Abigail’s thoughts snapped back from consideration about who it was who might have left Margaret Sandhayes penniless, and said, “Toad.”
“Well, to be perfectly accurate, my dear Mrs. Adams, weasel would be le mot plus bon—though it is not a terribly nice thing to be saying about either toads or weasels, poor things. A little spindle-shanked fellow with a voice like a mouse at the bottom of a barrel and a nose like one, too, always aquiver for what would benefit him. Or for a well-turned ankle, I’m afraid, though he managed to convince Mr. Fluckner of his respectability. Do you make this marmalade yourself? You colonials are positively astonishing! Please tell me the oranges were smuggled from Spain! I must be able to write my friends in Bath and tell them I’ve supped on smuggled goods with a patriot who refuses tea on political principle! La, I shall be the envy of Abbey Crescent!”
“Was Miss Fluckner aware that her father was going to announce her engagement to Cottrell at the Governor’s ball?”
“Dear, me, yes, and such an uproar as there was over it! With Miss Lucy vowing one moment she wouldn’t go at all, and the next, that she’d slap Sir Jonathan’s face before all Boston and spring up on a chair and denounce him for a blackguard, and Mr. Fluckner bawling at the top of his lungs he’d throw her into the street for a disobedient trull, and her poor little sisters crying! Like a bear-garden, it was! I suggested that the best thing she could do would be to speak to her host about the matter when they arrived, for the dear Governor would know better how to get ’round Mr. Fluckner than poor Lucy, and he’d never have permitted the announcement in his house against her will, you know. Such a gentlemanly man—not at all what one expects in the colonies—and perfectly good ton! Shocking, how the lower orders here have treated him!”
“Perhaps they don’t care for the spectacle of every paying position in the colony being handed to members of His Excellency’s family.”
“I don’t see what business it is of theirs.” Mrs. Sandhayes frowned. “Though come to think of it, that’s just what Lucy is always saying.” She considered the matter for all of about a second and a half with the expression of one trying to make out an inscription in Chinese, then shrugged. “Well, however it was, the Governor, I understand, agreed to intercept Sir Jonathan the moment he stepped into the house and speak to him—”
“I thought Sir Jonathan was the Governor’s guest?”
“And so he was.” The tall woman’s hand strayed toward the teacup, then she glanced at its despised contents and returned the hand to her lap. Because of the boycott on British tea—and the truly shocking expense of the Dutch tea that Mr. John Hancock and others smuggled in defiance of the King’s efforts to control colonial trade—Abigail had poured out warmed cider for John and Sam rather than break the Sabbath by the making of coffee, but with water kept hot in the kitchen boiler, a tisane was also possible. Peppermint and chamomile were poor substitutes for bohea and oolong, as far as Abigail was concerned, yet annoyance flashed through her at her guest’s politely veiled contempt. “But Sir Jonathan had been gone for ten days in Maine—Where is Maine?”
“’ Tis the northern district of the colony that borders on Canada,” Abigail explained. “’ Tis where we get most of our ship timber from. There’s very little there beyond that. Why Sir Jonathan would go there to search for ‘rebels and traitors, ’ as Lucy said, and not return ’til the very eve of his own engagement-party—”
“But without Sir Jonathan’s journey to Maine, there would be no engagement-party, you see.” The chaperone cocked her head, beaky as an absurdly crested bird’s in the elaborate rolls and poufs of her heavily powdered hair. “Apparently there’s some sort of question about title to part of the lands, and Sir Jonathan had agreed, when he returned to England, to speak to the King about settling it in Mr. Fluckner’s favor, if Mr. Fluckner agreed to the match with Lucy. But Sir Jonathan insisted upon seeing the lands—since a portion of them will comprise the bulk of dear Lucy’s marriage-portion—to see what he’d be up against, I daresay. It seems there are tenants living on them that nobody wants there, what are they called? Oh, I know—squatters! Such names you people do come up with!” She laughed again delightedly, but Abigail settled back in her chair, cradling the creamy queens-ware teacup and thinking.
She’d heard all her life about the Maine squatters, and the cat’s cradle of lawsuits, chicanery, and looking-the-other-way that entangled the relationships of the dozen or so Great Proprietors who’d managed to get claim to those cold inhospitable forests to the north. Various Proprietors had brought in tenants to settle the land—mostly the Protestant Irish who’d originated in Scotland—and treated them, as far as Abigail could ascertain, like medieval peasants, to be robbed both of their rental and their lands depending on where negotiations were among the Proprietors themselves, and nobody outside the charmed circle of the very rich Boston merchants really had any clear idea of who had legal title to which portions of Maine’s broken coast.
So Thomas Fluckner wanted to beat the other Proprietors to the post with a clear title newly granted by the King, did he?
And was willing to trade his eldest daughter’s happiness to get it.
She poured herself a little more tisane. “And did His Excellency manage to intercept Sir Jonathan before the engagement was announced?”
“Good Heavens, no!” Mrs. Sandhayes regarded her in surprise, as if she suspected Mrs. Adams hadn’t been properly keeping up with the affair. “Sir Jonathan never arrived at all! He got off the boat from Maine that morning, and the next time anyone saw him, he was lying facedown in the mud of the alley behind the Governor’s mansion, frozen through.”
“Frozen?” Abigail frowned. “The Provost Marshal finds a man frozen in an alley and concludes that Harry Knox must have had something to do with it?”
“Of course!” exclaimed her guest. “Because of the quarrel, you know. Last Thursday week, the day Sir Jonathan left for Maine, Sir Jonathan went riding with Lucy on the Common and offered her intolerable insult! Fleeing him she encountered Mr. Knox, and Mr. Knox—after quite properly escorting her home—repaired at once to lie in wait for Sir Jonathan in the lane behind the Governor’s stables, in the very place where the body was found this morning! When Sir Jonathan came riding in, Mr. Knox pulled him off his horse practically in the stable gateway and shouted at him in front of the entire stable staff that if he—Sir Jonathan—dared speak to Miss Fluckner again, he—Mr. Knox—would ‘kill him like a dog.’ Oh, dear, look at the time!”
Mrs. Sandhayes groped for her canes, and laboriously—with the first expression on her face that Abigail had seen of anything besides a vapid and condescending cheer—got herself to her feet. “I absolutely swore upon the Testament that I wouldn’t be late to Caroline Hartnell’s loo-party, and here I am forsworn and my immortal soul is in peril—I daresay the City Fathers would tell me, as much from playing loo on the Sabbath as for broken vows . . . Well, never mind. I have kept you”—she propped her cane against her pannier, extended her hand to grasp Abigail’s with strong warmth—“away from your family for an unconscienceable time, not to speak of making those poor lovely horses stand all this time in the cold street . . .”
She hobbled with surprising swiftness along the hall, Pattie springing out of the kitchen to wrap her in the heavy velvet layers of her worn cloak. “Thank you so very much for the marmalade, Mrs. Adams—delicious! I dare swear I couldn’t make a marmalade myself if you held a gun on me! Well, I’m off to endanger my immortal soul at loo—Is it still the Sabbath? Or does it end at sunset here?”