A Marked Man (13 page)

“So what did Mr. Brown plan to do?” she asked, and set her teacup aside.

“Only beat the shite out’n him—Only hammer him good,” the boy corrected himself, when Revere kicked him hard on the ankle. “He was for goin’ on the
Hetty
himself if Hev wouldn’t take him down in the
Magpie
. . . Hev Miller,” he provided, when Abigail looked puzzled. “That owns the
Magpie
. He’s my cousin and Matt’s, too, and he only agreed because Matt loses his temper like he does and he thought he’d better be along to keep an eye on him. Only somethin’s gone wrong, and I’m feared they come to harm, and I’ve been here waiting for ’em six days now, and if they’ve killed him, the magistrates’ll come for me, too. But I don’t like to ask, in case there’s somebody askin’ about for me. I’m scared even to steal food. I can’t just leave ’em, but I can’t let myself be took. I’ve got my ma to look after and my sisters, and I don’t know what to do.”

He looked from one to the other of them, pleading for guidance. Abigail had guessed his age at fourteen or fifteen, but now she wondered if he were younger than that. Or did he only seem so, because she had grown used to the sharp town prentices of Boston and had forgotten how much at sea these backwoods boys were, when they came to one of the biggest cities in all of America?

“Would you tell Mr. Adams how I’m fixed, m’am?” asked the boy timidly. “Mr. Quimby—that owns the Blue Ox in Boothbay—he’ll read us from what Mr. Sam Adams writes, about Freedom and the King and no taxes, and nobody to throw us off our land. He says, Sam Adams is a friend to us, though he’s never seen us.” His smile, suddenly shy, was like a ray of sunlight; a flash of hope in a life unremittingly bleak. “He says he’s a friend to all those that don’t hold by bein’ pushed about by the King’s rich friends.
Would
Mr. Adams stand a friend to me?”

Abigail’s glance crossed Revere’s in the murky darkness of the cabin. “To be sure he will,” she said.
Sam, I shall strangle you myself if this boy comes to harm.
“If nothing else, I’ll send someone over with something for you to eat—what
have
you been eating all this time?” And she clucked her tongue sharply at the boy’s mumbled recital of barter for the remnants of the cargo. “But you must tell us the truth. Did Mr. Brown and Mr. Miller wait for Cottrell when he came ashore?”

“Oh, yes, m’am. We all three was on Hancock’s Wharf when the
Hetty
put in, and saw him come off, in that fine gray coat with all the capes to it that he wore and a French cocked hat like Mr. Bingham wears. Hev says,
You stand to and be ready to take the
Magpie
out the second we come on board, and I mean the second
. Then Matt tells me to cut along back here, and cut I did. I seen him and Hev follow Mr. Cottrell off round the corner and up the street that leads away from the wharf—Lord, there was so many people about, and carts and things, they didn’t even need to take care not to be seen or anythin’! And that’s the last I saw them.”

“How were they dressed?” asked Revere, and young Putnam’s brow furrowed.

“I dunno. Just regular clothes.”

“Boots or shoes?”

“Moccasins,” said the boy, astonished that his questioner hadn’t known that.

“Is Hev’s coat brown or blue?”

“Green,” said the boy. “Matt’s used to be blue but it’s mostly all faded out sort of gray.” Then, as if it finally dawned on him that neither Revere nor Abigail would have the slightest idea what his friends looked like, he added, “Matt’s got a cocked hat, Hev’s has got a brim on it like a preacher, except he’s got a couple bear claws and some feathers hangin’ off it, ’cause he’ll go sometimes into the woods and trade with the Abenakis. His mother just hates it when he does that. Hev’s tall and thin, Matt’s about your height, sir, or maybe shorter, dark like you, and built like you but fatter. Matt brought his rifle and a pistol,” added the boy, “but Hev took ’em away from him. He left the rifle here”—the boy nodded at it, lying across two pegs driven into the wall—“but he took the pistol with ’em. And Matt had a club.”

