A Marked Man

and she has told me how much your observations are to be trusted—”

Not, in fact, a lie, she comforted herself.

“Did you see anything, on that Friday when you were out, that seemed odd to you? Out of the way?”

In the far (and coldest) corner of the room, where Philomela sat sewing with the dark-haired, diminutive girl whom Abigail guessed had to be Mrs. Hartnell’s Gwen, Abigail was conscious of quick movement. She turned her head to see Gwen look up and swiftly meet her eyes. Then, as quickly, the girl bowed her head again over her work. But Abigail knew she was listening.

“You remember, Caroline,” prompted Mrs. Sandhayes. “It was the day we went down to Merchant’s Row, and you found that astonishing piece of French lace, for truly dagger-cheap, and the pink satin shoes with the paste buckles—”

“Yes, yes, yes, of course!” cried the other woman. “How could I forget?”

“We were simply hours in that warehouse, and in the shops on the wharf,” said Mrs. Sandhayes. “Afterward I was half-froze and my feet felt as if I’d been bastinado’d, but I wouldn’t have traded for anything, you know.” And she smiled.

“No, no! Such a delightful day!”

“When you came back to the carriage,” said Abigail, wondering how even Mrs. Sandhayes’s devotion to fashion and “good society” could compensate her for even an hour of this woman’s conversation, “did Bathsheba seem upset or distressed in any way?”

“I don’t think so.” Mrs. Hartnell frowned uncertainly. “And surely—”

“But we didn’t leave them with the carriage, dear,” put in Mrs. Sandhayes. “Remember? We knew there would be a great many things to carry.”

“Of course!” Mrs. Hartnell broke into a smile. To Abigail, she confided, “Dear Hannah has been so generous, making sure poor Margaret has had a servant to go about with her. Really, not everyone would be so considerate of a guest.” She smirked happily, and Abigail was conscious of the sudden, slight rigidity Mrs. Sandhayes’s smile, at the reminder of her condition—and of the fact that for three months she had been living on Thomas Fluckner’s charity. “How she can have managed on the ship from England I can not imagine—”

“My dear, I lost the use of my legs, not my hands or my voice.” The thinnest touch of acerbity speared through the habitual sweetness of the Englishwoman’s tone. “It isn’t only servants who are willing to help a woman who is having trouble carrying her luggage.”

“Yes, but when one hasn’t a sou, one finds even the greatest gentlemen are so much less obliging,” responded Mrs. Hartnell blithely, and Abigail could not suppress the reflection that the chaperone was being paid back for some of her remarks in Philomela’s presence about the moral character of the servant class.

“So Bathsheba and Gwen were with you, pretty much, all that morning?”

“Indeed they were.”

“And you saw nothing amiss in Bathsheba’s behavior.”

Mrs. Hartnell frowned, more as if trying to decide why anyone would notice a servant’s behavior in the first place, than to recall what it had been on a day over three weeks ago.

“As you generally walked in the lead”—Mrs. Sandhayes smiled—“except of course when you so kindly took my arm in the crowds—I doubt you’d have had much chance to observe poor Bathsheba. Gwen, my dear—” She raised her voice slightly and beckoned Gwen Pugh from her corner, while her friend went back to feeding tidbits to Hercules, who all this time had been sitting happily on her lap and drooling into a hundred shillings’ worth of point lace.

“This is Mrs. Adams,” she introduced kindly. “And she is trying to discover what might have happened to Bathsheba. Do you remember the Friday Mrs. Hartnell and I went down to Hutchinson’s Wharf together? The last morning Bathsheba went out with us, before she ran away?”

The girl—who seemed to be in her early twenties, and was small and dark and rather shy—replied hesitantly, “I don’t remember clearly, m’am.” The coffee brown eyes went from Mrs. Sandhayes to Mrs. Hartnell, then swiftly, briefly touched Abigail’s before lowering to the carpet again.

“You do remember that Bathsheba seemed upset and forgetful, though? Mislaying things and missing the way walking back to the carriage?”

“Yes,” responded the girl obediently. “Yes, I do.”

“But she didn’t say what was troubling her?”

“No, m’am. That she didn’t.”

“And you didn’t see anyone speak to her, or give her anything, did you?”

“No, m’am.” Given the firm tone of the Englishwoman’s voice, it would have been astonishing, thought Abigail, had the girl had the courage to say anything else.

Rather vexed at this high-handed appropriation of what was supposed to be her investigation, Abigail asked, “Would you say that you were friends with Bathsheba, Miss Pugh?” and the maid looked up again, as if startled to be asked anything about her feelings at all.

“Yes, m’am. Bathsheba, she was all right. She told me who was the best tooth-drawer to go to, when I’d cracked my tooth on—”

“Gwen, I’m sure Mrs. Adams does not need details of your dental history,” laughed Mrs. Hartnell. “Really, the things servants will come up with if you encourage them!” Gwen’s cheeks colored, and she looked down in shame.

“Did Bathsheba ever speak to you,” asked Abigail gently, “of anyplace she would go—or anyone she would go to—if she were frightened, or in trouble? Was there anyone in Boston, or in the country round, that she had whom she trusted?”

“Mr. Barnaby, m’am,” said the girl promptly.

“’ Tis quite true,” put in Mrs. Fluckner. “Barnaby is very much the father to all the servants, which is of course as it should be. And speaking of servants—”

“That will be all, Gwen,” dismissed Mrs. Sandhayes. And the discussion of the enormities of the lower classes flowed over the tea table like an inexorable river. Abigail settled back and sipped her peppermint tea (on which both Mrs. Fluckner and Mrs. Hartnell had twitted her, as if standing against the King’s monopoly were some mental maggot or hobbyhorse), dissatisfied and troubled and very well aware that Mrs. Hartnell had told her very little, and Gwen, nothing at all.

Which was odd, given that most people were delighted to talk about events, particularly events connected with murders, disappearances, and conspiracies.

Or did Caroline Hartnell—like Margaret Sandhayes—simply consider her a provincial busybody?

Abigail’s eyes went back to the portrait of Hannah Fluckner—which could have been the depiction of any twenty-year-old girl some eighteen years ago—and then, troubled, to the two maidservants sewing in their corner. And so doing, her gaze crossed that of Gwen Pugh, and she saw in the girl’s dark eyes the wretched uncertainty of one who had lied, and knew she lied . . .

. . . and yet dared not speak the truth.

The maid turned her eyes quickly away.

Mrs. Sandhayes chirupped, “More tea?”

Seventeen

To lie about one’s activities is scarcely evidence of a conspiracy to murder a man she doesn’t know,” John remarked, when Abigail told him the tale of her morning call over dinner. “The woman might simply have been meeting a lover—”

“The two of them were in it together,” insisted Abigail. “Rather, I should say ’twas the Sandhayes woman who did the lying, for Caroline Hartnell quite clearly hasn’t the brains to find her way back from the outhouse if she ventures forth without a guide.”