Her visitor was watching her now with narrowed eyes, though her laugh was as empty and sparkling as ever. “Would you believe it, when I was dressing these silly curls—Did you ever see anything so foolish? Yet I understand they are all the rage now in London!—I caught the comb in my earring, a silly girl’s trick—”
“Oh, heavens—” Abigail made herself laugh, too, then drew a deep breath, pressed a hand to her bosom. “You must—forgive me. I feel suddenly queer—” What are the symptoms of oleander poisoning? “Pattie—” She staggered to her feet, and Margaret Sandhayes, with not the slightest effort to reach for her walking-sticks, sprang up like a panther, rounded the table, seized her by the arm, and shoved her back into her chair with one hand, and produced a pistol from her pocket with the other.
The walking-sticks clattered unheeded to the floor.
Well, of course she’d have lied about not being able to walk—
“If you’d drunk oleander, you would be retching your heart out by this time.”
Abigail forced herself to look away from the pistol, and up into Mrs. Sandhayes’s face. “Is oleander what you gave to Jonathan Cottrell?”
“Oleander is swift,” said the Englishwoman quietly, her pistol never wavering. “I did not wish him to die swiftly.”
At her words, Abigail saw with sudden and terrible clarity the square front hall of the Pear Tree House, like a great square well with doors to the rooms around it: west, east, north, and the front door facing south. Saw the telltale holes where bolts had been put on every door that would provide escape, upstairs and down.
She gave him the poison, got him into the hall . . .
And stood there on the stairs to watch him die. Not swiftly.
If he’d tried to mount the stair, she had only to retreat into one of the chambers, which communicated with each other and were all locked in their turn.
A chill went through Abigail at the deliberateness of it.
As deliberate as the poisoning of a whole household, when it looked like one member of it was getting close to the truth.
As deliberate as killing the servant in order to make sure no one met the Hetty at the wharf and saw that the man who got off was not, in fact, Sir Jonathan Cottrell.
Sandhayes nodded at the cup. “Drink it.”
“What did you use on him?” asked Abigail conversationally, though her heart was racing so that the tips of her ears felt like they were on fire. “Not death-cap mushroom, like poor Mr. Fenton, surely—Put that pistol down, m’am, you know perfectly well you can’t shoot me.”
“Can’t I?” Mrs. Sandhayes raised her brows.
“Well, you can’t very well go claiming to Pattie that I fell over and died of sickness if I’ve got a bullet-hole in me—”
“I won’t have to,” replied the Englishwoman. “All I’ll have to do is scream for Pattie, and she’ll come rushing downstairs and through that door. I can crack her skull with the butt of it while she’s bending over you. And unless you drink what is in that cup, Mrs. Adams, I assure you that after shooting you, and disposing of the helpful Pattie, I will then cover my tracks by setting this house afire, and leave your little sons upstairs to burn.”
Abigail stared at her, open-mouthed in shock. “And that is what Sybilla would have wanted you to do?” she asked after a time.
“Don’t name her to me.” The older woman’s eyes flashed with a cold green light. “You know nothing about it.”
“I know what I’m hearing,” replied Abigail. “Listen to yourself, woman! You honestly feel you can simply kill a man—”
It was Mrs. Sandhayes’s turn to stare. “Listen to yourself, Mrs. Adams. You honestly think that the man who raped a sixteen-year-old girl for his own amusement—only it was not rape, but murder, when she found she was with child—should walk away free? Or are you just like the men whose company you so clearly prefer? It’s perfectly all right to burn the hide off a man with boiling tar, or to thrust his wife and children into a life of poverty and ignorance by destroying his shop or ruining his business in the name of politics, but for actual justice—for the redress of human wrongs—you have little time.” She shifted as Abigail glanced toward the door, brought the pistol up closer. “Besides,” she added after a moment, “that isn’t poison in that tea—or whatever it is your girl gave me. It will make you sick and then put you to sleep for twenty-four hours, until I am well away from Boston. That’s all. I just need time.”
No, thought Abigail. What you need is an open road back to England, and to the family and the life you left . . . something you won’t have if there’s ANYONE who understands how you poisoned a man on the night you were at a ball in plain sight of two hundred people.
