A Marked Man

and the blame would have fallen on some illness unknown.

Rage went through her in a wave of fever, burning her flesh to her ear-tips and hairline, and she no longer asked herself if the hypothetical Mr. Tredgold could or would have tracked Cottrell to the earth’s ends to avenge the suicides of Sybilla Seaford and her unhappy sister.

Johnny. Nabby. Pattie. John . . . Her own hands shook with fury.

God’s certain vengeance would be insufficiently swift. I would wrest the weapon of it from His hand, for the pleasure of striking the blow myself, though my soul were damned for the act.

And in the back of her mind she heard John’s voice—Would you really? Though your soul were damned for it?

Abigail didn’t know.

It was far too late for Captain Dowling to cross from Castle Island that evening, but Lucy Fluckner appeared only an hour after the arrival of a hastily scrawled note requesting the favor of an interview etc., etc. Bearing all the lamps that could be gathered, she followed Abigail upstairs to the attic where the jetsam of the well had been laid out to dry. The shawl was still wringing-wet and discolored, but the girl’s face grew grave as she viewed it. “That’s Bathsheba’s,” she said quietly, and glanced back at Philomela, her blue eyes sick with grief. “It used to be mine. There’s where I tore it climbing over the palings by the stable, and see where the fringe has been burned? I caught it in the bedroom candle. It’s Bathsheba’s.” Her gaze went to Abigail’s. “She really is dead, isn’t she?”

Abigail said gently, “Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf will look after Marcellina and the baby.” For Lucy had brought her the news that while all else had been going forward that day, the farmer Silas Greenleaf had arrived to take the two children back to Weymouth with him, for a childhood of hard farmwork and regular meals, until they should be old enough to be set free. “But us finding her shawl there in that house proves that her disappearance is after all connected with Cottrell’s death, somehow. Think, Lucy. What could she have learned about Cottrell? What could she have seen?”

“Could Sir Jonathan have dropped, or left behind, some token or paper when he attempted to force himself on Bathsheba in her room?” Lucy—whose imagination of the scene had clearly been influenced by certain well-defined genres of fiction—glanced back at her maidservant, as the women left the attic and descended the ladderlike stair to the bedroom floor. “Something she found later?”

“That told her what, m’am?” responded the black girl. “She said nothing of it to me. Nor of seeing him later, nor of any message sent to her from him.”

“But she was upset, shaken up, the day before she disappeared,” the girl pressed. “You said she burst into tears in the public street, Margaret.” As they reached the bottom of the flight, she turned appealingly to Mrs. Sandhayes, who had insisted on being helped up the narrow stairs from the hall, but whose lameness had met with defeat at the second ascent. “If it was something that fell or rolled, and she only found it later, or a letter that whisked under the bed—”

“Now, you know as well as I do, m’am,” Philomela corrected softly, “how tidy Sheba was about her room. That time when Mr. Cottrell followed her up to her room was five days before he left Boston. Nothing would have lain on the floor, even under the bed, for that long.”

“Could she have found out something about this Mr. Tredgold?” persisted Lucy, holding out her arm to help her companion down the twisting, narrow stair to the hall.

“Who?” Mrs. Sandhayes frowned.

“Mr. Tredgold. You remember me asking Fanny Gardiner about poor Miss Seaford, and you saying that her sister had killed herself . . .”

“Good Heavens, you don’t think a man would wait all these years to wreak his vengeance, like some hero of a Venetian melodrama? Thank you, dearest—” She took her sticks, which Abigail had carried for her, and hobbled painfully to the parlor fire. Pattie and Philomela disappeared together down the hall to the kitchen, whence Pattie returned a few moments later with a tea-tray of gingerbread and gooseberry tart.

“He might have needed time to gather up money for his pursuit,” opined Lucy. “I think a man whose beloved killed herself for grief never would forget, nor forgive . . .”

“My dear—” Margaret Sandhayes raised her painted brows, and her long, rather square mouth tightened into a bitter line queerly at odds with the girlish brightness of her maquillage. “I think as time goes on, you’ll learn that a man who needs to spend a couple of years gathering money to pursue revenge upon a friend of the King’s, whose friends are all in a position to help the bereaved suitor to preferment in the law or the Church or some other useful profession, generally comes to the conclusion that vengeance is best left to Heaven, long before he’s saved half the cost of passage to Spain or wherever it was the odious Cottrell fled to.” She took a piece of gingerbread, broke it in half, lifted the cup of chamomile tea to her lips, and then set both down with a grimace.

“It’s a rare man who will sacrifice his entire life—all his affairs—for the pleasure of bringing to justice a blackguard whom the King has already forgiven for his peccadilloes. Men simply have not the necessary concentration of mind.”

Lucy bristled. “Harry would avenge me. Whatever the cost!”

“Indeed he would.” Mrs. Sandhayes folded her hands. “Harry is different from all other men.”

“What was her name?” asked Abigail, since Lucy appeared on the verge of some very unwise assertions. “Sybilla Seaford’s sister, the one on whose behalf this Mr. Tredgold is or is not seeking revenge?”

“Alice? Alisound?” Margaret Sandhayes shook her head. “Something with an A, or maybe it was Juliana. Something like that. The scandal was supposed to be quite nasty while it lasted, but these things never do last, you know. We were living in Bath at the time, and Mama did her best to keep the details from me, though I was quite old enough to hear them. But then, our family never did move in the highest circles, and poor Mama got all her gossip secondhand. I think it far more likely that whoever it was who waited for Sir Jonathan at the end of that alley on the night of the ball, he had a fresher grievance than poor Mr. What’s-His-Name and had not sailed two thousand miles in the dead of winter to appease it.”

With this, Abigail was more than a little inclined to concur, particularly in light of what she knew about the behavior of men when confronted with preferment and privilege. John frequently derided the somewhat far-fetched premise of her favorite novel—Richardson’s Pamela—on the grounds that no man would put himself through the social contortions undergone by the sinister Mr. B—in pursuit of the blameless heroine, but lying in the curtained darkness of her bed listening to the wind howl, Abigail reflected that this was not really the point of the book. More telling than the interior wrestling-match between love and lust was the behavior of those whom Mr. B—coerced into complicity with his will: the parson who, needing a way to make a living in a country overcrowded with impoverished parsons, chose B—’s patronage over moral imperatives; the servants who would sooner assist their master in raping an unwilling girl rather than lose the only means of making their own livings.

Would a man, confronted with the suicide of his beloved, risk his own livelihood— and the inevitable countervengeance of the King’s so-called justice—to commit murder when that royal justice had officially ignored what was, in effect, a moral rather than a legal offense? John’s powerful sense of duty had taken him away from her side tonight—and in her heart she prayed he wasn’t still out on the road between Salem and Haverhill somewhere, with the sleet flying about his ears. She could not imagine any respectable hero in a novel choosing his responsibility for making a living for his family—not to mention getting his client out of jail and making sure her children weren’t consigned to a cellar someplace—over staying on guard against an unspecified threat at home.

Is it madness, that throws away ALL?

The lives of the Christian martyrs—the tales of the ancient Romans—abounded in incidents of desperate selfimmolation, different in kind from the obsession of which the Reverend Cooper so often spoke. The Mark of the Beast that considers naught but his own desires . . .

The dead King says to Hamlet, Leave thy mother to Heaven, before his son goes on to destroy himself, his beloved, his mother, and his best friend in the obsessive quest for vengeance, leaving his leaderless country to the mercy of a foreign usurper.