A Marked Man aam-2 Read online

  A Marked Man

  ( Abigail Adams Mystery - 2 )

  Barbara Hamilton

  From Publishers Weekly

  Near the outset of Hamilton's well-crafted second Abigail Adams mystery (after 2009's The Ninth Daughter), 16-year-old Lucy Fluckner comes to Abigail for help. A good friend of Lucy's, 24-year-old bookseller Harry Knox, who prints pamphlets for the Sons of Liberty, has been arrested for the murder of Sir Joseph Cottrell, the King's Special Commissioner and, according to Lucy's Tory chaperone, Mrs. Sandhayes, Lucy's fiancé. Lucy insists that the victim, a notorious womanizer, was not her fiancé, her heart all too clearly belonging to the accused. Abigail and her lawyer husband, John, resolve to prove Harry innocent. The disappearance of a Negro servant woman from the house of Lucy's Loyalist parents adds to the intrigue. Hamilton once again brings to life colonial Boston on the brink of revolution, vividly portraying such noted patriots as Sam Adams, leader of the Sons of Liberty; silversmith Paul Revere; and Dr. Joseph Warren. The action builds to a bizarre if satisfying ending.

  Praise for THE NINTH DAUGHTER

  “An exciting new mystery series set in revolutionary Boston. Abigail Adams could become my favorite historical sleuth.”

  —Sharon Kay Penman, author of Devil’s Brood

  “Barbara Hamilton plunges us into colonial Boston, where we walk beside the legendary Abigail Adams as she tries to find justice for a murdered young woman while also helping with the birthing pangs of a new nation.”

  —Victoria Thompson, author of Murder on Lexington Avenue

  “[An] exceptional debut . . . While bringing to life such historical figures as Sam Adams and Paul Revere, Hamilton transports the reader to another time and place with close attention to matters like dress, menus, and the monumental task of doing laundry. Historical fans will eagerly look forward to the next in this promising series.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Hamilton . . . has just the right touch to guide the intelligent Abigail through the dangerous shoals of being a patriot while seeing the good side of the colonies’ English rulers. There are no missteps here in what should prove to be a captivating series for all historical fans.”

  —Library Journal

  “The wry repartee between Abigail and John, together with the fact that this clandestine investigation of the murder of loose women would never have made the official record, make Hamilton’s debut believable and gripping.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A deep historical mystery. Based on true activities of that time, Ms. Hamilton weaves a tale that could have actually taken place . . . A finely written first in a new series story with a surprise ending. I am eager to see what comes next.”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “The story line provides a deep look at Boston as rebellion is in the air. Fans will want to join the tea party hosted by Ms. Hamilton with guests being a who’s who of colonial Massachusetts.”

  —The Mystery Gazette

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Barbara Hamilton

  THE NINTH DAUGHTER A MARKED MAN

  For Hazel

  Special thanks to Peggy Wu

  One

  She’s dead,” said Abigail softly, and knew it to be true.

  Her husband looked up from a cold Sabbath breakfast of bread, salt butter, and cider, the cows having only that week come into the new spring’s milk. “Who’s dead?”

  “I don’t know her name.” Abigail slid last Monday’s Boston Gazette across the table to him, profane reading that her parson father would never have permitted on the Lord’s Day, no matter what retaliation the colony was expecting from an outraged Crown.

  RAN AWAY

  Upon the 26th of Feb. 1774 in the Morning. A Negro Woman, from the house of Thomas Fluckner, in Milk Street. She is twenty-three years of age, of Medium height and complexion, rather freckled, with prominent front teeth. She is well-spoken and reads well. She left behind her a Child of two years, and a Babe of 3 months. A Reward will be given for information leading to her capture.

  “I fail to notice”—John peered at Abigail over the oval rims of his spectacles—“the passage in this advertisement announcing this poor young woman’s decease. Or do you infer her demise from the circumstance that any sane person would prefer slavery to death?”

