Her start gave her away, and her first instinct—always her downfall—was to cry, “Here!” almost as if, like a disobedient child, he would surrender.
Instead he rushed her. He covered the distance with snake-strike speed, and Abigail—at first immobilized with shock—snatched up the nearest object to hand—a chair—and swung it at him with the whole strength of her back. He dodged, lunged, and Abigail had time only to think, I’ve seen him before—when the candle was struck from the table where she’d set it, and strong hands grabbed her shoulders, swung her in the darkness. Abigail twisted, grabbed at the man’s head—felt her hands seize an ear and heard the hiss of agonized fury in the second before she was slammed to the floor on top of the chair.
She cried out with pain, and then, belatedly, screamed at the top of her lungs. Somewhere upstairs she could hear John shouting “Nab? NAB—!!” and she screamed, “MURDER!” because it was easier than screaming Burglary! And she didn’t think of it and was in too much pain in her ribs, her knee, her head. She could hear her burglar blundering and scrambling close by—trying to find the window—and she screamed again, hoping to get not only John but Tom Butler from next door. It was too dark to see anything, but she felt the cold and smelled the wind when the burglar succeeded in slamming open the shutters, and she heard the splat when he got through the window and fell.
I hope he’s broke his leg . . . Then she heard his footfalls slap-slap-slap on the mud of the passway, and out to Queen Street.
John flung himself through the kitchen door, and she shouted, “I’m all right! He’s gone!”
John had a candle and a stick of firewood held like a club, and was already halfway to the window. He wheeled, dropped to his knees at her side. “Nab—”
“I’m all right.” This wasn’t entirely true. She felt like she’d fallen out of a tree, in more pain than she’d been—with the exception of childbearing—since her own childhood, and she fought not to weep for fear it would frighten him. He caught her up in his arms, and she heard more footsteps pattering upstairs, followed by the caroming of slight bodies off the stairwell walls and Pattie’s cry, “Johnny, no!” and then a wild clatter: Johnny had obviously come downstairs armed.
“You’re bleeding.” John caught her hand. Pattie brought another candle into the room and, with commendable presence of mind, went straight to the candle-box and set a dozen on the table beside which Abigail and John sat, next to the felled chair.
Abigail looked at her hand. There was blood under her nails. “I think it’s his.” With John’s hand beneath her arm she got unsteadily to her feet, and the children—who had hung back in shocked horror at the sight of their mother sitting on the floor, bruised and disheveled in her robe—flung themselves on her, Charley and Tommy bursting into loud tears.
There was of course no question of anyone getting to bed that night. John listened to her account of the robber with a detached attention that Abigail found far more comforting than repeated assurances of thankfulness that she’d taken no hurt, interrupted almost at once by the arrival of Tom Butler from next door and both his apprentices, armed with a pistol and a very fearsome hammer. He was succeeded almost at once by Ehud Hanson—a shoemaker who lived on the other side—his younger brother, and his formidable wife, also armed; the Watch arrived minutes later. While Abigail was assuring them all that she was well (“And get those children to bed, Pattie, please—”), John checked the drawer of the sideboard in which the household cash was kept. “He didn’t get that, in any case,” he remarked, and disappeared into his study, emerging almost at once with the report that nothing there seemed in the slightest disturbed.
“You must have surprised him just as he entered and was looking his way about.” John disappeared into the pantry and came out again with a pitcher of cider, which he poured into the smallest of the pots on the hearth to heat. Abigail, on the settle next to the hearth—Pattie had stirred up the fire—started to rise, then sank down again with a wince. Even sitting for a short while had stiffened bruises she hadn’t known she’d acquired. Distantly, she could hear the clock of the Brattle Street Meeting-House striking four.
