One, from Lieutenant Coldstone, simply reported that Mrs. Klinker of the Man-o’-War knew nothing of Mr. Elkins save his occasional visits to retrieve or dispatch mail, a convenience for which he paid her fivepence a week and had done so since the first week of January.
The other, from Dr. Joseph Warren, requested the favor of an interview, when it would be convenient.
She sent a note via one of Tom Butler’s prentice-boys next door, and the young doctor himself arrived that afternoon, just as she, Nabby, and Pattie finished mopping down the kitchen after dinner. John, who liked an after-dinner pipe once his portion of the cleanup was done, rose from the hearthside settle and held out a hand to the slender young man: “God bless you for seeing to that poor servant, Warren. Good Lord, what is it that he’s contracted? That’s no grippe . . .”
“Nor is it,” said Dr. Warren quietly. “It’s what I wished to speak of to you.” His clear gray eyes touched Abigail, included her in the statement, and the three of them moved to the fireside corner, away from where the tactful Pattie was settling the children to their lessons at the table.
“’Tis not some kind of tropical fever?” asked John worriedly, keeping his voice low. “I’ve heard of a jaundice like that in the Caribbean. The man was recently in Barbados, and indeed the night before he was taken sick had supper with an actor from Bridgetown—”
“Except that he had no fever,” said Warren. “He had supper with a man he’d known in Barbados—had his master known him?”
John shook his head.
“And half a day later, he was taken sick,” continued the doctor softly. “So that he could not accompany his master to Maine, nor be at Hancock’s Wharf to meet him when he returned. What does that sound like to you?”
John said nothing. His eyes went to Abigail’s, then returned to their friend.
Abigail said, “You’re not saying he was poisoned?”
“The symptoms sound precisely like certain mushroom poisons I have read of,” said Warren quietly. “They’re slow-acting and slow to begin their action—an advantage when someone doesn’t want to be associated with the onset of the symptoms. Had not this man’s master been murdered, the idea would not have crossed my mind at all. But Fenton’s illness seems mightily convenient for it to be simply jaundice and la grippe. It might be well,” he added, “to find this actor from Barbados with whom he supped, and learn if he was as ignorant of Sir Jonathan’s affairs and company as Mr. Fenton seemed to think he was.”
Fifteen
’Tis a long way,” said Sam Adams thoughtfully, “from guessing the servant was poisoned, to finding who it was that thrashed the master and left him to die of cold in a ditch. That distance is longer still, if this British colonel has the word of a good, rich Tory’s dogsbody about who was seen near the alley late that night and a conveniently dropped scarf to back him up.” He knocked the ash of his pipe into the kitchen fireplace, a stone archway considerably larger than that of Abigail’s more modern kitchen on Queen Street, and smiled his thanks as Bess, plump and graying, brought in coffee from the pantry for those gathered around her hearth. Wind howled eerily in the hollow of the chimney overhead. Sleet spattered on the gray windows like a rain of stones.
Paul Revere said, “I take it you want us to locate this Palmer.”
“It shouldn’t be difficult.” John leaned forward to tong a coal from the fire and applied it to the bowl of his own pipe. He was crowded cozily against Abigail on the old-fashioned settle that flanked the fire. “An actor’s a rare bird in these climes. He’ll have caught someone’s attention.” Sam’s house on Purchase Street—one of the most venerable in Boston—in which he had been born, was constructed in the antique style, so that the whole northern wall of what had been old Josiah Adams’s original “keeping room” was wrought of stone, with the fireplace so great that Bess knelt inside it to do the cooking. The settles were built along the fireplace’s rough stone inner walls, and afforded draft-free, if rather smoky, seats on afternoons like this one, with a sudden gale driving in off the bay.
“Indeed he did,” agreed the silversmith. “At least, if he’s the same who was at the Horn Spoon in Ship Street, back in at the start of the New Year.”
