A Marked Man

insisted that exercise will eventually strengthen my limbs—and indeed, I get about much more handily than I did! So I welcome every step. Did you convince the authorities to let you visit Mr. Knox?”

“How is he?” demanded Lucy. “Did you give him my message? He isn’t—they didn’t”—her face suddenly changed as she fought a shiver of dread from her voice—“they didn’t put him in irons or anything, did they?”

“They did not,” said Abigail briskly. “Nor is he in a common cell with the camp drunkards and troublemakers, but in a little room—a very little room, rather dank and cold, but he has blankets and his greatcoat—by himself. I took him food and a book—”

“Oh, thank you! Bless you!”

“—and slipped your note between its pages, and I shall see Mr. Thaxter goes across tomorrow with more. But,” she added, cutting short the girl’s next rapturous exclamations, “matters are worse than we knew. Did Mr. Knox lend you a scarf of his recently? Red and yellow—”

“The one I knit for him.” Lucy nodded, black curls bouncing in the frame of her scarlet hood. “Saturday a week ago, when I sneaked away and got poor Margaret into such trouble with Papa . . .” She threw an apologetic glance at her chaperone. “We met at the burying-ground, and I’d slipped out so quickly I forgot to bring a scarf of my own, and he lent me his, because I was nearly freezing. Does he want it back? I think it’s in my drawer, or maybe I left it in the pocket of the cloak I had on that day—”

“He has it,” said Abigail grimly. “Or, rather, the Provost Marshal has it. A Mr. Wingate made a special journey out to Castle Island with it on Sunday afternoon, with the information that he saw Harry emerge from Governor’s Alley at three o’clock Sunday morning—your father having sent him back to collect a forgotten wallet from the Governor’s after the ball—”

“The liar!” Lucy stopped in her tracks, mouth momentarily ajar with shock. “Oh, the blackguard!” She made a move as if she were about to run all the way to her father’s countinghouse, cloak flying, and throw herself at him in rage, then whirled back to face her companions with her face twisted with disillusion, betrayal, and dread. “Oh, how could he!”

“Dearest—” Mrs. Sandhayes laid a hand on her young charge’s shoulder. “Now, you know he must have done so at your father’s behest—”

“Well, of course he did! Because he’s a cheat, that’s why . . . About five years ago he borrowed a little money out of my father’s strongbox without telling him about it—” She pursed her lips, pulling herself back from her rage, and her blue eyes filled with sudden tears. “I shouldn’t speak badly of him, because it was when his wife had their last child, and both she and the baby were so sick . . . But Papa caught him putting the money back, you see. So if he were to dismiss him, you know it would be without a character—”

“La, child, your Papa wouldn’t do such a thing!”

“He would.” Lucy sighed, and wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist, like a child. “Just as he’d think to send Harry’s scarf over to the Provost Marshal, with that ridiculous story about a wallet, only to get Harry into trouble.”

“And so we must get him out of trouble,” said Abigail stoutly. “Come, shall we walk? And you must tell me all about Saturday night, in as much detail as you can recall. There must have been a great deal of comment when he did not appear at a ball to announce his own engagement.”

“My dear Mrs. Adams, like hurling a grenado into a dovecot!”

“Well, it was supposed to be announced at dinner,” said Lucy. “And of course Papa had arranged to have me seated next to Sir Jonathan, or where Sir Jonathan would have been sitting had he been there. I caught Governor Hutchinson first thing, as he received us in the hall, and begged him for a word, and told him that whatever Papa had said, I would not marry the man, and he arranged to have my place changed at the table. That set everyone talking, and Papa looked ready to have an apoplexy, but at least I didn’t have to sit next to his empty chair. And of course, no one would say things in front of me—”

“They did before me,” reported Mrs. Sandhayes, limping gamely along the frozen gravel of the walk on Lucy’s other side. “La, the rumors that flew about the cardroom! That Sir Jonathan had heard you’d jilted him and had walked out of the Governor’s house—that you’d told His Excellency some terrible tale about that charming Sir Jonathan and had obliged the Governor to eject him—that Sir Jonathan had discovered that your Papa was about to cheat him over the Maine lands, which really belonged to Mr. Gardiner—”

“They do not!” Lucy protested.

