A Marked Man

by Barbara Hamilton

  “Even had anyone thought to ask if her crutches—or her name—were genuine,” mused Coldstone. “Not considerations which occurred to me, I must admit.”

  “Why would they have? She kept Bathsheba’s body in the well, too, for a time, though the water hadn’t frozen then. If you drag the Mill-Pond, Lieutenant, and the marshes west of the Common, I think you shall find beneath the ice the body of the actor Androcles Palmer, and probably that of a young Negro woman named Bathsheba. Palmer bore enough of a resemblance to Cottrell to pass for him for ten days in Maine, among men who had never seen the real Cottrell. He lacked only the black eye Cottrell had acquired on the day of his supposed departure. Perhaps I should have realized his behavior there was uncharacteristic—he refused to steal a kiss from a milkmaid even when it was practically forced upon him—but I didn’t. I only thought he was too afraid of Mr. Fluckner’s irate tenants.”

  “Whereas I daresay,” put in Revere, “he was far too afraid of Mrs. Sandhayes. I’d be. If the woman knows what a scruple is, she hides the knowledge well.”

  “As I remember the scandal,” said Coldstone quietly, “the Seaford girls’ parents were dead; Sybilla was ten years younger than her elder sister, who raised her as a mother would. According to my mother—who knew the family—Margaret Seaford was a woman of iron will and strong character. Her single suitor had been engaged to her for eight years, without bringing matters to a conclusion, at least in part because Sybilla could not endure it that another would share her sister’s love. Sybilla was Margaret’s only weakness, my mother said; but the attachment was a weapon that cut both ways. Margaret would not share Sybilla’s love with a suitor, either, and the girl was”—he hesitated, like a man seeking a word—“ripe, I suppose one could say, to be seduced by a man observant enough to play upon her desire to rebel against her sister’s domination. This at least was my mother’s judgment of the matter,” he added, a sudden self-consciousness cracking his usual calm façade, as if speaking of his mother in this crowd of jostling hooligans on Boston’s wharves would bring her before them.

  “Your mother sounds like a woman of discernment,” said Abigail gently.

  “I have always found her so. Damn,” Coldstone added, as they came around the corner of Benning Wentworth’s countinghouse and stood at the head of the wharf beyond. A couple of dockhands were coiling ropes at the far end; a porter rolled a barrel out of one of the warehouses that lined the inner end, in the obvious expectation of another ship’s later approach. Beyond the wet black platform, stretching a hundred yards into the bay, green black water pitched and chopped with the high, outgoing tide.

  “Can we catch her?” Revere pointed to the white spread of the Saturn’s sails, just coming even, Abigail calculated, with Bird Island, two miles out in the harbor channel.

  “The Magpie’s said to be fast,” Abigail replied.

  “I reckon we’ll see if that’s true.”

  The tide was running strong out of the harbor, but the wind blew from the south rather than the west. The Saturn, a square-rigged two-master of some six hundred tons, had been built to carry quantities of furs, tobacco, and potash in safety to the Mother Country, not for speed. The Magpie’s slimmer build and sloop rigging caught even the contrary wind and drove her forward like a galloping horse. Abigail clung grimly to the rail as the first chop of the wind-driven channel hit the ship . . . I WILL not be sick . . .

  “We’ll have ’em, m’am.” Matthias Brown dropped from the rigging to the deck beside her, as graceful among the ropes as he was toadlike with land beneath his moccasins. “Don’t you worry.” He cast a glance, askance, at the British officer who stood beside her and the stolid redcoat sergeant who sat a little distance away on a coil of rope, one arm around Tommy and with the other arm firmly keeping Charley between his knees. Both boys were pale with excitement—Tommy in fact looked a little ill—but neither had allowed himself to be fobbed off with Now, Mama will be back soon . . . when they’d made it all the way down to the wharves with what they both knew perfectly well was one of Uncle Sam’s mobs.

  At least half the mob—Edes and Revere among them—had crowded onto the sloop, competently assisting young Eli Putnam, Hev Miller, and Matt Brown in setting the sails. They now clustered the bow, watching as the distance between them and the Saturn imperceptibly lessened. “Wind’s comin’ around,” someone remarked, and against the dark chop of the sea, white sails unfurled like clouds from the merchantman’s masts.

