“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 square 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
They descended to the cellar, as empty as the attic and twice as cold. “Nice wide stairs,” remarked Abigail, who had frequently spoken to John on the subject of their own cellar, which even the Spanish Inquisition would have rejected as a dungeon on the grounds of excessive discomfort to the prisoners.
“I wondered why the kitchen was so chill, with such a draught from below,” he responded. He thought the cellar at Queen Street was just fine.
The gold of the candle-flame touched the edges of a bucket, suspended by a pulley over a covered well in the center of the floor. “What’s the box for?” asked Coldstone, nodding toward a small, closed cabinet with a ring in its top that sat near the bottom of the stair, like a good-sized breadbox but more sturdy.
“ ’ Tis a wine-chest, sir. You see the ring at the top, that can be hooked in place of the bucket, so that it can be lowered down into the well to just above the level of the water. The property has no icehouse, you see. The well itself is only useful in the summer season, of course. It freezes hard this time of year.”
“Very ingenious.” At Coldstone’s gesture, Sergeant Muldoon moved aside the cover, and all five of them—Muldoon excluded—leaned over the narrow throat of darkness. Coldstone removed a candle-end from his pocket, lit it at Apthorp’s branch, and threw it down. It landed with a muted clunk, and Abigail saw for an instant a tiny circle of glittering ice around the flame, until it heated the surface sufficient to make a little melt-water, and so extinguished itself.
There was no wine in the wine-chest, and by the old cobweb that linked it to the wall, the contrivance had seen no use since the summer at least. “I don’t think your Mr. Elkins ever occupied this house,” Abigail remarked as they climbed the stair to the kitchen again. “At least he never slept in that bedchamber. Without bed-curtains, at this season, he’d have frozen in his sleep.”
“Yet there’s been a fire in this room,” pointed out Coldstone, indicating the wide hearth, the small stock of cord-wood in the box beside it. “The hearth has been cleaned and tidied—” He took from a shelf the white and blue German teapot, the neatly placed saucers and cups, and ran a fastidious finger along the dustless handle.
“Mr. Elkins paid extra to have certain amenities like the tea service and a set of sheets upstairs. Of course he’d fetch along his own tea and things, and silver, too, if he wanted it.”
Abigail turned over in her hands the plates and bowls, the Japan-ware tray and the little warming-lamp. All were clean. I’m missing something, she thought. Something I’ve been told . . .
“Had he a servant?”
“He must have, mustn’t he?” Apthorp regarded her in some surprise at the idea that a man able to rent a house for ten pounds a year would not have a valet.
“What sort of horse does he ride?” she asked, and again, Mr. Apthorp looked blank.
“I haven’t the least idea, m’am. He’s always come to my house afoot. I don’t even know if he keeps a horse.”
“By the appearance of the midden by the stables,” said Abigail, “someone has done so.”
Entry into the stable itself confirmed this, but not much more. Trampled straw heaped two of the stalls. Scattered oats—and a small quantity in the feedbox—had drawn the rodents from the fields around about, which had not been evident in the house, and the faint smell of horse-piss spoke of a fairly recent date of occupancy. By the same token, Abigail guessed that if horses had been here as recently as the fifth of March, they hadn’t been here much later.
“You say Mr. Elkins has an accommodation address,” said John, as they crossed to the house once more. “Is this how you generally communicate with him?” Through the gate and out across the fields in the direction of town, Abigail could see the wet-black roofs of the gaggle of taverns and houses that lay along Green Lane at the foot of the hill, but no trace of their earlier escort. Perhaps, like Hev Miller and Matt Brown, they had taken refuge at the Dressed Ship.
“Yes, sir. I write to him care of the taproom at the Man-o’-War, in Ship Street across from Clark’s Yard. A Mrs. Klinker owns the place, sir. A clean and respectable establishment, as such places go.” Apthorp sounded as if he feared they would judge him harshly by the place to which he sent his letters.
“Odd, isn’t it? To spend fifty shillings a quarter for an address and then receive one’s letters in a common tavern?”
Apthorp shook his head. “ ’ Tisn’t my business to say what’s odd about another man, Mr. Adams. He wants it that way and is willing to pay, so I’m sure he has his reasons.”
“When next you hear from Mr. Elkins,” said Coldstone, “please notify me—and Mr. Adams—at once, if you would, sir. I should very much like to speak with him. Is it your intention,” he added to Abigail, once they had parted company from Mr. Apthorp and were on their way back to Rowe’s Wharf in the deepening dusk, “to speak to Mr. Fenton again soon, Mrs. Adams?”
“I will write His Excellency, and Mr. Buttrick, this evening to ask if ’twould be convenient for me to do so tomorrow.”
