A Marked Man

by Barbara Hamilton

  “Britain, I’ve always assumed. At least, he always paid me in British coin.”

  “What, all of it?” It was the other question she had meant to ask, and Abigail felt a little as she had when, as a child, she’d pegged the bull at darts three times in a row, something even William couldn’t do.

  The householder nodded, and Abigail’s glance crossed Thaxter’s. Then Thaxter moved off toward the dining room, Apthorp bowing to Abigail to precede him . . .

  She paused, frowning at the closed door behind her. “Did Mr. Elkins say why he had the latch removed from this door?”

  “Latch?” He stared at her in surprise.

  Abigail’s gloved fingers brushed the holes in the wood of the door itself, and its frame. “Was there not a bolt here?”

  Apthorp shook his head: “Why on earth would anyone want to bolt the door to the drawing room? Good Lord,” he added, bending closer to look and squinting a little—Abigail realized he was nearsighted. “Well, bless my soul.” He straightened again, regarded Abigail—and Thaxter, who had turned back from the dining room door—in bafflement. “Was a latch put on the other door?” Apthorp hurried across the drawing room to see. “What an extraordinary thing to do—”

  He looked at the door into the dining room, then opened it and checked the other side. Abigail followed—rather carefully, as the shutters still covered the ground-floor windows—and checked as well. “Odd.” She crossed back to the door into the central hall, knelt in a rustle of quilted petticoats, and peered at the holes in the gloom. “It looks like a bolt—can you get those shutters open? Thank you! And the holes look fresh.”

  She got to her feet. “Let us see if other doors were used the same way.”

  They made a circuit of the ground-floor rooms, which were laid out around the central hall, and the pattern became immediately evident: all doors leading into the hall bore the same pattern of nail-holes on their inner sides. When the searchers climbed the stairs and checked the rooms above they found it so upstairs as well. “What on earth was the man afraid of?” asked Thaxter, as they came down the stair again. “None of the communicating doors between room and room, so he expected . . . What? That someone might be able to get into the hall—through the front door or that upper window above it—while he slept? But who?”

  “And would it not have been simpler to have told his servant to bed down in the hall?” inquired Apthorp.

  “I don’t think we’ve established yet that Mr. Elkins possesses a servant,” murmured Abigail, opening the dining room shutters and examining again both sides of the door from drawing to dining room. “Nor that he ever spent a night under this roof.”

  “It makes no sense!”

  “It does,” contradicted Abigail softly. “But in a context of which we’re ignorant.”

  “The context is that the man’s clearly mad,” declared Apthorp. “Who would have thought it? Such a gentlemanly young man . . .”

  A gentlemanly young man who KNOWS WHERE I LIVE. Who had access to at least one note in her handwriting? Abigail shivered at this thought, half guessing that as the note had been the bait for Coldstone, his murder had been almost certainly simply a tool, a means to have her hanged.

  Where have I seen him? She tried to set the strong cheekbones, the long nose, into a context, and failed. In the street? In the market?

  Why cannot I call to mind how he was dressed, where he stood, if he spoke, what sort of hat he wore?

  On her search this time, Abigail looked into every drawer and jar in the kitchen, though she admitted to herself that it was hardly likely that the mysterious Mr. Elkins would have left poisons in an empty house for anyone to find. The upper floors and attic proved as devoid of poison-pots, weapons, or little chests of British coin as they had upon the previous occasion—even the attic contained none of the trunks and disused furniture that could have provided hiding-places for such apparatus of villainy. The shuttered window casements showed no sign of having been opened in years. The house being fairly new, there were no loose boards in walls or floor, and no join of truss to king-post in all the maze of rafter-work had been made to serve as a hiding-place for anything but years-old rat-nests. Boots had scuffed the dust on the floor, it appeared, only once. She found one clear track, its length and thinness seeming to echo Apthorp’s earlier description of the man they sought. Nothing more.