“Can you confirm that?” asked John. For her part, Abigail felt no surprise that Palmer was already located. The Sons of Liberty, in its way, had grown out of the less formal network of gossip, friendships, and ward-level political alliances that had existed in Boston since time out of mind. In a community where a good third of the men were involved in the smuggling trade, people kept an eye on who was coming and going in the town, and people talked: to wives, to brothers, to friends met in taverns—those same taverns where men of compatible politics would meet after supper, in order to feel themselves a part of the greater community before going home to their wives and their beds. The women whose husbands ran the waterfront taverns—or who ran them themselves—talked, too: to sisters, to friends met at the market or outside the church. An actor from Barbados would be noted and commented upon (“Lord, the buttons on his waistcoat all covered with paste diamonds, ’twould fair blind you across the room!”), even as, these days, any outspoken Tory who seemed to be powerful or connected with the Army would be duly mentioned to Sam or Revere or Hancock or Ben Edes or any of the other men who made up the inner circle of the Sons.
The Sons of Liberty took good care to know who came and went in Boston.
“You wouldn’t know if he’s still there?” inquired Sam, and Revere shook his head.
“I’d have heard if he were, but I’ll ask. I’ll ask after his lady friend, too—Mrs. Nevers at the Spoon said there was a lady with ‘that actor fellow,’ as she called him—”
“A woman?” asked Dr. Warren, crowded onto the settle at Abigail’s other side. “Or a lady?”
“A lady, she said. Well-off, and paying all ‘that actor fellow’s’ bills. I’ll ask, too, after this Elkins, while I’m down there. The Man-o’-War’s only a few yards from the Horn Spoon—though God knows every sailor and smuggler uses those Ship Street taverns as accommodation addresses. Still, if Elkins is paying fifty shillings a quarter for a house he doesn’t live in, where is he living?”
“Check with the gate-guards,” suggested Abigail. “And the ferrymen. He may in fact be traveling, though it didn’t look to me like anyone had ever actually stayed at that house. Even if we could prove that poor Fenton was poisoned,” she added quietly, with a glance at Dr. Warren, “you’re right, Sam, that we’re as far as ever we were from proving that Harry Knox didn’t brain that—that weasel Cottrell. But if we can start finding these other people—Palmer and Elkins—we can perhaps show that wretched Colonel Leslie that Harry wasn’t part of the . . . the conspiracy.”
John sniffed, and rose to his feet, even his short height nearly brushing the roughly corbelled bricks of the huge fireplace. He strode across the hearth in his best courtroom manner, hands gripping his lapels as if he were clothed in an imaginary robe: “Gentlemen of the Admiralty Court,” he boomed, “I shall now prove to you conclusively, and beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Sir Jonathan Cottrell was not beaten to death by the man whose sweetheart he attempted to dishonor—by the man who shouted in the presence of these ten witnesses that he would kill him—but was in fact the victim of an elaborate conspiracy whose nature we have been unable to determine and whose minions have slipped away through our grip . . .”
As Revere, Dr. Warren, Sam, and Sam’s fifteen-year-old son—present on a little hearth-stool—all applauded wildly and raised their mugs and shouted, “Not Guilty, upon mine honor! You have convinced us, sir! Of course ’twas a conspiracy, the villains! Set the lad free!” Abigail flushed a little, and waved at John—
“Don’t be an idiot, John!”
But she knew he was right.
A little later, as she and John were wrapping up to take their leave of the house on Purchase Street, she said to Revere, “Whilst you’re asking after Palmer and his extremely obliging
patroness, would you ask if anyone has heard anything of a woman named Bathsheba? Fluckner’s servant-girl . . .”
“The one who went missing, yes.” Revere nodded—of course he’d read the advertisements. Revere read everything. “She’s not been found, then? I see Fluckner has quit advertising.”
“She disappeared two days after Cottrell left for Maine,” said Abigail. “On Thursday, Miss Fluckner found nearly twenty-five pounds hidden in her room—most of it in British coin. It can only have come from Cottrell.”
Revere’s eyebrows shot up at the sum, and he nodded. “I’ll see what I can learn. What became of the money?”
