A Marked Man

by Barbara Hamilton

  “They won’t try to arrest me. They haven’t a leg to stand on—and if I know Mr. Revere, reinforcements are already on their way.”

  When she reentered the Watchhouse, the youthful surgeon was examining the wound by the clustered light of the lanterns, but at least, Abigail reflected, he didn’t suggest that his patient be bled, puked, or given emetics to regulate the balance of his bodily humors.

  “We should get him to the camp before I attempt to remove the ball,” he said, straightening up at last. His speech, like Coldstone’s, was that of the gentry class: Abigail wondered if his parents, like the Lieutenant’s, had not been quite able to afford professional training for their son and so had apprenticed him to an Army surgeon instead. Looking around him, he registered a moment’s surprise at the sight of a woman in the place, then stepped over to her and bowed. “Lieutenant Dowling, m’am, at your service . . . Can you tell me, if there is some herb—some poultice that the local midwives use—as a sovereign for cleansing a dirty wound, or as a febrifuge? I have often found these old remedies to be of great use, but unfortunately I only know them for the Indies.”

  “Willow-bark tea will bring down a fever,” Abigail began.

  The artillery officer broke in, “Really, Lieutenant Dowling, do you think that’s wise?” And in a lower voice, “’ Twas this woman who lured Lieutenant Coldstone into the trap! Her husband is the head of the Sons of Liberty!”

  Exasperated, Abigail snapped, “Mr. Adams is nothing of the kind! You’re thinking of the other Mr. Adams—”

  And in a thread of a voice, Lieutenant Coldstone added, “’ Tis true.” His hand stirred toward her. “Mrs. Adams—”

  “Hush,” said Abigail. “Lie quiet. They’ll be taking you back to the camp—” For the soldiers that young Lieutenant Dowling had brought with him now entered, with a makeshift litter of poles.

  Coldstone shook his head. “My sergeant—?”

  “Is well,” said Abigail. “The shot was meant for you.” She stepped close, avoiding the soldiers as they prepared the litter. “I sent you no note, Lieutenant. That is, I did send you a note, but ’twasn’t the one you received: that was a forgery.”

  “What news?” he murmured. “Shocking news, you said—”

  She bit back her protest that she’d had nothing to do with that particular communication, and only said, “I shall tell you later, Lieutenant. All is well for now.” She laid her hands over his and through both pairs of gloves could still feel how cold his flesh was. “But I must have your permission to see you—” She glanced at the artillery officer, who was frowning at her in a way that presaged future welcome by the authorities in the camp.

  Coldstone nodded. Encouragingly, Lieutenant Dowling bent over him and said, “It will all be well, Mr. Coldstone. Beyond the loss of blood there is no mortal hurt.”

  He started to withdraw, with a sign to the soldiers to proceed, and Abigail laid her hand on his sleeve. “Pray, sir, tell no one that.”

  “I beg your pardon, m’am?”

  Her glance went to the artillery officer, to the constables, calling them close. “Please, listen to me, gentlemen. Tell no one that Lieutenant Coldstone’s hurt is not mortal.” And, when they looked at her blankly: “Do you not see? A trap was laid for him, by whom we know not. Nor do we know when they will strike again, or how. Let no one see him—”

  “Really, Mrs. Adams!” exclaimed the artilleryman. “In the safety of the camp—”

  “As few as may be, then . . . and myself.”

  He looked as if he had something else to say about that, but Coldstone whispered, “Let it be as she says. She is right.”

  “Enough now, sir.” Lieutenant Dowling stepped forward again, a trifle diffidently, and signed again to the soldiers. “We must take you across to the island, before the gale freshens further. Mrs. Adams—” He turned to her as the men began, with the competence of those who’ve handled the wounded on the field of battle, to shift Coldstone over onto a litter. “Is there one in Boston who deals in these herbal simples you’ve spoken of? In the islands it was the Negro midwives, and one had to go to the slave-dances to find them—”

  “I shall make up a packet for you,” she said, “and have it sent across before the day grows dark. I grow them myself, and dry them—my mother, and my mother-in-law, send others across from our family farms.” She flinched, as a cry was wrung from the patient when they settled him on the litter, and she turned to take his hand again. “Remember, when they carry you out, to do your best to look like a dying man, sir,” she instructed briskly, and Coldstone managed the flicker of a smile.

