As she swayed and lurched out into Queen Street, with the Fluckner coachman—for whose frozen feet, Abigail reflected, she hadn’t spared a thought—springing down from his box to help her, Abigail glimpsed, at the edge of the lamplight, a couple of the young men whom she recognized as Sons of Liberty, waiting until the carriage pulled away. One carried a big box of seditious pamphlets, the other, a couple of pieces of what was clearly Harry Knox’s printing press.
Paul Revere—and wily Cousin Sam—had evidently taken sunset as the definition of the Sabbath, for today, anyway. And that done, wherein lies the difference between defense of one’s country, and silver-loo?
Four
Are you sure you wish to do this?” John handed Abigail’s marketing basket—crammed to bursting with bread, butter, candles, cheese, apples, and clean linen that fifteen-year-old Billy Knox had brought for his brother that morning—to Thaxter and helped Abigail down into the skiff Katrina, which bobbed gently among the clots of ice at the end of Wentworth’s Wharf.
Abigail wasn’t at all sure she wanted to do it. The grand-daughter of one of the oldest merchant clans in the colony, she knew everything about tonnage, bills of lading, and where to hide cargoes from the excise men, but being on the water made her joints ache within minutes and even the shortest voyage rendered her queasy. Nevertheless, she clasped John’s gloved hands in her own and said, “All will be well, Mr. Adams.”
“If we gets back by afternoon, all’ll be well.” Ezra Logan, who brought in firewood and butter from the north side of the bay in the Katrina three market-days per week and smuggled illegal cargoes of French molasses on the other three nights, shaded his eyes to consider the clouds that barred the morning sky. “Squally weather comin’ in.”
He took the basket from Thaxter, then the larger bundle of two striped woolen blankets, of the sort the British fur companies traded with the Indians. “Don’t you worry, Mr. Adams. I’ll have her back safe, ’fore the first sign of chop.” He cast loose the lines, and poled the Katrina’s nose from the end of the dock; the deck-boy swung the foresail yard around to catch what light wind there was. Thaxter, who wasn’t a much better sailor than Abigail, unfolded one of the blankets and laid it around her shoulders, then settled himself on the bench at her side to stay out of the way of Logan and the boy, shivering in the icy spray. Much as Abigail detested the British troops that for five years now had been stationed in Boston, as they approached the low gray shape of Castle Island—two and a half miles out in the iron waters—she felt a throb of sympathy for them. The Crown may have dispatched them to suppress the colonists’ demands for their rights as Englishmen, but that didn’t make the damp, freezing brick barracks they had to live in any more endurable in the bitter season.
The camp was quieter than it had been the last time she’d come ashore here, in early December. During the confused days after the tea-ships had first docked, when Boston’s bells had tolled day and night to summon in from the countryside the armed mob whose presence had made the so-called Boston Tea-Party possible, many Loyalists, including the Fluckners, had come out to the camp for protection. Most had returned to Boston, but a number of the Crown’s clerks and officers, Abigail was well aware, had chosen to remain.
Coming ashore she observed that the grubby village of tents, sheep pens, horse-lines, and makeshift shelters occupied by soldiers and camp-followers that had sprung up around the fort’s walls in those days had shrunk almost to nothing, smaller even than its summer and autumn dimensions. When Abigail and Thaxter were admitted through the fortress gate, smoke clawed her eyes from campfires and Spanish-style braziers set up even in the corridors, where soldiers, camp-servants, and laundresses huddled for warmth. The central parade-ground, glimpsed through the windows, had acquired a ring of lean-tos around its walls, clinging to the brick as if for warmth. Everywhere wood was stacked; in the corridors, shirts and drawers hung to dry, frozen hard. The smell of cooking, of dirty wool, of men and women too cold and too crowded to bathe, nearly choked her.
Lieutenant Coldstone, Assistant to the Provost Marshal, rose when they were shown into the cubbyhole that he shared with two other military clerks; the fireplace there was the size of Abigail’s breadbox back on Queen Street and the so-called blaze there wouldn’t have melted the ink in the standish. “It happens that Mr. Knox is a cousin of mine,” Abigail replied to his lifted eyebrows, after Thaxter had requested an interview with the prisoner. “I’ve brought him some things from his poor dear mother.”
“Have you, m’am?” Coldstone bowed. The wintry pallor of his face and the marble white of his wig turned his dark eyes even darker, in features as delicate as a girl’s. “She must be most concerned for her son.”
“Dreadfully,” said Abigail. “’ Tis only her age and illness that have kept her from bringing them herself.”
“Those, and the fact that the lady has been dead since 1772. I am afraid, m’am, that there is no facility at present where you might speak to Mr. Knox, save in his cell. The late cold weather has driven even the hardiest of the men indoors, and we are severely crowded at the moment.”
“’ Tis quite all right.”
The Lieutenant drew off the writing-mitts he had been wearing, donned stouter gloves, and took a cloak from the peg on the wall. He opened the room’s other door, to admit men’s voices and a renewed fug of smoke from the cubbyhole beyond, and called, “Sergeant Muldoon? Please take Mrs. Adams’s things. This way, m’am, Mr. Thaxter.”
“Might I ask the Provost Marshal’s reasoning, in treating this matter as a military one?” Thaxter’s breath puffed white as they passed a window, turned a corner down a hall that seemed to have been converted into a laundry-room, wood-store, and nursery for the ragged little camp children who ran to and fro underfoot like cocky rats. “As I understand the accusation, it rests upon the presumption that the crime was a crime of passion: a young man in love shouting threats at the older man who offered insult to a girl.”
“That is one way of looking at it,” agreed Coldstone. “But one seldom finds that passion retaining its heat for ten days, then lying in wait to do murder once the object of its ire came back into range again.”
“I suppose that depends on the degree of passion,” remarked Abigail, “and the magnitude of the ire.”
“As you say, m’am.” They turned down another corridor, and Coldstone returned the salute of the guard who stood at attention next to a tiny brazier and stingy fire just beyond the corner of a short corridor. “But if the young man is a member of an organization whose stated purpose is to encourage disobedience to the Crown and the victim a servant of the Crown in lawful pursuit of information about that organization, then the crime becomes not passion but treason. And as such, it enters the domain of military law.”
They descended a few steps to a sort of anteroom, stacked in its corners with trunks and barrels: Flour? Apples? It was impossible to tell by the smell because even in the cold, the room stank like a privy, and from the door at one side came the desultory murmur of men’s voices, and now and then, the soft clank of chain.
“I had no idea the Boston Grenadiers encouraged disobedience to the Crown,” said Abigail. “And here I thought their stated purpose was to wear handsome uniforms and foregather in the Bunch of Grapes on Saturday afternoons!” She stepped back as Coldstone took the torch from one of the wall-brackets that burned close to the other locked door, trying to keep from shivering not only with the cold, but with the smell of hopelessness in this place, the sense of trapped despair. “And whatever the criminal’s intent, if Sir Jonathan’s body was found first thing Sunday morning by the Governor’s stable hands, it would follow that he was killed sometime late Saturday night. While Mr. Knox may not be able to prove himself Alibi at that time, I doubt that you or I or indeed the working half of the population of Boston could do so, either.”