A Marked Man

Abigail regarded him in surprise—as far as she’d known, Thaxter had been at the jail interviewing another of John’s clients—but his eyes met hers and he nodded.

“He’ll be on the Salem Road—I sent a man after him. He should be back within the hour, sir. You could return, or—”

“No, please come in.” With a rush of gratitude for Thaxter’s unimaginative presence, Abigail straightened her back and stepped aside to let them pass. “You must be freezing, all of you. Lieutenant Coldstone—”

“Is unconscious, m’am.” The artillery officer hesitated before crossing the threshold, but the crowd was growing thicker, and the wind streaming in from the bay was sharp as broken clamshells. “He has been taken to the Watchhouse on the Common. The regimental surgeon has been sent for.”

Thaxter ushered them into John’s office, his matter-offactness putting the men in the position of ordinary clients. Mistaken rather than sinister. As he did so, she whispered, “Who did you send?”

“Jed Paley, on that spitfire mare of his. They should catch him no matter how far he’s got.”

“What happened?”

“I was at the jail when the town herd-boys ran in looking for the constable. They were shouting that someone had murdered a lobsterback in the Common—one of them said that a note from you was in his hand.”

With my signature on it for all the world to see . . .

“Even a Whig surgeon would not assassinate a British officer if he were brought in to care for him, you know,” Abigail pointed out to the artilleryman and removed her apron. “Not with all of you looking on. Would you gentlemen care for some hot cider? Or have you orders not to let me out of your sight? Ah, Pattie—These gentlemen have come to arrest me for setting an ambuscade to murder Lieutenant Coldstone this morning. I’m pleased to say I did not succeed.”

“Mrs. Adams was with me all the morning,” announced the girl, with commendable promptness.

“No, dear, you’re forgetting that I went down to the wharf an hour ago, to send the Lieutenant a note,” Abigail corrected her. “Which must be still on its way to Castle Island—”

Unless the boat capsized in this weather. Had Abigail been a swearing woman, she would have done so at the thought.

“Miss Clarke.” The senior of the two constables held out the note to Pattie. “Is this your mistress’s hand?”

“No, sir,” stated Pattie, before she unfolded the paper.

“But ’tis very like,” said Abigail.

The girl looked at the paper, uncertain about admitting anything, then nodded. “Yes, m’am.”

No wonder the British complain Massachusetts witnesses never tell the truth!

“Mr. Thaxter,” said Abigail, “is there a way that I can go to the Watchhouse to see how Lieutenant Coldstone does, without prejudice to my cause or the construction placed upon my action that ’tis an admission that I’m submitting to arrest? I—Oh, Mr. Revere, thank goodness!”

All the men turned, as Paul Revere—who had come in as usual through the kitchen—appeared in the study door. The artillery officer scowled—evidently familiar with his name—but the constables greeted him as an old friend and thrust the incriminating evidence into his gloved hand.

“It reached Lieutenant Coldstone on one of the last of the provision boats yesterday,” said the senior man, whom Abigail recognized as one of those men long active in ward politics in the town. “His sergeant says they came ashore at Rowe’s Wharf on the first boat—”

“Sergeant Muldoon is with him?” broke in Abigail, relieved, and the constable nodded.

“The Lieutenant left Muldoon in the Mall near the work-house and crossed the Common toward the Great Elm alone, with the words to the effect that the note said nothing of another’s presence. Sergeant Muldoon said the Lieutenant had almost reached the elm when he heard a shot and saw the Lieutenant fall. He ran toward the place. He said he did not notice anyone fleeing and had no idea from which direction the shot came. But the Powder-Store is somewhat less than two hundred yards from the elm, at the top of a hill, and that hill, and the copse at its foot, would have covered a single attacker’s retreat.”

“Good shooting, whoever he is,” Revere commented. He went to the desk, and from the top of one of the neat stacks of correspondence there took a letter that Abigail had written to John some weeks ago, when he was at a trial in Worcester. “You generally sign yourself A.A., do you not, m’am?”

“It is my usual signature. Sometimes I’ll sign A. Adams, but not as a common thing.”

Revere held out both papers to the senior constable. “See how the line widens at the tail of the g,” he said, “where the forger tries to imitate the curve of Mrs. Adams’s hand, and where the g in great stands isolated from the r? Mrs. Adams’s hand connects it there, and there. The shape of the tail is completely different, too, as you will notice.”

While trying to recall whether she habitually connected her g’s to their parent words or not—or whether these so-called proofs were in fact just slips of a badly cut pen—Abigail reflected that had that difference not existed, the sharp-eyed silversmith would have found any of a dozen others. He was a man used to looking for details, but it was a lawyer’s riposte, one that she—and Revere— had seen John use any number of times to parry an enemy’s attack by throwing doubt upon the evidence. By the constable’s frown of concentration—and his slow nod—she could see that it worked.

“Might we go to the Watchhouse?” she asked. “Lieutenant Coldstone is my friend . . .” She bit back the words, And I trust there are enough of you gentlemen to prevent me from murdering him on sight. Knowing the constables, they would undoubtedly take her seriously and arrest her on the spot.

The Watchhouse that stood at the foot of the Powder-Store hill was barely larger than Abigail’s bedroom, a single whitewashed chamber with stone walls and a fireplace that wouldn’t have kept a bowl of gruel warm. The Common, a quarter mile north to south and twice that end to end, was a bleak and desolate place once the sun went down, and the open fields beyond it, over the slopes of Beacon Hill, largely deserted. The Hancocks and Olivers and Apthorps who held the great houses along Beacon Street wanted to make sure that in the event of trouble that their own servants couldn’t deal with, there would be constables within call.

As if the winds had whirled away Thursday’s strolling ladies and kite-flying children, the town pasture lay nearly empty under the scudding morning sky. The town cows, left in charge of the youngest and lowest-ranked herd-boy, were being slowly brought up from the other side of the meadow, and all the older herd-boys had already joined what amounted to a scattered crowd that milled about the Watchhouse. It was the usual Boston Mob, Abigail noted: prentice-boys and dock-laborers, and men who looked like tavern-servants. The eyes and ears of the Sons of Liberty . . . and of the smuggling-bands operated by half the merchants in Boston.

A number of these individuals were shouting insults and throwing stones and frozen cow-dung at the stolid red-clothed form of Sergeant Muldoon, who stood before the Watchhouse door with his musket at his side. One or two hooligans broke off at the sight of the artillery officer who had accompanied the constables to Abigail’s door, but the presence of a woman with them seemed to act as a deterrent to anything but shouts of “Fucking lobsterback!” and “Murdering pigs!”

“Excuse me a moment, m’am, gentlemen.” Revere strolled over to them. The shouting ceased at once, and the little knots of men and boys retreated. Some moved off around the hill, or into the brushy copse at the hill’s foot, but Abigail could feel their presence, like a tension in the air.

Muldoon kept his eyes very properly on the copse but spared a glance at Abigail as she came to his side; blue eyes troubled at the sight of her. “I shall want to speak with you later, Sergeant. Is that permitted, Constable?”

Rather than coming anywhere near the Watchhouse, Revere moved off, pacing the distance between the infamous copse and the Great Tree. Abigail knew why but considered the caution unnecessary. Did he really think the artillery major, unsupported by troops, would be such a fool as to attempt to arrest him in the teeth of the mob?

Lieutenant Coldstone had been laid on the table before the fire in the little building, with a third constable