She glanced at Thaxter, who had relatives in Lynn. Her own knowledge of the territory north of Boston ended five or six feet on either side of the Salem Road.
The young man frowned doubtfully. “At this season, he might reach Cambridge.” He didn’t sound as if he thought it a likely possibility. “Horse and man would tire very quickly in cold like Saturday’s. Of course, the countryside is thickly settled up, you know. He may just have gone visiting—er—Well, he could have had a sweetheart in any of a hundred farms . . .”
Coldstone moved his head a little, and for a moment, Abigail had the impression that he was about to crack his self-imposed calm and make some remark about the victim.
“Has he been in these parts before?” she asked. “Miss Fluckner indicated that he came down from Halifax late in December, but is this the first time he’s been in the colony? How would he have known how long to give himself, or where to go, if he took the ferry to the mainland Saturday?”
“Before Halifax, Sir Jonathan spent two years in Barbados,” replied Coldstone, in tones chillingly correct. “Prior to that he was about five years in Spain, upon the King’s business. Yet had he thought it worth his while, he would have learnt the ways of the countryside hereabouts quickly enough. And so might others have learnt where he was likely to go, so that they could close up their shops in good time and wait close to the ferry for his return.”
Abigail set down her coffee-cup with a clink. “To be sure, what does a man need to do to witness that he sought his bed at an honest hour because he felt poorly?”
“Cough now and then.” Coldstone folded his long-fingered hands upon his knee. “Which the guards assure me Mr. Knox has not once done in the thirty-some hours he has been in his cell.”
“I’m pleased to hear he’s feeling so much better,” responded Abigail promptly. Drat the man . . . “So to the regiment of problematical Mainers whose wives and sweethearts Sir Jonathan has spent the past ten days debauching, we might add any farmer or villager between here and Lynn, wives and sweethearts ditto—without coming anywhere near Sir Jonathan’s missing memorandum-book or Harry Knox’s unfortunate decision to get an unobserved night’s sleep.” She stepped down from the tall stool on which she’d sat and readjusted her scarves—the only outer garments of full-out protection against the weather that she’d been even slightly tempted to loosen the entire time she had been in the fort. “If you would be so good as to tell me, Lieutenant Coldstone, what it is that I and my husband and Harry’s friends need to discover in order to convince Colonel Leslie of Harry’s innocence, I would very much appreciate it. Because as it is, we’re put in the position of proving a negative, difficult even without the Colonel’s hopes that Mr. Knox may accuse others of sedition—in which he is not involved—in an effort to save his own skin, or Mr. Fluckner’s objections to seeing his daughter marry a man who is of no social use to him.”
Coldstone, who had risen when she did, stood before her for a moment without replying, without giving the slightest indication that he heard his two office-mates arguing with and harassing Sergeant Muldoon in the corridor, or the sharp clatter of weapons-drill in the parade-ground. Abigail wondered whether Harry could hear these camp-noises in his cell, and how long it would take him to read The Persian Wars, and whether this would distract his mind from the thought of the twenty minutes or so that it took a man to strangle, once he had been hoisted on the gallows.
She looked up at Coldstone’s face, cold as a marble angel’s. The servant of the King, whose job was defined by the crimson uniform he wore: first serve the King, then seek Justice . . .
Provided, as he had said, one could define the word.
What did he hear, or think about, as he lay at night in this dank brick fortress set in the midst of the ocean, waiting for word to come from his master about how to punish rebel colonists for defying the King’s commands?
At length he said, “If you would be so kind, m’am—What you can discover is who else might have seen Sir Jonathan after his debarking from the Hetty on Saturday morning, and who in Boston might also have wished to do him harm. Mr. Knox’s defense is based upon the proof of a negative and I cannot do anything about that, and for that I am sorry. However much I am dissatisfied with the case against Mr. Knox, Colonel Leslie finds little amiss in it. My superior officer, Major Salisbury, has instructed me to draw up an accusation. When the Incitatus arrives here from Jamaica next week, unless some new evidence is found, Mr. Knox will be taken to Halifax and tried before an Admiralty Court for conspiracy and treason.”
Six
John said, “That’s ridiculous!” and slammed his hand down on the top of his desk, making the standish jump. “To convict a man on the perjured evidence of a clerk frightened for his position and the word of rich man who’ll do anything to keep his daughter from wedding a poor one—”
“I suspect Lieutenant Coldstone would remark that you’re making a bit free with the burden of proof as to Mr. Fluckner’s motives—”
“Damn the burden of proof!” John pulled off his wig and hurled it against the opposite wall of his study. “You know, and I know—”
“And the Provost Marshall does not know.”
“Does not wish to know, you mean!” Red-faced with wrath, John looked around him, as if seeking something else small enough to fling that wouldn’t leave the books in the shelf splattered with ink or sand. Abigail fished in her pocket and handed him her pocket memorandum-book. He flung it with a satisfying smack. “Damn the man!”
In the hallway behind her, Abigail heard the faint creak of the kitchen’s door-hinge: Johnny, Nabby, and Charley pressing close to hear their father in his wrath. Young Mr. Thaxter, standing by his own small desk in the corner of the study, looked far less sanguine, despite nearly two years of dealing with his employer’s rages.
“Lieutenant Coldstone says he will try to wangle the appointment as Harry’s defender himself, but he may not succeed.” She crossed the little study, retrieved John’s wig and the faded little Morocco-leather notebook, and placed both on the corner of the high desk at John’s elbow. “If the Tribunal appoints an officer from the garrison at Halifax, he will almost certainly share the prevalent opinion that any Bostonian will lie about the whereabouts of any other Bostonian—”
John swept the wig up and hurled it again, followed at once by the memorandum-book.
“—so whatever evidence we manage to locate about the actual killer had best be of a solid rather than a verbal nature.” Early in their married life John had sometimes been moved to hurl teacups, but Abigail’s practice of gluing them back together and serving him his tea in them had gradually broken him of this practice: in any case the boycott against tea had made the entire point moot.
“Is there any chance you might put off your journey to Haverhill? Even a day—”
John hesitated, looking at the notes on his desk with an uncertainty that told her this wasn’t the first time he’d considered doing exactly that. “I had rather not, Portia,” he said after a time. “The husband of my client there has cast her and her children out of his house, claiming her to be a whore, and the children not his own; if her suit against him fails, she will have nothing to live by. She seems to me an honest woman, and there are rumors that ’tis the husband who wishes to put her away and marry a neighbor lately widowed: an ugly story. If the weather holds cold like this, I should be home on Monday.”