“Two months.”
September, 1772. Apple-picking time, when Tommy was born.
“I think his last note came just before Mrs. Fishwire was killed,” said Lucy after a moment. “Philomela and I were just terrified, because I’d already talked to Papa about not selling her and he gave me his lecture about how she wanted to stay with us only because I spoiled her, and all Negroes lie, etc. etc. And Mama gave me her lecture about how that wasn’t any of my business anyway, and young ladies shouldn’t concern themselves with men’s business etc. etc.” She reached across the short distance that separated them, and gripped her servant’s hand.
“And after that,” said Philomela quietly, “nothing. This man I’d thought was him . . . I didn’t see him anymore. But for a year and a half now, every time I go outside, it’s terrible. That poem is still under a floorboard in my room, but it’s like a burning coal, that I smell the smoke of, every waking moment.”
“It’s like the Sword of Damocles in the story,” agreed Lucy. “For months—over a year—we’ve been waiting for the thread to break, and the blade to drop. But at the same time, you know how easy it is, to think, Were we really making that up? Did that truly happen? Or was it like the games you play when you’re little, about being a princess in danger, and all the time you know that nobody really gets carried off and held captive in a big house far from anywhere, and has their captor fall madly in love with them. And then Philomela told me about Mrs. Pentyre.”
“From whom did you hear that?”
“The woman who comes to help with the laundry, the next day. I was scared, and when I went to the market Saturday I asked about. And Mrs. Adams, it truly sounded like the same man who’d killed the others. Then a few days later Scipio told me you were asking about it, because of Mrs. Malvern disappearing, and that you’d talked to Mrs. Pentyre’s French maid, and were really looking, the way the constables and the magistrates never did . . . Scipio’s a sort of friend of mine,” she added. “He lived for years in the same part of Virginia I come from—though he was long gone from there before I was ever born. But he knew a lot of the people I grew up with. I didn’t know you by sight, but on the wharf yesterday, Miss Lucy heard the officer introduce you to her father, and knew you would be coming here today.”
“And you thought you would tell me what you know of the matter? Can you remember—”
“It isn’t just that,” Lucy broke in.
After a slight pause—because no well-bred servant would follow into even someone else’s interruption of a white lady—Philomela said, “The day before yesterday, I saw him again. Watching me the way he used to, on the way to the market.”
Twenty-three
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” There was not a shadow of doubt in her voice. “But the problem is, m’am, I can’t be sure. When he would watch me, the summer before last, he wore summer things: a blue coat with a good trim cut to it, and stockings and shoes, not boots. Thursday he was muffled up in a greatcoat, and boots, and a scarf, for ’twas bitter cold. But it was the man. I saw his face, and the way he stood and moved. It was the man.”
Abigail was silent for a time. Throughout this recital she’d held her watch cradled in her palm, and the time stood very near four thirty. Light was nearly gone from the sky. Yet if she could not cross back to Boston, then neither could Thaxter, or anyone. With matters as they stood, would John have the good sense to wait until morning? Would he show up, alone and unarmed, in the boat of one of Sam’s smuggler friends, like the hero of a gothic romance to attempt a rescue? Under ordinary circumstances, of course—
She looked back at the two young women, Lucy in her gaudy silk, Philomela who wore her extraordinary beauty like a nimbus of light. What other victims has this man sought? Is this man still seeking?
She took a deep breath. “What color greatcoat?”
“Gray. A sort of stone gray.”
The same color as John’s. And Orion Hazlitt’s. And Charles Malvern’s. And Paul Revere’s and Nehemiah Tillet’s and Mr. Ballagh on Love Lane and several score more of Abigail’s male acquaintance both in and out of Boston. “Caped?”
Philomela closed her eyes, calling the scene back. “Yes. I think so, yes.”
Voices sounded suddenly loud in the other room, two women bewailing the inconveniences of the island and the savage barbarity of the traitors whose insanity had taken over Boston. One of them expressed a strident hope that Sam would be hanged. Recalling Sam’s outright command to John to keep her from this expedition today—and his probable reaction if John came to him with the news that Abigail had not returned—she felt inclined to agree. “And the scarf?”
