A Marked Man Read online

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

  Abigail paused in the act of taking off her 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?”

  Cousin Sam.

  Who should, Abigail reflected, be in church—which is where WE should be—

  John opened the door. It was wily Cousin Sam, all right, wrapped up in his gray greatcoat and a dozen scarves, knocking the snow off his boots on the scraper. The muffled shape at his heels was the street-level organizer of the Sons of Liberty’s information network, silversmith Paul Revere.

  Revere pulled the door to behind them as they stepped inside, for the morning was like frozen iron.

  Sam said, “The British have arrested Harry Knox.”

  Harry Knox, aged twenty-four, bookseller, was responsible for printing and distributing any number of seditious broadsides penned by the Sons of Liberty . . . and, under a variety of pseudonyms, by John. One of which, Abigail knew, was to have been printed in the cellar of his Cornhill Street shop last night. “The British—”

  John asked, quite calmly, “Did they find his press? Or the pamphlets?”

  Sam shook his head. “Not that I’ve heard. They took him on his way to church. He’s being charged with murder.”

  Two

  Abigail was accustomed to the sensation she periodically experienced of wanting to smite the husband of her bosom over the head with a stick of firewood.

  She knew, when John looked at her following Cousin Sam’s announcement, that the next words out of his mouth were going to be the request that she take the children on to church while he and Sam consulted on the matter, leaving her to speculate, through the two and a half hours of the Reverend Cooper’s sermon, upon who young Harry—whose youth had been surprisingly rowdy for a scholarly bookseller—was supposed to have murdered and why it was the British Army authorities who had come for him rather than the Boston constabulary.

  And she knew, too, that if she was going to set a good example to the children about refraining from quarrels on the Sabbath, she could not protest.

  Feeling blackmailed, she said brightly, “Come now Johnny, Nabby, we are woefully late,” and took each child by the hand. John handed his Bible to Nabby, and Sam—whom Abigail would cheerfully have brained with a skillet—opened the door for them.

  As she had anticipated, the entire congregation of the Brattle Street Meeting-House turned in its pews and stared as she led her children—fatherless—down the aisle in the middle of the first reading of the service, to the little whitewashed cubicle of the Adams family pew.

  Devoting the whole of her mind and heart to the Reverend Cooper’s argument, “The State of the Soul Laid Bare before the Eyes of God,” was as difficult for her, she realized, as it was for Nabby and Johnny under ordinary circumstances: a reminder to herself, she reflected wryly, to be mindful that her adult concentration was only a matter of practice and degree, and not any special quality of adulthood. Given sufficient distraction—the possibility that the Provost Marshal of the King’s Sixty-Fourth Regiment might be even now on his way to arrest John for sedition, for instance—she was no more capable than her six-year-old son of focusing her thoughts.

  “For behold, God did not set his mark upon Cain in the spirit of vengefulness, but in the spirit of forgiveness, that any that slew Cain should be avenged sevenfold; even Cain who had slain his brother and brought murder into the world.”

  Murder. Harry Knox?

  Five years ago, one might have believed it possible. Today—

  Tall, fat, and scholarly, Harry had spent the years of his early teens running with the South End street-gangs and had been acknowledged as the best fistfighter in many a Pope’s Night brawl. He had helped found the Boston Grenadiers, one of the patriot militia companies, and in his position as second-in-command he’d had no trouble trouncing whoever he needed to among the ranks. But with the acquisition of his own bookshop, he had consciously and firmly put his rough-and-tumble youth behind him.

  Nabby’s eyes were closed. Abigail nudged her sharply. Johnny, on the far side of the little girl with the fire-box on the floor between their feet, was reading his father’s Bible. As a Christian, Abigail knew she shouldn’t countenance such inattention to the sermon, but at least it would improve his command of the language. Not every six-year-old could manage those archaic phrases.

  “When Cain in his sin cried out before God, My punishment is greater than I can bear, God’s punishment of Cain was not death, even though he had murdered his brother, but exile, that he might learn of his punishment what it was like to have no brother forever and to be afraid . . .”

  Who would Harry have had the opportunity—or the desire—to harm? He was a loyal friend, but his only family was his younger brother; and these days, Harry was far more likely to talk his way out of trouble than to resort to violence. Besides, if he’d cracked a thief or burglar over the head with a poker, the charge would be manslaughter, and his captors, the local Watch, not the Provost Marshal.

  For the British military to be involved, the crime had to be one that touched the Crown. And in these times—given that Harry and his Grenadiers had been among the men who’d stood guard at Griffin’s Wharf in December to keep the British tea-ships from unloading their cargoes—the only crime Abigail could think of that would involve arrest by the Provost Marshal would be treason.