And the note I sent to Lucy yesterday told you that’s exactly what I am.
She took a breath, and made her shoulders relax as if in acquiescence; turned her face slightly away. Her hands were shaking so badly she wasn’t sure she’d be able to grip anything. You can do this . . . you can do this . . . O God, help me do this . . . She was aware of her adversary close at her elbow as she turned back toward the table, of the pistol against her side.
“Did Cottrell know it was you?” she asked, and Mrs. Sandhayes sniffed.
“After he’d drunk it I told him. Before—How would he have recognized me? He never spared a glance for me whilst he was seducing my—”
In what she hoped was a single movement, Abigail hurled the tea from the cup into Mrs. Sandhayes’s face, ducked sideways, and swept her leg with all her force at the other woman’s feet. Their petticoats tangled, Mrs. Sandhayes staggered, and the gun went off with a noise like the break of doom in the little parlor. Not even sure if she’d been hit or not, Abigail grabbed a leg of her chair and hurled it at her assailant, tripped as her petticoats snarled in the other chair, and took a kick in her side as she fell that left her gasping.
Trying to roll to her feet she heard the other woman’s steps in the hall, racing for the kitchen—
“Tommy!”
Abigail sprang up, fell against the wall, dimly conscious of the clatter of Pattie’s feet on the stair and a jumbled crashing from the kitchen.
Tommy screamed.
Abigail jerked open the kitchen door and smoke poured out into her face. Her first terrified impression was that the whole room was ablaze—her second, knowing that there hadn’t been time for such fire to take hold, was of a dozen small fires where the logs from the hearth had been hurled into the room, against the table, the chairs, the sideboard where Tommy was tied.
The back door was open, but Abigail saw nothing of that in that moment, only the burning wood under the sideboard and the fire licking greedily up. She flung herself to her knees beside her hysterical son, “Stay still!” she commanded, which of course the terrified child didn’t, as she ripped and wrenched at the long cloth tapes. She sprang up, half choked on the smoke swirling around her, wrenched open the knife-drawer, seized the first blade that came to hand.
She heard Pattie scream and had the confused impression of someone behind her as she slashed through the leading-strings, half turned as hands grabbed her—I thought she’d gone—
She barely got a glimpse of the man who flung her to the floor, before she was smothered in darkness.
Twenty-five
A bigail slashed, kicked, and struck out with the knife that was still in her hand. An Irish voice swore, “Mother o’ God!” and what Abigail realized was a man’s cloak was pulled clear of her head. Somewhere—outside?—she could hear Tommy screaming, and the kitchen was filled with smoke and the smell of wet ashes and brick.
Lieutenant Coldstone, her neighbors Tom Butler and Ehud Hanson, and three extremely rough-looking men who looked like rope makers—presumably, Abigail reflected, the Sons of Liberty who’d followed Coldstone from the wharf—were raking together the pile of firewood, over which someone had dumped the contents of the kitchen water-jar. The Lieutenant’s left arm and shoulder were strapped tight in a sling, and his face was
nearly as white as his wig with the exertion.
Abigail gasped, “Where’s Tommy?”
Sergeant Muldoon, kneeling at her side sucking the blood from his slashed hand, said, “He’s outside with Miss Pattie, m’am, and fine as thruppence . . . Beggin’ your pardon for handlin’ you so, m’am, but your skirt had caught.”
“Did you catch her?” Abigail seized Muldoon’s arm, and the young man lifted her to her feet as if she’d been a ten-year-old girl. Staggering, she looked down and saw that yes, the whole right side of her skirt-hem was burned away, the petticoat beneath charred. She had neither seen nor felt a thing. “Margaret Sandhayes,” she added, as Muldoon and Coldstone helped her to the back door, beside which not only Pattie but Charley sat on the log bench, Pattie cradling the sobbing Tommy in her arms. Tommy reached out for his mother, howling in terror. “Only I think her true name is Seaford . . .”
“Margaret Seaford?” said Coldstone.
“The girl Sybilla’s sister? She told me the sister’s name was Alice . . .”
