A Marked Man aam-2 Read online

  “Perhaps they don’t care for the spectacle of every paying position in the colony being handed to members of His Excellency’s family.”

  “I don’t see what business it is of theirs.” Mrs. Sandhayes frowned. “Though come to think of it, that’s just what Lucy is always saying.” She considered the matter for all of about a second and a half with the expression of one trying to make out an inscription in Chinese, then shrugged. “Well, however it was, the Governor, I understand, agreed to intercept Sir Jonathan the moment he stepped into the house and speak to him—”

  “I thought Sir Jonathan was the Governor’s guest?”

  “And so he was.” The tall woman’s hand strayed toward the teacup, then she glanced at its despised contents and returned the hand to her lap. Because of the boycott on British tea—and the truly shocking expense of the Dutch tea that Mr. John Hancock and others smuggled in defiance of the King’s efforts to control colonial trade—Abigail had poured out warmed cider for John and Sam rather than break the Sabbath by the making of coffee, but with water kept hot in the kitchen boiler, a tisane was also possible. Peppermint and chamomile were poor substitutes for bohea and oolong, as far as Abigail was concerned, yet annoyance flashed through her at her guest’s politely veiled contempt. “But Sir Jonathan had been gone for ten days in Maine—Where is Maine?”

  “’ Tis the northern district of the colony that borders on Canada,” Abigail explained. “’ Tis where we get most of our ship timber from. There’s very little there beyond that. Why Sir Jonathan would go there to search for ‘rebels and traitors, ’ as Lucy said, and not return ’til the very eve of his own engagement-party—”

  “But without Sir Jonathan’s journey to Maine, there would be no engagement-party, you see.” The chaperone cocked her head, beaky as an absurdly crested bird’s in the elaborate rolls and poufs of her heavily powdered hair. “Apparently there’s some sort of question about title to part of the lands, and Sir Jonathan had agreed, when he returned to England, to speak to the King about settling it in Mr. Fluckner’s favor, if Mr. Fluckner agreed to the match with Lucy. But Sir Jonathan insisted upon seeing the lands—since a portion of them will comprise the bulk of dear Lucy’s marriage-portion—to see what he’d be up against, I daresay. It seems there are tenants living on them that nobody wants there, what are they called? Oh, I know—squatters! Such names you people do come up with!” She laughed again delightedly, but Abigail settled back in her chair, cradling the creamy queens-ware teacup and thinking.

  She’d heard all her life about the Maine squatters, and the cat’s cradle of lawsuits, chicanery, and looking-the-other-way that entangled the relationships of the dozen or so Great Proprietors who’d managed to get claim to those cold inhospitable forests to the north. Various Proprietors had brought in tenants to settle the land—mostly the Protestant Irish who’d originated in Scotland—and treated them, as far as Abigail could ascertain, like medieval peasants, to be robbed both of their rental and their lands depending on where negotiations were among the Proprietors themselves, and nobody outside the charmed circle of the very rich Boston merchants really had any clear idea of who had legal title to which portions of Maine’s broken coast.

  So Thomas Fluckner wanted to beat the other Proprietors to the post with a clear title newly granted by the King, did he?

  And was willing to trade his eldest daughter’s happiness to get it.

  She poured herself a little more tisane. “And did His Excellency manage to intercept Sir Jonathan before the engagement was announced?”

  “Good Heavens, no!” Mrs. Sandhayes regarded her in surprise, as if she suspected Mrs. Adams hadn’t been properly keeping up with the affair. “Sir Jonathan never arrived at all! He got off the boat from Maine that morning, and the next time anyone saw him, he was lying facedown in the mud of the alley behind the Governor’s mansion, frozen through.”

  “Frozen?” Abigail frowned. “The Provost Marshal finds a man frozen in an alley and concludes that Harry Knox must have had something to do with it?”