“I sent it to my father,” said Abigail, “to arrange for the purchase of the woman’s two babies, and their care. I can’t imagine what she knew about Cottrell, or what she could have learned. But I suspect that she’s met the same fate that will take poor Fenton very shortly.”
The silversmith nodded. “Whoever these people are,” he murmured, “they seem to have wanted Cottrell dead very badly . . . and to have let no one stand in their way.”
“I suppose not. But how could a Negro servant-woman stand in the way of anyone killing a King’s Commissioner? I can understand having Fenton put out of the way, so that Cottrell would be alone on his journey to Maine. But why would that poor girl have needed to die?”
“When we learn that,” replied Revere, “we shall have a much better idea of who it is we’re looking for.”
Abigail relayed the gist of this debate to Lucy Fluckner on the following day, carefully omitting any reference to the money they had found in Bathsheba’s rooms or to whom, exactly, was going to do the inquiring about Palmer, because Margaret Sandhayes was hobbling beside them, with surprising agility, on the frozen mud of the elm-treed Mall. Lucy flung up her hands in exasperation. “What are they going to say?” she demanded, when Abigail had done. “That Harry just happened to blunder into a conspiracy and murdered Sir Jonathan before these other villains could get to him?”
Yesterday’s gale had blown itself out in a chilly, glittering morning. Any who could afford to set their work aside for an hour had done so: men in cloaks and greatcoats strode the uneven ground of the Common with the movements of slaves new-freed, or gathered around the bare and venerable Great Tree that stood in the center of the meadow. Women strolled in twos and threes between the naked elms of the Mall, chattering of babies and servants and the laundry they’d do if the weather continued this fair.
“If I know anything of the British system of justice, dear child,” observed Mrs. Sandhayes acerbically now, “that is precisely what they’ll say. What is a conspiracy in comparison with a couple of good, loud threats and an eyewitness?”
“And you think Bathsheba—” began Philomela, who had been walking quietly in the rear. Mrs. Sandhayes turned, an expression of such affronted shock on her face that a servant would put herself into the conversation of her betters—that a servant would listen to what was being said—and the dark girl drew back in confusion.
“No!” Lucy caught her maid’s hand. “No, she was your friend. Please speak.”
Philomela flashed a glance of crimson-faced apology at Mrs. Sandhayes, who to do her justice seemed to realize that her own reaction to a servant’s putting herself forward had been precisely that—a reaction—and was herself looking slightly embarrassed.
“Dear me, Bathsheba, yes,” she murmured, and Philomela seemed to take this as an admission of mitigating circumstances.
“Do you think then that Bathsheba was upset—was frightened—because she had learned something of this conspiracy against Sir Jonathan?”
“Did she speak of it to you?” asked Abigail.
Philomela shook her head.
“Where would she have learned of it?” put in Lucy eagerly. “Bathsheba used to go about with you, Margaret—did you ever see anything? Hear anything? Did you ever go near that house on Beacon Hill, where Sir Jonathan went the day he was killed?”
“On that side of the town?” Mrs. Sandhayes looked so startled at the idea that it was almost comical. “Have you seen the place? By what Mrs. Adams tells us, it’s at the antipodes, with nothing near it but churches and distilleries!”
“Not precisely the ends of the earth,” said Abigail, amused at her dismay. “’ Tis only over that rise of ground over there, about a half mile . . . Yet you’re quite right, Lucy. Bathsheba may have heard or seen something that meant something to her—that would mean something to a native Bostonian, perhaps, which would be lost on someone not from this town.”
Mrs. Sandhayes arched her eyebrows—clearly there was nothing that a black servant-girl could see that would escape an Englishwoman—but Lucy said, “Where did you go on that Thursday, Margaret? On the day all the fuss took place, with me, and Harry, and Sir Jonathan—” Her cheeks suddenly flushed, with remembered anger, and she looked away. Past her—beyond the bare double line of trees that bordered the western edge of the meadow—the little hill crowed by the town Powder-Store rose, disused now that its successor was being built, like a solitary and dilapidated prison-tower in a fairy tale.
