And Mother, Abigail reflected—still tasting the bitterness that flavored her resignation—Mother believed his tale of mistaken identities and lying witnesses, as she will always believe . . .
Annoyed as she’d been with her brother, she’d been sufficiently curious about how one went about breaking out of the Boston town jail to put aside her rancor for her parents’ sake and ask him, and had learned that jail deliverance was, in fact, laughably easy. “Oh, they’ll search a visitor for something like a pistol or a cutlass,” William grinned. “But anyone can slip you a chisel or a file, and the bars aren’t set into the bricks, only into the wood of the framing. People come in and out of the place all day, selling food and wood and visiting the prisoners. There’s always someone there who can arrange for things.”
No wonder Colonel Leslie had placed an embargo on clean shirts for Harry.
“You are incorrigible,” she said, and hugged him, smelling even in her dreams the stink of his unwashed clothing, of tobacco and ale. Though she knew he was wrong, she could not help her gladness that he’d been spared the lash and the stocks.
In William’s case, she’d gathered that his friends had broken open the jail-yard gate, and used a horse and a wagon-chain to pull out one of the barred windows . . . an indiscriminate method that had resulted in most of her current neighbors (she and John had been living in Braintree at the time) being subjected to a brief rash of petty thefts and burglaries by the other occupants of the jail. The Sons of Liberty, she gathered when Revere appeared at her side as she shopped in the market Monday morning, had exercised greater finesse.
“I saw the Hoyles in Meeting yesterday, so I assume those shots I heard Saturday night didn’t hit anyone,” she remarked, as she selected fat, shining mackerel from the baskets set along the Town Dock. This time of the year, when it would be months before anything fresh appeared in any garden in Massachusetts, was in some ways one of the most discouraging in the markets, but at least one could get fresh fish to eat with one’s corn-mush and potatoes.
“Good Lord, no!” Revere put on an expression of shock. “That was Mrs. Hoyle, and without her spectacles she can’t hit the side of a barn. No, two of Sam’s smugglers broke into Hoyle’s rooms and took the keys. We—they”—he corrected himself quickly—“shoved a bench in front of the door and ran downstairs to get our birds out, and Hoyle himself only got off a couple of shots at us—them—as they were on their way out down the street. At least, so I’ve been told.”
“Hmph.” Abigail eyed him up and down cynically. She agreed wholeheartedly with John that the colonies could not win their rights before King and Parliament if those rights were championed by a law-breaking mob of smugglers and hooligans. Most members of Parliament would have looked askance even at this brilliant and quick-minded artisan and be damned to the fact that he made the most beautiful silver pieces in the colony. One doesn’t want one’s daughter marrying a bookseller, Margaret Sandhayes had said, as if the matter were self-evident.
Revere himself seemed to see no problem in giving political power to illiterates whose vote—and fists—could be bought for a quart of rum and a friendly handshake.
Like her mother—and herself—with the ne’er-do-well William, Abigail found herself accepting the situation, because without the help of Sam’s tame ruffians, Harry Knox would undoubtedly hang. But her heart told her that trouble would one day come of their violence, as it would come—was coming—from the mob’s violent defiance of the King’s orders concerning tea.
“And where are our friends staying now that they’ve ceased to be Mr. Hoyle’s guests?”
“The storeroom at Christ’s Church,” replied Revere cheerfully. “Young Rob Newman’s the sexton there, and his brother looks after the organ. Between them they’re able to keep our friends fed and happy and out of everyone’s way for the time being. With baths and different clothes, and a wig or maybe an eyepatch, they should be quite well able to meet us at the foot of Beacon Hill in an hour and show us where it is that Sir Jonathan Cottrell went—on a rented horse though the distance could be walked in a quarter hour—instead of returning to his host’s house and the party given in his honor on the day that he died.”
