A Marked Man

for Meeting, in my best bib and tucker. I don’t curl my hair for Meeting, and I’m certainly not going to give a morning call more time and attention than I do a morning spent with God.”

“Why are they called morning calls, if they take place after noon?” inquired Nabby, raising her blue eyes from The Pilgrim’s Progress.

“Because women are silly, and live in sloth and sin,” Johnny proclaimed. “Rich ones, anyway,” he added quickly, seeing Abigail’s eyebrows lift. “All they think of is their dogs and their dresses.”

“I rather think,” corrected Abigail mildly, “that ’tis because dinner used to be eaten at noon . . . and people used to get up just after midnight, to be about their morning’s business, isn’t that so, John Quincy?”

The boy nodded importantly and returned to his Latin while Abigail unfolded and perused again the notes that had been waiting for her when she’d returned from her rendezvous with Lucy and Mrs. Sandhayes that morning.

My very dear Mrs. Adams

(Lieutenant Coldstone had written)

—

Enquiries with the harbormaster have yielded no one by the name of Elkins as having come ashore from the

Lady Bishop,

nor from the

Speedheart,

which was the other ship in port from Bridgetown at the end of December and upon which Sir Jonathan Cottrell took passage. Nor is Elkins or anyone of his description listed as passenger on the

Juno

from Halifax, or the

Polly Amos

out of London, which were in port at about that time. Androcles Palmer is listed as a passenger on the

Lady Bishop.

Needless to say, if Mr. Elkins entered Boston by land, or came up from Barbados (if that was his place of origin) to another town on this coast and entered Boston on a coastwise trader like the

Hetty,

I would have no record of him. Make of this what you are able.

Your ob’t,

J. Coldstone

Lt. Kings 64th Rgt. Ft

And from Sam:

Palmer packed up and left the Horn Spoon on Thursday the 24th February. Men have asked about the district for an Englishman of his description, and none thereabouts have seen him, under that name or any other. A woman named Cherne—tall and handsome, dark-haired and of a strong cast of feature, well dressed and appearing in the midforties—paid for his room and his meals, and was much with him, though she herself did not stay at the inn but the first night. I venture this is the lady friend of whom poor Fenton spoke, unless there were more than just the one. None at the Horn Spoon remarked on one of Elkins’s description, though the Man-o’-War lies but yards away.

Abigail folded the notes, turned them over and over in her hands: Drat those wretched actors. Changed their names and moved their goods across the street or down two doors—that portion of Ship Street boasted more taverns than the rest of Boston put together—and how could we tell?

The thought returned to vex her the following day, when—properly gowned in dark, well-cut wool and wearing, as she had said, her best bib and tucker—she sat drinking peppermint tisane in the Fluckner drawing room, making conversation with Hannah Fluckner and contemplating again the portrait of that sweet-faced lady in her youth. A pity, Abigail reflected, one could not acquire decent miniatures of such lesser personalities as the elusive Mr. Elkins or Androcles Palmer, to show to innkeepers who might never have heard the names but might well recognize the faces. Not that the miniatures would be an invariable help, she amended, returning her eyes to the portrait with a certain amount of regret. When the portrait’s original asked her politely, “A penny for your thoughts, Mrs. Adams,” she said, “I was only thinking what a shame it is, that no one in New England seems to be able to paint faces that look anything like the actual people.”

“La, I protest, Mrs. Adams!” cried Mrs. Hartnell. “’Tis a fine, big portrait, and very handsomely done! Mr. Stanley—the man who painted it, and such a very gentlemanlike man he was!—did one of me, in my green and white satin—Do you remember my green and white satin, Hannah? La, such a crack as we thought it, with those great dowdy panniers—”

Abigail listened politely to the subsequent description of various recollected toilettes, but it was clear to her that it had never crossed the minds of either woman that the business of a portrait was to portray not the cost of the sitter’s clothing, but those individual differences of eyebrow and chin and lip that distinguished the rather saturnine Margaret Sandhayes from the fragile and flighty Caroline Hartnell.

Neither pretty; both fairish rather than fair; both slender rather than beefy of build. Even as portraits missed the differences of feature, the fashionable layers of paint and powder blurred them, concealing the natural hues of complexions as well as their flaws under white lead and cochineal. How could you describe a woman, she reflected, if the main thing you saw about her was not her face, but the elaborately curled, puffed, and swagged white meringue of powdered hair that surrounded it? A describer would fix first on, One lady was a cripple, the other two were sound, and then perhaps might notice, One lady had a tiny tricorn hat pinned to the summit of her coiffeur, the other two had silk flowers. Certainly this was how Margaret Sandhayes had remembered those who came in and out of the cardroom and the ballroom: the gentleman in the violet waistcoat, the lady with the coiffure Aux Reves Sentimentales . . . Only later had Lucy’s scribbled hand filled in the names. Even those who did notice features might only say “big nose,” which could describe either the Hartnell aquiline or the Sandhayes inquiring beak. And in fact, Abigail suspected, only people like John, who were used to analyzing faces, would consciously register that the uncomeliness of feature common to both women stemmed from large noses at all, or that one had a chin that was far too weak for beauty, the other, far too strong.

Mrs. Hartnell concluded her breathless and extended account of her most recent shopping-trip and turned to Abigail at last. “Now, dearest Margaret tells me you’ve taken an interest in that sweet little Bethlehem girl—”

“Bathsheba,” corrected Lucy, ignoring her mother’s admonitory glare.

“Bathsheba, of course! Brain like a sieve, Mr. Hartnell is forever telling me—How very extraordinary that she would run away like that, you’re always so kind to your Negroes, Hannah. Positively spoil them, I say—” She laughed, as if her own observations were always the height of wit. “Well, it’s very kind of you, for all that, seeing that the children go to a good home, poor brats. I am terribly fond of children, you know, Mrs. Adams. My own are the heartbeat of my life, you may ask any of my friends—”

Mrs. Sandhayes nodded, although she had imparted to Abigail on other occasions that her friend was unhesitating in her choice of her own convenience and pleasure over that of any of her children, having dispatched every one of them back to England for schooling at the earliest possible moment.

Abigail said, “Indeed,” and continued into the split second that the other woman was drawing breath to expand on the topic, “but I have the theory that she may in fact be in hiding. Mrs. Sandhayes said that she seemed upset and frightened on the day before she fled. I understand that you had been out with Mrs. Sandhayes that day,