A Marked Man

from a cringing slave to a bawling soldier to a pious nun . . .

Given Mr. Apthorp’s vagueness about description, it was perfectly possible that young Mr. Elkins and slender Mr. Palmer were in fact one and the same man. Abigail dug through a memory sharpened by years of reading and quoting classics and the Bible for anything Thurlow Apthorp had said about when last he’d seen the elusive Mr. Elkins. As far as she could recall, nothing had been seen of the man later than Thursday, the twenty-fourth of February: the day Sir Jonathan Cottrell had set sail for Maine—unless of course that had been Mr. Elkins she had encountered in her kitchen at three o’clock on Monday morning. That same day, the twenty-fourth, Androcles Palmer had packed up his belongings and left the Horn Spoon for parts unknown. According to Gwen Pugh, that had been the last day upon which Mrs. Sandhayes had met her lover.

And if Mrs. Sandhayes was a part of the conspiracy . . .

Abigail frowned, quickening her stride.

If Mrs. Sandhayes was part of the conspiracy, how much of what she had said about Cottrell—or the events surrounding his murder—could be taken as the truth?

Certainly nothing that was corroborated by that imbecile Hartnell woman. The woman clearly hadn’t the foggiest recollection that anything distinguished one shopping expedition from another, and in any case—with the prospect of blackmail hanging over her head—would cheerfully go along with anything her “friend” suggested.

Drat John, for being away!

So the whole of Margaret Sandhayes’s catalogue of who came in and out of the Governor’s cardroom, and when, could simply be tossed down the privy. The woman could have included or excluded anyone from her list, while smiling and chatting at the ball herself with all and sundry. She could have vouched for Palmer/Elkins to get him into the Governor’s house . . .

Or, more simply still, Palmer could have waited at the Pear Tree House for a meeting prearranged that afternoon. It wouldn’t have taken much. A letter to Cottrell purporting to be from a claimant to the Fluckner land-grant would have brought the man anywhere in New England hotfoot and could have been waiting for the man on the wharf, the moment he returned. If the Sandhayes woman was in on it somehow—and that certainly explains where they obtained my handwriting!—it also explains how Bathsheba would have seen something she ought not to have seen.

Whatever that might be.

The twenty-three pounds was only to keep her silent, until a meeting with her could be arranged for a more final solution to the problem.

Palmer—or Elkins—is still in Boston, hidden somewhere. There’s some reason the Sons haven’t been able to find him . . . Speculating on what that might be, she turned down the passway to her own yard, calves aching from what felt like miles walked in pattens. She mentally reviewed the abject apologies owed to Pattie, and how quickly after dinner she could abandon her rightful chores and walk down to North Square to consult with Paul Revere. He, if anyone, would be able to make some sense out of—

She stepped into the kitchen, and there was the man himself, seated by the hearth making a penny appear and disappear in his fingers, for the edification of the enraptured Charley. Sam, on the settle opposite, held Tommy on his knee, while Johnny and Nabby hurried to and fro under Pattie’s direction, setting the table for dinner.

At Abigail’s entrance, both men got to their feet.

“We need to see you, Nab.” Sam set Tommy aside, and—as Abigail had done yesterday—guided Abigail down the hallway and into the parlor, where a warm and welcoming fire had been kindled. Revere followed them in and closed the door behind them, a large and rather battered roll of cartridge-paper in his hand.

“We need to know.” Sam handed Abigail into the fireside chair. “You’ve been there. Where is Harry being kept?”

“Harry—?” Abigail blinked at him, for a moment not understanding. “He’s on Castle Island—”

Sam made an impatient gesture, and Revere said, “Can you show me the place on this?” He unrolled the cartridge-paper and brought a couple of draftsman’s pencils out of a coat pocket, and Abigail, looking at the spread-out diagram, recalled that Revere had been one of the men who’d worked on putting the fort back into order three years ago, when the Boston garrison was moved there after the Massacre in Customhouse Square.

Something in the graveness of those dark eyes sent a chill down her back. “What are you going to do?”

“We just need to know where he is,” said Sam, too quickly, “if we’re to slip word to him before he’s taken away. That’s all.”

Sam could generally make anyone believe anything he said, but this time Abigail heard the lie in his voice, even if she had not seen it in Revere’s eyes.

“You can’t mean to break into the fort!” Yet the crowded, bustling quay below Castle Island’s main gate sprang to her mind, the jostling confusion of launches and skiffs and whale-boats that plied the harbor between the island and Boston. The constant comings and goings of provision-merchants, wigmakers, whores, and porters, and purveyors of sheep and pigs. Anyone, she knew, could walk ashore and walk into the fort itself . . .

“Good Lord, Nab, of course we wouldn’t!”

He’s going to exclaim, “What an idea—”

“What an idea!”

Her glance went back to Revere’s face. He, too, she could tell, was thinking about how long it took a man to die on the gallows, and how long that last night on Earth would be for a young man who knew he could save himself with a handful of names.

“We’re not talking about the Boston jail,” said Abigail quietly. “Have you any idea what the British would do —especially after what happened with the tea, and with Heaven only knows what Writ of Vengeance already on its way from Britain—if insurrectionists, as they’ll call them, tried to break into the Castle itself? What would befall them if they were caught? What—”

“Mrs. Adams,” said Revere softly. “Please.”

She looked up at Sam again, a second thought going through her like the chill of poison in her veins. With a deadly sense of calm, she asked, “Or were you thinking of something a little quieter?”

And she saw Sam’s gray eyes shift.

Revere said, “No. We were not.”

No, thought Abigail. But at some point, Sam had considered it.

For a time she was so angry she couldn’t speak.

It was Revere who broke the silence. “We have to get him out, Mrs. Adams. The Incitatus is going to sail within hours of the wind dying down, and then our only course would be to try and take her on the high seas. She outguns anything we could float.”

“You’ll be killed,” said Abigail. “And there will be Hell to pay.”

Neither man replied.

“And I have learned some quite extraordinary things about Sir Jonathan Cottrell’s murder.”

“Have you learned who beat him and left him in that alleyway?” Sam’s voice was flat, level, and hard as a sadiron. “Acquired evidence that will convince Colonel Leslie not to send him? Or the Admiralty Tribunal to acquit him?” It was Abigail’s turn not to be able to meet his gaze. “We have no more time to wait, Nab. We have no more time to hope that what you seek will fall into your hand. We must act—one way or another.”

“First tell me this,” said Abigail. “When was this Toby Elkins last seen? When did he last come into the Man- o’-War?”

“The twelfth of February,” replied Sam at once. “Having taken the house, and paid his rent, about three weeks before. Letters, communications, everything since then are still under the bar in the taproom. Believe me, Nab,” he went on, “we have looked for this man—or a man of his description—everywhere in Boston. We have asked tavern-keepers and rich men’s servants, street-urchins and merchants and the farmers in every town in riding distance, if there is an Englishman who came into these parts at any time this winter, probably from Barbados, who cannot be otherwise accounted for . . . And especially I have asked,” he added, “after Sunday night, when he would have had the mark of your fingernails on his ear, for all the world to see. ’Twere Elkins, he must have been somewhere in the town from the time the gates were shut on the Neck until at least it grew light enough for a boat to get across the river and believe me, I had men at both the ferries and the Neck when that sun came up. And we have found nothing.”

“That there was a conspiracy afoot, I will readily believe,” said Revere, as Abigail drew breath to protest.