“That’s not what Felicity Gardiner says.”

“Felicity Gardiner’s a—Well,” said Lucy. “Anyway, His Excellency kept sending servants to ask in the stables, had Sir Jonathan arrived yet? He even sent a footman down to the wharf to see if Mr. Bingham’s boat had come in from Maine as it was supposed to, and he brought word back that yes, Sir Jonathan had debarked that morning and gone off no one knew where, without sending word or anything. That set the cat among the pigeons! And everyone kept staring at me and whispering behind their fans—”

“They weren’t whispering about you at that point, my dear.” Mrs. Sandhayes raised her kohl black eyebrows. “I suppose you’re aware by this time, Mrs. Adams, that Sir Jonathan’s appetites would have shamed a rabbit in the brambles. I don’t doubt—and neither did anyone at the Governor’s that night, I assure you—that he had a sweetheart somewhere in town, for whom he’d been pining all those days in Maine. Not that he wasn’t perfectly capable of trying to get up an intrigue or two in the Penobscot or the Kennebec—lud, what names you Americans think up! But then I understand the women of the province tend to be of the granitey, Gog and Magog variety—”

“But no one you know of?”

Margaret Sandhayes considered the matter, forehead puckering in a manner that threatened the thick pink and white maquillage that habitually plastered her rather horsey face, then shook her head. The whaleboned stays in the hood of her cloak creaked alarmingly—it was of the variety boned out to accommodate a much-curled and decorated coiffure, and the sharp gusts of wind that slashed across Boston from the bay gave Abigail the impression every minute that the whole structure was going to be whipped away like a kite, carrying the gawky chaperone with it.

“Would Mr. Fenton know?” asked Lucy. “Sir Jonathan’s man. He came down with la grippe the night before Sir Jonathan left for Maine. He was going to follow when he got better, but I think he’s still at the Governor’s.”

“La, child, one doesn’t go about questioning a man’s servants!”

“Not even to save an innocent man’s life?”

“It is shockingly bad ton, child, and your reputation would never recover if it got about! As well have it said that you pay peoples’ maids for copies of their letters!”

“Margaret—” Lucy looked almost as if she wanted to shake the older woman. “This is Harry’s life we’re talking about!”

“Oh, pooh.” Mrs. Sandhayes looked aside uneasily. “I daresay they won’t hang him on a clerk’s tittle-tattle —”

“They will,” said Abigail quietly. “Mr. Knox has been—er—outspoken in his objection to some of the Crown’s policies regarding the colonies, and yes, he stands in grave and immediate danger of being hanged. Whatever Mr. Fenton might be able to tell us truly could save Mr. Knox’s life.”

Mrs. Sandhayes made a face expressive of her opinion as to how much any servant could be useful for anything besides fetching her another tea-cake, but Lucy exclaimed, “Mr. Barnaby will know. Our butler, you remember, Mrs. Adams. His sister’s husband is Governor Hutchinson’s steward—Mr. Buttrick. Do you mind walking back with us to ask? It isn’t far.”

They had come opposite the writing-school by this time, so it was, in fact, something more than a half mile to the handsome house on Milk Street that Thomas Fluckner had purchased with his wife’s money, many years ago. This part of Boston lay west of the original town that huddled around the waterfront, and the streets were far less crowded, with open spaces of fields and gardens lying behind the houses of timber and brick. As they passed along Marlborough Street, Abigail slowed her steps before the Governor’s house itself and stood for a moment considering the mansion through the bare branches of the oak trees on its snow-covered lawn. On the cupola, the copper Indian weather vane swung in the cutting wind, and had the day not been so cold—and Mrs. Sandhayes lagging farther and