A Marked Man

Lord bless you, m’am, don’t stand there lookin’ at me like I’m going to stick my spoon in the wall this second.” Mr. Fenton blinked sleepily at Abigail as she stood in the doorway. When she came close, she saw that even in the washed-out gray daylight that came through the attic window, the man’s pupils were contracted to the size of pinheads; the bottle that stood on the table beside his cot must contain an opiate of some kind. “Your good Doctor Warren didn’t tell me anythin’ I didn’t suspect already. At least he give me somethin’ for the pain, God bless him.”

Abigail brought up the broken chair, and John—as Thaxter had done two days before—sat tailor-fashion on the floor with his notebook in his hand. “Are you in much pain?” she asked gently, and Fenton moved his head, as if in a denial that the sweat on his face and his stertorous breathing belied.

“Not to speak of.”

Even had Mr. Buttrick not warned her, when he led her and John through the servants’ hall and up the backstairs, that Dr. Warren had pronounced the man beyond help, Abigail thought she would have known at the sight of him that he was dying. Under a sheen of sweat, his face was swollen almost unrecognizably from the man she’d spoken to only Monday evening, and in the daylight the progress of the jaundice had turned his flesh nearly orange. His voice was barely a whisper. When she took his hand—puffy with dropsy, though the wrist above it was wasted from the starvation of long illness—it felt chill and limp, like a dead man’s hand already.

“Mr. Buttrick said you had a thing or two you wanted yet to ask,” Fenton prompted her after a moment. “Don’t fret after me, m’am—happens to everyone, I’ve heard tell. His Excellency sent his pastor in, for me to make my peace—” He managed a crooked grin in spite of the pain. “Leastwise I know now for certain there’s no danger of meetin’ His Nibs when I gets to the other side. I know which way he went. How’s things look for your friend?”

“Unpromising,” said Abigail softly. Beyond the unceiled slant of the roof, the wind flung handfuls of sleet upon the shingles. “When last we spoke you mentioned actors from Barbados—What were they doing in Boston? Surely it’s a strange place for actors to come?”

“Oh, Palmer said he’d got word his sister, who’d run off two years ago with a sea captain, was now in Boston, and he was in search of her. A sad tale, but not so unusual. I’ve heard its like a dozen times. Cassandra, her name was—”

“You spoke to him, then?”

“Lord, yes. Had dinner with him and his lady friend at the Spancel.”

“When was this? How long before Sir Jonathan left for Maine?” she added, realizing that there was a good chance Mr. Fenton was no longer aware of how long he himself had been lying here ill.

“Just the day before. I’d packed most of his kit. He was off that evening for a meeting with these great friends of Fluckner’s about yet another claim that had popped up about these lands in Maine, one that none of ’em had ever heard of before. He was in a rare taking over it. Fellow’d have to be tracked down and bought off, he said—I knew he wouldn’t be in until late. Mr. Palmer walked into the Spancel just a few minutes after me, with his woman on his arm, and asked, was it true we was stayin’ in the Governor’s house, and would the folk there know about this fellow Jellicoe who was supposed to have run off with Cassie? One thing led to another. You know how it is, when you scrape acquaintance, not knowin’ anyone in the town.”

“It must be a lonely life, traveling,” said Abigail softly. You know how it is, he had said, and yet she didn’t. It came to her that she had never lived anywhere where she had not had family and friends already waiting for her when she arrived. Even when she and John had first moved to Boston from Braintree, the whole tribe of Quincy, Tufts, and Smith cousins and uncles and aunts had all been waiting to greet her, not to speak of half a regiment of Boston Adamses. She thought of Lieutenant Coldstone, crossing the Atlantic in a troop-ship—of all those men on Castle Island—coming to this strange country where they knew no one and where they were automatically loathed . . .

“You gets used to it.” Fenton’s breath caught with a stab of pain, and his hand closed hard on hers for a moment. “And you learns. I’d seen Palmer on the stage, an’ here and there about the town—Bridgetown’s about the size of a market-village back home—but never to speak to: very grand, he was. Yet cast him adrift, and he was glad enough of seein’ any face he knew that he bought me dinner and a couple good glasses of ale.”

