Thurlow Apthorp waited for them, just within the doors of the Pear Tree House. He appeared relieved to see that Abigail’s escort was her husband’s very respectable young clerk and not some shaggy mechanic. He seemed, too, genuinely troubled by Abigail’s information that she suspected that Mr. Elkins had something to do with—or at least some knowledge of—the shooting that had taken place on the Common the previous day: “Please understand that we have no accusation to make against him,” said Thaxter, not entirely truthfully but certainly within the letter of the law. “But events having taken the turn that they have, it is imperative that we speak to Mr. Elkins as soon as may be.”
“There’s the trouble, sir,” replied Apthorp worriedly, and he shut the door to exclude the whipping draft. The tall central hall settled again into the semblance of a well filled with shadow. “Mr. Elkins has not come into the Man-o’-War to pick up his letters—”
Abigail was already aware of this fact from Sam, since a couple of the Sons of Liberty were watching the place.
“—and I’ve no means of reaching the man until he does.” He added, as if he feared they thought such a course might have slipped his mind, “I have written him.”
This, too, Sam had reported. His informants had gotten a good look at the letters waiting under the tavern’s counter.
“Of course you have,” said Abigail soothingly. “And the matter being one of suspected violence against officers of the Crown, your permitting us use of the house again in your tenant’s absence is certainly not actionable.” She looked around her again at the high walls with the single stairway leading up one side, the cold light from the window above the door lending a kind of pallid illumination to the upper reaches and almost none down below. The sickly odor of death had faded, yet she still led the way as quickly as she could into the drawing room that was the only fully furnished chamber in the house. “Has Mr. Elkins never spoken to you, when coming or going from the town, of which direction he would travel in? Or of where he might have been, ere coming to New England?”
“Britain, I’ve always assumed. At least, he always paid me in British coin.”
“What, all of it?” It was the other question she had meant to ask, and Abigail felt a little as she had when, as a child, she’d pegged the bull at darts three times in a row, something even William couldn’t do.
The householder nodded, and Abigail’s glance crossed Thaxter’s. Then Thaxter moved off toward the dining room, Apthorp bowing to Abigail to precede him . . .
She paused, frowning at the closed door behind her. “Did Mr. Elkins say why he had the latch removed from this door?”
“Latch?” He stared at her in surprise.
Abigail’s gloved fingers brushed the holes in the wood of the door itself, and its frame. “Was there not a bolt here?”
Apthorp shook his head: “Why on earth would anyone want to bolt the door to the
He looked at the door into the dining room, then opened it and checked the other side. Abigail followed— rather carefully, as the shutters still covered the ground-floor windows—and checked as well. “Odd.” She crossed back to the door into the central hall, knelt in a rustle of quilted petticoats, and peered at the holes in the gloom. “It looks like a bolt—can you get those shutters open? Thank you! And the holes look fresh.”
She got to her feet. “Let us see if other doors were used the same way.”
They made a circuit of the ground-floor rooms, which were laid out around the central hall, and the pattern became immediately evident: all doors leading into the hall bore the same pattern of nail-holes on their inner sides. When the searchers climbed the stairs and checked the rooms above they found it so upstairs as well. “What on earth was the man afraid of?” asked Thaxter, as they came down the stair again. “None of the communicating doors between room and room, so he expected . . . What? That someone might be able to get into the hall— through the front door or that upper window above it—while he slept? But who?”
“And would it not have been simpler to have told his servant to bed down in the hall?” inquired Apthorp.
“I don’t think we’ve established yet that Mr. Elkins possesses a servant,” murmured Abigail, opening the dining room shutters and examining again both sides of the door from drawing to dining room. “Nor that he ever spent a night under this roof.”
“It makes no sense!”
“It does,” contradicted Abigail softly. “But in a context of which we’re ignorant.”
“The context is that the man’s clearly mad,” declared Apthorp. “Who would have thought it? Such a gentlemanly young man . . .”
On her search this time, Abigail looked into every drawer and jar in the kitchen, though she admitted to herself that it was hardly likely that the mysterious Mr. Elkins would have left poisons in an empty house for anyone to find. The upper floors and attic proved as devoid of poison-pots, weapons, or little chests of British coin as they had upon the previous occasion—even the attic contained none of the trunks and disused furniture that could have provided hiding-places for such apparatus of villainy. The shuttered window casements showed no sign of having been opened in years. The house being fairly new, there were no loose boards in walls or floor, and no join of truss to king-post in all the maze of rafter-work had been made to serve as a hiding-place for anything but years-old rat- nests. Boots had scuffed the dust on the floor, it appeared, only once. She found one clear track, its length and thinness seeming to echo Apthorp’s earlier description of the man they sought. Nothing more.
The fact that the rather epicene gentleman the householder had described didn’t sound to her capable of beating another man to death she put aside. Sir Jonathan had not been a big man, either, and if Mr. Elkins were indeed Mr. Tredgold, cold vengeance would undoubtedly have lent strength to his slender arm.
Candles were lighted, but because the house was built rather high, small, stoutly barred windows admitted a gray and dismal light to the whitewashed cellar. Like the attic it was virtually bare, containing not even the spare stores of firewood that choked the corners of Abigail’s own cellar at Queen Street, much less the usual cellar impedimenta of potato-bins, broken milk-pails, and sealed crocks of vinegar, butter, and cheese.
Though the room was three times the size of Abigail’s, the place oppressed her. Despite its cover, the well exuded a dampness that seemed to eat into her bones. Even in prosaic daylight, the pulley that hung above the well-curb still had the look of some sinister implement of torture, and she felt a strange unwillingness to touch the square wine-box, as if it contained the unspeakable.
It did not, even upon second inspection.
She sat back on her heels, her breath a thick cloud and her toes growing swiftly numb. “Will you open the well?” she asked.
Thaxter lifted the heavy cover. It was designed, Abigail observed, so that it could be closed even when the wine-box was lowered into its cooling depths. This time, when Abigail dropped a lighted candle-end into the Stygian depths, it vanished with a prompt little plop—evidently the slight warming of the past two windy weeks had been enough to melt the ice. “Is there a pole, or a hook of some kind, that we can use to plumb the well?” she asked, and Apthorp regarded her again in bafflement, as if asking himself if his somewhat Gothic tenant weren’t the only person in the case who was mad.
“Whatever for?”
“ ’ Tis the only container in the house I haven’t looked into,” she replied. “I don’t mean to leave until I’ve seen all there is to see.”
No pole in the kitchen or the stables proved long enough, so in the end Abigail lowered the bucket-hook down on the end of its chain, weighted with a couple of small stones from the garden bound onto it with twine. More
