The Ninth Daughter (16 page)

“How old was she?”

“Seventeen, Madame, when she married M’sieu Pentyre. She was twenty when she died.”

Abigail drew in a breath, and let it out, thinking about that very young girl. Had it been her husband taking a mistress, that had determined her on revenge? Yesterday morning, rereading Rebecca’s letters, she had found several accounts of trips to Castle Island, in quest of pamphlet-worthy gossip at the camp. Perdita Pentyre would have seen in her first a kindred spirit, then a link with the Sons of Liberty themselves, the organization whose writings she read with such eagerness.
M’sieu would laugh, and kiss her, and she would be wild with indignation, and storm away out of the house . . .

She could almost hear her daughter Nabby shouting at her one day in fury,
I’ll show you—!

She was from New York, Abigail recalled; without friends or close connections here to distract her from her adventure. And Colonel Leslie, as she had glimpsed him yesterday, was a well-enough-looking man, and younger than one might expect.

As if she discerned the sadness in Abigail’s face, Mademoiselle Droux said, “
Eh bien
, Madame, it is not as if the Colonel was her only lover.”

Abigail snapped sharply from her reverie. “Was he not?” and at the same moment a flash of disgust went through her.
As if her sort stops at one
, Queenie had sniffed, and standing there in the market yesterday, Abigail had been ready to snatch the cook’s cap off, and pull her hair.
The one she let in through her parlor window . . . This Mrs. Pentyre, if she . . . had someone else she wanted to meet . . .

So it was only a sordid assignation after all.

Oh, Rebecca, no. How
could
you?

Perdita Pentyre may not have had any connection with the Sons of Liberty at all.

Rebecca had only used their code, as the most convenient one to hand, to help another woman as unhappily wed as she herself had been. No wonder Sam had known nothing about her.

Only it wasn’t Rebecca, who had written that note.

Abigail turned the matter over in her mind while Mademoiselle Droux went on. “Mrs. Pentyre, she knew it is bad
ton
, to have two lovers at a time; it smacks of excess. She never spoke of him to me. But,
mercredi soir
was not the first time that she would have Gerald put the chaise to for her—and pay him well, to keep his mouth shut.” Her lips pinched a little:
disapproval, or merely the ordering of her thoughts
? “I have seen him, this young gentleman,
beau comme Adonais
, watching her so jealously. And when all is said, the Colonel
is
five-and-thirty. To a girl of twenty . . .” She shrugged.

The rain puddle by the window; would opening the shutters account for that amount of water on her skirt? She’d known the Tillets would be away. And yet—Abigail frowned. Rebecca knew that Queenie spied and told tales. With Mr. Tillet loitering in her house whenever he had the chance, and Mrs. Tillet seething with jealousy and annoyance over how many shirts she thought Rebecca should be sewing for her gratis,
would
Rebecca have risked using her house for so small a purpose?

Particularly when there were any number of women on the North End who did
not
have problems with their land-ladies, equally willing to accommodate would-be multiple adulteresses.

Something did not fit. “Do you have any idea who this young Adonis is?”

Lisette shook her head. “She would have notes from him, I think, from a woman she always met by chance when she went out walking. A little curly-haired woman, dark, with a snub nose—”

“Rebecca,” said Abigail.

“I do not know her name, Madame. The notes were always of commonplaces—trees, or birds, or flowers. But for two women who only met in the streets, I thought they corresponded a great deal about trees, or birds, or flowers. I think it was a cipher,
en effet
—”

“She showed you these notes?”

“Madame.” Mademoiselle Droux gave her another look of pitying patience. “M’sieu Pentyre paid me two dollars each month, to tell him all the correspondence that came to my lady. It is done in all households, Madame,” she added, a note of concern in her voice at Abigail’s startled reaction, as if reassuring a simpleton that the booming kettledrums in a military parade were not in fact real thunder. “A man is a fool, who does not pay his wife’s maidservant—and a woman a fool, who does not pay them even more. One must build one’s nest against the storm, particularly if one is thirty-seven years old, and looks as I do.”

