A Marked Man Read Online Free Page A

course of the service. “And Papa would flay me if he knew I’d come to you, and throw poor Margaret”—she nodded toward her chaperone—“out in the street for letting me do it, because she’s supposed to keep me out of trouble, but you were so brilliant in helping Philomela . . . Really she was, Margaret. She can help us if anyone can.” She turned back to Abigail. “There’s been a murder.”
    Several things seemed to click into place in Abigail’s mind, filling her with a sense of shock and dismay. “The slave-woman?”
    Great Heavens, what had Harry to do with—?
    Lucy stared at her, taken aback.
    “Your father’s slave-woman. The one who disappeared—”
    “Bathsheba? Has she been found?” Her dark brows puckered in swift consternation. “Why do you say she’s dead?”
    “I’m sorry,” said Abigail quickly. “I thought—” She shook her head, trying to collect her thoughts. “Forgive me. Who is it who was killed?”
    “Sir Jonathan Cottrell. The King’s Special Commissioner—”
    “And your fiancé.” Mrs. Sandhayes, who had been leaning on her canes and gazing around the sanctuary with the bemused expression of an explorer contemplating a grass temple on Otaheite, gave her an arch wink.
    Lucy flushed a dark pink, not with maiden modesty, but with anger. “He was not my fiancé,” she snapped.
    “’ Tis not what your father thought, my dear.”
    “My father could marry him, then.” The girl turned back to Abigail with a little flounce. “Sir Jonathan was sent last year by the King to collect evidence about where the Sons of Liberty—‘Rebels and Traitors,’ he called them, but that’s who he meant—were getting their money from. He’d been staying with Governor Hutchinson all last month, which was where he met Papa, and he was found dead in the alley behind the Governor’s house early this morning: horrible! And they’ve arrested . . .”
    Again she colored, and this time there was no mistaking the blush. She turned her head aside, a startling display of timidity in a girl Abigail knew was ordinarily as straightforward as a runaway goods-wagon.
    “They’ve arrested a—a friend of mine for it,” she finished shyly, in a voice that Abigail had never before heard her use. “And you’ve got to help us, Mrs. Adams. Help me, I mean—Help him . Help Harry.”
    “Harry Knox.”
    Lucy raised her eyes, brimming with the transformation of a bossy girl’s first love. “Harry Knox.”

Three

    S ince even the presence of a maidservant and a chaperone would not have protected the marriageable daughter of the wealthiest merchant in Boston from gossip for long—at least not from the gossip of the wives of other wealthy merchants—to say nothing of consideration for the Fourth Commandment and her family’s dinner, it was agreed that Abigail would present herself at the Fluckner mansion on the following morning to hear all the details. She found John at home, but Sam and Revere both gone. Sam’s wife Bess shared Abigail’s attitude about Sabbath dinner and attendance at both church services on Sundays: it was all very well to pull an ox out of a pit on the Sabbath, as the Lord had said, but one needn’t take the whole day at it. Sam, to do him credit, was not one to put even the Sons of Liberty before God’s Law unless he really had to. And though Paul Revere might have inherited a greater carelessness about Sabbath-keeping with his French blood, Abigail knew him well enough to know that having missed the first service at the New Brick Meeting-House, he would not miss the second.
    “ ’ Tis a bad business, Portia,” said John quietly, when after helping his children disengage themselves from scarves and cloaks, pattens and overshoes, he drew Abigail aside into the corner of the kitchen near the hearth. “The man who was killed—”
    “Was the King’s Commissioner, Sir Jonathan Cottrell.” Had she been a Papist, Abigail reflected, she would have owed her confessor a