“Oh, I’ll work, m’am,” provided Gomer, hurrying her steps to close the distance between them. “Just please don’t lock me up with the rats. I got so hungry up there in the attic, and cold. I’ll even sew for you, but I’m no good at it.”
Abigail thought about the single slice of thinly buttered bread, the jug of water. Even the harsh laws of Leviticus enjoined the Hebrews to look after their beasts, and to treat the lowest of their households with common humanity. Which obviously—since the frugal Tillets had smuggled her into their attic while the rest of the household was in turmoil on the day of the murder—they had had no intention of doing, even from the first. Free labor, and the cheapest possible food . . .
At least the slave Philomela, thought Abigail, was worth four hundred dollars to somebody.
She stopped, and laid a hand on Lieutenant Coldstone’s arm. “Lieutenant,” she said, “might I impose upon you for one more favor? And this one,” she added, “will advance us on our way, to finding the murderer of Mrs. Pentyre.”
She had the notes from both Philomela and Lucy Fluckner still in her pocket, but the Fluckner butler Mr. Barnaby barely glanced at them. “A shocking thing it was, m’am,” he said. “Well, there’s always young men who’ll try to get up an affaire with a maidservant, especially one as beautiful as Miss Philomela, and some of them do send poems. Terrible lot of tosh, most of them.” He glanced back at Coldstone, who followed them up the stair—a broad and handsome flight, open in the fashion of wealthy English houses where presumably there was more money to be spent on heating. “But this, sir—m’am—there was something about these, after the first two or three, that made my blood run cold. I didn’t know Miss Philomela had kept that last one. Terrible frightened she was over it—and no wonder! The first few weeks after she got it, I thought she was like to faint, going outside the house.”
He opened the door to the maid’s room, which was a narrow chamber on the main bedroom floor, between the overdecorated demipalaces allotted to Mrs. Fluckner and her daughter. Philomela’s room was very like the girl herself, Abigail thought. No frills, no fuss, though she probably could have gleaned any number of gaudy castoffs from either of her mistresses. On a little table beside the bed lay a book of Sir Philip Sidney’s poems.
The more sinister poem in question was, as Philomela had said, under the loose floorboard beside the head of the bed.
Abigail saw immediately that it was written on the same expensive English paper as had been the note that summoned Perdita Pentyre to her death. Her heart beating hard, she unfolded it, carried it to the window where the last of the daylight still lingered over Boston’s peaked roofs. She remembered what the girls had said of its contents, and braced herself for horrors.
But the words of those first lines were blanked from her mind by the handwriting itself.
No. Oh, no.
She felt sick, almost dizzy with the rush of surmise and horror, pieces of some monstrous mosaic falling into place . . .
And worse than that, the vertiginous shock of how close she’d stood to the man.
Dear God in Heaven—!
“Mrs. Adams?” Coldstone was watching her face narrowly. Quickly she turned to the second page, aware that her fingers were shaking. “Do you know the hand?”
“No. It’s—” She shook her head, stammered—groped for some other reason to account for her distress. “It’s just that it’s a little like my father’s, at first glance—that rounding of the letters . . . It shocked me for an instant, that’s all.” Had I babbled, ‘Good Heavens, it looks exactly like the Emperor of China’s,’ it would not be so obvious a lie . . .
“Mrs. Adams.” The officer took the sheets from her hand, and his dark eyes traveled swiftly over the lines. Then he returned his gaze to her, and she looked aside, fighting to keep her thoughts from her face and aware she must be white-lipped and distracted as one who has seen a ghost. “What is it?”
“Naught.” She could barely get the word out.
“Naught,” he repeated, and it was the first time she saw emotion—rage—blaze in his eyes, cold as the northern lights. “Even with what you know. Naught.”
Abigail looked away. “My secrets are not mine to tell.”
“Nor are mine,” said Coldstone quietly. “Yet I have spoken with those who have been magistrates in London for many years, and on one fact they all agree: that these men do not stop their crimes. How many more women are you willing to have die, Mrs. Adams, before you conclude that protection of the innocent is more important to you than shielding politically suspect friends? May I take these?”
“Let me keep two pages.” Her voice sounded stifled in her own ears. “In case one of my politically suspect friends recognizes it.”
Without a word he pocketed the other three sheets, and preceded her down the handsome stairs. Mr. Barnaby glanced at them inquiringly, but neither spoke. At the outer door Coldstone looked up and down the darkening length of Milk Street. At least two dozen of Revere’s North End boys loitered still, hands in pockets, studiously paying not the slightest attention to the two soldiers stationed beside the Fluckner door. “Go on to the wharf,” said Abigail. “You won’t be molested, and there’s enough light left, for you to return to Castle Island. I will circulate these”—she touched her pocket—“and see if the hand is familiar—”
“And if it belongs to one of the Sons of Liberty, will that be the last I hear of it?”
He was so angry she could almost see it, coming off him like frozen smoke. In a voice held steady with an effort, Abigail said, “We aren’t savages, Lieutenant. Even as we are not traitors.”
He faced her in the thin twilight. “You are not a savage, Mrs. Adams,” he replied. “Yet you are devoted to a cause—which you feel to be right—which is being led by men who feel themselves justified in breaking the King’s law. Whether that law is just or unjust is immaterial in the face of the fact that you—and they—believe your cause to be above law. Even as those killers of witches in Salem a generation ago believed theirs to be. Such an attitude, m’am, makes you as dangerous as they.”
He bowed, and left her on the steps. The circle of patriots followed him and his men, like sharks around a ship’s boat, out of sight in the gloom. When they had gone, young Dr. Warren emerged from the shadows of a nearby alley, raffish-looking in a mechanic’s corduroy jacket and rough boots. “May I escort you home, Mrs. Adams?”
Later, Abigail recalled that she’d talked with him of something, but didn’t know what, and she was hard-put not to simply answer his remarks at random. Her mind seemed to return, again and again, to two things:
These men do not stop their crimes.
And the poem about the slaughter of a red-haired whore, written in Orion Hazlitt’s hand.
“Will you come with me to Sam’s?” John picked up his boots, which he’d already pulled off by the fire by the time Abigail handed him the two sheets of fe vered verse. “It’s gone beyond choice, now. You didn’t do anything foolish like try to see Hazlitt, did you?”
“I walked down Hanover Street.” Abigail took off her apron, closed the sewing box that she’d been working on when John had returned home. Upstairs, the children and Pattie slumbered in their beds. “The shop was shuttered, and there was no light in the upstairs windows. I had not the courage to do more.”