With only an hour before the rendezvous, Abigail scarcely had time to change Tommy’s clout, measure out potatoes, cabbage, and onions for dinner, and order Pattie not to do her mistress’s work as well as her own while her mistress went and played sleuth-hound with the Sons of Liberty: “’ Tis my own punishment if I’m to be making beds after dinner instead of calling on my friends,” she told her servant firmly. “I’ll not have you loading yourself with an extra burden because of my sloth.”
“No, m’am.” But as Abigail set out with Revere again—he had obligingly cleaned the fish while she was dealing with Tommy and chopped a hunk of the frozen pork in the pantry to thaw for tomorrow—she had the suspicion that she’d come home to find her chores done for her, something against which her Puritan soul revolted. Pattie was very fond—and a little in awe—of both Harry Knox and Paul Revere, and she took a vicarious delight in doing extra work so that Abigail might engage in her investigations. Abigail, who hated housework like the mouth of Hell, felt that there was something profoundly wrong with this arrangement: a yielding to her worser nature against which she had been warned all her inquisitive and disobedient life. There was too much chaos in the world, she reflected, her pattens slithering on the uneven, icy earth of the Common, for citizens to leave their children to come home to no one but the servants while they rushed off and did as they pleased, even if the goal was to save a man wrongly accused of murder . . .
. . . or to learn the fate of another woman who had abandoned her children.
The north side of the Common was empty at this hour of the morning, the frozen ground still patched with last week’s snow. In the distance she could see the town herd-boys moving the cattle along the slope of Fox Hill, near the river. Further out on the slatey waters, a couple of men were crossing the mudflats in a punt. After dinner, despite the steel-colored roof of scudding cloud and the taste of sleet in the air, those muddy spaces would be dotted with boys released from their lessons and shouting madly as they flew their kites in the ice gray sky, or rolled hoops, or ran footraces, or risked their lives skating on ponds whose ice was, at last, beginning to thin.
Perhaps it was the memory of William and his good-for-nothing friends—stealing back horses that one of them had lost at cards to the blacksmith, and the man’s anvil to “teach him a lesson”—but Abigail found herself remembering wistfully the open countryside around Weymouth, where her father had been parson now for forty years. About her and Mary and Betsy, walking those snow-covered lanes arm in arm or running races themselves, all bundled in their quilted petticoats and the bright red cloaks considered suitable for young girls, in the confidence that anyone they might meet would be a neighbor and a friend.
Here in Boston, crammed into this stony little peninsula surrounded by salt marshes, one had to come here to the Common to run, or to play, or to ride at a gallop . . . and not even then, if one was a little girl. She guessed her daughter Nabby missed the countryside—and her cousins in Braintree—as much as Abigail herself did, and as a child, Nabby did not have the social and intellectual compensations of living in town. In town, Abigail was aware that she kept her daughter much more circumscribed, as if she still wore a toddler’s leading-strings on her clothing. There was more that could befall a child—a girl—in town.
And girls always paid a higher price for carelessness or ill-luck than did boys.
The chilly precision of Lieutenant Coldstone’s soft voice came back to her, when he spoke of the man who’d been murdered. A boy who’d been “led astray” by “evil companions” was seldom reduced to such desperation as to seek the razor or the noose. His evil companions would break him out of the local lockup, and he’d show up dirty and beaming on his parents’ doorstep, and even his disapproving sister would take him in her arms.
For a girl, it wasn’t like that. Not only would she be cast out by her friends, but her sisters would find their chances of marriage halved, or worse: If the one girl was loose, who’s to say the rest are honest . . . ? They would be forced to turn their backs on her in sheerest defense of their own futures.
No wonder Hannah Fluckner had leaped upon the chance to enlist her shabby but genteel houseguest as a chaperone for the adventurous Lucy.