Mrs. Butler had put in her appearance by this time, semi-dressed and with her hair hanging in a braid, and while Abigail was reassuring her in her turn that she was well and stood in no need of assistance, John disappeared again, to come back downstairs a few minutes later dressed, wigged, and carrying his saddlebags. “Will you be all right?” he asked, after he’d tactfully but firmly shoved the cooper’s well-meaning wife out the door. “Nab, forgive me—”
“No, you have thirty miles to ride—”
“Were I not sure that my client has spent the past three days in the town jail, I would stay, but I cannot, Nab. If it rains again, God knows how long ’twill be—”
“No, of course you must go! Wherever her children are, you know no one in town will be caring for them, if all are saying their mother’s a murderess. I’m bruised, ’tis all. ’Tis as if I fell down the stairs.” She opened her mouth to begin, I didn’t want to tell you before others, but I knew the man. I’ve seen him, I know it . . .
Then she thought of the child Marcellina, and tiny Stephen fretfully sucking at the spouted milk-cup held for him by Mrs. Barnaby, and of how the world treated the children of paupers. The sooner John got to Haverhill, the better for those unknown offspring of his client.
She closed her lips again.
The light of a single candle, darkness and confusion . . . Had she seen her assailant before? She groped in her mind, trying to recall where, and couldn’t even be sure that her impression was an accurate one. The prominent chin, the long nose emerging from beneath the shadow of his hat, the dark brows: a fleeting sensation of recognition, based upon what? One of the loafers around the Watchhouse yesterday? Someone passing in the street?
It was nearly time to do the milking. The herd-boys would be blowing their tin trumpets in the street before long. Gently rejecting Pattie’s offer of assistance, Abigail went upstairs and dressed, and came down again to find John and the children devouring a scratch breakfast of the last heel-ends of Friday’s bread, and the cider that he now poured steaming from the kettle. Baking tonight. “I shall be home Wednesday,” John promised, and went out to the stable with her, saddling Balthazar while she and Nabby milked. “Thursday at latest.”
Then he was gone, and in spite of herself, Abigail felt a shiver of dread, watching him ride away through the first chilly dimness of the wind-lashed dawn.
I know I saw him before.
But what did I see?
Thaxter arrived. He and Johnny did the stable chores before the two older children left for school. When they were gone and Thaxter settled in John’s office to copy documents, Abigail sank down onto the settle again, with the queer shakiness of exhaustion. Just after the burglary, she had felt clear-headed and strong: What’s the matter with me now? I’ve dealt with worse. Those Roman matrons one reads about could defend the city’s walls in the morning and bake bread in the afternoon without turning a hair.
“Are you sure you don’t want to lie down a little, Mrs. Adams?”
She looked up with a start, to see Pattie standing beside her.
“I can clean the kitchen, and get the bread started, and get you up in time to get the dinner begun, if you feel able for it. You don’t look any too well.”
“Maybe I will rest a little.” Abigail got to her feet, and flinched in earnest. She turned toward the stairs and then stopped, something tugging at her mind—“Tommy,” she said, shocked, “what have you got there?”
Though it was quite obvious that what Tommy had there was a dead mouse. She and Pattie reached the boy in a couple of strides, though he tried to duck back into the pantry with his prize. Messalina, thought Abigail . . . Did our visitor last night dodge back into the pantry and interrupt her at her kill?
She took the mouse by the tail and moved toward the back door, then stopped again.
There was no bl
ood on its fur. Rather, its whiskers and paws were powdered with flour . . . Oh, not again! Above all things, Abigail hated to have to throw out flour because rodents had somehow managed to get into it, despite every precaution of barrels and bags. She glanced back at the flour-barrel, expecting to see a telltale track that would show where it had been gnawed through . . .
And saw that the barrel was open.
Good heavens, did Pattie or I forget to close it?
She had only to form the thought to discard it.
White tracks amply showed where the vermin had taken advantage of their opportunity . . .
And down behind the barrel, another mouse lay, as dead as the one still dangling from her hand.
On the shelf above the barrel lay the longest of her wooden spoons, whitened with flour for a good three-quarters of its length, as if someone—Who?—had stirred the barrel . . .
Had stirred something into the barrel . . .
Abigail put her hand over her mouth and felt herself go cold.
Dear Heavens . . .
Half a day later, he was taken sick . . . She heard Dr. Warren’s light voice in her mind. What does that sound like to you?
