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 . . .
She frowned and halted, the wind lashing the heavy folds of her cloak. “Mr. Thaxter . . .”
Absorbed in his own thoughts, he’d gone on a few steps and now turned back hastily. “M’am?”
“There are no theaters in Boston: there never have been.”
He missed her point. “No, m’am, of course not—”
“Then what are actors from Bridgetown doing here?”
Thirteen
John was home when she and Thaxter reached the house chilled and tired from a day’s long ride and out of temper that Abigail had not been there to greet him. It wasn’t until supper was over that he recovered his good humor enough to relate the facts, as he’d gathered them, of his case in Haverhilclass="underline" Mary Teasel’s prickly independence of spirit that had alienated most of the men who would sit on her jury, Ham Teasel’s irruption into the local inn one night to seize John by his coat-lapels and promise him a beating out of hand if he continued to meddle in what ain’t your business.
“Good Heavens, John, what did you do?” Abigail asked, alarmed, and John turned a little pink in the lamplight.
“Oh, just leaned to the side to put him off balance and hooked his foot.” For all his verbal pyrotechnics when out of temper, John was not a violent man, and she could tell that the thought of something that even came close to a tavern-brawl scratched his touchy dignity. “By the time he got to his feet again the innkeeper’s brother and nephews were on him and put him outside, but I shall have to watch myself, when I go back up for the trial at the end of the month.”
Still, with one thing and another, it was breakfast the following morning—mellowed with the fresh bread that she’d tucked into the oven just before bed—before he asked after the events of her week and heard what Matthias Brown and the Heavens Rejoice Miller had had to say about Sir Jonathan’s activities on his return from Maine. “That note that was waiting for me when I came in yesterday evening—when you, sir, were so high-handed as to suggest that my wifely duties ranked above the call of my country’s need—”
“I said I was sorry.”
She mouthed a kiss at him. “Well, the note was from Lieutenant Coldstone, saying he’s arranged to meet Thurlow Apthorp at four this afternoon at the Pear Tree House”—she produced the communication from her apron pocket—“and would the both of us care to join them there and see what there is to be seen?”
“Good Lord, woman, why didn’t you speak of this last night?”
She paused with raised eyebrows in the act of handing Johnny his coat—at six, the boy refused all assistance in dressing and preparing himself for school—and returned, “Because I know better than to poke at a snarling bear, sir, for fear of getting my hand bit.” Johnny also had reached the age of refusing maternal kisses as “babyish,” so waited patiently while she kissed Nabby and straightened the girl’s cap and cloak, then held out his hand to be gravely shaken by both his parents.
“Acquit yourself well at school, son,” instructed John.
“And keep your sister’s hand,” Abigail added, though she knew her son would dispense with this badge of infancy the moment he and Nabby were out of sight of the front door. Besides, Nabby would fall back to walk with her friends, and Johnny dash ahead to run with his.
But knowing how busy were the town’s ice-slick streets in the first flush of daybreak, she couldn’t leave the words unsaid.
As soon as the children were out of the kitchen, John rose from his chair and put both arms around Abigail’s waist from behind. “I shall bite you, m’am, and to good purpose.” Smiling, she held up her hand to him to let him do so, stepping apart from him with the skill of long practice as Charley came charging into the room, with Pattie—leading Tommy—at his heels.
John helped her with the dishes, then retired to his study when Thaxter arrived, to sort through the conflicting stories and rumors about the conduct of the Teasels, and parse out what should be done about the half dozen other Essex County cases that would be decided at the same session. Only after the kitchen was clean, and Abigail had swept and mopped and dusted abovestairs—not that any house could be kept clean of soot-smuts and the smell of smoke, in the shut-up months of winter—and sent off a note via Pattie to Dr. Warren and another to Paul Revere, did she return to her husband’s study, to finish her report on what she had put together of Sir Jonathan’s nature and activities.
“According to our fine lads from Maine, Cottrell kept himself much to himself while he was there,” she said. “He went once to Georgetown Island, to confer with Mr. Fluckner’s agent there, but he habitually went about with a couple of Mr. Bingham’s hired men for escort. Eli Putnam—who, Mr. Revere tells me, is in hiding with Ezra Logan out on Hog Island—has further reported that there wasn’t the smallest whisper of scandal about Cottrell while he was there. Evidently either he didn’t fancy the ladies of Maine, or they didn’t fancy him.”