  “Of course!” exclaimed her guest. “Because of the quarrel, you know. Last Thursday week, the day Sir Jonathan left for Maine, Sir Jonathan went riding with Lucy on the Common and offered her intolerable insult! Fleeing him she encountered Mr. Knox, and Mr. Knox—after quite properly escorting her home—repaired at once to lie in wait for Sir Jonathan in the lane behind the Governor’s stables, in the very place where the body was found this morning! When Sir Jonathan came riding in, Mr. Knox pulled him off his horse practically in the stable gateway and shouted at him in front of the entire stable staff that if he—Sir Jonathan—dared speak to Miss Fluckner again, he—Mr. Knox—would ‘kill him like a dog.’ Oh, dear, look at the time!”

  Mrs. Sandhayes groped for her canes, and laboriously—with the first expression on her face that Abigail had seen of anything besides a vapid and condescending cheer—got herself to her feet. “I absolutely swore upon the Testament that I wouldn’t be late to Caroline Hartnell’s loo-party, and here I am forsworn and my immortal soul is in peril—I daresay the City Fathers would tell me, as much from playing loo on the Sabbath as for broken vows . . . Well, never mind. I have kept you”—she propped her cane against her pannier, extended her hand to grasp Abigail’s with strong warmth—“away from your family for an unconscienceable time, not to speak of making those poor lovely horses stand all this time in the cold street . . .”

  She hobbled with surprising swiftness along the hall, Pattie springing out of the kitchen to wrap her in the heavy velvet layers of her worn cloak. “Thank you so very much for the marmalade, Mrs. Adams—delicious! I dare swear I couldn’t make a marmalade myself if you held a gun on me! Well, I’m off to endanger my immortal soul at loo—Is it still the Sabbath? Or does it end at sunset here?”

  As she swayed and lurched out into Queen Street, with the Fluckner coachman—for whose frozen feet, Abigail reflected, she hadn’t spared a thought—springing down from his box to help her, Abigail glimpsed, at the edge of the lamplight, a couple of the young men whom she recognized as Sons of Liberty, waiting until the carriage pulled away. One carried a big box of seditious pamphlets, the other, a couple of pieces of what was clearly Harry Knox’s printing press.

  Paul Revere—and wily Cousin Sam—had evidently taken sunset as the definition of the Sabbath, for today, anyway. And that done, wherein lies the difference between defense of one’s country, and silver-loo?

  Four

  Are you sure you wish to do this?” John handed Abigail’s marketing basket—crammed to bursting with bread, butter, candles, cheese, apples, and clean linen that fifteen-year-old Billy Knox had brought for his brother that morning—to Thaxter and helped Abigail down into the skiff Katrina, which bobbed gently among the clots of ice at the end of Wentworth’s Wharf.

  Abigail wasn’t at all sure she wanted to do it. The grand-daughter of one of the oldest merchant clans in the colony, she knew everything about tonnage, bills of lading, and where to hide cargoes from the excise men, but being on the water made her joints ache within minutes and even the shortest voyage rendered her queasy. Nevertheless, she clasped John’s gloved hands in her own and said, “All will be well, Mr. Adams.”

  “If we gets back by afternoon, all’ll be well.” Ezra Logan, who brought in firewood and butter from the north side of the bay in the Katrina three market-days per week and smuggled illegal cargoes of French molasses on the other three nights, shaded his eyes to consider the clouds that barred the morning sky. “Squally weather comin’ in.”

  He took the basket from Thaxter, then the larger bundle of two striped woolen blankets, of the sort the British fur companies traded with the Indians. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Adams. I’ll have her back safe, ’fore the first sign of chop.” He cast loose the lines, and poled the Katrina’s nose from the end of the dock; the deck-boy swung the foresail yard around to catch what light wind there was. Thaxter, who wasn’t a much better sailor than Abigail, unfolded one of the
blankets and laid it around her shoulders, then settled himself on the bench at her side to stay out of the way of Logan and the boy, shivering in the icy spray. Much as Abigail detested the British troops that for five years now had been stationed in Boston, as they approached the low gray shape of Castle Island—two and a half miles out in the iron waters—she felt a throb of sympathy for them. The Crown may have dispatched them to suppress the colonists’ demands for their rights as Englishmen, but that didn’t make the damp, freezing brick barracks they had to live in any more endurable in the bitter season.