  “I infer her demise from the fact that no woman will desert her children for her freedom. Certainly not an infant at breast.”

  “My dearest Portia.” John Adams folded the newspaper, glanced a trifle guiltily across at his son and namesake—six years old and consuming his bread-and-butter with the studied appearance of total deafness. Young John Quincy Adams was already aware that if he showed undue attention to this un-Sabbath-like discussion, the interesting topic would cease. John lowered his voice. “My dearest wife, sometime you must accompany me to the magistrate’s court. There I can introduce you to any number of perfectly free women in this city who would cheerfully desert their children for the price of a bottle of gin.”

  Abigail was obliged to admit that her husband had a point. As the daughter of a country parson, and the wife of a Boston lawyer, she had seen maternal misconduct that would have made Medea gasp.

  But something about the way John tucked the newspaper away into his coat pocket, with the implied admonition that circumstances that would lead a young woman to abandon children so helpless were matters that could be put off until Monday, roused her contentious side. “In the morning?” she asked. “In broad daylight, when she could as easily walk out of her master’s house carrying her babe as not? ’Twould be understandable, if she and her owners were on a journey, and the surety of her freedom were thrown against the fact that her children were back in some place where retrieving them would cost her her chance. But that isn’t the case.”

  John opened his mouth to expound some precedent from either his own experience in the Colony Courts of Massachusetts or from the collected decisions of British judges that made up his legal library—or from the annals of ancient Rome, belike, knowing John—then closed it again. His blue eyes—rather protuberant in a round, short-nosed face—narrowed suddenly in thought.

  Abigail reiterated, more to herself than to John, “The woman has come to harm.”

  She rose from the table, folded her napkin and ringed it, and went to help Charley dispose of the last of his bread-and-butter. At three, her middle son was a fussy eater, far likelier to experiment with how many times he could dunk bread into his cider before its inevitable dissolution, than to actually consume much. “Time to finish,” she informed him. “You shall be a hungry boy by dinnertime.”

  He regarded her with enormous blue eyes, clearly without the slightest idea of how long that was going to be and with only the dimmest recollection of his previous experience with this kind of improvident starvation. “I shall eat it, if you won’t,” offered Johnny, not out of greediness, Abigail was certain, but because he knew the suggestion would have its effect: Charley quickly wolfed down his soggy breakfast. Johnny and Nabby—a few months short of her ninth birthday and quiet as a little barn-fairy—cleared away the dishes and folded their own and their brother’s napkins, rinsing the plates but leaving them stacked on the sideboard for a more thorough washing tomorrow. Abigail knew houses in Boston where not even that much work was performed on the Sabbath, but she drew the line at it. A God who spent so many verses of Leviticus discussing the purification of any vessel that has so much as touched mice, moles, tortoises, or chameleons would not consider it an honor to have dishes left unrinsed overnight in His name.

  As the children went upstairs to ready themselves for church, John unfolded the Gazette and reconsidered the advertisement by the strengthening gray light of the kitchen’s
wide windows.

  “I think you may be right, Portia.”

  Abigail smiled at her old nickname, which he’d called her during their courtship: Shakespeare’s intrepid lady lawyer. Even ten years ago, they’d both known that were it possible for a girl to obtain the education to do so, Abigail would have made a fine lawyer herself.

  He went on, “’Twere another man I’d think, the girl was driven by desperation. But though Fluckner’s an ass, and he’s toad-eaten for the governor so that it’s a wonder he doesn’t have warts from his lips to his hairline . . .” He shook his head. “He has no name for being a cruel master, nor for meddling with the women in his household.”

  “But he would sell children left behind. The mother would know this.”