  That being the case, was Harry’s arrest only the first, with more to come?

  Abigail shivered, and not simply because yesterday’s snow lay thick in Brattle Street outside.

  “We bear the stain of our deeds on our foreheads, or on our right hands, as the Book of Revelation teaches us: Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord God. Think you, before you accomplish any deed for your own willfulness or pleasure, What mark will this leave upon me? Some there are, for whom the mark obscures the whole of their faces, so that those who behold them see only that mark, and could not say, This man is dark or fair, or comely or otherwise, but only, This man bears a mark . . .”

  Last night, thought Abigail. Last night Harry was supposed to be printing pamphlets in the basement of his shop on
Cornhill, leaflets concerning the assault of a girl in Dorchester by two British soldiers who had crossed to that little village from their island camp to buy wood. These pamphlets, leaflets, and broadsheets appeared in taverns from Philadelphia to Maine, and westward deep into the backcountry, carried by the Sons of Liberty and trumpeting to all that the King’s efforts to tighten his hold on the colony were not merely a matter that concerned a few merchants in Boston or which townsmen would run for office. In many cases, Abigail was quite well aware, these incidents of violence between civilians and soldiers were either wholly fictitious or blown wildly out of proportion, though this assault had at least actually happened. John had written the original broadside, and by the time Sam had edited it and turned it over to Harry for printing, it was guaranteed to put men in a frame of mind to fight—

  Was the murder charge simply a screen? Did the British really suspect that Harry had a printing press hidden in his cellar, one that they weren’t keeping an eye on the way they kept an eye on the Gazette and the Spy and the various other printers in town?

  LISTEN to what the Reverend Cooper is saying . . . You cannot chide Johnny for reading John’s Bible, or even poor Nabby for sleeping, if your own mind is straying like a cow in a meadow. Discipline your mind, woman . . .

  “For each deed leaves its mark, and God can read all of them upon our faces and in our right hands. And we cannot know which of these marks is the sign of the Cross, and which the number of the beast . . . Which, the Evangelist tells us, is the number of a man, and of the deeds of a man and not a beast. How can we know that what seems right to us, what seems natural, is not natural at all in the eyes of God? How can we know that what we seek will not mark us before those all-seeing eyes as those who have turned away from God, and from man, and from our own families, in pursuit of fleshy shadow?”

  You wouldn’t leave us, if you were a slave, Nabby had asked that morning, and leaving us was the only way you could be free?

  Was that in fact what that Negro Woman, twenty-three years old, well-spoken and rather freckled, had done?

  Abandoned a two-year-old child and a baby at breast—tiny orphans who would be sold off for a dollar or two to spare Thomas Fluckner the cost of raising them—to seek her own liberty? What mark would she bear before the eyes of God who knew everything?

  And what mark would Sam and John and Revere and all those others bear for putting the affairs of politics and rebellion before the commandment that the Sabbath should be kept holy?

  The case is entirely different—

  Any trace of heat had long ago faded from the fire-box at their feet. Vainly, Abigail wiggled her frozen toes. In the next pew, despite the discreet muffling of several layers of quilted petticoat, Abigail heard the thin tinkling of Mrs. Hitchbourne using what the French called a bourdaloue: a small, portable chamber pot named after a French bishop given to notoriously long sermons. Such devices were frowned upon in New England—Abigail had long disciplined herself to drink nothing at Sunday breakfast and had taught Nabby likewise—but in a fashionable church like Brattle Street, there were always those less fastidious in their observances than they should be.

  She saw Johnny catch Nabby’s eye and giggle, and Abigail reached across to pinch the boy’s arm.

  “How many seek out the Mark of the Beast for themselves, without which no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name? So consider your desires and whether they are worth the consequence. Is anything worth God’s punishment of exile, and vagabondage, and living as Cain lived on through the rest of his mortal span, out from the presence of the Lord? A man may say that it is permitted to do ill that good may come of it—but consider what mark that ill might leave upon our foreheads and our right hands. 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, ourselves, with the Mark of the Beast that considers naught but the urgency of his own desires and claims them as good only because they seem good to him?

  “I had planted thee a noble vine, saith the Lord, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?”

  “Mama,” asked Johnny, as they retreated up the aisle at last, “if the Lord put the Israelites into the hand of the Midianites because they sinned, why did the Lord then help the Israelites slaughter the Midianites later? Weren’t the Midianites doing just what the Lord told them to do?”

