A Marked Man

unmistakable shape of a man standing in the pantry.

Her start gave her away, and her first instinct—always her downfall—was to cry, “Here!” almost as if, like a disobedient child, he would surrender.

Instead he rushed her. He covered the distance with snake-strike speed, and Abigail—at first immobilized with shock—snatched up the nearest object to hand—a chair—and swung it at him with the whole strength of her back. He dodged, lunged, and Abigail had time only to think, I’ve seen him before—when the candle was struck from the table where she’d set it, and strong hands grabbed her shoulders, swung her in the darkness. Abigail twisted, grabbed at the man’s head—felt her hands seize an ear and heard the hiss of agonized fury in the second before she was slammed to the floor on top of the chair.

She cried out with pain, and then, belatedly, screamed at the top of her lungs. Somewhere upstairs she could hear John shouting “Nab? NAB—!!” and she screamed, “MURDER!” because it was easier than screaming Burglary! And she didn’t think of it and was in too much pain in her ribs, her knee, her head. She could hear her burglar blundering and scrambling close by—trying to find the window—and she screamed again, hoping to get not only John but Tom Butler from next door. It was too dark to see anything, but she felt the cold and smelled the wind when the burglar succeeded in slamming open the shutters, and she heard the splat when he got through the window and fell.

I hope he’s broke his leg . . . Then she heard his footfalls slap-slap-slap on the mud of the passway, and out to Queen Street.

John flung himself through the kitchen door, and she shouted, “I’m all right! He’s gone!”

John had a candle and a stick of firewood held like a club, and was already halfway to the window. He wheeled, dropped to his knees at her side. “Nab—”

“I’m all right.” This wasn’t entirely true. She felt like she’d fallen out of a tree, in more pain than she’d been —with the exception of childbearing—since her own childhood, and she fought not to weep for fear it would frighten him. He caught her up in his arms, and she heard more footsteps pattering upstairs, followed by the caroming of slight bodies off the stairwell walls and Pattie’s cry, “Johnny, no!” and then a wild clatter: Johnny had obviously come downstairs armed.

“You’re bleeding.” John caught her hand. Pattie brought another candle into the room and, with commendable presence of mind, went straight to the candle-box and set a dozen on the table beside which Abigail and John sat, next to the felled chair.

Abigail looked at her hand. There was blood under her nails. “I think it’s his.” With John’s hand beneath her arm she got unsteadily to her feet, and the children—who had hung back in shocked horror at the sight of their mother sitting on the floor, bruised and disheveled in her robe—flung themselves on her, Charley and Tommy bursting into loud tears.

There was of course no question of anyone getting to bed that night. John listened to her account of the robber with a detached attention that Abigail found far more comforting than repeated assurances of thankfulness that she’d taken no hurt, interrupted almost at once by the arrival of Tom Butler from next door and both his apprentices, armed with a pistol and a very fearsome hammer. He was succeeded almost at once by Ehud Hanson—a shoemaker who lived on the other side—his younger brother, and his formidable wife, also armed; the Watch arrived minutes later. While Abigail was assuring them all that she was well (“And get those children to bed, Pattie, please—”), John checked the drawer of the sideboard in which the household cash was kept. “He didn’t get that, in any case,” he remarked, and disappeared into his study, emerging almost at once with the report that nothing there seemed in the slightest disturbed.

“You must have surprised him just as he entered and was looking his way about.” John disappeared into the pantry and came out again with a pitcher of cider, which he poured into the smallest of the pots on the hearth to heat. Abigail, on the settle next to the hearth—Pattie had stirred up the fire—started to rise, then sank down again with a wince. Even sitting for a short while had stiffened bruises she hadn’t known she’d acquired. Distantly, she could hear the clock of the Brattle Street Meeting-House striking four.

Mrs. Butler had put in her appearance by this time, semi-dressed and with her hair hanging in a braid, and while Abigail was reassuring her in her turn that she was well and stood in no need of assistance, John disappeared again, to come back downstairs a few minutes later dressed, wigged, and carrying his saddlebags. “Will you be all right?” he asked, after he’d tactfully but firmly shoved the cooper’s well- meaning wife out the door. “Nab, forgive me—”

“No, you have thirty miles to ride—”

“Were I not sure that my client has spent the past three days in the town jail, I would stay, but I cannot, Nab. If it rains again, God knows how long ’twill be—”

“No, of course you must go! Wherever her children are, you know no one in town will be caring for them, if all are saying their mother’s a murderess. I’m bruised, ’tis all. ’Tis as if I fell down the stairs.” She opened her mouth to begin, I didn’t want to tell you before others, but I knew the man. I’ve seen him, I know it . . .

Then she thought of the child Marcellina, and tiny Stephen fretfully sucking at the spouted milk-cup held for him by Mrs. Barnaby, and of how the world treated the children of paupers. The sooner John got to Haverhill, the better for those unknown offspring of his client.

She closed her lips again.

The light of a single candle, darkness and confusion . . . Had she seen her assailant before? She groped in her mind, trying to recall where, and couldn’t even be sure that her impression was an accurate one. The prominent chin, the long nose emerging from beneath the shadow of his hat, the dark brows: a fleeting sensation of recognition, based upon what? One of the loafers around the Watchhouse yesterday? Someone passing in the street?

It was nearly time to do the milking. The herd-boys would be blowing their tin trumpets in the street before long. Gently rejecting Pattie’s offer of assistance, Abigail went upstairs and dressed, and came down again to find John and the children devouring a scratch breakfast of the last heel-ends of Friday’s bread, and the cider that he now poured steaming from the kettle. Baking tonight. “I shall be home Wednesday,” John promised, and went out to the stable with her, saddling Balthazar while she and Nabby milked. “Thursday at latest.”

Then he was gone, and in spite of herself, Abigail felt a shiver of dread, watching him ride away through the first chilly dimness of the wind-lashed dawn.

I know I saw him before.

But what did I see?

Thaxter arrived. He and Johnny did the stable chores before the two older children left for school. When they were gone and Thaxter settled in John’s office to copy documents, Abigail sank down onto the settle again, with the queer shakiness of exhaustion. Just after the burglary, she had felt clear-headed and strong: What’s the matter with me now? I’ve dealt with worse. Those Roman matrons one reads about could defend the city’s walls in the morning and bake bread in the afternoon without turning a hair.

“Are you sure you don’t want to lie down a little, Mrs. Adams?”

She looked up with a start, to see Pattie standing beside her.

“I can clean the kitchen, and get the bread started, and get you up in time to get the dinner begun, if you feel able for it. You don’t look any too well.”

“Maybe I will rest a little.” Abigail got to her feet, and flinched in earnest. She turned toward the stairs and then stopped, something tugging at her mind—“Tommy,” she said, shocked, “what have you got there?”

Though it was quite obvious that what Tommy had there was a dead mouse. She and Pattie reached the boy in a couple of strides, though he tried to duck back into the pantry with his prize. Messalina, thought Abigail . . . Did our visitor last night dodge back into the pantry and interrupt her at her kill?

She took the mouse by the tail and moved toward the back door, then stopped again.

There was no blood on its fur. Rather, its whiskers and paws were powdered with flour . . . Oh, not again! Above all things, Abigail hated to have to throw out flour because rodents had somehow managed to get into it, despite every precaution of barrels and bags. She glanced back at the flour-barrel, expecting to see a telltale track that would show where it had been gnawed through . . .

And saw that the barrel was open.