A Marked Man aam-2 Page 9

  “He did.” Coldstone’s voice was suddenly dry and flat. “He was known for it. My mother would not have him in our house.”

  “You knew him?” Abigail regarded him in startled surprise. And yet, she thought, Lieutenant Coldstone came from the same class of society that Sir Jonathan Cottrell did, the English gentry whose landed wealth and sense of social responsibility formed the backbone of government and society in the home country. They were the men who were elected to the House of Commons, the magistrates who enforced its laws in thousands of England’s villages from Land’s End to Hadrian’s Wall, the officers who commanded her armies, and the churchmen who were given livings whether they deserved them or not. They knew one another, married one another’s daughters to their sons, attended the same plays and salons, patronized the same modistes and bootmakers. Rich or poor, they sent their sons to the same schools, where they learned to write with Coldstone’s elegant hand, to speak with his clear diction, to wear clothes with a certain style—even if they were refurbished like Margaret Sandhayes’s gowns, or put on, as Coldstone had put on his crimson uniform, because the family had not the money or the influence for him to do otherwise.

  Of course their families had moved in the same circles.

  “I did not know him personally, as I was at school when he was obliged to leave the country.”

  “Was there a scandal?”

  “Of sorts. A girl hanged herself.” The savagery in his voice was all the more shocking because it was not raised above his usual soft conversational tone. “It would have raised no eyebrows, except that she wasn’t a servant. A number of people cut him after that and he went to the Continent for some years, but of course such things do get forgotten, particularly if the man in question is a friend of the King’s. My mother knew him. If you will pardon me, the recollection played a part in the immediacy of my suspicion of Mr. Knox. But it is equally likely that another outraged husband or brother or sweetheart did the office, or that the crime was connected with the absence of the memorandum-book from his pocket.”

  “It was not in his luggage, I suppose?”

  “No. Nor in his room at the Governor’s.”

  “Did his luggage contain a journal or daybook of any sort, recording where he went in Maine?”

  “Nothing. Not even notes. His regular daybook of expenses he left at the Governor’s. Mr. Fenton says that his master’s memory for such things was quite good, and he would frequently go for a week without making any notation, then tally up all the preceding expenses at once. His luggage did contain letters of introduction to Mr. Bingham at Boothbay, and to another agent of Mr. Fluckner’s on Georgetown Island, further along the coast. Both letters bore the appearance of having been unfolded, handed about, and read, as is to have been expected.”

  “Please don’t tell me,” sighed Abigail, “that we’re going to have to pursue enquiries into Maine at this season.”

  The afternoon was darkening, and as she genuinely liked Lieutenant Coldstone, when he rose to go, Abigail went to the kitchen and donned cloak, scarves, shawls, and pattens to accompany him as far as the wharf. The mob that had followed him from the Governor’s would still, despite the cold, be waiting in Queen Street, and while they might have orders from Paul Revere not to lay a hand on the two British soldiers, she wouldn’t have wanted to wager on the chance that they’d protect them if others tried.

  Sergeant Muldoon, his red coat off and his musket placed carefully in the pantry where none of the children could get at it, was helping Pattie fill the lamps at the big worktable in the kitchen, while Johnny and Nabby, instead of doing their lessons, were listening to the sergeant’s tales of camp and transport and fighting the French. At Abigail’s appearance in the doorway the children dived back into their books and slates; Pattie and Muldoon scrambled to their feet. “I trust you’re not corrupting my son?” Abigail inquired.

  “No, m’am. I doubt I could,” he added with a grin, “with all his da’s already havin’ him read of what the Romans got up to! Lord, think of a boy that age, able to write Latin and all.”

  “Young Mr. Adams brought you a note from Mr. Sam.” Pattie produced a folded paper from her apron pocket.

  The

  Magpie,

  out of Boothbay, sloop of 94 tons. Master: The Heavens Rejoice Miller. Put in at Scarlett’s Wharf Saturday, March 5, cargo butter, potash, skins. Still there. Ship’s boy Eli Putnam sleeping aboard, Miller and Matthias Brown, also of Boothbay, went ashore morning of March 5 shortly before arrival of Cottrell on the

  Hetty,

  not seen since.

