“Mrs. Hazlitt,” said Damnation gently, “you know that wasn’t really him.”
“It was!” she insisted. “He came to me, blue and glowing. He sat beside my bed and took my hand, and I saw then that a great beam of wood had been driven into his chest! I saw the blood, my child! I saw the bruises on his face, where it had been crushed in—”
“M’am, that isn’t true.” The girl took her mistress’s hand in one hand, and gripped her arm with the other. “You know it isn’t.” She turned to Abigail, added in a whisper, “That didn’t really happen, m’am. It’s just the opium, that makes her see things. It wasn’t a real spirit.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” said Abigail, startled at the girl’s assumption that it could have been and that Abigail would probably believe it.
“You must let me go find him!” pleaded Mrs. Hazlitt, as Damnation steered her firmly toward her chair. “You must let me speak to him, beg his forgiveness before it is too late—”
“Of course, m’am, but first you sit down—”
Without being told, Abigail checked the mantelpiece and the sideboard for the opium bottle, then darted upstairs to the bedroom. As before, the bottle stood on the mantelpiece there; as before, a brisk fire burned in the grate, warming the room; and as before, though it was close to nightfall, nobody had cleaned the room or tidied the bed that day, nor even pushed the trundle bed away out of sight. Lying across the foot of the trundle bed, discarded at waking presumably, was a man’s nightshirt. Yesterday’s stockings, that lay on the floor by the trundle’s foot, were a pair of yellow ones that Abigail recognized as Orion’s.
She returned downstairs, and helped Damnation dose the struggling, weeping woman beside the fire, despite wailed threats that the Lord would smite them both and cast them down with Jezebel from the window to be eaten by dogs, and pleas that she had seen her son begging for her to come to him.
Walking home in the early falling darkness, Abigail tried to put aside the lingering distaste of that frowsy, smelly room. The nightshirt and stockings called up other images, of Mrs. Hazlitt dragging her son’s lips down to hers: my treasure, she had called him, my King . . .
No wonder the poor man threw himself into his work for the Sons of Liberty with such passion. Anything to be doing something other than what his life was with her . . . anything to have even the illusion of real life.
The Lord seeth not as man seeth: for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.
Abigail found herself wondering very much what the Lord saw when He looked on Nehemiah Tillet’s heart.
Twenty-six
Midmorning—the first break she had in transferring garment after waterlogged garment from the lye-tubs in which they’d soaked all night to the cauldrons of boiling rinse-water—Abigail changed her dress, smoothed her hair, and walked with John—who had himself spent the morning with Thaxter trying to catch up on legal papers neglected in favor of leading meetings and writing pamphlets—to Milk Street again. She had hoped that yesterday would have brought a letter from Miss Fluckner to Mr. Barnaby, but though the whiff of smoke still floated from what Abigail guessed to be the kitchen chimney, no window was unshuttered, and no footman opened to John’s repeated pounding at the door.
“I’ll write to Coldstone,” said Abigail, as they walked back home. “Sam can change his precious codes—or explain to Philomela, on Judgment Day, after she is murdered by this monster, why he thought their preservation as they stand was more important than her life.”
She thought John might have said something about how short the time was until the seventeenth—the day by which the Dartmouth’s cargo must be confiscated to pay the harbor dues—but he remained silent.
Shortly after she, Pattie, Nabby, and Johnny commenced the horrendous task of lifting out each dripping, steaming shirt, sheet, chemise, or baby-clout from the slowly cooling rinse-water to wring and hang to dry, Thaxter appeared in the kitchen door with the information that Mr. Malvern was here to see her.
As it had been during Lieutenant Coldstone’s call last Wednesday, the parlor was arctically cold, but as on last Wednesday, Pattie—by some miracle of efficiency—had already that morning swept the grate and laid a fire. Flames crackled cheerily as Abigail entered to receive a bow from her guest. She had been used to thinking of the tough, grim-faced little merchant as old before his time, yet seeing him now she was struck by how facile her earlier judgment had been. A week and a half ago, he had been merely weatherworn and wrinkled. Now he was old. His shoulders bowed, and the lines of his face had not merely deepened but slackened under the burden of dread.
Abigail cried, “Sir!” in consternation, and instead of curtseying, clasped his hands. “You ought not to have come.”
“You think I fear the rabble that have flooded into this town?” He sniffed, and took the seat that Coldstone had, only after Abigail herself sat down. “The lascars in Singapore would eat the lot of them for breakfast, and I managed to deal with them smartly enough. If His Majesty—” He caught himself, took a deep breath, as if forcing down the crimson anger rising to his face. “I’m quite well, Mrs. Adams,” he added, in a quieter voice. He will never be capable of gentleness, she thought. But she had the impression of looking at a granite slab that had been broken, to let the first shoots of green peep through. “And feeling a bit of a poke-nose, for I know had you learned anything—anything at all—you would have writ me, as you said.”
“And so I would,” said Abigail. “In the past week I have run up one blind alley and down another, chasing spec ters—”
Like poor Mrs. Hazlitt, conversing with the glowing blue ghost of her son, conjured by her frenzied need not to let him from her sight? She pushed the thought from her mind, though it made her stammer a little.
“I take it communication with Mrs. Moore yielded nothing?”
Abigail shook her head.
“Might—Forgive a man who’s lived hard, for his suspicions—You do not think Mrs. Malvern might have instructed her to write that she was not there, when in fact she was?”
He brought the words out carefully, not like a story thought-out beforehand but like phrases in a foreign language, recently learned: an effort to break a long-held pattern of rough and hasty speech that touched Abigail strangely. Whether this new learning would hold the first time he lost his temper was another matter—she knew how desperately hard it was, to break a habit even as trivial as biting one’s cuticles—but he was clearly trying. She wondered who he’d asked for pointers. Scipio?
“I think not, sir,” she replied. “I made the journey out to Townsend myself—”
“Good God, woman! In this weather?” His old self slammed out of the shadows of self-imposed restraint. “It’s at the ends of the bloody earth!”
“So I learned.” She hid a smile. “Yet I had to be sure.”
“Of all the damfool harebrained—” He caught himself in hand, and added, “Thank you. I would not for the world have asked it of you. No, no,” he added, as she reached for the handbell—in its proper place, for a marvel, not that Pattie or anyone else was in the kitchen to answer it—“I can see I’ve taken you in the midst of your work, and will not keep you from it. I just—”
He was silent a moment, big hands clenched, staring into the fire. Then his hard gray eyes flicked up to Abigail’s again and he said, “If you—when you . . . Please let her know that I stand ready to protect her, with all that I have, from anything, no questions asked. I am her husband,” he added. “It is my duty—and my desire.”