A Marked Man

“Nor is it,” said Dr. Warren quietly. “It’s what I wished to speak of to you.” His clear gray eyes touched Abigail, included her in the statement, and the three of them moved to the fireside corner, away from where the tactful Pattie was settling the children to their lessons at the table.

“’Tis not some kind of tropical fever?” asked John worriedly, keeping his voice low. “I’ve heard of a jaundice like that in the Caribbean. The man was recently in Barbados, and indeed the night before he was taken sick had supper with an actor from Bridgetown—”

“Except that he had no fever,” said Warren. “He had supper with a man he’d known in Barbados—had his master known him?”

John shook his head.

“And half a day later, he was taken sick,” continued the doctor softly. “So that he could not accompany his master to Maine, nor be at Hancock’s Wharf to meet him when he returned. What does that sound like to you?”

John said nothing. His eyes went to Abigail’s, then returned to their friend.

Abigail said, “You’re not saying he was poisoned?”

“The symptoms sound precisely like certain mushroom poisons I have read of,” said Warren quietly. “They’re slow-acting and slow to begin their action—an advantage when someone doesn’t want to be associated with the onset of the symptoms. Had not this man’s master been murdered, the idea would not have crossed my mind at all. But Fenton’s illness seems mightily convenient for it to be simply jaundice and la grippe. It might be well,” he added, “to find this actor from Barbados with whom he supped, and learn if he was as ignorant of Sir Jonathan’s affairs and company as Mr. Fenton seemed to think he was.”

Fifteen

’Tis a long way,” said Sam Adams thoughtfully, “from guessing the servant was poisoned, to finding who it was that thrashed the master and left him to die of cold in a ditch. That distance is longer still, if this British colonel has the word of a good, rich Tory’s dogsbody about who was seen near the alley late that night and a conveniently dropped scarf to back him up.” He knocked the ash of his pipe into the kitchen fireplace, a stone archway considerably larger than that of Abigail’s more modern kitchen on Queen Street, and smiled his thanks as Bess, plump and graying, brought in coffee from the pantry for those gathered around her hearth. Wind howled eerily in the hollow of the chimney overhead. Sleet spattered on the gray windows like a rain of stones.

Paul Revere said, “I take it you want us to locate this Palmer.”

“It shouldn’t be difficult.” John leaned forward to tong a coal from the fire and applied it to the bowl of his own pipe. He was crowded cozily against Abigail on the old-fashioned settle that flanked the fire. “An actor’s a rare bird in these climes. He’ll have caught someone’s attention.” Sam’s house on Purchase Street—one of the most venerable in Boston—in which he had been born, was constructed in the antique style, so that the whole northern wall of what had been old Josiah Adams’s original “keeping room” was wrought of stone, with the fireplace so great that Bess knelt inside it to do the cooking. The settles were built along the fireplace’s rough stone inner walls, and afforded draft-free, if rather smoky, seats on afternoons like this one, with a sudden gale driving in off the bay.

“Indeed he did,” agreed the silversmith. “At least, if he’s the same who was at the Horn Spoon in Ship Street, back in at the start of the New Year.”

“Can you confirm that?” asked John. For her part, Abigail felt no surprise that Palmer was already located. The Sons of Liberty, in its way, had grown out of the less formal network of gossip, friendships, and ward-level political alliances that had existed in Boston since time out of mind. In a community where a good third of the men were involved in the smuggling trade, people kept an eye on who was coming and going in the town, and people talked: to wives, to brothers, to friends met in taverns—those same taverns where men of compatible politics would meet after supper, in order to feel themselves a part of the greater community before going home to their wives and their beds. The women whose husbands ran the waterfront taverns—or who ran them themselves—talked, too: to sisters, to friends met at the market or outside the church. An actor from Barbados would be noted and commented upon (“Lord, the buttons on his waistcoat all covered with paste diamonds, ’twould fair blind you across the room!”), even as, these days, any outspoken Tory who seemed to be powerful or connected with the Army would be duly mentioned to Sam or Revere or Hancock or Ben Edes or any of the other men who made up the inner circle of the Sons.

