But, she told herself, the case is not the same here, either.
Even so, she was glad Penelope Sellars wasn’t in the building.
“It might have been Mr. Sellars,” said the apprentice, to Abigail’s story of a visitor last Wednesday night, just before the rain started, who had been gone before she could be called in from the cowhouse and had left this package, and Pattie had said she thought it might be Mr. Sellars. “In truth he spent that night from home. He was called out to Cambridge, just after dinner, and didn’t return in time, and the gates were closed on him . . .” He glanced around the empty shop, with its neat packages of candles and rope, soap and nails, as if for listening ears. His voice sank to a whisper. “Mrs. Sellars, she wasn’t any too pleased, either. The squawk she set up!”
Abigail said, a little primly, “Well, if Mr. Sellars was in Cambridge Wednesday night, he could not be the man who left this book upon my husband’s doorstep, could he? I think it would be a favor to them both, if you mentioned nothing of this.”
“No, m’am.” He looked like he might have said something else—mentioned the deacon’s latest “ladyfriend” on the North End?—but only repeated after a moment, “No, m’am.”
Drat men. Abigail’s pattens clinked sharply on Milk Street’s cobblestone paving. If they have an aversion to a woman, why wed her? If they want to tup harlots, let them marry the hussies to begin with—then they’d see there’s more to happiness than four bare legs in a bed.
Orion Hazlitt’s face returned to her, harsh with sudden anger at the thought of Charles Malvern. Do you ever wish—?
Yet Rebecca Woodruff had pledged herself to Charles Malvern for her family’s sake, long before her path had ever crossed the young stationer’s. What God hath joined, let no man put asunder.
Rebecca had said that to her, on her first evening in the new house on Queen Street, when she and John had come back to Boston from Braintree a year ago. Rebecca had helped her, Bess, Hannah, and Pattie scrub every surface with hot water and vinegar, move pots and kettles into the kitchen, make up the beds. After dinner was done for all friends and family, Rebecca had remained, to help clean up, and to tell at greater depth the small events that had made up her life during Abigail’s year and a half of absence from the town. Orion’s name had come up early in the conversation: “He is a good man,” Rebecca had said, perhaps too quickly, when Abigail had mentioned the number of times his name had arisen in her letters. “Cannot a woman take pleasure in a man’s conversation without all the world winking and smirking, if he but walk her home from church?”
Abigail had replied carefully, “If she is living apart from her husband, it behooves her to take care how she shows her pleasure. Either to others, or to him.”
Rebecca had reddened a little in the pallor of the winter twilight, but it was anger that sparkled in her dark eyes, not shame. She had bent over her sewing again. “Those who walk with their gaze in the gutters will see mud wherever they look,” she replied after a time. “He tells me his mother is the same. She thinks that any woman who speaks to her son is ‘on the catch’ to take him away from her. She’s never forgiven him for coming to Boston in the first place, he says, As if he were running away from me! Which of course is exactly what he was doing. She thinks the young ladies of the Brattle Street congregation are heretics, let alone me, whether I were married or not. And I am married,” Rebecca went on. “Abigail, I do not forget that. What God hath joined, let no man put asunder . . . not even the man who has cast me out.”
It had been on Abigail’s lips to ask, What if things were different?
But they were not different, nor would they be. So she had held her peace.
“Mrs. Adams?”
Startled, Abigail turned, as she came into the open space between the Old State House and the Old Meeting House—the very place where, three and a half years ago, British troopers had opened fire on a mob of unarmed civilians—to see a man approaching from the doorway of the State House, wrapped in a thick gray cloak. His hat shadowed the pristine gleam of hair powder, but even before he came close enough for her to see his face her heart leaped to her throat.
“Heavens, man, are you insane?” She strode over to him, and he removed his hat and bowed: It was Lieutenant Coldstone, sure enough, and in uniform beneath that very military-looking cloak. He wasn’t even accompanied by the faithful Sergeant Muldoon.
“On the contrary,” said the young officer, “you could scarcely call upon me, m’am. And we are not half a mile from the soldiers at the Battery.”
“With all of—oh, what is it? Twenty troops? Do you think they’d even turn out, if they heard a mob going after a Tory who wasn’t smart enough to keep off the streets at a time like this? What on earth are you doing here?”
“My duty,” he responded stiffly, as Abigail caught him by the arm and almost dragged him down King Street toward the relative safety of the Battery. “We were sent to escort the Fluckner family across to Castle Island”—Thomas Fluckner was a crony of Governor Hutchinson’s—“and I thought to improve the occasion by asking if you had had time to pursue inquiries on the North End. I left a note with your girl, that I would return at three. The town seems quiet enough.”
“That’s because they’re all at Old South Church, listening to my husband’s cousin tell them the Crown has no right to tax British citizens without the consent of their elected representatives in Parliament, or set up a monopoly on any item for the benefit of his personal friends.”
Coldstone’s lips parted on the words Three pence a pound—and closed again. She thought he might have followed this up with an argument beginning, Nevertheless, it is the law . . . but that look, too, passed from his eyes. He only said, “You are quite right, Mrs. Adams. It was foolish of me.”
For a moment King Street was quiet indeed, save for the eternal tolling of the bells. Then he continued, “Last night I reviewed the notes I made at the time of the Fishwire murder, and those of my predecessor. The regiment had only just taken up post at Castle William. The previous Provost Marshal seemed to have the attitude that a woman who has been reduced to selling her body deserves whatever befalls her, and merely noted the savagery of the post mortem slashing. I was angry, both that he would make no more of it than he did, and because it was plain to me that his neglect in pursuing the first murder had left the culprit at large to commit a second. For that reason, though it was deemed a civil matter only, when the constable reported it to the Provost Marshal—in his usual weekly report, and thus some days after the event—I asked permission to visit the Fishwire house.”
“And did you have dung thrown at you by the local children?” inquired Abigail. When he did not reply, she glanced sidelong up at the young man’s face, and added, more kindly, “There are few enough in Boston who would take such trouble, for a woman who made her living fixing hair and selling herbs.”
“Few in London either.” Coldstone didn’t return her glance. His dark, clear eyes roved to the muddy flats that lay on their left as they emerged from Kilby Street, the rough, open ground on both sides of the Battery March below the slope of Fort Hill, as if seeking signs of danger.
“Are you from London, Lieutenant Coldstone?”
That brought his eyes back to her, and put that little crease back in the corner of his mouth. “Not originally. My parents lived in Kent. They didn’t start bringing me to London with them until I was seven or eight. I’ve always preferred the country. Even as a child, I think I sensed that London was a place where a poor woman could be slashed to death, or a poor child trampled by a rich man’s horse, and no one would really care. This seems to hold true in Boston as well.”