A Marked Man

twine looped around the chain gave her a sort of leading-string by which she could drag the hook back and forth in the lightless depth. Apthorp only watched in puzzled fascination, but after a little, Thaxter asked, “What do you hope to find, m’am?”

“I have not the faintest idea. But someone was killed in this house—in the front hall, I think, by the smell of it—” Apthorp looked like he’d have visibly blenched, had the light been better. “If Mr. Elkins is as clever and thorough as he has been so far, we should find nothing—”

The hook snagged on something, held for a moment, then came free.

Abigail shut her teeth hard upon a sudden qualm of nausea at the thought of what it might be.

Twenty-one

I doubt it’s a man.” Abigail kept her voice steady with great effort. Her brother William— and any number of her older Smith and Quincy cousins in and around Weymouth—had outdone themselves in their efforts to shock and sicken the parson’s three stuck-up daughters, and the half-wild countryside had abounded in dead cats, maggoty bird-corpses, cow-dung, and other gooey and odiferous evidences of Nature’s ability to break down mortality into its component elements. Mary had gotten angry, and little Betsy had squealed and squirmed, but Abigail had regarded it as a matter of honor to meet all such attempts with calm sangfroid—an attitude that she guessed would stand her in good stead a few years hence, as the mother of three boys.

She felt a strange—and very ancient—stirring of gratification at the expressions of queasy horror on the faces of the two men with her.

She went on, “I felt it start to come, before it pulled loose, and it felt too light. Besides, there’s no stink. How long is it, for a man’s body to float?”

Apthorp shook his head. Thaxter looked too disconcerted to even attempt a response. In the back of Abigail’s mind stirred the childhood recollection of Asa Shapleigh—who had been no loss to the Weymouth community—going missing and his body coming to the surface of Vinal’s Pond a week or two after he’d last been seen staggering away drunk into the woods.

“What is it?” Thaxter asked, when at last Abigail hauled up an object limp and dripping, glistening darkly in the light of the candles and the waning afternoon light.

Apthorp, who despite Abigail’s reassurances seemed to have feared that it would indeed be Bathsheba’s body, only looked profoundly relieved.

Gingerly handling the sodden folds—the cloth was unbelievably cold, even through her gloves—Abigail spread it out on the cellar floor.

“A shawl, it looks like.” She gently flapped the corners of the big rectangle to straighten them. “We need to dry it.” As near as she could tell, it was wool rather than silk, but with what daylight there was beginning to fade, it was impossible to distinguish color or pattern. Dropped a second time, the hook clinked and scraped a little on the irregularities of the well’s bottom, but encountered nothing similar: no clothing, no ropes, no shoes. Apthorp went upstairs, and after a little time came down with coarse toweling from the kitchen, and in this they wrapped the wet mass of cloth, to carry back to Queen Street.

“I suggest that you have the locks on the outer doors and the stables changed at once,” said Abigail, as Apthorp locked the house up after them. “The sooner the better, though I doubt Elkins will be back. If he is indeed this Mr. Tredgold—or anyone who sought to conspire against Sir Jonathan’s life—he has accomplished his end.”

“But why stay in Boston?” asked Thaxter, as they descended the bare slope of the hill again. “If he was the man who attacked you last night—”

“We cannot say for certain that it was Elkins.” Abigail shook her head. “Or who else might have been acting with or for him. Had I conspired to murder a man I had, perhaps foolishly, spoken of killing at some time in the past, I think I should personally make sure I had a regiment of witnesses that I was elsewhere on the night of his death . . . and that I did not announce my guilt by fleeing the morning the body was discovered.”

“Exactly like Harry, in other words.”

“Yes, well,” admitted Abigail, “perhaps we had best reword that theory, if and when we present our case to Colonel Leslie. I suspect,” she added more soberly, pausing to look out toward the harbor, where the masts of the dark ships rocked uneasily at anchor along Boston’s sixty-plus wharves, “that the main reason he’s still in town is that almost since the night of the murder, wind has kept all the oceangoing ships in port. If this is Mr. Tredgold we’re dealing with—or only his spiritual brother—having accomplished his vengeance, he’ll be returning to England now, to take up his life again—”

She paused, as the Reverend Cooper’s words returned from—When?—Two Sundays ago? Three?— How can we do good in the sight of the Lord God, if the doing of it will transform us into the Servants of Ill? Will mark us with the Mark of the Beast?

“To take up his life again,” she said softly, “if he can. If he was the local curate and has spent eight years tracking a man with the intention of doing murder in cold blood, I doubt he will find himself much suited for the care of anyone’s soul.”

The thought returned to Abigail later, as she found herself obsessively scrubbing and rescrubbing every apple, every potato, every carrot that she’d brought up from the cellar, having thrown down the outhouse anything edible that remained in the kitchen. This included things she knew intellectually must have been safe, like the butter in a crock still sealed (Agrippina the Younger of Roman infamy would have found a way to poison butter in a sealed crock . . .), and the cheese even after she’d trimmed away slices from its cut ends (How WOULD one poison a cheese?).

“This way lies madness,” she murmured to herself as she stood debating whether the new barrel of flour, delivered through Sam’s good offices, should be put under lock and key in the cellar, yet she spent the whole of the evening after dinner taking her own pulse, monitoring every ache and twinge of her joints (which, thanks to an afternoon spent in a damp cellar, were indeed in feverish pain by nightfall) and watching her children in surreptitious panic. She had told them nothing of the attempt to poison the family, but when the kitchen was cleared up and the lamps lit, she gathered them about her and informed them that the same Evil Person who had shot Lieutenant Coldstone might be also out to do them harm, and until she told them otherwise, none were to accept food or drink from anyone but herself, Pattie, Thaxter, or John.

“Will he try to poison us?” Johnny’s face glowed in hopeful delight.

“This is serious, John Quincy.” Abigail never used her son’s full name, save when matters were indeed grave. “’ Tis no game.”

“No, m’am.” He tried to readjust his features. “Is it the Tories?”

“I don’t know. I think so.” She salved her conscience with the fact that the money in the case definitely pointed to the British, and that was Tories, if you would. “You and your sister must keep a careful eye on the others.”

Nabby, standing at her side, said nothing, but slid a very cold little hand into hers.

In between her preparations for dinner, Abigail had written notes—dispatched via the various apprentices of Butler and Hanson on either side of the house—to Sam and Revere, Lucy Fluckner and Lieutenant Dowling, enclosing in the latter a message to be relayed to Lieutenant Coldstone, and this had kept her thoughts at least in the reality of what had happened, and away from speculation. But after dinner, in the last of the afternoon’s waning light, she had pried loose the cover on the contaminated flour-barrel and examined it by the attic windows, observing the thick streaks of a greenish gray powder, where it had been imperfectly stirred into the pale buff contents. Had her visitor had but a little more time, he could have mixed it thoroughly enough to conceal any adulteration.

She remembered poor Mr. Fenton’s sufferings: the thirst of the damned, the jaundiced agony as his liver died within him, the bloated features. She, and John, and their children would have died—in who knew what horrors?—