  Eight

  The Magpie was a thirty-five-foot sloop, Jamaica-rigged, that badly needed a coat of paint. Among the tall oceangoing vessels of the harbor it blended in, like a shabby idler in a crowd, but Abigail picked it out at once as she crossed the icy black planks that joined Scarlett’s Wharf with the higher ground along Ship Street. Somebody on board had built a fire in the little galley. Smoke trickled from the cabin’s half-open door, snagged and whipped away by the wind that tore at Abigail’s cloak and cut through the quilted jacket, skirt, and petticoats beneath.

  “You know a man’s poor, when he’s living on water in weather like this.” Paul Revere hunched his shoulders and kept one steadying hand on Abigail’s elbow against the force of the squalls, the other hand being engaged in holding on to his hat.

  Abigail could only nod agreement, so tightly were her teeth clenched to keep them from chattering.

  One truly knew one’s friends, she reflected, on evenings like this: after escorting Coldstone and Muldoon to Rowe’s Wharf, she’d walked along the waterfront to North Square in the fading twilight and knocked at the door of the tall, narrow Revere house. The silversmith, God bless him, had not inquired why she wanted an escort to Scarlett’s Wharf, which lay only a few yards beyond. He’d only laid aside his pipe, kissed his wife and his numerous offspring, and gotten his coat.

  He called out now, “Ahoy the Magpie!” as he held out his hand to help Abigail up the gangplank. The boy who appeared in the low cabin doorway was well in keeping with the vessel and with everything Abigail had heard about the inhabitants of Maine: unwashed, glum, his shaggy hair drooping in his eyes, he was dressed in castoffs that would have embarrassed a scarecrow.

  “You’d be Eli Putnam?” Revere enquired briskly. “We’re looking for Mr. Miller or Mr. Brown.”

  The boy’s eyes widened with alarm and he whirled like a hare seeking its burrow. Only Revere’s quickness kept the boy from slamming the cabin door behind him. Revere got a shoulder and a thigh into the aperture and leaned his weight on the door as the youth struggled to shut it. “Don’t know nobody by that name,” the boy shouted out of the smoky murk below.

  “Are you the master of this vessel, then?” demanded Revere.

  The boy, confused, said, “Yes.”

  “Don’t be daft, son.” Revere leaned his weight on the door and heaved it open, leaned in to catch the youth by the arm before he could disappear down the hatchway. “You’ve no more beard than my baby daughter and a vessel this size needs a crew of two at least. Did Miller follow Cottrell down from Boothbay?”

  “Matt Brown made him!” blurted the boy. “You ain’t magistrates, are you?”

  “Don’t be a dunce,” said Revere good-naturedly. “Do we look like magistrates? My name’s Revere. This is Mrs. Adams.”

  The boy’s dark eyes got bigger still. “Like Sam Adams?” he whispered.

  Abigail nodded, since this was technically true. John and Sam shared a great-grandfather, who had doubtless spent the past decade rolling over in his grave at the thought of Sam’s politics. “We need to speak to Mr. Miller or Mr. Brown,” she said.

  “That’s just it, m’am—mister,” said the boy. “I dunno where they be. Come down,” he added belatedly, and gestured down the nearly pitch-black gangway. “There’s a bit of a fire. You’ll be froze up here, stiff as a pig in the shed. I got tea,” he added. “I mean smuggler tea, not
Crown tea. And rum.”

  “What did your friends want with Cottrell?” asked Revere, once the three of them were crowded knee-to-knee in a cabin barely the size of Abigail’s pantry. “What did he get up to in Maine?”

  “He were lookin’ about, sir. Everybody down east said they’d teach him not to fool with Maine men. But he kept cautious. Kept indoors at night and got old Bingham to send a man with him when he went about. Quimby, that owns the public house, said we’s not to harm him, though the boys was all for showin’ them Proprietors here in Boston they can’t pull us about and put us off our land. But it’s hard to put Matt off a plan when he’s got one. Matt took it in his head that if every man the Proprietors send up got his head broke, pretty soon they’d decide not to send any more men, and he says Quimby’s a coward that’s read too many books and newspapers.”