  “We can’t know what the Lord asked the Midianites to do,” explained Abigail, who had never been quite comfortable with this particular aspect of Predestination herself, “or how to do it.” She tucked Johnny’s scarf more tightly around his throat and over his head, thankful that both her children took after John in their sturdy strength. Poor Arabella Butler next door had just lost her three-year-old son, a fragile child she had vainly nursed through measles, fevers, sweats, and croup, and whose loss had left her desolate. “Perhaps the Midianites overstepped their instructions.” That’s what came of letting a critical, too-intelligent six-year-old get his hands on the Holy Writ.

  “Yes, but if God knows everything from the beginning of Time, wouldn’t He have known the Midianites would oppress the Children of Israel that cruelly—?”

  “Mrs. Adams—”

  Abigail turned gratefully to meet the three women silhouetted against the queer snow-light of the doors that led from the vestibule to Brattle Street outside. The one who had spoken stepped forward, pushing back her cardinal red hood to reveal herself not a woman but a girl of sixteen: black-haired, blue-eyed, stout, and dressed in a vivid and stylish polonaise of mustard-colored silk that made her stand out among the sober dark garments of the congregation like a macaw in a chicken-run. “You may not remember me, m’am, but I’m Lucy Fluckner—”

  “Of course I remember you.” Abigail smiled at the girl and held out her hand. “And Philomela—?”

  Miss Fluckner’s maidservant curtseyed: slender as Miss Fluckner was buxom, quiet as Miss Fluckner was bossy, she had been, some three months before, the target of a religious madman whom Abigail had been instrumental in trapping. The third woman, older than either of the others, was still gazing about her with the precise expression of a schoolgirl at a raree-show, as if she couldn’t quite believe the Spartan plainness of the church vestibule or the somber garb of its inhabitants. When Lucy Fluckner introduced her—“Mrs. Sandhayes, Mrs. Adams”—she propped one of her canes against her wide, whaleboned panniers and extended two fingers only, in the manner of English ladies. “Well, I wouldn’t have believed it, m’am! Do this many people really come out on a morning like this to be told they’re all going to Hell?”

  Abigail opened her mouth to snap a retort, but recalled that that was the deserved destination predicted by the Reverend Cooper for at least seven-eighths of the world’s population, past and present, if not more. So she merely gestured about her, at her neighbors crowding to shake the pastor’s hand, and replied, “As you see, m’am. I understand that in England, those who aren’t destined for Heaven don’t wish to know it,” and Mrs. Sandhayes laughed, a light, cheerful sound like shaken silver bells, which caused the grimmer stalwarts of the congregation like Fearful Perkins and old Mr. Gilbert to turn their heads and glare.

  “Mrs. Adams, I came to beg your help.” Lucy drew back from the group around the outer door and back into the sanctuary, where the minimal heat from the small fire-boxes of coals brought by each family on so bitter a morning had managed to raise the temperature a degree or two during the course of the service. “And Papa would flay me if he knew I’d come to you, and throw poor Margaret”—she nodded toward her chaperone—“out in the street for letting me do it, because she’s supposed to keep me out of trouble, but you were so brilliant in helping Philomela . . . Really she was, Margaret. She can help us if anyone can.” She turned back to Abigail. “There’s been a murder.”

  Several things seemed to click into place in Abigail’s mind, filling
her with a sense of shock and dismay. “The slave-woman?”

  Great Heavens, what had Harry to do with—?

  Lucy stared at her, taken aback.

  “Your father’s slave-woman. The one who disappeared—”

  “Bathsheba? Has she been found?” Her dark brows puckered in swift consternation. “Why do you say she’s dead?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Abigail quickly. “I thought—” She shook her head, trying to collect her thoughts. “Forgive me. Who is it who was killed?”

  “Sir Jonathan Cottrell. The King’s Special Commissioner—”

  “And your fiancé.” Mrs. Sandhayes, who had been leaning on her canes and gazing around the sanctuary with the bemused expression of an explorer contemplating a grass temple on Otaheite, gave her an arch wink.

  Lucy flushed a dark pink, not with maiden modesty, but with anger. “He was not my fiancé,” she snapped.

  “’ Tis not what your father thought, my dear.”

  “My father could marry him, then.” The girl turned back to Abigail with a little flounce. “Sir Jonathan was sent last year by the King to collect evidence about where the Sons of Liberty—‘Rebels and Traitors,’ he called them, but that’s who he meant—were getting their money from. He’d been staying with Governor Hutchinson all last month, which was where he met Papa, and he was found dead in the alley behind the Governor’s house early this morning: horrible! And they’ve arrested . . .”

  Again she colored, and this time there was no mistaking the blush. She turned her head aside, a startling display of timidity in a girl Abigail knew was ordinarily as straightforward as a runaway goods-wagon.