A Marked Man

“Since you’ve been in Boston,” she asked, “have you seen anyone Sir Jonathan knew in Barbados?”

Fenton shook his head.

“Anyone from Barbados at all?”

“A couple of the actors that was tourin’ in Bridgetown while we was there, but no one that my gentleman would have spoke to.”

“None of the servants from Sir Damien’s house, for instance? Or from any of the houses of his friends?”

“No, m’am. Servants in Barbados, they’re all black. Even had he done one of ’em wrong, and a bad wrong, they can’t come and go the way folks can here. They can’t just take a ship after him. Nor none from Spain, either, though he did have trouble there over a girl, a maidservant in the house of the Marques de Tallegas: bad trouble. Could I bother you for another cup of water, m’am? Thank you. Does me no good, it doesn’t feel like—” He sighed. “The girl’s sweetheart ended up killed. It wasn’t ever proved who’d done it, but I always wondered if the Marques had had it done, to stay on Sir Jonathan’s good side. That was a sorry business.”

He stretched his hand feebly toward the cup as Abigail filled it again—she made a mental note to take the pitcher down to the kitchen with her to be refilled when she left. When he had drunk, Fenton’s head dropped back onto the thin pillow, his face twisting in the dim candlelight; the filthy smell of sickness grew stronger in the room and mixed with the trace of fresh blood.

“A last thing,” said Abigail softly, “and then we’ll go. Did your master ever speak of the maidservant at the Fluckners’? A black woman named Bathsheba?”

“In passin’,” murmured Fenton. “Laughed about her, like it was a lark.” His eyes had slipped closed. “Like a kid pissin’ on the schoolmaster’s doorstep.”

“Did he give her money?”

“Him?” The servant’s breath puffed out in a whispered laugh, a tiny cloud of gold in the icy dark. “A black girl?”

Abigail drew the blankets—ample, she was glad to see—up over the man’s shoulders, tucking them gently in. Even in the thrashing light of the single candle at the bedside, she could see how sunken his eyes were, and when Thaxter stood and picked up the branch of lights that had been at his side, she started back, appalled at the dusky lividity of jaundice that the stronger glow made clear.

When she and the clerk returned to the servants’ hall and thanked Buttrick for his kindness in arranging the interview, she asked, “Is Governor Hutchinson still at home, Mr. Buttrick? Could he spare me a moment of his time?” and in a very few minutes was shown into the front part of the house, where the Governor rose to greet her from beside the fire in his study. John would expire with envy, she reflected: books lined the walls, some new and imported from England, others old, clasped in clumsy bindings—the remains of the early records of the colony, whose history His Excellency had made his lifelong study. Despite the man’s pigheaded intransigence about the tea last December—despite the letter that he’d written the King urging His Majesty to deal with the discontented colonists in the harshest possible fashion—still Abigail’s hair prickled on her nape at the thought of the irreplaceable colony records that had been lost, trampled in the mud, and burned when one of Sam’s mobs had looted the Hutchinson family home in the North End.

And yet, as Fenton had said of his master, the Governor had great charm, warmth, and intelligence shining from his gentle eyes. Abigail curtseyed and thanked His Excellency for his hospitality, “And for your willingness to help us gather evidence to be used in favor of Mr. Knox. What I wish to say now has little to do with that matter, sir, and is perhaps none of my business—except insofar as it is every Christian’s business to do one’s best to help a man who is suffering. Has any doctor other than Dr. Rowe seen Mr. Fenton?”

The Governor’s fine brows drew together over his nose. “Dr. Rowe is my personal physician, Mrs. Adams, and the nephew of one of my closest friends.”

“And I’m sure he is quite a fine one,” replied Abigail. “Yet I’m sure you have observed how each physician has his own methods of going about a cure, and it appears to me—Sir, do you think, from your own observations, that Mr. Fenton is improving, simply by being bled?” When Hutchinson was silent, considering this, she went on, “I have had some experience of illness, Your Excellency, and Mr. Fenton appears to me to be jaundiced—and to be suffering from symptoms far beyond those of la grippe. Dr. Joseph Warren—”

He reacted like a horse suddenly enraged by a fly. “Dr. Joseph Warren is a fomenter of sedition and a professional troublemaker.”

“And is a very good physician, with experience in this type of disorder.” She comforted herself with the reflection that this might well be actually true, since it was clear neither of them had the slightest idea what type of disorder had Jonathan Cottrell’s servant in its grip. “This is not a matter of politics, sir. I honestly believe this to be a case in which a misdiagnosis could mean a man’s life. The man is a stranger in a strange land,” she went on quietly. “His very life has been left in the hands of strangers. Could you not at least permit Dr. Warren to see him?”

The Governor’s flat, square shoulders relaxed a little. He said a trifle grudgingly, “I could do that.”

“Thank you, sir.” She rose and curtseyed again. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart. May I write to Dr. Warren, asking him to attend on Mr. Fenton tomorrow?”

Hutchinson smiled wryly, and again, Abigail felt the warmth of his charm. “Would it do me the slightest bit of good, Mrs. Adams, if I said, ‘No?’ ”

’T is all well to say no one whom Sir Jonathan wronged in Bridgetown has followed him here, nor from Spain, either,” remarked Thaxter, as he and Abigail made their way along Marlborough Street in the windy dark of early evening. Spits of sleet struck their faces, and Abigail shivered, thinking of the sick man, lying between waking and sleep in the dark of a stranger’s attic, feeling his life leak away. “He sounds like a man who couldn’t but make enemies wherever he went: A plain-dealing villain, like Don John in Shakespeare, who doesn’t care who knows his evil and holds himself in such pride that he can’t see any reason to change, because he’s fine as he is.”

“I cannot hide what I am,” repeated Abigail softly, savoring the words of one of her favorite plays. “I must be sad when I have cause, and smile at no man’s jests; eat when I have stomach and wait for no man’s leisure; sleep when I am drowsy and tend to no man’s business; laugh when I am merry . . .”

“And kiss whatever woman as takes his fancy, without asking what she or anyone else thinks of it,” finished the clerk grimly. “A despoiler, even as Don John was of poor Miss Hero in the play, only because it amused him.”

“Let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me,” she murmured, reflecting on the deeper sin of that troublemaking canker in the lovely Arcadia of Shakespeare’s imagining; the man who is utterly selfish to his own appetite and whims. Her father, she remembered, had a special voice, a special inflection, when he would read Don John’s part, sneering and leering. John—her John—would for his part read the man quietly cold. As if, as poor Mr. Fenton said, other people were no more to him than faces painted in a picture. When the London papers came to Boston, she would scan their columns for mention of Shakespeare’s plays in the theaters there and would wonder what it would be like to actually see these events. To see men—and women, too! for shame!— striding about the raised and lighted stage, rich in gleaming costumes, gesturing and turning; not just the circle of friends by the parlor fire reading those words . . .

She frowned and halted, the wind lashing the heavy folds of her cloak. “Mr. Thaxter . . .”

Absorbed in his own thoughts, he’d gone on a few steps and now turned back hastily. “M’am?”

“There are no theaters in Boston: there never have been.”

He missed her point. “No, m’am, of course not—”

“Then what are actors from Bridgetown doing here?”

Thirteen

John was home when she and Thaxter reached the house chilled and tired from a day’s