  “Curious.” He drank the rest of his cider, which was growing cold. The bells of Boston’s earlier-assembling congregations—the French Meeting-House on School Street and the Anabaptists over by the Mill-Pond—had not yet begun to sound, but Abigail’s ear was cocked for them as she cleared her own plate and John’s. Once the early bells started up, it was time to go upstairs for the children and herd her family toward the door. “Why should anyone do harm to a slave-woman? Unless she’s returned or been found”—he checked the date on the paper—“in the course of this week. Here, let me do that—”

  As he sprang up to forestall her putting another log on the kitchen hearth a tremendous thump sounded upstairs, followed by a furious confusion of treble voices. John’s face crimsoned, and he hurled the wood into the fire. “Drat those children, can they not respect the Sabbath?”

  “Not when they were born with your temper, dearest,” replied Abigail, fetching the tongs to straighten the log.

  As she did so, she made out Nabby shouting, “ ’ Tisn’t true! You’re a liar!”

  “So are you!”

  And Pattie, the fourteen-year-old hired girl, cried, “Such words on a Sunday—!”

  Small feet rattled in the boxed-in spiral of the stairwell, and a small body caromed off its corners. The next moment Nabby flung herself through the kitchen door and skidded to a stop before Abigail. Had she been a year younger, Abigail reflected, her daughter would have grabbed her around her waist.

  “Mama, you wouldn’t run away, if you were a slave, and leave us, would you?”

  “She would.” Johnny almost fell through the doorway behind her, pale hair tousled and neckcloth pulled awry. He could never bear to have his older sister get to anything before he did.

  “Wouldn’t!”

  “Would!”

  “Liar!”

  The boy stepped back as Nabby’s hand jerked, as if she would hit him, but she remembered the holy day and stayed herself. He made sure all was safe before turning to Abigail again. “You’d value freedom more than anything.” Johnny looked up at his mother with those disconcerting light blue eyes. “And anything means us.”

  Abigail was spared the answer to this conundrum by Pattie’s voice calling out upstairs, “Charley—!” and the wild clatter of descending feet, followed by the inevitable crash and series of thumps, then, comfortingly, Charley’s wails, which indicated that the boy had not knocked himself senseless. Still, John and Abigail were both across the kitchen and at the door to the hallway when Pattie came down the stairs with eighteen-month-old Tommy in her arms, and knelt beside the stairwell door where Charley sat clutching his head and howling.

  “There!” Abigail was on her knees beside the child in the next second, moving aside the round pink hand and the silky light brown hair to ascertain that the damage was, in fact, no more than a bruise above the bridge of his snub nose. “And how did you come by that, sir?”

  “Fell down!”

  “And were you walking slowly?”

  Charley only sobbed and held out his arms; Abigail gathered him in and kissed the brow above the injury.

  “A gentleman walks in the house, sir,” she said sternly, and brushed—very gently—the baby-soft quiff of hair aside. “And on the Sabbath! What must the Lord think of you?”

  “He’s always running,” pointed out Nabby righteously. “Mama, you wouldn’t leave us, if you were a slave and leaving us was the only way you could be free? Johnny says you would.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” declared Johnny, who already showed signs of wanting to grow up to be an ancient Roman. “I would rejoice that Mother valued liberty above all things.”

  “You wouldn’t!” Nabby took Charley’s hand and led the boy back toward the kitchen, throwing a glance over her shoulder at Johnny. “You’d cry.”

  “Would not!” He lunged at her and Abigail caught his arm with the deftness of long practice.

  Why don’t my children ever argue over normal things? “What I do not value,” stated Abigail, “nor does God either, is children who quarrel on the Lord’s Day. And there’s the meeting-bell,” she added, as John—who had preceded them all back into the kitchen—put into her hand the clean washrag, wrapped around a handful of the snow that still lay inches deep and iron-hard in the yard.

  “Nabby started it—”

  “Don’t contradict your mother, sir,” said John.

  Johnny—who contradicted everybody these days and heard this admonition a great deal—looked instantly abashed. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  At least he no longer protests that he’s only telling the truth.