  The fact that the rather epicene gentleman the householder had described didn’t sound to her capable of beating another man to death she put aside. Sir Jonathan had not been a big man, either, and if Mr. Elkins were indeed Mr. Tredgold, cold vengeance would undoubtedly have lent strength to his slender arm.

  Candles were lighted, but because the house was built rather high, small, stoutly barred windows admitted a gray and dismal light to the whitewashed cellar. Like the attic it was virtually bare, containing not even the spare stores of firewood that choked the corners of Abigail’s own cellar at Queen Street, much less the usual cellar impedimenta of potato-bins, broken milk-pails, and sealed crocks of vinegar, butter, and cheese.

  Though the room was three times the size of Abigail’s, the place oppressed her. Despite its cover, the well exuded a dampness that seemed to eat into her bones. Even in prosaic daylight, the pulley that hung above the well-curb still had the look of some sinister implement of torture, and she felt a strange unwillingness to touch the square wine-box, as if it contained the unspeakable.

  It did not, even upon second inspection.

  She sat back on her heels, her breath a thick cloud and her toes growing swiftly numb. “Will you open the well?” she asked.

  Thaxter lifted the heavy cover. It was designed, Abigail observed, so that it could be closed even when the wine-box was lowered into its cooling depths. This time, when Abigail dropped a lighted candle-end into the Stygian depths, it vanished with a prompt little plop—evidently the slight warming of the past two windy weeks had been enough to melt the ice. “Is there a pole, or a hook of some kind, that we can use to plumb the well?” she asked, and Apthorp regarded her again in bafflement, as if asking himself if his somewhat Gothic tenant weren’t the only person in the case who was mad.

  “Whatever for?”

  “ ’ Tis the only container in the house I haven’t looked into,” she replied. “I don’t mean to leave until I’ve seen all there is to see.”

  No pole in the kitchen or the stables proved long enough, so in the end Abigail lowered the bucket-hook down on the end of its chain, weighted with a couple of small stones from the garden bound onto it with twine. More twine looped around the chain gave her a sort of leading-string by which she could drag the hook back and forth in the lightless depth. Apthorp only watched in puzzled fascination, but after a little, Thaxter asked, “What do you hope to find, m’am?”

  “I have not the faintest idea. But someone was killed in this house—in the front hall, I think, by the smell of it—” Apthorp looked like he’d have visibly blenched, had the light been better. “If Mr. Elkins is as clever and thorough as he has been so far, we should find nothing—”

  The hook snagged on something, held for a moment, then came free.

  Abigail shut her teeth hard upon a sudden qualm of nausea at the thought of what it might be.

  Twenty-one

  I doubt it’s a man.” Abigail kept her voice steady with great effort. Her brother William—and any number of her older Smith and Quincy cousins in and around Weymouth—had outdone themselves in their efforts to shock and sicken the parson’s three stuck-up daughters, and the half-wild countryside had abounded in dead cats, maggoty bird-corpses, cow-dung, and other gooey and odiferous evidences of Nature’s ability to break down mortality into its component elements. Mary had gotten angry, and little Betsy had squealed and squirmed, but Abigail had regarded it as a matter of honor to meet all such attempts with calm sangfroid—an attitude that she guessed would stand her in good stead a few years hence, as the mother of three boys.

  She felt a strange—and ver
y ancient—stirring of gratification at the expressions of queasy horror on the faces of the two men with her.

  She went on, “I felt it start to come, before it pulled loose, and it felt too light. Besides, there’s no stink. How long is it, for a man’s body to float?”

  Apthorp shook his head. Thaxter looked too disconcerted to even attempt a response. In the back of Abigail’s mind stirred the childhood recollection of Asa Shapleigh—who had been no loss to the Weymouth community—going missing and his body coming to the surface of Vinal’s Pond a week or two after he’d last been seen staggering away drunk into the woods.

  “What is it?” Thaxter asked, when at last Abigail hauled up an object limp and dripping, glistening darkly in the light of the candles and the waning afternoon light.

