Fort Hill lay only a few hundred yards from Sam’s house, outside of Boston proper at the eastern end of that sprawled plot of open ground that had once comprised the whole of the town’s Common Land. During the wars with France, batteries had been established to guard the harbor in case a French fleet came down from Canada. Now that the French were gone from Canada, the North Battery, in old Boston proper where Ship Street ran into Lynn Street, was scantly manned. The soldiers in charge of the guns there were ferried straight across from Castle Island for their watches and straight back, and observed with invisible zeal by the ruffians, idle prentices, and Sons of Liberty who frequented the wharves. The South Battery, more isolated on its hill outside the confines of the town, had a cluster of barrack huts surrounded by a palisade, so that the men charged with keeping the Sons of Liberty from stealing the thirty-five cannon in its gun park had at least someplace to sit on bitter spring days like this one. Even before the events of last December, as tensions mounted between the Crown and those who protested its interference in the colony’s government, the soldiers had learned to remain within the wooden palings on the hill’s east side. There were always loafers on the wharves along the Battery March, and should any untoward number of soldiers attempt to land on Rowe’s Wharf or Apthorp’s or any other close by, word would flash through the town with the speed of a heliograph, and an armed mob would be waiting before the invaders reached shore.
Thus Abigail didn’t blame Lieutenant Dowling for taking the better part of valor and asking that she—a respectable married woman—venture into what constituted a miniature Army camp. The sentry on the gate glanced at her and the handsome, smiling black woman who walked at her heels, and pointed out the hut where Lieutenant Dowling waited.
“Lieutenant Coldstone is well,” the young surgeon answered her first question, bringing up another chair to the fire of the rather grubby little office that the post commander relinquished to him. Abigail knew women—numbering Mrs. Fluckner and her friends among them—who’d have left Surry to wait outside in the cold. Though Lieutenant Dowling would not fetch a chair for a servant-woman, he raised no objection to her simply standing close to the fire. In fact, in the way of that class of Englishmen to which he, Lieutenant Coldstone, and Margaret Sandhayes all belonged, he simply did not appear to see her at all.
He went on, “Per your request, m’am, I have kept information about his condition to the fewest possible hearers. Do you honestly think him in danger, even out at the camp?”
“I scarcely know,” confessed Abigail. “I would have said, No, and assumed that the attempt upon his life was the work of some”—she hesitated, then went on smoothly—“of some traitor, perhaps, who had heard of his association with me. Did my own note—the one requesting a meeting in some place at his convenience—reach his office at the camp?”
“It did, m’am. The hands were compared and are very like. Yet if you had baited a trap with the first, why send a second? Moreover, the Lieutenant insists upon your innocence.”
“I appreciate his confidence.” Abigail smiled. “I had meant to bring some bread and jellies for him, but . . . Well, I would rather now be a little careful, who is seen giving food to whom.” And she told him of the events of Sunday night. “ ’ Tis the opinion of my medical friends that the death of Cottrell’s servant Fenton resembles in its symptoms the effects of the death-cap mushroom. My friends found it suspicious that there was no fever, nor were others in the Governor’s household sick with like symptoms.”
“Poison?” Dowling frowned. “Why would anyone poison a servant?” Unspoken was the question, Why would anyone bother?
“Why would anyone poison me or my family?” returned Abigail. She brought from her marketing basket the little packet of paper, carefully folded and sealed, that she had carried from the house. “Whatever this was, ’twas deadly enough to kill two mice almost on the spot. Dr. Warren was kind enough to conduct a postmortem on one of them, but all he could say was that he found neither corrosion nor internal bleeding. It has been a little mixed with the flour in the barrel,” she added, as Dowling tapped the contents of the crock out onto a dry saucer. “’Twas the darkest place I could find, of the half-mixed streaks.”
“It seems to be vegetable.” The surgeon stirred it with the tip of his penknife, then carried it to the window’s light.
“I was wondering,” said Abigail, following him, “if ’twere familiar to you from the West Indies?”
Dowling bent his head close to the saucer, and sniffed, carefully. “By the color it looks a little like oleander,” he said at last. “Yes, it is grown in the Indies, in gardens; also in Italy, though it’s originally an Asian plant. A virulent poison.” He shook his head, sparse fair eyebrows tugging together. “I have known men to die from having spitted meat on its twigs to cook. Yet Sir Jonathan himself wasn’t poisoned, but beaten—by the look of the bruises on his head and shoulders—and left to die of cold.”
“I would say,” said Abigail, “it might be because the killer feared Sir Jonathan would recognize him if he somehow introduced himself into Governor Hutchinson’s party that night. Or it may simply be that he had not the clothing, nor the manner, to pass himself off as someone who would be welcome in the Governor’s house. The merchants of the town all know one another, and might be quick to spot a stranger. Where were you stationed in the Indies, Lieutenant? And how long ago?”
“I’ve been on post here six months.” He returned to the fire with her, and carefully wiped his penknife on a corner of his pocket-handkerchief, which he then knotted, as a reminder—Abigail assumed—not to do anything further with that cloth until it had been washed. A virulent poison indeed. “I was in Kingston four years.”
“Did you ever hear of an actor in those parts named Palmer? Androcles Palmer?”
“I saw him in The Jew of Malta, if he’s the man I’m thinking of.” The young man smiled at the recollection. “He played about six roles—all of them poisoned by the said Jew—and was one of the best things in the performance, which was shockingly bad . . . at least it seemed so to me, since I was seventeen years old and was used to Garrick and Woodford. He’s one of the men poor Coldstone has been seeking word of, isn’t he? I seem to recollect that he’s partner with a man named Blaylock—the fellow who did the Jew himself—and they tour the colonies every few years.”
“Do you know anything of him?” Coldstone—and Revere, who had done militia service—had both told her how gossip about anything and everything would be handed round military posts, by men with too little to do and too much time to do it in. “To his credit or discredit?”