but (Abigail had repeatedly pointed out to her) a serious look at how men and the world regarded a woman’s right to choose her own destiny—Abigail found her mind returning again and again to the riddle that lay before her, like a labyrinth plunged in darkness and reeking with the smell of blood.
It was close to two when John emerged at last from Colonel Leslie’s office—Abigail checked twice more at the door, as the hour had dragged on, to make sure she could still hear his voice—and he was escorted only by the subaltern who had shown him in. She would have given much to have been able to hear what Lieutenant Coldstone and Colonel Leslie had to say to one another in private, but even had John not worn the watchful look of one who isn’t certain he’ll actually be allowed to board the departing boat, she couldn’t think of an unobtrusive way of listening at the door.
“Damn Sam and his myrmidons,” said John softly, as they passed between the red-coated guards at the Castle’s gate and picked their way through the straggle of tents, boxes, and sheep pens toward the wharf. “Too many times they’ve run up against witnesses who’ll swear that one or another of the Sons of Liberty was elsewhere than where they know he was, or smugglers who’ll slip a man across the harbor at dead of night when the gates are closed.”
“That’s what they assume you did?”
He nodded. “Left my horse in one of the smuggler barns on Hog Island and crossed in a rowboat, did the deed, then slipped back—”
“But why? Why do they believe this of you, of all people, and why would you have done such a thing? It was an atrocity, John. Do they honestly think you would be capable of performing those acts—”
“They don’t know that.” John’s voice was grim. “Thanks to Sam, all they saw was her body—slashed, yes, but laid neatly out on a bed, and the blood all mopped away. And we cannot tell them otherwise. You’re frozen,” he added, chaffing her gloved hand as they descended the muddy path to the little wharf where Linus Logan waited for them in the Katrina. “You should not have—”
“They gave me very nice coffee,” replied Abigail. “And had I not come, in all this time waiting I’d have gone mad at home, and murdered the children in my rage, and then wouldn’t we both have felt silly when you came back safe after all.”
No message had come from Sam, or Revere, or Orion Hazlitt in their absence. But after a dinner of yesterday’s chicken stewed, when Abigail had milked “the girls” (as she called Semiramis and Cleopatra) and was pouring out milk by lantern light in the icy scullery, Pattie came in with a note. “A boy brought it, m’am. Is it about Mrs. Malvern?” Her elfin face puckered anxiously, as she watched Abigail unfold the scrap of kitchen paper and angle it to the light.
Mrs. Adams—
Forgive me the inconvenience to you entailed in a meeting at six thirty tomorrow evening, in the yard of Mr. Malvern’s house, to tell you what I know of Mrs. Moore’s whereabouts. These are the only time and place available to me. I will arrange that the gate be open, and that an escort is provided to see you to your home.
I am your ob’t etc,
Scipio Carter
Nine
Whatever Charles Malvern might feel—and say—about those would-be imitators of English society who ate their dinners by lamplight, Abigail guessed that with a fashionably minded daughter and son in the house, six thirty was probably the earliest any servant there was going to have a moment’s leisure. Which was, she supposed, to the good. Her conscience nagged her painfully about her own work, neglected or, more reprehensibly, shuffled off onto poor Pattie’s slim shoulders.
Yet the next morning, instead of setting briskly forth to the market the moment Nabby and Johnny led the cows out of the yard toward what little pasturage the Common offered these days, Abigail brought out her writing desk, and began reading through the twoscore letters that Rebecca had sent to her, in the eighteen months between the family’s removal to the Adams farm in Braintree in April of ’71, and their return to Boston nineteen months later, in November of ’72, scanning for names. In hundreds of desultory conversations, Abigail recalled her speaking occasionally of friends, cousins, her brother’s comrades from Baltimore, to any one of whom she would have opened her