  Apthorp, who despite Abigail’s reassurances seemed to have feared that it would indeed be Bathsheba’s body, only looked profoundly relieved.

  Gingerly handling the sodden folds—the cloth was unbelievably cold, even through her gloves—Abigail spread it out on the cellar floor.

  “A shawl, it looks like.” She gently flapped the corners of the big rectangle to straighten them. “We need to dry it.” As near as she could tell, it was wool rather than silk, but with what daylight there was beginning to fade, it was impossible to distinguish color or pattern. Dropped a second time, the hook clinked and scraped a little on the irregularities of the well’s bottom, but encountered nothing similar: no clothing, no ropes, no shoes. Apthorp went upstairs, and after a little time came down with coarse toweling from the kitchen, and in this they wrapped the wet mass of cloth, to carry back to Queen Street.

  “I suggest that you have the locks on the outer doors and the stables changed at once,” said Abigail, as Apthorp locked the house up after them. “The sooner the better, though I doubt Elkins will be back. If he is indeed this Mr. Tredgold—or anyone who sought to conspire against Sir Jonathan’s life—he has accomplished his end.”

  “But why stay in Boston?” asked Thaxter, as they descended the bare slope of the hill again. “If he was the man who attacked you last night—”

  “We cannot say for certain that it was Elkins.” Abigail shook her head. “Or who else might have been acting with or for him. Had I conspired to murder a man I had, perhaps foolishly, spoken of killing at some time in the past, I think I should personally make sure I had a regiment of witnesses that I was elsewhere on the night of his death . . . and that I did not announce my guilt by fleeing the morning the body was discovered.”

  “Exactly like Harry, in other words.”

  “Yes, well,” admitted Abigail, “perhaps we had best reword that theory, if and when we present our case to Colonel Leslie. I suspect,” she added more soberly, pausing to look out toward the harbor, where the masts of the dark ships rocked uneasily at anchor along Boston’s sixty-plus wharves, “that the main reason he’s still in town is that almost since the night of the murder, wind has kept all the oceangoing ships in port. If this is Mr. Tredgold we’re dealing with—or only his spiritual brother—having accomplished his vengeance, he’ll be returning to England now, to take up his life again—”

  She paused, as the Reverend Cooper’s words returned from—When?—Two Sundays ago? Three?—How can we do good in the sight of the Lord God, if the doing of it will transform us into the Servants of Ill? Will mark us with the Mark of the Beast?

  “To take up his life again,” she said softly, “if he can. If he was the local curate and has spent eight years tracking a man with the intention of doing murder in cold blood, I doubt he will find himself much suited for the care of anyone’s soul.”

  The thought returned to Abigail later, as she found herself obsessively scrubbing and rescrubbing every apple, every potato, every carrot that she’d brought up from the cellar, having thrown down the outhouse anything edible that remained in the kitchen. This included things she knew intellectually must have been safe, like the butter in a crock still sealed (Agrippina the Younger of Roman infamy would have found a way to poison butter in a sealed crock . . .), and the cheese even after she’d trimmed away slices from its cut ends (How WOULD one poison a cheese?).

  “This way lies madness,” she murmured to herself as she stood debating whether the new barrel of flour, delivered through Sam’s good offices, should be put under lock and key in the cellar, yet she spent the whole of the evening after dinner taking her own pulse, monitoring every ache and twinge of her joints (which, thanks to an afternoon spent in a damp cellar, were indeed in feverish pain by nightfall) and watching her children in surreptitious panic. She had told them nothing of the attempt to poison the family, but when the kitchen was cleared up and the lamps lit, she gathered them about her and informed them that the same Evil Person who had shot Lieutenant Coldstone might be also out to do them harm, and until she told them otherwise, none were to accept food or drink from anyone but herself, Pattie, Thaxter, or John.

  “Will he try to poison us?” Johnny’s face glowed in hopeful delight.

  “This is serious, John Quincy.” Abigail never used her son’s full name, save when matters were indeed grave. “’ Tis no game.”

