the small eyots that dotted the harbor’s deep channel. The clammy cold seemed to seep into her joints, and the pitching of the sea turned her stomach.
“Are you all right?” John pulled his own scarf higher and tighter about his throat. “I will be quite safe, you know.” As Abigail had feared, she slept little. When John had come to bed after midnight she had been lying with open eyes, fearing what she would see when she closed them.
“I know you can slay any number of British troopers with your bare hands,” she replied gravely. “Yet you may need someone to untie the boat, while you battle your way to the wharf.”
John slapped his forehead. “I had forgot, we might have to fight our way out.” His eyes danced as they met hers. But there was a sober worry in them, that answered the fear in hers, and neither needed to speak of what they both knew. On Castle Island, there was no chance that Sam could summon up a convenient armed mob to outnumber the available British troops. The only thing that might prevent Lieutenant Coldstone from arresting John the moment he set foot on Castle Island would be the fact that if he wished to do so secretly, he would have to detain Abigail as well.
Exhausted as she had been by the time she’d lain down last night, Abigail had remained awake by the light of her single candle, picturing over and over in her mind every room of Rebecca’s house, both before and after Sam and the others had gone over it. What did they forget? What could Coldstone have found that convinced him of John’s guilt? No list, no fragment of paper . . . Had she, Abigail, dropped her handkerchief, for someone to deduce John’s presence from? Yet why (her overtired mind had picked endlessly at this detail) would John have been carrying his wife’s handkerchief?
If they had found the brown-backed “Household Expenses” book, they would have gone to Sam, or Revere.
The same could be said if their only ground for suspicion was that Richard Pentyre—that wealthy and fashionable friend of the Crown—was one of the consignees to whom a monopoly of the East India Company tea had been granted. John had always held himself aloof from the darker doings of the Sons of Liberty. Even his pamphlets argued in terms of reason and the Constitutional Rights of Englishmen, not Sam’s flamboyant demagoguery.
Now, in the gray daylight, with the walls of Castle William bobbing ahead of them, Abigail shivered at the thought, What did they find in Mrs. Pentyre’s room?
In addition to the four hundred men of the Sixty-Fourth Foot, and the some sixty female “camp followers” supported on regimental half rations, Castle William—the brick fortress on the island to which the British troops had retired after the Massacre three and a half years ago—housed an assortment of servants, sutlers, animals, munitions, and supplies. These in turn engendered the need for offices and service buildings, so that what had originally been a castle indeed on the round-topped green island now had more the appearance of a grubby village, complete with cattle, chickens, children underfoot, and laundry hanging between the rough wooden dwellings of the men. The office of the Provost Marshal was in the fort itself, but as Abigail had feared, she and John were kept waiting for nearly three hours, on a bench in the chilly brick-paved corridor that circled the parade ground. Through a wide archway they watched the men come and go: clerks, grooms, batmen carrying officers’ bedding to air. A couple of soldiers edged by them with a crate of wine bottles. Another, brisk and military despite a rather unsoldierly smock, bore a brace of ducks toward the kitchen.
Did Perdita Pentyre have her own rooms here at the fortress? Was that a perquisite of the Colonel’s mistress? Abigail wondered who she could decently ask.
Of course, Rebecca will know . . .
And her momentary, reflexive cheer at the answer to her question turned instantly to the haunted pain of dread.
While she’d washed in the icy predawn cold, gone to the stables to milk Semiramis and Cleopatra, she’d strained her ears, listening for footfalls in the yard, for Young Sam or Young Paul: Mrs. Malvern’s at my Pa’s, safe . . .
Nothing. Orion Hazlitt will be listening, too, she thought. Waiting as she had waited, in that dark little house as he got his mother up, dressed her for the day, made coffee