The Ninth Daughter (11 page)

“This is ridiculous,” muttered John, face reddening as those who’d arrived after them—town merchants and contractors in victuals, an elegantly clothed Tory judge, and a widow of the town notorious for the gambling-parties held at her house—were admitted to the office almost as soon as they presented their cards to the subaltern who answered their knocks. When that young gentleman finally emerged from the Colonel’s office and said, “Mr. Adams?” Abigail rose as well. “I beg your pardon, m’am.” The young man stepped, if not into her path, at least enough closer to her to make his point. “The Colonel has said, Mr. Adams by himself.”

“Nonsense!” stormed John. “My wife has been kept sitting here, in a cold and drafty hallway, since nine o’clock! I do not propose to leave her alone in the midst of an armed camp, exposed to the comment of every servant and laundress who happens by! You tell your Colonel—”

“I’m quite comfortable, thank you, Mr. Adams.” Abigail laid a quick touch on his elbow. “I have brought a book with me.”

“I will not have you treated—”

Though she was shivering with the cold, she shook her head again, meeting his eyes. “It is of no consequence. We have been delayed long enough already.”

John looked about to say something else, but at that moment Lieutenant Coldstone appeared in the archway from outside, a leather sabertache beneath his arm and his Irish sergeant at his heels. “My apologies for the inconvenience, Mrs. Adams, Mr. Adams. Unfortunately there is no other place to wait. Sergeant Muldoon, would you be so good as to bring Mrs. Adams a cup of tea? Or coffee, if you would prefer, Madame.”

“Coffee,” said Abigail drily, and the Lieutenant bowed, as if the whole of the colony were not aflame on the subject of tea.

“Coffee, then. Mr. Adams?” He held open the door, and closed it behind them.

Three hours. Abigail opened the book she had brought, then let it rest on her lap. The gauzy quality of the noon overcast brought other clouded days to her, in the little kitchen on Brattle Street: one of those wet mornings when she’d patiently attempted to teach Rebecca how to make Indian pudding that did not end as inedible clots. “He sent her away,” Rebecca had said, holding up the note that had just come to the house. “Without a character, Scipio says. Only for having served me.” “Does she have family?” Abigail had asked, and Rebecca had said, “A brother. She fled the place; she wanted something other than to be a farm drudge—”

At that point Johnny, who had just turned three, had staggered purposefully toward the fireplace and the discussion had ended, and Abigail never had learned where Catherine’s brother lived. From time to time over the ensuing years, Rebecca had spoken of receiving letters from her former servant: a farm somewhere, in the harsh backcountry that still crowded close to the cities of the seaside. Charles Malvern had not scrupled to—

Raised voices came dimly through the office door, faded almost at once. Abigail blinked, frowned.
How long do they need, for John to sign a bond?

She waited for a moment when the corridor was empty—servants were coming and going with greater frequency now, bearing dress uniforms to be brushed, trays of tea things or port bottles—then stepped to the door. Putting her ear close to the crack, she heard Coldstone’s chill, measured voice asking something, and John’s, loud with his anger, reply, “. . . liver bay, about ten years old, white stocking on the off hind . . .” Balthazar, in fact: John’s horse. Had John dispatched his clerk, young Thaxter, to return the post-horse he’d borrowed to get back to Boston on? He must have—she hadn’t seen the young man at dinner yesterday afternoon, though he often stayed to eat with the family. She shook her head at herself.
I must have been more tired than I knew . . .

“Purley himself, for one,” John was saying.
They must have asked him, who saw him at Purley’s Inn.
“Mrs. Purley, for another. A couple of the Uxford boys, and Elias Norton from Danvers . . .”

“The same Elias Norton, who has been accused of smuggling? I understand, too, that Mr. Purley’s sympathies are strongly with the so-called patriots—”

“The sympathies of half the men in New England are with the patriots, man! Will you discount a man’s testimony on the grounds of his politics?”

“M’am?”

She turned, sharply, to see young Sergeant Muldoon behind her with a tray of coffee things, and a sort of folding camp table hung over one immense shoulder. Her cheek-bones heated with embarrassment at being caught eavesdropping, but she asked, “Is there another door out of that office?” and reached out to take the tray from his hands.

“That there is, m’am,” he said, gratefully handing it over and unfolding the camp table. “Into the Colonel’s bedroom, it leads, and out into the parade. The cook says, there’s precious little cream this time of year, but I got you some, I have, and a bit of cake.”

Abigail made herself smile, spread her skirts, and settled on the bench again, there being no way that she could think of to check whether a company of armed men waited in the Colonel’s bedroom to drag John away in chains. “Thank you, Sergeant,” she said. “Lieutenant Coldstone didn’t happen to mention whether anything was found in Mrs. Pentyre’s chaise, to hint at whoever might have driven it from the house where Mrs. Pentyre’s body was found, to . . . was it Lee’s shipyard?”

“That it was, m’am!” The young man regarded her with admiration. “Think of you askin’ after that, same as the Lieutenant did, when he looked it over so careful. A chaise is a chaise for my money, and himself that angry that it’d been tipped off the end of the dock there where the water’s deep, not to speak of it spucketin’ rain like Noah’s Flood. Looked it over like somebody’d hid a treasure map under the seats, he did.
And
looked over every inch of the horse they found, like he meant to buy it. He’s a caution, he is, m’am, beggin’ your pardon, m’am.”

“Pardon freely granted.” Abigail smiled, and poured herself out some coffee from the small earthenware pot. “And
did
he find aught?”

