A Marked Man

Monday was as bad as the thought of poor Lieutenant Coldstone being tossed and thrashed on a military launch between Rowe’s Wharf and the island camp.

“I would stay here if I could, Nab. Yet I fear they’ll have put Mrs. Teasel in the town jail, and God only knows where and with whom her children will be disposed—”

“I’ll be well, John. You know Sam will keep an eye on things.” Privately, given the spattering of rain and sleet that began as they detached themselves from the mob and made their way along Cornhill to Queen Street, Abigail was just as glad John had returned. The rain was sweeping in from the north and east, and would have made the road even as far as Salem a nightmare. By Monday it might be easier.

Or impassable.

“Pattie’s making dinner,” announced Nabby, hugging her mother as the family entered the kitchen. “Stew and Indianbread—Did the constables arrest you, Mama? Shim Walton says they did. He said they’d take you over to the Army camp, and if Papa came back and tried to get you out, they’d arrest him, too—”

“As you see,” smiled Abigail, “I was not taken over to the Army camp, and your father is perfectly safe and will be going to Haverhill on Monday. No one is arresting anyone.”

“But that Lieutenant was murdered,” said Johnny, with a six-year-old’s ghoulish anxiety not to be cheated of at least a little bloodshed. “Was he not?”

Abigail started to say, Of course not, and then considered how much information the Sons of Liberty—and perhaps others—gleaned from the tales told by children in the streets. She said, “We won’t talk of it now, Johnny. Help your Father with—Is that Mr. Paley’s horse you borrowed to ride back on, John? Pattie, I cannot thank you enough—” She stripped off her cloak as she said the words, put on her apron and house-cap.

While John fretted and reviewed with Thaxter all the details of the Teasel case that had to be dealt with, Abigail made up a packet of willow-bark and Saint-John’s-wort, yarrow and coral bells, for young Lieutenant Dowling, but guessed that no one would be crossing to the island this afternoon. As she packaged up the mild- smelling simples, she found her thoughts returning to Braintree, where her sister-in-law and John’s redoubtable little mother—a widow now on her second husband—had grown these things and sent them on to her. Closing her eyes, she felt for a moment that she could reach out and touch not only the warm summer afternoons on the farm there, but the peace of a world separated from Boston’s politics, Boston’s grime, and Boston’s violence. What were the analogous plants in Barbados, she wondered, that young Lieutenant Dowling sought out the Negro midwives to buy?

Was this something she could ask him in her note, and would he respond?

The rain increased, hammering the black, wet roofs of the town, driven sidelong by the northeast wind. As she chucked wood onto the fire after dinner, while John brought in bucket after ice-cold bucket of water to heat for the family baths, Abigail wondered how Harry was faring in that dank and icy cell. Both Billy Knox and Lucy, she knew, had tried to get food, books, and clothing to him, and had had them sent back. Had the Provost Marshal let him keep even what she’d brought him?

They must have. They couldn’t . . .

A dark shape crossed the wavering gray curtains of the rain, loomed by the back door. Abigail hastened to open it and saw that it was Philomela. “I can’t stay but a moment, Mrs. Adams,” said the girl, “and such an uproar as there is, over this shooting, and Mr. Fluckner claiming ’twas only to be expected with traitors going unpunished everywhere in Boston, and Miss Lucy—” She shook her head, and held out a note. “But Miss Lucy said that you would want to know this, m’am.”

Mrs. Adams,

Mr. Barnaby told me his brother-in-law sent him word today that poor Mr. Fenton died in the night.

Yrs faithfully,

Lucy Fluckner

On those nights when John knew he must rise betimes, to be ready to take to the road the moment there was light enough in the sky for the ferrymen to make out the crossing to the mainland, he could fall asleep quickly and sleep like the dead.

Abigail wasn’t sure what woke her in the small hours of Monday morning. The rain that had hammered Boston through Sunday morning had gradually lightened, though the wind remained strong—but she was used to the sounds the house made on windy nights.

Something in her dream, then? A troubling dream about sitting at David Fenton’s bedside, listening to his whispered ramblings. Only sometimes it wasn’t the servant who lay dying in that dark and chilly attic room above the Governor’s house, but Lieutenant Coldstone, very young and vulnerable-looking without his wig. Folded notes littered the blanket all around him, all of them in her own handwriting: she kept opening and reading them, looking for the one she had actually written, filled with a despairing sense that even if she found it, she could not prove the others had not been written by her as well. If she failed, they would send her to Halifax to be tried and hanged, unless she betrayed John and her children, her sisters, and her parents. . . . The ship was at the dock, waiting for her, dark masts swaying in the wind, rigging creaking—

She heard something in the house below her and knew it was the cover being slammed on the well in the cellar.

Her eyes opened to the inky darkness of their curtained bed.

How foolish. There’s no well in our cellar.

John’s breathing was slow and deep and utterly peaceful at her side. A restless sleeper at the best of times, she wanted to reach across and shake him out of sheer annoyance.

Messalina, she thought. Whoever had invented the phrase graceful as a cat had never seen Messalina hunt.

But even as her mind framed the thought, she knew it wasn’t the cat.

The fire had been banked; the bedroom was glacial and dark as Erebus. Yet in nearly two years of residence, Abigail had learned the exact number of steps that would carry her to its door, and that door’s exact relationship to the bed. Charley had been barely a year old when John had bought this house, and Johnny only four. At such ages there were nightmares beyond the power of a mere older sister to hold at bay. Charley especially was prone to them, and within the first weeks here Abigail could traverse the house from the room where she slept with John— and in those days tiny Tommy as well—to that shared by the other children, in utter darkness.

She gathered up candle, striker, flint, and slipped into the hallway, where she stood listening for a time in the darkness. No sound from the children’s rooms. In any case, something about what had wakened her—if it had been a sound that had done so—had said to her, Deeper in the house.

In the hallway she stooped to strike light, where the new tiny brightness wouldn’t wake John (as if the Last Trump would wake John . . . !). When she stood, she knew what was wrong. The candle- flame leaned, ever so slightly, to the left, toward from the tight, square spiral of the stair. It straightened almost at once, but Abigail knew every chink and draft and crochet of the house. The door at the bottom of the stair never fit quite right, especially in the winter; in the daytime, when there was coming and going from the kitchen, close it how she would, there was always a whisper of a draft.

There was a window open downstairs.

She thought—and later could not believe she could have been so stupid—only that in barring the shutters, Pattie had been hasty. There was one in the kitchen whose bolt never fit quite right into its slots. Just as it had simply failed to occur to her that anyone could or would attach scandal to her friendship with the extremely comely Lieutenant Coldstone, it never crossed her mind that a window would have come open in the middle of a very windy night due to anything but accident. What she should have done, she knew in hindsight, was to go back into her room immediately and fetch John, dawn departure or no dawn departure.

What she did was descend to the kitchen, soundless as a ghost in her quilted blue nightgown, and cross to the window in question—which was open, shutters and casement both—and reach out to pull the shutters closed.

She didn’t know what made her turn. Messalina, she later thought—the cat came bolting out of the pantry, fleeing for the hall door, which Abigail had left open behind her . . . Turning, she saw in the almost total gloom the