Philomela’s forehead puckered, trying to call back a moment that she would rather forget. “Red? Dull red, I think. What we’d dye wool at home, with madder-root.”
Abigail owned three of that color, including the one she had on at the moment. “I must go,” she said, rising. A man’s voice cut through those of the ladies next door, gruff and rumbling. “Else I won’t be able to get home at all. Is there anyone left at your father’s house, Miss Fluckner?” And when she nodded, “You say this poem is under the floorboard in your room?”
“Yes, m’am. ’Tis on the second floor, between Miss Lucy’s room and her mother’s. There’s a loose board beside the head of the bed, near the wall. Mrs. Adams, thank you—”
“Don’t thank me yet. Miss Fluckner, can you send me a note, as soon as may be, authorizing me to whoever is in charge at your father’s house? We live in Queen Street, anyone there will know where. I must—”
A knock on the connecting door: “Lucy, dearest? Are you ready?”
“Drat it—tea with Commander Leslie—” Lucy bounded off the bed, turned her back on Philomela. “Get me unlaced . . .”
“Lucy?” bellowed Mr. Fluckner’s voice.
“I’ll be dressed in a moment, Papa.”
Abigail curtseyed and left through the outer door. Behind her, framed in the lamplight, she saw Philomela rapidly divesting the girl of her brilliant day-gown in a cloud of green and yellow silk.
John Thaxter was pacing the bricks fretfully outside the commander’s office, looking in all directions. When he saw Abigail across the parade he strode toward her, followed by the sturdy, towering figure of Sergeant Muldoon. Rather despairingly, Abigail added Thaxter to the list of men she knew who owned caped gray greatcoats. “M’am, I’ve been to the wharf, the men say—”
“We’re going,” promised Abigail, and obediently turned her steps toward the castle gate. Distantly, the tolling of Boston’s church bells carried over the three miles of tumbled gray harbor, dreary and ominous in the failing light. “Is Lieutenant Coldstone—?”
“He’s with Colonel Leslie, m’am.” Muldoon saluted her respectfully as he spoke. “In a rare taking he is, and the Provost Marshal, too, and trying to get shut of a mountain of business before the Colonel’s to take tea with the Royal Commissioners and the wives of all these rich nobs from Boston, beggin’ your pardon, m’am.” He nodded toward a small group of men crossing the parade, the torchlight borne by the soldier who preceded them glittering on the bullion that decked the Colonel’s dress uniform, gleaming on the marble smoothness of powdered hair. Beside the Colonel, resplendent in a caped greatcoat of some dark hue that could have been liver brown or indigo in the darkness, walked Richard Pentyre, gesturing with his quizzing glass and speaking with what appeared to be a ferocious intensity.
No sign of Coldstone. Drat it.
“I hope your talk with Mr. Pentyre went as you hoped it would, m’am?”
Abigail shook her head. “It wasn’t a wasted trip, but Mr. Pentyre was hardly forthcoming.”
“Well, you can scarce blame him, can you?” remarked Thaxter, as the freezing draft dragged at Abigail’s cloak and they entered the lamplit tunnel of the gate. “Between the lawsuit over the Sellars land that’s to be decided next month, and being served notice by the Sons of Liberty to—”
“What lawsuit?”
“Up in Essex County, m’am. If all this isn’t solved, the thing looks to be dragging on into another session. It’s been up in the courts, or some other nuisance suit that he’s brought in aid of it, every time Mr. Adams and I have had a case on the docket there.”
“Not—” She glanced at Muldoon, stopped herself from saying, Abednego Sellars, and to turn the subject said instead, “Not likely to be settled soon, if trouble comes of this tea business. I know he had notice to report to the Liberty Tree and resign his position, but I’d scarcely consider that grounds for having his visitors searched before they’re permitted to see him.”