They skirted the grim brick Almshouse, the crumbling stone wall of the old burying-ground, and moved through the orchards on the footslope of Beacon Hill into the fields beyond. Here, as Hev Miller had said, streets had been laid out, in what had once all been the common land of a smaller Boston years ago. Now speculators bought up what they hoped would one day become valuable town lots. At the moment it was only these ice-slicked tracks that distinguished much of the land here from the Common itself. Here and there, houses had been built, and occasional gardens enclosed or orchards planted. But these were few and far between, and the place had a forlorn air. Downslope toward the town, a string of dwellings fringed Treamount Street, the wind from the bay raveling smoke from their chimneys like dirty wool. Just beyond where the land leveled toward the frozen slab of the Mill-Pond, the Lynd Street Meeting-House reared its red-brick steeple, and across the street from it, a little group of men stood talking, watching in their direction as they came.
Even at a distance of fifty yards, Abigail picked out the black coat and sturdy form of the young sexton of Christ’s Church, and the burly figure of Matthias Brown. When she and Revere came closer, she recognized Hev Miller despite a respectable-looking gray wig, somewhat more civilized foot-gear, and one of Sam’s hats. The fourth man was Ezra Logan, the master of the Katrina who’d taken her across to Castle Island a week ago. He’d probably been included, Abigail guessed, to keep an eye on Miller and Brown in case they decided they didn’t want to stay in Boston after all.
“There’s the place.” Miller pointed almost due southwest of where they stood. The house he indicated was almost new and stood back from the road. Abigail was familiar with it, in that she’d passed it dozens of times, on summer afternoons when she and John would come walking on the Common and up and down these rough-cut, unpaved streets. She’d had the impression on those occasions that the place was uninhabited, and on this blustery morning she could see no trace of smoke from its chimneys.
“Who owns it?”
Revere shook his head. “Should be easy enough to find out.”
She glanced up at Miller. Abigail herself was reckoned tall for a woman, but the young Mainer stood a good six feet. “Did Cottrell knock at the door, or did he have a key?”
“I didn’t see.” Miller produced a spyglass from his pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to her. Evidently, the jail key wasn’t the only thing that had been extracted from Hoyle’s apartments. “He rode round behind, so there might have been someone in the stables, though I didn’t see smoke. He’d been out of our sight for some little time, before smoke came from the house chimney.”
Revere capped the horn flask of rum that Logan had handed him, and gave it back to the boatman. “Let’s have a look.”
“Won’t they be watching the place?” asked Miller uneasily. “The Provost Marshall? It is your bird’s house.”
“That’s just it,” said Abigail. “It isn’t. Nor was he staying there, that anyone knew of. Of course there’s been nothing to tell us,” she added, as the little party set off up the steep grade of the hill, “that he wasn’t staying there. But I’ll take oath that the Provost Marshall doesn’t know.”
“Ground’s frozen hard.” Paul Revere hacked at the surface of the driveway with his bootheel as they approached from the lane, which maps optimistically designated as George Street. “I doubt it’s taken a track in the past two weeks.”
“The heavens be praised for small favors,” remarked Abigail. “I should hate to try to approach the house if the mud wasn’t frozen. This drive doesn’t look as if it’s been graveled in years. Yet there’s a knocker on the door,” she added, as they reached the shallow granite steps. “Curious.”
“A cheat and a come-on,” declared Revere, after several minutes’ hammering with the ornamental brass hand—unpolished, Abigail noted, and beginning to tarnish. The steps beneath their feet were muddied with tracks, coming and going; a slatternly note on so elegant a façade. “A lure for the unsuspecting and a snare for the foot of the curious.”
“Yet the house itself is well maintained,” she observed. “The shutters have been painted recently. So has the door.” She moved to the edge of the step, studied the first of the ground-floor windows on that side, all shuttered tight. “Were the windows shuttered when Cottrell came here, Mr. Miller?”
“They were, m’am.”
“So you would not have been able to see it, had there been a light on inside or not? Had you not,” she added, “been otherwise occupied after it grew dark.”
He grinned a little shyly. “No, m’am. Matt—!” he added, as his comrade stepped forward, jerked hard on the handle of the door, and dealt the green-painted panels a brutal kick.