“Did he say how long he was staying in Boston?” John asked, and Fenton shook his head.

“Long as it took him to learn whether his sister was here or not, I reckon. They’ll be gone by now.”

“Did your master ever speak of a man named Elkins? Toby Elkins?” asked Abigail. “’Twas his house that Sir Jonathan visited on the day he returned.”

Again Fenton shook his head. His face twisted, and Abigail found a spoon on the little table and poured a measure of the laudanum into it. “Another,” whispered Fenton, when he’d drunk it. “If you please—the pain catches me . . .” After the second dose he seemed to sink deeper into the bedclothes, like a wrecked ship settling. He whispered drowsily, “Thank ’ee, m’am. It’s good not bein’ alone.”

When Fenton had sunk into opiated sleep, John and Abigail slipped silently from the room and in silence walked back to Queen Street. Though it was only midmorning, Abigail felt strange, as if it should have been night when she sat beside the dying man. Had he family back in England? she wondered. How would anyone find out where to write to them, to tell them their son—brother—uncle—was gone? It crossed her mind to think of John, in his long and frequent travels, riding for days sometimes on the muddy roads in the western woods to one county court or another: out to Worcester, up to Haverhill, through those deep primeval forests untouched since God called them into being.

If he were taken sick, she thought, looking sidelong at that blunt, round face, that burly shape in the bundle of his cloak . . . If he were taken sick, would anyone there know to write to me? The thought of such a letter turned her cold inside.

John, too, was deep in thought as they walked, though his mind followed other roads, for in time he said, “No Elkins. I wonder if Sir Jonathan spoke of the man to your friend Miss Fluckner, or to that blithering gooseberry of hers. He doesn’t sound the man to tell his business to a woman . . .”

“It may not have been business.”

John raised his brows.

She shrugged. “Mr. Elkins may have been a professional procurer, for all we know . . . It certainly doesn’t sound as if Cottrell indulged himself much in Maine.” Her voice turned dry. “It would fit with everything else we’ve heard of the man.”

“In that case, would not Elkins have arrived with a young lady?”

Abigail shook her head. “Would he? I have no idea how such matters are arranged.”

“They aren’t,” said John. “Not in Boston, anyway—at least not on so opulent a scale. Yet I find it curious,” he added softly, “that there is a young woman missing . . . a young woman, moreover, upon whose virtue Cottrell made at least one attempt and possibly more. It answers nothing of how and why Jonathan Cottrell died . . . but I would very much like to know where the woman Bathsheba was during the eight days between her disappearance and Cottrell’s return.”

He turned down the little passway that led from Queen Street into the yard behind the Adams’ house, narrow and muddy and smelling of the two cows that traversed it twice a day to be led out and grazed on the Common. In general, John—or Thaxter, if John were out of Boston—would rake out the cowhouse in the afternoon, just before the town herd-boy brought the cattle down Queen Street for the children of their various owners to fetch in for the evening milking. This morning, however, having put off the start of his day’s work thus far, as soon as they came indoors, he kissed Abigail and went upstairs to change clothes, while Abigail herself shed her pattens and donned apron and day-cap to start preparations for dinner. “There’s two notes for you, m’am,” reported Pattie, coming into the kitchen with a broom and duster in hand and Charley and Tommy at her heels.

One, from Lieutenant Coldstone, simply reported that Mrs. Klinker of the Man-o’-War knew nothing of Mr. Elkins save his occasional visits to retrieve or dispatch mail, a convenience for which he paid her fivepence a week and had done so since the first week of January.

The other, from Dr. Joseph Warren, requested the favor of an interview, when it would be convenient.

She sent a note via one of Tom Butler’s prentice-boys next door, and the young doctor himself arrived that afternoon, just as she, Nabby, and Pattie finished mopping down the kitchen after dinner. John, who liked an after- dinner pipe once his portion of the cleanup was done, rose from the hearthside settle and held out a hand to the slender young man: “God bless you for seeing to that poor servant, Warren. Good Lord, what is it that he’s contracted? That’s no grippe . . .”