Abigail knew Surry was right about that. Heaven only knew what the slave-woman—the sole remaining fragment, along with the house itself, of the patrimony that Old Deacon Adams had left his brilliant, scheming son—thought of the Sons of Liberty, in her heart.
Bess, when she came to the gate at the sound of Surry’s voice, understood Abigail’s excuse that she had to return home to begin dinner, for the older children would be home from school soon. “Sam has everything well in hand, dear,” declared Bess reassuringly, and pressed upon her a twist of paper containing a couple of spoonfuls of smuggled tea: “If you mix it with chamomile, you can get at least four pots from it.”
Sam has everything well in hand . . . Abigail shivered, as she hastened her steps along Long Street, the sharp gales off the harbor whipping her cloak and turning her toes and fingers numb.
Except how to get Harry Knox out of the grip of the British. Except any assurance that, faced with the noose, the young bookseller wouldn’t turn King’s Evidence once he got to Halifax where the Sons of Liberty could not take their revenge. Harry, Abigail knew, was committed to the cause of colonial liberties and to the concept of the colony’s self-government, free of interference from the King’s Commissioners and the King’s bosom friends. He was committed, moreover, to the friendships that made up the heart and soul of any normal man: to Sam and Bess, to Dr. Warren, to Paul and Rachel Revere, to Robbie Newman at Old South, to herself and John. To the people he’d known in his home town of Boston all his life.
She knew also that once a man was hoisted on the gallows, it took twenty long minutes, dangling, kicking, at rope’s end, to suffocate to death.
She remembered how Revere had joked about breaking Matt Brown and Hev Miller out of the Boston jail; how her brother’s friends had gotten him out of the place almost casually, as if he’d been locked in a cupboard or a cellar. In Boston it was generally known that the King’s Commissioners couldn’t take a smuggler, because of the providential appearance of large numbers of armed dockside types—the chief reason that the Crown had begun to prosecute smugglers in Halifax.
Walking along Purchase Street, Abigail could look out across the bay and see the Incitatus, riding at anchor off Castle Island. Waiting for the wind to change.
“Mrs. Adams?”
A girl who was passing her as Abigail turned the corner into Queen Street halted on the pavement and put back the hood of her cloak. Under a neatly starched white cap, black curls flickered in the tug of the wind.
“I’m Mrs. Adams, yes.” Abigail wondered why the wide brown eyes, the heart-shaped face were so familiar . . .
“Miss Pugh,” she said.
“I’ve waited for you, m’am—Miss Pattie let me in—but I couldn’t wait no longer.” The girl cast a frightened glance back in the direction from which Abigail had come—the direction of the Common, and the handsome houses of the rich along Milk Street and Beacon Hill. “Mrs. Hartnell, she’ll be askin’ after me, and I don’t dare not be there—”
“I shall accompany you,” said Abigail promptly, “that you may lose no time. I’m sorry I was from home. Had I known—”
Gwen Pugh shook her head, “Oh, not your fault, m’am, no, please. I saw the chance, when Mrs. H was still abed, after being up all hours playing cards.” They crossed by the Customhouse and turned along Cornhill again, stepping quickly on the slippery cobbles. “I had to find you, and speak, m’am. I didn’t know Sheba well, but she was that kind to me, not just about the tooth-drawer but afterward, when I was in so much pain. And the way she spoke of her little girl, and how worried she was about her baby when she had to go out with Mrs. Sandhayes—” She shook her head. “Though she was a Negress and all, I did so much feel like I was home again, with my own sister and baby brother. And Mrs. H has been so very kind to me also, and took me in when I was barely a mite, when my mamma died, and didn’t know no manners or how to sew or iron, and had me taught . . .” Anguish at her own disloyalty pulled at the girl’s face. “But she lied to you.”
“Yes,” said Abigail softly. “I thought she had.”
