With an angry gesture, almost like a blow, she scrubbed the tears from her eyes and stood staring out across the pale sunlight of the Common, the illusion of light and space.
“I’ve tried to speak to him as well,” added Mrs. Sandhayes hesitantly, when Abigail opened her lips to utter some very unwise words and then closed them again. Considering she was a guest in the Fluckner household, Abigail guessed that she had had to pick her words very carefully. “I was never so close to anything as I was to striking the man over the head with my stick! It’s true—all he wants to do is get poor Mr. Knox out of Boston for a time . . . Just as he’s sent away that wretched little clerk of his. Just as he’d arrange for any prentice-boy to be sent away by his master, if that boy started sending flowers to Miss Lucy, or a sailing-man to be shipped out. It is what they do,” she added, and her green eyes suddenly narrowed with an uncharacteristic flicker of anger, “the friends of Parliament. The friends of the King. If there’s trouble, they arrange for there not to be trouble anymore.”
And for a moment, Abigail felt that she had stepped around the corner of a screen to see what lay behind the lame woman’s smiling and empty-headed cheerfulness: like the sudden sight of a disfiguring scar.
The next moment Mrs. Sandhayes smiled blithely again and shrugged. “I suppose the silly man feels that Lucy will forget Mr. Knox if he’s not right there beside her, and fall madly in love with someone else. Honestly, Mrs. Adams, men can be such asses sometimes!”
“Papa isn’t—” Lucy began unhappily, and then fell silent, looking away again as if unable to bear the company even of friends. “I love Papa.” And in her tone was the whole of her grief, that one man she loved would find abhorrent the other man she loved, not because Harry was a drunkard or a monster or a thief, but only because he worked with his hands. Because his father had been poor.
“Of course you do, dear child.” Margaret Sandhayes took a lurching step toward the girl, propped one cane against her panniers, and put her arm around Lucy’s shoulders. “Just because you want to take someone and shake some sense into their heads doesn’t mean you don’t love them . . . And just because they’re acting like a complete booby doesn’t mean they don’t love you. It will work itself out, child—” She shifted her position a little, which caused the propped stick to fall; Abigail caught it neatly, before it struck the frozen path. “Come,” she said. “Let’s go up to the top of Beacon Hill, as long as we’re out here. You’ll feel better.”
Together, the four women left the bare trees of the Mall and made their way by those frozen and houseless lanes to the top of Beacon Hill, to see the whole of the bay spread like a world of blue black diamond beneath their feet, pricked with a thousand flecks of white and tufted with islands: violet, gray, and brown. Below them on the Common, children launched a kite on the cold sea breeze; their voices skirled shrill as birds, as the boatless sail whipped and whirled aimlessly, then swooped suddenly upward, as if it had all at once discovered what it meant to be able to fly free.
“A ship!” cried Lucy, pointing, and there she was: black hull, white sails, floating among the islands with breathtaking lightness. She fished in the deep pocket of her cloak for a spyglass. “You don’t think it’s word from the King, finally, do you?” She sounded excited rather than scared. “About the tea? About what’s going to happen?”
Even before she could focus the glass, however, Mrs. Sandhayes replied softly, “It’s early for that, child. No, I think this must be the Incitatus, up from the Indies, on its way to Halifax.”
Sixteen
Parting, Lucy promised to write to Mrs. Hartnell the moment she got home. “I beg of you, be discreet, child,” pleaded Mrs. Sandhayes. “You have no idea what the slightest breath of scandal can do to your reputation—”
“Oh, pooh! Everyone says terrible things about Belinda Sumner behind her back and yet she’s received everywhere—”
“Belinda Sumner is married,” said Mrs. Sandhayes firmly. “And don’t expect too much of Caroline Hartnell. She’s stupid as an owl and wouldn’t see a conspiracy if twenty cloaked Venetians surrounded her with daggers.”
So much, thought Abigail, for “dear friendships” among the Tory gentry of the town.