  “We’ll have ’em,” Miller echoed his cousin’s words. And to Abigail, “You’re saying that wasn’t Cottrell who came to Maine at all?”

  “I don’t think so, no.” Abigail clung steadfastly to the nearest line and kept her eye on the sails ahead, grimly pushing away the nauseating dizziness of seasickness that swept her like the heaving waves. “I think what happened was this: probably after considerable searching, Margaret Seaford encountered a man who could pass himself off as Sir Jonathan Cottrell. Whether this happened in England or on the Continent or in Barbados itself, I don’t know, but she’d clearly built up a reserve of money by that time and had certainly been keeping track of where Sir Jonathan was stationed in his service to the King. I suspect, but I’m not sure, that at some point she had announced her intention to murder Sir Jonathan in revenge for her beloved sister’s death—or that someone who knew the story remarked on it, when she took up the study of poisons. I see no other reason that she would have taken such pains to prove that she was nowhere near him when he was killed—”

  “I heard from my mother that she so swore,” put in Coldstone. “So it must have been common knowledge.”

  “Common enough to keep her from returning to her home and having the use of her property, once her revenge was accomplished,” said Abigail.

  “A woman of deliberation as well as passion,” remarked the officer. “A dangerous combination.”

  “Deliberate enough to learn the finer points of cardsharping as well as poisoning, at any rate,” said Abigail. “I trust, by the way, that somebody put aside the contents of my teapot where they can be examined—”

  “I instructed your girl to see to it,” said Coldstone. “I daresay you shall need to replace the teapot.”

  “Just as well. ’Twas a wedding-present from my Uncle Tufts; I never liked the thing.”

  “Then why’d she come after you?” Muldoon wanted to know. “Beggin’ your pardon, m’am, Lieutenant . . . What’d you say in that note of yours to Miss Fluckner?”

  “I asked Lucy Fluckner about Margaret Sandhayes’s movements on the day Sir Jonathan supposedly left Boston,” said Abigail. “I included the strictest warning against letting its subject know anything about the matter, but I daresay Mrs. Sandhayes was paying one of the servants to intercept messages from me. She knew I had discovered the well in the cellar, and she may have worried that I would eventually reason out how she could have been instrumental in the murder while attending a ball at the Governor’s at the only time it could have been committed. I wonder now whether Palmer knew anything about why he was going to Maine at all. Mrs. Sandhayes was careful about her accomplices—I suspect she herself was ‘Toby Elkins’ who rented the house. She was certainly the one who attempted to poison me and my family.”

  “And you think that’s why she did for that poor Negro girl?” put in Muldoon. “That the girl saw her, walkin’ about in her room wi’out her sticks?”

  “It may have been that simple,” agreed Abigail. “Or she might have come on some item of her male disguise, or her cache of money . . . Or Mrs. Sandhayes might only have wanted to put out of the way anyone who knew about Pear Tree House and her meetings with Androcles Palmer. A promise of money would be enough to secure a meeting with a slave longing to buy freedom for herself and her babies.”

  “The way a letter telling Cottrell that there was another claimant to the Fluckner land-grant was enough to bring him to the Dressed Ship Tavern,” said Coldstone. “And that lies only a few hundred yards from Pear Tree
House. It was undated,” he added grimly, “but tucked in the desk in his chamber. Damn!” he added, as the Magpie turned to better catch the wind, and Castle Island came into clear view off the starboard.

  And Abigail said, “Oh, no—”

  The sloop was within half a mile of the little round knoll of rock; the Saturn, already past Governor’s Island and heading out into open sea. At the end of the Castle wharf, the Incitatus, which Abigail had seen only in tight-furled stillness, now swarmed with activity. Like ants, she could see men moving up and down the ladders, and the water around the dark hull bobbed with boats. Beside her, Coldstone had put a glass to his eye. Then he silently passed it to her, and she could see that very little in the way of provisions or water-kegs remained on the wharf.