The man had come not to steal but, with a deliberateness that took her breath away, to kill every member of the household.
Twenty
For the love of Heaven, Nab, we don’t need to be calling Apthorp into this.” Cousin Sam thumped his hand on the parlor table with an impatience that rattled the half-empty cider-mugs. Not wanting to disturb the children any more than they already were, Abigail had chosen to confer with the men in this room rather than the more homey—and also warmer—kitchen. “I have a couple of friends who can get you into that house—”
“There has been quite enough breaking and entering in the past twelve hours.” Abigail glanced from Sam to Paul Revere to Dr. Warren—the latter, to his credit, looked shocked at the suggestion—and then back to Sam. “Just because the man’s a Tory and an Apthorp doesn’t mean he’s going to run to this mysterious Mr. Elkins and warn him that I want to see the inside of that house again. Besides, I need to speak to him about his tenant.”
“You think it was Elkins who came here last night, then?” Warren didn’t sound disbelieving, only curious about her reasoning.
“I think I should like to see if Mr. Elkins has a wounded ear,” replied Abigail. “He may not. He may have some perfectly legitimate reason for spending fifty shillings a quarter on a house he doesn’t seem to be living in—which coincidentally lies within easy walking distance of where Lieutenant Coldstone was shot.”
Though she was fairly certain she’d interrupted her visitor in the midst of his first task of the evening, she’d spent the hour or so between her discovery of the dead mice and the appearance of her three friends in response to her frantic notes, nailing shut and stowing in the attic not only the flour, but also the cornmeal and the cider, and her mind kept questing back to the other contents of the pantry . . .
Did poison wait for them there, too? She knew this was unreasonable but could not free herself of the panicky obsession. Greeks and Romans had poisoned one another with liquids as well as powders, and such a philtre might conceivably have been poured over or into the sugar as well . . . Would it have caused the sugar-loaf to change color?
She would have to ask Lucy, who seemed to be a girl familiar with the more lurid forms of fiction that might deal with such matters . . .
“A man lays out money like that only if he has good reason, and no good reason seems readily visible. Money also turns up in the room of the servant-girl Bathsheba, who disappeared two days after Cottrell left Boston. And now this actor, this Mr. Palmer, who had dinner with poor Fenton the night before he took sick, seems to have disappeared as well. We have a pattern, gentlemen”—she ticked off the points on her long, slender fingers—“money, poison, and people disappearing . . . I shall take Mr. Thaxter to Pear Tree House with me. Not simply for the sake of respectability,” she added after a moment. “But I’m starting to find it a bit unnerving, to go about alone.”
And you think this Mr. Elkins is connected with the Seaford sisters—the ones who killed themselves on Cottrell’s account?” Thaxter glanced around him and drew closer to Abigail as they emerged from the relative shelter of the houses along Southack Court and made their way along the frost-hard mud of one of the unfinished streets that crossed the northern slope of Beacon Hill. The river and the Mill-Pond, which had been dammed off it, both floated with chunks of ice, and the wind that swept across them and over the hill’s bare shoulder was wickedly cold. Having dispatched a note to Lieutenant Coldstone informing him of these new developments and having received from the same boatman a very polite thank-you from Lieutenant Dowling, Abigail spared a pitying thought for that very young sawbones, exiled from the warm Caribbean to ply his trade in the damp brick corridors of a fort in a half-frozen bay.
“I think he is connected with someone whom Cottrell harmed.” For Cottrell—also newly come to this brutally frigid land from the mild Indies—she felt no pity. Margaret tells me that this girl’s sister so griev’d the loss that she too died at her own hand. Heat flashed through her at Lucy’s words, rage so stifling that for a moment she was scarcely aware of where she was. She loved her scapegrace brother William, for all his faults, but the love for her sisters Mary and Betsy went deeper, twined around the roots of her soul. The world being what it was, she had tried to face in imagination what it would be like were brisk, busybody Mary to die in childbed, or spinsterish, beautiful Betsy of some disease in their parents’ home. Such things happened, and Abigail had prayed that should such an event come to pass, the God who had sent it would help her to bear it.