“Damn it!” They emerged from the gate, into the mucky chaos of the camp around the walls. With a hasty, “Excuse me, m’am!” Thaxter dashed ahead, to intercept two sailors in striped jerseys and tarred pigtails, making their way up the torchlit path. Presumably, guessed Abigail, with deep forboding, the men who were to take her back to Boston. Their obvious reluctance to have anything further to do with the project was understandable: Darkness was closing in, and beyond the range of each smoky little campfire among the close-crowded jumble of tents and wash-lines, virtually nothing could be seen but a sense of movement in the shadows, and the occasional flash of an animal eye. Around Thaxter and the sailors, more civilians were coming up the path from the wharf: not rich merchants, but ordinary citizens of the town. Angry and harried-looking, they bore makeshift bundles and glanced right and left at the chaos with the expression of people who have been cheated of their rights. A small child was crying.
We have all been cheated of our rights, thought Abigail, pitying them yet knowing there was no good answer to their distress. We will all be cheated of our rights, unless we take a stand against the Crown while yet we have a little freedom to do so.
Beside her, Muldoon said, “T’cha! Searchin’—that’s goin’ a bit far, beggin’ your pardon, m’am, note or no note.”
“Note?” Abigail turned her head sharply, her mind still running on poems stuffed through shutters, hidden under floorboards. “What note?”
“The note Mr. Pentyre had, m’am. About how the Sons of Liberty were going to kill him and his wife both.”
She stared at him, aghast, and Thaxter came striding back up the path, coat flapping. “They say they’ll do it, Mrs. Adams, but you must come now.”
“Where did they get it? Who sent it?” She took Thaxter’s arm, her pattens slipping in the mud as they descended another two yards of path, turned a corner around a makeshift tavern, found themselves suddenly at the dock itself.
Muldoon shook his head. “That I don’t know, m’am, I’m sorry.”
“Does Coldstone have it in his possession?”
“Mrs. Adams, you must come—”
“I don’t know, m’am. I’ll ask him—”
“Mrs. Adams—!”
She allowed herself to be helped into the boat, what was called in New England a whaleboat: like a large rowboat with a sail. Scarcely what one wanted to be on the water in, on an overcast winter evening with wind howling down the bay straight from the North Pole . . .
“Who signed the note?” she asked, standing up precariously as the boat moved from the dock. “Whose name was on it?”
Muldoon looked puzzled, fishing in his memory. “Something Latin,” he said. “No-vangelus?”
Novanglus. New Englander.
John’s pseudonym.
And John, of course, was away at a meeting when Thaxter finally walked her up from Rowe’s Wharf to Queen Street again. “Mrs. Adams, you must be froze!” Pattie almost dragged her and Thaxter indoors. The warmth of the kitchen—redolent of soap and wet bricks, for Pattie had Johnny and Charley in the tub before the fire and Nabby was drying her long blonde hair—wrapped her like a shadowy amber blanket. Woozy as she was with residual sea-sickness from the crossing, Abigail was suddenly, crashingly conscious that she had consumed nothing since the bread-and-butter nuncheon just after two.
On that thought came another, of the promise she’d made poor Orion. It was nearly full-dark—the sailors had grumbled about having to spend the night with the little Battery garrison, instead of rowing back to the safety of Castle Island—and Abigail was almost certain that for the pious Hazlitt household, the Sabbath had well and truly begun. Still, she reflected, she could but try.
And she knew she’d better try now, because if she so much as sat down and took off her pattens, she knew she wouldn’t want to stand up again.
“Hercules—” She put her hand on Thaxter’s arm. “Could I trouble you for one more Labor before you turn in for the night?”
Abigail suspected that this particular Labor would be in vain, and so it proved. The little house on Hanover Street was closed up tight, the feeblest glimmer of candlelight leaking through the cracks in the rear shutters visible only by the comparative blackness of the yard when she and Thaxter groped their way to the back door. No one answered her knock, though she thought she heard the droning voice within pause in its reading of Scripture.
When it resumed, she sighed. “No sense adding to the poor man’s trouble by leaving bait out for rats.” She settled the basket more firmly on her arm. “But, I couldn’t sleep tonight, without having tried.”