  “No—”

  Abigail was aware of Revere’s dark gaze, on herself and on Coldstone. Once Harry Knox reached Halifax, there was very little likelihood that three British admirals would be much impressed by tales of conspiracies of revenge. “Have you enough,” the silversmith asked Coldstone quietly, “to convince Colonel Leslie to drop the charge?”

  Coldstone’s eyes met Revere’s.

  Gently, the silversmith went on, “Or is it the charge of murder that is your Colonel’s principle concern?”

  Coldstone’s lips tightened slightly. “The charge of murder,” he replied, “is my principle concern. Mr. Miller,” he went on, “put about and take us into the Castle.”

  Twenty-six

  The Magpie lay at anchor for some four hours at the wharf at Castle Island; Paul Revere and Ben Edes remained prudently belowdecks. In a fog of giddiness and nausea, shivering in her own cloak and Lieutenant Coldstone’s, Abigail waited in the brick corridor outside Colonel Leslie’s office, listening to the dim murmur of voices within. Muldoon fetched her hot tea and bread-and-butter. She couldn’t touch the food, but the tea made her feel better and be damned to Cousin Sam’s boycott.

  At length Coldstone opened the door and bowed her inside.

  “That is certainly an extraordinary accusation you are making, Mrs. Adams.” Colonel Leslie frowned at her across his small and scrupulously tidy desk. On the office wall behind him maps of Massachusetts Colony, and of the coast-line from Halifax down to Philadelphia, made buff-colored panes against the sooty whitewash; the light from the little window caught a steely gleam from a gorget on top of the cabinet.

  “It is indeed, sir,” Abigail replied, and was a little surprised, when she inclined her head, that it didn’t fall off. “Yet the guilty flee when no man pursueth, and if you will but send to the Fluckner house, you will find that Mrs. Margaret Sandhayes took flight without warning this morning, upon reading the note that I sent to Miss Fluckner, which asked after Mrs. Sandhayes’s movements on February twenty-fourth—that is, the day on which Sir Jonathan Cottrell supposedly departed for Maine.”

  And if I’m wrong, thought Abigail wearily, and the messenger arrives at the Fluckners’ to find Mrs. Sandhayes peacefully taking tea with her hostess . . .

  Her tired mind would pursue the thought no further.

  “Supposedly.”

  “In point of fact,” said Abigail, in a voice she usually reserved for reasoning about politics with her Cousin Isaac, “Margaret Sandhayes—by her own admission to me—poisoned Sir Jonathan Cottrell at a house just north of the Boston Common and lowered his body down a well in the cellar, where it was preserved by the cold while her lover, an actor named Androcles Palmer, of stature similar to Cottrell’s, traveled in his place to Maine. The previous evening, Palmer and, I think, Sandhayes had accosted Cottrell’s servant at the Spancel tavern on School Street and, in the course of dining with him, dosed him with what appears to have been death-cap mushroom. The servant was too ill to join his master aboard ship the following day, and in fact he died two weeks later. When Palmer returned to Boston in the guise of Cottrell, he went, not to the house of his host Governor Hutchinson, but to Pear Tree House, which Mrs. Sandhayes had rented under the name of Toby Elkins, only a few days before Sir Jonathan’s arrival in Boston.”

  The Colonel raised his eyebrows. A youngish man, he was handsome in his way, but Abigail thought he looked tired—as indeed would any man, who had been given the chore of enforcing the King’s Law in a town that would have none of it. It was a commonplace in hundreds of pamphlets—including the one Harry Knox had been printing on the night of the murder—to accuse the British of being either knaves or brutes, but in fact Abigail was well aware that Alexander Leslie, second son of the Earl of Leven, was neither.

  And while he would certainly have welcomed the opportunity to put a suspected Son of Liberty to the choice of death on the gallows or turning King’s Evidence, she didn’t think he looked the kind of man to relish going into court against clear evidence of conspiracy with nothing more than a jealous father’s trumped-up story about scarves and faces seen providentially by moonlight.

  “And this Mrs. Sandhayes—”

  A knock sounded on the office door, and a young midshipman put his head through. “Colonel Leslie, sir, Captain asks, with his compliments, will there in fact be a prisoner to transport to Halifax? If we’re to be in open water before the tide turns, sir, Captain says, it must be soon.”