But the Fluckner fortune, even if it attracted parasites like Sir Jonathan Cottrell and caused Lucy’s father to look askance at the suits of honest tradesmen, had its uses. Soon after dinner Philomela knocked diffidently on the back door of the Adams’ kitchen, with a note from her mistress saying that the stylish matron—wife to one of Boston’s wealthiest ship-owners—would pay a “morning call” at Milk Street the following day.
“She’ll have Gwenifer with her,” promised Philomela, as Abigail refolded the note and tucked it into one of the drawers of the kitchen sideboard. “She won’t stir from the house without her.”
“That scarcely gives the poor girl time to do her work, does it?”
“I shouldn’t think so, m’am, no,” replied the young woman, with a noncommittal politeness that some of her so-called social betters, Abigail reflected, could do well to imitate.
“Is she so frightened of the outside world?”
“I don’t think so, m’am. Sheba told me that Mrs. Hartnell and other friends of Mrs. Fluckner have all heard that no English lady will go out without a maidservant to lend her consequence.”
“Consequence indeed.” Abigail sniffed. “Yet I suppose it spares me the awkwardness of letting Mrs. Hartnell know that it’s her maid I need to speak to, rather than her all-important self. Was Bathsheba a friend to this girl Gwen, then?”
“They were friendly.” Philomela gave the matter a moment’s thought. “Bathsheba used to be Mrs. Fluckner’s own maid, you see, before she had Marcellina, so when Mrs. Sandhayes came to stay with us, Mrs. Fluckner would have Bathsheba go about with her, for that same reason—which was very kind of her, toward Mrs. Sandhayes, but very hard on Sheba who had only just had Stephen. But Sheba would say, there’s no cloud without silver lining, because Mrs. Sandhayes was very generous with her tips—”
“How so, if she’s not a wealthy woman?”
Philomela sank her voice and glanced toward Pattie, who was drying plates at the table. “She cheats at cards, m’am.”
Abigail said, “Ah.”
“So in any event,” Philomela went on in a more normal voice, “after Mrs. Hartnell took up Mrs. Sandhayes, Sheba and Gwen were much thrown together, and you know how it is. Unless a woman takes against you for some reason, you do fall into friendliness with those you see often, do you not? When they would go about together, down to the wharves, or take Mrs. Hartnell’s carriage out into the country, then Sheba and Gwen would sit up on the box with the coachman, which sounds finer than it actually is,” added the girl with her faint, quick grin, “when the weather is as it was in February. Sheba said she and Gwen used to share cloaks and hug together sometimes to keep warm.”
“Hmm.” Abigail dipped into the little jar of hard money on the sideboard for a tip.
The uncovering of Bathsheba’s strange hoard had served to remind her that other servants in that household might be saving up their tips and perquisites, too, in the hopes of building some defense against the misfortunes of the world. And perhaps, she reflected, that was exactly how Margaret Sandhayes viewed her cardsharping.
The money seemed to remind Philomela as well, for she turned upon the threshold, and said, “I wanted to thank you again, Mrs. Adams, for arranging with your father and Mr. Greenleaf to buy Sheba’s children. Mrs. Barnaby told me this morning that Mr. Greenleaf had offered for the pair of them—”
“’ Tis nothing,” said Abigail. “If ill has indeed befallen to their mother, they’ll at least have food and a roof above their heads. I know Silas Greenleaf. He is an honest man who will give those children their freedom when they’re of age to seek their own fortunes, and he’ll not split them up. Whyever that money was offered to Bathsheba, it will have been used for the reason she took it: to save them.”
Mrs. Caroline Hartnell!” murmured Pattie, profoundly impressed, when Philomela had gone and Abigail returned to the kitchen table. Johnny and Nabby had carried the clean dishes to the sideboard and were bringing out their schoolbooks and slates. “What shall you wear tomorrow, m’am? I can curl your hair—”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” retorted Abigail, settling herself on the other side of the table with the household daybook, where she could reach the inkwell that stood between the children. “And I shall dress as I do for Meeting, in my best bib and tucker. I don’t curl my hair for Meeting, and I’m certainly not going to give a morning call more time and attention than I do a morning spent with God.”
“Why are they called morning calls, if they take place after noon?” inquired Nabby, raising her blue eyes from The Pilgrim’s Progress.
