A Marked Man

people do come up with!” She laughed again delightedly, but Abigail settled back in her chair, cradling the creamy queens-ware teacup and thinking.

She’d heard all her life about the Maine squatters, and the cat’s cradle of lawsuits, chicanery, and looking- the-other-way that entangled the relationships of the dozen or so Great Proprietors who’d managed to get claim to those cold inhospitable forests to the north. Various Proprietors had brought in tenants to settle the land—mostly the Protestant Irish who’d originated in Scotland—and treated them, as far as Abigail could ascertain, like medieval peasants, to be robbed both of their rental and their lands depending on where negotiations were among the Proprietors themselves, and nobody outside the charmed circle of the very rich Boston merchants really had any clear idea of who had legal title to which portions of Maine’s broken coast.

So Thomas Fluckner wanted to beat the other Proprietors to the post with a clear title newly granted by the King, did he?

And was willing to trade his eldest daughter’s happiness to get it.

She poured herself a little more tisane. “And did His Excellency manage to intercept Sir Jonathan before the engagement was announced?”

“Good Heavens, no!” Mrs. Sandhayes regarded her in surprise, as if she suspected Mrs. Adams hadn’t been properly keeping up with the affair. “Sir Jonathan never arrived at all! He got off the boat from Maine that morning, and the next time anyone saw him, he was lying facedown in the mud of the alley behind the Governor’s mansion, frozen through.”

“Frozen?” Abigail frowned. “The Provost Marshal finds a man frozen in an alley and concludes that Harry Knox must have had something to do with it?”

“Of course!” exclaimed her guest. “Because of the quarrel, you know. Last Thursday week, the day Sir Jonathan left for Maine, Sir Jonathan went riding with Lucy on the Common and offered her intolerable insult! Fleeing him she encountered Mr. Knox, and Mr. Knox—after quite properly escorting her home—repaired at once to lie in wait for Sir Jonathan in the lane behind the Governor’s stables, in the very place where the body was found this morning! When Sir Jonathan came riding in, Mr. Knox pulled him off his horse practically in the stable gateway and shouted at him in front of the entire stable staff that if he—Sir Jonathan—dared speak to Miss Fluckner again, he—Mr. Knox—would ‘kill him like a dog.’ Oh, dear, look at the time!”

Mrs. Sandhayes groped for her canes, and laboriously—with the first expression on her face that Abigail had seen of anything besides a vapid and condescending cheer—got herself to her feet. “I absolutely swore upon the Testament that I wouldn’t be late to Caroline Hartnell’s loo-party, and here I am forsworn and my immortal soul is in peril—I daresay the City Fathers would tell me, as much from playing loo on the Sabbath as for broken vows . . . Well, never mind. I have kept you”—she propped her cane against her pannier, extended her hand to grasp Abigail’s with strong warmth—“away from your family for an unconscienceable time, not to speak of making those poor lovely horses stand all this time in the cold street . . .”

She hobbled with surprising swiftness along the hall, Pattie springing out of the kitchen to wrap her in the heavy velvet layers of her worn cloak. “Thank you so very much for the marmalade, Mrs. Adams—delicious! I dare swear I couldn’t make a marmalade myself if you held a gun on me! Well, I’m off to endanger my immortal soul at loo—Is it still the Sabbath? Or does it end at sunset here?”

As she swayed and lurched out into Queen Street, with the Fluckner coachman—for whose frozen feet, Abigail reflected, she hadn’t spared a thought—springing down from his box to help her, Abigail glimpsed, at the edge of the lamplight, a couple of the young men whom she recognized as Sons of Liberty, waiting until the carriage pulled away. One carried a big box of seditious pamphlets, the other, a couple of pieces of what was clearly Harry Knox’s printing press.

Paul Revere—and wily Cousin Sam—had evidently taken sunset as the definition of the Sabbath, for today, anyway. And that done, wherein lies the difference between defense of one’s country, and silver-loo?