“Bathsheba, she wasn’t upset or frightened or anything else they said that Friday, just vexed that she had to be away from baby Stephen again. When Mrs. H and Mrs. S would go out together, it would be hours before she was able to go home again, and the poor little thing would be crying from hunger, which always made Mr. F wild. But Mr. Hartnell, m’am—Well, after last time there was almost a scandal, about Mrs. H and that Mr. Smyles from New York, he took on pretty severe. The only reason he’d let her take the carriage, you see, was if she went with some other lady.”
“I see,” murmured Abigail, disappointed but not surprised. Mrs. Sandhayes wanted social recognition and friendship with a wealthy woman who was too stupid to keep track of her discards playing loo. Mrs. Hartnell wanted a respectable-looking stalking-horse for her amours. Yet Philomela and the Barnabys had described Bathsheba as profoundly upset by Friday evening. Had she dissembled to this girl? Found some message awaiting her on her return to the Fluckner home? Or learned something in some other fashion after she got there?
“So in fact, Mrs. Hartnell was going out to meet a lover. And you, Mrs. Sandhayes, and Bathsheba were only out to provide a good story for her, lest anyone ask.”
“’ Twasn’t that, m’am,” said the girl earnestly. “Though Heaven help me, I’ve done that these five years, and put up with some of her men-friends, when they thought she wouldn’t see . . . And she means no harm by it, m’am. She truly doesn’t. You’d have to know her—” She stopped herself. “The thing is, m’am, we weren’t with Bathsheba hardly at all that day. Nor most days when we’d been out together. We’d walk out by the Common, usually, and there’s a Mr. Vassall that would drive by and take us up—Mrs. Hartnell and myself—and drive us out to Roxbury, where he has his house.”
Abigail said, “T’cha!” in disgust. What had John said? Very little beyond a respectable wardrobe and a couple of letters of introduction: nothing to live on or by . . .
So in fact Bathsheba could have seen something . . .
“And she’d leave her so-called friend to loiter about—staying out of sight, I daresay, so that there could be no comment—until she was ready to come home. Your mistress is very fortunate indeed that her useful friend isn’t of a nature to demand hush-money. Were walking as painful to me as it is to her, I should certainly feel justified in asking for a compensation for—”
“Oh, no, m’am,” corrected Miss Pugh. “The thing is, Mrs. Sandhayes couldn’t ask for hush-money, for she was meeting with a lover herself.”
Twenty-three
For a moment Abigail could only stare. Her instinctive thought—How could a crippled woman—? dissolved at once in anger at herself. The poor woman did everything a normal one could do, except dance, with a zest that made a mockery of the fate that had robbed her of that pleasure. Goodness knew a woman didn’t have to skip and scamper to enjoy the embrace of a lover. Though her upbringing cried sternly to her that such behavior was reprehensible (as her own, she had to admit, had been with John, when they were courting . . .), if Mrs. Sandhayes had met a man who saw the intelligence of her eyes, and not the threadbare dresses and the gold-headed sticks—the more credit to him!
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes, m’am. More than once, when Mr. Vassall brought us back again at the end of the afternoon, we’d see them coming down Cambridge Street, this man and Mrs. S in a chaise, with Bathsheba sitting up behind . . .”
“Cambridge Street?” Abigail blinked, wondering if her thoughts upon the Pear Tree House had led her hearing astray.
“Yes, m’am.” They had reached the head of Milk Street, where the houses began to thin and the garden walls along the unpaved way showed treetops above them here and there, the orchards of the well-to-do. The Governor’s house, where Lucy Fluckner had waited uneasily for the arrival of a lover for whom another had also waited in the alley, stood opposite, bland and handsome behind its twi
n lodges. Gwen Pugh nodded past it, in the direction of the Common only a few hundred yards away. “He had a house, Bathsheba said—a fair big place with a ruined orchard by it—on the back-side of Beacon Hill.”
Margaret Sandhayes.
Margaret Sandhayes and Toby Elkins . . .
Or was it, Abigail wondered as she walked slowly back toward Queen Street, Margaret Sandhayes and Sir Jonathan Cottrell?