  “And is that what Cottrell said he’d do?” asked Abigail. “Turn you off your land?” Someone had clearly been cheated on the tea—about a soupspoon’s worth of crumbles and dust at the bottom of a decades-old box. The brew it yielded was grayish and utterly flavorless, and judging by the cautious way her companion sipped his rum, the contents of his cup was either just as bad or murderously strong or both.

  “They been sayin’ it at the public house for months,” said the boy Putnam. “How after we fought the Indians and cleared the land, it wasn’t really that Dunbar feller’s to let in the first place, and Mr. Fluckner or Mr. Bowdoin or Mr. Apthorp or one of them others, they’re going to clear us all off.” He pushed back the hair from his eyes for the tenth time: a thin boy, the skin of his face reddened and darkened from a short lifetime at sea, his fingers—where they showed beyond roughly knitted mitts—calloused and knotted already with work. Some of John’s strangest tales of his legal journeying involved men and women he’d encountered in that cruel and stony land, Scots and Germans clinging to unyielding acres, fighting Indians or trading with them until many of them were very like the savages themselves, barely knowing God’s name and with only the sketchiest notion of His Commandments. The hard work broke men without giving them enough to feed their families; the sea from which they took the bulk of their living was a cold and greedy creditor who demanded from every family a son or a husband or a brother every few years.

  It isn’t just about tea, Abigail thought, and it isn’t just about taxes. Looking into the boy’s eyes in the near-dark of the little cabin, she saw again Mrs. Fluckner’s smiling lace-decked portrait on the wall and the liveried footman bringing in a tray of cakes for Mrs. Sandhayes to slip to the lapdog. And suddenly, she understood Sam. It’s about the fact that men who’re friends with the King can do this to men who’re not friends with the King.

  “So what did Mr. Brown plan to do?” she asked, and set her teacup aside.

  “Only beat the shite out’n him—Only hammer him good,” the boy corrected himself, when Revere kicked him hard on the ankle. “He was for goin’ on the Hetty himself if Hev wouldn’t take him down in the Magpie . . . Hev Miller,” he provided, when Abigail looked puzzled. “That owns the Magpie. He’s my cousin and Matt’s, too, and he only agreed because Matt loses his temper like he does and he thought he’d better be along to keep an eye on him. Only somethin’s gone wrong, and I’m feared they come to harm, and I’ve been here waiting for ’em six days now, and if they’ve killed him, the magistrates’ll come for me, too. But I don’t like to ask, in case there’s somebody askin’ about for me. I’m scared even to steal food. I can’t just leave ’em, but I can’t let myself be took. I’ve got my ma to look after and my sisters, and I don’t know what to do.”

  He looked from one to the other of them, pleading for guidance. Abigail had guessed his age at fourteen or fifteen, but now she wondered if he were younger than that. Or did he only seem so, because she had grown used to the sharp town prentices of Boston and had forgotten how much at sea these backwoods boys were, when they came to one of the biggest cities in all of America?

  “Would you tell Mr. Adams how I’m fixed, m’am?” asked the boy timidly. “Mr. Quimby—that owns the Blue Ox in Boothbay—he’ll read us from what Mr. Sam Adams writes, about Freedom and the King and no taxes, and nobody to throw us off our land. He says, Sam Adams is a friend to us, though he’s never seen us.” His smile, suddenly shy, was like a ray of sunlight; a flash of hope in a life unremittingly bleak. “He says he’s a friend to all those that don’t hold by bein’ pushed about by the King’s rich friends. Would Mr. Adams stand a friend to me?”

  Abigail’s glance crossed Revere’s in the murky darkness of the cabin. “To be sure he will,” she said. Sam, I shall strangle you myself if this boy comes to harm. “If nothing else, I’ll send someone over with something for you to eat—what have you been eating all this time?” And she clucked her tongue sharply at the boy’s mumbled recital of barter for the remnants of the cargo. “But you must tell us the truth. Did Mr. Brown and Mr. Miller wait for Cottrell when he came ashore?”

  “Oh, yes, m’am. We all three was on Hancock’s Wharf when the Hetty put in, and saw him come off, in that fine gray coat with all the capes to it that he wore and a French cocked hat like Mr. Bingham wears. Hev says, You stand to and be ready to take the Magpie out the second we come on board, and I mean the second. Then Matt tells me to cut along back here, and cut I did. I seen him and Hev follow Mr. Cottrell off round the corner and up the street that leads away from the wharf—Lord, there was so many people about, and carts and things, they didn’t even need to take care not to be seen or anythin’! And that’s the last I saw them.”

