The Ninth Daughter (20 page)

The resemblance doesn’t end there
, thought Abigail, smiling a little to herself as the men clustered around her, gripped her hand, all talking a mile a minute and all about their own affairs. She could have been Queen Charlotte or Helen of Troy for all they actually saw her, so preoccupied were they about the announcement to go out tomorrow that all the East India Company consignees for the
Dartmouth
’s tea must report to the Liberty Tree—at the head of the Neck—to resign their appointments, and the plan to have riders go out to farther-flung towns. So many hundred pamphlets from Edes, so many from Hazlitt, so many from Thomas over at the
Spy
—meet again tomorrow to coordinate details—John, you’ll get us up a draft of what we’re to say to the harbormaster about refusing to unload the ship . . .

Sam smiling at this man, clapping that one on the shoulder, or gripping that one’s arm. She could almost see him commanding Brother Lament-Sin to put her and Thaxter up for the night (in that atrocious,
freezing
loft with his daughters), or directing Brother Mortify to guide them on their way again.

And Sam would react, thought Abigail uneasily as she bade them good-night, exactly as the Hand of the Lord would react to the smallest suggestion of unbelief, should she, Abigail, say to him:
I think Perdita Pentyre’s killer is a Son of Liberty. I think your organization numbers a madman in its midst
.

 

 

 

J
ohn was gone in the morning. Whether under bond for thirty pounds or three hundred, reflected Abigail wryly, it wouldn’t keep him from committing sedition against the Crown right here in Boston. Her two days of absence had left a staggering backlog of tasks which Pattie had simply not had the time to accomplish—from cleaning lamps and candlesticks to bringing the household account books up to date—so although her bones ached with weariness and rheumatism, Abigail forced herself to rise when John did, milk the cows, and set about making breakfast while Pattie rinsed and scalded the milk-pails. John kissed her when she brought his cider and oatmeal to the kitchen table: “ ’Tis good to have you home.” And then vanished through the back door, to meet with Sam and the others before the main meeting of Friends, Brethren, etc. at nine.

The bells had tolled all night, and were tolling still. A warning of peril, of invasion, their sound would carry across the bay to Charles Town and Winnisimmet, to Braintree and Lynn; inland to Medford and Concord. Summoning Friends, Brethren, and Countrymen into Boston, to make their stand against the King’s assumption that he could arbitrarily clap a tax on whatever goods he thought people couldn’t do without—that he could with a scratch of his pen inform the colonists that they must buy their goods only from his friends.

In Scotland, in times of invasion, the men of the clans would burn a cross on the highest hill, that the men of the clan would know to assemble in arms. Even so, thought Abigail, as she dipped water from the boiler on the hearth into the washbowl for the dishes—even so the sound of the bells went out, to that great clan that Cousin Sam had formed with his skill and his charm and his wily understanding of human nature. And in Medford and Dorchester, Cambridge and Lynn, men were turning the management of their farms and shops over to their wives and mothers, and starting out for Boston.

Is
it someone in the Sons of Liberty?
She probed and tested at the thought, as if trying to untangle a necklace without breaking its delicate links.
Is that why he bound Rebecca, shut her up in her room? Or did he do that because he wanted her alive, wanted her to return to him . . .

Yet she couldn’t imagine Charles Malvern taking a knife to a girl of twenty. Exposing her
affaire
with this second Adonis—if indeed such an
affaire
were not merely Lisette’s rather Gallic interpretation of an innocent admiration—certainly. And possibly Malvern’s vindictiveness would have extended to spying on Rebecca, by which means he’d have learned of the misdeeds of his rival’s flighty bride in the first place. But further than that . . .

Her mind chased itself in a circle, trying to fit what she knew into what she could only surmise.

Richard Pentyre would be hearing the bells, in that handsome house on Prince’s Street. They’d passed it last night, riding back from the ferry, its old walls of timber and stone covered over with handsome brick, its old gabled attics remodeled with a fashionable mansard roof. There’d been a handbill plastered to the door already, demanding that Pentyre report himself to the Liberty Tree and resign his appointment, as the tea consignees in Philadelphia and New York had resigned theirs. None of the Massachusetts consignees had yet done so: Probably, reflected Abigail wryly, their father the Governor wouldn’t let them. If—

“Mama!” Johnny and Nabby flung themselves panting through the back door, red-faced with the cold. “Soldiers are coming!”

Had Abigail been a swearing woman, she would have sworn. She hadn’t yet taken her hands from the washbasin when she heard knocking at the front door, and Pattie’s swift step from the parlor where she’d been cleaning the grate—

Abigail strode into the little hallway in time to see the girl open the door and yes, for that first instant the aperture seemed to be filled with the color of the King’s Men and blood. She was conscious of Nabby and Johnny at her side, half hiding behind her skirts but at the same time determined not to leave her. The thought flashed through her mind,
Johnny’s six! He shouldn’t have to be trying to protect his mother from soldiers.
In the kitchen, Tommy started to wail in fright, and from the street outside came the unmistakable
thunk
of a thrown glob of mud and a child chanting, “Lobsterbacks, lobsterbacks . . .”

Lieutenant Coldstone stepped forward across the threshold, removed his hat, and bowed. “Mrs. Adams? Please forgive this intrusion. May I beg a few minutes of your time? I’ve come to ask your help.”

Fifteen

“In the past eighteen months, two other women have been killed in the same fashion as Mrs. Pentyre.” Lieutenant Coldstone stretched his hands to the small blaze in the parlor hearth, newly kindled and struggling, but his coffee-dark gaze remained on Abigail’s face.