A slender little fellow, Miss Pugh had described the unknown lover; fairish with a dimpled chin. Palmer was universally described as dark, but a different wig would alter that description in seconds—and she cursed again the shortcomings of the art of miniatures. Shorter nor Mrs. S, Miss Pugh had said, but then Margaret Sandhayes was a tall woman.
Toby Elkins was “tall.” But how tall is tall?
He played about six roles, Dowling had said of Palmer. 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 . . . from a cringing slave to a bawling soldier to a pious nun . . .
Given Mr. Apthorp’s vagueness about description, it was perfectly possible that young Mr. Elkins and slender Mr. Palmer were in fact one and the same man. Abigail dug through a memory sharpened by years of reading and quoting classics and the Bible for anything Thurlow Apthorp had said about when last he’d seen the elusive Mr. Elkins. As far as she could recall, nothing had been seen of the man later than Thursday, the twenty-fourth of February: the day Sir Jonathan Cottrell had set sail for Maine—unless of course that had been Mr. Elkins she had encountered in her kitchen at three o’clock on Monday morning. That same day, the twenty-fourth, Androcles Palmer had packed up his belongings and left the Horn Spoon for parts unknown. According to Gwen Pugh, that had been the last day upon which Mrs. Sandhayes had met her lover.
And if Mrs. Sandhayes was a part of the conspiracy . . .
Abigail frowned, quickening her stride.
If Mrs. Sandhayes was part of the conspiracy, how much of what she had said about Cottrell—or the events surrounding his murder—could be taken as the truth?
Certainly nothing that was corroborated by that imbecile Hartnell woman. The woman clearly hadn’t the foggiest recollection that anything distinguished one shopping expedition from another, and in any case—with the prospect of blackmail hanging over her head—would cheerfully go along with anything her “friend” suggested.
Drat John, for being away!
So the whole of Margaret Sandhayes’s catalogue of who came in and out of the Governor’s cardroom, and when, could simply be tossed down the privy. The woman could have included or excluded anyone from her list, while smiling and chatting at the ball herself with all and sundry. She could have vouched for Palmer/Elkins to get him into the Governor’s house . . .
Or, more simply still, Palmer could have waited at the Pear Tree House for a meeting prearranged that afternoon. It wouldn’t have taken much. A letter to Cottrell purporting to be from a claimant to the Fluckner land-grant would have brought the man anywhere in New England hotfoot and could have been waiting for the man on the wharf, the moment he returned. If the Sandhayes woman was in on it somehow—and that certainly explains where they obtained my handwriting!—it also explains how Bathsheba would have seen something she ought not to have seen.
Whatever that might be.
The twenty-three pounds was only to keep her silent, until a meeting with her could be arranged for a more final solution to the problem.
Palmer—or Elkins—is still in Boston, hidden somewhere. There’s some reason the Sons haven’t been able to find him . . . Speculating on what that might be, she turned down the passway to her own yard, calves aching from what felt like miles walked in pattens. She mentally reviewed the abject apologies owed to Pattie, and how quickly after dinner she could abandon her rightful chores and walk down to North Square to consult with Paul Revere. He, if anyone, would be able to make some sense out of—
She stepped into the kitchen, and there was the man himself, seated by the hearth making a penny appear and disappear in his fingers, for the edification of the enraptured Charley. Sam, on the settle opposite, held Tommy on his knee, while Johnny and Nabby hurried to and fro under Pattie’s direction, setting the table for dinner.
At Abigail’s entrance, both men got to their feet.
“We need to see you, Nab.” Sam set Tommy aside, and—as Abigail had done yesterday—guided Abigail down the hallway and into the parlor, where a warm and welcoming fire had been kindled. Revere followed them in and closed the door behind them, a large and rather battered roll of cartridge-paper in his hand.
“We need to know.” Sam handed Abigail into the fireside chair. “You’ve been there. Where is Harry being kept?”
