A Marked Man

Yet could Hamlet have turned aside, knowing what he knew?

In the morning, head heavy with sleeplessness, Abigail did her marketing, then turned her steps toward the Old North Church, where young Robbie Newman let her into the little outbuilding that had been turned into a combination jail and hiding-place for Matt Brown and the Heavens Rejoice Miller. Sam had brought her up-to-date on the story that the two Mainers had been told, about how unsafe it was for them to leave Boston yet and how the Magpie—in reality safely berthed at Lynn—had fled back to Boothbay, with promises to return in a week or maybe two . . .

In the meantime, the two fugitives had plenty to eat, ample gossip from every Son of Liberty with a few hours to spare, and enough seditious literature on hand to bring an empire down in flames. Abigail went over with them again every word and action of the deceased, either witnessed by the cousins or relayed to them by gossip: Had Cottrell ever spoken of a man named Toby Elkins? A woman named Sybilla Seaford? (As if any man would give a moment’s thought to a seduction eight years in the past . . .)

She felt the nagging certainty that these men held the key to finding Cottrell’s killer, if she could but ask them the right question. Yet like a key mislaid—In a drawer? On a shelf?—it eluded her. Was there any woman in Boothbay that Cottrell was supposed to have seduced or insulted? Or the rumor of one?

“Not even the rumor, m’am,” affirmed Miller. “Right from the first, he kept his nose indoors.”

“Even Hilda Sturmur couldn’t get a rise out of him,” added Brown helpfully. “And she’s had every man around Penobscot Bay behind old Bingham’s barn.”

“Bingham? The man Cottrell stayed with?”

Both men nodded. “Hilda’s old Bingham’s milkmaid.”

Brown added with a grin, “They say even Bingham’s bull turns tail in panic when he sees Hildy coming—” and got a sharp elbow in his side from the marginally more respectable Miller.

“That is, no, m’am,” filled in Miller, and took a long pull of the cider Abigail had brought them. “Why seduce someone in the village when Hildy Sturmur was there and willing, and she was just beside herself not to manage him while he was there.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t have boasted of it—”

“Oh, no, m’am. Hildy’s not that kind of girl.”

Abigail blinked, wondering exactly what that kind of girl was considered to be, in Maine.

“But she complained of him to my sister Levvy—”

“Levi?”

“Leviathan. Hildy complained to Levvy that Cottrell wouldn’t so much as look her in the eye. Most people think Hildy had her eye on that gold ring he wore on his pinky, though she never did manage to get it off him. Myself, I think it was just the challenge that she likes.”

“Challenge,” said Brown wisely, “is not what Hildy Sturmur likes.”

Maybe not, Abigail reflected, as she turned her steps homeward along the crowded wharves. But challenge was the farthest thing from what, under normal circumstances, any female would have faced, living in the same household as Sir Jonathan Cottrell.

Was the man that frightened? she wondered, holding her cloak tight around her against the gray howl of the offshore wind. Frightened even in Maine, where he was reasonably certain Harry Knox would not have pursued him? Did that fear have anything to do with the telltale nail-holes in every door that communicated with the central hall of the Pear Tree House—doors bolted to confine someone or something in the central hall, as if in a pit?

Was it fear of the disgruntled Mainers themselves that made him so radically change his habits? Or something—or someone—else?

Twenty-two

The note that awaited Abigail in the kitchen upon her return said simply,

Mrs. Adams,

I am at your service and will await your convenience at the garrison house attached to the South Battery.

Lieutenant Rufus Dowling

Surgeon, King’s 64th Foot

He must have crossed—in weather like this!—as soon as ’twere light enough to do so. Guilty as she felt about abandoning poor Pattie yet again to doubled morning chores (“Don’t you dare do the beds or the dusting for me! I shall deal with them when I return if it means working ’til sunset!”), Abigail felt still more responsible for leaving that earnest young surgeon stranded in the garrison house at the foot of Fort Hill, particularly as the day was worsening again. She set the fish and the ducks she’d bought in the pantry-shed to stay cold, checked that Tommy was dry and firmly affixed to the sideboard, and that Charley hadn’t hidden any of Johnny’s belongings in any of his usual places, warned Pattie to keep a close watch against dangers unspecified, kissed both little boys, and set forth again, taking the long way to the small cluster of barrack huts so as to stop in Purchase Street and obtain the company of Sam’s servant-woman Surry. Though it was Abigail’s repeated contention that in America—unlike in England—a woman could walk anywhere unmolested, she drew the line at venturing into even a minor group of British soldiers alone.

Fort Hill lay only a few hundred yards from Sam’s house, outside of Boston proper at the eastern end of that sprawled plot of open ground that had once comprised the whole of the town’s Common Land. During the wars with France, batteries had been established to guard the harbor in case a French fleet came down from Canada. Now that the French were gone from Canada, the North Battery, in old Boston proper where Ship Street ran into Lynn Street, was scantly manned. The soldiers in charge of the guns there were ferried straight across from Castle Island for their watches and straight back, and observed with invisible zeal by the ruffians, idle prentices, and Sons of Liberty who frequented the wharves. The South Battery, more isolated on its hill outside the confines of the town, had a cluster of barrack huts surrounded by a palisade, so that the men charged with keeping the Sons of Liberty from stealing the thirty-five cannon in its gun park had at least someplace to sit on bitter spring days like this one. Even before the events of last December, as tensions mounted between the Crown and those who protested its interference in the colony’s government, the soldiers had learned to remain within the wooden palings on the hill’s east side. There were always loafers on the wharves along the Battery March, and should any untoward number of soldiers attempt to land on Rowe’s Wharf or Apthorp’s or any other close by, word would flash through the town with the speed of a heliograph, and an armed mob would be waiting before the invaders reached shore.

Thus Abigail didn’t blame Lieutenant Dowling for taking the better part of valor and asking that she—a respectable married woman—venture into what constituted a miniature Army camp. The sentry on the gate glanced at her and the handsome, smiling black woman who walked at her heels, and pointed out the hut where Lieutenant Dowling waited.

“Lieutenant Coldstone is well,” the young surgeon answered her first question, bringing up another chair to the fire of the rather grubby little office that the post commander relinquished to him. Abigail knew women— numbering Mrs. Fluckner and her friends among them—who’d have left Surry to wait outside in the cold. Though Lieutenant Dowling would not fetch a chair for a servant-woman, he raised no objection to her simply standing close to the fire. In fact, in the way of that class of Englishmen to which he, Lieutenant Coldstone, and Margaret Sandhayes all belonged, he simply did not appear to see her at all.

He went on, “Per your request, m’am, I have kept information about his condition to the fewest possible hearers. Do you honestly think him in danger, even out at the camp?”

“I scarcely know,” confessed Abigail. “I would have said, No, and assumed that the attempt upon his life was the work of some”—she hesitated, then went on smoothly—“of some traitor, perhaps, who had heard of his