A Marked Man

had indeed handed over the cost of a good horse to a slave-girl . . . and possibly, why.

Two notes lay on the sideboard when Abigail came into her own kitchen again, to find Pattie telling Charley and Tommy the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff while she chopped up yesterday’s chicken into a stew for today’s dinner . . . a task which Abigail knew she herself should have been doing. Yesterday’s laundry, like a maze of whitewashed planks, swung awkwardly on the lines that crisscrossed the yard, and a glance into the shed told her that Pattie had not yet had the time to churn the small amount of cream into butter.

Good. There were still three crocks of last fall’s butter in the cellar—tired as everyone was of the salt taste of it. Even this modest contribution from that morning should suffice for a blancmange.

She turned her attention to the notes. The one from Lieutenant Coldstone contained a neatly drafted plan of the mews behind the Governor’s house, the alley, and the mews gate, with the location of Sir Jonathan’s body, of the lanterns on the gate, and of the farthest range (ascertained by experiment by the Governor’s head-coachman Mr. Sellon) at which a hundred-pound sack of corn could be distinguished on the ground once full dark had fallen. There was also a list of the names of all footmen, coachmen, and stable hands present in the yard that night.

The other message was from Paul Revere.

Matthias Brown, The Heavens Rejoice Miller taken up for brawling at The Dressed Ship 8 o’clock Saturday night. Will be there after dinner, to take you to see them at the gaol.

Ten

The city jail of Boston stood on Queen Street, not a hundred feet from Abigail’s front door. Because Hoyle—the dour and rum-breathing jail keeper—knew John of old, there was only cursory bargaining for the use of a penitential cubicle that had been built to one side of the grim brick structure, rather than obliging them to conduct the meeting through the judas of the cell door. Because John knew Hoyle of old, Abigail knew enough to bring her own firewood to warm the interview chamber.

“Two Maine men, eh?” grumbled the jail keeper. “Fat one and tall one. Sometimes the one calls himself Smith, sometimes Jones. Magistrate’ll sort ’em out.”

“When will they be up?” Revere asked over his shoulder asas he clacked flint to steel over the kindling in the disused and spidery fireplace. “I’m surprised they’re still here.” He paused, used a billet of the kindling to shovel aside what looked like several weeks’ accumulation of ashes, and rearranged the sticks to try again.

“Won’t give names like honest men.” John always said Hoyle gave him the impression of charging for his own conversation by the word. “Monday, he’ll sort ’em out.”

Abigail and Revere traded a glance as the jailer retreated in a clanking of long iron keys. Though the jail was barely five years old, already this room was acquiring the old jail’s lingering stink: of mold, of dirt, of old vomit and filthy garments. Abigail was only grateful to be in a position to pay for the use of this room. Both John—who had interviewed clients there—and Abigail’s younger brother William—who had fetched up in the place himself upon occasion—had described to her the single long chamber, freezing as an icehouse in this season and reeking like a cesspit in the summer. Hell on earth, one journalist had described it when he’d had the misfortune to learn that fact firsthand.

She settled herself on one of the benches that flanked the little hearth, pulled her cloak closer around her slender shoulders, and watched as Revere coaxed the fire into being. Abigail prided herself on her judgment of cooking-fire and coals, but as a silversmith, Paul Revere was an artist with flame. With air-draft, too, she reflected, coughing, and retreated as her companion adjusted damper and flue. Though it was far colder near the window, it was out of the smoke—through the wavery and unwashed glass she had an impression of a yard blotted with dirty snow, of the brick jail building itself and a window shuttered tight.

Because the opening was unglazed, behind those shutters?

What had “Smith” and “Jones” used to pay Hoyle for food, she wondered. The only person they knew in town—poor little Eli Putnam back on the Magpie—didn’t even know they were there. Her brother had told her, and John had confirmed it, that Hoyle and his wife routinely sold half the foodstuffs the city allotted them for the prisoners. A man who had no family to bring him extra rations—as she had tried to do for Harry—went hungry indeed.

Under two layers of stockings, her toes were growing numb.

Fetters clanked on the bricks of the hall.

“Whoever they be, they got the wrong folk,” growled a deep voice. “We got nobody here in this stink-pit town.”

“Well, they think they know you,” retorted Hoyle’s voice. “Smith.”

“I’m Smith,” corrected another, lighter voice. “He’s Jones.”

They entered the room, one tall and one short, one fairish—his hair the color of the lowest grade of molasses sugar—the other swart. Yet something in their eyes and the shape of their unshaven chins whispered of cousinry. Abigail remarked mildly, “Well, the heavens rejoice,” at which the tall so-called Smith started like a spooked deer. Smiling, she continued, “Mr. Smith—Mr. Jones—permit me to introduce Mr. Eli Putnam, master of the sloop Magpie,” and gestured to Paul Revere. “And I am Mrs. Adams.”

The two men stared at her with widened eyes. “Jones,” the shorter, darker man in the much-fouled and faded once-blue coat, whispered reverently, “That wouldn’t be—Sam Adams?” and Abigail’s smile widened.

“Let’s just say Mrs. Adams for now.” She glanced significantly toward the door, through which Hoyle had disappeared. “And as my mother always says, First things first.” And she unpacked the basket she had brought, and set out two loaves of bread, half a crock of butter, a chunk of cheese the size of her two fists, and two bottles of cider. The men fell on these like starving dogs, without a wasted word.

“M’am,” said “Smith,” after an appropriate time, “Mrs. Adams, we owe you whatever you care to name for that.”

“I’m pleased you feel that way, Mr. Miller,” responded Abigail. “Because we really do need to know what happened last Saturday night.”

“It wasn’t us,” blurted Matt Brown. “I swear on my mother’s grave it wasn’t us!”

“Your ma’s not dead,” pointed out Miller. “Ow!” he added as Brown punched him in the arm.

“What wasn’t you, Mr. Brown?”

The two men traded a glance. Miller lowered his voice, leaned toward her, though he kept a polite distance owing to the reek—and the infested condition—of his clothing: a consideration Abigail found surprisingly fastidious, after seeing him eat. “In the jail they’re saying how the King’s man was killed that night,” he said softly. “It wasn’t us. We never saw him after he went into that house beyond the Common, and that’s God’s truth, strike us both dead for our sins.”

“What house?”

Brown and Miller traded a glance.

“We know you followed Sir Jonathan Cottrell back from Maine,” said Abigail.

“We wasn’t going to hurt him,” said Brown earnestly. “Just beat the innards out of him, to show them psalm-singing stinkard Proprietors they can’t mess with us in Maine.”

Abigail said, “I see.”

“Bingham’s man always put the Hetty in at Hancock’s Wharf,” explained Miller, “so we knew where to wait for him when we came in, since the Hetty’s the slowest thing on the water between Philadelphia and the Bay of Fundy. We loafed around the wharf for maybe two hours, ’fore they arrived. Cottrell got off the boat and left his luggage, and went up the hill to rent a horse from a feller at a livery —”

“A little bay Narragansett,” said Revere. “White star, white stockings on the near fore and off hind—”

“That’s the one!” said Brown, impressed. The single bar of his black eyebrow quirked down in the middle, over the short, ugly curve of his nose. “You wan’t there, was you?”