A Marked Man

dozen within that distance of the Lynd Street Meeting-House, and at least two I know of have the remains of orchards or gardens attached. For another, it may take us some time to locate Cottrell’s mysterious visitor—the last man to see him alive. The last thing we need is to have to send to Maine for them—and get them sobered up and back down here to testify in court that it was indeed he whom they saw enter the house.”

Always provided they haven’t done something else in the meantime . . .

“What about the boy Putnam?” asked Abigail, surrendering to the inevitable. “You can’t oblige that poor child to stay living on the water like that—”

“Heavens, no! We’ll have to tell him some tale that will get him out of town altogether—Lynn or Salem should do. One of our boys there will see to him, so we can send for him quickly if need arises.”

“I suppose now our only problem will be,” she sighed, and maneuvered her arm beneath her cloak so that she might scratch without being obvious about it, “whether when we find Cottrell’s visitor, the Provost Marshall will believe our witnesses about a mysterious visitor to an unknown house . . . or whether he’ll find a more complicated explanation too much bother to pursue.”

Eleven

The jail deliverance took place the following night.

In the cozy pitch-black box of her curtained bed, Abigail heard dimly the crack of shots from Queen Street and the clatter of hooves on the cobblestones. Then, more muffled, the trample of fleeing feet. Two minutes for the Watch? Five? Ten . . . ?

She had almost slipped into sleep again when the constabulary finally arrived, muffled voices shouting from the door of the jailhouse: Hoyle’s and those of his wife, mother, and the crippled sister who shared bleak quarters on an upper floor of the jail itself. The elder Mrs. Hoyle especially had a voice that could shatter a cannonball, and even through the thick walls of her house and the curtains of her bed, Abigail could make out a word or two: rogues, ruffians, pistols, outrage . . .

And let’s hope Sam and his friends didn’t deliver the entire population of the jail while they were about it, to pick pockets and steal washing off the line . . .

Which was what had happened, she recalled, sliding back toward sleep, when her brother William’s friends broke him out of the jail the year before last. Like Hev Miller and Matthias Brown, William had sworn on his honor —an item Abigail regretfully reflected was as fictitious as the grave of Matthias Brown’s mother—that he’d had nothing to do with the fraudulent removal of three horses and an anvil from a local blacksmith’s shop, for which he’d been scheduled to answer to the local magistrates on the morrow of his arrest. Like the two Mainers, he had declined to give his name to the constables who’d taken him up, though being brighter than Miller and Brown—a distinction he shared with seven-eighths of the population of Boston and the kitchen cat—he’d cheerfully provided an invented one. “I wouldn’t have cared, for myself,” he’d told their parents—in her dream Abigail could see him, filthy and beaming on the family doorstep, fair hair falling into bright brown eyes. “I knew my innocence would be my shield. But I could not bear that your names would be spoken in open court.”

And Mother, Abigail reflected—still tasting the bitterness that flavored her resignation—Mother believed his tale of mistaken identities and lying witnesses, as she will always believe . . .

Annoyed as she’d been with her brother, she’d been sufficiently curious about how one went about breaking out of the Boston town jail to put aside her rancor for her parents’ sake and ask him, and had learned that jail deliverance was, in fact, laughably easy. “Oh, they’ll search a visitor for something like a pistol or a cutlass,” William grinned. “But anyone can slip you a chisel or a file, and the bars aren’t set into the bricks, only into the wood of the framing. People come in and out of the place all day, selling food and wood and visiting the prisoners. There’s always someone there who can arrange for things.”

No wonder Colonel Leslie had placed an embargo on clean shirts for Harry.

“You are incorrigible,” she said, and hugged him, smelling even in her dreams the stink of his unwashed clothing, of tobacco and ale. Though she knew he was wrong, she could not help her gladness that he’d been spared the lash and the stocks.

In William’s case, she’d gathered that his friends had broken open the jail-yard gate, and used a horse and a wagon-chain to pull out one of the barred windows . . . an indiscriminate method that had resulted in most of her current neighbors (she and John had been living in Braintree at the time) being subjected to a brief rash of petty thefts and burglaries by the other occupants of the jail. The Sons of Liberty, she gathered when Revere appeared at her side as she shopped in the market Monday morning, had exercised greater finesse.

“I saw the Hoyles in Meeting yesterday, so I assume those shots I heard Saturday night didn’t hit anyone,” she remarked, as she selected fat, shining mackerel from the baskets set along the Town Dock. This time of the year, when it would be months before anything fresh appeared in any garden in Massachusetts, was in some ways one of the most discouraging in the markets, but at least one could get fresh fish to eat with one’s corn-mush and potatoes.

“Good Lord, no!” Revere put on an expression of shock. “That was Mrs. Hoyle, and without her spectacles she can’t hit the side of a barn. No, two of Sam’s smugglers broke into Hoyle’s rooms and took the keys. We—they”—he corrected himself quickly—“shoved a bench in front of the door and ran downstairs to get our birds out, and Hoyle himself only got off a couple of shots at us— them—as they were on their way out down the street. At least, so I’ve been told.”

“Hmph.” Abigail eyed him up and down cynically. She agreed wholeheartedly with John that the colonies could not win their rights before King and Parliament if those rights were championed by a law-breaking mob of smugglers and hooligans. Most members of Parliament would have looked askance even at this brilliant and quick- minded artisan and be damned to the fact that he made the most beautiful silver pieces in the colony. One doesn’t want one’s daughter marrying a bookseller, Margaret Sandhayes had said, as if the matter were self-evident.

Revere himself seemed to see no problem in giving political power to illiterates whose vote—and fists—could be bought for a quart of rum and a friendly handshake.

Like her mother—and herself—with the ne’er-do-well William, Abigail found herself accepting the situation, because without the help of Sam’s tame ruffians, Harry Knox would undoubtedly hang. But her heart told her that trouble would one day come of their violence, as it would come—was coming—from the mob’s violent defiance of the King’s orders concerning tea.

“And where are our friends staying now that they’ve ceased to be Mr. Hoyle’s guests?”

“The storeroom at Christ’s Church,” replied Revere cheerfully. “Young Rob Newman’s the sexton there, and his brother looks after the organ. Between them they’re able to keep our friends fed and happy and out of everyone’s way for the time being. With baths and different clothes, and a wig or maybe an eyepatch, they should be quite well able to meet us at the foot of Beacon Hill in an hour and show us where it is that Sir Jonathan Cottrell went—on a rented horse though the distance could be walked in a quarter hour—instead of returning to his host’s house and the party given in his honor on the day that he died.”

With only an hour before the rendezvous, Abigail scarcely had time to change Tommy’s clout, measure out potatoes, cabbage, and onions for dinner, and order Pattie not to do her mistress’s work as well as her own while her mistress went and played sleuth-hound with the Sons of Liberty: “’ Tis my own punishment if I’m to be making beds after dinner instead of calling on my friends,” she told her servant firmly. “I’ll not have you loading yourself with an extra burden because of my sloth.”

“No, m’am.” But as Abigail set out with Revere again—he had obligingly cleaned the fish while she was dealing with Tommy and chopped a hunk of the frozen pork in the pantry to thaw for tomorrow—she had the suspicion that she’d come home to find her chores done for her, something against which her Puritan soul revolted. Pattie was very fond—and a little in awe—of both Harry Knox and Paul Revere, and she took a vicarious delight in