“. . . wanted a place to meet with gentlemen—in the timber trade, I believe he said,” she heard Apthorp’s rather light voice echo from the dining room. “But I never heard of him doing it . . .”
Abigail knelt for a closer look at the carpet. English, with a looped pile, and probably thirty shillings. It showed a little wear and some caked mud, as far as she could tell in the dingy gloom. But there was no sign that a man had died upon it—something which she knew would be difficult to hide. The oak floor elsewhere in the hall was clean as if recently mopped.
She got to her feet as the men reentered through the door at the back of the hall and followed them into the unfurnished parlor and the bare-shelved library on the left side of the front door. “What did Mr. Elkins look like?” she asked, and Apthorp frowned.
“An average sort of young chap,” he said at length.
Abigail bit her lip to keep from saying, Can you be less specific? and Lieutenant Coldstone—evidently long used to winkling information from those not used to describing others—inquired, “Thin rather than fat?”
“Oh, thin, I should say.”
“Tall rather than short?”
“Tall,” said Apthorp promptly, though at an inch or so under her own height, Abigail reflected, the man would probably describe Lieutenant Coldstone as tall . . .
“My height?”
Apthorp’s frown deepened. He’d clearly never even thought about it. “I should say so, yes.”
“Taller?”
“Maybe a little taller—”
“Or shorter?”
“A trifle.”
“Dark or fair?”
“Fair. Well, his hair was always powdered, you know. Dark brows, I think.”
“Dark eyes or light?”
“Light.”
Except for the difference in the height he had just described Sir Jonathan Cottrell, or Lieutenant Coldstone, or Dr. Joseph Warren, or the Heavens Rejoice Miller for that matter if one wanted to stretch the point. Abigail followed the men up the stairs. “If you thought to yourself what a fool Mr. Elkins was being for proposing to set up as a merchant,” she said, “he must have rented the house later than December.”
“Seventh of January,” said Apthorp. “He arrived on the Lady Bishop, from Bridgetown. Myself, if ’tweren’t for the cost of the thing, I’d have said—Well . . .” He glanced apologetically at Abigail.
Abigail sighed inwardly, and said, “Excuse me just one moment, gentlemen, I seem to have mislaid my handkerchief. Please do go on . . .” She stepped out of the bedchamber into which he’d led them—the only one furnished in the house, and that, as he’d said, only with a washstand and an uncurtained bed. She heard their voices murmur as she moved about the hollow square of hall at the top of the stairs—like a viewing-gallery of the hall below—off which all the bedchambers opened, putting her head through each door in turn. The empty rooms smelled strongly of damp plaster and mold. Not even the smell of mice, nor their furtive scurry. Clearly, no one had had anything resembling food in this place for years.
As Apthorp showed them up into the attics, John fell back to her side to whisper, “His private theory was that it was the sort of thing a very wealthy man might rent in which to rendezvous with a mistress.”
“Catch me, John, I think I’m going to faint with shock.”
“Any New Englander—and I don’t care how rich he is—would faint with shock at the thought of paying fifty shillings the quarter for a house this size in which to meet a woman now and then, when he could get a perfectly serviceable room and bed at the Queen of Argyll down by the wharves for ten-pence for the evening with the woman thrown in gratis.”
“Then our Mr. Elkins was clearly willing to pay the difference for one thing that he would have here, that he would not have at the Queen of Argyll.”
John nodded, as they emerged into the dense gloom of the attic, empty and icy and echoing as Apthorp, Coldstone, and Muldoon walked its length with candles held high and showing nothing but last summer’s cobwebs. “Solitude,” he agreed.
Fourteen
They descended to the cellar, as empty as the attic and twice as cold. “Nice wide stairs,” remarked Abigail, who had frequently spoken to John on the subject of their own cellar, which even the Spanish Inquisition would have rejected as a dungeon on the grounds of excessive discomfort to the prisoners.
“I wondered why the kitchen was so chill, with such a draught from below,” he responded. He thought the cellar at Queen Street was just fine.
The gold of the candle-flame touched the edges of a bucket, suspended by a pulley over a covered well in the center of the floor. “What’s the box for?” asked Coldstone, nodding toward a small, closed cabinet with a ring in its top that sat near the bottom of the stair, like a good-sized breadbox but more sturdy.
“ ’ Tis a wine-chest, sir. You see the ring at the top, that can be hooked in place of the bucket, so that it can be lowered down into the well to just above the level of the water. The property has no icehouse, you see. The well itself is only useful in the summer season, of course. It freezes hard this time of year.”
“Very ingenious.” At Coldstone’s gesture, Sergeant Muldoon moved aside the cover, and all five of them—Muldoon excluded—leaned over the narrow throat of darkness. Coldstone removed a candle-end from his pocket, lit it at Apthorp’s branch, and threw it down. It landed with a muted clunk, and Abigail saw for an instant a tiny circle of glittering ice around the flame, until it heated the surface sufficient to make a little melt-water, and so extinguished itself.
There was no wine in the wine-chest, and by the old cobweb that linked it to the wall, the contrivance had seen no use since the summer at least. “I don’t think your Mr. Elkins ever occupied this house,” Abigail remarked as they climbed the stair to the kitchen again. “At least he never slept in that bedchamber. Without bed-curtains, at this season, he’d have frozen in his sleep.”
“Yet there’s been a fire in this room,” pointed out Coldstone, indicating the wide hearth, the small stock of cord-wood in the box beside it. “The hearth has been cleaned and tidied—” He took from a shelf the white and blue German teapot, the neatly placed saucers and cups, and ran a fastidious finger along the dustless handle.
“Mr. Elkins paid extra to have certain amenities like the tea service and a set of sheets upstairs. Of course he’d fetch along his own tea and things, and silver, too, if he wanted it.”