A Marked Man

morning stowing boxes of seditious pamphlets and fragments of Harry’s printing press behind the trunks in the attic. “Mr. Knox—”

“Harry.”

“Harry. Don’t worry.” She extended her hands, took his in hers. Though he was only six or seven years her junior, she felt toward him a sudden protectiveness, as if he were a son or a nephew. “We’ll see justice is done.”

“For justice to be done,” replied Coldstone drily, “it must first be defined, m’am.”

“And you think officers in service to the Crown are capable of that?” She turned back to the young bookseller. “One more question. You say Cottrell would ill-use the servants in Mr. Fluckner’s house. Did he ever attempt liberties with a woman named Bathsheba? A young woman, light-skinned, with two children—”

Harry made a face. “Lord, poor Sheba! At least Philomela could stick close to Lucy. The man could scarcely steal kisses from the maid with her mistress looking on. Bathsheba is a sewing maid, m’am, and often by herself— has anything been heard of her?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said Abigail. “I find it odd that she would leave her children behind her—odder still, that she would choose to disappear after Sir Jonathan left for Maine. I’m rather curious to know why.”

Five

I take it,” remarked Abigail, as Lieutenant Coldstone poured out coffee for herself and Thaxter in the cramped cubbyhole of his office, “you think as little as I do of this business of, I happened to find his scarf in the lane?” The office wasn’t appreciably warmer than it had been an hour ago, and neither Lieutenant Stevenson nor Lieutenant Barclay appeared to have refilled the wood-basket before departing, but after Harry’s cell, the dank little chamber seemed a paradise of comfort. Abigail perched on Lieutenant Barclay’s high desk-stool, and set her cup among the account-books he had left behind him.

“Regrettably,” returned Coldstone, “what I think has no bearing on the matter. My apologies that I have no milk to offer you, m’am, and only muscovado sugar. Sugar of any sort is most difficult to obtain.”

“I can recommend you a very good smuggler to obtain as much of it as you’d care to use, straight from the West Indies,” offered Abigail, and tonged a small lump of the sticky brown substance into her cup. “I’ve always considered it a shocking waste of energy, to ship it to England and then trans-ship it back here, only so that the King’s friends can make money off transport fees and import duties.”

“I have, of course, no opinion on the subject,” responded Coldstone politely. “Yet I would be pleased to have your sugar-purveyor’s name.”

“Frederick North, wasn’t it, Thaxter?” Abigail named the Chancellor of the King’s Exchequer who was responsible for the tea-tax and much of the Crown’s fiscal policy toward the colonies. “Something like that. Surely Colonel Leslie can’t believe that a clerk who owes the whole of his living to a wealthy merchant isn’t going to tell whatever lie his master instructs him to? Or is there some other reason that Colonel Leslie would like to send Mr. Knox to Halifax and put a rope around his neck?”

Her glance crossed the young officer’s, and he nodded, not pretending that he didn’t understand what she meant. “Naturally, should Mr. Knox feel moved to turn King’s Evidence against whomever he can think of in Boston who might be connected with the Sons of Liberty—or with John Hancock’s smuggling operation, which in Colonel Leslie’s eyes amounts to the same thing—it would affect the verdict of the Tribunal. Colonel Leslie is not being arbitrary in this matter, m’am. Mr. Knox is a known associate of men believed to be involved with traitors; information concerning traitors is what Sir Jonathan came to the colony to obtain.”

“Why don’t you just arrest my husband, then, or Sam Adams, or Mr. Hancock, and put a pistol to their heads, if you think you’ll get information under threat of death?”

“Because neither your husband, nor Sam Adams, nor John Hancock was so unwise as to shout I will kill you like a dog to a man who subsequently was found dead. Would you like to hear details of Sir Jonathan’s arrival Saturday morning, insofar as we have been able to ascertain them? I fear that the day is turning blustery, and would not wish to detain you longer than is necessary.”