Four

Are you sure you wish to do this?” John handed Abigail’s marketing basket—crammed to bursting with bread, butter, candles, cheese, apples, and clean linen that fifteen-year-old Billy Knox had brought for his brother that morning—to Thaxter and helped Abigail down into the skiff Katrina, which bobbed gently among the clots of ice at the end of Wentworth’s Wharf.

Abigail wasn’t at all sure she wanted to do it. The grand-daughter of one of the oldest merchant clans in the colony, she knew everything about tonnage, bills of lading, and where to hide cargoes from the excise men, but being on the water made her joints ache within minutes and even the shortest voyage rendered her queasy. Nevertheless, she clasped John’s gloved hands in her own and said, “All will be well, Mr. Adams.”

“If we gets back by afternoon, all’ll be well.” Ezra Logan, who brought in firewood and butter from the north side of the bay in the Katrina three market-days per week and smuggled illegal cargoes of French molasses on the other three nights, shaded his eyes to consider the clouds that barred the morning sky. “Squally weather comin’ in.”

He took the basket from Thaxter, then the larger bundle of two striped woolen blankets, of the sort the British fur companies traded with the Indians. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Adams. I’ll have her back safe, ’fore the first sign of chop.” He cast loose the lines, and poled the Katrina’s nose from the end of the dock; the deck-boy swung the foresail yard around to catch what light wind there was. Thaxter, who wasn’t a much better sailor than Abigail, unfolded one of the blankets and laid it around her shoulders, then settled himself on the bench at her side to stay out of the way of Logan and the boy, shivering in the icy spray. Much as Abigail detested the British troops that for five years now had been stationed in Boston, as they approached the low gray shape of Castle Island—two and a half miles out in the iron waters—she felt a throb of sympathy for them. The Crown may have dispatched them to suppress the colonists’ demands for their rights as Englishmen, but that didn’t make the damp, freezing brick barracks they had to live in any more endurable in the bitter season.

The camp was quieter than it had been the last time she’d come ashore here, in early December. During the confused days after the tea-ships had first docked, when Boston’s bells had tolled day and night to summon in from the countryside the armed mob whose presence had made the so-called Boston Tea-Party possible, many Loyalists, including the Fluckners, had come out to the camp for protection. Most had returned to Boston, but a number of the Crown’s clerks and officers, Abigail was well aware, had chosen to remain.

Coming ashore she observed that the grubby village of tents, sheep pens, horse-lines, and makeshift shelters occupied by soldiers and camp-followers that had sprung up around the fort’s walls in those days had shrunk almost to nothing, smaller even than its summer and autumn dimensions. When Abigail and Thaxter were admitted through the fortress gate, smoke clawed her eyes from campfires and Spanish-style braziers set up even in the corridors, where soldiers, camp-servants, and laundresses huddled for warmth. The central parade-ground, glimpsed through the windows, had acquired a ring of lean-tos around its walls, clinging to the brick as if for warmth. Everywhere wood was stacked; in the corridors, shirts and drawers hung to dry, frozen hard. The smell of cooking, of dirty wool, of men and women too cold and too crowded to bathe, nearly choked her.

Lieutenant Coldstone, Assistant to the Provost Marshal, rose when they were shown into the cubbyhole that he shared with two other military clerks; the fireplace there was the size of Abigail’s breadbox back on Queen Street and the so-called blaze there wouldn’t have melted the ink in the standish. “It happens that Mr. Knox is a cousin of mine,” Abigail replied to his lifted eyebrows, after Thaxter had requested an interview with the prisoner. “I’ve brought him some things from his poor dear mother.”

“Have you, m’am?” Coldstone bowed. The wintry pallor of his face and the marble white of his wig turned his dark eyes even darker, in features as delicate as a girl’s. “She must be most concerned for her son.”

“Dreadfully,” said Abigail. “’ Tis only her age and illness that have kept her from bringing them herself.”

“Those, and the fact that the lady has been dead since 1772. I am afraid, m’am, that there is no facility at present where you might speak to Mr. Knox, save in his cell. The late cold weather has driven even the hardiest of the men indoors, and we are severely crowded at the moment.”

“’ Tis quite all right.”