The Ninth Daughter (22 page)

To Abigail, the tight-tangled alleys and narrow, anonymous rights-of-way that made up the North End always smacked more of the village Boston had been a hundred and fifty years ago, than of the thriving colonial city it had become. In fall and spring, the bustle and variety in the crowded streets went to her head like a glass of wine: book-shops, silversmiths’, the closeness of the wharves with their tall ships; the smells of sea salt and pine. In the stench and heat of summer, with pigs and chickens and the occasional milk-goat blocking the narrow alleys, she invariably felt a longing for the green quiet and fresh food of Braintree, and today—with winter closing in, and the bells of the city tolling, and an edge of violence in the air—it seemed to her that here in this cramped islet could be found the concentrated solution of the worst of what Boston was.

Boston was a seaport town: sailors, both coastal and deep-water, were to be seen everywhere. The tenements that crowded these narrow streets housed them in their hundreds and—cheek-by-jowl with them—the chandler ies, slopshops, and harlots that made up their world.

Boston was a wealthy town: Amid the crumbling squalor of dockside poverty, handsome brick mansions reared, where merchant families had held land for generations while the neighborhood decayed around them. Up until eight years ago, Governor Hutchinson had resided here with his family, in a splendid house up the hill from his wharf. Then in ’65—enraged by Britain’s arbitrary decision to tax everything printed, from bills of lading to playing cards—rioters had gutted the building, burned the Governor’s painstakingly collected library of the colony’s oldest documents, and driven his family out into the night. The family lived in Milton now, in the countryside, and the Governor, when in town, had a newer and larger brick mansion on Marlborough Street close to the Commons. The Olivers—relations of the Hutchinsons and the Governor’s appointees to the most lucrative colonial posts—had a house on the North End as well, but as Abigail passed it, she noted that its shutters were up, and the knocker taken from its door.

Boston was a town of passions: for religion, for liberty, for riotous street fighting that broke out every fifth of November—Pope’s Day—in parades, brawls, battles between North-Enders and South-Enders. As she followed Sam’s maid Surry along the cobbled pavement, Abigail could hear voices arguing in taverns, in tenements, in alleyways. In addition to the homes of the rich, the North End held a large concentration of Boston’s poor, and though it outraged Abigail’s Christian soul, she knew that the refuge of the poor (
if they have not the spiritual mettle to either resign their souls or to better their condition
) was drink, of which plenty was available. The liveliness that elsewhere characterized Boston seemed here to be only a step from violence. On this very cold morning most of the local dwellers were on their way to or from the market in North Square, but gangs and groups of countrymen clustered around the inns and taverns, with rifles on their backs, tomahawks at their belts, and little parcels of clean shirts and spare stockings under their arms.

“Do you remember hearing of the two murders, three summers ago?” she asked her companion, and the slave-woman nodded.

“Was there two? I only heard of the one. Kitta—Mrs. Blaylock’s cook”—Mrs. Blaylock was Sam Adams’s neighbor—“says Mrs. Fishwire was cut up something horrible. A judgment on her, Kitta says, though to my mind that don’t show much of the Christian charity she’s always braggin’ on that she has.” Having been the property of Sam Adams for many years, Surry was easy-tempered and virtually unshockable: a pretty mulatto woman of about Abigail’s own age, to whose speech still clung the lazy accent of Virginia.

“Why a judgment? I thought Mrs. Fishwire was a hairdresser.”

“Oh, Lord, nuthin’ like that.” The maidservant shook her head. “For one thing, Zulieka Fishwire was older than Mr. Adams—not that that’s ever stopped a woman with a good man,” she added with a pixie grin. “But Kitta—and some other folks in this town—thinks that because a woman learned herb-doctorin’ from the Indians, and maybe from the country Negroes that come in from Africa, she’s got to be learnin’ it from the Devil.” She sniffed scornfully. “Some of those
white
doctors can’t tell the difference between prickly heat and the smallpox . . . Well, Mrs. F.
did
dress hair, and did it well. But folks knew, if they didn’t want to be bled or purged or dosed with some of those awful things doctors’ll make you swallow, she was the one to come to, to get you well.”

The blocks of the North Street Ward had originally been plotted deep enough to permit gardens behind them, but during the course of time this land had been sold, and divided, and built upon for rentals and barns and work-shops. In much the same way, old Ezra Tillet had built the narrow little house behind his own, that his son Nehemiah had rented to Rebecca Malvern. The result of this rear-yard building was that much of the North End was a maze of yards and cottages, and alleyways that would admit no more than a wheelbarrow. Down one of these, past the Blue Bull tavern and behind Love Lane, Surry led Abigail, to a sort of cobbled courtyard surrounded by three or four ramshackle structures of various sizes, aswarm with grubby children barefoot in the cold.

