“Did Cottrell know it was you?” she asked, and Mrs. Sandhayes sniffed.
“After he’d drunk it I told him. Before—How would he have recognized me? He never spared a glance for me whilst he was seducing my—”
In what she hoped was a single movement, Abigail hurled the tea from the cup into Mrs. Sandhayes’s face, ducked sideways, and swept her leg with all her force at the other woman’s feet. Their petticoats tangled, Mrs. Sandhayes staggered, and the gun went off with a noise like the break of doom in the little parlor. Not even sure if she’d been hit or not, Abigail grabbed a leg of her chair and hurled it at her assailant, tripped as her petticoats snarled in the other chair, and took a kick in her side as she fell that left her gasping.
Trying to roll to her feet she heard the other woman’s steps in the hall, racing for the kitchen—
“Tommy!”
Abigail sprang up, fell against the wall, dimly conscious of the clatter of Pattie’s feet on the stair and a jumbled crashing from the kitchen.
Tommy screamed.
Abigail jerked open the kitchen door and smoke poured out into her face. Her first terrified impression was that the whole room was ablaze—her second, knowing that there hadn’t been time for such fire to take hold, was of a dozen small fires where the logs from the hearth had been hurled into the room, against the table, the chairs, the sideboard where Tommy was tied.
The back door was open, but Abigail saw nothing of that in that moment, only the burning wood under the sideboard and the fire licking greedily up. She flung herself to her knees beside her hysterical son, “Stay still!” she commanded, which of course the terrified child didn’t, as she ripped and wrenched at the long cloth tapes. She sprang up, half choked on the smoke swirling around her, wrenched open the knife-drawer, seized the first blade that came to hand.
She heard Pattie scream and had the confused impression of someone behind her as she slashed through the leading-strings, half turned as hands grabbed her—I thought she’d gone—
She barely got a glimpse of the man who flung her to the floor, before she was smothered in darkness.
Twenty-five
A bigail slashed, kicked, and struck out with the knife that was still in her hand. An Irish voice swore, “Mother o’ God!” and what Abigail realized was a man’s cloak was pulled clear of her head. Somewhere—outside?—she could hear Tommy screaming, and the kitchen was filled with smoke and the smell of wet ashes and brick.
Lieutenant Coldstone, her neighbors Tom Butler and Ehud Hanson, and three extremely rough-looking men who looked like rope makers—presumably, Abigail reflected, the Sons of Liberty who’d followed Coldstone from the wharf—were raking together the pile of firewood, over which someone had dumped the contents of the kitchen water-jar. The Lieutenant’s left arm and shoulder were strapped tight in a sling, and his face was nearly as white as his wig with the exertion.
Abigail gasped, “Where’s Tommy?”
Sergeant Muldoon, kneeling at her side sucking the blood from his slashed hand, said, “He’s outside with Miss Pattie, m’am, and fine as thruppence . . . Beggin’ your pardon for handlin’ you so, m’am, but your skirt had caught.”
“Did you catch her?” Abigail seized Muldoon’s arm, and the young man lifted her to her feet as if she’d been a ten-year-old girl. Staggering, she looked down and saw that yes, the whole right side of her skirt-hem was burned away, the petticoat beneath charred. She had neither seen nor felt a thing. “Margaret Sandhayes,” she added, as Muldoon and Coldstone helped her to the back door, beside which not only Pattie but Charley sat on the log bench, Pattie cradling the sobbing Tommy in her arms. Tommy reached out for his mother, howling in terror. “Only I think her true name is Seaford . . .”
“Margaret Seaford?” said Coldstone.
“The girl Sybilla’s sister? She told me the sister’s name was Alice . . .”
As the words came out of her mouth, Abigail felt like kicking herself, because of course the woman would have told her the dead girl’s sister was called Helen of Troy rather than Margaret. A woman who had patiently counterfeited lameness to make others assume she could not be a killer would not have committed the mistake of giving her rightful name.
It seemed to her that every neighbor for blocks of Queen Street swarmed the yard, and that a dozen more of Sam and Revere’s rougher henchmen were coming in and out of the kitchen, clearing out the wet wood and the few chairs that had been aflame.
Coldstone reached out suddenly to lean against the wall beside her, and she caught at his sleeve, even as she pressed her weeping son’s head to her shoulder. “She poisoned Cottrell,” she said quickly. “Not the night he was found, but ten days earlier, the day he was to leave for Maine—and got Palmer to take his place. The body was kept down the well in the cellar of Pear Tree House. Frozen, like pork in the pantry, so the death could not be traced to her—”
“She told you this?”
“She told me she poisoned Cottrell, for what he did to her sister. I’ll take oath on it—”
“You shall have to. Sergeant, go to the Battery, get as many men as they can spare—if”—Coldstone added, glancing about him a little grimly at the incipient mob in the yard—“these gentlemen will permit it . . .”
“Ben!” Abigail stretched out a hand to a man she recognized. Ben Edes, who printed the Boston Gazette, was dressed as if for a rough day’s hunting, or for the street rowdiness of Pope’s Night. Ink still blotted his hands. “Ben, go with the Sergeant, make sure no one hinders him, or the soldiers he brings—”
“Why trouble the King’s good servants, Mrs. Adams, Lieutenant?” Edes cocked a wise, dark eye at Coldstone. “If you’re able to make an arrest of the—woman, is it?—who did this to Mrs. Adams, we’re all the posse comitatus you’ll need.”
Coldstone’s upper lip seemed to lengthen with his disapproval, but Abigail said, “He’s right, Lieutenant . . . There, there, sweeting,” she added, as Tommy, sensing himself ignored, began to howl again. “ ’ Tis well, Mama’s here—And don’t trouble going back to the Fluckners’. Margaret Sandhayes will have headed straight from here to the wharves, for whatever ship is leaving for England with the tide.”
“That’ll be the Saturn,” put in a huge, unshaven laborer unexpectedly. “They’ve been loaded and ready this week at Wentworth’s Wharf, and Captain Nesbitt wearing out the deck-planks pacing to be off.”
“Some one of you—Jed,” she added, turning to one of the prentice-boys whom she knew. “Run to Burrough’s Wharf and tell Eli Putnam on the Magpie sloop to be ready to sail in ten minutes—”
Tommy, as if sensing that the next event would be his forcible detachment from the mother he adored in the midst of this confusion and pain, tightened his grip on Abigail’s dress and hair. Only then did she become aware that her hair had come unraveled from beneath its cap, with thick dark waves hanging over her shoulders and back; and she looked around at Pattie, knowing she would indeed have to abandon her son.
Of all these men—including Lieutenant Coldstone and Sergeant Muldoon—only she would be able to recognize Margaret Sandhayes.
And without testimony against Margaret Sandhayes, the one who would be leaving on the tide would be Harry Knox.
Tommy whimpered, “No—” as Abigail gently tried to pry his tiny hands loose. “Mama—”
She could scarcely blame him—had John been present, she reflected, she would probably have clung to him and whimpered as well.