A Marked Man

Good heavens, did Pattie or I forget to close it?

She had only to form the thought to discard it.

White tracks amply showed where the vermin had taken advantage of their opportunity . . .

And down behind the barrel, another mouse lay, as dead as the one still dangling from her hand.

On the shelf above the barrel lay the longest of her wooden spoons, whitened with flour for a good three- quarters of its length, as if someone—Who?—had stirred the barrel . . .

Had stirred something into the barrel . . .

Abigail put her hand over her mouth and felt herself go cold.

Dear Heavens . . .

Half a day later, he was taken sick . . . She heard Dr. Warren’s light voice in her mind. What does that sound like to you?

The man had come not to steal but, with a deliberateness that took her breath away, to kill every member of the household.

Twenty

For the love of Heaven, Nab, we don’t need to be calling Apthorp into this.” Cousin Sam thumped his hand on the parlor table with an impatience that rattled the half-empty cider-mugs. Not wanting to disturb the children any more than they already were, Abigail had chosen to confer with the men in this room rather than the more homey—and also warmer—kitchen. “I have a couple of friends who can get you into that house —”

“There has been quite enough breaking and entering in the past twelve hours.” Abigail glanced from Sam to Paul Revere to Dr. Warren—the latter, to his credit, looked shocked at the suggestion—and then back to Sam. “Just because the man’s a Tory and an Apthorp doesn’t mean he’s going to run to this mysterious Mr. Elkins and warn him that I want to see the inside of that house again. Besides, I need to speak to him about his tenant.”

“You think it was Elkins who came here last night, then?” Warren didn’t sound disbelieving, only curious about her reasoning.

“I think I should like to see if Mr. Elkins has a wounded ear,” replied Abigail. “He may not. He may have some perfectly legitimate reason for spending fifty shillings a quarter on a house he doesn’t seem to be living in—which coincidentally lies within easy walking distance of where Lieutenant Coldstone was shot.”

Though she was fairly certain she’d interrupted her visitor in the midst of his first task of the evening, she’d spent the hour or so between her discovery of the dead mice and the appearance of her three friends in response to her frantic notes, nailing shut and stowing in the attic not only the flour, but also the cornmeal and the cider, and her mind kept questing back to the other contents of the pantry . . .

Did poison wait for them there, too? She knew this was unreasonable but could not free herself of the panicky obsession. Greeks and Romans had poisoned one another with liquids as well as powders, and such a philtre might conceivably have been poured over or into the sugar as well . . . Would it have caused the sugar-loaf to change color?

She would have to ask Lucy, who seemed to be a girl familiar with the more lurid forms of fiction that might deal with such matters . . .

“A man lays out money like that only if he has good reason, and no good reason seems readily visible. Money also turns up in the room of the servant-girl Bathsheba, who disappeared two days after Cottrell left Boston. And now this actor, this Mr. Palmer, who had dinner with poor Fenton the night before he took sick, seems to have disappeared as well. We have a pattern, gentlemen”—she ticked off the points on her long, slender fingers —“money, poison, and people disappearing . . . I shall take Mr. Thaxter to Pear Tree House with me. Not simply for the sake of respectability,” she added after a moment. “But I’m starting to find it a bit unnerving, to go about alone.”

And you think this Mr. Elkins is connected with the Seaford sisters—the ones who killed themselves on Cottrell’s account?” Thaxter glanced around him and drew closer to Abigail as they emerged from the relative shelter of the houses along Southack Court and made their way along the frost-hard mud of one of the unfinished streets that crossed the northern slope of Beacon Hill. The river and the Mill-Pond, which had been dammed off it, both floated with chunks of ice, and the wind that swept across them and over the hill’s bare shoulder was wickedly cold. Having dispatched a note to Lieutenant Coldstone informing him of these new developments and having received from the same boatman a very polite thank-you from Lieutenant Dowling, Abigail spared a pitying thought for that very young sawbones, exiled from the warm Caribbean to ply his trade in the damp brick corridors of a fort in a half-frozen bay.

“I think he is connected with someone whom Cottrell harmed.” For Cottrell—also newly come to this brutally frigid land from the mild Indies—she felt no pity. Margaret tells me that this girl’s sister so griev’d the loss that she too died at her own hand. Heat flashed through her at Lucy’s words, rage so stifling that for a moment she was scarcely aware of where she was. She loved her scapegrace brother William, for all his faults, but the love for her sisters Mary and Betsy went deeper, twined around the roots of her soul. The world being what it was, she had tried to face in imagination what it would be like were brisk, busybody Mary to die in childbed, or spinsterish, beautiful Betsy of some disease in their parents’ home. Such things happened, and Abigail had prayed that should such an event come to pass, the God who had sent it would help her to bear it.

But had one or the other of these women—these souls who seemed as much a part of her as her own—died by her own hand, in shame and horror . . . would she, Abigail, be driven to end her own life rather than live without the sister she loved?

She didn’t think so. Yet she found herself contemplating with a certain hellish satisfaction the image of Sir Jonathan Cottrell, beaten half to death, lying conscious and freezing for some time in that alley before the darkness took him. Forgive me, Jesus . . .

She forced herself to add, And forgive him.

And soften my heart that I may actually mean those words. Because I don’t.

She realized she had been long silent. Her husband’s clerk was watching her face with the eyes of one who read her thought.

“Poor Mr. Fenton spoke of a number of women whom Cottrell despoiled,” she went on. “One at least had a lover for whose death Cottrell seems to have been responsible as well. A fulyear, Grannie Quincy says they used to call such a man: A man who dishonors women for sport. Of those women, only one—or two, if you count the poor sister—seems to have had family or friends in a position to seek vengeance for what he did. And even those, as John pointed out, may have had to wait until they had the resources to begin the pursuit.”

Her iron pattens scrunched in the hard-frozen mud as they ascended the hill toward Pear Tree House, its pink bricks very bright against the brown of the naked orchard. Thaxter put a hand, stout in its dogskin glove, beneath her elbow to steady her, until they reached the muck-drowned gravel of the drive.

“Unfortunately,” Abigail went on, “it will take at least six weeks for a letter to reach anyone who knew the Seafords in England for a description of the sister’s fiance Mr. Tredgold. Another six weeks or more for a reply. And it is beyond hope that by June, this town will not be entangled in such a confusion of reprisal and counterreprisal for the destruction of that miserable tea last December, at the very least . . . and in any case,” she added, “were it two weeks, I fear it will not save Mr. Knox.”

“It may not,” said Thaxter. “Yet all we need to do, really, is find a single point sufficiently telling to Colonel Leslie, for him to cancel the order for an Admiralty trial. And for that we need produce only the evidence that one who wished the Commissioner’s death with sufficient resolution was here in Boston and had the means to accomplish it.”

“You’re quite right, of course,” replied Abigail thoughtfully. “But more’s the pity, you’ve just given a description of Harry Knox.”