But had one or the other of these women—these souls who seemed as much a part of her as her own—died by her own hand, in shame and horror . . . would she, Abigail, be driven to end her own life rather than live without the sister she loved?
She didn’t think so. Yet she found herself contemplating with a certain hellish satisfaction the image of Sir Jonathan Cottrell, beaten half to death, lying conscious and freezing for some time in that alley before the darkness took him. Forgive me, Jesus . . .
She forced herself to add, And forgive him.
And soften my heart that I may actually mean those words. Because I don’t.
She realized she had been long silent. Her husband’s clerk was watching her face with the eyes of one who read her thought.
“Poor Mr. Fenton spoke of a number of women whom Cottrell despoiled,” she went on. “One at least had a lover for whose death Cottrell seems to have been responsible as well. A fulyear, Grannie Quincy says they used to call such a man: A man who dishonors women for sport. Of those women, only one—or two, if you count the poor sister—seems to have had family or friends in a position to seek vengeance for what he did. And even those, as John pointed out, may have had to wait until they had the resources to begin the pursuit.”
Her iron pattens scrunched in the hard-frozen mud as they ascended the hill toward Pear Tree House, its pink bricks very bright against the brown of the naked orchard. Thaxter put a hand, stout in its dogskin glove, beneath her elbow to steady her, until they reached the muck-drowned gravel of the drive.
“Unfortunately,” Abigail went on, “it will take at least six weeks for a letter to reach anyone who knew the Seafords in England for a description of the sister’s fiancé Mr. Tredgold. Another six weeks or more for a reply. And it is beyond hope that by June, this town will not be entangled in such a confusion of reprisal and counterreprisal for the destruction of that miserable tea last December, at the very least . . . and in any case,” she added, “were it two weeks, I fear it will not save Mr. Knox.”
“It may not,” said Thaxter. “Yet all we need to do, really, is find a single point sufficiently telling to Colonel Leslie, for him to cancel the order for an Admiralty trial. And for that we need produce only the evidence that one who wished the Commissioner’s death with su
fficient resolution was here in Boston and had the means to accomplish it.”
“You’re quite right, of course,” replied Abigail thoughtfully. “But more’s the pity, you’ve just given a description of Harry Knox.”
Thurlow Apthorp waited for them, just within the doors of the Pear Tree House. He appeared relieved to see that Abigail’s escort was her husband’s very respectable young clerk and not some shaggy mechanic. He seemed, too, genuinely troubled by Abigail’s information that she suspected that Mr. Elkins had something to do with—or at least some knowledge of—the shooting that had taken place on the Common the previous day: “Please understand that we have no accusation to make against him,” said Thaxter, not entirely truthfully but certainly within the letter of the law. “But events having taken the turn that they have, it is imperative that we speak to Mr. Elkins as soon as may be.”
“There’s the trouble, sir,” replied Apthorp worriedly, and he shut the door to exclude the whipping draft. The tall central hall settled again into the semblance of a well filled with shadow. “Mr. Elkins has not come into the Man-o’-War to pick up his letters—”
Abigail was already aware of this fact from Sam, since a couple of the Sons of Liberty were watching the place.
“—and I’ve no means of reaching the man until he does.” He added, as if he feared they thought such a course might have slipped his mind, “I have written him.”
This, too, Sam had reported. His informants had gotten a good look at the letters waiting under the tavern’s counter.
“Of course you have,” said Abigail soothingly. “And the matter being one of suspected violence against officers of the Crown, your permitting us use of the house again in your tenant’s absence is certainly not actionable.” She looked around her again at the high walls with the single stairway leading up one side, the cold light from the window above the door lending a kind of pallid illumination to the upper reaches and almost none down below. The sickly odor of death had faded, yet she still led the way as quickly as she could into the drawing room that was the only fully furnished chamber in the house. “Has Mr. Elkins never spoken to you, when coming or going from the town, of which direction he would travel in? Or of where he might have been, ere coming to New England?”
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