A Marked Man

doing extra work so that Abigail might engage in her investigations. Abigail, who hated housework like the mouth of Hell, felt that there was something profoundly wrong with this arrangement: a yielding to her worser nature against which she had been warned all her inquisitive and disobedient life. There was too much chaos in the world, she reflected, her pattens slithering on the uneven, icy earth of the Common, for citizens to leave their children to come home to no one but the servants while they rushed off and did as they pleased, even if the goal was to save a man wrongly accused of murder . . .

. . . or to learn the fate of another woman who had abandoned her children.

The north side of the Common was empty at this hour of the morning, the frozen ground still patched with last week’s snow. In the distance she could see the town herd-boys moving the cattle along the slope of Fox Hill, near the river. Further out on the slatey waters, a couple of men were crossing the mudflats in a punt. After dinner, despite the steel-colored roof of scudding cloud and the taste of sleet in the air, those muddy spaces would be dotted with boys released from their lessons and shouting madly as they flew their kites in the ice gray sky, or rolled hoops, or ran footraces, or risked their lives skating on ponds whose ice was, at last, beginning to thin.

Perhaps it was the memory of William and his good-for-nothing friends—stealing back horses that one of them had lost at cards to the blacksmith, and the man’s anvil to “teach him a lesson”—but Abigail found herself remembering wistfully the open countryside around Weymouth, where her father had been parson now for forty years. About her and Mary and Betsy, walking those snow-covered lanes arm in arm or running races themselves, all bundled in their quilted petticoats and the bright red cloaks considered suitable for young girls, in the confidence that anyone they might meet would be a neighbor and a friend.

Here in Boston, crammed into this stony little peninsula surrounded by salt marshes, one had to come here to the Common to run, or to play, or to ride at a gallop . . . and not even then, if one was a little girl. She guessed her daughter Nabby missed the countryside—and her cousins in Braintree—as much as Abigail herself did, and as a child, Nabby did not have the social and intellectual compensations of living in town. In town, Abigail was aware that she kept her daughter much more circumscribed, as if she still wore a toddler’s leading-strings on her clothing. There was more that could befall a child—a girl—in town.

And girls always paid a higher price for carelessness or ill-luck than did boys.

The chilly precision of Lieutenant Coldstone’s soft voice came back to her, when he spoke of the man who’d been murdered. A boy who’d been “led astray” by “evil companions” was seldom reduced to such desperation as to seek the razor or the noose. His evil companions would break him out of the local lockup, and he’d show up dirty and beaming on his parents’ doorstep, and even his disapproving sister would take him in her arms.

For a girl, it wasn’t like that. Not only would she be cast out by her friends, but her sisters would find their chances of marriage halved, or worse: If the one girl was loose, who’s to say the rest are honest . . . ? They would be forced to turn their backs on her in sheerest defense of their own futures.

No wonder Hannah Fluckner had leaped upon the chance to enlist her shabby but genteel houseguest as a chaperone for the adventurous Lucy.

They skirted the grim brick Almshouse, the crumbling stone wall of the old burying- ground, and moved through the orchards on the footslope of Beacon Hill into the fields beyond. Here, as Hev Miller had said, streets had been laid out, in what had once all been the common land of a smaller Boston years ago. Now speculators bought up what they hoped would one day become valuable town lots. At the moment it was only these ice-slicked tracks that distinguished much of the land here from the Common itself. Here and there, houses had been built, and occasional gardens enclosed or orchards planted. But these were few and far between, and the place had a forlorn air. Downslope toward the town, a string of dwellings fringed Treamount Street, the wind from the bay raveling smoke from their chimneys like dirty wool. Just beyond where the land leveled toward the frozen slab of the Mill-Pond, the Lynd Street Meeting-House reared its red-brick steeple, and across the street from it, a little group of men stood talking, watching in their direction as they came.

