for John to sign a bond?
Is there another door out of that office?
She waited for a moment when the corridor was empty—servants were coming and going with greater frequency now, bearing dress uniforms to be brushed, trays of tea things or port bottles—then stepped to the door. Putting her ear close to the crack, she heard Coldstone’s chill, measured voice asking something, and John’s, loud with his anger, reply, “. . . liver bay, about ten years old, white stocking on the off hind . . .” Balthazar, in fact: John’s horse. Had John dispatched his clerk, young Thaxter, to return the post-horse he’d borrowed to get back to Boston on? He must have—she hadn’t seen the young man at dinner yesterday afternoon, though he often stayed to eat with the family. She shook her head at herself. I must have been more tired than I knew . . .
“Purley himself, for one,” John was saying. They must have asked him, who saw him at Purley’s Inn. “Mrs. Purley, for another. A couple of the Uxford boys, and Elias Norton from Danvers . . .”
“The same Elias Norton, who has been accused of smuggling? I understand, too, that Mr. Purley’s sympathies are strongly with the so-called patriots—”
“The sympathies of half the men in New England are with the patriots, man! Will you discount a man’s testimony on the grounds of his politics?”
“M’am?”
She turned, sharply, to see young Sergeant Muldoon behind her with a tray of coffee things, and a sort of folding camp table hung over one immense shoulder. Her cheek-bones heated with embarrassment at being caught eavesdropping, but she asked, “Is there another door out of that office?” and reached out to take the tray from his hands.
“That there is, m’am,” he said, gratefully handing it over and unfolding the camp table. “Into the Colonel’s bedroom, it leads, and out into the parade. The cook says, there’s precious little cream this time of year, but I got you some, I have, and a bit of cake.”
Abigail made herself smile, spread her skirts, and settled on the bench again, there being no way that she could think of to check whether a company of armed men waited in the Colonel’s bedroom to drag John away in chains. “Thank you, Sergeant,” she said. “Lieutenant Coldstone didn’t happen to mention whether anything was found in Mrs. Pentyre’s chaise, to hint at whoever might have driven it from the house where Mrs. Pentyre’s body was found, to . . . was it Lee’s shipyard?”
“That it was, m’am!” The young man regarded her with admiration. “Think of you askin’ after that, same as the Lieutenant did, when he looked it over so careful. A chaise is a chaise for my money, and himself that angry that it’d been tipped off the end of the dock there where the water’s deep, not to speak of it spucketin’ rain like Noah’s Flood. Looked it over like somebody’d hid a treasure map under the seats, he did. And looked over every inch of the horse they found, like he meant to buy it. He’s a caution, he is, m’am, beggin’ your pardon, m’am.”
“Pardon freely granted.” Abigail smiled, and poured herself out some coffee from the small earthenware pot. “And did he find aught?”
“Not on the horse nor the chaise, m’am, given they was out in the rain all the night. But just lookin’ at the poor lady’s shoes, an’ at the hems of her petticoats, if you’ll excuse me mentionin’ such a thing, m’am, and her poor face, he says she wasn’t tidied up and laid on the bed by him what killed her, but by others, hours later, for what purpose God only knows.” He gave her a bow, and then—not to omit any sign of respect—saluted her as well, before excusing himself and hurrying off.
A caution indeed, Abigail reflected, reopening Pamela and taking a nibble of the regimental cook’s excellent cake. Wet hems and wet shoes meant she’d arrived in the rain, and the settling of the blood that Dr. Warren had spoken of told its own tale of how long she’d lain on her face before she was put on her back on the bed. Just because he knows someone tampered with the house doesn’t mean he knows who.
Was that why he suspected John? Because Rebecca would have admitted him to her house without question?
Try as she might to absorb herself into her favorite book—not, as Rebecca had described it, “the world’s longest shilly-shally,”