The Sons of Liberty took good care to know who came and went in Boston.

“You wouldn’t know if he’s still there?” inquired Sam, and Revere shook his head.

“I’d have heard if he were, but I’ll ask. I’ll ask after his lady friend, too—Mrs. Nevers at the Spoon said there was a lady with ‘that actor fellow,’ as she called him—”

“A woman?” asked Dr. Warren, crowded onto the settle at Abigail’s other side. “Or a lady?”

“A lady, she said. Well-off, and paying all ‘that actor fellow’s’ bills. I’ll ask, too, after this Elkins, while I’m down there. The Man-o’-War’s only a few yards from the Horn Spoon—though God knows every sailor and smuggler uses those Ship Street taverns as accommodation addresses. Still, if Elkins is paying fifty shillings a quarter for a house he doesn’t live in, where is he living?”

“Check with the gate-guards,” suggested Abigail. “And the ferrymen. He may in fact be traveling, though it didn’t look to me like anyone had ever actually stayed at that house. Even if we could prove that poor Fenton was poisoned,” she added quietly, with a glance at Dr. Warren, “you’re right, Sam, that we’re as far as ever we were from proving that Harry Knox didn’t brain that—that weasel Cottrell. But if we can start finding these other people—Palmer and Elkins—we can perhaps show that wretched Colonel Leslie that Harry wasn’t part of the . . . the conspiracy.”

John sniffed, and rose to his feet, even his short height nearly brushing the roughly corbelled bricks of the huge fireplace. He strode across the hearth in his best courtroom manner, hands gripping his lapels as if he were clothed in an imaginary robe: “Gentlemen of the Admiralty Court,” he boomed, “I shall now prove to you conclusively, and beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Sir Jonathan Cottrell was not beaten to death by the man whose sweetheart he attempted to dishonor—by the man who shouted in the presence of these ten witnesses that he would kill him—but was in fact the victim of an elaborate conspiracy whose nature we have been unable to determine and whose minions have slipped away through our grip . . .”

As Revere, Dr. Warren, Sam, and Sam’s fifteen-year-old son—present on a little hearth-stool—all applauded wildly and raised their mugs and shouted, “Not Guilty, upon mine honor! You have convinced us, sir! Of course ’twas a conspiracy, the villains! Set the lad free!” Abigail flushed a little, and waved at John—

“Don’t be an idiot, John!”

But she knew he was right.

A little later, as she and John were wrapping up to take their leave of the house on Purchase Street, she said to Revere, “Whilst you’re asking after Palmer and his extremely obliging patroness, would you ask if anyone has heard anything of a woman named Bathsheba? Fluckner’s servant-girl . . .”

“The one who went missing, yes.” Revere nodded—of course he’d read the advertisements. Revere read everything. “She’s not been found, then? I see Fluckner has quit advertising.”

“She disappeared two days after Cottrell left for Maine,” said Abigail. “On Thursday, Miss Fluckner found nearly twenty-five pounds hidden in her room—most of it in British coin. It can only have come from Cottrell.”

Revere’s eyebrows shot up at the sum, and he nodded. “I’ll see what I can learn. What became of the money?”

“I sent it to my father,” said Abigail, “to arrange for the purchase of the woman’s two babies, and their care. I can’t imagine what she knew about Cottrell, or what she could have learned. But I suspect that she’s met the same fate that will take poor Fenton very shortly.”

The silversmith nodded. “Whoever these people are,” he murmured, “they seem to have wanted Cottrell dead very badly . . . and to have let no one stand in their way.”

“I suppose not. But how could a Negro servant-woman stand in the way of anyone killing a King’s Commissioner? I can understand having Fenton put out of the way, so that Cottrell would be alone on his journey to Maine. But why would that poor girl have needed to die?”