Even at a distance of fifty yards, Abigail picked out the black coat and sturdy form of the young sexton of Christ’s Church, and the burly figure of Matthias Brown. When she and Revere came closer, she recognized Hev Miller despite a respectable-looking gray wig, somewhat more civilized foot-gear, and one of Sam’s hats. The fourth man was Ezra Logan, the master of the Katrina who’d taken her across to Castle Island a week ago. He’d probably been included, Abigail guessed, to keep an eye on Miller and Brown in case they decided they didn’t want to stay in Boston after all.

“There’s the place.” Miller pointed almost due southwest of where they stood. The house he indicated was almost new and stood back from the road. Abigail was familiar with it, in that she’d passed it dozens of times, on summer afternoons when she and John would come walking on the Common and up and down these rough-cut, unpaved streets. She’d had the impression on those occasions that the place was uninhabited, and on this blustery morning she could see no trace of smoke from its chimneys.

“Who owns it?”

Revere shook his head. “Should be easy enough to find out.”

She glanced up at Miller. Abigail herself was reckoned tall for a woman, but the young Mainer stood a good six feet. “Did Cottrell knock at the door, or did he have a key?”

“I didn’t see.” Miller produced a spyglass from his pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to her. Evidently, the jail key wasn’t the only thing that had been extracted from Hoyle’s apartments. “He rode round behind, so there might have been someone in the stables, though I didn’t see smoke. He’d been out of our sight for some little time, before smoke came from the house chimney.”

Revere capped the horn flask of rum that Logan had handed him, and gave it back to the boatman. “Let’s have a look.”

“Won’t they be watching the place?” asked Miller uneasily. “The Provost Marshall? It is your bird’s house.”

“That’s just it,” said Abigail. “It isn’t. Nor was he staying there, that anyone knew of. Of course there’s been nothing to tell us,” she added, as the little party set off up the steep grade of the hill, “that he wasn’t staying there. But I’ll take oath that the Provost Marshall doesn’t know.”

“Ground’s frozen hard.” Paul Revere hacked at the surface of the driveway with his bootheel as they approached from the lane, which maps optimistically designated as George Street. “I doubt it’s taken a track in the past two weeks.”

“The heavens be praised for small favors,” remarked Abigail. “I should hate to try to approach the house if the mud wasn’t frozen. This drive doesn’t look as if it’s been graveled in years. Yet there’s a knocker on the door,” she added, as they reached the shallow granite steps. “Curious.”

“A cheat and a come-on,” declared Revere, after several minutes’ hammering with the ornamental brass hand—unpolished, Abigail noted, and beginning to tarnish. The steps beneath their feet were muddied with tracks, coming and going; a slatternly note on so elegant a facade. “A lure for the unsuspecting and a snare for the foot of the curious.”

“Yet the house itself is well maintained,” she observed. “The shutters have been painted recently. So has the door.” She moved to the edge of the step, studied the first of the ground-floor windows on that side, all shuttered tight. “Were the windows shuttered when Cottrell came here, Mr. Miller?”

“They were, m’am.”

“So you would not have been able to see it, had there been a light on inside or not? Had you not,” she added, “been otherwise occupied after it grew dark.”

He grinned a little shyly. “No, m’am. Matt—!” he added, as his comrade stepped forward, jerked hard on the handle of the door, and dealt the green-painted panels a brutal kick.

Matt Brown shrugged, as if breaking and entering were something one did every day to the houses of witch- festering Tory bastards. “Just thought I’d try.”

Further evidence of occasional usage rather than habitation was forthcoming when they circled the house. A small heap of soiled straw, frozen solid, lay outside the locked stables. “In this cold it’s hard to tell whether someone was here Monday or Tuesday,” remarked Revere, cracking at one of the rock-hard balls of dung with his heel. “Neither this nor the straw looks to be much older than last week, that’s for certain. None of it’s fresh.”

“So it could be from Cottrell’s horse on Saturday.”