A Marked Man Read Online Free Page B

few Paternosters for the smug relish she felt at the look on John’s face. She supposed she could only throw herself on the mercy of the Lord, if sin there was in her enjoyment of her husband’s realization that he wasn’t the only member of the Adams family who could pull oxen out of that particular pit. “Which would account for the Provost Marshal’s interest in the matter. Thomas Fluckner’s daughter sought me out to ask my help with finding the killer. She and her chaperone were apparently at a ball at the Governor’s last night when the man was killed—”
    “Did Miss Fluckner mention that it was her engagement to Cottrell, which was to have been announced at the ball?”
    Abigail raised her brows. No wonder Mrs. Sandhayes had looked coy. “I should dearly like to have been there to see them try it. The girl appears to have an understanding with Harry Knox.”
    “Ah,” said John. He helped her off with her cloak and spread its heavy folds over one of the wooden settles that flanked the kitchen fire. “Well, that explains a great deal.” On the opposite settle, Nabby and Johnny had already spread their cloaks, and the thick wool steamed gently in the heat. The advancing morning had not lessened in the slightest degree the previous night’s cold; as Abigail dumped the fire-box’s coals back onto the hearth and set the box ready for that afternoon’s ration after dinner, she shivered at the thought of another three hours in the freezing sanctuary. Rail thin and unhealthy as a girl, Abigail had never, in her thirty years of New England winters and long sermons, grown used to the discipline of attending to the Lord’s Word in the bitter season.
    Charley and Tommy, who had spent the morning in their usual Sabbath pastime of listening to Pattie read to them from the Bible while they fidgeted, scurried at the heels of their older brother and sister to set the table: anything being preferable to “playing quietly” and refraining from the “profane” toys of the rest of the week. John followed Abigail into the pantry to help her bring in the cold roast pork cooked yesterday, mush, sweet potatoes and molasses, and the minute quantity of milk that Semiramis and Cleopatra had only just begun to provide again as they freshened after the winter’s drought. “They’ll have taken Harry out to Castle Island, won’t they?” she added quietly, and John nodded.
    For a moment they regarded one another in apprehensive silence.
    After the Governor’s request for troops to “keep order” some three years ago had resulted in those troops opening fire into a crowd of civilians, it had been agreed upon that, though Boston would remain garrisoned by a regiment of the King’s forces, it would probably be better if those forces were not brought into daily contact with mobs stirred up by the Sons of Liberty. As a compromise, the Sixty-Fourth Regiment now occupied Castle Island, a brick fortress in the bay that had been built during the most recent French War. Since the dumping of the tea into the harbor in December, contact between the Bostonians and the much-outnumbered redcoats had been very limited indeed.
    But Abigail—and every man, woman, and child over the age of five in Boston—was aware that Colonel Leslie was only biding his time. A man taken up for the murder of the King’s Commissioner would not only be imprisoned on the island: there was every likelihood he would not be tried in Boston at all. Like a smuggler, he would be taken before an Admiralty Court of three Crown judges and no jury at the British naval base in Halifax, three hundred miles from the sort of inflammatory pamphlets that Harry had spent most of the night printing up.
    And despite John’s having defended the troopers who fired into the mob at the so-called Boston Massacre back in ’70, with his involvement in the Sons of Liberty an open secret, there was a very good chance that if he went out to the island to speak with Harry Knox, he