Movement in the passway to the street caught her eye. Turning—her thought going at once to Sam and his “boys”—she saw Sergeant Muldoon. He saluted, and she quickly draped the garments over her big wicker clothes-hamper and hurried across to him: “Good Heavens, man, are you mad? I’m astonished you weren’t set upon, on your way here.”
“Well, there was a bit of a botheration.” He craned his head around to look over his own shoulder at splotches of fresh horse dung smeared on his back. “But ’twas just bad words, when all’s said, and none tried to stay me. ’Tis early yet. Though I’ll be hopin’,” he added a little shyly, “that you’ll be so kind as to find a minute, to walk me back to the wharves. I’ve this for you, from Himself.”
He held out a sealed note.
My very dear Mrs. Adams:
When we parted yesterday evening I expressed myself harshly, being very angry. Yet on reflection I see that we are equally accessories after the fact.
If we do not trust one another, at least insofar as this case is concerned, the next victim’s blood will be upon both of our hands. Sooner or later, one of us must surrender the high ground of safety with proof of good intent.
Therefore, as I am detained today upon the island, I enclose the reason that Colonel Leslie is so sure that it was your husband who was responsible for the murder of Mrs. Pentyre. I trust, first, that you will show this to no one—not to your husband, nor to anyone whom you may know or suspect to be associated with the Sons of Liberty—and that you will return it to me.
I hope that this gesture will prompt a reciprocal sharing of at least some of the information which I know that you have been keeping from me, concerning the circumstances of Mrs. Pentyre’s murder. I promise you, that I will keep silent concerning what you tell me, save where it touches that which would immediately endanger the lives of the soldiers under Colonel Leslie’s charge. I know you to be a woman of profound integrity, and loyalty to your husband and to his cause; even as I have my loyalty to my King and to my Regiment.
Your obedient servant,
Lieutenant Jeremy Coldstone
King’s 64th Regiment
She unfolded the enclosed note.
Pentyre—
The hand of Liberty lies heavy upon you, and shall crush your wife and yourself for your Sins against your Country and those who Love her.
Novanglus
For the second time in just over half a day, Abigail was smitten dizzy with the vertiginous sensation of being bombarded with too much light. As if she had opened a door long closed, and before her a vista of doors slammed open in such swift sequence that the sight of what lay beyond one was immediately overwhelmed by what lay beyond the next. Her breath stopped—she had the sensation it was minutes before she was able to draw it again, and she fought to keep her hands from shaking.
Rebecca.
DEAR GOD!!!
She folded up both notes. She was almost surprised, to see her yard with its mazes of clothes-ropes exactly as it had been five minutes before. “Can you read, Sergeant Muldoon?” she inquired in her sweetest voice.
“Oh, not me, m’am. I can put me name good and proper, but more’n that our priest never did manage to teach me.”
“Hmm,” said Abigail. “Well, Lieutenant Coldstone writes here that you are to disregard all former orders to you, and accompany me. You and I are going on a little journey.”
Dearest Friend,
I pray this letter will reach you quickly. Shim Walton is good at finding people in the North End. I have sent another like it to Sam, and a third—suitably excised—to Lt. Coldstone.
The man who wrote a threat of death, under your name, to Mr. and Mrs. Pentyre was the Hand of the Lord Atonement Bargest, for the simple reason (I will confirm this with Abednego Sellars or his wife before I leave for Gilead this morning) that the Gilead congregation has been in a lawsuit with Pentyre over the former Sellars lands in Essex County, lands upon which much of Gilead stands. The suit as I recall is coming up for final judgment at the next Session. To kill Pentyre alone would be insufficient, as Mrs. Pentyre would inherit the lands—and the lawsuit—in the event of her husband’s death. The next heir—Pentyre’s brother—lives, with the remainder of the family, in England.
Therefore, you must undertake at once to protect Richard Pentyre, and to find Orion Hazlitt before he reaches him. He will, I assume, have gone to Castle William.
I am not sure, but I suspect that Hazlitt may have killed someone—probably a young woman—at Gilead years ago, and that Bargest knows it. Certainly he has a hold of some kind over the man, beyond mere superstition. I don’t believe Hazlitt even knows that Bargest wrote the threat, directing suspicion toward the Sons of Liberty (and away from Gilead).
My fear is, that Rebecca, having escaped imprisonment in her room, saw Orion, and was apprehended by him before she could get out of the house. If he did not immediately kill her—and I do not believe he did or would—the only place he could have sent her was to Gilead itself, keeping her and his mother both dosed with laudanum while he dispatched Damnation to the settlement with instructions to Bargest to send (or come) to fetch her from one of the smuggler-barns across the bay from Boston, to which Hazlitt could take her one night. I think she must have been in the bedroom overhead, unconscious, even as I talked to Orion and his mother on Thursday, and that she was in one of the deserted dwellings in Gilead when Thaxter and I passed through there the following Monday night.
For this reason I have commandeered Sergeant Muldoon—who is under the impression that he is obeying his commanding officer’s orders—and am on my way to Gilead even now. I beg of you, send reinforcements after us at once, for should Bargest discover that he has been implicated in this crime, I do not put it past him to incite violence against us, to protect his own position.
Likewise I have warned Thaxter, Gomer, and Pattie to keep the children close to home, and to let no one see them until you have given them word.
I trust that you (and suitable assistance) will catch us up on the road.
Your own,
Portia
They spent the night in Salem. The modern seaport town had had little to do with the witchcraft trials that had spread over Essex County like a poison-rash not quite eighty years before. “They weren’t in this town at all, then?” Sergeant Muldoon sounded disappointed.
Rain rattled the darkening casements of Purley’s Tavern, as Mrs. Purley—who always reminded Abigail of a dried apple-doll—set before them a dish of stew and a fresh-baked loaf of bread. Wind shrieked around the eaves. Abigail gratefully drank the landlady’s excellent cider, feeling that she would never get warm again.
“There may have been one or two here, once the accusations were started,” she said. “When people found they could accuse their personal enemies of sending out their spirits to do evil, when the accused themselves were demonstrably elsewhere, a great many found they knew people who must be witches . . . But the accusations themselves began in Salem Village, about eight miles west of here. They changed the name of that settlement to Danvers.”