“Because women are silly, and live in sloth and sin,” Johnny proclaimed. “Rich ones, anyway,” he added quickly, seeing Abigail’s eyebrows lift. “All they think of is their dogs and their dresses.”
“I rather think,” corrected Abigail mildly, “that ’tis because dinner used to be eaten at noon . . . and people used to get up just after midnight, to be about their morning’s business, isn’t that so, John Quincy?”
The boy nodded importantly and returned to his Latin while Abigail unfolded and perused again the notes that had been waiting for her when she’d returned from her rendezvous with Lucy and Mrs. Sandhayes that morning.
My very dear Mrs. Adams (Lieutenant Coldstone had written)—
Enquiries with the harbormaster have yielded no one by the name of Elkins as having come ashore from the Lady Bishop, nor from the Speedheart, which was the other ship in port from Bridgetown at the end of December and upon which Sir Jonathan Cottrell took passage. Nor is Elkins or anyone of his description listed as passenger on the Juno from Halifax, or the Polly Amos out of London, which were in port at about that time. Androcles Palmer is listed as a passenger on the Lady Bishop. Needless to say, if Mr. Elkins entered Boston by land, or came up from Barbados (if that was his place of origin) to another town on this coast and entered Boston on a coastwise trader like the Hetty, I would have no record of him. Make of this what you are able.
Your ob’t,
J. Coldstone
Lt. Kings 64th Rgt. Ft
And from Sam:
Palmer packed up and left the Horn Spoon on Thursday the 24th February. Men have asked about the district for an Englishman of his description, and none thereabouts have seen him, under that name or any other. A woman named Cherne—tall and handsome, dark-haired and of a strong cast of feature, well dressed and appearing in the midforties—paid for his room and his meals, and was much with him, though she herself did not stay at the inn but the first night. I venture this is the lady friend of whom poor Fenton spoke, unless there were more than just the one. None at the Horn Spoon remarked on one of Elkins’s description, though the Man-o’-War lies but yards away.
Abigail folded the notes, turned them over and over in her hands: Drat those wretched actors. Changed their names and moved their goods across the street or down two doors—that portion of Ship Street boasted more taverns than the rest of Boston put together—and how could we tell?
The thought returned to vex her the following day, when—properly gowned in dark, well-cut wool and wearing, as she had said, her best bib and tucker—she sat drinking peppermint tisane in the Fluckner drawing room, making conversation with Hannah Fluckner and contemplating again the portrait of that sweet-faced lady in her youth. A pity, Abigail reflected, one could not acquire decent miniatures of such lesser personalities as the elusive Mr. Elkins or Androcles Palmer, to show to innkeepers who might never have heard the names but might well recognize the faces. Not that the miniatures would be an invariable help, she amended, returning her eyes to the portrait with a certain amount of regret. When the portrait’s original asked her politely, “A penny for your thoughts, Mrs. Adams,” she said, “I was only thinking what a shame it is, that no one in New England seems to be able to paint faces that look anything like the actual people.”
“La, I protest, Mrs. Adams!” cried Mrs. Hartnell. “’Tis a fine, big portrait, and very handsomely done! Mr. Stanley—the man who painted it, and such a very gentlemanlike man he was!—did one of me, in my green and white satin—Do you remember my green and white satin, Hannah? La, such a crack as we thought it, with those great dowdy panniers—”
Abigail listened politely to the subsequent description of various recollected toilettes, but it was clear to her that it had never crossed the minds of either woman that the business of a portrait was to portray not the cost of the sitter’s clothing, but those individual differences of eyebrow and chin and lip that distinguished the rather saturnine Margaret Sandhayes from the fragile and flighty Caroline Hartnell.