“Harry—?” Abigail blinked at him, for a moment not understanding. “He’s on Castle Island—”
Sam made an impatient gesture, and Revere said, “Can you show me the place on this?” He unrolled the cartridge-paper and brought a couple of draftsman’s pencils out of a coat pocket, and Abigail, looking at the spread-out diagram, recalled that Revere had been one of the men who’d worked on putting the fort back into order three years ago, when the Boston garrison was moved there after the Massacre in Customhouse Square.
Something in the graveness of those dark eyes sent a chill down her back. “What are you going to do?”
“We just need to know where he is,” said Sam, too quickly, “if we’re to slip word to him before he’s taken away. That’s all.”
Sam could generally make anyone believe anything he said, but this time Abigail heard the lie in his voice, even if she had not seen it in Revere’s eyes.
“You can’t mean to break into the fort!” Yet the crowded, bustling quay below Castle Island’s main gate sprang to her mind, the jostling confusion of launches and skiffs and whale-boats that plied the harbor between the island and Boston. The constant comings and goings of provision-merchants, wigmakers, whores, and porters, and purveyors of sheep and pigs. Anyone, she knew, could walk ashore and walk into the fort itself . . .
“Good Lord, Nab, of course we wouldn’t!”
He’s going to exclaim, “What an idea—”
“What an idea!”
Her glance went back to Revere’s face. He, too, she could tell, was thinking about how long it took a man to die on the gallows, and how long that last night on Earth would be for a young man who knew he could save himself with a handful of names.
“We’re not talking about the Boston jail,” said Abigail quietly. “Have you any idea what the British would do—especially after what happened with the tea, and with Heaven only knows what Writ of Vengeance already on its way from Britain—if insurrectionists, as they’ll call them, tried to break into the Castle itself? What would befall them if they were caught? What—”
“Mrs. Adams,” said Revere softly. “Please.”
She looked up at Sam again, a second thought going through her like the chill of poison in her veins. With a deadly sense of calm, she asked, “Or were you thinking of something a little quieter?”
And she saw Sam’s gray eyes shift.
Revere said, “No. We were not.”
No, thought Abigail. But at some point, Sam had considered it.
For a time she was so angry she couldn’t speak.
It was Revere who broke the silence. “We have to get him out, Mrs. Adams. The Incitatus is going to sail within hours of the wind dying down, and then our only course would be to try and take her on the high seas. She outguns anything we could float.”
“You’ll be killed,” said Abigail. “And there will be Hell to pay.”
Neither man replied.
“And I have learned some quite extraordinary things about Sir Jonathan Cottrell’s murder.”
“Have you learned who beat him and left him in that alleyway?” Sam’s voice was flat, level, and hard as a sadiron. “Acquired evidence that will convince Colonel Leslie not to send him? Or the Admiralty Tribunal to acquit him?�
�� It was Abigail’s turn not to be able to meet his gaze. “We have no more time to wait, Nab. We have no more time to hope that what you seek will fall into your hand. We must act—one way or another.”
“First tell me this,” said Abigail. “When was this Toby Elkins last seen? When did he last come into the Man-o’-War?”
“The twelfth of February,” replied Sam at once. “Having taken the house, and paid his rent, about three weeks before. Letters, communications, everything since then are still under the bar in the taproom. Believe me, Nab,” he went on, “we have looked for this man—or a man of his description—everywhere in Boston. We have asked tavern-keepers and rich men’s servants, street-urchins and merchants and the farmers in every town in riding distance, if there is an Englishman who came into these parts at any time this winter, probably from Barbados, who cannot be otherwise accounted for . . . And especially I have asked,” he added, “after Sunday night, when he would have had the mark of your fingernails on his ear, for all the world to see. ’Twere Elkins, he must have been somewhere in the town from the time the gates were shut on the Neck until at least it grew light enough for a boat to get across the river and believe me, I had men at both the ferries and the Neck when that sun came up. And we have found nothing.”
“That there was a conspiracy afoot, I will readily believe,” said Revere, as Abigail drew breath to protest. “That this Elkins murdered the woman Bathsheba, and paid off an out-of-work actor who knew Fenton by sight to hail him at a tavern and then put poison in his food, I accept—”
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