Nine
And of course, the first thing John wanted to know of when he returned that night—just as Abigail was sweeping the coals from the lid of the Dutch oven, and Johnny and Nabby were setting the table for dinner—was about what everyone in town was saying about the King and whether the ship from London had been sighted?
This was understandable, Abigail knew, considering the possibility—remote but not unthinkable—that John himself might be included on a list of suspected persons as Sam’s cousin . . . and as someone who had written any number of inflammatory letters and pamphlets concerning Governor Hutchinson. “The countryside is in arms already,” he said, when Abigail had outlined what she knew on this subject, which was—as with everyone else in Boston—merely a collection of speculation and rumor. “From here to the Kennebec, every village and town has formed militia, elected officers . . . They’ve spoken of reestablishing the minutemen, as a first defense against an alarm, and are stockpiling powder and muskets in Concord and a dozen other places. What good that will do against trained troops—”
He shook his head, his round face grave. “What frightens me more, Portia—”
She smiled a little, at his use of the old nickname from their courting-days.
“—is that the Tories are arming as well. If war breaks out, ’twill be civil war, with every local squabble about landboundaries and who-cheated-who-out-of-Grandpa’s-inheritance dragged into it, to confuse and embitter the quarrel. Sam has threatened the King:
Abigail was silent, sitting beside the spent dishes—dinner over, Nabby and Johnny quietly clearing off and (thank Heavens!) fending aside Charley and Tommy as they clamored for their parents’ attention . . . “How much danger are you in?” she asked at last.
“Not much, I don’t think. I’m Sam’s cousin, not Sam.” John finished his cider, handed the empty cup to his daughter, who—Abigail feared—was listening more than was probably good for the little girl’s peace. “I’ve done what it’s within the rights of every Englishman to do: spoken for our rights as Englishmen. I’ve broken no windows, boiled no tar, hamstrung no man’s horse—”
“What if they don’t care?” asked Abigail softly. “What if the Crown gives Hutchinson extraordinary powers to disregard the rights of habeus corpus, to suppress disorders here as and how he pleases, and sends him the troops to do it with? You’ve marked yourself his enemy—”
“If the Crown has given its Governor the power to punish a man’s thoughts and words,” returned John, “it will have made me its enemy indeed . . . and every man of the colony as well. Now leave over the clearing-up for a time, and tell me of your endeavors these two weeks, dearest friend.” He gathered her onto his knee. “And tell me how it happens that you left our children with Uncle Isaac and Aunt Eliza for a night while you went gallivanting about the countryside—”
“Gallivanting, is it, sir?” Abigail raised her brows. “Take the log from thine own eye, Lysander, before you go looking for specks in mine . . .”
He pressed his knuckles to his breast and inclined his head in penitence, with an expression so humble that Abigail couldn’t keep herself from pushing back his wig a little to kiss the smooth skin of his forehead.
Then she rose, and while she helped Pattie and the children clear up and do the dishes (“Sit down, John, you’ve a dispensation for today . . .”), she recounted the tale of Horace’s adventure and its increasingly disquieting chain of sequels. She did not speak of Charley’s encounter (
“How would such a man have known of you? Of our house?”
She shook her head. “As Mr. Ryland said, in some ways Cambridge is very like a village. Word gets about very swiftly, from servants at the college overhearing the conversations of their masters belike: it doesn’t seem very difficult for Weyountah to have learned from the unfortunate Mr. Pinkstone what he was sworn not to tell under threat of being eaten by cannibals.”
“And anything you happened to speak of to Ryland,” remarked John, leaning to the fire to tong up a coal for his long-stemmed Dutch pipe, “has now gone straight to His Excellency—if he didn’t know it already.”
Mrs. Lake’s note he turned over in his fingers and held to the strengthening light of the kitchen hearth: “It’s a man’s hand, anyway, so we can assume Mrs. Lake is a cat’s-paw—”
“Or had the wits to guess that her intended victim might wonder why a Boston lawyer’s handwriting was so girlish?”
John made the gesture with his pipe, of a fencer acknowledging a hit. He’d taken off his wig, and without its neat frame of snuff brown waves his round face seemed more relaxed: the at-home John, the evening-John who seemed to her like lover and brother and best friend in one.
“Is the hand anything like Hutchinson’s? Do you have a letter of his?”
“In his own hand and not a clerk’s? I doubt it. As I recall it, Narcissa Seckar’s father was Emmanuel Whitehead, who held the Vassall Chair of Theology before Seckar did. I never heard anything about a pirate in the family—”
“I should imagine ’twas the sort of thing they’d hush up. Particularly after Sam making a jest of it.”
“Well, ’tis nothing you’d think of, looking at Old Whitehead. The man was dry and cold as the Original Snake in the Garden. You’d never have caught him giving his books to a college. He left everything he owned to Seckar, who was his student—house, property, the very dishes in the kitchen—rather than turn any of it over to a member of the sex that was responsible for human perdition, he said—”
“Wretch. I take it Mrs. Seckar was his only child.”
“I think there was another daughter who ran off with a horse coper or something. ’Twas all a very long time ago. I believe his father was a merchant—”
“And a slave-dealer, His Excellency said. Myself, I had rather have a good, honest pirate than the pack of hypocrites I’ve heard about—”
“That’s only,” said John quietly, “because you’ve never found yourself in the hands of one.”
“And in any case,” went on Abigail, “there must have been a genuine pirate somewhere in the family, because from what I gather of the two books that are missing, they’re nothing that would have been purchased by a man who held the Vassall Chair of Theology . . . unless he was a thoroughgoing hypocrite indeed. I’ve found nothing out of the ordinary about the papers in Mr. Fairfield’s desk and will return them there tomorrow for old Mr. Fairfield to deal with; the love-letters I shall burn. Weyountah writes me that they think they’ve found the farmhouse where Mrs. Lake lured Horace, so we shall see what the place can tell us—”
“Not much, I daresay. Ten to one you’ll find ’tis the house of a Tory family that lives in town these days and rents out the land—and if Hutchinson’s behind it, they’ll not even have asked why he wanted to borrow the key to the place. And don’t burn the love-letters just yet.” He took from the settle beside them the packet of letters that had been in Fairfield’s pocket, unfolded one of them in the flickering hearth-light. “French paper, expensive scent, a hand that shouts ‘governess’—would there be any chance that these were sent by the Woodleigh girl?
“Montgomery Woodleigh’s fortune is sufficient temptation, given the right circumstances, for a man to want to kill a rival, and given the nature of the missing books, they may in fact have nothing to do with the murder. Ask Diomede about whose hopes these letters”—he gestured with the scented packet—“might have crushed. And be careful, Nab.”
He took her hand. Abigail was about to disavow any danger in dealing with possible minions of the scholarly gentleman to whom she’d spoken the evening before . . .
And then glanced across the hearth at Charley progressing through the alphabet at Pattie’s side. She had, of course, scrubbed off the V-shaped “scar” that afternoon the moment the boy had come into the house, and Charley denied that Mr. Scar-Eye had spoken to him or even attempted to do so . . . and later, that he’d even existed.
And yet, for a moment, it seemed to her that she saw the mark on her son’s face still.
