“If I’m here to put the poor man on a gridiron about his late master,” returned Abigail, drawn in spite of herself to the Governor’s serene ease of manner, “the least I can do is bring him something, poor soul. This is Mr. Thaxter, my husband’s clerk.” The two men shook hands, and the little gentleman in the striped waistcoat was introduced, as Abigail had suspected, as Barnaby’s brother-in-law Mr. Buttrick.
“I fear poor Fenton may not yet be in a condition to appreciate the work you put into your offering,” the Governor continued, as he led his guests toward the servants’ stair, which ascended, like a secret spine, through the whole height of the building. “Dr. Rowe has bled him almost daily, and though he claims to see improvement, poor Fenton is still extremely weak.”
As the German cook took the blancmange from Abigail’s hands to set aside in the cold pantry, Abigail saw the woman glance at Hutchinson’s face with a sidelong look—What? Anger? Disapproval? As if words unsaid were tightening those heavy lips. But she only curtsied and backed away. Buttrick fetched a branch of candles from the table and bore it ahead of them up what felt like a thousand cramped, wedge-shaped little stairs.
David Fenton occupied a room among the neat little cubicles in the Governor’s attic, allotted to his servants and those of his guests: stifling in the summertime, Abigail guessed, and freezing tonight. Like the room at Fluckner’s in which Bathsheba had shared her narrow cot with her children, its walls consisted of lath and plaster slapped up between the struts and queen-posts of the roof, and its illumination by day would have come from the single dormer now shuttered against the cold. A candle on a mended table provided a modicum of light and a tremendous amount of smoke as the wind that moaned outside whispered and tugged at the flame. By the look of the wick, nobody had been up here for hours. It would smell, too, were the cold and stuffy air not thick with stenches worse by far. She wondered if the sick man could hear rats scratching among the rafters, if he woke in the night.
He didn’t turn his head when the door opened, but she saw the gleam of his moving eyes.
“Mr. Fenton?”
As Buttrick brought the other candles closer, Abigail caught her breath, shocked at the appearance of the patient on the bed. Dr. Rowe, whoever he was—and by his name he was a member of one of that elite circle of merchant families that ruled Boston—deserved to be horsewhipped, if he had continued to bleed a man in this state.
“Mr. Fenton, my name is Mrs. Adams. This is Mr. Thaxter, my husband’s law clerk. Mr. Buttrick said you were willing to speak with us, but if you’re tired now, we can return another time.”
“Quite all right, m’am.” It was almost surprising to hear the soft words coming out of those cracked, unshaven lips. “Don’t know what I can tell you, but if it’ll save some poor bloke a scragging, I’ll let you know what I can. Is there water in that pitcher, m’am?”
There was only a spoonful. Buttrick took the vessel, and he and Governor Hutchinson bowed themselves from the tiny room. Abigail made a silent vow, as Thaxter brought her up the single rush-bottomed chair, to have a few words with His Excellency on the subject of Dr. Rowe when she was finished here.
“We will all be most grateful for whatever you can tell us.” Abigail pulled her cloak tight around her. “And I apologize for troubling you like this. But yes, young Mr. Knox—who is accused of killing your master—is likely to be tried by an Admiralty Court in Halifax for the murder, and he had no more to do with killing Sir Jonathan than I did.”
“I dunno, m’am.” A ghost of a smile flickered at the corner of the man’s mouth. “You look as if you’d do a fair job of murder yourself if you had to, beggin’ your pardon.”
She said, “Go along with you, sir,” but smiled in return. “The trouble is that Mr. Knox cannot prove he was in bed and asleep like a decent workingman, and so we are obliged to find the true culprit, if we are to keep his head out of the noose. I shall try to be as brief as I can.”
Mr. Fenton moved his fingers a little, as if to say, It’s all one, m’am. But his brow tweaked for a moment, and she heard his breath catch as if at the pinch of some inner pain.
“Did your master ever visit a house on the far side of Beacon Hill while you’ve been here? It stands by itself, beyond the edge of the settled buildings of town, near the Common? Do you know who lives there?”