  “I’ll do that, Mrs. Adams.” Pattie had set Tommy down at a safe distance from the hearth—not that anywhere in the kitchen was a safe distance from the hearth, as quickly as the boy moved—and took the washrag from Abigail’s hand. “Though we should by rights have a piece of fresh meat for it—There’s my brave boy,” she added encouragingly, as Charley glanced from her to his mother, clearly wondering if renewed protestations of mortal injury would serve to keep her at his side with the meeting-house bell ringing around the corner on Brattle Street.

  He evidently concluded that they would not, and held out his arms for Pattie. The girl—the daughter of neighbors of the family’s farm in Braintree across the bay—had practically grown up in the kitchen of the Adams farm herself and was much more an older sister to the children than a servant. She was friendly and pretty and much taken with the bustle and busyness of Boston. With the first notes of the Anabaptists’ off-key bell, Nabby had gone to gather everyone’s cloaks and scarves from the cupboard by the back door, and Johnny to dump a shovelful of hearth-coals into the fire-box that it was his duty to carry to their pew. Charley, at three, and little Tommy were too young to attend the meeting-house with their parents yet, so it was Pattie who stayed with them during the first service. At eight, almost nine, Abigail deemed Nabby old enough to look after the three boys when she, John, and Pattie returned to church for the afternoon service after dinner.

  When John laid the folded Gazette on the sideboard, Pattie glanced at it, asked hesitantly, “Is there word about England yet, Mr. Adams?” and despite the bell that tolled like a nagging conscience, John turned back. “About the King, I mean,” continued Pattie, “and what he means to do about the tea?” She sounded as apprehensive as if she, and not a gang of unknown persons disguised as Indians, had dumped three hundred and forty-two chests of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor.

  “Nothing yet.” John smiled encouragingly at the girl. “Best we not worry over what we don’t know.”

  Pattie bit her underlip and nodded, clearly trying to look as if she hadn’t heard the rumors that had begun to fly around the town in the ten weeks since John’s wily cousin Sam had led the Sons of Liberty in this act of protest, about what the Crown’s reaction would be. Damage was estimated at some $90,000. Given Boston’s history of riots, protests, and stubborn disobedience to every effort of the King to establish royal control over the town and the Colony of Massachusetts, only the most delusional optimists could believe that retribution would not be crushing.

  “They wouldn’t send to arrest you, would they, Mr. Adams?”

  Abigail paused in the act of taking off he
r day-cap, tucking up the heavy coil of her sable hair, conscious of the swift glance that passed between her two older children.

  “Arrest me?” John widened his eyes at the girl. “For remaining peacefully at home on the night of the ruckus? As any of my good neighbors will attest.”

  This made Nabby giggle. Even at the age of eight, she knew perfectly well that no member of the mysterious Sons of Liberty was ever without a dozen witnesses to his spotless conduct, whatever he’d been doing. Johnny, ever the stickler, asked, “Then it’s all right, Father, to lie to the King’s officers?”

  Another man—Cousin Sam, for instance, reflected Abigail—would have answered the question with a broad wink that said, Well, what do YOU think, my boy? But John replied soberly, “’Tis never ‘all right’ to lie, Johnny. But men, when they are grown to the age of judgment, are sometimes forced to it by the threat of greater evil that would come upon others should the whole of the truth be told. Only God knows whether this is ‘all right’ or not. And we are now,” he added, scooping his Bible and hat from the sideboard, “well and truly late—”

  Johnny picked up his own small hat, pulled his scarf over his fine blond hair, and jammed the hat on top for warmth, as Abigail put on a fresh cap and tied the strings of Nabby’s hood. And now the whole of the congregation will see us troop in during the opening reading . . .

  John picked up the little metal fire-box of hot coals and they turned toward the door into the yard—nobody in Boston went in and out their own front doors except on the most formal of occasions—and stopped with a sort of shock at the sight of looming shadows beyond the misted windows. Two men . . . Nabby caught Abigail’s hand, as if all this talk of treason, liberty, and arrest had conjured the redcoat troops from their camp. A sharp knock sounded on the panels and a voice called, “John? Are you there?”