  “Endeavor—to convince . . .” His fingers closed weakly around hers. “News,” he said. “What was it? Shocking—”

  She shook her head, “Later,” she said. And then, when he gripped her hand as she tried to draw it away: “The name of the girl who hanged herself over Cottrell. What was it?”

  “Seaford.” His eyelids slipped closed again. “Sybilla Seaford.”

  “And her sister?”

  Breath and consciousness went out of him with a sigh.

  Nineteen

  If the would-be killer were watching, Abigail knew it would be better to have herself taken out of the Watchhouse surrounded by constables, as though she were under arrest. But she could think of no way to do this without having the rabble attempt to rescue her—certainly she could think of no way to convince the harassed artillery officer to go along with the charade. The soldiers who manned the British batteries at either horn of the mile-wide crescent of Boston Harbor seldom emerged from behind the palings of their garrisons, and with good reason. Vastly outnumbered, it would not take much of a confrontation for someone to start shooting . . .

  Which is all we’d need, with the King and Parliament convinced we’re a rabble of traitors because we refuse to submit to arbitrary taxes.

  It was all Harry would need, she reflected a moment later, when he came before the Admiralty Court—

  No. She thrust the thought from her mind. We can’t let it go so far. One way or the other, we cannot let him be taken aboard the Incitatus . . .

  But as she followed the stretcher-party out the door of the Watchhouse, she could think of no way of stopping the event.

  Coldstone had promised he would try to be appointed for the defense. She shivered as she looked down at the young man’s waxen face. And shivered again at the thought that the would-be killer was a good enough shot with a rifle to hit a man at nearly two hundred yards—

  —and that Lieutenant Coldstone might not have been the man’s only target.

  Fortunately, the Common was the widest space of open ground in Boston, and the only possible cover—the copse of brush at the bottom of the Powder-Store’s unkempt hill—had been thoroughly overrun with prentice-boys, ruffians, and smugglers, and probably thoroughly searched by Paul Revere as well.

  She saw she had been right, too, in her guess that Revere would send for reinforcements the moment two other soldiers appeared on the scene. The mob formed a loose ring around the little cluster of stretcher-bearers, constables, and soldiers, at a distance of about twenty yards: idly loafing, looking about them as if they had by coincidence all decided at once to take a walk on the Common that morning. But many of them carried cudgels, or the short clubs used by the men at the ropewalks for beating cable; some openly bore guns. She knew that they’d stay with the shore party down to Rowe’s Wharf.

  “ ’ Twill be a savage crossing for poor Coldstone,” she murmured to John, who came forward out of the ring of men, leading his borrowed horse, as she fell back from the stretcher-bearers. “But I suppose if we were to offer Lieutenant Dowling the spare room in which to remove the bullet, and to keep the Lieutenant there to recover, that artillery captain would suffer an apoplexy.”

  “As would Cousin Sam,” returned John. “Not to mention every one of our neighbors, when I ride out for Haverhill Monday morning. Will you never cease being a scandal, woman?” he asked, with a grin
at Abigail’s shocked expression. “For a good Christian you’ve a surprising innocence of heart.”

  “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” she retorted.

  “Then shame upon the whole length of Queen Street, because mal pense is precisely what everyone will do . . . and does, given your penchant for making friends with handsome British officers. Besides,” he added, clearly enjoying her outrage at the thought that anyone would read scandal into her meetings with Coldstone, “you’d never separate that sergeant of his from him, and what would we do with the man? Let him sleep in the kitchen? Then there’d be trouble from one end of the town to the other, about British troops being quartered upon civilians—”

  They followed the litter-bearers down Winter Street and past the Governor’s house on Marlborough Street, men and women coming out of homes and shops to gawk—and some to join the mob. Abigail saw Revere and Ben Edes—the publisher of the Gazette—and young Robbie Newman in the crowd, and at one point thought she glimpsed Cousin Sam. But the Sons of Liberty had no intention of permitting another Massacre. The four soldiers clustered more tightly together but did not break their disciplined step, and in the whole of the company, no one shouted.