“No, m’am, that I never knew.” He glanced past her, to where Thaxter sat on the floor with the branch of candles at his side, scribbling in his commonplace-book. “’Course, he was often out and about without me. Often he’d ride out from town into the countryside. It was his job, after all, to learn what he could of where the troublemakers in town was gettin’ their money from, for paper an’ print an’ rum for the mob.”
Abigail opened her lips to snap, What makes you think men need to be drunk or paid to express disgust with the King’s rich friends? but stopped herself. Politics were all beside the way, and the man who lay before her, she knew, would tire very quickly. “Did he tell you whom he met on these rides, or where he went?”
“No, m’am. I don’t think it ever crossed his mind, to say where he was goin’ nor when he’d be back, and I’d served Sir Jonathan twenty years. Just I knew to have a clean shirt ready, an’ his coat brushed an’ his wig powdered for him to go to dinner. There’s gentlemen like that, m’am.” He made a movement that might have been a shrug. “All part of bein’ a gentleman’s gentleman, like gettin’ boots chucked at you. My uncle that brought me up did for a baronet in Hampshire that used to thrash him with his ridin’ whip. Wouldn’t even get angry.” He shook his head again, wonderingly. “When I come down sick, if he could have found a man to take my place that short a time before we sailed, he’d have sacked me without thinkin’ twice about it. Thank God decent servants is thin on the ground in this daft land, beggin’ your pardon, m’am.”
“Would he truly have sacked you when he got back?” It had nothing to do with Harry Knox getting hanged or where Sir Jonathan Cottrell had spent Saturday afternoon, but Abigail could not keep herself from asking. “As ill as you are?”
“Lord love you, m’am, it’s kind of you to ask. ’Course he would. What use is a sick man to him? Specially if he was to be goin’ back to England once good sailin’ weather comes.”
Abigail’s lips tightened. “Was there any who hated your master?”
The servant tilted his head again to look toward Thaxter. “You down there with the cocked hat . . . How many pages has that little book of yours got?”
Thaxter, taken by surprise, ran a swift thumb over the corner. “Thirty still blank.”
“Not near enough, m’am. The way he treated me—treated the chaps in the stables—the boots in any inn we stayed in . . . It was all one. You, an’ me, m’am, an’ your good husband, too, I’ll wager, if here you are out doin’ a good turn for your fellow-man without no fuss raised at home—we look at other folks an’ we think, Well, she or he has his troubles, too, an’ if I don’t like bein’ treated like that chair you’re sittin’ on there, probably t’other chap doesn’t like it, either. But I swear to you, m’am, Sir Jonathan Cottrell was . . . It was like he didn’t think about other people at all. Like they was no more real to him than faces in a painting. Not just servants an’ beggars in the street, but everyone.”
He grimaced and turned his face aside, his breath suddenly swift, and the door opened again to admit a very young scullery maid carrying the water-pitcher. Abigail filled the spouted invalids-cup that sat on the table at the bed’s side, beside the wavering candle, and helped the sick man to drink. “It’s like I got a fire in me,” he whispered, when she refilled it and he drained it again. “I drink enough to drown a horse, an’ it’s like I’ve had nuthin’ at all. I had the dysentery when first we got to Barbados, if you’ll pardon me mentionin’ such a thing, m’am, and before that was sick from bad water in Spain, an’ it was never like this.”
“Your master sounds,” opined Thaxter quietly, “like a man walking about the
world asking for someone to lie in wait for him with a club.”
“He could be charmin’, though.” Fenton sketched another weak small gesture. “When he wanted somethin’—I’ve seen it. He had a nice voice, Sir Jonathan, and a way of listening like you were his dearest friend. It was somethin’ he’d learned off, like a piece of music, to get what he had his eye on. It’s like the lads in the stables say of His Excellency the Governor, not meanin’ no disrespect of him: that he’s a good man, a kind man, an’ a brilliant one, and I’m here to say that’s true . . . But they say, too, that folks all over this colony hate him, ’cause he gives all the plum jobs to his relatives and can see only the one side of any problem, an’ that side his own. Like those magistrates that can’t see that a man might steal ’cause he’s hungry and can’t get no work, not ’cause he’s a thief in his heart. He was as he was.”
“I suppose the question is not, who hated your master,” murmured Abigail. “But who hated him enough to kill him. Not to want to kill him, but to actually go through with it. And who, of those people, was in Boston last Saturday, when Sir Jonathan came off the boat from Maine. How long were you in Barbados?”
