A Marked Man (29 page)

She took the mouse by the tail and moved toward the back door, then stopped again.

There was no blood on its fur. Rather, its whiskers and paws were powdered with flour . . .
Oh, not again
! Above all things, Abigail hated to have to throw out flour because rodents had somehow managed to get into it, despite every precaution of barrels and bags. She glanced back at the flour-barrel, expecting to see a telltale track that would show where it had been gnawed through . . .

And saw that the barrel was open.

She had only to form the thought to discard it.

White tracks amply showed where the vermin had taken advantage of their opportunity . . .

And down behind the barrel, another mouse lay, as dead as the one still dangling from her hand.

On the shelf above the barrel lay the longest of her wooden spoons, whitened with flour for a good three-quarters of its length, as if someone
—Who
?—had stirred the barrel . . .

Had stirred something into the barrel . . .

Abigail put her hand over her mouth and felt herself go cold.

Half a day later, he was taken sick
. . . She heard Dr. Warren’s light voice in her mind.
What does that sound like to you?

The man had come not to steal but, with a deliberateness that took her breath away, to kill every member of the household.

F
or the love of Heaven, Nab, we don’t need to be calling Apthorp into this.” Cousin Sam thumped his hand on the parlor table with an impatience that rattled the half-empty cider-mugs. Not wanting to disturb the children any more than they already were, Abigail had chosen to confer with the men in this room rather than the more homey—and also warmer—kitchen. “I have a couple of friends who can get you into that house—”

“There has been quite enough breaking and entering in the past twelve hours.” Abigail glanced from Sam to Paul Revere to Dr. Warren—the latter, to his credit, looked shocked at the suggestion—and then back to Sam. “Just because the man’s a Tory and an Apthorp doesn’t mean he’s going to run to this mysterious Mr. Elkins and warn him that I want to see the inside of that house again. Besides, I need to speak to him about his tenant.”

“You think it was Elkins who came here last night, then?” Warren didn’t sound disbelieving, only curious about her reasoning.

“I think I should like to see if Mr. Elkins has a wounded ear,” replied Abigail. “He may not. He may have some perfectly legitimate reason for spending fifty shillings a quarter on a house he doesn’t seem to be living in—which coincidentally lies within easy walking distance of where Lieutenant Coldstone was shot.”

Though she was fairly certain she’d interrupted her visitor in the midst of his first task of the evening, she’d spent the hour or so between her discovery of the dead mice and the appearance of her three friends in response to her frantic notes, nailing shut and stowing in the attic not only the flour, but also the cornmeal and the cider, and her mind kept questing back to the other contents of the pantry . . .

Did poison wait for them there, too? She knew this was unreasonable but could not free herself of the panicky obsession. Greeks and Romans had poisoned one another with liquids as well as powders, and such a philtre might conceivably have been poured over or into the sugar as well . . . Would it have caused the sugar-loaf to change color?

She would have to ask Lucy, who seemed to be a girl familiar with the more lurid forms of fiction that might deal with such matters . . .

“A man lays out money like that only if he has good reason, and no good reason seems readily visible. Money also turns up in the room of the servant-girl Bathsheba, who disappeared two days after Cottrell left Boston. And now this actor, this Mr. Palmer, who had dinner with poor Fenton the night before he took sick, seems to have disappeared as well. We have a pattern, gentlemen”—she ticked off the points on her long, slender fingers—“money, poison, and people disappearing . . . I shall take Mr. Thaxter to Pear Tree House with me. Not simply for the sake of respectability,” she added after a moment. “But I’m starting to find it a bit unnerving, to go about alone.”

 

 

A
nd you think this Mr. Elkins is connected with the Seaford sisters—the ones who killed themselves on Cottrell’s account?” Thaxter glanced around him and drew closer to Abigail as they emerged from the relative shelter of the houses along Southack Court and made their way along the frost-hard mud of one of the unfinished streets that crossed the northern slope of Beacon Hill. The river and the Mill-Pond, which had been dammed off it, both floated with chunks of ice, and the wind that swept across them and over the hill’s bare shoulder was wickedly cold. Having dispatched a note to Lieutenant Coldstone informing him of these new developments and having received from the same boatman a very polite thank-you from Lieutenant Dowling, Abigail spared a pitying thought for that very young sawbones, exiled from the warm Caribbean to ply his trade in the damp brick corridors of a fort in a half-frozen bay.

“I think he is connected with someone whom Cottrell harmed.” For Cottrell—also newly come to this brutally frigid land from the mild Indies—she felt no pity.
Margaret tells me that this girl’s sister so griev’d the loss that she too died at her own hand.
Heat flashed through her at Lucy’s words, rage so stifling that for a moment she was scarcely aware of where she was. She loved her scapegrace brother William, for all his faults, but the love for her sisters Mary and Betsy went deeper, twined around the roots of her soul. The world being what it was, she had tried to face in imagination what it would be like were brisk, busybody Mary to die in childbed, or spinsterish, beautiful Betsy of some disease in their parents’ home. Such things happened, and Abigail had prayed that should such an event come to pass, the God who had sent it would help her to bear it.

But had one or the other of these women—these souls who seemed as much a part of her as her own—died by her own hand, in shame and horror . . . would she, Abigail, be driven to end her own life rather than live without the sister she loved?

She didn’t think so. Yet she found herself contemplating with a certain hellish satisfaction the image of Sir Jonathan Cottrell, beaten half to death, lying conscious and freezing for some time in that alley before the darkness took him.
Forgive me, Jesus . . .

