The Ninth Daughter - By Barbara Hamilton Page 0,95
he saw Abigail across the parade he strode toward her, followed by the sturdy, towering figure of Sergeant Muldoon. Rather despairingly, Abigail added Thaxter to the list of men she knew who owned caped gray greatcoats. “M’am, I’ve been to the wharf, the men say—”
“We’re going,” promised Abigail, and obediently turned her steps toward the castle gate. Distantly, the tolling of Boston’s church bells carried over the three miles of tumbled gray harbor, dreary and ominous in the failing light. “Is Lieutenant Coldstone—?”
“He’s with Colonel Leslie, m’am.” Muldoon saluted her respectfully as he spoke. “In a rare taking he is, and the Provost Marshal, too, and trying to get shut of a mountain of business before the Colonel’s to take tea with the Royal Commissioners and the wives of all these rich nobs from Boston, beggin’ your pardon, m’am.” He nodded toward a small group of men crossing the parade, the torchlight borne by the soldier who preceded them glittering on the bullion that decked the Colonel’s dress uniform, gleaming on the marble smoothness of powdered hair. Beside the Colonel, resplendent in a caped greatcoat of some dark hue that could have been liver brown or indigo in the darkness, walked Richard Pentyre, gesturing with his quizzing glass and speaking with what appeared to be a ferocious intensity.
No sign of Coldstone. Drat it.
“I hope your talk with Mr. Pentyre went as you hoped it would, m’am?”
Abigail shook her head. “It wasn’t a wasted trip, but Mr. Pentyre was hardly forthcoming.”
“Well, you can scarce blame him, can you?” remarked Thaxter, as the freezing draft dragged at Abigail’s cloak and they entered the lamplit tunnel of the gate. “Between the lawsuit over the Sellars land that’s to be decided next month, and being served notice by the Sons of Liberty to—”
“What lawsuit?”
“Up in Essex County, m’am. If all this isn’t solved, the thing looks to be dragging on into another session. It’s been up in the courts, or some other nuisance suit that he’s brought in aid of it, every time Mr. Adams and I have had a case on the docket there.”
“Not—” She glanced at Muldoon, stopped herself from saying, Abednego Sellars, and to turn the subject said instead, “Not likely to be settled soon, if trouble comes of this tea business. I know he had notice to report to the Liberty Tree and resign his position, but I’d scarcely consider that grounds for having his visitors searched before they’re permitted to see him.”
“Damn it!” They emerged from the gate, into the mucky chaos of the camp around the walls. With a hasty, “Excuse me, m’am!” Thaxter dashed ahead, to intercept two sailors in striped jerseys and tarred pigtails, making their way up the torchlit path. Presumably, guessed Abigail, with deep forboding, the men who were to take her back to Boston. Their obvious reluctance to have anything further to do with the project was understandable: Darkness was closing in, and beyond the range of each smoky little campfire among the close-crowded jumble of tents and wash-lines, virtually nothing could be seen but a sense of movement in the shadows, and the occasional flash of an animal eye. Around Thaxter and the sailors, more civilians were coming up the path from the wharf: not rich merchants, but ordinary citizens of the town. Angry and harried-looking, they bore makeshift bundles and glanced right and left at the chaos with the expression of people who have been cheated of their rights. A small child was crying.
We have all been cheated of our rights, thought Abigail, pitying them yet knowing there was no good answer to their distress. We will all be cheated of our rights, unless we take a stand against the Crown while yet we have a little freedom to do so.
Beside her, Muldoon said, “T’cha! Searchin’—that’s goin’ a bit far, beggin’ your pardon, m’am, note or no note.”
“Note?” Abigail turned her head sharply, her mind still running on poems stuffed through shutters, hidden under floorboards. “What note?”
“The note Mr. Pentyre had, m’am. About how the Sons of Liberty were going to kill him and his wife both.”
She stared at him, aghast, and Thaxter came striding back up the path, coat flapping. “They say they’ll do it, Mrs. Adams, but you must come now.”
“Where did they get it? Who sent it?” She took Thaxter’s arm, her pattens slipping in the mud as they descended another two yards of path, turned a corner around a makeshift tavern, found themselves suddenly at the dock