“Did Bathsheba ever speak to you,” asked Abigail gently, “of anyplace she would go—or anyone she would go to—if she were frightened, or in trouble? Was there anyone in Boston, or in the country round, that she had whom she trusted?”
“Mr. Barnaby, m’am,” said the girl promptly.
“’ Tis quite true,” put in Mrs. Fluckner. “Barnaby is very much the father to all the servants, which is of course as it should be. And speaking of servants—”
“That will be all, Gwen,” dismissed Mrs. Sandhayes. And the discussion of the enormities of the lower classes flowed over the tea table like an inexorable river. Abigail settled back and sipped her peppermint tea (on which both Mrs. Fluckner and Mrs. Hartnell had twitted her, as if standing against the King’s monopoly were some mental maggot or hobbyhorse), dissatisfied and troubled and very well aware that Mrs. Hartnell had told her very little, and Gwen, nothing at all.
Which was odd, given that most people were delighted to talk about events, particularly events connected with murders, disappearances, and conspiracies.
Or did Caroline Hartnell—like Margaret Sandhayes—simply consider her a provincial busybody?
Abigail’s eyes went back to the portrait of Hannah Fluckner—which could have been the depiction of any twenty-year-old girl some eighteen years ago—and then, troubled, to the two maidservants sewing in their corner. And so doing, her gaze crossed that of Gwen Pugh, and she saw in the girl’s dark eyes the wretched uncertainty of one who had lied, and knew she lied . . .
. . . and yet dared not speak the truth.
The maid turned her eyes quickly away.
Mrs. Sandhayes chirupped, “More tea?”
Seventeen
To lie about one’s activities is scarcely evidence of a conspiracy to murder a man she doesn’t know,” John remarked, when Abigail told him the tale of her morning call over dinner. “The woman might simply have been meeting a lover—”
“The two of them were in it together,” insisted Abigail. “Rather, I should say ’twas the Sandhayes woman who did the lying, for Caroline Hartnell quite clearly hasn’t the brains to find her way back from the outhouse if she ventures forth without a guide.”
John spooned Indian pudding onto the plates as Johnny passed them to him. “Nor does she need brains,” he replied. “Mrs. Hartnell is wealthy. Her husband is a member of the General Court and a friend of the Governor, and her friendship assures that Margaret Sandhayes will not be treated in this town as the charity case that she is. No, you shall not have more molasses, Charley—that is all the molasses that a boy of your years should eat.” He turned from his middle son—who knew better than to argue the point—back to Abigail.
“We are in large part as people treat us, Portia. The difference between a woman who accompanies a wealthy young lady about town to keep would-be suitors at a distance, in trade for a roof over her head and a pittance of money, and a woman who does precisely the same thing as a kindness because she is a guest of the young lady’s family is—incalculable. And the difference lies entirely in whether that woman is welcomed by the family’s friends or is regarded by them as a very intelligent servant.”
“But for a woman of Mrs. Sandhayes’s intelligence to participate in a cheap intrigue—”
“So far as I’ve been able to ascertain,” John said, “Margaret Sandhayes came to this town this winter with very little beyond a respectable wardrobe and a couple of letters of introduction: nothing to live on or by. Yet she’s a proud woman and obviously of good family. She would readily admit that Philomela and Barnaby are intelligent . . . and I daresay she would rather die than be regarded as their equal.”
“There is no shame in it.”
“There is no shame in it for you,” John replied. “Nor for your sisters, nor any of the women you know, because Massachusetts is not like England.” He finished his corn-pudding and rose, Nabby springing to her feet and gathering up the plates while Tommy in his raised chair—quick to observe his mother’s preoccupation with her conversation—gravely applied palmfuls of molasses to his own cheeks.
“We demand the rights of Englishmen, in Parliament and before the King, but we are not like them,” John went on. “ ’ Tis what they don’t understand. We know in our hearts—men and women both—that we can always find some honest work that will feed us, even if it be breaking flax in some backcountry farm. ’Tis not the same in England. We forget that.”
“How do we go about finding the truth, then?” Abigail folded her napkin, her thoughts far beyond the warm kitchen and the bright, icy slant of the evening light upon the wall. “We have no idea how long until the Incitatus sails, but it can’t be more than a day or two. And all we have learned is who couldn’t have had to do with Cottrell’s murder—a formidable list of the ‘best people’ in the town”—she drew out the several amended tallies put together by Lucy and Mrs. Sandhayes—“plus the two men who had the best cause to thrash him, whether or not he froze to death afterward. Three men, I should say, counting Harry. Thomas Boylston Adams!” she added, suddenly aware of her youngest child’s experimentation with molasses as facial decoration and hair restorant. “If this is the purpose to which you put your molasses, you shall have no more of it!”
“I’ll take his, Mama, please.” Charley stood up on his chair in his anxiety to be heard. “I promise I won’t put it on my hair!”
There was a pause in the adult conversation, as Abigail cleaned up her son while Johnny, Nabby, and Pattie cleared the table, put the leftovers in the pantry, spread towels, and poured water from the boiler for the washing-up. Thaxter, returning from his mother’s house, dropped the afternoon post on the sideboard and said, “One from Haverhill, sir. It looks like Mrs. Teasel’s hand,” and this John read while Abigail led the cleaning-up, then bundled the older three children up tightly for an excursion to the Common.
But her mind was on the Incitatus, lying at anchor off Castle Island with its white sails folded like a Death Angel’s wings; on Margaret Sandhayes’s firm determination to avoid the impropriety of interviewing the servants of people socially useful to herself; on the shadowy cavern of the front hall of the Pear Tree House and the trace of stink lurking in its gloom that whispered like a trapped ghost, Someone died here . . .
John said, “Damn.”
Abigail looked up.
He held Mrs. Teasel’s letter, but his eyes were on Thaxter’s, who had read it over his shoulder. Their faces were grave.
“What is it?”
John put down the folded, much-crossed sheet. “The body of Mary Teasel’s husband was found in the kitchen of his house—their house”—he turned the sheet to look at the date—“Tuesday evening. I’ll have to go. Pray the weather holds—” He crossed to her, put his hand on her waist to kiss her on his way to the hall, the stair, the bedroom to pack—
“I won’t,” she said softly. “I can’t.”
His round blue eyes widened at this—if the weather didn’t hold it meant thirty miles in cold and sleety gale, and undoubtedly finishing the journey in the dark—and then he remembered. He said softly, “Ah.”
If the icy good weather remained, the Incitatus would sail for Halifax within days, with Harry in chains onboard. And once he’d been tried by the Navy Court—and, given the feelings of the British military since the dumping of the King’s tea, convicted—Abigail suspected that nothing would prevent the young man from turning King’s Evidence against Sam, against Dr. Warren, against John and dozens of others, to keep his own neck out of a noose.