“It doesn’t sound like that’s ever stopped him before,” sniffed John.
“Perhaps they weren’t helpless enough. Or maybe the black eye Miss Fluckner gave him served him as a reminder every morning when he looked in the mirror.”
“Hmm.” John settled back in his chair and with his penknife scraped a thin paring from the edge of his quill-tip to adjust the flow of the ink. “And nothing from Miss Fluckner herself?”
“A quite remarkable list of every dance that was played at His Excellency’s ball that night, the order in which they were played, and the men Miss Fluckner danced with, delivered yesterday by Philomela. Mrs. Sandhayes’s tally of who was in the cardroom when—if the woman keeps count of other peoples’ aces the way she recalls who was present around the table, she must be an absolute demon at vignt-et-un—is rather less complete, I gather because she had promised not to let Miss Fluckner alone to face Sir Jonathan and kept returning to her side.”
“Little realizing that neither had a thing to worry about,” muttered John, “because the guest of honor had the best of all possible reasons for being late to his own ball. Has a vessel come in to take Harry to Halifax yet?”
“Not yet.” Abigail prodded the study fire grimly and hung the poker back on its hook at the side of the grate. “Not in weather like this. John—Mr. Fenton spoke yesterday of seeing some actors who had been in Bridgetown at the same time as Sir Jonathan here in Boston. Does that sound as odd to you as it does to me? What would actors be doing in Boston?”
“On their way to Halifax, perhaps?”
“But there’s nothing in Halifax. Certainly not a theater. Only the shipyard and some troops and the local fishermen, who wouldn’t lay out half a copper to see the Antichrist defeated on Judgment Day. The last few weeks of February—before Cottrell left and Mr. Fenton took sick—were extremely cold but quite clear. They would not have been forced to put up here because of bad weather. Would not actors have gone rather to New York or Philadelphia?”
“You’re right.” John laid down his pen. “ ’ Tis odd. I’ll be at the Green Dragon tonight”—he spoke the name of the tavern where the Sons of Liberty often met in the evening, sometimes only to drink ale and talk politics in the long upper room, sometimes for darker purposes—“I’ll ask Sam and Revere if they can find out who these men were, and when they left town. Did Fenton speak to them, did he say?”
Abigail shook her head. “It didn’t strike me as curious until after I’d left him. But I think he’d be agreeable, for me to see him again.”
“Do that,” said John. “Ask him when he saw them—it has to have been sometime before he took sick on the twentyfourth—and if he spoke to them. God knows, Sam has informants all along the waterfront, and if there’s a tavern-keeper on the docks that’s a Loyalist, I’ll—I’ll leave you and marry him. Sam can learn, quick enough, if these actors were still in Boston on the fifth. ’Twill give me something to say to him when he begins to pester me about what we’re to do to keep young Knox from being sent to the gallows.”
By dint of concentrated exertion, Abigail had the beds made, at least some of the mending done, and dinner ready at three when Nabby and Johnny came in from school and John emerged, ink-boltered and cranky, from his study. Thanks to Abigail’s message to Revere, when Lieutenant Coldstone knocked at their door promptly at four, he was followed by a gaggle of stevedores and layabouts who presumably had instructions to keep freelance patriots from molesting him and Sergeant Muldoon. Coldstone looked as annoyed about this as Johnny did when Abigail told him to hold his sister’s hand, but the last thing anybody needed at this point, Abigail reasoned, was for a British officer to be beaten up in the street.
The impromptu bodyguard fell back when she and John, cloaked and scarfed to the eyes, emerged from their front door, but she was conscious of them trailing at a distance as they followed Treamount Street to the Common.
Thurlow Apthorp—a youngish man whose name Abigail recognized as connected with real estate speculation both here and in the countryside around Cambridge—met them on the ill-graveled drive. “I sent word to Mr. Elkins—both here and at his accommodation address—of your request to see the house, sir.” He bowed to Coldstone, then, upon the officer’s introductions, shook hands with John and bowed over Abigail’s hand. “It is Mr. Elkins who has leased the house, for a year at fifty shillings the quarter. He gave me to understand that he travels a good deal, and there would be long periods when he would be away and the house locked up.”
As they walked up the drive, Abigail reflected upon how Apthorp—a scion of the great merchant family—simply ignored Sergeant Muldoon, as he would have ignored one of Thomas Fluckner’s footmen, or a tree-stump if one had happened to be near the place where they met. Like they were just faces in a painting, Mr. Fenton had said of his master’s treatment of himself, of servants, of the workers at inns . . .
Of utterly no account.
What had Cottrell made of the rough and grubby Matt Brown cornering him at the local tavern in Maine and threatening him with mayhem, not about a woman—which Cottrell was clearly used to—but about the land that was the only thing these men and their families had? Had he written to Hutchinson about that confrontation? To anyone?
Was that something that he considered simply part of the cost of getting ahead in the world, along with informing on smugglers not useful to his interests, putting men off their farms, and paying off the families of girls he’d seduced?
He was what he was, Fenton had said, with the same resignation Abigail had schooled herself to feel about her mother’s blindness where her brother was concerned. Let me be that I am, and do not seek to alter me.
The house smelled damp and faintly moldy. After the wind outside, the atmosphere within felt heavy and still. A trace of smoke seemed to cling to the walls, but nothing like the stuffy reek of a house that has had candles and fires burned in it day in, day out since November. “Who is this Mr. Elkins?” John asked, as Thurlow Apthorp led them into the wide central hallway—an open well up to the second floor in the English fashion, and impossible to heat—and thence right into a small but handsomely furnished drawing room.
“A London gentleman, well-off it seems, seeking to establish trading connections here in Boston.” Apthorp shook his head. “Myself, I think the man’s a fool. After what happened with the tea-ships, this town will be fortunate if the King doesn’t close the port entirely to teach its more violent spirits a much-needed lesson.”
“Did you tell him so?” inquired Coldstone.
“I did. He only shrugged, and said he’d take the house in any case, and have a look about. I’d have thought—” He frowned. “I’d have thought there was something smoky about the fellow—a French agent, maybe—except he had letters of introduction from half the planters in Bridgetown, men my uncle has had dealings with for years.”
“Bridgetown in Barbados?”
Abigail’s glance touched John’s, then Coldstone’s, as the young officer asked the question. Like them, she felt herself come alert, as if at the sound of a foot on the stair of a dark house reputed empty.
Unaware of this quick and silent communion Apthorp nodded and led the way into the dining room. “This is the only room he had furnished up properly. Even the bedroom’s got merely the bed in it, and a washstand . . .” The men passed through the length of the drawing room after him. Abigail lingered for a moment in the doorway to the central hall, wondering what it was that she smelled—or almost smelled—in the place. The trace—the thinnest whisper—of mortal sickness: vomit and blood-laced human waste. She looked around her at the double-high room, eerie with curtaining shadows. The doors on either side of the hall opened into chambers whose windows were shuttered, leaving the hall itself drowned in dimness, as if the gloom had settled like water into its lower half. A wide stair rose straight along one wall to a sort of gallery above, off which doorways opened into other chambers. These, unshuttered, admitted the day’s gray pallor secondhand into the upper portion of the hall. A window above the door itself shed some light, but the effect was depressing and rather disconcerting, as if someone had read a book on the fashions that the English preferred in their houses without thinking through what would be needed to make the design livable here in another land. If one shut those upstairs doors, it would turn the whole of this hall into a gloomy pit.