“Two years,” said Fenton. “Two years and four months.”
“What was Sir Jonathan there to do?”
“Same as here. To report back to Lord North about smugglin’, which is worse there than it is here, if you can believe it, the French and Spanish bein’ so close. We stayed with Sir Damien Purcell, that’s on the Governor’s council in Bridgetown—” He winced again, and his breath caught as his hand pressed momentarily to his belly.
“Was there any trouble down there? Over women, or cards, or politics?”
Fenton’s breath whispered in a laugh. “Lord, Sir Jonathan didn’t care one way or t’other about politics, m’am. He’d follow whoever was strongest and make ’em think he’d believed what he said all his life. And women . . . beggin’ your pardon for speakin’ of such a thing, m’am, but Sir Damien, and about ten of the other big planters that was involved in the smugglin’, they bought him the prettiest slave-women they could find. The men he reported, it wasn’t that they didn’t bribe him, but whether they could help him get on with the King or not. Up here, there’s fewer that can do that for him.
“As for the women, he tired of ’em pretty quick. There was a little trouble over a white girl that was the daughter of Sir Damien’s wife’s mantua-maker, but he paid her parents twenty pounds and that was the end of that. There was no one about her to follow him up to Boston, even if they had had the money.”
“What was her name?” asked Abigail, in spite of the fact that she knew he was probably right.
“Fanny Gill.”
Thaxter wrote it down.
“Since you’ve been in Boston,” she asked, “have you seen anyone Sir Jonathan knew in Barbados?”
Fenton shook his head.
“Anyone from Barbados at all?”
“A couple of the actors that was tourin’ in Bridgetown while we was there, but no one that my gentleman would have spoke to.”
“None of the servants from Sir Damien’s house, for instance? Or from any of the houses of his friends?”
“No, m’am. Servants in Barbados, they’re all black. Even had he done one of ’em wrong, and a bad wrong, they can’t come and go the way folks can here. They can’t just take a ship after him. Nor none from Spain, either, though he did have trouble there over a girl, a maidservant in the house of the Marques de Tallegas: bad trouble. Could I bother you for another cup of water, m’am? Thank you. Does me no good, it doesn’t feel like—” He sighed. “The girl’s sweetheart ended up killed. It wasn’t ever proved who’d done it, but I always wondered if the Marques had had it done, to stay on Sir Jonathan’s good side. That was a sorry business.”
He stretched his hand feebly toward the cup as Abigail filled it again—she made a mental note to take the pitcher down to the kitchen with her to be refilled when she left. When he had drunk, Fenton’s head dropped back onto the thin pillow, his face twisting in the dim candlelight; the filthy smell of sickness grew stronger in the room and mixed with the trace of fresh blood.
“A last thing,” said Abigail softly, “and then we’ll go. Did your master ever speak of the maidservant at the Fluckners’? A black woman named Bathsheba?”
“In passin’,” murmured Fenton. “Laughed about her, like it was a lark.” His eyes had slipped closed. “Like a kid pissin’ on the schoolmaster’s doorstep.”
“Did he give her money?”
“Him?” The servant’s breath puffed out in a whispered laugh, a tiny cloud of gold in the icy dark. “A black girl?”
Abigail drew the blankets—ample, she was glad to see—up over the man’s shoulders, tucking them gently in. Even in the thrashing light of the single candle at the bedside, she could see how sunken his eyes were, and when Thaxter stood and picked up the branch of lights that had been at his side, she started back, appalled at the dusky lividity of jaundice that the stronger glow made clear.
When she and the clerk returned to the servants’ hall and thanked Buttrick for his kindness in arranging the interview, she asked, “Is Governor Hutchinson still at home, Mr. Buttrick? Could he spare me a moment of his time?” and in a very few minutes was shown into the front part of the house, where the Governor rose to greet her from beside the fire in his study. John would expire with envy, she reflected: books lined the walls, some new and imported from England, others old, clasped in clumsy bindings—the remains of the early records of the colony, whose history His Excellency had made his lifelong study. Despite the man’s pigheaded intransigence about the tea last December—despite the letter that he’d written the King urging His Majesty to deal with the discontented colonists in the harshest possible fashion—still Abigail’s hair prickled on her nape at the thought of the irreplaceable colony records that had been lost, trampled in the mud, and burned when one of Sam’s mobs had looted the Hutchinson family home in the North End.