Softly, Abigail said, “Did he, indeed?”

“Is Mr. Cottrell killed, m’am?” asked the boy. “Would you know how to find that out?”

“I’m afraid he is dead,” replied Revere quietly. “He was killed—apparently beaten to death—sometime Saturday night.”

 

 

I
f Abigail had Jesuitically neglected to mention which Mr. Adams she was married to, her companion, she noticed, had likewise been less than ingenuous in answering the question of whether they were magistrates or not. In fact, Paul Revere was active in the politics of his ward, and had served as clerk of the North Square Market on a number of occasions, and knew most of the selectmen of the town. “Something the boy didn’t need to know just now,” he remarked, as he steadied Abigail in her unwieldy iron pattens up the slippery planks of the wharf once more. “I’ll call on the Chief Constable in the morning and see if my suspicion is correct about where our two friends have been this past week.”

“I think jail’s the only place they could be, don’t you?” Abigail glanced back at the feeble glimmer of the
Magpie
’s porthole in the frozen stillness of the new-fallen dark. Even in the harbor, sitting in the little sloop’s damp cabin had left her aching and slightly sick. “If they were looking to flee the town, they hadn’t far to run to get on a ship. Going inland across the Neck would only get them to Cambridge, where it doesn’t sound as if they had friends. They could take the ferry to Charles Town or Winissimet, but why? Thank you,” she added, when they turned along Ship Street, toward her home and the much-belated supper that poor Pattie would have been obliged to prepare. “I beg you extend my apologies to Rachel for taking you away like this—”

Revere waved a hand good-naturedly and then grabbed for his hat again. “Lord, Thursday is Rachel’s night to have her sisters over,” he said. “They’ll be clustered around the fire, stitching and talking like a tree-full of finches in the spring.” He grinned. “You’ve only made me a trifle late for my pint at the Salutation—” He named one of the North End’s most notoriously Whig taverns. “And I know for a fact that that’s never killed a man, because Rachel’s told me so a thousand times. I’ll send you a note in the morning, to let you know if anything turns up at the jail.”

 

 

B
ut the note that arrived the next morning, as Abigail was scalding the churn and the dasher preparatory to starting (
Heavens be praised
!) the first butter of the year, was borne, not by Paul Revere, Junior, but by the young black footman who had served her tea and cakes at the Fluckners’. He emerged from the passway from the street, grinned with relief as he recognized her, and hurried up to her, shivering a little and wrapped to his cheekbones in scarves and a coat. “Mrs. Adams, m’am.” He held out a note. “This from Miss Fluckner. She say it’s important.”

“Come inside.” She left the bucket standing on the icy bricks, deposited the butter-making equipment in the shed as they passed its door, and took a silver bit out of the box on the sideboard to pay the youth. Though she heartily disapproved of tipping the servants of rich people who probably ate better than did her own children, Abigail knew also that the small pleasures of freedom would be few for a slave. “Does she need a reply?” she asked as she broke the seal, and the young man, who was holding out mittened hands gratefully to the fire, shook his head.

“She didn’t say, m’am. Just that it was important that you get this right away.”

W
hat on earth—?” Abigail knelt in a whisper of petticoats to peer behind the narrow bed that Lucy had pulled away from the wall of the little attic room.

“I put it back exactly where I found it,” provided the girl. “Bathsheba had a piece of planking over the hole, braced in place with the end of the bed. I know a lot of the servants hide their tips, because there’s always somebody in any house who steals. You couldn’t see this, unless you moved the bed and lay down on the floor.”

“I see.” Abigail brought her own cheek close to the worn planks, tried to angle the candle to the hole that had been gouged straight through the thick layer of plaster and broken-off lathe, without burning down Mr. Fluckner’s very expensive residence.