As if on cue, wind snarled in the chimney, and Abigail, glancing swiftly at the chamber’s small window, saw to her dismay that the bars of cloud visible that morning in the eastern sky were changing rapidly to scudding fragments of gray racing in from the east and north. At the same moment the chimney sneezed out a quantity of gritty smoke. Abigail coughed and managed to say, “Yes, thank you, Lieutenant—I apologize for my ill temper. But Mr. Knox is a friend of mine, and I promise you, he would not harm a fly. I presume you’ve obtained Mr. Fluckner’s version of what Sir Jonathan was doing in Maine?”

“Speaking with Mr. Fluckner’s agent in Boothbay, I understand—a Mr. Bingham, who handles the timber shipping for several of the Great Proprietors. Bingham was the owner of a schooner called the Hetty, on which Sir Jonathan took passage from Boothbay Friday night, arriving at Hancock’s Wharf between ten thirty and eleven Saturday morning. When he came ashore, Sir Jonathan repaired immediately to the livery stable of a man named Brainert Howell, in Prince’s Street, and rented a saddle horse —”

“Rented?” Abigail’s eyebrows drew sharply together. “The Governor’s mansion lies less than a mile from Hancock’s Wharf. Had he not free use of his host’s stables?”

“He had indeed. Yet a man of his description was seen walking up Prince’s Street, and it was certainly the name of the man who rented Brainert Howell’s horse—an animal that was found, saddled and bridled, in the open fields of the Marlborough Street ward on Sunday morning, not long after the discovery of Sir Jonathan’s body. Sir Jonathan further arranged with Howell to have his trunk and portmanteau transported from the wharf to the Governor’s house, Sir Jonathan’s manservant not having gone to Maine with him on account of illness.”

“So in fact,” said Abigail, “we have no evidence as to what Sir Jonathan actually did in Maine or who he might have offended or enraged in the ten days preceding his murder. He could have attempted the virtue of every damsel in the Maritimes and run onto the Hetty between a gauntlet of outraged Mainers all shaking their fists at him and crying, I shall kill you like a dog— ”

“ ’ Tis not a conviction I’d like to try to get in court,” mused Thaxter, scribbling away in his memorandum-book.

“Possibly not,” Coldstone agreed. “Yet until you produce an eyewitness of the scene described who has provably no connection with either the Sons of Liberty or any of Boston’s less political smuggling rings, I fear that we are left with the facts as they stand and with no alternative to Mr. Wingate’s story. Mr. Knox’s young brother, I understand, has been in Cambridge this past week, only returning on Sunday—not that his testimony would serve to acquit Mr. Knox, unless they slept in the same room, and even then might not be believed.”

“Surely,” said Thaxter after a pause, “if Cottrell were assaulted and murdered a dozen yards from the Governor’s stables, someone would have heard an outcry? Or seen him lying there? How far from the stable gate was the body discovered?”

“About twenty feet from where Governor’s Alley ends in Rawson’s Lane,” said Coldstone. “Sir Jonathan lay facedown in frozen mud and had clearly been dead for many hours. His flesh was quite cold. Myself, I would have said that he died of the cold rather than of the beating. His extremities were nearly purple with it despite gloves and boots, and the abrasions on his face did not suggest blows hard enough to be fatal. Yet he had clearly been thrashed: a fate often incurred by men who attempt the virtue of other men’s sweethearts.”

“Thrashed, yes,” said Abigail softly. “Murdered—not so often. Even what could be construed as an attempt at rape is more likely to result in a man’s cork being drawn than his life ended—and it seems to me that Miss Fluckner herself took a hand in that.”

Coldstone’s seraph lips twitched in something perilously like a grin. “It’s true that I’ve seldom seen so comprehensive a ‘mouse,’ as the street-urchins call it. Yet a man may set out to thrash another and leave him lying alive in the mud, and his victim may still be dead of cold in the morning.”

“Who found him?” asked Thaxter.