“Do so, if you would, m’am. You may add Major Salisbury’s name to that request, if you have any concern that Governor Hutchinson might refuse you admittance to his house. You have never told me,” he added, as they left the bare back-slopes of Beacon Hill behind them for the muddy ice of Green Lane, “how you came to know of this place and of Sir Jonathan’s presence there on the day of his death. We shall need sworn
witnesses, you know,” he went on, with a disapproving glance at John, “if we are to bring the matter before the Admiralty Court—or even the Massachusetts General Court.”
“Witnesses shall be forthcoming,” said John. “Once we know enough of our direction,” he added, as Coldstone opened his lips to make some observation about the handiness and reliability of Massachusetts witnesses, “to be sure that our witnesses will not find themselves under arrest.”
Coldstone looked as if he were going to speak again, then closed his mouth and paced on for a time looking straight before him. Abigail noticed as they passed Green Lane that their bodyguards were back. Two men coming up from the direction of the waterfront caught a glimpse of Muldoon’s crimson uniform and started to cross Treamount Street to them, and one of the men who’d been trailing them all afternoon loafed casually over and caught the two patriots by the arms. Coldstone gave no sign that he’d seen this defense, but Abigail thought his shoulders stiffened beneath their dark military cloak.
At length he muttered, “This is ridiculous.”
“I agree, sir,” John replied.
“I don’t speak of the fact that a King’s officer, legitimately pursuing the King’s duty, needs a corps assigned by the local incendiaries to enter this city without being assaulted—”
“I did not think that was what you meant, sir.” John glanced sidelong up at the officer at his side. “For myself, I consider it not ridiculous, but appalling, that a question of politics—of whether or not Englishmen living in Massachusetts should enjoy the same liberties as Englishmen living in London—has so preoccupied and distorted the minds of both sides that the business of justice cannot be pursued because neither side can or will trust the word of the other. With the result, as we have seen, that a criminal feels safe in murdering a servant of the King within a hundred feet of the Governor’s house.”
Coldstone moved his head a little at that, and something in the look of his eye made Abigail say, “If he was murdered in the alley. Did you smell anything in that house, Lieutenant? In the front hall?”
“I did,” he replied grimly. “And I have fought on enough battlefields and walked through enough hospital-tents to know what death smells like. Yet as I can think of no reason why a killer would carry a murdered man a quarter of a mile to dump his body on the Governor’s doorstep, when a quarter mile in the other direction would bring him to the ice-covered river where a body could lie undetected until April, I can only conclude that whoever died in that hall, it was not Sir Jonathan Cottrell.”
Lord bless you, m’am, don’t stand there lookin’ at me like I’m going to stick my spoon in the wall this second.” Mr. Fenton blinked sleepily at Abigail as she stood in the doorway. When she came close, she saw that even in the washed-out gray daylight that came through the attic window, the man’s pupils were contracted to the size of pinheads; the bottle that stood on the table beside his cot must contain an opiate of some kind. “Your good Doctor Warren didn’t tell me anythin’ I didn’t suspect already. At least he give me somethin’ for the pain, God bless him.”
Abigail brought up the broken chair, and John—as Thaxter had done two days before—sat tailor-fashion on the floor with his notebook in his hand. “Are you in much pain?” she asked gently, and Fenton moved his head, as if in a denial that the sweat on his face and his stertorous breathing belied.
“Not to speak of.”
Even had Mr. Buttrick not warned her, when he led her and John through the servants’ hall and up the backstairs, that Dr. Warren had pronounced the man beyond help, Abigail thought she would have known at the sight of him that he was dying. Under a sheen of sweat, his face was swollen almost unrecognizably from the man she’d spoken to only Monday evening, and in the daylight the progress of the jaundice had turned his flesh nearly orange. His voice was barely a whisper. When she took his hand—puffy with dropsy, though the wrist above it was wasted from the starvation of long illness—it felt chill and limp, like a dead man’s hand already.
“Mr. Buttrick said you had a thing or two you wanted yet to ask,” Fenton prompted her after a moment. “Don’t fret after me, m’am—happens to everyone, I’ve heard tell. His Excellency sent his pastor in, for me to make my peace—” He managed a crooked grin in spite of the pain. “Leastwise I know now for certain there’s no danger of meetin’ His Nibs when I gets to the other side. I know which way he went. How’s things look for your friend?”
“Unpromising,” said Abigail softly. Beyond the unceiled slant of the roof, the wind flung handfuls of sleet upon the shingles. “When last we spoke you mentioned actors from Barbados—What were they doing in Boston? Surely it’s a strange place for actors to come?”
“Oh, Palmer said he’d got word his sister, who’d run off two years ago with a sea captain, was now in Boston, and he was in search of her. A sad tale, but not so unusual. I’ve heard its like a dozen times. Cassandra, her name was—”
“You spoke to him, then?”
“Lord, yes. Had dinner with him and his lady friend at the Spancel.”
“When was this? How long before Sir Jonathan left for Maine?” she added, realizing that there was a good chance Mr. Fenton was no longer aware of how long he himself had been lying here ill.