  “No, m’am.” He tried to readjust his features. “Is it the Tories?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.” She salved her conscience with the fact that the money in the case definitely pointed to the British, and that was Tories, if you would. “You and your sister must keep a careful eye on the others.”

  Nabby, standing at her side, said nothing, but slid a very cold little hand into hers.

  In between her preparations for dinner, Abigail had written notes—dispatched via the various apprentices of Butler and Hanson on either side of the house—to Sam and Revere, Lucy Fluckner and Lieutenant Dowling, enclosing in the latter a message to be relayed to Lieutenant Coldstone, and this had kept her thoughts at least in the reality of what had happened, and away from speculation. But after dinner, in the last of the afternoon’s waning light, she had pried loose the cover on the contaminated flour-barrel and examined it by the attic windows, observing the thick streaks of a greenish gray powder, where it had been imperfectly stirred into the pale buff contents. Had her visitor had but a little more time, he could have mixed it thoroughly enough to conceal any adulteration.

  She remembered poor Mr. Fenton’s sufferings: the thirst of the damned, the jaundiced agony as his liver died within him, the bloated features. She, and John, and their children would have died—in who knew what horrors?—and the blame would have fallen on some illness unknown.

  Rage went through her in a wave of fever, burning her flesh to her ear-tips and hairline, and she no longer asked herself if the hypothetical Mr. Tredgold could or would have tracked Cottrell to the earth’s ends to avenge the suicides of Sybilla Seaford and her unhappy sister.

  Johnny. Nabby. Pattie. John . . . Her own hands shook with fury.

  God’s certain vengeance would be insufficiently swift. I would wrest the weapon of it from His hand, for the pleasure of striking the blow myself, though my soul were damned for the act.

  And in the back of her mind she heard John’s voice—Would you really? Though your soul were damned for it?

  Abigail didn’t know.

  It was far too late for Captain Dowling to cross from Castle Island that evening, but Lucy Fluckner appeared only an hour after the arrival of a hastily scrawled note requesting the favor of an interview etc., etc. Bearing all the lamps that could be gathered, she followed Abigail upstairs to the attic where the jetsam of the well had been laid out to dry. The shawl was still wringing-wet and discolored, but the girl’s face grew grave as she viewed it. “That’s Bathsheba’s,” she said quietly, and glanced back at Philomela, her blue eyes sick with grief. “It used to be mine. There’s where I tore it climbing over the palings by the stable, and see where the fringe has been burned? I caught it in the bedroom candle. It’s Bathsheba’s.” Her gaze went to Abigail’s. “She really is dead, isn’t she?”

 
Abigail said gently, “Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf will look after Marcellina and the baby.” For Lucy had brought her the news that while all else had been going forward that day, the farmer Silas Greenleaf had arrived to take the two children back to Weymouth with him, for a childhood of hard farmwork and regular meals, until they should be old enough to be set free. “But us finding her shawl there in that house proves that her disappearance is after all connected with Cottrell’s death, somehow. Think, Lucy. What could she have learned about Cottrell? What could she have seen?”

  “Could Sir Jonathan have dropped, or left behind, some token or paper when he attempted to force himself on Bathsheba in her room?” Lucy—whose imagination of the scene had clearly been influenced by certain well-defined genres of fiction—glanced back at her maidservant, as the women left the attic and descended the ladderlike stair to the bedroom floor. “Something she found later?”

  “That told her what, m’am?” responded the black girl. “She said nothing of it to me. Nor of seeing him later, nor of any message sent to her from him.”

  “But she was upset, shaken up, the day before she disappeared,” the girl pressed. “You said she burst into tears in the public street, Margaret.” As they reached the bottom of the flight, she turned appealingly to Mrs. Sandhayes, who had insisted on being helped up the narrow stairs from the hall, but whose lameness had met with defeat at the second ascent. “If it was something that fell or rolled, and she only found it later, or a letter that whisked under the bed—”