And yet, as Fenton had said of his master, the Governor had great charm, warmth, and intelligence shining from his gentle eyes. Abigail curtseyed and thanked His Excellency for his hospitality, “And for your willingness to help us gather evidence to be used in favor of Mr. Knox. What I wish to say now has little to do with that matter, sir, and is perhaps none of my business—except insofar as it is every Christian’s business to do one’s best to help a man who is suffering. Has any doctor other than Dr. Rowe seen Mr. Fenton?”
The Governor’s fine brows drew together over his nose. “Dr. Rowe is my personal physician, Mrs. Adams, and the nephew of one of my closest friends.”
“And I’m sure he is quite a fine one,” replied Abigail. “Yet I’m sure you have observed how each physician has his own methods of going about a cure, and it appears to me—Sir, do you think, from your own observations, that Mr. Fenton is improving, simply by being bled?” When Hutchinson was silent, considering this, she went on, “I have had some experience of illness, Your Excellency, and Mr. Fenton appears to me to be jaundiced—and to be suffering from symptoms far beyond those of la grippe. Dr. Joseph Warren—”
He reacted like a horse suddenly enraged by a fly. “Dr. Joseph Warren is a fomenter of sedition and a professional troublemaker.”
“And is a very good physician, with experience in this type of disorder.” She comforted herself with the reflection that this might well be actually true, since it was clear neither of them had the slightest idea what type of disorder had Jonathan Cottrell’s servant in its grip. “This is not a matter of politics, sir. I honestly believe this to be a case in which a misdiagnosis could mean a man’s life. The man is a stranger in a strange land,” she went on quietly. “His very life has been left in the hands of strangers. Could you not at least permit Dr. Warren to see him?”
The Governor’s flat, square shoulders relaxed a little. He said a trifle grudgingly, “I could do that.”
“Thank you, sir.” She rose and curtseyed
again. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart. May I write to Dr. Warren, asking him to attend on Mr. Fenton tomorrow?”
Hutchinson smiled wryly, and again, Abigail felt the warmth of his charm. “Would it do me the slightest bit of good, Mrs. Adams, if I said, ‘No?’ ”
’T is all well to say no one whom Sir Jonathan wronged in Bridgetown has followed him here, nor from Spain, either,” remarked Thaxter, as he and Abigail made their way along Marlborough Street in the windy dark of early evening. Spits of sleet struck their faces, and Abigail shivered, thinking of the sick man, lying between waking and sleep in the dark of a stranger’s attic, feeling his life leak away. “He sounds like a man who couldn’t but make enemies wherever he went: A plain-dealing villain, like Don John in Shakespeare, who doesn’t care who knows his evil and holds himself in such pride that he can’t see any reason to change, because he’s fine as he is.”
“I cannot hide what I am,” repeated Abigail softly, savoring the words of one of her favorite plays. “I must be sad when I have cause, and smile at no man’s jests; eat when I have stomach and wait for no man’s leisure; sleep when I am drowsy and tend to no man’s business; laugh when I am merry . . .”
“And kiss whatever woman as takes his fancy, without asking what she or anyone else thinks of it,” finished the clerk grimly. “A despoiler, even as Don John was of poor Miss Hero in the play, only because it amused him.”
“Let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me,” she murmured, reflecting on the deeper sin of that troublemaking canker in the lovely Arcadia of Shakespeare’s imagining; the man who is utterly selfish to his own appetite and whims. Her father, she remembered, had a special voice, a special inflection, when he would read Don John’s part, sneering and leering. John—her John—would for his part read the man quietly cold. As if, as poor Mr. Fenton said, other people were no more to him than faces painted in a picture. When the London papers came to Boston, she would scan their columns for mention of Shakespeare’s plays in the theaters there and would wonder what it would be like to actually see these events. To see men—and women, too! for shame!—striding about the raised and lighted stage, rich in gleaming costumes, gesturing and turning; not just the circle of friends by the parlor fire reading those words . . .
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