Outside, it featured weathered clapboards and a beautiful colonial garden. Inside, Brogan found wide-plank flooring and a central chimney. Public notices, printed circulars, and hand-scrawled advertisements papered the front wall. They sat in the dining room beneath the yellow glow of the oil lamps hanging overhead from hand-hewn beams. As Huntley spoke grace over the meal, Brogan couldn’t resist contemplating the crockery bowl set before him. It appeared to contain some sort of hash, browned and crispy around the edges and releasing a tantalizing vapor of sage and onion.
The prayer concluded, he reached for his silverware and forked into its moist center, sampling the fare. Chicken hash. It was hot and satisfying to his taste, with a pleasing sour edge of cranberry.
“Lorena would enjoy this dish,” Huntley said with a thoughtful smile. “My daughter loves a good home-style Yankee casserole. She shares that in common with her mother. There are many ways, in fact, that she reminds me of dear Clara.”
Beside them, a group of travelers bowed their heads in a lively discussion of politics, but to Brogan the voices were nothing more than a collective hum amid the pipe smoke and cigar rings as he sat listening to Huntley reminisce about his late wife.
A shame it was too, to hear of the grief this good fellow bore for a spouse several years deceased. He reminisced of her delicate beauty, her gentle spirit, her unending compassion for others.
“Qualities she passed on to her daughter,” praised Huntley.
Brogan nodded. Aye, Lorena Huntley lived her devotion and commitment to family with the same passion that Brogan yearned to be a part of one.
He felt for the shipbuilder, who was still fairly young to have lost such a wife—the kind of devoted and faithful life companion Brogan could only imagine. Huntley’s was nothing like the relationship Brogan had known with Abigail. Extreme sadness and guilt rose within him that he did not mourn his own wife so.
“I am deeply sorry for your loss, sir. Not only of your wife, but I believe you also lost a brother a few years back.” Brogan tread carefully and in a tone inviting further discussion.
Huntley winced before gazing thoughtfully in the direction of the hearth. To Brogan, the man’s eyes appeared misty, but whether as a result of the smoke-filled room or his memories, it was impossible to tell.
“Died of pneumonia,” the shipbuilder confirmed.
“I read of the tragedy in the Boston papers.”
Huntley gave a grim nod. “God have mercy on his soul. Stephen was richly blessed. If only he’d taken more responsibility with those blessings.”
Brogan stared into his cup of mulled cider, confused as to the shipbuilder’s meaning. “His death was rumored to have been linked with a mysterious house fire in which a Boston woman perished. Were you acquainted with her?”
How well did you know my wife? The question burned on the tip of his tongue. How did you manage to take possession of my son? With bated breath, Brogan anticipated Huntley’s answer.
“I hear she was a social woman, acquainted with a great many people.”
The man’s evasiveness gnawed at Brogan. He’d been at sea, captaining the privateer Black Eagle, when Abigail perished. Upon his return he learned only what the newspapers had revealed and what little else he’d been able to garner through his own inquiries.
Abigail had succumbed in a fire that began quite late in the evening, burning their home—the brick waterfront she’d inherited from the estate of her first husband, wealthy Boston lawyer and merchant, Hezekiah Russell—beyond repair. The papers portrayed her as beautiful and haughty, referring to her as the “widow Russell,” as she had been more widely recognized throughout Boston society due to her first husband’s prominence . . . and as opposed to her second husband’s commonness. She was hailed as a woman of means who had made a surprising marriage to a younger man, a lowly seaman to whom she had borne a son.
It was an insult to Brogan that his name was not mentioned, nor Benjamin’s. No infant’s body was found at the scene, and yet the child was reported to have died in the blaze. No one cared enough to investigate further, and no mention was made of the babe again. Reportedly, no mourners attended his mother’s funeral. Abigail had no other family.
Brogan visited her resting place often once he returned, as though she could speak through the grave and tell him the whereabouts of their son.
He continued to search, knocking on neighborhood doors, though he was not always well received. When necessary, he waited on street corners in order to question certain folk as they were leaving or returning from their homes. He interviewed the seafront community, from merchants, sea captains, and sailors to the seedier characters of Boston Harbor and its taverns. He visited orphanages and churches throughout the area into outlying towns. He chased any lead, any possibility of a clue, yet found nothing that might lead him to Ben’s whereabouts.