and enough seditious literature on hand to bring an empire down in flames. Abigail went over with them again every word and action of the deceased, either witnessed by the cousins or relayed to them by gossip: Had Cottrell ever spoken of a man named Toby Elkins? A woman named Sybilla Seaford? (As if any man would give a moment’s thought to a seduction eight years in the past . . .)

  She felt the nagging certainty that these men held the key to finding Cottrell’s killer, if she could but ask them the right question. Yet like a key mislaid—In a drawer? On a shelf?—it eluded her. Was there any woman in Boothbay that Cottrell was supposed to have seduced or insulted? Or the rumor of one?

  “Not even the rumor, m’am,” affirmed Miller. “Right from the first, he kept his nose indoors.”

  “Even Hilda Sturmur couldn’t get a rise out of him,” added Brown helpfully. “And she’s had every man around Penobscot Bay behind old Bingham’s barn.”

  “Bingham? The man Cottrell stayed with?”

  Both men nodded. “Hilda’s old Bingham’s milkmaid.”

  Brown added with a grin, “They say even Bingham’s bull turns tail in panic when he sees Hildy coming—” and got a sharp elbow in his side from the marginally more respectable Miller.

  “That is, no, m’am,” filled in Miller, and took a long pull of the cider Abigail had brought them. “Why seduce someone in the village when Hildy Sturmur was there and willing, and she was just beside herself not to manage him while he was there.”

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t have boasted of it—”

  “Oh, no, m’am. Hildy’s not that kind of girl.”

  Abigail blinked, wondering exactly what that kind of girl was considered to be, in Maine.

  “But she complained of him to my sister Levvy—”

  “Levi?”

  “Leviathan. Hildy complained to Levvy that Cottrell wouldn’t so much as look her in the eye. Most people think Hildy had her eye on that gold ring he wore on his pinky, though she never did manage to get it off him. Myself, I think it was just the challenge that she likes.”

  “Challenge,” said Brown wisely, “is not what Hildy Sturmur likes.”

  Maybe not, Abigail reflected, as she turned her steps homeward along the crowded wharves. But challenge was the farthest thing from what, under normal circumstances, any female would have faced, living in the same household as Sir Jonathan Cottrell.

  Was the man that frightened? she wondered, holding her cloak tight around her against the gray howl of the offshore wind. Frightened even in Maine, where he was reasonably certain Harry Knox would not have pursued him? Did that fear have anything to do with the telltale nail-holes in every door that communicated with the central hall of the Pear Tree House—doors bolted to confine someone or something in the central hall, as if in a pit?

  Was it fear of the disgruntled Mainers themselves that made him so radically change his habits? Or something—or someone—else?

  Twenty-two

  The note that awaited Abigail in the kitchen upon her return said simply,

  Mrs. Adams,

  I am at your service and will await your convenience at the garrison house attached to the South Battery.

  Lieutenant Rufus Dowling

  Surgeon, King’s 64th Foot

  He must have crossed—in weather like this!—as soon as ’twere light enough to do so. Guilty as she felt about abandoning poor Pattie yet again to doubled morning chores (“Don’t you dare do the beds or the dusting for me! I shall deal with them when I return if it means working ’til sunset!”), Abigail felt still more responsible for leaving that earnest young surgeon stranded in the garrison house at the foot of Fort Hill, particularly as the day was worsening again. She set the fish and the ducks she’d bought in the pantry-shed to stay cold, checked that Tommy was dry and firmly affixed to the sideboard, and that Charley hadn’t hidden any of Johnny’s belongings in any of his usual places, warned Pattie to keep a close watch against dangers unspecified, kissed both little boys, and set forth again, taking the long way to the small cluster of barrack huts so as to stop in Purchase Street and obtain the company of Sam’s servant-woman Surry. Though it was Abigail’s repeated contention that in America—unlike in England—a woman could walk anywhere unmolested, she drew the line at venturing into even a minor group of British soldiers alone.

