A Marked Man

us: Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord God. Think you, before you accomplish any deed for your own willfulness or pleasure, What mark will this leave upon me? Some there are, for whom the mark obscures the whole of their faces, so that those who behold them see only that mark, and could not say, This man is dark or fair, or comely or otherwise, but only, This man bears a mark . . .”

Last night, thought Abigail. Last night Harry was supposed to be printing pamphlets in the basement of his shop on Cornhill, leaflets concerning the assault of a girl in Dorchester by two British soldiers who had crossed to that little village from their island camp to buy wood. These pamphlets, leaflets, and broadsheets appeared in taverns from Philadelphia to Maine, and westward deep into the backcountry, carried by the Sons of Liberty and trumpeting to all that the King’s efforts to tighten his hold on the colony were not merely a matter that concerned a few merchants in Boston or which townsmen would run for office. In many cases, Abigail was quite well aware, these incidents of violence between civilians and soldiers were either wholly fictitious or blown wildly out of proportion, though this assault had at least actually happened. John had written the original broadside, and by the time Sam had edited it and turned it over to Harry for printing, it was guaranteed to put men in a frame of mind to fight—

Was the murder charge simply a screen? Did the British really suspect that Harry had a printing press hidden in his cellar, one that they weren’t keeping an eye on the way they kept an eye on the Gazette and the Spy and the various other printers in town?

LISTEN to what the Reverend Cooper is saying . . . You cannot chide Johnny for reading John’s Bible, or even poor Nabby for sleeping, if your own mind is straying like a cow in a meadow. Discipline your mind, woman . . .

“For each deed leaves its mark, and God can read all of them upon our faces and in our right hands. And we cannot know which of these marks is the sign of the Cross, and which the number of the beast . . . Which, the Evangelist tells us, is the number of a man, and of the deeds of a man and not a beast. How can we know that what seems right to us, what seems natural, is not natural at all in the eyes of God? How can we know that what we seek will not mark us before those all-seeing eyes as those who have turned away from God, and from man, and from our own families, in pursuit of fleshy shadow?”

You wouldn’t leave us, if you were a slave, Nabby had asked that morning, and leaving us was the only way you could be free?

Was that in fact what that Negro Woman, twenty-three years old, well-spoken and rather freckled, had done?

Abandoned a two-year-old child and a baby at breast—tiny orphans who would be sold off for a dollar or two to spare Thomas Fluckner the cost of raising them—to seek her own liberty? What mark would she bear before the eyes of God who knew everything?

And what mark would Sam and John and Revere and all those others bear for putting the affairs of politics and rebellion before the commandment that the Sabbath should be kept holy?

The case is entirely different—

Any trace of heat had long ago faded from the fire-box at their feet. Vainly, Abigail wiggled her frozen toes. In the next pew, despite the discreet muffling of several layers of quilted petticoat, Abigail heard the thin tinkling of Mrs. Hitchbourne using what the French called a bourdaloue: a small, portable chamber pot named after a French bishop given to notoriously long sermons. Such devices were frowned upon in New England—Abigail had long disciplined herself to drink nothing at Sunday breakfast and had taught Nabby likewise— but in a fashionable church like Brattle Street, there were always those less fastidious in their observances than they should be.

She saw Johnny catch Nabby’s eye and giggle, and Abigail reached across to pinch the boy’s arm.

“How many seek out the Mark of the Beast for themselves, without which no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name? So consider your desires and whether they are worth the consequence. Is anything worth God’s punishment of exile, and vagabondage, and living as Cain lived on through the rest of his mortal span, out from the presence of the Lord? A man may say that it is permitted to do ill that good may come of it—but consider what mark that ill might leave upon our foreheads and our right hands. How can we do good in the sight of the Lord God, if the doing of it will transform us into the Servants of Ill? Will mark us, ourselves, with the Mark of the Beast that considers naught but the urgency of his own desires and claims them as good only because they seem good to him?

“I had planted thee a noble vine, saith the Lord, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?”

“Mama,” asked Johnny, as they retreated up the aisle at last, “if the Lord put the Israelites into the hand of the Midianites because they sinned, why did the Lord then help the Israelites slaughter the Midianites later? Weren’t the Midianites doing just what the Lord told them to do?”

“We can’t know what the Lord asked the Midianites to do,” explained Abigail, who had never been quite comfortable with this particular aspect of Predestination herself, “or how to do it.” She tucked Johnny’s scarf more tightly around his throat and over his head, thankful that both her children took after John in their sturdy strength. Poor Arabella Butler next door had just lost her three-year-old son, a fragile child she had vainly nursed through measles, fevers, sweats, and croup, and whose loss had left her desolate. “Perhaps the Midianites overstepped their instructions.” That’s what came of letting a critical, too-intelligent six-year-old get his hands on the Holy Writ.

“Yes, but if God knows everything from the beginning of Time, wouldn’t He have known the Midianites would oppress the Children of Israel that cruelly—?”

“Mrs. Adams—”

Abigail turned gratefully to meet the three women silhouetted against the queer snow-light of the doors that led from the vestibule to Brattle Street outside. The one who had spoken stepped forward, pushing back her cardinal red hood to reveal herself not a woman but a girl of sixteen: black-haired, blue-eyed, stout, and dressed in a vivid and stylish polonaise of mustard-colored silk that made her stand out among the sober dark garments of the congregation like a macaw in a chicken-run. “You may not remember me, m’am, but I’m Lucy Fluckner—”

“Of course I remember you.” Abigail smiled at the girl and held out her hand. “And Philomela—?”

Miss Fluckner’s maidservant curtseyed: slender as Miss Fluckner was buxom, quiet as Miss Fluckner was bossy, she had been, some three months before, the target of a religious madman whom Abigail had been instrumental in trapping. The third woman, older than either of the others, was still gazing about her with the precise expression of a schoolgirl at a raree-show, as if she couldn’t quite believe the Spartan plainness of the church vestibule or the somber garb of its inhabitants. When Lucy Fluckner introduced her—“Mrs. Sandhayes, Mrs. Adams”—she propped one of her canes against her wide, whaleboned panniers and extended two fingers only, in the manner of English ladies. “Well, I wouldn’t have believed it, m’am! Do this many people really come out on a morning like this to be told they’re all going to Hell?”

Abigail opened her mouth to snap a retort, but recalled that that was the deserved destination predicted by the Reverend Cooper for at least seven-eighths of the world’s population, past and present, if not more. So she merely gestured about her, at her neighbors crowding to shake the pastor’s hand, and replied, “As you see, m’am. I understand that in England, those who aren’t destined for Heaven don’t wish to know it,” and Mrs. Sandhayes laughed, a light, cheerful sound like shaken silver bells, which caused the grimmer stalwarts of the congregation like Fearful Perkins and old Mr. Gilbert to turn their heads and glare.

“Mrs. Adams, I came to beg your help.” Lucy drew back from the group around the outer door and back into the sanctuary, where the minimal heat from the small fire-boxes of coals brought by each family on so bitter a morning had managed to raise the temperature a degree or two during the course of the service. “And Papa would flay me if he knew I’d come to you, and throw poor Margaret”—she nodded toward her chaperone—“out in the street for letting me do it, because she’s supposed to keep me out of trouble, but you were so brilliant in helping Philomela . . . Really she was, Margaret. She can help us if anyone can.” She turned back to Abigail. “There’s been a murder.”