As the words came out of her mouth, Abigail felt like kicking herself, because of course the woman would have told her the dead girl’s sister was called Helen of Troy rather than Margaret. A woman who had patiently counterfeited lameness to make others assume she could not be a killer would not have committed the mistake of giving her rightful name.
It seemed to her that every neighbor for blocks of Queen Street swarmed the yard, and that a dozen more of Sam and Revere’s rougher henchmen were coming in and out of the kitchen, clearing out the wet wood and the few chairs that had been aflame.
Coldstone reached out suddenly to lean against the wall beside her, and she caught at his sleeve, even as she pressed her weeping son’s head to her shoulder. “She poisoned Cottrell,” she said quickly. “Not the night he was found, but ten days earlier, the day he was to leave for Maine—and got Palmer to take his place. The body was kept down the well in the cellar of Pear Tree House. Frozen, like pork in the pantry, so the death could not be traced to her—”
“She told you this?”
“She told me she poisoned Cottrell, for what he did to her sister. I’ll take oath on it—”
“You shall have to. Sergeant, go to the Battery, get as many men as they can spare—if”—Coldstone added, glancing about him a little grimly at the incipient mob in the yard—“these gentlemen will permit it . . .”
“Ben!” Abigail stretched out a hand to a man she recognized. Ben Edes, who printed the Boston Gazette, was dressed as if for a rough day’s hunting, or for the street rowdiness of Pope’s Night. Ink still blotted his hands. “Ben, go with the Sergeant, make sure no one hinders him, or the soldiers he brings—”
“Why trouble the King’s good servants, Mrs. Adams, Lieutenant?” Edes cocked a wise, dark eye at Coldstone. “If you’re able to make an arrest of the—woman, is it?—who did this to Mrs. Adams, we’re all the posse comitatus you’ll need.”
Coldstone’s upper lip seemed to lengthen with his disapproval, but Abigail said, “He’s right, Lieutenant . . . There, there, sweeting,” she added, as Tommy, sensing himself ignored, began to howl again. “ ’ Tis well, Mama’s here—And don’t trouble going back to the Fluckners’. Margaret Sandhayes will have headed straight from here to the wharves, for whatever ship is leaving for England with the tide.”
“That’ll be the Saturn,” put in a huge, unshaven laborer unexpectedly. “They’ve been loaded and ready this week at Wentworth’s Wharf, and Captain Nesbitt wearing out the deck-planks pacing to be off.”
“Some one of you—Jed,” she added, turning to one of the prentice-boys whom she knew. “Run to Burrough’s Wharf and tell Eli Putnam on the Magpie sloop to be ready to sail in ten minutes—”
Tommy, as if sensing that the next event would be his forcible detachment from the mother he adored in the midst of this confusion and pain, tightened his grip on Abigail’s dress and hair. Only then did she become aware that her hair had come unraveled from beneath its cap, with thick dark waves hanging over her shoulders and back; and she looked around at Pattie, knowing she would indeed have to abandon her son.
Of all these men—including Lieutenant Coldstone and Sergeant Muldoon—only she would be able to recognize Margaret Sandhayes.
And without testimony against Margaret Sandhayes, the one who would be leaving on the tide would be Harry Knox.
Tommy whimpered, “No—” as Abigail gently tried to pry his tiny hands loose. “Mama—”
She could scarcely blame him—had John been present, she reflected, she would probably have clung to him and whimpered as well.
“Here,” said Muldoon, “we can take the boy along, can’t we? Poor tot’s had grief enough for the day, wi’out havin’ his mum leave him again.”
“Me!” added Charley, running to catch Abigail’s charred skirt as she rose. “Me!”
So it was that Sergeant Muldoon carried the ecstatic Charley on his shoulders in the midst of the mob that followed Coldstone and Abigail down to Wentworth’s Wharf, and Abigail bore Tommy, his blue eyes wide with delight. At some point during the walk from Queen Street to the long waterfront, Paul Revere joined the mob and nodded a friendly greeting to Lieutenant Coldstone, whose crimson coat, like Abigail’s clothing, bore the marks of the fire.
Abigail handed him the note that Pattie had given her just before the mob left the house—I found this in the knife-drawer, m’am, and I don’t know how it got there, for I’d left it on the sideboard for you . . .
Where Margaret Sandhayes read it the moment you were out of the room.