  The camp was quieter than it had been the last time she’d come ashore here, in early December. During the confused days after the tea-ships had first docked, when Boston’s bells had tolled day and night to summon in from the countryside the armed mob whose presence had made the so-called Boston Tea-Party possible, many Loyalists, including the Fluckners, had come out to the camp for protection. Most had returned to Boston, but a number of the Crown’s clerks and officers, Abigail was well aware, had chosen to remain.

  Coming ashore she observed that the grubby village of tents, sheep pens, horse-lines, and makeshift shelters occupied by soldiers and camp-followers that had sprung up around the fort’s walls in those days had shrunk almost to nothing, smaller even than its summer and autumn dimensions. When Abigail and Thaxter were admitted through the fortress gate, smoke clawed her eyes from campfires and Spanish-style braziers set up even in the corridors, where soldiers, camp-servants, and laundresses huddled for warmth. The central parade-ground, glimpsed through the windows, had acquired a ring of lean-tos around its walls, clinging to the brick as if for warmth. Everywhere wood was stacked; in the corridors, shirts and drawers hung to dry, frozen hard. The smell of cooking, of dirty wool, of men and women too cold and too crowded to bathe, nearly choked her.

  Lieutenant Coldstone, Assistant to the Provost Marshal, rose when they were shown into the cubbyhole that he shared with two other military clerks; the fireplace there was the size of Abigail’s breadbox back on Queen Street and the so-called blaze there wouldn’t have melted the ink in the standish. “It happens that Mr. Knox is a cousin of mine,” Abigail replied to his lifted eyebrows, after Thaxter had requested an interview with the prisoner. “I’ve brought him some things from his poor dear mother.”

  “Have you, m’am?” Coldstone bowed. The wintry pallor of his face and the marble white of his wig turned his dark eyes even darker, in features as delicate as a girl’s. “She must be most concerned for her son.”

  “Dreadfully,” said Abigail. “’ Tis only her age and illness that have kept her from bringing them herself.”

  “Those, and the fact that the lady has been dead since 1772. I am afraid, m’am, that there is no facility at present where you might speak to Mr. Knox, save in his cell. The late cold weather has driven even the hardiest of the men indoors, and we are severely crowded at the moment.”

  “’ Tis quite all right.”

  The Lieutenant drew off the writing-mitts he had been wearing, donned stouter gloves, and took a cloak from the peg on the wall. He opened the room’s other door, to admit men’s voices and a renewed fug of smoke from the cubbyhole beyond, and called, “Sergeant Muldoon? Please take Mrs. Adams’s things. This way, m’am, Mr. Thaxter.”

  “Might I ask the Provost Marshal’s reasoning, in treating this matter as a military one?” Thaxter’s breath puffed white as they passed a window, turned a corner down a hall that seemed to have been converted into a laundry-room, wood-store, and nursery for the ragged little camp children who ran to and fro underfoot like cocky rats. “As I understand the accusation, it rests upon the presumption that the crime was a crime of passion: a young man in love shouting threats at the older man who offered insult to a girl.”

  “That is one way of looking at it,” agreed Coldstone. “But one seldom finds that passion retaining its heat for ten days, then lying in wait to do murder once the object of its ire came back into range again.”

  “I suppose that depends on the degree of passion,” remarked Abigail, “and the magnitude of the ire.”

  “As you say, m’am.” They turned down another corridor, and Coldstone returned the salute of the guard who stood at attention next to a tiny brazier and stingy fire just beyond the corner of a short corridor. “But if the young man is a member of an organization whose stated purpose is to encourage disobedience to the Crown and the victim a servant of the Crown in lawful pursuit of information about that organization, then the crime becomes not passion but treason. And as such, it enters the domain of military law.”

  They descended a few steps to a sort of anteroom, stacked in its corners with trunks and barrels: Flour? Apples? It was impossible to tell by the smell because even in the cold, the room stank like a privy, and from the door at one side came the desultory murmur of men’s voices, and now and then, the soft clank of chain.