Neither pretty; both fairish rather than fair; both slender rather than beefy of build. Even as portraits missed the differences of feature, the fashionable layers of paint and powder blurred them, concealing the natural hues of complexions as well as their flaws under white lead and cochineal. How could you describe a woman, she reflected, if the main thing you saw about her was not her face, but the elaborately curled, puffed, and swagged white meringue of powdered hair that surrounded it? A describer would fix first on, One lady was a cripple, the other two were sound, and then perhaps might notice, One lady had a tiny tricorn hat pinned to the summit of her coiffeur, the other two had silk flowers. Certainly this was how Margaret Sandhayes had remembered those who came in and out of the cardroom and the ballroom: the gentleman in the violet waistcoat, the lady with the coiffure Aux Rêves Sentimentales . . . Only later had Lucy’s scribbled hand filled in the names. Even those who did notice features might only say “big nose,” which could describe either the Hartnell aquiline or the Sandhayes inquiring beak. And in fact, Abigail suspected, only people like John, who were used to analyzing faces, would consciously register that the uncomeliness of feature common to both women stemmed from large noses at all, or that one had a chin that was far too weak for beauty, the other, far too strong.
Mrs. Hartnell concluded her breathless and extended account of her most recent shopping-trip and turned to Abigail at last. “Now, dearest Margaret tells me you’ve taken an interest in that sweet little Bethlehem girl—”
“Bathsheba,” corrected Lucy, ignoring her mother’s admonitory glare.
“Bathsheba, of course! Brain like a sieve, Mr. Hartnell is forever telling me—How very extraordinary that she would run away like that, you’re always so kind to your Negroes, Hannah. Positively spoil them, I say—” She laughed, as if her own observations were always the height of wit. “Well, it’s very kind of you, for all that, seeing that the children go to a good home, poor brats. I am terribly fond of children, you know, Mrs. Adams. My own are the heartbeat of my life, you may ask any of my friends—”
Mrs. Sandhayes nodded, although she had imparted to Abigail on other occasions that her friend was unhesitating in her choice of her own convenience and pleasure over that of any of her children, having dispatched every one of them back to England for schooling at the earliest possible moment.
Abigail said, “Indeed,” and continued into the split second that the other woman was drawing breath to expand on the topic, “but I have the theory that she may in fact be in hiding. Mrs. Sandhayes said that she seemed upset and frightened on the day before she fled. I understand that you had been out with Mrs. Sandhayes that day, and she has told me how much your observations are to be trusted—”
Not, in fact, a lie, she comforted herself.
“Did you see anything, on that Friday when you were out, that seemed odd to you? Out of the way?”
In the far (and coldest) corner of the room, where Philomela sat sewing with the dark-haired, diminutive girl whom Abigail guessed had to be Mrs. Hartnell’s Gwen, Abigail was conscious of quick movement. She turned her head to see Gwen look up and swiftly meet her eyes. Then, as qui
ckly, the girl bowed her head again over her work. But Abigail knew she was listening.
“You remember, Caroline,” prompted Mrs. Sandhayes. “It was the day we went down to Merchant’s Row, and you found that astonishing piece of French lace, for truly dagger-cheap, and the pink satin shoes with the paste buckles—”
“Yes, yes, yes, of course!” cried the other woman. “How could I forget?”
“We were simply hours in that warehouse, and in the shops on the wharf,” said Mrs. Sandhayes. “Afterward I was half-froze and my feet felt as if I’d been bastinado’d, but I wouldn’t have traded for anything, you know.” And she smiled.
“No, no! Such a delightful day!”
“When you came back to the carriage,” said Abigail, wondering how even Mrs. Sandhayes’s devotion to fashion and “good society” could compensate her for even an hour of this woman’s conversation, “did Bathsheba seem upset or distressed in any way?”
“I don’t think so.” Mrs. Hartnell frowned uncertainly. “And surely—”
“But we didn’t leave them with the carriage, dear,” put in Mrs. Sandhayes. “Remember? We knew there would be a great many things to carry.”
“Of course!” Mrs. Hartnell broke into a smile. To Abigail, she confided, “Dear Hannah has been so generous, making sure poor Margaret has had a servant to go about with her. Really, not everyone would be so considerate of a guest.” She smirked happily, and Abigail was conscious of the sudden, slight rigidity Mrs. Sandhayes’s smile, at the reminder of her condition—and of the fact that for three months she had been living on Thomas Fluckner’s charity. “How she can have managed on the ship from England I can not imagine—”
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