She settled herself on one of the benches that flanked the little hearth, pulled her cloak closer around her slender shoulders, and watched as Revere coaxed the fire into being. Abigail prided herself on her judgment of cooking-fire and coals, but as a silversmith, Paul Revere was an artist with flame. With air-draft, too, she reflected, coughing, and retreated as her companion adjusted damper and flue. Though it was far colder near the window, it was out of the smoke—through the wavery and unwashed glass she had an impression of a yard blotted with dirty snow, of the brick jail building itself and a window shuttered tight.
Because the opening was unglazed, behind those shutters?
What had “Smith” and “Jones” used to pay Hoyle for food, she wondered. The only person they knew in town—poor little Eli Putnam back on the Magpie—didn’t even know they were there. Her brother had told her, and John had confirmed it, that Hoyle and his wife routinely sold half the foodstuffs the city allotted them for the prisoners. A man who had no family to bring him extra rations—as she had tried to do for Harry—went hungry indeed.
Under two layers of stockings, her toes were growing numb.
Fetters clanked on the bricks of the hall.
“Whoever they be, they got the wrong folk,” growled a deep voice. “We got nobody here in this stink-pit town.”
“Well, they think they know you,” retorted Hoyle’s voice. “Smith.”
“I’m Smith,” corrected another, lighter voice. “He’s Jones.”
They entered the room, one tall and one short, one fairish—his hair the color of the lowest grade of molasses sugar—the other swart. Yet something in their eyes and the shape of their unshaven chins whispered of cousinry. Abigail remarked mildly, “Well, the heavens rejoice,” at which the tall so-called Smith started like a spooked deer. Smiling, she continued, “Mr. Smith—Mr. Jones—permit me to introduce Mr. Eli Putnam, master of the sloop Magpie,” and gestured to Paul Revere. “And I am Mrs. Adams.”
The two men stared at her with widened eyes. “Jones,” the shorter, darker man in the much-fouled and faded once-blue coat, whispered reverently, “That wouldn’t be—Sam Adams?” and Abigail’s smile widened.
“Let’s just say Mrs. Adams for now.” She glanced significantly toward the door, through which Hoyle had disappeared. “And as my mother always says, First things first.” And she unpacked the basket she had brought, and set out two loaves of bread, half a crock of butter, a chunk of cheese the size of her two fists, and two bottles of cider. The men fell on these like starving dogs, without a wasted word.
“M’am,” said “Smith,” after an appropriate time, “Mrs. Adams, we owe you whatever you care to name for that.”
“I’m pleased you feel that way, Mr. Miller,” responded Abigail. “Because we really do need to know what happened last Saturday night.”
“It wasn’t us,” blurted Matt Brown. “I swear on my mother’s grave it wasn’t us!”
“Your ma’s not dead,” pointed out Miller. “Ow!” he added as Brown punched him in the arm.
“What wasn’t you, Mr. Brown?”
The two men traded a glance. Miller lowered his voice, leaned toward her, though he kept a polite distance owing to the reek—and the infested condition—of his clothing: a consideration Abigail found surprisingly fastidious, after seeing him eat. “In the jail they’re saying how the King’s man was killed that night,” he said softly. “It wasn’t us. We never saw him after he went into that house beyond the Common, and that’s God’s truth, strike us both dead for our sins.”
“What house?”
Brown and Miller traded a glance.
“We know you followed Sir Jonathan Cottrell back from Maine,” said Abigail.
“We wasn’t going to hurt him,” said Brown earnestly. “Just beat the innards out of him, to show them psalm-singing stinkard Proprietors they can’t mess with us in Maine.”
Abigail said, “I see.”
“Bingham’s man always put the Hetty in at Hancock’s Wharf,” explained Miller, “so we knew where to wait for him when we came in, since the Hetty’s the slowest thing on the water between Philadelphia and the Bay of Fundy. We loafed around the wharf for maybe two hours, ’fore they arrived. Cottrell got off the boat and left his luggage, and went up the hill to rent a horse from a feller at a livery—”
“A little bay Narragansett,” said Revere. “White star, white stockings on the near fore and off hind—”
“That’s the one!” said Brown, impressed. The single bar of his black eyebrow quirked down in the middle, over the short, ugly curve of his nose. “You wan’t there, was you?”
Revere looked wise and tapped the side of his nose.
“We thought we’d be left in the mud, us not havin’ two shillings for our dinner, let alone the price of a horse,” said Miller, leaning forward on the bench with his manacled hands folded on his knees. “But he rode along at a walk, in no hurry, down the main streets of the town and out west of town near the Common, where they got a couple of streets cut but not so many houses to speak of, and cows and gardens and maybe a house or two. Cottrell rides straight up to one of the houses that is there, a good-size brick place with what looks to be an orchard at one side of it, that nobody’s taking care of, and puts his horse up in the stable like he owned the place and goes inside. We couldn’t get close, on account of him knowin’ us and us not wantin’ to be seen.”
“How did he know you?” asked Revere, and Matthias Brown looked puzzled, as if there were some self-evident portion of the story inscribed in the air above his head that Revere had neglected to examine.
“Because I’d laid hold of him in the ordinary-room of the Blue Ox and told him I’d beat the innards out of him for the festerin’ English Tory psalm-singin’ bastard he was.”
Revere echoed Abigail, “I see.”
“Only after that the festerin’ psalm-singin’ English Tory bastard kept indoors, or had two of Bingham’s men go about with him, so I never got the chance in Maine, y’see. I followed him all the way down to Georgetown Island and back, too. And that witch-friggin’ coward Quimby that owns the Blue Ox kept close to him, like they’d got engaged, as if there’s any harm in poundin’ the Proprietors’ agents, the festerin’—”
“Quite so,” said Abigail. “So you threatened Cottrell with a beating in front of witnesses.” No wonder Miller—who seemed in charge of what brains the duo possessed—had exhibited anxiety over the magistrates learning their right names.
“Ain’t I just told you that? But like Hev was sayin’, we never got the chance.” Brown’s deep voice was tinged with regret.
“Did you wait for him outside the house?”
“Oh, yes, m’am,” said Miller. “The house stands on a rise of ground, some two-three hundred yards off from the meeting-house that looks out over the Mill-Pond. I had my glass with me, so we stayed by the corner of the meeting-house and watched the place, turn and turn about, all the afternoon. Just before dinnertime a man rode up on a dapple gray horse and went inside, and stayed maybe an hour. Bar that, there was nothing, though just after Cottrell got there, smoke came out the chimney, white and clotty-looking the way it is when the chimney’s cold. We didn’t see no servants, no stableman, nothing.”