A Marked Man

known in his home town of Boston all his life.

She knew also that once a man was hoisted on the gallows, it took twenty long minutes, dangling, kicking, at rope’s end, to suffocate to death.

She remembered how Revere had joked about breaking Matt Brown and Hev Miller out of the Boston jail; how her brother’s friends had gotten him out of the place almost casually, as if he’d been locked in a cupboard or a cellar. In Boston it was generally known that the King’s Commissioners couldn’t take a smuggler, because of the providential appearance of large numbers of armed dockside types—the chief reason that the Crown had begun to prosecute smugglers in Halifax.

Walking along Purchase Street, Abigail could look out across the bay and see the Incitatus, riding at anchor off Castle Island. Waiting for the wind to change.

“Mrs. Adams?”

A girl who was passing her as Abigail turned the corner into Queen Street halted on the pavement and put back the hood of her cloak. Under a neatly starched white cap, black curls flickered in the tug of the wind.

“I’m Mrs. Adams, yes.” Abigail wondered why the wide brown eyes, the heart-shaped face were so familiar . . .

“Miss Pugh,” she said.

“I’ve waited for you, m’am—Miss Pattie let me in—but I couldn’t wait no longer.” The girl cast a frightened glance back in the direction from which Abigail had come—the direction of the Common, and the handsome houses of the rich along Milk Street and Beacon Hill. “Mrs. Hartnell, she’ll be askin’ after me, and I don’t dare not be there —”

“I shall accompany you,” said Abigail promptly, “that you may lose no time. I’m sorry I was from home. Had I known—”

Gwen Pugh shook her head, “Oh, not your fault, m’am, no, please. I saw the chance, when Mrs. H was still abed, after being up all hours playing cards.” They crossed by the Customhouse and turned along Cornhill again, stepping quickly on the slippery cobbles. “I had to find you, and speak, m’am. I didn’t know Sheba well, but she was that kind to me, not just about the tooth-drawer but afterward, when I was in so much pain. And the way she spoke of her little girl, and how worried she was about her baby when she had to go out with Mrs. Sandhayes—” She shook her head. “Though she was a Negress and all, I did so much feel like I was home again, with my own sister and baby brother. And Mrs. H has been so very kind to me also, and took me in when I was barely a mite, when my mamma died, and didn’t know no manners or how to sew or iron, and had me taught . . .” Anguish at her own disloyalty pulled at the girl’s face. “But she lied to you.”

“Yes,” said Abigail softly. “I thought she had.”

“Bathsheba, she wasn’t upset or frightened or anything else they said that Friday, just vexed that she had to be away from baby Stephen again. When Mrs. H and Mrs. S would go out together, it would be hours before she was able to go home again, and the poor little thing would be crying from hunger, which always made Mr. F wild. But Mr. Hartnell, m’am—Well, after last time there was almost a scandal, about Mrs. H and that Mr. Smyles from New York, he took on pretty severe. The only reason he’d let her take the carriage, you see, was if she went with some other lady.”

“I see,” murmured Abigail, disappointed but not surprised. Mrs. Sandhayes wanted social recognition and friendship with a wealthy woman who was too stupid to keep track of her discards playing loo. Mrs. Hartnell wanted a respectable-looking stalking-horse for her amours. Yet Philomela and the Barnabys had described Bathsheba as profoundly upset by Friday evening. Had she dissembled to this girl? Found some message awaiting her on her return to the Fluckner home? Or learned something in some other fashion after she got there?

“So in fact, Mrs. Hartnell was going out to meet a lover. And you, Mrs. Sandhayes, and Bathsheba were only out to provide a good story for her, lest anyone ask.”

“’ Twasn’t that, m’am,” said the girl earnestly. “Though Heaven help me, I’ve done that these five years, and put up with some of her men-friends, when they thought she wouldn’t see . . . And she means no harm by it, m’am. She truly doesn’t. You’d have to know her—” She stopped herself. “The thing is, m’am, we weren’t with Bathsheba hardly at all that day. Nor most days when we’d been out together. We’d walk out by the Common, usually, and there’s a Mr. Vassall that would drive by and take us up—Mrs. Hartnell and myself—and drive us out to Roxbury, where he has his house.”

Abigail said, “T’cha!” in disgust. What had John said? Very little beyond a respectable wardrobe and a couple of letters of introduction: nothing to live on or by . . .

So in fact Bathsheba could have seen something . . .

“And she’d leave her so-called friend to loiter about—staying out of sight, I daresay, so that there could be no comment—until she was ready to come home. Your mistress is very fortunate indeed that her useful friend isn’t of a nature to demand hush-money. Were walking as painful to me as it is to her, I should certainly feel justified in asking for a compensation for—”

“Oh, no, m’am,” corrected Miss Pugh. “The thing is, Mrs. Sandhayes couldn’t ask for hush-money, for she was meeting with a lover herself.”

Twenty-three

For a moment Abigail could only stare. Her instinctive thought—How could a crippled woman—? dissolved at once in anger at herself. The poor woman did everything a normal one could do, except dance, with a zest that made a mockery of the fate that had robbed her of that pleasure. Goodness knew a woman didn’t have to skip and scamper to enjoy the embrace of a lover. Though her upbringing cried sternly to her that such behavior was reprehensible (as her own, she had to admit, had been with John, when they were courting . . .), if Mrs. Sandhayes had met a man who saw the intelligence of her eyes, and not the threadbare dresses and the gold-headed sticks—the more credit to him!

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes, m’am. More than once, when Mr. Vassall brought us back again at the end of the afternoon, we’d see them coming down Cambridge Street, this man and Mrs. S in a chaise, with Bathsheba sitting up behind . . .”

“Cambridge Street?” Abigail blinked, wondering if her thoughts upon the Pear Tree House had led her hearing astray.

“Yes, m’am.” They had reached the head of Milk Street, where the houses began to thin and the garden walls along the unpaved way showed treetops above them here and there, the orchards of the well-to-do. The Governor’s house, where Lucy Fluckner had waited uneasily for the arrival of a lover for whom another had also waited in the alley, stood opposite, bland and handsome behind its twin lodges. Gwen Pugh nodded past it, in the direction of the Common only a few hundred yards away. “He had a house, Bathsheba said—a fair big place with a ruined orchard by it—on the back-side of Beacon Hill.”

Margaret Sandhayes.

Margaret Sandhayes and Toby Elkins . . .

Or was it, Abigail wondered as she walked slowly back toward Queen Street, Margaret Sandhayes and Sir Jonathan Cottrell?

A slender little fellow, Miss Pugh had described the unknown lover; fairish with a dimpled chin. Palmer was universally described as dark, but a different wig would alter that description in seconds—and she cursed again the shortcomings of the art of miniatures. Shorter nor Mrs. S, Miss Pugh had said, but then Margaret Sandhayes was a tall woman.

Toby Elkins was “tall.” But how tall is tall?

He played about six roles, Dowling had said of Palmer. He was one of those actors who can change not only his makeup and wig, but his posture and voice and the way he walked . . .