“Just the day before. I’d packed most of his kit. He was off that evening for a meeting with these great friends of Fluckner’s about yet another claim that had popped up about these lands in Maine, one that none of ’em had ever heard of before. He was in a rare taking over it. Fellow’d have to be tracked down and bought off, he said—I knew he wouldn’t be in until late. Mr. Palmer walked into the Spancel just a few minutes after me, with his woman on his arm, and asked, was it true we was stayin’ in the Governor’s house, and would the folk there know about this fellow Jellicoe who was supposed to have run off with Cassie? One thing led to another. You know how it is, when you scrape acquaintance, not knowin’ anyone in the town.”
“It must be a lonely life, traveling,” said Abigail softly. You know how it is, he had said, and yet she didn’t. It came to her that she had never lived anywhere where she had not had family and friends already waiting for her when she arrived. Even when she and John had first moved to Boston from Braintree, the whole tribe of Quincy, Tufts, and Smith cousins and uncles and aunts had all been waiting to greet her, not to speak of half a regiment of Boston Adamses. She thought of Lieutenant Coldstone, crossing the Atlantic in a troop-ship—of all those men on Castle Island—coming to this strange country where they knew no one and where they were automatically loathed . . .
“You gets used to it.” Fenton’s breath caught with a stab of pain, and his hand closed hard on hers for a moment. “And you learns. I’d seen Palmer on the stage, an’ here and there about the town—Bridgetown’s about the size of a market-village back home—but never to speak to: very grand, he was. Yet cast him adrift, and he was glad enough of seein’ any face he knew that he bought me dinner and a couple good glasses of ale.”
“Did he say how long he was staying in Boston?” John asked, and Fenton shook his head.
“Long as it took him to learn whether his sister was here or not, I reckon. They’ll be gone by now.”
“Did your master ever speak of a man named Elkins? Toby Elkins?” asked Abigail. “’Twas his house that Sir Jonathan visited on the day he returned.”
Again Fenton shook his head. His face twisted, and Abigail found a spoon on the little table and poured a measure of the laudanum into it. “Another,” whispered Fenton, when he’d drunk it. “If you please—the pain catches me . . .” After the second dose he seemed to sink deeper into the bedclothes, like a wrecked ship settling. He whispered drowsily, “Thank ’ee, m’am. It’s good not bein’ alone.”
When Fenton had sunk into opiated sleep, John and Abigail slipped silently from the room and in silence walked back to Queen Street. Though it was only midmorning, Abigail felt strange, as if it should have been night when she sat beside the dying man. Had he family b
ack in England? she wondered. How would anyone find out where to write to them, to tell them their son—brother—uncle—was gone? It crossed her mind to think of John, in his long and frequent travels, riding for days sometimes on the muddy roads in the western woods to one county court or another: out to Worcester, up to Haverhill, through those deep primeval forests untouched since God called them into being.
If he were taken sick, she thought, looking sidelong at that blunt, round face, that burly shape in the bundle of his cloak . . . If he were taken sick, would anyone there know to write to me? The thought of such a letter turned her cold inside.
John, too, was deep in thought as they walked, though his mind followed other roads, for in time he said, “No Elkins. I wonder if Sir Jonathan spoke of the man to your friend Miss Fluckner, or to that blithering gooseberry of hers. He doesn’t sound the man to tell his business to a woman . . .”
“It may not have been business.”
John raised his brows.
She shrugged. “Mr. Elkins may have been a professional procurer, for all we know . . . It certainly doesn’t sound as if Cottrell indulged himself much in Maine.” Her voice turned dry. “It would fit with everything else we’ve heard of the man.”
“In that case, would not Elkins have arrived with a young lady?”
Abigail shook her head. “Would he? I have no idea how such matters are arranged.”
“They aren’t,” said John. “Not in Boston, anyway—at least not on so opulent a scale. Yet I find it curious,” he added softly, “that there is a young woman missing . . . a young woman, moreover, upon whose virtue Cottrell made at least one attempt and possibly more. It answers nothing of how and why Jonathan Cottrell died . . . but I would very much like to know where the woman Bathsheba was during the eight days between her disappearance and Cottrell’s return.”
He turned down the little passway that led from Queen Street into the yard behind the Adams’ house, narrow and muddy and smelling of the two cows that traversed it twice a day to be led out and grazed on the Common. In general, John—or Thaxter, if John were out of Boston—would rake out the cowhouse in the afternoon, just before the town herd-boy brought the cattle down Queen Street for the children of their various owners to fetch in for the evening milking. This morning, however, having put off the start of his day’s work thus far, as soon as they came indoors, he kissed Abigail and went upstairs to change clothes, while Abigail herself shed her pattens and donned apron and day-cap to start preparations for dinner. “There’s two notes for you, m’am,” reported Pattie, coming into the kitchen with a broom and duster in hand and Charley and Tommy at her heels.
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