She dropped lard into her flour, two knives deftly flashing as she cut it smaller and smaller. The wreckers themselves might well be caught, too, multiplying the number of frightened men apt to turn King’s Evidence . . .
The shouting in the street was definitely coming up Queen Street. Her eyes met Pattie’s: “Get them upstairs.” Charley had already put aside the battle royal he’d been conducting between two walnuts and stood by the table, listening with widened eyes. Johnny, Abigail reflected, would hear the tumult with that strange eagerness, that readiness to fight, shining in his face . . .
Charley was scared.
Pattie scooped Tommy up and took Charley by the hand, just as someone knocked sharply at the front door.
Abigail said, “Go.” She dropped a towel over the flour, dried her hands on her apron as she strode down the hall. Just as she opened the door Thaxter—panting—slipped out of the mob and into the hall at her side.
“Mrs. Adams—”
Two constables were immediately behind him, and a man whose blue military cloak didn’t quite conceal the uniform of Major of Artilleryman from the shore battery. It was one of the constables who spoke.
“Mrs. Adams?”
“I am she.”
He held up a folded square of paper. “Did you send a message across to Lieutenant Coldstone of the King’s Sixty-Fourth Foot, at Castle Island, bidding him to meet you?”
“I did.” What on earth—?
“He was ambushed and shot in the Common. You’re not under arrest by any means, m’am—” That was for the benefit of the growing crowd of men behind them. “But we’ve been asked to bring you before the magistrate of the ward, to explain why your summons was in his hand at the time.”
Eighteen
Is he alive?” For the moment it was all that she could think of: that cold-blooded, oddly compassionate young man dead, far from the family that he cared for. I’ll have to write to them, she thought . . . Then the constable’s words sank in: “In his hand? I only gave that note to—” Her mind stalled on the name of the fisherman she’d handed it to . . . Geller? Gilson? One of John Hancock’s part-time smugglers . . . “I only sent that note across to the island an hour ago.”
“Do you deny that this is the note that you sent?”
Lieutenant Coldstone,
A shocking piece of information has come to me that I do not know what to do with. Meet me beneath the Great Tree on the Common at nine tomorrow morning.
Abigail Adams
Abigail blinked, trying to shake herself free of the sense of being in a dream. The handwriting was so similar to her own that for a moment she wondered, COULD I have written that and not been aware of it . . . ?
Don’t be silly, Abigail. This is not a romance.
“When had he this?” she asked. “I do deny it—”
“Do you deny that it is in your hand?”
“I—”
“The hand is very similar to Mrs. Adams’s.” With John’s best courtroom manner, young Thaxter took the note from Abigail’s fingers. “Yet it is not her own.” The stolid young clerk held the paper to the light for a moment, then handed it back to the constable. “I’ve already sent for Mr. Adams—”
Abigail regarded him in surprise—as far as she’d known, Thaxter had been at the jail interviewing another of John’s clients—but his eyes met hers and he nodded.
“He’ll be on the Salem Road—I sent a man after him. He should be back within the hour, sir. You could return, or—”
“No, please come in.” With a rush of gratitude for Thaxter’s unimaginative presence, Abigail straightened her back and stepped aside to let them pass. “You must be freezing, all of you. Lieutenant Coldstone—”
“Is unconscious, m’am.” The artillery officer hesitated before crossing the threshold, but the crowd was growing thicker, and the wind streaming in from the bay was sharp as broken clamshells. “He has been taken to the Watchhouse on the Common. The regimental surgeon has been sent for.”
Thaxter ushered them into John’s office, his matter-offactness putting the men in the position of ordinary clients. Mistaken rather than sinister. As he did so, she whispered, “Who did you send?”
“Jed Paley, on that spitfire mare of his. They should catch him no matter how far he’s got.”
“What happened?”
“I was at the jail when the town herd-boys ran in looking for the constable. They were shouting that someone had murdered a lobsterback in the Common—one of them said that a note from you was in his hand.”
With my signature on it for all the world to see . . .
“Even a Whig surgeon would not assassinate a British officer if he were brought in to care for him, you know,” Abigail pointed out to the artilleryman and removed her apron. “Not with all of you looking on. Would you gentlemen care for some hot cider? Or have you orders not to let me out of your sight? Ah, Pattie—These gentlemen have come to arrest me for setting an ambuscade to murder Lieutenant Coldstone this morning. I’m pleased to say I did not succeed.”
“Mrs. Adams was with me all the morning,” announced the girl, with commendable promptness.
“No, dear, you’re forgetting that I went down to the wharf an hour ago, to send the Lieutenant a note,” Abigail corrected her. “Which must be still on its way to Castle Island—”
Unless the boat capsized in this weather. Had Abigail been a swearing woman, she would have done so at the thought.
“Miss Clarke.” The senior of the two constables held out the note to Pattie. “Is this your mistress’s hand?”
“No, sir,” stated Pattie, before she unfolded the paper.
“But ’tis very like,” said Abigail.
The girl looked at the paper, uncertain about admitting anything, then nodded. “Yes, m’am.”
No wonder the British complain Massachusetts witnesses never tell the truth!
“Mr. Thaxter,” said Abigail, “is there a way that I can go to the Watchhouse to see how Lieutenant Coldstone does, without prejudice to my cause or the construction placed upon my action that ’tis an admission that I’m submitting to arrest? I—Oh, Mr. Revere, thank goodness!”
All the men turned, as Paul Revere—who had come in as usual through the kitchen—appeared in the study door. The artillery officer scowled—evidently familiar with his name—but the constables greeted him as an old friend and thrust the incriminating evidence into his gloved hand.
“It reached Lieutenant Coldstone on one of the last of the provision boats yesterday,” said the senior man, whom Abigail recognized as one of those men long active in ward politics in the town. “His sergeant says they came ashore at Rowe’s Wharf on the first boat—”
“Sergeant Muldoon is with him?” broke in Abigail, relieved, and the constable nodded.
“The Lieutenant left Muldoon in the Mall near the work-house and crossed the Common toward the Great Elm alone, with the words to the effect that the note said nothing of another’s presence. Sergeant Muldoon said the Lieutenant had almost reached the elm when he heard a shot and saw the Lieutenant fall. He ran toward the place. He said he did not notice anyone fleeing and had no idea from which direction the shot came. But the Powder-Store is somewhat less than two hundred yards from the elm, at the top of a hill, and that hill, and the copse at its foot, would have covered a single attacker’s retreat.”
“Good shooting, whoever he is,” Revere commented. He went to the desk, and from the top of one of the neat stacks of correspondence there took a letter that Abigail had written to John some weeks ago, when he was at a trial in Worcester. “You generally sign yourself A.A., do you not, m’am?”