  There was only a low murmur, like bees when a hive swarms. For her part, Abigail felt uneasily conscious of the number of upper windows they passed between, and as the houses thickened on either side, she walked closer to John.

  “I’m sorry you had to return.”

  “It couldn’t be helped. I’d hoped to have Sunday there to walk about and see the town, but if I leave at first light Monday, ’twill be the same.” Abigail reflected guiltily that had the weather worsened today, while he was on the road, he would have had the choice of passing the Sabbath at some point in between. Now he had lost that leisure, and the thought of obliging him to do thirty hard miles, in so rough a gale, in order to reach Haverhill on Monday was as bad as the thought of poor Lieutenant Coldstone being tossed and thrashed on a military launch between Rowe’s Wharf and the island camp.

  “I would stay here if I could, Nab. Yet I fear they’ll have put Mrs. Teasel in the town jail, and God only knows where and with whom her children will be disposed—”

  “I’ll be well, John. You know Sam will keep an eye on things.” Privately, given the spattering of rain and sleet that began as they detached themselves from the mob and made their way along Cornhill to Queen Street, Abigail was just as glad John had returned. The rain was sweeping in from the north and east, and would have made the road even as far as Salem a nightmare. By Monday it might be easier.

  Or impassable.

  “Pattie’s making dinner,” announced Nabby, hugging her mother as the family entered the kitchen. “Stew and Indianbread—Did the constables arrest you, Mama? Shim Walton says they did. He said they’d take you over to the Army camp, and if Papa came back and tried to get you out, they’d arrest him, too—”

  “As you see,” smiled Abigail, “I was not taken over to the Army camp, and your father is perfectly safe and will be going to Haverhill on Monday. No one is arresting anyone.”

  “But that Lieutenant was murdered,” said Johnny, with a six-year-old’s ghoulish anxiety not to be cheated of at least a little bloodshed. “Was he not?”

  Abigail started to say, Of course not, and then considered how much information the Sons of Liberty—and perhaps others—gleaned from the tales told by children in the streets. She said, “We won’t talk of it now, Johnny. Help your Father with—Is that Mr. Paley’s horse you borrowed to ride back on, John? Pattie, I cannot thank you enough—” She stripped off her cloak as she said the words, put on her apron and house-cap.

  While John fretted and reviewed with Thaxter all the details of the Teasel case that had to be dealt with, Abigail made up a packet of willow-bark and Saint-John’s-wort, yarrow and coral bells, for young Lieutenant Dowling, but guessed that no one would be crossing to the island this afternoon. As she packaged up the mild-smelling simples, she found her thoughts returning to Braintree, where her sister-in-law and John’s redoubtable little mother—a widow now on her second husband—had grown these things and sent them on to her. Closing her eyes, she felt for a moment that she could reach out and touch not only the warm summer afternoons on the farm there, but the peace of a world separated from Boston’s politics, Boston’s grime, and Boston’s violence. What were the analogous plants in Barbados, she wondered, that young Lieutenant Dowling sought out the Negro midwives to buy?

  Was this something she could ask him in her note, and would he respond?

  The rain increased, hammering the black, wet roofs of the town, driven sidelong by the northeast wind. As she chucked wood onto the fire after dinner, while John brought in bucket after ice-cold bucket of water to heat for the family baths, Abigail wondered how Harry was faring in that dank and icy cell. Both Billy Knox and Lucy, she knew, had tried to get food, books, and clothing to him, and had had them sent back. Had the Provost Marshal let him keep even what she’d brought him?

  They must have. They couldn’t . . .

  A dark shape crossed the wavering gray curtains of the rain, loomed by the back door. Abigail hastened to open it and saw that it was Philomela. “I can’t stay but a moment, Mrs. Adams,” said the girl, “and such an uproar as there is, over this shooting, and Mr. Fluckner claiming ’twas only to be expected with traitors going unpunished everywhere in Boston, and Miss Lucy—” She shook her head, and held out a note. “But Miss Lucy said that you would want to know this, m’am.”

