A Marked Man

whether this would distract his mind from the thought of the twenty minutes or so that it took a man to strangle, once he had been hoisted on the gallows.

She looked up at Coldstone’s face, cold as a marble angel’s. The servant of the King, whose job was defined by the crimson uniform he wore: first serve the King, then seek Justice . . .

Provided, as he had said, one could define the word.

What did he hear, or think about, as he lay at night in this dank brick fortress set in the midst of the ocean, waiting for word to come from his master about how to punish rebel colonists for defying the King’s commands?

At length he said, “If you would be so kind, m’am—What you can discover is who else might have seen Sir Jonathan after his debarking from the Hetty on Saturday morning, and who in Boston might also have wished to do him harm. Mr. Knox’s defense is based upon the proof of a negative and I cannot do anything about that, and for that I am sorry. However much I am dissatisfied with the case against Mr. Knox, Colonel Leslie finds little amiss in it. My superior officer, Major Salisbury, has instructed me to draw up an accusation. When the Incitatus arrives here from Jamaica next week, unless some new evidence is found, Mr. Knox will be taken to Halifax and tried before an Admiralty Court for conspiracy and treason.”

Six

John said, “That’s ridiculous!” and slammed his hand down on the top of his desk, making the standish jump. “To convict a man on the perjured evidence of a clerk frightened for his position and the word of rich man who’ll do anything to keep his daughter from wedding a poor one—”

“I suspect Lieutenant Coldstone would remark that you’re making a bit free with the burden of proof as to Mr. Fluckner’s motives—”

“Damn the burden of proof!” John pulled off his wig and hurled it against the opposite wall of his study. “You know, and I know—”

“And the Provost Marshall does not know.”

“Does not wish to know, you mean!” Red-faced with wrath, John looked around him, as if seeking something else small enough to fling that wouldn’t leave the books in the shelf splattered with ink or sand. Abigail fished in her pocket and handed him her pocket memorandum-book. He flung it with a satisfying smack. “Damn the man!”

In the hallway behind her, Abigail heard the faint creak of the kitchen’s door-hinge: Johnny, Nabby, and Charley pressing close to hear their father in his wrath. Young Mr. Thaxter, standing by his own small desk in the corner of the study, looked far less sanguine, despite nearly two years of dealing with his employer’s rages.

“Lieutenant Coldstone says he will try to wangle the appointment as Harry’s defender himself, but he may not succeed.” She crossed the little study, retrieved John’s wig and the faded little Morocco-leather notebook, and placed both on the corner of the high desk at John’s elbow. “If the Tribunal appoints an officer from the garrison at Halifax, he will almost certainly share the prevalent opinion that any Bostonian will lie about the whereabouts of any other Bostonian—”

John swept the wig up and hurled it again, followed at once by the memorandum-book.

“—so whatever evidence we manage to locate about the actual killer had best be of a solid rather than a verbal nature.” Early in their married life John had sometimes been moved to hurl teacups, but Abigail’s practice of gluing them back together and serving him his tea in them had gradually broken him of this practice: in any case the boycott against tea had made the entire point moot.

“Is there any chance you might put off your journey to Haverhill? Even a day—”

John hesitated, looking at the notes on his desk with an uncertainty that told her this wasn’t the first time he’d considered doing exactly that. “I had rather not, Portia,” he said after a time. “The husband of my client there has cast her and her children out of his house, claiming her to be a whore, and the children not his own; if her suit against him fails, she will have nothing to live by. She seems to me an honest woman, and there are rumors that ’tis the husband who wishes to put her away and marry a neighbor lately widowed: an ugly story. If the weather holds cold like this, I should be home on Monday.”

“That will do.” Abigail laid her palm to his cheek. “Any woman bringing suit about a man’s misdeeds before a jury of men needs all the help she can get. Mr. Thaxter and I will do what we can. Still, if on your way north you hear word of”—she unfolded Coldstone’s description of Cottrell—“A fair, well-looking gentleman, of small stature, with a long nose and a cleft to his chin. Blue eyes and a fair pigeon-wing tie-wig; a stone-gray greatcoat of four capes, top boots, and a gray- or snuff-colored coat and breeches beneath. Yellow waistcoat, silver basket-weave buttons, gold signet ring on his left little finger. Possibly last seen in pursuit of a woman,” she added drily, and went to retrieve notebook and wig once again.

“I shall make a note of it.” John fetched back his wig, brushed it off, and set it on the corner of the desk again. It was the same color as his close-cropped hair, and dressed simply, yet when he wore it—to Meeting or to visit friends and family—Abigail always felt him to be slightly in disguise. A lawyer, a writer, an arguer of politics and the rights of Englishmen . . . but not the husband and father, lover and friend she had loved since the age of fifteen.

“And I,” said Abigail, preceding him down the hall to the kitchen where Pattie was checking the contents of the Dutch-oven dinner, “shall see what Miss Fluckner and Mrs. Sandhayes can tell me about who was at the Governor’s ball who might have made the occasion to slip out and intercept Sir Jonathan upon his arrival . . . provided Miss Fluckner can steal away from her father’s house tomorrow.” She put on a clean apron, opened the door of the oven beside the hearth, and held her hand just inside for a count of two or three; the fire she’d begun that morning before leaving for Castle Island had settled to darkly throbbing coals, and the oven felt right for bread. “If nothing else,” she went on, closing it and turning to the warm corner of the hearth where the covered loaves were rising, “I may learn more about the woman Bathsheba.”

“Who? Oh, the young Negress who disappeared.” John perched on a corner of the big worktable. “You think she knew something of it?”

“I haven’t the smallest idea.” Abigail fetched the shovel, opened the oven again, and moving swiftly, transferred the coals back to the hearth. “It could be happenstance that she walked out of her master’s house— leaving behind her two children too young to do without a mother’s care—two days after the departure of a man who made attempts on her virtue . . . a man who was beaten to death upon his return to town.” She caught up the whisk, swept the ashes from the bricks. “But I should like to learn more of the matter if I can.”

“I daresay.” She turned to get the loaves from the table, found John just behind her, the risen, rounded dough ready on the peel in his hands. She smiled at him, stepped back—for a lawyer and a scholar, John had a wide streak of farmer in him . . . and a little element of housewife, too. He shuffled the loaves deftly off the peel and into the oven, where they would bake slowly for the remainder of the evening, filling the kitchen with an incomparable scent.

“But ask Miss Fluckner as well where her suitor went in Maine and whatever she can recall of her father’s dealings with the tenants on the land. I’ve heard it said that the chief reason Fluckner needs clear title is so that he can put the tenants off the land—men who’ve been farming there for two generations—and bring in German settlers who’ll pay more for the privilege of freezing while being robbed.” With a neat gesture, he dropped the peel back into its place on its pegs, turned back to her with a grave wariness in his eyes. “My experience has always been that of all the things a man will kill for, land is ever close to the top of the list.”

Abigail had expected Lucy Fluckner to be accompanied only by Philomela on her walk to the Common the following morning. But when she caught sight of the girl’s bright red walking-cloak among the elms of the Mall that bounded the Common’s eastern side, she was surprised to make out the tall, swaying form of Mrs. Sandhayes at Lucy’s side. “My dear Mrs. Adams, I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to assist at a romance for a thousand pounds!” replied that lady, smiling, when Abigail tactfully inquired whether the icy wind was not too bitter for her. And, reading Abigail’s true concern, which had little to do with the weather, she added, “My physicians