The little stone watchhouse stood at the hill’s foot, in use mostly at night, and visible beyond it was the straggly copse of brush and trees, where Sir Jonathan had lain in wait for the girl.
Not because he cared about her, reflected Abigail, studying Lucy’s half-averted profile. Not because he was in the slightest interested in who she was or what she thought. The one he had wooed had been her father. Secure in the assurance that his engagement to several thousand acres at least of land in Maine would be announced upon his return, he had only wanted to make his unwilling fiancée unmarriageable by anyone else until his return.
Did he really think Harry would repudiate Lucy if he learned that she’d been possessed by another man?
The look in Lucy’s face when she spoke his name, the way Lucy would saddle her own horse to escape the house, the storms of temper that punctuated her relationship with the father who regarded her as a pawn to consolidate his own financial empire: these fit together as Abigail studied this big, clumsy girl who seemed so out of step with the genteel world of wealthy Boston. Against the brightness of that open sweep of hillside, Lucy had the look, suddenly, of a captive herself. With her unfashionable snub nose, her unromantically round pink cheeks and sturdy shoulders, she seemed to Abigail a creature who should have been born into a different world, a different station—a woman who belonged to the open country and the wild spring sunshine a great deal more than she belonged in the elegant drawing rooms of her father’s house.
“I was out with Caroline Hartnell,” Mrs. Sandhayes replied. “Do you know her, Mrs. Adams? A delightful woman—But it wasn’t until the day after, you know, the Friday, that Bathsheba seemed to come all to pieces.”
“Was Bathsheba much acquainted with her woman?” Lucy asked, turning back to Philomela. “Gwenifer is her name—?”
“Gwen, yes,” agreed the dark girl. “Gwen Pugh.”
“Would she have noticed anything, do you think?”
“Heavens, child, don’t start again with prying into servants’ tittle-tattle! These things get about . . .”
“I can certainly ask her,” said Abigail thoughtfully. “Though you’re probably right, Mrs. Sandhayes—” She turned tactfully to include the indignant chaperone. “Unless we find some definite—and spectacular—evidence of conspiracy, ’twill be hard to convince an Admiralty Court of anything except that the villainous citizens of Boston are out to cast up a smoke screen . . . again. From these”—she held up the notes that Lucy and Mrs. Sandhayes had given her, the last of their assembled compilations of who they could remember being where, when, at the Governor’s ball—“it doesn’t appear that anyone was markedly absent or noticeably late—except for Sir Jonathan, of course.”
“Well, the Sumners were late, but they’re always late,” amended Lucy. “And anyway the four of them came together, and I can’t imagine old Mrs. Sumner helping her
son and daughters lie in wait in an alley to murder a man. I’ll keep up my program of spying,” she added stoutly, “and even drink tea with all Mother’s friends, to get them to gossip about Sir Jonathan, but I haven’t learned anything yet.”
Margaret Sandhayes beamed. Evidently gossip and tittle-tattle with the wealthy were a completely different issue than the same tactics used upon servants.
“I don’t suppose there’s a chance of you speaking to Mr. Wingate . . .”
Lucy’s jaw hardened and she looked away again for a moment. “Father’s sent him to Philadelphia,” she said, her usually bluff tones muted with distress. “He thought of that. I tried to talk to him, you know—to Father, I mean. About Harry. About what they’ll do to him.”
Sudden tears threatened her voice and she forced it steady. “Father just says—I think he really believes it—Good Lord, they’ll never actually hang the boy . . . no matter what he was doing out in the alley at that time. Because of course he pretends that he didn’t put Mr. Wingate up to it. All that’ll happen is he’ll spend a few weeks in irons, which I daresay the boy deserves.” Her voice flexed and fluffed in an imitation of her father’s gruff tones, then broke again. “He really, honestly sees it as a kind of—not a practical joke, but a comeuppance, because of Harry’s politics. He should be more careful who he’s seen with, or he wouldn’t be in this trouble, he says.”
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