  Mrs. Adams,

  Mr. Barnaby told me his brother-in-law sent him word today that poor Mr. Fenton died in the night.

  Yrs faithfully,

  Lucy Fluckner

  On those nights when John knew he must rise betimes, to be ready to take to the road the moment there was light enough in the sky for the ferrymen to make out the crossing to the mainland, he could fall asleep quickly and sleep like the dead.

  Abigail wasn’t sure what woke her in the small hours of Monday morning. The rain that had hammered Boston through Sunday morning had gradually lightened, though the wind remained strong—but she was used to the sounds the house made on windy nights.

  Something in her dream, then? A troubling dream about sitting at David Fenton’s bedside, listening to his whispered ramblings. Only sometimes it wasn’t the servant who lay dying in that dark and chilly attic room above the Governor’s house, but Lieutenant Coldstone, very young and vulnerable-looking without his wig. Folded notes littered the blanket all around him, all of them in her own handwriting: she kept opening and reading them, looking for the one she had actually written, filled with a despairing sense that even if she found it, she could not prove the others had not been written by her as well. If she failed, they would send her to Halifax to be tried and hanged, unless she betrayed John and her children, her sisters, and her parents. . . . The ship was at the dock, waiting for her, dark masts swaying in the wind, rigging creaking—

  She heard something in the house below her and knew it was the cover being slammed on the well in the cellar.

  Her eyes opened to the inky darkness of their curtained bed.

  How foolish. There’s no well in our cellar.

  John’s breathing was slow and deep and utterly peaceful at her side. A restless sleeper at the best of times, she wanted to reach across and shake him out of sheer annoyance.

  Messalina, she thought. Whoever had invented the phrase graceful as a cat had never seen Messalina hunt.

  But even as her mind framed the thought, she knew it wasn’t the cat.

  The fire had been banked; the bedroom was glacial and dark as Erebus. Yet in nearly two years of residence, Abigail had learned the exact number of steps that would carry her to its door, and that door’s exact relationship to the bed. Charley had been barely a year old when John had bought this house, and Johnny only four. At such ages there were nightmares beyond the power of a mere older sister to hold at bay. Charley especially was prone to them, and within the fir
st weeks here Abigail could traverse the house from the room where she slept with John—and in those days tiny Tommy as well—to that shared by the other children, in utter darkness.

  She gathered up candle, striker, flint, and slipped into the hallway, where she stood listening for a time in the darkness. No sound from the children’s rooms. In any case, something about what had wakened her—if it had been a sound that had done so—had said to her, Deeper in the house.

  In the hallway she stooped to strike light, where the new tiny brightness wouldn’t wake John (as if the Last Trump would wake John . . . !). When she stood, she knew what was wrong. The candle-flame leaned, ever so slightly, to the left, toward from the tight, square spiral of the stair. It straightened almost at once, but Abigail knew every chink and draft and crochet of the house. The door at the bottom of the stair never fit quite right, especially in the winter; in the daytime, when there was coming and going from the kitchen, close it how she would, there was always a whisper of a draft.

  There was a window open downstairs.

  She thought—and later could not believe she could have been so stupid—only that in barring the shutters, Pattie had been hasty. There was one in the kitchen whose bolt never fit quite right into its slots. Just as it had simply failed to occur to her that anyone could or would attach scandal to her friendship with the extremely comely Lieutenant Coldstone, it never crossed her mind that a window would have come open in the middle of a very windy night due to anything but accident. What she should have done, she knew in hindsight, was to go back into her room immediately and fetch John, dawn departure or no dawn departure.

  What she did was descend to the kitchen, soundless as a ghost in her quilted blue nightgown, and cross to the window in question—which was open, shutters and casement both—and reach out to pull the shutters closed.

  She didn’t know what made her turn. Messalina, she later thought—the cat came bolting out of the pantry, fleeing for the hall door, which Abigail had left open behind her . . . Turning, she saw in the almost total gloom the unmistakable shape of a man standing in the pantry.