  Fort Hill lay only a few hundred yards from Sam’s house, outside of Boston proper at the eastern end of that sprawled plot of o
pen ground that had once comprised the whole of the town’s Common Land. During the wars with France, batteries had been established to guard the harbor in case a French fleet came down from Canada. Now that the French were gone from Canada, the North Battery, in old Boston proper where Ship Street ran into Lynn Street, was scantly manned. The soldiers in charge of the guns there were ferried straight across from Castle Island for their watches and straight back, and observed with invisible zeal by the ruffians, idle prentices, and Sons of Liberty who frequented the wharves. The South Battery, more isolated on its hill outside the confines of the town, had a cluster of barrack huts surrounded by a palisade, so that the men charged with keeping the Sons of Liberty from stealing the thirty-five cannon in its gun park had at least someplace to sit on bitter spring days like this one. Even before the events of last December, as tensions mounted between the Crown and those who protested its interference in the colony’s government, the soldiers had learned to remain within the wooden palings on the hill’s east side. There were always loafers on the wharves along the Battery March, and should any untoward number of soldiers attempt to land on Rowe’s Wharf or Apthorp’s or any other close by, word would flash through the town with the speed of a heliograph, and an armed mob would be waiting before the invaders reached shore.

  Thus Abigail didn’t blame Lieutenant Dowling for taking the better part of valor and asking that she—a respectable married woman—venture into what constituted a miniature Army camp. The sentry on the gate glanced at her and the handsome, smiling black woman who walked at her heels, and pointed out the hut where Lieutenant Dowling waited.

  “Lieutenant Coldstone is well,” the young surgeon answered her first question, bringing up another chair to the fire of the rather grubby little office that the post commander relinquished to him. Abigail knew women—numbering Mrs. Fluckner and her friends among them—who’d have left Surry to wait outside in the cold. Though Lieutenant Dowling would not fetch a chair for a servant-woman, he raised no objection to her simply standing close to the fire. In fact, in the way of that class of Englishmen to which he, Lieutenant Coldstone, and Margaret Sandhayes all belonged, he simply did not appear to see her at all.

  He went on, “Per your request, m’am, I have kept information about his condition to the fewest possible hearers. Do you honestly think him in danger, even out at the camp?”

  “I scarcely know,” confessed Abigail. “I would have said, No, and assumed that the attempt upon his life was the work of some”—she hesitated, then went on smoothly—“of some traitor, perhaps, who had heard of his association with me. Did my own note—the one requesting a meeting in some place at his convenience—reach his office at the camp?”

  “It did, m’am. The hands were compared and are very like. Yet if you had baited a trap with the first, why send a second? Moreover, the Lieutenant insists upon your innocence.”

  “I appreciate his confidence.” Abigail smiled. “I had meant to bring some bread and jellies for him, but . . . Well, I would rather now be a little careful, who is seen giving food to whom.” And she told him of the events of Sunday night. “ ’ Tis the opinion of my medical friends that the death of Cottrell’s servant Fenton resembles in its symptoms the effects of the death-cap mushroom. My friends found it suspicious that there was no fever, nor were others in the Governor’s household sick with like symptoms.”

  “Poison?” Dowling frowned. “Why would anyone poison a servant?” Unspoken was the question, Why would anyone bother?

  “Why would anyone poison me or my family?” returned Abigail. She brought from her marketing basket the little packet of paper, carefully folded and sealed, that she had carried from the house. “Whatever this was, ’twas deadly enough to kill two mice almost on the spot. Dr. Warren was kind enough to conduct a postmortem on one of them, but all he could say was that he found neither corrosion nor internal bleeding. It has been a little mixed with the flour in the barrel,” she added, as Dowling tapped the contents of the crock out onto a dry saucer. “’Twas the darkest place I could find, of the half-mixed streaks.”

  “It seems to be vegetable.” The surgeon stirred it with the tip of his penknife, then carried it to the window’s light.

  “I was wondering,” said Abigail, following him, “if ’twere familiar to you from the West Indies?”

  Dowling bent his head close to the saucer, and sniffed, carefully. “By the color it looks a little like oleander,” he said at last. “Yes, it is grown in the Indies, in gardens; also in Italy, though it’s originally an Asian plant. A virulent poison.” He shook his head, sparse fair eyebrows tugging together. “I have known men to die from having spitted meat on its twigs to cook. Yet Sir Jonathan himself wasn’t poisoned, but beaten—by the look of the bruises on his head and shoulders—and left to die of cold.”

  “I would say,” said Abigail, “it might be because the killer feared Sir Jonathan would recognize him if he somehow introduced himself into Governor Hutchinson’s party that night. Or it may simply be that he had not the clothing, nor the manner, to pass himself off as someone who would be welcome in the Governor’s house. The merchants of the town all know one another, and might be quick to spot a stranger. Where were you stationed in the Indies, Lieutenant? And how long ago?”