  “I had no idea the Boston Grenadiers encouraged disobedience to the Crown,” said Abigail. “And here I thought their stated purpose was to wear handsome uniforms and foregather in the Bunch of Grapes on Saturday afternoons!” She stepped back as Coldstone took the torch from one of the wall-brackets that burned close to the other locked door, trying to keep from shivering not only with the cold, but with the smell of hopelessness in this place, the sense of trapped despair. “And whatever the criminal’s intent, if Sir Jonathan’s body was found first thing Sunday morning by the Governor’s stable hands, it would follow that he was killed sometime late Saturday night. While Mr. Knox may not be able to prove himself Alibi at that time, I doubt that you or I or indeed the working half of the population of Boston could do so, either.”

  “No, indeed, Mrs. Adams.” Coldstone held the torch aloft for the guard, who had followed them in from the corridor, to shift the heavy bar that closed the second, nearer door, and to find and turn the iron key. “But though Mr. Knox was arrested on the presumption of a crime of passion alone, yesterday afternoon an eyewitness came forward who saw him emerging from Governor’s Alley at shortly after three o’clock that morning, only hours before the body was found. Please excuse me, m’am.”

  He stepped through the door; Abigail heard him say, “Mr. Knox?” within, and saw the flare of the torchlight on the unplastered brick walls. The room had not, to judge by the judas in the door, been completely dark before. Both it and the common cell across the vestibule appeared to have windows, for which she thanked Heaven even as she glanced in alarm at Thaxter, then in startled enquiry at Sergeant Muldoon. That young man—whom John had once described as a mountain walking about on legs—returned her look with a grimace—I haven’t the faintest idea, Mrs. A—and shook his head, even as Coldstone reemerged from the cell, and signed them with a bow to precede him inside.

  Henry Knox was sitting on the low cot that was the cell’s single item of furniture—the single object that the tiny chamber was capable of containing, in fact. There wasn’t even a latrine-bucket, only a hole in the brickwork of the floor from which noxious vapors emerged to make the whole room reek of sewage. Harry rose at once and held out his hands to Abigail, saying, “My dear Mrs. Adams, please forgive me for getting myself into a situation that obliges you to come here—and thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”

  As his plump, powerful hands gripped hers he glanced across at the three red-coated soldiers still grouped in the cell door, and went on, “And I swear to you, m’am, I didn’t actually get myself into this situation at all! I don’t know what witness this officer is talking about. I was in bed and asleep, as I’ve told these gentlemen any number of times.” His blue gray eyes met Abigail’s urgently as he said this, and she nodded, congratulating him silently on his good sense. Though any number of the Sons of Liberty would be perfectly happy to corroborate any tale Harry wished to concoct, Abigail could only shudder at the thought of the logistics necessary to coordinate a convincing story.

  Much better to follow Aristotle and stick with the plausible that could not be proven,
rather than come to ruin pursuing firmer proof that ultimately wouldn’t hold up.

  “Never mind that for the moment, Cousin Harry.”

  He started a little at the claim of kinship but nodded in his turn.

  “We’ve brought you food—please don’t tell me they’re feeding you what the troopers get, knowing some of the contractors for it—and blankets—”

  Muldoon brought the basket forward, and Harry gathered the blankets to his bosom with the fervor of a mother reunited with her child. Harry Knox was a young man comfortably padded by nature, like a somewhat rotund whale, but the cold in the cell was fearful. Had he not been taken on his way to church, as Sam had said, and thus wearing his greatcoat and gloves, Abigail reflected with an uneasy glance at the single filthy blanket on the insalubrious cot, he probably would have frozen in the night as surely as his purported victim.

  “I’ve also brought you a book,” she added, turning the basket a little so that her own body, and Thaxter’s, interposed for a moment between its contents and Coldstone. As she opened the volume of Herodotus that she’d brought, she slipped the unaddressed note from Lucy between its pages. Harry met her eyes again, startled, then colored slightly in the torchlight.

  “Thank you, m’am—Cousin Abigail,” he remembered to add. “That is of more worth to me than all the rest put together.” His gloved hands closed briefly around hers again. Then he straightened and turned back to Coldstone. “But as to this man who says he saw me, it is simply not true. I despise the Governor and his friends and wouldn’t go near his house on a wager, much less at three o’clock in the morning. Who was this man?”