A Marked Man

and there would be long periods when he would be away and the house locked up.”

As they walked up the drive, Abigail reflected upon how Apthorp—a scion of the great merchant family— simply ignored Sergeant Muldoon, as he would have ignored one of Thomas Fluckner’s footmen, or a tree-stump if one had happened to be near the place where they met. Like they were just faces in a painting, Mr. Fenton had said of his master’s treatment of himself, of servants, of the workers at inns . . .

Of utterly no account.

What had Cottrell made of the rough and grubby Matt Brown cornering him at the local tavern in Maine and threatening him with mayhem, not about a woman—which Cottrell was clearly used to—but about the land that was the only thing these men and their families had? Had he written to Hutchinson about that confrontation? To anyone?

Was that something that he considered simply part of the cost of getting ahead in the world, along with informing on smugglers not useful to his interests, putting men off their farms, and paying off the families of girls he’d seduced?

He was what he was, Fenton had said, with the same resignation Abigail had schooled herself to feel about her mother’s blindness where her brother was concerned. Let me be that I am, and do not seek to alter me.

The house smelled damp and faintly moldy. After the wind outside, the atmosphere within felt heavy and still. A trace of smoke seemed to cling to the walls, but nothing like the stuffy reek of a house that has had candles and fires burned in it day in, day out since November. “Who is this Mr. Elkins?” John asked, as Thurlow Apthorp led them into the wide central hallway—an open well up to the second floor in the English fashion, and impossible to heat— and thence right into a small but handsomely furnished drawing room.

“A London gentleman, well-off it seems, seeking to establish trading connections here in Boston.” Apthorp shook his head. “Myself, I think the man’s a fool. After what happened with the tea-ships, this town will be fortunate if the King doesn’t close the port entirely to teach its more violent spirits a much-needed lesson.”

“Did you tell him so?” inquired Coldstone.

“I did. He only shrugged, and said he’d take the house in any case, and have a look about. I’d have thought —” He frowned. “I’d have thought there was something smoky about the fellow—a French agent, maybe—except he had letters of introduction from half the planters in Bridgetown, men my uncle has had dealings with for years.”

“Bridgetown in Barbados?”

Abigail’s glance touched John’s, then Coldstone’s, as the young officer asked the question. Like them, she felt herself come alert, as if at the sound of a foot on the stair of a dark house reputed empty.

Unaware of this quick and silent communion Apthorp nodded and led the way into the dining room. “This is the only room he had furnished up properly. Even the bedroom’s got merely the bed in it, and a washstand . . .” The men passed through the length of the drawing room after him. Abigail lingered for a moment in the doorway to the central hall, wondering what it was that she smelled—or almost smelled—in the place. The trace—the thinnest whisper—of mortal sickness: vomit and blood-laced human waste. She looked around her at the double-high room, eerie with curtaining shadows. The doors on either side of the hall opened into chambers whose windows were shuttered, leaving the hall itself drowned in dimness, as if the gloom had settled like water into its lower half. A wide stair rose straight along one wall to a sort of gallery above, off which doorways opened into other chambers. These, unshuttered, admitted the day’s gray pallor secondhand into the upper portion of the hall. A window above the door itself shed some light, but the effect was depressing and rather disconcerting, as if someone had read a book on the fashions that the English preferred in their houses without thinking through what would be needed to make the design livable here in another land. If one shut those upstairs doors, it would turn the whole of this hall into a gloomy pit.

“. . . wanted a place to meet with gentlemen—in the timber trade, I believe he said,” she heard Apthorp’s rather light voice echo from the dining room. “But I never heard of him doing it . . .”

Abigail knelt for a closer look at the carpet. English, with a looped pile, and probably thirty shillings. It showed a little wear and some caked mud, as far as she could tell in the dingy gloom. But there was no sign that a man had died upon it—something which she knew would be difficult to hide. The oak floor elsewhere in the hall was clean as if recently mopped.

She got to her feet as the men reentered through the door at the back of the hall and followed them into the unfurnished parlor and the bare-shelved library on the left side of the front door. “What did Mr. Elkins look like?” she asked, and Apthorp frowned.

“An average sort of young chap,” he said at length.

Abigail bit her lip to keep from saying, Can you be less specific? and Lieutenant Coldstone—evidently long used to winkling information from those not used to describing others—inquired, “Thin rather than fat?”

“Oh, thin, I should say.”

“Tall rather than short?”

“Tall,” said Apthorp promptly, though at an inch or so under her own height, Abigail reflected, the man would probably describe Lieutenant Coldstone as tall . . .

“My height?”

Apthorp’s frown deepened. He’d clearly never even thought about it. “I should say so, yes.”

“Taller?”

“Maybe a little taller—”

“Or shorter?”

“A trifle.”

“Dark or fair?”

“Fair. Well, his hair was always powdered, you know. Dark brows, I think.”

“Dark eyes or light?”

“Light.”

Except for the difference in the height he had just described Sir Jonathan Cottrell, or Lieutenant Coldstone, or Dr. Joseph Warren, or the Heavens Rejoice Miller for that matter if one wanted to stretch the point. Abigail followed the men up the stairs. “If you thought to yourself what a fool Mr. Elkins was being for proposing to set up as a merchant,” she said, “he must have rented the house later than December.”

“Seventh of January,” said Apthorp. “He arrived on the Lady Bishop, from Bridgetown. Myself, if ’tweren’t for the cost of the thing, I’d have said—Well . . .” He glanced apologetically at Abigail.

Abigail sighed inwardly, and said, “Excuse me just one moment, gentlemen, I seem to have mislaid my handkerchief. Please do go on . . .” She stepped out of the bedchamber into which he’d led them—the only one furnished in the house, and that, as he’d said, only with a washstand and an uncurtained bed. She heard their voices murmur as she moved about the hollow square of hall at the top of the stairs—like a viewing-gallery of the hall below—off which all the bedchambers opened, putting her head through each door in turn. The empty rooms smelled strongly of damp plaster and mold. Not even the smell of mice, nor their furtive scurry. Clearly, no one had had anything resembling food in this place for years.

As Apthorp showed them up into the attics, John fell back to her side to whisper, “His private theory was that it was the sort of thing a very wealthy man might rent in which to rendezvous with a mistress.”

“Catch me, John, I think I’m going to faint with shock.”

“Any New Englander—and I don’t care how rich he is—would faint with shock at the thought of paying fifty shillings the quarter for a house this size in which to meet a woman now and then, when he could get a perfectly serviceable room and bed at the Queen of Argyll down by the wharves for ten-pence for the evening with the woman thrown in gratis.”

“Then our Mr. Elkins was clearly willing to pay the difference for one thing that he would have here, that he would not have at the Queen of Argyll.”

John nodded, as they emerged into the dense gloom of the attic, empty and icy and echoing as Apthorp, Coldstone, and Muldoon walked its length with candles held high and showing nothing but last summer’s cobwebs. “Solitude,” he agreed.