“Not on the horse nor the chaise, m’am, given they was out in the rain all the night. But just lookin’ at the poor lady’s shoes, an’ at the hems of her petticoats, if you’ll excuse me mentionin’ such a thing, m’am, and her poor face, he says she wasn’t tidied up and laid on the bed by him what killed her, but by others, hours later, for what purpose God only knows.” He gave her a bow, and then—not to omit any sign of respect—saluted her as well, before excusing himself and hurrying off.

A caution indeed, Abigail reflected, reopening
Pamela
and taking a nibble of the regimental cook’s excellent cake. Wet hems and wet shoes meant she’d arrived in the rain, and the settling of the blood that Dr. Warren had spoken of told its own tale of how long she’d lain on her face before she was put on her back on the bed.
Just because he knows someone tampered with the house doesn’t mean he knows who.

Was that why he suspected John? Because Rebecca would have admitted him to her house without question?

Try as she might to absorb herself into her favorite book—
not
, as Rebecca had described it, “the world’s longest shilly-shally,” but (Abigail had repeatedly pointed out to her) a serious look at how men and the world regarded a woman’s right to choose her own destiny—Abigail found her mind returning again and again to the riddle that lay before her, like a labyrinth plunged in darkness and reeking with the smell of blood.

 

 

 

 

I
t was close to two when John emerged at last from Colonel Leslie’s office—Abigail checked twice more at the door, as the hour had dragged on, to make sure she could still hear his voice—and he was escorted only by the subaltern who had shown him in. She would have given much to have been able to hear what Lieutenant Coldstone and Colonel Leslie had to say to one another in private, but even had John not worn the watchful look of one who isn’t certain he’ll actually be allowed to board the departing boat, she couldn’t think of an unobtrusive way of listening at the door.

“Damn Sam and his myrmidons,” said John softly, as they passed between the red-coated guards at the Castle’s gate and picked their way through the straggle of tents, boxes, and sheep pens toward the wharf. “Too many times they’ve run up against witnesses who’ll swear that one or another of the Sons of Liberty was elsewhere than where they know he was, or smugglers who’ll slip a man across the harbor at dead of night when the gates are closed.”

“That’s what they assume you did?”

He nodded. “Left my horse in one of the smuggler barns on Hog Island and crossed in a rowboat, did the deed, then slipped back—”

“But
why
?
Why
do they believe this of
you
, of all people, and why would you have done such a thing? It was an atrocity, John. Do they honestly think you would be capable of performing those acts—”

“They don’t know that.” John’s voice was grim. “Thanks to Sam, all they saw was her body—slashed, yes, but laid neatly out on a bed, and the blood all mopped away. And we cannot tell them otherwise. You’re frozen,” he added, chaffing her gloved hand as they descended the muddy path to the little wharf where Linus Logan waited for them in the
Katrina
. “You should not have—”

“They gave me very nice coffee,” replied Abigail. “And had I not come, in all this time waiting I’d have gone mad at home, and murdered the children in my rage, and then wouldn’t we both have felt silly when you came back safe after all.”

 

 

 

 

No message had come from Sam, or Revere, or Orion Hazlitt in their absence. But after a dinner of yesterday’s chicken stewed, when Abigail had milked “the girls” (as she called Semiramis and Cleopatra) and was pouring out milk by lantern light in the icy scullery, Pattie came in with a note. “A boy brought it, m’am. Is it about Mrs. Malvern?” Her elfin face puckered anxiously, as she watched Abigail unfold the scrap of kitchen paper and angle it to the light.

Nine

Whatever Charles Malvern might feel—and say—about those would-be imitators of English society who ate their dinners by lamplight, Abigail guessed that with a fashionably minded daughter and son in the house, six thirty was probably the earliest any servant there was going to have a moment’s leisure. Which was, she supposed, to the good. Her conscience nagged her painfully about her own work, neglected or, more reprehensibly, shuffled off onto poor Pattie’s slim shoulders.

Yet the next morning, instead of setting briskly forth to the market the moment Nabby and Johnny led the cows out of the yard toward what little pasturage the Common offered these days, Abigail brought out her writing desk, and began reading through the twoscore letters that Rebecca had sent to her, in the eighteen months between the family’s removal to the Adams farm in Braintree in April of ’71, and their return to Boston nineteen months later, in November of ’72, scanning for names. In hundreds of desultory conversations, Abigail recalled her speaking occasionally of friends, cousins, her brother’s comrades from Baltimore, to any one of whom she would have opened her door on a rainy night. Names Abigail recalled only vaguely, and sought now, in the letters, grimly fighting the temptation to linger on the memories they stirred.

Her anger came back to her, reading of how Charles Malvern had harried her from first one set of chambers and then another; the sadness and pity, at that letter when Rebecca spoke of Orion Hazlitt’s growing love for her; grief at the account of little Nathan Malvern’s death. And like a mirror in her friend’s words, the recollection of her own days on the farm, with John’s two brothers and their wives and children, John’s indomitable little mother and her easygoing second husband . . . No lying jealousies about stepparents there.

It was well and truly eight o’clock before she set out for the market. Coincidentally, just about the time the Tillet cook Queenie—in Abigail’s mind one of the laziest women in New England—generally made her appearance there.

“Wait your turn, you pushy slattern!” the stout little woman shrilled at a young housemaid who was trying to get past her to a golden heap of pears. “The nerve of some people!” she added, loudly, as Abigail came up beside her. “Think they own the market—not that these nasty things have any more juice to them than ninepins, or flavor either. And a penny the slut wants for two of them! Why would anyone want two of the things, or one either—don’t you pay her prices, Mrs. Adams, I refuse to stand by and let a good woman be cheated.” She dragged Abigail away. “What Mrs. T will say sweetening the fruit, with sugar at three shillings for a loaf, and blaming me that there’s nothing fit for the family to eat—”