She forced herself to add,
And forgive him
.

She realized she had been long silent. Her husband’s clerk was watching her face with the eyes of one who read her thought.

“Poor Mr. Fenton spoke of a number of women whom Cottrell despoiled,” she went on. “One at least had a lover for whose death Cottrell seems to have been responsible as well. A
fulyear
, Grannie Quincy says they used to call such a man: A man who dishonors women for sport. Of those women, only one—or two, if you count the poor sister—seems to have had family or friends in a position to seek vengeance for what he did. And even those, as John pointed out, may have had to wait until they had the resources to begin the pursuit.”

Her iron pattens scrunched in the hard-frozen mud as they ascended the hill toward Pear Tree House, its pink bricks very bright against the brown of the naked orchard. Thaxter put a hand, stout in its dogskin glove, beneath her elbow to steady her, until they reached the muck-drowned gravel of the drive.

“Unfortunately,” Abigail went on, “it will take at least six weeks for a letter to reach anyone who knew the Seafords in England for a description of the sister’s fiancé Mr. Tredgold. Another six weeks or more for a reply. And it is beyond hope that by June, this town will not be entangled in such a confusion of reprisal and counterreprisal for the destruction of that miserable tea last December, at the very least . . . and in any case,” she added, “were it
two
weeks, I fear it will not save Mr. Knox.”

“It may not,” said Thaxter. “Yet all we need to do, really, is find a single point sufficiently telling to Colonel Leslie, for him to cancel the order for an Admiralty trial. And for that we need produce only the evidence that one who wished the Commissioner’s death with sufficient resolution was here in Boston and had the means to accomplish it.”

“You’re quite right, of course,” replied Abigail thoughtfully. “But more’s the pity, you’ve just given a description of Harry Knox.”

Thurlow Apthorp waited for them, just within the doors of the Pear Tree House. He appeared relieved to see that Abigail’s escort was her husband’s very respectable young clerk and not some shaggy mechanic. He seemed, too, genuinely troubled by Abigail’s information that she suspected that Mr. Elkins had something to do with—or at least some knowledge of—the shooting that had taken place on the Common the previous day: “Please understand that we have no accusation to make against him,” said Thaxter, not entirely truthfully but certainly within the letter of the law. “But events having taken the turn that they have, it is imperative that we speak to Mr. Elkins as soon as may be.”

“There’s the trouble, sir,” replied Apthorp worriedly, and he shut the door to exclude the whipping draft. The tall central hall settled again into the semblance of a well filled with shadow. “Mr. Elkins has not come into the Man-o’-War to pick up his letters—”

Abigail was already aware of this fact from Sam, since a couple of the Sons of Liberty were watching the place.

“—and I’ve no means of reaching the man until he does.” He added, as if he feared they thought such a course might have slipped his mind, “I have written him.”

This, too, Sam had reported. His informants had gotten a good look at the letters waiting under the tavern’s counter.

“Of course you have,” said Abigail soothingly. “And the matter being one of suspected violence against officers of the Crown, your permitting us use of the house again in your tenant’s absence is certainly not actionable.” She looked around her again at the high walls with the single stairway leading up one side, the cold light from the window above the door lending a kind of pallid illumination to the upper reaches and almost none down below. The sickly odor of death had faded, yet she still led the way as quickly as she could into the drawing room that was the only fully furnished chamber in the house. “Has Mr. Elkins never spoken to you, when coming or going from the town, of which direction he would travel in? Or of where he might have been, ere coming to New England?”

“Britain, I’ve always assumed. At least, he always paid me in British coin.”

“What, all of it?” It was the other question she had meant to ask, and Abigail felt a little as she had when, as a child, she’d pegged the bull at darts three times in a row, something even William couldn’t do.

The householder nodded, and Abigail’s glance crossed Thaxter’s. Then Thaxter moved off toward the dining room, Apthorp bowing to Abigail to precede him . . .

She paused, frowning at the closed door behind her. “Did Mr. Elkins say why he had the latch removed from this door?”

“Latch?” He stared at her in surprise.

Abigail’s gloved fingers brushed the holes in the wood of the door itself, and its frame. “Was there not a bolt here?”

Apthorp shook his head: “Why on earth would anyone want to bolt the door to the
drawing room
? Good Lord,” he added, bending closer to look and squinting a little—Abigail realized he was nearsighted. “Well, bless my soul.” He straightened again, regarded Abigail—and Thaxter, who had turned back from the dining room door—in bafflement. “Was a latch put on the other door?” Apthorp hurried across the drawing room to see. “What an extraordinary thing to do—”

He looked at the door into the dining room, then opened it and checked the other side. Abigail followed—rather carefully, as the shutters still covered the ground-floor windows—and checked as well. “Odd.” She crossed back to the door into the central hall, knelt in a rustle of quilted petticoats, and peered at the holes in the gloom. “It looks like a bolt—can you get those shutters open? Thank you! And the holes look fresh.”

She got to her feet. “Let us see if other doors were used the same way.”

They made a circuit of the ground-floor rooms, which were laid out around the central hall, and the pattern became immediately evident: all doors leading into the hall bore the same pattern of nail-holes on their inner sides. When the searchers climbed the stairs and checked the rooms above they found it so upstairs as well. “What on earth was the man afraid of?” asked Thaxter, as they came down the stair again. “None of the communicating doors between room and room, so he expected . . . What? That someone might be able to get into the hall—through the front door or that upper window above it—while he slept? But who?”