At the head of the stair, laudanum bottle in hand, Abigail paused, her eye caught by the ladder that led up to the attic. On impulse she went back to it, and climbed to the trapdoor—
The tiny space below the steep-slanted roof was crammed with more trunks, all the things Mrs. Hazlitt had bought in the nearly two years she’d lived with her son: dresses, sets of chinaware, clocks, birdcages, an ostrich egg packed in straw. One couldn’t have imprisoned a lapdog up there, let alone a full-grown kidnapped maidservant.
You have indeed read Pamela too many times.
Abigail descended to the keeping room once more.
Mrs. Hazlitt was in tears by the time Abigail emerged from the staircase (and thriftily closed the door after herself), Orion holding her in his arms and covering her face with kisses. But in his own countenance was only exhaustion and revulsion, and the haggard desperation of a man who sees no light at the end of his road. He beckoned Abigail up, and it took the two of them to get his mother to swallow the medicine: She spit the first mouthful at him, cried when he forced her to swallow the second by holding her nose and keeping a hand on her mouth.
“When she gets excited like this, I’m always afraid Damnation will give her too much of the stuff,” he said, when they’d finally guided the stumbling, disheveled woman to her chair by the keeping room fire. “I must finish the pamphlets, and I must get to the meeting this afternoon. Please don’t think—” he began, with a glance back toward his mother. He brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, making the mess worse. “She wasn’t always like this, you know.”
“I know.” Though in fact, Rebecca had written to her last year that according to her son, Mrs. Hazlitt had always been a horror.
“Bless you—” He lifted the napkin from the basket, his tired face lighting up. “You are indeed an angel, Mrs. Adams. Now I must fly—” His face altered, suddenly twisted with dread, fatigue, grief. “You have heard nothing, I suppose?”
Looking up at him, she wondered when he had last slept. She shook her head. Now was not the time, she knew, to lay upon him her own inconclusive findings and nightmare surmises. He was a man who bore trouble enough.
“It will be over soon.” Abigail placed her hands over his, on the basket’s plaited handle. “I’ll make a little extra for dinner tonight, and send Pattie over with it. John tells me the Dartmouth must unload her tea by Saturday—a week from today—else it will all be confiscated to pay the harbor tolls. Whatever happens, it will only be a week.”
He caught her wrist as she was turning away, looking up at her with ravaged eyes. “And then what?” he asked softly. “Rebecca—Mrs. Malvern—”
Saved or endangered, dead or alive, femme seule or spouse abused . . . Rebecca would always be some other man’s wife.
Abigail said quietly, “God knows. But God does know—and will inform us, in due time.”
Twenty-one
Visiting Castle Island on the previous Friday, Abigail had received the impression of crowding and bustle, in the brick corridors of the little fortress, and in the village of tents, huts, cow-byres, sheep pens, and laundry-lines that had grown up around its walls. When the two sailors from the Cumberland landed her there today—in company with the family of an English customs clerk named Burrell, two gentlemen related to the Olivers, and towering mountains of luggage—Abigail saw her earlier error. It seemed to her that at least as many tents and huts again had been newly erected, not only for the servants of the refugee Tories but for all the lesser officers and their clerks and servants who had been displaced from the fort, so that the likes of the Hutchinsons, Olivers, and Fluckners could have its sturdier roof over their heads. Smoke from cook-fires wreathed the walls and stung Abigail’s eyes as she and Thaxter picked their way up from the dock. Every step was impeded by camp servants putting up shelters, sheep penned in the thoroughfare, bales of provisions, and prostitutes. The whole place smelled like a privy.
Lieutenant Coldstone met her a few yards from Castle William’s gate.
“Mrs. Adams.” He bowed over her hand. “I beg your pardon. I had meant to come to fetch you—”
“Good heavens, Lieutenant, with this many soldiers shifting their arrangements about I’m astonished you have a few minutes to meet me here. Did you have civilians quartered upon you?”
The chilly reserve broke into a grin at this reversal of the usual civilian complaint of the military being quartered in private homes, swiftly repressed: His eyes still smiled. “I have lived under canvas before, m’am; and that, recently enough that it is no catastrophe. The civilians forced to take refuge here, from fear of the mobs in Boston, have been neither trained to it, nor are they for the most part physically suited to such hardships. Not only the men by whom your husband and his friends feel wronged, but their wives, who have surely wronged no one, and children as well.”
“And, as the Lord says to Jonah, also much cattle,” remarked Abigail, stepping out of the way of a girl in a dirty skirt, driving half a dozen pigs through the gate. “Lieutenant Coldstone, you recall Mr. Thaxter, my husband’s clerk? I assume Mr. Pentyre has consented to see me?” She took Thaxter’s arm again and followed Coldstone after the pigs up to the gate, the muck of the path sucking and clinging to her pattens.
“With certain stipulations, yes.”
“Stipulations?” Abigail raised her brows, and got an enigmatic glance over Coldstone’s epauletted shoulder in reply.
“He has asked that I be present at the interview—at a sufficient distance that conversation in a low voice should be private enough if you choose,” he added, anticipating Abigail’s protest, though in fact what she felt was relief that she would not be obliged either to broach or explain the matter of his presence herself. “And he has requested that you be searched.”
Abigail stopped short under the low brick tunnel of the gate. “Searched?”
“With all due decency.” Coldstone’s voice, like his features, seemed wrought of polished marble, ungiving and absolutely smooth. “I have asked the wives of five of the sergeants major here: respectable women, and honest. You may choose which of them you will, to perform the office. He would not meet you, else.”
Abigail opened her mouth, outraged, then closed it again. Why would he ask that? Her eyes searched the face of the man before her. “He sounds like a man in fear for his life.”
“Were he not,” replied Coldstone civilly, “he would not be living in a single clerk’s room on this island. Nor would any of the other lawyers, Crown officers, merchants, and their families currently eating Army rations. Your husband is, I might remind you, known as one of the leaders of the Boston mob—”
“He is not!”
“Forgive me for contradicting a lady, m’am, but he is indeed known as such, whatever his true position might be. And if he will take such a position, his wife must needs suffer for it, even as Mrs. Oliver and Mrs. Fluckner and the Apthorp ladies do—and, I might add, suffer to a considerably lesser degree. Will you agree to submit to the conditions?”
Abigail smiled. “I would not miss it for worlds.”
The wives of the sergeants major were red-faced, thick-armed, good-natured-looking women of the kind one would meet in the marketplace any day, not the slatternly trulls described in pamphlets from one end of New England to the other (I have been listening to too many of Sam’s diatribes). Abigail selected the one who looked most talkative, and remarked, as they retired behind a screen (there being no spare rooms in the fortress at all besides this single office), “I had no idea I was considered so formidable. Does Mr. Pentyre truly expect me to assault him?”