“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.”