I want you to remember from now on that you are working for me
, Charles Malvern had said to Oonaugh.

The sinister Mr. B of
Pamela
was not so unreal as Rebecca had thought.

“I know everything that my lady received, and tucked away in the hiding places that she thought were so clever, behind the pictures and beneath the mattress of her bed. Thus I know that no one sent my lady these letters of threat that our maiden-faced Provost kept pressing me to say that she had. And so I told him. Was this woman then she in whose house my lady was killed? This Mrs. Malvern, whose name the Provost kept demanding did I know?”

“That is she,” said Abigail slowly. “What did Mr. Pentyre have to say of this other man? A Regimental Colonel is one thing—and useful to a merchant, be he never so wealthy. Was he angry over this good-looking stranger?”

“Now you ask me to speculate on the contents of a man’s heart, Madame. He laughed and joked his wife about her lovers, yet if any man crossed him in a business way—even a farmer who cheated him a little on the cost of oats for his horses—he make sure that that man became truly sorry that he had done so. He would have his agents find out, had this man ever broken a law? And
voilà
, the sheriffs would be at that man’s door. Or, a rumor would start in the taverns that the man was, what do you call?—was a Tory, and suddenly these Sons of Liberty would break the windows of that man’s shop the next time they rioted. Or the man’s horses would be hamstrung one night, and blame would fall on these same
Fils du Liberté
. Would such a man truly shrug his shoulders, if his wife lay with another man?” She spread her hands. “That I do not know.”

“And where was Mr. Pentyre, on Wednesday night?”

Something—a little glint like a malicious star—twinkled in the lizard black eyes. “He was not at home, Madame. He told the imbecile officer that he was playing cards with the sons of the Governor, but myself, I believe he was at the house of his mistress. She is a lady of the West Indies, named Belle-Isle; she has a little house on Hull Street, near to the
cimitiere
. Would Madame wish me to ask her maid, if indeed M’sieu Pentyre paid such a call that night?”

Quite casually, she extended a hand as she spoke. It was only a momentary gesture, as if accepting a coin. Four generations of Yankee ancestors cried out in Abigail’s heart at such venality, particularly since there was nothing to assure her that she would be getting the truth for her money. But she replied, “If you would, Mademoiselle, I thank you. I shall—
er
—make arrangements with Mr. Malvern.”

The maid smiled, and nodded appreciation of her tact. “Merci, Madame.”

“Was there anyone else? Anyone who might have wished your young lady ill? Either here, or back in New York?”

“All young ladies have their mortal foes, Madame.
Oh, such a one has stolen my hairdresser away from me, I shall claw out her eyes with my fingernails, so! Ah, such another has got herself sat next to that most divine preacher at tea, I will strangle her in her own hair-ribbons!
Does one pay heed to such trivialities?”

“One must, in the circumstances.”

“One must, if my lady were found with her eyes scratched out, or strangled in her hair-ribbons,” said the older woman somberly. “I saw her body, Madame. I took the clothes off her, and washed her, and dressed her in her prettiest night-dress, that her husband gave her when they were wed, and Madame, I would not admit M’sieu Pentyre into the room until I was done. Even then I kept a cloth over my young lady’s face. What was done to her was done by the Devil himself.”

Abigail whispered, “Amen,” and Mademoiselle Droux crossed herself. “And was she ever afraid of what she could not define? Afraid without reason, of a shadow, or a pas serby?”

“
En effet
, Madame, my lady was twenty years old, and the young do not frighten easily. If she had such fears, she did not speak of them to me. I did not make of myself a confidante, as so many maids do, except at the very beginning, when she was lonely and her empty-headed mother and sisters in New York did not write to her, if they
could
write, which I doubt. But I would sooner be a good maid than a good friend. Unless the friendship is extraordinary, it is too easy for confidence to turn into anger, and then one is on the street again, with nowhere to go.”