  Leslie held up a finger. “Thank you, Mr. Purfoy, just one moment more—This Mrs. Sandhayes simply asked Sir Jonathan to tea and he went? Drinking tea with a complete stranger in a strange house? And then she admitted as much to you?”

  “I had made her angry, sir,” replied Abigail. “And as she was holding a pistol on me—by which means she meant to persuade me to drink tea, which I believe I can prove to be poisoned—I suspect she was confident of my later discretion. I am here in your quarters, sir—having never been introduced before—drinking tea, without thought that it contains anything but tea.”

  “I think you’ll find, sir,” put in Coldstone, “that the undated letter I found in Sir Jonathan’s room concerning questionable title of lands in the Kennebec Grant is written on paper identical to that to be found in the Fluckner household, where Mrs. Sandhayes was staying as a guest.”

  “Circumstantial evidence.”

  “As a scarf,” inquired Abigail, “claimed found by an employee of a man who would like to see Harry Knox shipped away to Canada, is not?”

  “I myself can vouch for the authenticity of the tea in question, Colonel,” added Coldstone. “I entered the house and sealed the pot with my signet ring, and am confident that its contents are in fact lethal.”

  One corner of Colonel Leslie’s mouth turned sharply down; he glanced over at the midshipman, still standing in the doorway. “My compliments to Captain Dashwood,” he said. “Please let him know that he is free to make sail at his earliest convenience. There will be no further passengers at this time.”

  Abigail was heartily glad that she was the only American present. The Colonel of the Sixty-Fourth would not have taken kindly to the war-whoop of joy that would have greeted these words had any of the contingent still on the Magpie been privileged to hear them.

  “And I have spoken to Lieutenant Dowling,” added Coldstone, when the middy had gone. “Upon my request, he has just reexamined Sir Jonathan’s body—which has been kept preserved in one of the post stores-depots, as the ground has been too frozen for burial. He says that the torso is certainly bruised beneath the arms, as if a thickly padded rope or line had been passed around it, to hold it suspended. Likewise, he attests that the discoloration of the extremities, which he took to be the result of cold, is consonant with livor mortis, in a body so suspended, and that the abrasions on the corpse’s head and hands could easily have been produced as the result of convulsions caused by certain types of poison.”

  “She said,” murmured Abigail, “that she did not wish Sir Jonathan to die swiftly. It appears that he did not.”

  It took another hour of arguing, however, to convince Colonel Leslie to release Harry Knox on a bond and let him return to Boston on the Magpie pending confirmation of Ab
igail’s story. As Abigail emerged from the office, almost shaking with exhaustion, she heard behind her the Colonel’s voice: “You will change your coat, Lieutenant, bullet-hole or no bullet-hole in your shoulder, and return to Boston this evening. And if you find the Sandhayes woman at the Fluckners’ after all, so help me I shall have Mr. Knox and Mrs. Adams clapped in irons, and yourself as well!”

  As the Magpie put to sea again—Charley and Tommy sleeping like tired puppies with their heads on Abigail’s lap—Harry Knox dropped onto the bench beside her and whispered, “Thank you, Mrs. Adams.” He looked like he’d lost a good ten pounds during his incarceration and had neither bathed nor shaved in that time, nor, Abigail guessed, slept much. “I cannot—there are no words. Thank you.” He reached to clasp her hand, then drew back his own filthy one; from a pocket Abigail produced one of the several clean handkerchiefs that motherhood had taught her to always have upon her person, and draped it over her palm. Harry smiled—probably for the first time in two weeks—and gripped her fingers with a thankfulness that almost cracked the bones.

  Dusk was gathering when Abigail finally reached her own kitchen again. Pattie, emerging from the cowhouse with a pail and a half of milk, cried, “Mrs. Adams!” and from the back door burst not only Johnny and Nabby, but John, Philomela, and, gorgeous as a peony among demure New England herbs, Lucy Fluckner.

  “My God, Nab!” John cried, as the older children fell upon her, and Charley—just set on his feet by Paul Revere—said proudly, “We was in the mob!”