A Marked Man

Abigail guessed that she had had to pick her words very carefully. “I was never so close to anything as I was to striking the man over the head with my stick! It’s true—all he wants to do is get poor Mr. Knox out of Boston for a time . . . Just as he’s sent away that wretched little clerk of his. Just as he’d arrange for any prentice-boy to be sent away by his master, if that boy started sending flowers to Miss Lucy, or a sailing-man to be shipped out. It is what they do,” she added, and her green eyes suddenly narrowed with an uncharacteristic flicker of anger, “the friends of Parliament. The friends of the King. If there’s trouble, they arrange for there not to be trouble anymore.”

And for a moment, Abigail felt that she had stepped around the corner of a screen to see what lay behind the lame woman’s smiling and empty-headed cheerfulness: like the sudden sight of a disfiguring scar.

The next moment Mrs. Sandhayes smiled blithely again and shrugged. “I suppose the silly man feels that Lucy will forget Mr. Knox if he’s not right there beside her, and fall madly in love with someone else. Honestly, Mrs. Adams, men can be such asses sometimes!”

“Papa isn’t—” Lucy began unhappily, and then fell silent, looking away again as if unable to bear the company even of friends. “I love Papa.” And in her tone was the whole of her grief, that one man she loved would find abhorrent the other man she loved, not because Harry was a drunkard or a monster or a thief, but only because he worked with his hands. Because his father had been poor.

“Of course you do, dear child.” Margaret Sandhayes took a lurching step toward the girl, propped one cane against her panniers, and put her arm around Lucy’s shoulders. “Just because you want to take someone and shake some sense into their heads doesn’t mean you don’t love them . . . And just because they’re acting like a complete booby doesn’t mean they don’t love you. It will work itself out, child—” She shifted her position a little, which caused the propped stick to fall; Abigail caught it neatly, before it struck the frozen path. “Come,” she said. “Let’s go up to the top of Beacon Hill, as long as we’re out here. You’ll feel better.”

Together, the four women left the bare trees of the Mall and made their way by those frozen and houseless lanes to the top of Beacon Hill, to see the whole of the bay spread like a world of blue black diamond beneath their feet, pricked with a thousand flecks of white and tufted with islands: violet, gray, and brown. Below them on the Common, children launched a kite on the cold sea breeze; their voices skirled shrill as birds, as the boatless sail whipped and whirled aimlessly, then swooped suddenly upward, as if it had all at once discovered what it meant to be able to fly free.

“A ship!” cried Lucy, pointing, and there she was: black hull, white sails, floating among the islands with breathtaking lightness. She fished in the deep pocket of her cloak for a spyglass. “You don’t think it’s word from the King, finally, do you?” She sounded excited rather than scared. “About the tea? About what’s going to happen?”

Even before she could focus the glass, however, Mrs. Sandhayes replied softly, “It’s early for that, child. No, I think this must be the Incitatus, up from the Indies, on its way to Halifax.”

Sixteen

Parting, Lucy promised to write to Mrs. Hartnell the moment she got home. “I beg of you, be discreet, child,” pleaded Mrs. Sandhayes. “You have no idea what the slightest breath of scandal can do to your reputation—”

“Oh, pooh! Everyone says terrible things about Belinda Sumner behind her back and yet she’s received everywhere—”

“Belinda Sumner is married,” said Mrs. Sandhayes firmly. “And don’t expect too much of Caroline Hartnell. She’s stupid as an owl and wouldn’t see a conspiracy if twenty cloaked Venetians surrounded her with daggers.”

So much, thought Abigail, for “dear friendships” among the Tory gentry of the town.

But the Fluckner fortune, even if it attracted parasites like Sir Jonathan Cottrell and caused Lucy’s father to look askance at the suits of honest tradesmen, had its uses. Soon after dinner Philomela knocked diffidently on the back door of the Adams’ kitchen, with a note from her mistress saying that the stylish matron—wife to one of Boston’s wealthiest ship-owners—would pay a “morning call” at Milk Street the following day.

“She’ll have Gwenifer with her,” promised Philomela, as Abigail refolded the note and tucked it into one of the drawers of the kitchen sideboard. “She won’t stir from the house without her.”

“That scarcely gives the poor girl time to do her work, does it?”

“I shouldn’t think so, m’am, no,” replied the young woman, with a noncommittal politeness that some of her so-called social betters, Abigail reflected, could do well to imitate.

“Is she so frightened of the outside world?”

“I don’t think so, m’am. Sheba told me that Mrs. Hartnell and other friends of Mrs. Fluckner have all heard that no English lady will go out without a maidservant to lend her consequence.”

“Consequence indeed.” Abigail sniffed. “Yet I suppose it spares me the awkwardness of letting Mrs. Hartnell know that it’s her maid I need to speak to, rather than her all-important self. Was Bathsheba a friend to this girl Gwen, then?”

“They were friendly.” Philomela gave the matter a moment’s thought. “Bathsheba used to be Mrs. Fluckner’s own maid, you see, before she had Marcellina, so when Mrs. Sandhayes came to stay with us, Mrs. Fluckner would have Bathsheba go about with her, for that same reason—which was very kind of her, toward Mrs. Sandhayes, but very hard on Sheba who had only just had Stephen. But Sheba would say, there’s no cloud without silver lining, because Mrs. Sandhayes was very generous with her tips—”

“How so, if she’s not a wealthy woman?”

Philomela sank her voice and glanced toward Pattie, who was drying plates at the table. “She cheats at cards, m’am.”

Abigail said, “Ah.”

“So in any event,” Philomela went on in a more normal voice, “after Mrs. Hartnell took up Mrs. Sandhayes, Sheba and Gwen were much thrown together, and you know how it is. Unless a woman takes against you for some reason, you do fall into friendliness with those you see often, do you not? When they would go about together, down to the wharves, or take Mrs. Hartnell’s carriage out into the country, then Sheba and Gwen would sit up on the box with the coachman, which sounds finer than it actually is,” added the girl with her faint, quick grin, “when the weather is as it was in February. Sheba said she and Gwen used to share cloaks and hug together sometimes to keep warm.”

“Hmm.” Abigail dipped into the little jar of hard money on the sideboard for a tip.

The uncovering of Bathsheba’s strange hoard had served to remind her that other servants in that household might be saving up their tips and perquisites, too, in the hopes of building some defense against the misfortunes of the world. And perhaps, she reflected, that was exactly how Margaret Sandhayes viewed her cardsharping.

The money seemed to remind Philomela as well, for she turned upon the threshold, and said, “I wanted to thank you again, Mrs. Adams, for arranging with your father and Mr. Greenleaf to buy Sheba’s children. Mrs. Barnaby told me this morning that Mr. Greenleaf had offered for the pair of them—”

“’ Tis nothing,” said Abigail. “If ill has indeed befallen to their mother, they’ll at least have food and a roof above their heads. I know Silas Greenleaf. He is an honest man who will give those children their freedom when they’re of age to seek their own fortunes, and he’ll not split them up. Whyever that money was offered to Bathsheba, it will have been used for the reason she took it: to save them.”

Mrs. Caroline Hartnell!” murmured Pattie, profoundly impressed, when Philomela had gone and Abigail returned to the kitchen table. Johnny and Nabby had carried the clean dishes to the sideboard and were bringing out their schoolbooks and slates. “What shall you wear tomorrow, m’am? I can curl your hair—”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” retorted Abigail, settling herself on the other side of the table with the household daybook, where she could reach the inkwell that stood between the children. “And I shall dress as I do