“We’ll have ’em,” Miller echoed his cousin’s words. And to Abigail, “You’re saying that wasn’t Cottrell who came to Maine at all?”
“I don’t think so, no.” Abigail clung steadfastly to the nearest line and kept her eye on the sails ahead, grimly pushing away the nauseating dizziness of seasickness that swept her like the heaving waves. “I think what happened was this: probably after considerable searching, Margaret Seaford encountered a man who could pass himself off as Sir Jonathan Cottrell. Whether this happened in England or on the Continent or in Barbados itself, I don’t know, but she’d clearly built up a reserve of money by that time and had certainly been keeping track of where Sir Jonathan was stationed in his service to the King. I suspect, but I’m not sure, that at some point she had announced her intention to murder Sir Jonathan in revenge for her beloved sister’s death—or that someone who knew the story remarked on it, when she took up the study of poisons. I see no other reason that she would have taken such pains to prove that she was nowhere near him when he was killed—”
“I heard from my mother that she so swore,” put in Coldstone. “So it must have been common knowledge.”
“Common enough to keep her from returning to her home and having the use of her property, once her revenge was accomplished,” said Abigail.
“A woman of deliberation as well as passion,” remarked the officer. “A dangerous combination.”
“Deliberate enough to learn the finer points of cardsharping as well as poisoning, at any rate,” said Abigail. “I trust, by the way, that somebody put aside the contents of my teapot where they can be examined—”
“I instructed your girl to see to it,” said Coldstone. “I daresay you shall need to replace the teapot.”
“Just as well. ’Twas a wedding-present from my Uncle Tufts; I never liked the thing.”
“Then why’d she come after you?” Muldoon wanted to know. “Beggin’ your pardon, m’am, Lieutenant . . . What’d you say in that note of yours to Miss Fluckner?”
“I asked Lucy Fluckner about Margaret Sandhayes’s movements on the day Sir Jonathan supposedly left Boston,” said Abigail. “I included the strictest warning against letting its subject know anything about the matter, but I daresay Mrs. Sandhayes was paying one of the servants to intercept messages from me. She knew I had discovered the well in the cellar, and she may have worried that I would eventually reason out how she could have been instrumental in the murder while attending a ball at the Governor’s at the only time it could have been committed. I wonder now whether Palmer knew anything about why he was going to Maine at all. Mrs. Sandhayes was careful about her accomplices—I suspect she herself was ‘Toby Elkins’ who rented the house. She was certainly the one who attempted to poison me and my family.”
“And you think that’s why she did for that poor Negro girl?” put in Muldoon. “That the girl saw her, walkin’ about in her room wi’out her sticks?”
“It may have been that simple,” agreed Abigail. “Or she might have come on some item of her male disguise, or her cache of money . . . Or Mrs. Sandhayes might only have wanted to put out of the way anyone who knew about Pear Tree House and her meetings with Androcles Palmer. A promise of money would be enough to secure a meeting with a slave longing to buy freedom for herself and her babies.”
“The way a letter telling Cottrell that there was another claimant to the Fluckner land-grant was enough to bring him to the Dressed Ship Tavern,” said Coldstone. “And that lies only a few hundred yards from Pear Tree House. It was undated,” he added grimly, “but tucked in the desk in his chamber. Damn!” he added, as the Magpie turned to better catch the wind, and Castle Island came into clear view off the starboard.
And Abigail said, “Oh, no—”
The sloop was within half a mile of the little round knoll of rock; the Saturn, already past Governor’s Island and heading out into open sea. At the end of the Castle wharf, the Incitatus, which Abigail had seen only in tight-furled stillness, now swarmed with activity. Like ants, she could see men moving up and down the ladders, and the water around the dark hull bobbed with boats. Beside her, Coldstone had put a glass to his eye. Then he silently passed it to her, and she could see that very little in the way of provisions or water-kegs remained on the wharf.
“No—”
Abigail was aware of Revere’s dark gaze, on herself and on Coldstone. Once Harry Knox reached Halifax, there was very little likelihood that three British admirals would be much impressed by tales of conspiracies of revenge. “Have you enough,” the silversmith asked Coldstone quietly, “to convince Colonel Leslie to drop the charge?”
Coldstone’s eyes met Revere’s.
Gently, the silversmith went on, “Or is it the charge of murder that is your Colonel’s principle concern?”
Coldstone’s lips tightened slightly. “The charge of murder,” he replied, “is my principle concern. Mr. Miller,” he went on, “put about and take us into the Castle.”
Twenty-six
The Magpie lay at anchor for some four hours at the wharf at Castle Island; Paul Revere and Ben Edes remained prudently belowdecks. In a fog of giddiness and nausea, shivering in her own cloak and Lieutenant Coldstone’s, Abigail waited in the brick corridor outside Colonel Leslie’s office, listening to the dim murmur of voices within. Muldoon fetched her hot tea and bread-and-butter. She couldn’t touch the food, but the tea made her feel better and be damned to Cousin Sam’s boycott.
At length Coldstone opened the door and bowed her inside.
“That is certainly an extraordinary accusation you are making, Mrs. Adams.” Colonel Leslie frowned at her across his small and scrupulously tidy desk. On the office wall behind him maps of Massachusetts Colony, and of the coast-line from Halifax down to Philadelphia, made buff-colored panes against the sooty whitewash; the light from the little window caught a steely gleam from a gorget on top of the cabinet.
“It is indeed, sir,” Abigail replied, and was a little surprised, when she inclined her head, that it didn’t fall off. “Yet the guilty flee when no man pursueth, and if you will but send to the Fluckner house, you will find that Mrs. Margaret Sandhayes took flight without warning this morning, upon reading the note that I sent to Miss Fluckner, which asked after Mrs. Sandhayes’s movements on February twenty-fourth—that is, the day on which Sir Jonathan Cottrell supposedly departed for Maine.”
And if I’m wrong, thought Abigail wearily, and the messenger arrives at the Fluckners’ to find Mrs. Sandhayes peacefully taking tea with her hostess . . .
Her tired mind would pursue the thought no further.
“Supposedly.”
“In point of fact,” said Abigail, in a voice she usually reserved for reasoning about politics with her Cousin Isaac, “Margaret Sandhayes—by her own admission to me—poisoned Sir Jonathan Cottrell at a house just north of the Boston Common and lowered his body down a well in the cellar, where it was preserved by the cold while her lover, an actor named Androcles Palmer, of stature similar to Cottrell’s, traveled in his place to Maine. The previous evening, Palmer and, I think, Sandhayes had accosted Cottrell’s servant at the Spancel tavern on School Street and, in the course of dining with him, dosed him with what appears to have been death-cap mushroom. The servant was too ill to join his master aboard ship the following day, and in fact he died two weeks later. When Palmer returned to Boston in the guise of Cottrell, he went, not to the house of his host Governor Hutchinson, but to Pear Tree House, which Mrs. Sandhayes had rented under the name of Toby Elkins, only a few days before Sir Jonathan’s arrival in Boston.”