Wind screamed along Hanover Street as they made their way back, cutting through Abigail’s cloak and jacket as if she wore gauze and lace. This corner of Boston, along the footslopes of Beacon Hill, was but thinly built-upon yet, and the neighborhood along Hanover Street lacked the crowded liveliness of the North End. With all shutters closed, and the moon hidden in cloud-wrack, the darkness was abyssal, swallowing the wan flicker of Thaxter’s lantern and causing Abigail to wonder what people did, who were abroad in such darkness who didn’t know the way. Even thieves, she reflected, would have a hard time—
She stopped, and turned to look back.
“What is it, m’am?”
What had it been? She stood for a moment, wondering if she should say anything . . . “I thought I saw a light behind us,” she said.
“There’s naught now.” Thaxter raised his lantern—not that the single candle inside could have put out enough light to show up a regiment of dragoons at ten feet. The two of them might have been sewn up in a sack, for all either could see.
With the wind, the whole of the night seemed to be in motion: creakings from shop-signs, the constant whispered rattle of shutters in the darkness.
“Could have been a cat,” the young man opined.
It could have.
“Or there’s no reason that we’re the only ones abroad tonight.”
None.
It was only a few hundred feet, to the narrow passway that led back into the Adams yard and the warmth of the kitchen door. Abigail looked back over her shoulder half a dozen times, but never saw a thing in the darkness.
When John came home and heard what Sergeant Muldoon had said about the threat made in the name of Novanglus, his face took on that congealed, heavy look of rage that Abigail knew so well—then he shook his head, and let it go. “I must say I’m a little insulted, that the British believe I’d be such a booby as to announce murderous intentions under the name that pretty much everyone in New England knows is mine.” He pulled off his wig, folded it carefully, and laid it on the corner of the table, then vigorously scratched his scalp. A small pot of cider—and two larger ones of hot water—steamed gently over the fire, and Abigail went to fetch cold chicken and a couple of slices of corn-pudding for him from the crocks where tomorrow’s cold Sabbath dinner waited, cooked and ready.
Of her account of Richard Pentyre’s reaction to being asked about his movements on the night of the twenty-third, he said, “In truth it’s no more than I expected. Even if he didn’t murder his wife, he might have been up to a dozen things he’d rather the Provost Marshal didn’t know about. The fact that he’s a friend of the Crown and a consignee for the East India Company’s tea doesn’t mean he isn’t elbow-deep in smuggling cognac,
silk, and paint-pigment from the French.”
“Is that something Sam could find out about?”
“I suppose.” John poured molasses over the corn-pudding. “If you feel like explaining to him that you’re still investigating this murder.”
“I do,” said Abigail grimly. “While on the island I spoke to Lucy Fluckner—”
“What, Tom Fluckner’s heiress?”
“And a true-blue Whig, it sounds like,” said Abigail. “She told me that at the time Mrs. Fishwire and Mrs. Barry were murdered, a third woman—the Fluckners’ maidservant Philomela—was having horrible poems sent to her, and was being followed, by a man whom she suspects was the killer.”
“Suspects—?”
“Because of something in one of the poems, about killing a red-haired woman. A few days ago—less than a week after Mrs. Pentyre’s murder, in other words—he started following her again.”
John whispered, “Damn. Is she sure? Not that it’s the killer, but that it’s the same man who followed her the summer before last?”
“She’s sure.” Quickly she outlined all that the girls had told her. “There was no time to seek out Lieutenant Coldstone after I learned this, or I would have been stranded on the island for the night, and Heaven only knows what Sam would have had to say. I’ll write him tomorrow. Coldstone, I mean, not Sam. At least she shall be safe there at the fort . . .”
“If the man isn’t a Tory himself, and there among them,” murmured John, and carried his plate to the sideboard. “Or masquerading as one. With the island that crowded, and people coming and going on business to the town, it would be easy. It does sound as if he’s been away, doesn’t it?”
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