  “I’ve been on post here six months.” He returned to the fire with her, and carefully wiped his penknife on a corner of his pocket-handkerchief, which he then knotted, as a reminder—Abigail assumed—not to do anything further with that cloth until it had been washed. A virulent poison indeed. “I was in Kingston four years.”

  “Did you ever hear of an actor in those parts named Palmer? Androcles Palmer?”

  “I saw him in The Jew of Malta, if he’s the man I’m thinking of.” The young man smiled at the recollection. “He played about six roles—all of them poisoned by the said Jew—and was one of the best things in the performance, which was shockingly bad . . . at least it seemed so to me, since I was seventeen years old and was used to Garrick and Woodford. He’s one of the men poor Coldstone has been seeking word of, isn’t he? I seem to recollect that he’s partner with a man named Blaylock—the fellow who did the Jew himself—and they tour the colonies every few years.”

  “Do you know anything of him?” Coldstone—and Revere, who had done militia service—had both told her how gossip about anything and everything would be handed round military posts, by men with too little to do and too much time to do it in. “To his credit or discredit?”

  “To his credit,” said Dowling, with a grin that made him seem even more boyish, “he was one of those actors who can change not only his makeup and wig, but his posture and voice and the way he walked. On stage I could tell by his stature ’twas the same man, but otherwise, he would go from a cringing slave to a bawling soldier to a pious nun. To his discredit, I understand the man is what my sisters call a thoroughly bad hat: a cheat at cards, they said on the post, and a thief of his partner’s share of the profits. Rumor had it that the only reason poor old Blaylock keeps with him is because he’s very good, and Blaylock, bless his ranting and his tears, is very bad. If they’ve parted company by this time, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Would rumor put it past him, to murder a man, if he were paid to do it?”

  “I don’t think so.” The young surgeon considered the matter. “I don’t know, really. It’s a hard thing to say of a man, you know? Especially one who’s not here to defend himself. My impression is that he would have to be very well-paid, and the murder a very safe one, for everyone said he’s the most arrant coward who walks the earth. I can’t see him thrashing Sir Jonathan, for instance.”

  He frowned into the pitiful fire. “Not that he wouldn’t walk off and leave him lying, I don’t believe—but I think that, given his choice, he would pick some other way to punish him. Beating a man and leaving him in an alleyway is . . . is only incidentally conducive to death, you know. Sir Jonathan would very likely have lived through a night less cold, for the cont
usions on him were all quite superficial.”

  They were what a man would have sustained, Abigail reflected uneasily as she made her way back toward Queen Street, who had been beaten up by the large and angry sweetheart of a woman he’d insulted. Only the offended sweetheart had been busy that night, printing up the broadsides at present lodged in her attic, and Paul Revere’s, and a dozen others in the town—broadsides calling all men of courage to be prepared to stand against the tyranny of the Crown. Not an argument one could present in one’s own defense.

  “Like as not the wretched actor’s halfway to New York by this time,” muttered Abigail. “And will be on his way back to the West Indies, or to London, by the time a letter reaches the proper authorities.”

  “I don’t know about proper authorities, m’am,” said Surry, pacing calmly along a half step to Abigail’s rear. “But Mr. Sam’s had the word out since last Wednesday, when Dr. Warren first said that that poor manservant had been poisoned by this Palmer, and them friends of his travel faster than any postrider in New England. If Palmer’s above the ground, they’ll find him.”

  “How, among all the men in New England?”

  They paused by the gate of Sam’s dwelling; Bess’s voice could be heard from the yard, singing a rather disreputable sailor’s song with her daughter Hannah. Surry smiled. “Among all the honest men in New England, they’d have a problem, m’am,” she agreed. “That actor fellow might be able to pass himself off as a Turk or a nun or a friendly fellow that’s safe to have a meal with, for a short time. But low blood and a low mind is going to come out, sooner or later, and I’m willing to bet you, acting is all the man can do. The weather bein’ what it is, we know he’s not took ship for England because nobody’s took ship for England. Which means he’s on his way to New York or Philadelphia, because that’s the only place he’ll find work, unless he’s set on livin’ off this Mrs. Cherne—whatever her real name is—that Mr. Sam said was payin’ Palmer’s bills at the Horn Spoon. The Sons’ll find him, m’am. Don’t you worry about that. There aren’t that many places an actor can be. And then you bet they’ll ask him who was the one who paid him to make sure Mr. Fenton wasn’t with his master when his master come home from Maine. And they’ll ask him so he’ll fall all over hisself to answer.”