“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?”