Abigail thought about Catherine Moore, turned out of her job and obliged to return to the farm of her brother, near Townsend (
wherever
that
was
) somewhere in the wooded wilds of Essex County.

In the high kitchen windows the light was fading. This woman would have her duties, back at the great brick Pentyre mansion on Prince’s Street. “These notes that Mrs. Pentyre received from the woman in the street. Did she keep them?”

“She locked them away, yes, Madame. Indeed, she took greater care of them, than commonplaces about trees and birds and flowers warranted.” She shrugged. “I copied them for M’sieu Pentyre, and the originals, our pretty Provost took away with him. What he shall make of them, I do not know.”

“Mademoiselle Droux,” she said, “you have been very kind, and your observations extremely helpful.”

“When one is forbidden by one’s employment to marry,” remarked the maid, rising and taking Abigail’s proffered hand, “and obliged in it to occupy oneself wholly with the life and concerns of another—and that other, often a person who considers herself the most important object in Creation—one must take amusement in observation, or perish. I hope that I have helped you, Madame. My lady was young and foolish, and a little spoilt as girls are who have never been obliged to work for their livings. But she had no malice in her, which cannot be said of many ladies whom I have served. She did not deserve her fate—Jezebel herself would not deserve such an end. The heathen Greeks had goddesses armed with spears, who hunted down men who did such things to women, and gave them their deserving. I wish you good hunting, Madame.”

She made her curtsey again, and signed to Scipio at his little table in the corner, to summon one of the servants to escort her home.

Twelve

“Could you not send a letter?” asked John, following Abigail into the kitchen in the predawn gloom the following morning, where her small portmanteau, cloak, and scarves were heaped, ready to be strapped onto Balthazar’s saddle. Young Mr. Thaxter—a stout and good-natured youth related to Abigail through the Quincys—was saddling up in the yard. She felt guilty about not only deserting her husband but taking his horse as well. Still, under the terms of his bond to the Provost Marshal, John wouldn’t be going anywhere he couldn’t walk to in the next several days. “ ’Tis a very long way. Thaxter could take it, as easily as escort yourself.”

“Indeed, he could,” agreed Abigail equably. She walked to the sideboard where John’s leather portfolio lay, along with several letters to clients in Roxbury and Cambridge explaining why it would be impossible for him to attend on them until next week or the week after. “Could not Thaxter also take these depositions for you, instead of bearing Mr. Sweet and Mr. Duggan excuses for postponement?”

John slewed around, blue eyes almost bulging. “Thaxter’s a boy! He wouldn’t know—” He broke off, realizing that Abigail knew perfectly well why a youthful clerk, be he ever so honest, could not be trusted with the task.

“Wouldn’t know what questions to ask?”

John sniffed, and picked up her cloak. “Townsend’s barely a handful of houses at the end of a farm-track,” he said as he laid it around her shoulders. “I doubt they have such a thing as an inn. I don’t like to think of you hunting for shelter there, or in the woods between it and Wenham, if it should come on to snow.”

“And I don’t like to think of the man who killed Perdita Pentyre coming to the same conclusion that I have, that Rebecca might have taken shelter with her maid.”

 

 

 

 

Though it was Abigail’s lifelong contention that in America any woman could travel alone through the countryside without fear of robbery or assault—a situation unthinkable in the Home Country—during the final week of November such a solitary excursion was inadvisable for other reasons. The harsh northeast winds and threat of snow that had made John insist that she take the escort of his clerk likewise precluded shortening the trip to the settlement of Townsend by taking one of her uncle Isaac’s little coastwise trading vessels as far as Salem. Moreover, Thaxter’s mother had kin in western Essex County, and had provided him with clear instructions for getting to Townsend, whence they could inquire for Kemiah Moore’s farm.