A Marked Man

“Is well,” said Abigail. “The shot was meant for you.” She stepped close, avoiding the soldiers as they prepared the litter. “I sent you no note, Lieutenant. That is, I did send you a note, but ’twasn’t the one you received: that was a forgery.”

“What news?” he murmured. “Shocking news, you said—”

She bit back her protest that she’d had nothing to do with that particular communication, and only said, “I shall tell you later, Lieutenant. All is well for now.” She laid her hands over his and through both pairs of gloves could still feel how cold his flesh was. “But I must have your permission to see you—” She glanced at the artillery officer, who was frowning at her in a way that presaged future welcome by the authorities in the camp.

Coldstone nodded. Encouragingly, Lieutenant Dowling bent over him and said, “It will all be well, Mr. Coldstone. Beyond the loss of blood there is no mortal hurt.”

He started to withdraw, with a sign to the soldiers to proceed, and Abigail laid her hand on his sleeve. “Pray, sir, tell no one that.”

“I beg your pardon, m’am?”

Her glance went to the artillery officer, to the constables, calling them close. “Please, listen to me, gentlemen. Tell no one that Lieutenant Coldstone’s hurt is not mortal.” And, when they looked at her blankly: “Do you not see? A trap was laid for him, by whom we know not. Nor do we know when they will strike again, or how. Let no one see him—”

“Really, Mrs. Adams!” exclaimed the artilleryman. “In the safety of the camp—”

“As few as may be, then . . . and myself.”

He looked as if he had something else to say about that, but Coldstone whispered, “Let it be as she says. She is right.”

“Enough now, sir.” Lieutenant Dowling stepped forward again, a trifle diffidently, and signed again to the soldiers. “We must take you across to the island, before the gale freshens further. Mrs. Adams—” He turned to her as the men began, with the competence of those who’ve handled the wounded on the field of battle, to shift Coldstone over onto a litter. “Is there one in Boston who deals in these herbal simples you’ve spoken of? In the islands it was the Negro midwives, and one had to go to the slave-dances to find them—”

“I shall make up a packet for you,” she said, “and have it sent across before the day grows dark. I grow them myself, and dry them—my mother, and my mother-in-law, send others across from our family farms.” She flinched, as a cry was wrung from the patient when they settled him on the litter, and she turned to take his hand again. “Remember, when they carry you out, to do your best to look like a dying man, sir,” she instructed briskly, and Coldstone managed the flicker of a smile.

“Endeavor—to convince . . .” His fingers closed weakly around hers. “News,” he said. “What was it? Shocking—”

She shook her head, “Later,” she said. And then, when he gripped her hand as she tried to draw it away: “The name of the girl who hanged herself over Cottrell. What was it?”

“Seaford.” His eyelids slipped closed again. “Sybilla Seaford.”

“And her sister?”

Breath and consciousness went out of him with a sigh.

Nineteen

If the would-be killer were watching, Abigail knew it would be better to have herself taken out of the Watchhouse surrounded by constables, as though she were under arrest. But she could think of no way to do this without having the rabble attempt to rescue her—certainly she could think of no way to convince the harassed artillery officer to go along with the charade. The soldiers who manned the British batteries at either horn of the mile-wide crescent of Boston Harbor seldom emerged from behind the palings of their garrisons, and with good reason. Vastly outnumbered, it would not take much of a confrontation for someone to start shooting . . .

Which is all we’d need, with the King and Parliament convinced we’re a rabble of traitors because we refuse to submit to arbitrary taxes.

It was all Harry would need, she reflected a moment later, when he came before the Admiralty Court—

No. She thrust the thought from her mind. We can’t let it go so far. One way or the other, we cannot let him be taken aboard the Incitatus . . .

But as she followed the stretcher-party out the door of the Watchhouse, she could think of no way of stopping the event.

Coldstone had promised he would try to be appointed for the defense. She shivered as she looked down at the young man’s waxen face. And shivered again at the thought that the would-be killer was a good enough shot with a rifle to hit a man at nearly two hundred yards—

—and that Lieutenant Coldstone might not have been the man’s only target.

Fortunately, the Common was the widest space of open ground in Boston, and the only possible cover—the copse of brush at the bottom of the Powder-Store’s unkempt hill—had been thoroughly overrun with prentice-boys, ruffians, and smugglers, and probably thoroughly searched by Paul Revere as well.

She saw she had been right, too, in her guess that Revere would send for reinforcements the moment two other soldiers appeared on the scene. The mob formed a loose ring around the little cluster of stretcher-bearers, constables, and soldiers, at a distance of about twenty yards: idly loafing, looking about them as if they had by coincidence all decided at once to take a walk on the Common that morning. But many of them carried cudgels, or the short clubs used by the men at the ropewalks for beating cable; some openly bore guns. She knew that they’d stay with the shore party down to Rowe’s Wharf.

“ ’ Twill be a savage crossing for poor Coldstone,” she murmured to John, who came forward out of the ring of men, leading his borrowed horse, as she fell back from the stretcher-bearers. “But I suppose if we were to offer Lieutenant Dowling the spare room in which to remove the bullet, and to keep the Lieutenant there to recover, that artillery captain would suffer an apoplexy.”

“As would Cousin Sam,” returned John. “Not to mention every one of our neighbors, when I ride out for Haverhill Monday morning. Will you never cease being a scandal, woman?” he asked, with a grin at Abigail’s shocked expression. “For a good Christian you’ve a surprising innocence of heart.”

“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” she retorted.

“Then shame upon the whole length of Queen Street, because mal pense is precisely what everyone will do . . . and does, given your penchant for making friends with handsome British officers. Besides,” he added, clearly enjoying her outrage at the thought that anyone would read scandal into her meetings with Coldstone, “you’d never separate that sergeant of his from him, and what would we do with the man? Let him sleep in the kitchen? Then there’d be trouble from one end of the town to the other, about British troops being quartered upon civilians—”

They followed the litter-bearers down Winter Street and past the Governor’s house on Marlborough Street, men and women coming out of homes and shops to gawk—and some to join the mob. Abigail saw Revere and Ben Edes—the publisher of the Gazette—and young Robbie Newman in the crowd, and at one point thought she glimpsed Cousin Sam. But the Sons of Liberty had no intention of permitting another Massacre. The four soldiers clustered more tightly together but did not break their disciplined step, and in the whole of the company, no one shouted.

There was only a low murmur, like bees when a hive swarms. For her part, Abigail felt uneasily conscious of the number of upper windows they passed between, and as the houses thickened on either side, she walked closer to John.

“I’m sorry you had to return.”

“It couldn’t be helped. I’d hoped to have Sunday there to walk about and see the town, but if I leave at first light Monday, ’twill be the same.” Abigail reflected guiltily that had the weather worsened today, while he was on the road, he would have had the choice of passing the Sabbath at some point in between. Now he had lost that leisure, and the thought of obliging him to do thirty hard miles, in so rough a gale, in order to reach Haverhill on