“And did you find Bathsheba’s body?” asked John. It was the first time John had come to join one of Abigail’s conferences with Coldstone in the parlor: generally, since the dumping of the tea, when the British officer came to the house, it was the signal for John to disappear. If the Lieutenant had any instructions regarding John’s arrest for sedition, he didn’t mention them. Perhaps Colonel Leslie knew no redcoat with a prisoner would make it back to the wharves, particularly after Harry’s arrest had caught the Sons off-guard on a Sunday morning. Perhaps, after a long, cold day on the marshes, Coldstone was simply too tired to try.
“We did,” said Coldstone, and by the way he said we, Abigail guessed he and Muldoon had had plenty of help from the Sons of Liberty. “Because iced water is in fact somewhat colder than ice itself, the body, though waterlogged, is not decomposed at all; there was no question of her identity. She bore no mark of violence, so we must assume her to have been lured to Pear Tree House and poisoned as well.”
“That would have been on the day she disappeared, would it not?” asked Abigail. “That was the day that Miss Fluckner slipped away from her guardian to meet Mr. Knox.”
“Given her father’s anger over that,” mused John, “no wonder nobody asked Mrs. Sandhayes’s whereabouts.” He glanced across at Coldstone, sipping the coffee that Pattie had quietly brought in on a tray. “Was Palmer poisoned as well?”
“Mr. Palmer,” said Coldstone, “had been shot through the body, at so close a range as to burn his clothing.” For a time he was silent, gazing at the last of the spring sunlight in the parlor window, his good hand stretched to the warmth of the fire.
“Was he as like Sir Jonathan Cottrell as all that?” asked Abigail curiously. “Or is it no longer possible to tell?”
“That I do not know. I suppose the only ones who saw both of them in life were Cottrell’s valet Fenton and Bathsheba. And Margaret Sandhayes herself, of course.”
“So what will happen now?” asked Abigail at length. “Who handles a murder done in the colonies, if the murderess flees to Britain? Can a letter be sent—?”
“What happens now?” There was a chill note of anger in the young officer’s voice, and his features had the look of a Praxiteles statue that has bitten into a lemon. “Nothing, Mrs. Adams. ’Tis not only Colonel Leslie who has learned to distrust Boston witnesses. Were I to send the depositions from you, and Mr. Adams, and Mssrs. Brown and Miller, and all the others to a British Court, do you really think any English magistrate would so much as read them? A barrister’s clerk could tear them to pieces in minutes.”
Abigail stared. “But it wasn’t only Cottrell she killed! The woman murdered Fenton, and Bathsheba, and Palmer in cold blood—”
“An actor and two servants.” Coldstone shook his head. “Colonel Leslie will write to Whitehall, and I shall send the facts of the case to my friends in Bow Street, for all the good it is likely to do. But if Margaret Sandhayes is taken at all, I doubt she will even be tried. And for that,” he added bitterly, “you may thank the politics of this country, and the late actions of defiance that your townsmen have chosen to pursue.”
“May we thank those actions, Lieutenant?” John leaned his shoulder against the chimney breast. “Or the reaction of your government to those actions? My experience—and my studies in the histories of empires—lead me to conclude that it takes two to make a quarrel. Justice is justice, and does not—or should not—read the political newspapers.”
Coldstone sighed and looked aside. “You are right, sir. And I speak in anger that a woman who caused so much harm—not to speak of putting a bullet through my shoulder—should escape in the smoke and confusion of a general insurrection.”
“I doubt she will escape.” John bent to the fire and tonged up a coal for his pipe. “Like Hamlet’s mother, her punishment must be left to Heaven . . . as indeed the Queen of Denmark’s was, and was speedily accomplished nevertheless.” Red reflection flickered deep in his eyes. “I suspect in time Margaret Sandhayes will bring other punishment upon herself, through acquiring the habit of thinking that she can kill with impunity . . . even as the man she pursued had come to feel that he could rape without penalty. Rather than sacrificing all for vengeance, she took a great deal of trouble to make sure that she could return to England unprosecuted, but I doubt she will find it quite so simple as she thinks, to return to her old life, with the Mark of the Beast on her forehead and her hand.”
“What does one do, I wonder,” murmured Abigail, “when one has lived for something for eight years, striven toward it without thought of anything else . . . and then achieved it. She was a brilliant strategist, but it seems to me that she turned the whole of her life into a psalm of vengeance for her sister. Where does one go from there?”
“I have often wondered the same,” replied the officer, “about your patriots, Mrs. Adams.” He turned his pale blue eyes to John’s face, rubbed unconsciously at his aching arm. “Have you, Mr. Adams, or your cousin, or Mr. Knox, or Mr. Revere, or any of those others, even thought about what sort of world you would create, or can create, if you teach your followers—and yourselves—that violence is the best answer to a political question? Can those who learn this lesson do other than continue to perpetuate it by force rather than law?”
John said nothing. From the kitchen, Abigail heard the friendly rumble of Sergeant Muldoon’s voice and the laughter of Pattie and the children.
“I suppose,” she replied after a moment, “that is something we shall all soon see.”
Author’s Note
Harry Knox and Lucy Fluckner were married in June of 1774. In April of 1775, a British regiment attempted to seize a colonial powder-store hidden at Concord, Massachusetts, some seventeen miles from Boston, an event that triggered the American Revolution. In the wake of the battles of Lexington and Concord, the British retreated to Boston and were besieged by a makeshift force of colonists camped on the mainland. Harry and Lucy Knox sneaked across the British lines to join the American forces, Lucy concealing Harry’s military sword, the story goes, in the lining of her cloak.
Thomas and Hannah Fluckner remained in Boston, still under siege by the colonial army, until March of the following year. In the dead of winter, Harry Knox led a small force of men to bring sixty British cannon three hundred miles through the snow from the captured British forts at Crown Point and Ticonderoga in the Hudson Valley—guns that comprised the colonial army’s first artillery, without which General Washington could never have driven the British from Boston. With the British evacuation of Boston, on March 17, 1776, the Fluckner family—along with hundreds of other Americans who remained loyal to the Crown—were passengers on the British ships that carried the British Army out of Boston. This ended the New England phase of the conflict. Lucy’s parents subsequently crossed to England and never saw their daughter again.
Harry Knox was promoted to Major General, and Lucy—cheerfully bearing an ever-increasing brood of babies—followed him from camp to camp for eight years of war, “fat, lively, and somewhat interfering,” renowned for dancing even that inveterate rug-cutter George Washington to a breathless standstill. After the war, as the only member of the Fluckner family not deemed a “traitor,” Lucy was awarded the whole of her father’s Maine lands—several million acres—where she and Harry built an enormous mansion and lived with their many children in baronial splendor. Harry Knox, who during the war founded the United States’ first officer-training school at the age of twenty-eight, went on to become George Washington’s first Secretary of War. Fort Knox and the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, are named after this extraordinary man. He died of peritonitis resulting from a swallowed chicken bone in 1806 at the age of fifty-six.