  “How were they dressed?” asked Revere, and young Putnam’s brow furrowed.

  “I dunno. Just regular clothes.”

  “Boots or shoes?”

  “Moccasins,” said the boy, astonished that his questioner hadn’t known that.

  “Is Hev’s coat brown or blue?”

  “Green,” said the boy. “Matt’s used to be blue but it’s mostly all faded out sort of gray.” Then, as if it finally dawned on him that neither Revere nor Abigail would have the slightest idea what his friends looked like, he added, “Matt’s got a cocked hat, Hev’s has got a brim on it like a preacher, except he’s got a couple bear claws and some feathers hangin’ off it, ’cause he’ll go sometimes into the woods and trade with the Abenakis. His mother just hates it when he does that. Hev’s tall and thin, Matt’s about your height, sir, or maybe shorter, dark like you, and built like you but fatter. Matt brought his rifle and a pistol,” added the boy, “but Hev took ’em away from him. He left the rifle here”—the boy nodded at it, lying across two pegs driven into the wall—“but he took the pistol with ’em. And Matt had a club.”

  Softly, Abigail said, “Did he, indeed?”

  “Is Mr. Cottrell killed, m’am?” asked the boy. “Would you know how to find that out?”

  “I’m afraid he is dead,” replied Revere quietly. “He was killed—apparently beaten to death—sometime Saturday night.”

  If Abigail had Jesuitically neglected to mention which Mr. Adams she was married to, her companion, she noticed, had likewise been less than ingenuous in answering the question of whether they were magistrates or not. In fact, Paul Revere was active in the politics of his ward, and had served as clerk of the North Square Market on a number of occasions, and knew most of the selectmen of the town. “Something the boy didn’t need to know just now,” he remarked, as he steadied Abigail in her unwieldy iron pattens up the slippery planks of the wharf once more. “I’ll call on the Chief Constable in the morning and see if my suspicion is correct about where our two friends have been this past week.”

  “I think jail’s the only place they could be, don’t you?” Abigail glanced back at the feeble glimmer of the Magpie’s porthole in the frozen stillness of the new-fallen dark. Even in the harbor, sitting in the little sloop’s damp cabin had left her aching and slightly sick. “If they were looking to flee the town, they hadn’t far to run to get on a ship. Going inland across the Neck would on
ly get them to Cambridge, where it doesn’t sound as if they had friends. They could take the ferry to Charles Town or Winissimet, but why? Thank you,” she added, when they turned along Ship Street, toward her home and the much-belated supper that poor Pattie would have been obliged to prepare. “I beg you extend my apologies to Rachel for taking you away like this—”

  Revere waved a hand good-naturedly and then grabbed for his hat again. “Lord, Thursday is Rachel’s night to have her sisters over,” he said. “They’ll be clustered around the fire, stitching and talking like a tree-full of finches in the spring.” He grinned. “You’ve only made me a trifle late for my pint at the Salutation—” He named one of the North End’s most notoriously Whig taverns. “And I know for a fact that that’s never killed a man, because Rachel’s told me so a thousand times. I’ll send you a note in the morning, to let you know if anything turns up at the jail.”

  But the note that arrived the next morning, as Abigail was scalding the churn and the dasher preparatory to starting (Heavens be praised!) the first butter of the year, was borne, not by Paul Revere, Junior, but by the young black footman who had served her tea and cakes at the Fluckners’. He emerged from the passway from the street, grinned with relief as he recognized her, and hurried up to her, shivering a little and wrapped to his cheekbones in scarves and a coat. “Mrs. Adams, m’am.” He held out a note. “This from Miss Fluckner. She say it’s important.”

  “Come inside.” She left the bucket standing on the icy bricks, deposited the butter-making equipment in the shed as they passed its door, and took a silver bit out of the box on the sideboard to pay the youth. Though she heartily disapproved of tipping the servants of rich people who probably ate better than did her own children, Abigail knew also that the small pleasures of freedom would be few for a slave. “Does she need a reply?” she asked as she broke the seal, and the young man, who was holding out mittened hands gratefully to the fire, shook his head.