A Marked Man

The note was from Dr. Joseph Warren.

My dear Mrs. Adams,

The problem you put to me is a curious and interesting one, and one with which I have no firsthand knowledge. That said, I will venture to affirm that were a man’s eye to be blacked—or in fact were any other sort of severe bruise or contusion to be administered some hours before death—and the body subsequently frozen, the “mouse,” or other bruise, would remain visible when the body thawed, in the same state of appearance it was when death occurred. Bruises are occasioned by blood leaking from broken capillaries into the surrounding flesh, which engorges and darkens. At length, the blood is reabsorbed into the living tissue, an effect which would not take place in the dead.

I trust this solution will have bearing upon the case of Sir Jonathan Cottrell, and result in the freedom of our friend?

Yr ob’t,

Dr. Joseph Warren

“Lieutenant Dowling is a good man,” remarked Lieutenant Coldstone, when Revere passed the message to him in turn. “Yet he was very young when he began his apprenticeship in Army surgery, and that, in the West Indies, where he would have no opportunity to observe the effect of cold such as New England’s upon bodies that had been subsequently frozen. I daresay the duskiness he remarked in the corpse’s hands and feet came not from freezing, as he surmised, but from the body’s having been hanged down the well. From the hook that supported the wine-chest, I presume.”

“Was there the mark of a rope beneath the arms?” asked Revere.

“She’ll have padded it,” replied Abigail, unhesitatingly. “And made sure to carry the rope away with her, when she finally pulled the body up. By taking it on Mr. Howell’s horse to the head of Governor’s Alley in the small hours of the Sunday morning, she unimpeachably proved herself to be at the ball—in the presence of at least two hundred witnesses—when the death must have occurred . . .”

“Even had anyone thought to ask if her crutches—or her name—were genuine,” mused Coldstone. “Not considerations which occurred to me, I must admit.”

“Why would they have? She kept Bathsheba’s body in the well, too, for a time, though the water hadn’t frozen then. If you drag the Mill-Pond, Lieutenant, and the marshes west of the Common, I think you shall find beneath the ice the body of the actor Androcles Palmer, and probably that of a young Negro woman named Bathsheba. Palmer bore enough of a resemblance to Cottrell to pass for him for ten days in Maine, among men who had never seen the real Cottrell. He lacked only the black eye Cottrell had acquired on the day of his supposed departure. Perhaps I should have realized his behavior there was uncharacteristic—he refused to steal a kiss from a milkmaid even when it was practically forced upon him—but I didn’t. I only thought he was too afraid of Mr. Fluckner’s irate tenants.”

“Whereas I daresay,” put in Revere, “he was far too afraid of Mrs. Sandhayes. I’d be. If the woman knows what a scruple is, she hides the knowledge well.”

“As I remember the scandal,” said Coldstone quietly, “the Seaford girls’ parents were dead; Sybilla was ten years younger than her elder sister, who raised her as a mother would. According to my mother—who knew the family—Margaret Seaford was a woman of iron will and strong character. Her single suitor had been engaged to her for eight years, without bringing matters to a conclusion, at least in part because Sybilla could not endure it that another would share her sister’s love. Sybilla was Margaret’s only weakness, my mother said; but the attachment was a weapon that cut both ways. Margaret would not share Sybilla’s love with a suitor, either, and the girl was”— he hesitated, like a man seeking a word—“ripe, I suppose one could say, to be seduced by a man observant enough to play upon her desire to rebel against her sister’s domination. This at least was my mother’s judgment of the matter,” he added, a sudden self-consciousness cracking his usual calm facade, as if speaking of his mother in this crowd of jostling hooligans on Boston’s wharves would bring her before them.

“Your mother sounds like a woman of discernment,” said Abigail gently.

“I have always found her so. Damn,” Coldstone added, as they came around the corner of Benning Wentworth’s countinghouse and stood at the head of the wharf beyond. A couple of dockhands were coiling ropes at the far end; a porter rolled a barrel out of one of the warehouses that lined the inner end, in the obvious expectation of another ship’s later approach. Beyond the wet black platform, stretching a hundred yards into the bay, green black water pitched and chopped with the high, outgoing tide.

“Can we catch her?” Revere pointed to the white spread of the Saturn’s sails, just coming even, Abigail calculated, with Bird Island, two miles out in the harbor channel.

“The Magpie’s said to be fast,” Abigail replied.

“I reckon we’ll see if that’s true.”

The tide was running strong out of the harbor, but the wind blew from the south rather than the west. The Saturn, a square-rigged two-master of some six hundred tons, had been built to carry quantities of furs, tobacco, and potash in safety to the Mother Country, not for speed. The Magpie’s slimmer build and sloop rigging caught even the contrary wind and drove her forward like a galloping horse. Abigail clung grimly to the rail as the first chop of the wind-driven channel hit the ship . . . I WILL not be sick . . .

“We’ll have ’em, m’am.” Matthias Brown dropped from the rigging to the deck beside her, as graceful among the ropes as he was toadlike with land beneath his moccasins. “Don’t you worry.” He cast a glance, askance, at the British officer who stood beside her and the stolid redcoat sergeant who sat a little distance away on a coil of rope, one arm around Tommy and with the other arm firmly keeping Charley between his knees. Both boys were pale with excitement—Tommy in fact looked a little ill—but neither had allowed himself to be fobbed off with Now, Mama will be back soon . . . when they’d made it all the way down to the wharves with what they both knew perfectly well was one of Uncle Sam’s mobs.

At least half the mob—Edes and Revere among them—had crowded onto the sloop, competently assisting young Eli Putnam, Hev Miller, and Matt Brown in setting the sails. They now clustered the bow, watching as the distance between them and the Saturn imperceptibly lessened. “Wind’s comin’ around,” someone remarked, and against the dark chop of the sea, white sails unfurled like clouds from the merchantman’s masts.

“We’ll have ’em,” Miller echoed his cousin’s words. And to Abigail, “You’re saying that wasn’t Cottrell who came to Maine at all?”

“I don’t think so, no.” Abigail clung steadfastly to the nearest line and kept her eye on the sails ahead, grimly pushing away the nauseating dizziness of seasickness that swept her like the heaving waves. “I think what happened was this: probably after considerable searching, Margaret Seaford encountered a man who could pass himself off as Sir Jonathan Cottrell. Whether this happened in England or on the Continent or in Barbados itself, I don’t know, but she’d clearly built up a reserve of money by that time and had certainly been keeping track of where Sir Jonathan was stationed in his service to the King. I suspect, but I’m not sure, that at some point she had announced her intention to murder Sir Jonathan in revenge for her beloved sister’s death—or that someone who knew the story remarked on it, when she took up the study of poisons. I see no other reason that she would have taken such pains to prove that she was nowhere near him when he was killed—”

“I heard from my mother that she so swore,” put in Coldstone. “So it must have been common knowledge.”

“Common enough to keep her from returning to her home and having the use of her property, once her revenge was accomplished,” said Abigail.

“A woman of deliberation as well as passion,” remarked the officer. “A dangerous combination.”

“Deliberate enough to learn the finer points of cardsharping as well as poisoning, at any rate,” said Abigail. “I trust, by the way, that somebody put aside the contents of my teapot where they can be examined—”

“I instructed your girl to see to it,” said Coldstone. “I daresay you shall need to replace the teapot.”

“Just as well. ’Twas a wedding-present from my Uncle Tufts; I never liked the thing.”