“This whole attic used to be one huge room,” explained Lucy. “This”—she slapped the wall—“covers a truss-beam about twelve inches square, and there’s another partition wall there on the other side, with a hollow in between where the beam goes. You can reach in,” she added, when Abigail hesitated. “There’s nothing awful in there.”

Abigail obeyed, bringing out first an old teapot, half full of something that made it weigh several pounds, and then an apron, rolled together around what felt like coins. Quite a number of coins.

“I wanted you to see them exactly how they were.”

She spread the apron out on the bed. “Good heavens!”

“I counted,” said Lucy in an awed voice. “There’s twenty-three pounds in there.”

Abigail picked up one of the coins. Silver—English. On its face, King George stared superciliously off into space. She sorted the rest of the coins with swift fingers, while Lucy held the candle above her shoulder, for the window in the little dormer was small and faced west, away from the fitful morning sun. “All English,” she murmured, still trying to adjust her mind to the fact that a slave-woman would have that much hard cash.

She opened the broken-spouted teapot, and from it dipped out more coins. These were more typical of the little hoards of hard money collected and saved by all of her friends: quarters and bits of Mexican doubloons, French deniers, Dutch rix-thalers. As a girl, she’d scarcely ever seen currency. Most business in Weymouth and the surrounding farms had been done by barter:
I’ll fix your shoes if you give me some butter
. John still had a great many clients who paid him in potatoes. When he did get paid in cash money, it was always like this, minted in the name of a dozen European kings because Parliament would not give any colony the power to hold silver or strike coins of its own.

She didn’t think she had ever seen twenty pounds in English coin all together at the same time.

She let the bits and coppers slither through her fingers, touched the hem of the apron, clean and still stiff with starch. “That apron hasn’t been in there long. Nor has the silver tarnished.”

“And Papa isn’t missing any money,” added Lucy. “Believe me, the whole house would know it if even a penny went missing out of his desk. Sir Jonathan’s the only person—maybe even counting Governor Hutchinson—who would
have
that much English coin. But why would he give it to her? He could get fifty harlots for it—couldn’t he?”

“At least,” agreed Abigail absentmindedly, her thoughts on other things than her companion’s moral upbringing. “Depending on how fastidious he was. And what were
you
doing, young lady, searching your servant’s room?” She looked around her at the bare and icy little chamber. Besides the bed there was only a low bench that appeared to do service as both table and cupboard. There were two stools tucked beneath it, and along its back edge a neat line of folded petticoats, caps, and stockings, piles of clean baby-clouts and tiny garments. Both children must have shared their mother’s bed, a desperate necessity in the unheated room. Something in the stale air of the place made her think that the room had been closed up for the almost two weeks since Bathsheba’s disappearance, and Abigail breathed a prayer of relief. At least they weren’t making poor little Marcellina stay up here alone.

“I remembered what you said,” said Lucy slowly, “about Sheba maybe being dead. I hope she isn’t—Papa’s still offering a reward for her—but if she doesn’t come back soon, I
know
he’s going to sell the children, or even just
give
them away just to get them out of the house!” There was real distress in her voice. “I know it isn’t my business, but I thought . . . I know some of the servants keep their tips. When Sheba was my maid, men were
always
paying her off to carry love-notes to me. I don’t mean that to sound like it does,” she apologized. “But it’s true. For three years now, I’ve been . . . It makes me sick, Mrs. Adams. Sick and mad. That’s why Harry—”

She stopped herself, her jaw tightened at the thought of Harry Knox. Abigail laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder, and Lucy shook her head, pushing the thought aside.

“Anyway, I knew Bathsheba was saving her tips, to buy Marcie free, and then Stephen when he was born. And I thought, she might have saved enough that if I gave it to you,
you
could buy at least one of them. Mama’s already spoken to Mrs. Barnaby about the time she spends changing Stephen’s clouts and feeding him and Marcie. I honestly don’t know where they can go. I don’t even think the orphanage would take Negro children, and that only leaves the poorhouse . . .”