Whatever that might be.
The twenty-three pounds was only to keep her silent, until a meeting with her could be arranged for a more final solution to the problem.
Palmer—or Elkins—is still in Boston, hidden somewhere. There’s some reason the Sons haven’t been able to find him . . . Speculating on what that might be, she turned down the passway to her own yard, calves aching from what felt like miles walked in pattens. She mentally reviewed the abject apologies owed to Pattie, and how quickly after dinner she could abandon her rightful chores and walk down to North Square to consult with Paul Revere. He, if anyone, would be able to make some sense out of—
She stepped into the kitchen, and there was the man himself, seated by the hearth making a penny appear and disappear in his fingers, for the edification of the enraptured Charley. Sam, on the settle opposite, held Tommy on his knee, while Johnny and Nabby hurried to and fro under Pattie’s direction, setting the table for dinner.
At Abigail’s entrance, both men got to their feet.
“We need to see you, Nab.” Sam set Tommy aside, and—as Abigail had done yesterday—guided Abigail down the hallway and into the parlor, where a warm and welcoming fire had been kindled. Revere followed them in and closed the door behind them, a large and rather battered roll of cartridge-paper in his hand.
“We need to know.” Sam handed Abigail into the fireside chair. “You’ve been there. Where is Harry being kept?”
“Harry—?” Abigail blinked at him, for a moment not understanding. “He’s on Castle Island—”
Sam made an impatient gesture, and Revere said, “Can you show me the place on this?” He unrolled the cartridge-paper and brought a couple of draftsman’s pencils out of a coat pocket, and Abigail, looking at the spread-out diagram, recalled that Revere had been one of the men who’d worked on putting the fort back into order three years ago, when the Boston garrison was moved there after the Massacre in Customhouse Square.
Something in the graveness of those dark eyes sent a chill down her back. “What are you going to do?”
“We just need to know where he is,” said Sam, too quickly, “if we’re to slip word to him before he’s taken away. That’s all.”
Sam could generally make anyone believe anything he said, but this time Abigail heard the lie in his voice, even if she had not seen it in Revere’s eyes.
“You can’t mean to break into the fort!” Yet the crowded, bustling quay below Castle Island’s main gate sprang to her mind, the jostling confusion of launches and skiffs and whale-boats that plied the harbor between the island and Boston. The constant comings and goings of provision-merchants, wigmakers, whores, and porters, and purveyors of sheep and pigs. Anyone, she knew, could walk ashore and walk into the fort itself . . .
“Good Lord, Nab, of course we wouldn’t!”
He’s going to exclaim, “What an idea—”
“What an idea!”
Her glance went back to Revere’s face. He, too, she could tell, was thinking about how long it took a man to die on the gallows, and how long that last night on Earth would be for a young man who knew he could save himself with a handful of names.
“We’re not talking about the Boston jail,” said Abigail quietly. “Have you any idea what the British would do—especially after what happened with the tea, and with Heaven only knows what Writ of Vengeance already on its way from Britain—if insurrectionists, as they’ll call them, tried to break into the Castle itself? What would befall them if they were caught? What—”
“Mrs. Adams,” said Revere softly. “Please.”
She looked up at Sam again, a second thought going through her like the chill of poison in her veins. With a deadly sense of calm, she asked, “Or were you thinking of something a little quieter?”
And she saw Sam’s gray eyes shift.
Revere said, “No. We were not.”
No, thought Abigail. But at some point, Sam had considered it.
For a time she was so angry she couldn’t speak.
It was Revere who broke the silence. “We have to get him out, Mrs. Adams. The Incitatus is going to sail within hours of the wind dying down, and then our only course would be to try and take her on the high seas. She outguns anything we could float.”
“You’ll be killed,” said Abigail. “And there will be Hell to pay.”
Neither man replied.
“And I have learned some quite extraordinary things about Sir Jonathan Cottrell’s murder.”
“Have you learned who beat him and left him in that alleyway?” Sam’s voice was flat, level, and hard as a sadiron. “Acquired evidence that will convince Colonel Leslie not to send him? Or the Admiralty Tribunal to acquit him?” It was Abigail’s turn not to be able to meet his gaze. “We have no more time to wait, Nab. We have no more time to hope that what you seek will fall into your hand. We must act—one way or another.”
“First tell me this,” said Abigail. “When was this Toby Elkins last seen? When did he last come into the Man-o’-War?”
“The twelfth of February,” replied Sam at once. “Having taken the house, and paid his rent, about three weeks before. Letters, communications, everything since then are still under the bar in the taproom. Believe me, Nab,” he went on, “we have looked for this man—or a man of his description—everywhere in Boston. We have asked tavern-keepers and rich men’s servants, street-urchins and merchants and the farmers in every town in riding distance, if there is an Englishman who came into these parts at any time this winter, probably from Barbados, who cannot be otherwise accounted for . . . And especially I have asked,” he added, “after Sunday night, when he would have had the mark of your fingernails on his ear, for all the world to see. ’Twere Elkins, he must have been somewhere in the town from the time the gates were shut on the Neck until at least it grew light enough for a boat to get across the river and believe me, I had men at both the ferries and the Neck when that sun came up. And we have found nothing.”
“That there was a conspiracy afoot, I will readily believe,” said Revere, as Abigail drew breath to protest. “That this Elkins murdered the woman Bathsheba, and paid off an out-of-work actor who knew Fenton by sight to hail him at a tavern and then put poison in his food, I accept—”
“I think they were one and the same man. And I believe the Sandhayes woman is in on it—”
“It changes nothing, Mrs. Adams.” He leaned toward her, strong brown fingers outspread on the stained diagram before her. “We have deduced a conspiracy but proven nothing. Nor can we prove anything until we have something in hand that will connect any of these people—whether they are two or three or even all one and the same—with the death of Sir Jonathan Cottrell on the night of the fifth of March. Until we can do that, we can do nothing—except get Harry away from Castle Island at the soonest possible moment, before the wind dies down, cost what it may. And that,” he concluded softly, “is what we need to do.”
Pattie tapped softly at the parlor door: “Mrs. Adams?”
Abigail rose and opened it halfway. “Get the children their dinner, and just put aside a little for me, if you will, please,” she said. “We shall be here a time.” Closing the door, she returned to the table, and for the next hour, she went over her visit to the Castle, step by step: guards, corridors, right turn, left turn. Cells, doors, windows. Revere made notes on the edges of the cartridge-paper, which was, Abigail saw, already laced with them. He must have worked up descriptions from smugglers, farmers, laundrywomen over the years that British troops had occupied the island—Abigail had one friend that she knew of who had made a regular study of the place, for the benefit of the Sons of Liberty. She heard Thaxter’s voice in the hall as he returned from his own dinner, heard the clunk of John’s office door shutting, and knew the afternoon was getting late.