Abigail stared at him, feeling as if she had been struck.
Two—?
And then, sickened that she had not thought earlier to ask,
Why did I think she was the only one
?

She took a deep breath, yet could think of nothing to say.

“One was a whore, the other a hairdresser—common women—”

“And does a woman’s poverty or morals make her more deserving of that
horror
?” She fought the urge to pick up a stick of firewood from the box beside the hearth and smash it over that immaculately powdered wig.

“No, of course not,” he replied calmly. “But it does make it curious that the third victim was a wealthy woman, a married woman, and a woman who under normal circumstances could not be easily got at by a stranger who did not have an introduction to her.”

Abigail opened her mouth again to snap a response, then thought about his words, and closed it. Her mind darted at once to Charles Malvern’s house, and how it was never entirely still: always the distant tread of a servant, the sense of other people at call. When Rebecca had taken up her first set of rooms in that cheap lodging house on the North End, after six months of living with the Adamses on Brattle Street, she had said,
It feels so queer, to come in from the market, and know I’ll be there alone
.

She said, slowly, “And Mrs. Malvern
was
poor, and
she
lived alone . . . as I presume the other two did. And though her landlord had servants and prentice-boys, they were not in the same house with her.
She
fits the pattern, not Mrs. Pentyre.”

“Precisely. And, Mrs. Pentyre deliberately took considerable trouble—ordering her husband’s man to harness a chaise for her, and driving herself through the rain on a pitch-black night—to put herself into a locality of danger. Why?”

Abigail shook her head. The forged note, in the code of the Sons of Liberty, seemed to her mind to be crying out from the drawer in the sideboard where she had put it, like a kitten in a cupboard. “I can’t imagine. Who were the other two?”

“Zulieka Fishwire was found in her own house, on the floor of her parlor, her throat cut and her body mutilated quite as horribly as Mrs. Pentyre’s was. It was as difficult to tell the circumstances of Jenny Barry’s murder as it was Mrs. Pentyre’s because Jenny Barry was a woman of the town. Like the other two, her throat had been cut with what appears, by the wound, to have been a thin, long-bladed knife. I would guess also that like the other two, she was violated as well as slashed, but given her occupation it is less easy to be certain of that.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, as if to another man, something Abigail appreciated but found more disconcerting than she had thought she would. John was one of the few men she knew who did not skirt around the subject of the prostitutes who trolled the wharves and serviced the sailors, but he would never have brought the subject up with a woman he had barely met. “Her body was found among the barrels near Scarlett’s Wharf. It had obviously been taken there, because there was no blood on the scene, even”—the Lieutenant’s cold eye rested disapprovingly upon Abigail—“as there was no blood in the house where Mrs. Pentyre’s body was found.”

Abigail felt a flush mount to her cheeks.
What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.

Not Mrs. Pentyre’s blood—the blood of that passionate, not-always-wise girl who sought to get even with her straying husband and help her country at the same time . . . who had wanted to be the heroine of a novel. But the blood of the next woman to die at the killer’s hand because she, Abigail, would not describe to this man what she had actually seen.

“I am given also to understand,” the Lieutenant went on drily, “that poverty and solitude were not the only things that Mrs. Malvern had in common with the other two. Which makes it interesting to me—”

“If by that you mean that you give credence to that poisonous Queensboro woman’s hints that Mrs. Malvern had lovers, it’s a lie.”

“Is it?” He regarded her without change of expression, but something in his eyes made Abigail realize, with a sudden blast of fury, that Queenie had assumed—because of his legal help, and the fact that for six months Rebecca had lived under his roof—that John was one of them. And that she had told this man so.

“Who did she name? Orion Hazlitt?”

“One of them, yes.”

“Orion Hazlitt has been desperately in love with Rebecca Malvern since they met over printing work he was doing. He’s an intelligent young man but he was not well educated. Mrs. Malvern, who teaches a dame school, helped him with the spelling and arrangement of manuscripts he was given to print. I suppose it’s the fashion to believe calumny rather than innocence, but I have been friends with Mrs. Malvern for six years, and there was no more between them than his longing for someone in his life other than his execrable mother, and Mrs. Malvern’s determination to remain faithful to a husband who treated her like a dog. I take it another of the accused was my husband?”

Coldstone inclined his head.

“As too close a party to the case any testimony of mine would be disbelieved,” said Abigail, “so I will not waste your time with trying to prove a negative. And the third, I suppose, was Mr. Tillet—”

“Who owned the house she lived in, which he could have rented for considerably more than she paid him—”

“Had his wife not had in her so convenient a slave for sewing shirts. Mrs. Queensboro is a woman who lives in furtiveness and spite, Lieutenant. I would weigh very carefully any testimony she gives you.”

“Including the fact that you were at Mrs. Malvern’s door Thursday morning, long before the Watch was called?”

“I had contracted with Mrs. Malvern to do some sewing for me,” replied Abigail steadily. “And, as I said to you that morning, I passed by to ask, was there anything I could purchase for her at the market, as I knew it was difficult for her to do so because of teaching.”

Coldstone regarded her in silence, his head a little on one side. He still bore a bruise on his forehead, where he’d struck his head when his horse had come down with him Tuesday; its edges were starting to turn yellowy green. Pattie knocked at the parlor door, then entered bearing a tray nobly laden with coffeepot, bread and butter, new cream, and a small dish of hunks of brown Jamaican sugar. The girl laid her burden on the small table that she drew up between them, curtseyed, and withdrew again, and it was some moments before Coldstone spoke.

“Mrs. Adams,” he said, “I apologize if I have angered you. I did not mean to do so. I came here seeking your help—”

“To put my husband’s neck in a noose?”