Matt Brown shrugged, as if breaking and entering were something one did every day to the houses of witch-festering Tory bastards. “Just thought I’d try.”
Further evidence of occasional usage rather than habitation was forthcoming when they circled the house. A small heap of soiled straw, frozen solid, lay outside the locked stables. “In this cold it’s hard to tell whether someone was here Monday or Tuesday,” remarked Revere, cracking at one of the rock-hard balls of dung with his heel. “Neither this nor the straw looks to be much older than last week, that’s for certain. None of it’s fresh.”
“So it could be from Cottrell’s horse on Saturday.”
“Easily.”
Abigail turned and looked back at the rear of the house. Closed as tightly as the front, it nevertheless had not the appearance of a place long deserted. There was a small wood-pile beside the kitchen door, nothing like the cords of logs stacked in the shed at home. She asked Miller, “Did you get a look at Cottrell’s visitor?”
“Not well, m’am. He moved brisk, like a young man. Dark cloak—dark gray or maybe dark blue—gray scarf, and bundled up good. Leaped off the horse rather than eased off, if you take me, and led him into the yard like he owned the place.”
“Led him himself?”
“Cold as ’twas, you couldn’t let a horse stand.”
“So you didn’t see who let him in?”
Miller shook his head.
Revere muttered, “I’ll wager it was Cottrell himself who opened the back door. It doesn’t sound like there was a servant in the place.”
“Fenton being sick, of course,” Abigail replied thoughtfully. “I wonder, though—Mr. Miller, Mr. Brown, I thank you more than I can say for your observations. As it happens, I’m acquainted with the Provost Marshal’s assistant—”
Both culprits looked startled and awed, and as Revere had done, Abigail put on her wisest face and tapped the side of her nose, as if to say, I would tell an’ if I could . . .
“Mr. Adams has eyes and ears everywhere,” she said. “On our next meeting, I’ll find out for certain what they know. Until then, gentlemen . . .”
Shortly before dinner, Young Paul Revere—at thirteen turning into a sturdy, dark, second edition of his father—arrived panting with a note in the silversmith’s neat hand: No word in any livery stable of a dapple horse rented to a young man in a gray scarf Saturday 5th inst. Pear Tree House (as it is called) owned by Thurlow Apthorp.
This information Abigail copied onto a square of note-paper, together with the statement: I understand from reliable witness that this is where Sir Jonathan Cottrell went between his arrival Saturday morning and at least sunset of the day of his death. From the little money-box on the sideboard, she took two silver pieces of eight and gave them to Young Paul, to take the message to Apthorp’s Wharf and make sure it was sent across to
Lieutenant Coldstone on Castle Island.
Twelve
When Paul Revere had brought Abigail home from the Common that Monday morning, it was to find that firstly, Pattie had completely disobeyed her orders and had made the beds, and was in the process of fixing bubble and squeak for the family dinner, and secondly, a note had arrived from Lucy Fluckner, enclosing one from her father’s butler Mr. Barnaby.
Permission has been obtained from His Excellency Governor Hutchinson, for you to visit Mr. Fenton this evening, when dinner is done. Mr. Buttrick will be waiting for you in the servants’ room at seven.
The late hour at which the fashionable ate their dinners gave Abigail sufficient time to make a blancmange—assisted by Nabby, when the girl and her brother had returned from school—and to let it cool sufficiently in the icy pantry to be of a proper consistency at half past six, to be carried to the invalid. “I think it would be horrid,” Nabby said as they took turns stirring the steaming mix of slowly thickening sugar and cream, “to be sick in a foreign country, and not know anyone, and have to accept charity from someone else’s servants.”
And Charley, watching from the other side of the table with the expression of a starved orphan stamped on his round-cheeked rosy face, added hopefully, “I’d thank God and pray, if someone brought me a blancmange.”
A Marked Man Page 12