A Marked Man

Several things seemed to click into place in Abigail’s mind, filling her with a sense of shock and dismay. “The slave-woman?”

Great Heavens, what had Harry to do with—?

Lucy stared at her, taken aback.

“Your father’s slave-woman. The one who disappeared—”

“Bathsheba? Has she been found?” Her dark brows puckered in swift consternation. “Why do you say she’s dead?”

“I’m sorry,” said Abigail quickly. “I thought—” She shook her head, trying to collect her thoughts. “Forgive me. Who is it who was killed?”

“Sir Jonathan Cottrell. The King’s Special Commissioner—”

“And your fiance.” Mrs. Sandhayes, who had been leaning on her canes and gazing around the sanctuary with the bemused expression of an explorer contemplating a grass temple on Otaheite, gave her an arch wink.

Lucy flushed a dark pink, not with maiden modesty, but with anger. “He was not my fiance,” she snapped.

“’ Tis not what your father thought, my dear.”

“My father could marry him, then.” The girl turned back to Abigail with a little flounce. “Sir Jonathan was sent last year by the King to collect evidence about where the Sons of Liberty—‘Rebels and Traitors,’ he called them, but that’s who he meant—were getting their money from. He’d been staying with Governor Hutchinson all last month, which was where he met Papa, and he was found dead in the alley behind the Governor’s house early this morning: horrible! And they’ve arrested . . .”

Again she colored, and this time there was no mistaking the blush. She turned her head aside, a startling display of timidity in a girl Abigail knew was ordinarily as straightforward as a runaway goods-wagon.

“They’ve arrested a—a friend of mine for it,” she finished shyly, in a voice that Abigail had never before heard her use. “And you’ve got to help us, Mrs. Adams. Help me, I mean—Help him. Help Harry.”

“Harry Knox.”

Lucy raised her eyes, brimming with the transformation of a bossy girl’s first love. “Harry Knox.”

Three

Since even the presence of a maidservant and a chaperone would not have protected the marriageable daughter of the wealthiest merchant in Boston from gossip for long—at least not from the gossip of the wives of other wealthy merchants—to say nothing of consideration for the Fourth Commandment and her family’s dinner, it was agreed that Abigail would present herself at the Fluckner mansion on the following morning to hear all the details. She found John at home, but Sam and Revere both gone. Sam’s wife Bess shared Abigail’s attitude about Sabbath dinner and attendance at both church services on Sundays: it was all very well to pull an ox out of a pit on the Sabbath, as the Lord had said, but one needn’t take the whole day at it. Sam, to do him credit, was not one to put even the Sons of Liberty before God’s Law unless he really had to. And though Paul Revere might have inherited a greater carelessness about Sabbath-keeping with his French blood, Abigail knew him well enough to know that having missed the first service at the New Brick Meeting-House, he would not miss the second.

“ ’ Tis a bad business, Portia,” said John quietly, when after helping his children disengage themselves from scarves and cloaks, pattens and overshoes, he drew Abigail aside into the corner of the kitchen near the hearth. “The man who was killed—”

“Was the King’s Commissioner, Sir Jonathan Cottrell.” Had she been a Papist, Abigail reflected, she would have owed her confessor a few Paternosters for the smug relish she felt at the look on John’s face. She supposed she could only throw herself on the mercy of the Lord, if sin there was in her enjoyment of her husband’s realization that he wasn’t the only member of the Adams family who could pull oxen out of that particular pit. “Which would account for the Provost Marshal’s interest in the matter. Thomas Fluckner’s daughter sought me out to ask my help with finding the killer. She and her chaperone were apparently at a ball at the Governor’s last night when the man was killed—”

“Did Miss Fluckner mention that it was her engagement to Cottrell, which was to have been announced at the ball?”

Abigail raised her brows. No wonder Mrs. Sandhayes had looked coy. “I should dearly like to have been there to see them try it. The girl appears to have an understanding with Harry Knox.”

“Ah,” said John. He helped her off with her cloak and spread its heavy folds over one of the wooden settles that flanked the kitchen fire. “Well, that explains a great deal.” On the opposite settle, Nabby and Johnny had already spread their cloaks, and the thick wool steamed gently in the heat. The advancing morning had not lessened in the slightest degree the previous night’s cold; as Abigail dumped the fire-box’s coals back onto the hearth and set the box ready for that afternoon’s ration after dinner, she shivered at the thought of another three hours in the freezing sanctuary. Rail thin and unhealthy as a girl, Abigail had never, in her thirty years of New England winters and long sermons, grown used to the discipline of attending to the Lord’s Word in the bitter season.

Charley and Tommy, who had spent the morning in their usual Sabbath pastime of listening to Pattie read to them from the Bible while they fidgeted, scurried at the heels of their older brother and sister to set the table: anything being preferable to “playing quietly” and refraining from the “profane” toys of the rest of the week. John followed Abigail into the pantry to help her bring in the cold roast pork cooked yesterday, mush, sweet potatoes and molasses, and the minute quantity of milk that Semiramis and Cleopatra had only just begun to provide again as they freshened after the winter’s drought. “They’ll have taken Harry out to Castle Island, won’t they?” she added quietly, and John nodded.

For a moment they regarded one another in apprehensive silence.

After the Governor’s request for troops to “keep order” some three years ago had resulted in those troops opening fire into a crowd of civilians, it had been agreed upon that, though Boston would remain garrisoned by a regiment of the King’s forces, it would probably be better if those forces were not brought into daily contact with mobs stirred up by the Sons of Liberty. As a compromise, the Sixty-Fourth Regiment now occupied Castle Island, a brick fortress in the bay that had been built during the most recent French War. Since the dumping of the tea into the harbor in December, contact between the Bostonians and the much-outnumbered redcoats had been very limited indeed.

But Abigail—and every man, woman, and child over the age of five in Boston—was aware that Colonel Leslie was only biding his time. A man taken up for the murder of the King’s Commissioner would not only be imprisoned on the island: there was every likelihood he would not be tried in Boston at all. Like a smuggler, he would be taken before an Admiralty Court of three Crown judges and no jury at the British naval base in Halifax, three hundred miles from the sort of inflammatory pamphlets that Harry had spent most of the night printing up.

And despite John’s having defended the troopers who fired into the mob at the so-called Boston Massacre back in ’70, with his involvement in the Sons of Liberty an open secret, there was a very good chance that if he went out to the island to speak with Harry Knox, he would not be permitted to return.

She asked worriedly, “Will you send Thaxter to see him?”

Thaxter was John’s clerk.

“I suppose I must.”

Abigail nodded, understanding John’s tone rather than his words. Young John Thaxter was steady, intelligent, and cool-headed in such emergencies as were likely to arise in either the courtroom or in the Adams’ kitchen where he’d taken so many of his meals over the past year or two: he would, John often said, make a fine lawyer. He was observant, articulate, and assiduous about double-checking facts. Neither John nor Abigail had ever been able to quite put their fingers on what he lacked, but they both knew it was something. Perhaps only the cynicism that comes from a decade of riding Massachusetts court circuits in the backwoods.

Whatever it was, it was in John’s eyes as he looked at her.

“Might I go?”