The note was from Dr. Joseph Warren.
My dear Mrs. Adams,
The problem you put to me is a curious and interesting one, and one with which I have no firsthand knowledge. That said, I will venture to affirm that were a man’s eye to be blacked—or in fact were any other sort of severe bruise or contusion to be administered some hours before death—and the body subsequently frozen, the “mouse,” or other bruise, would remain visible when the body thawed, in the same state of appearance it was when death occurred. Bruises are occasioned by blood leaking from broken capillaries into the surrounding flesh, which engorges and darkens. At length, the blood is reabsorbed into the living tissue, an effect which would not take place in the dead.
I trust this solution will have bearing upon the case of Sir Jonathan Cottrell, and result in the freedom of our friend?
Yr ob’t,
Dr. Joseph Warren
“Lieutenant Dowling is a good man,” remarked Lieutenant Coldstone, when Revere passed the message to him in turn. “Yet he was very young when he began his apprenticeship in Army surgery, and that, in the West Indies, where he would have no opportunity to observe the effect of cold such as New England’s upon bodies that had been subsequently frozen. I daresay the duskiness he remarked in the corpse’s hands and feet came not from freezing, as he surmised, but from the body’s having been hanged down the well. From the hook that supported the wine-chest, I presume.”
“Was there the mark of a rope beneath the arms?” asked Revere.
“She’ll have padded it,” replied Abigail, unhesitatingly. “And made sure to carry the rope away with her, when she finally pulled the body up. By taking it on Mr. Howell’s horse to the head of Governor’s Alley in the small hours of the Sunday morning, she unimpeachably proved herself to be at the ball—in the presence of at least two hundred witnesses—when the death must have occurred . . .”
“Even had anyone thought to ask if her crutches—or her name—were genuine,” mused Coldstone. “Not considerations which occurred to me, I must admit.”
“Why would they have? She kept Bathsheba’s body in the well, too, for a time, though the water hadn’t frozen then. If you drag the Mill-Pond, Lieutenant, and the marshes west of the Common, I think you shall find beneath the ice the body of the actor Androcles Palmer, and probably that of a young Negro woman named Bathsheba. Palmer bore enough of a resemblance to Cottrell to pass fo
r him for ten days in Maine, among men who had never seen the real Cottrell. He lacked only the black eye Cottrell had acquired on the day of his supposed departure. Perhaps I should have realized his behavior there was uncharacteristic—he refused to steal a kiss from a milkmaid even when it was practically forced upon him—but I didn’t. I only thought he was too afraid of Mr. Fluckner’s irate tenants.”
“Whereas I daresay,” put in Revere, “he was far too afraid of Mrs. Sandhayes. I’d be. If the woman knows what a scruple is, she hides the knowledge well.”
“As I remember the scandal,” said Coldstone quietly, “the Seaford girls’ parents were dead; Sybilla was ten years younger than her elder sister, who raised her as a mother would. According to my mother—who knew the family—Margaret Seaford was a woman of iron will and strong character. Her single suitor had been engaged to her for eight years, without bringing matters to a conclusion, at least in part because Sybilla could not endure it that another would share her sister’s love. Sybilla was Margaret’s only weakness, my mother said; but the attachment was a weapon that cut both ways. Margaret would not share Sybilla’s love with a suitor, either, and the girl was”—he hesitated, like a man seeking a word—“ripe, I suppose one could say, to be seduced by a man observant enough to play upon her desire to rebel against her sister’s domination. This at least was my mother’s judgment of the matter,” he added, a sudden self-consciousness cracking his usual calm façade, as if speaking of his mother in this crowd of jostling hooligans on Boston’s wharves would bring her before them.
“Your mother sounds like a woman of discernment,” said Abigail gently.
“I have always found her so. Damn,” Coldstone added, as they came around the corner of Benning Wentworth’s countinghouse and stood at the head of the wharf beyond. A couple of dockhands were coiling ropes at the far end; a porter rolled a barrel out of one of the warehouses that lined the inner end, in the obvious expectation of another ship’s later approach. Beyond the wet black platform, stretching a hundred yards into the bay, green black water pitched and chopped with the high, outgoing tide.
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