Washing-lines stretched from house to house, and a bonfire burned in the middle of the court under a black cauldron that looked as if it had begun its career on a whaling vessel. Two children who should have been in school were feeding the fire beneath it. A third, slightly older, stirred an acrid burgoo of shirts and chemises simmering within it. The heavy air smelled of woodsmoke, lye, and privies that needed cleaning.

Abigail walked up to the older woman engaged, with yet another child, in hanging shirts of white ruffled linen over the stretched ropes, and asked, “Begging your pardon, m’am, but does Hattie Kern still live hereabouts?” Rachel Revere, who lived two streets away on North Square, had given her this name along with the information that Mrs. Kern took in washing. Sure enough, the woman said, “That’ll be me, m’am.”

“I’m Mrs. Andrews, from Haverhill.” She held out her hand to the warm, laundry-wet grip of those rough fingers. “And this is Lula.” Surry curtseyed. “I understand a woman named Fishwire used to live near here; Lula was her niece. We only heard this past summer about the poor woman’s death”—in an isolated township like Haverhill, this was not beyond the realm of possibility—“and Lula being her closest relative we had wondered, if any of her things remained?”

“Lord save you,” exclaimed Mrs. Kern, and dried her hands on her apron. “I have some of her things—a good few, anyway—and Georgie Ballagh still has that poor cat of hers. Nannie”—this to one of the children feeding the cauldron fire—“run get Mr. Ballagh, there’s a good girl . . . Not you, Isaac, you stay with the fire. To think of her having a niece after all!”

“What happened?” asked Abigail, though Rachel Revere had last night given her the armature of the story: that sometime during the night of the twelfth of September, 1772, Zulieka Fishwire had been slashed to death in her house on Love Lane—a house now rented to a tailor named Gridley and his family. (“And a very pleasant gentleman he is, when he’s himself,” affirmed Mrs. Kern loyally.)

Paul Revere’s wife had, like Lieutenant Coldstone, described Mrs. Fishwire as a hairdresser, “But that was just so the church elders wouldn’t come pokin’ their long noses into her affairs,” provided Mrs. Kern. “Between black eyes from the Bull”—she nodded in the direction of the public house—“and round bellies from the girls down at the wharves, if you’ll excuse my mentioning what’s in front of everyone’s noses hereabouts, and children hereabouts comin’ down with fever and what-have-you every summer, not to speak of breakin’ their arms like my Timmy did climbin’ on the back of the butcher’s cart like a young id jit . . . Well, Mrs. F. barely had time to fix her
own
hair, poor lady.”

“It’s why nobody thought a thing of it, that strangers were in and out of her house all the day and of an evening,” confirmed Georgie Ballagh, a bent little man who’d lost a leg and a hand fighting the French at Louisburg, over a decade ago. “Mysel’, I don’t hold with a woman gettin’ shut of a child she’s carryin’, but what’s the odds, if the poor mite’ll be born to a mother who’s workin’ the streets for her livin’? Sailors’d come in with their doxies, or by theirselves to be rid of the pox—beggin’ your pardon for mentionin’ it, m’am—at all hours of the day and night.”

He frowned, and ruffled at his thin, colorless hair with the iron hook that had replaced his left hand; Abigail told herself firmly that she must not speculate how many scars he had on his scalp from this habit. “We think a sight more of it now, I’ll tell ye. There’s not a man or a woman on this yard, that don’t prick up their ears when they see a stranger come ’round. But all that’s after closin’ the barn door when the horse is already gone.”

“Did anyone not see who was the last person to visit her house that evening?” Abigail made herself look shocked, and Mrs. Kern, Mr. Ballagh, and three other neighbors poured out a confused tale: it was a lady, at about the time Mrs. Kern was setting out to find where Nannie had got to—no, no, it was a man in a green coat (only Lettie Grace said it was gray) who’d come in a chaise, she thought—No, that chaise belonged to that French feller stopping at the Bull. Mrs. Russell said it was a Negro, but then Mrs. Russell had no use for Negroes on the whole—

As Abigail had coached her, Surry, upon being shown the few effects that Mrs. Kern (and several other neighbors) had taken from the house once the constables of the Watch had been there, asked, “Did no one find among her things a coral necklace? There was a gold bead on it. It was my mother’s, that she’d brought from Africa when they came over,” which gave Abigail the chance to describe both Rebecca Malvern and Perdita Pentyre, as the possible thieves.

It was a bow drawn at a venture, and if either of those women had visited the tiny shop that Zulieka Fishwire had kept on the ground floor of the little house, nobody had particularly noticed them. Given the proximity of the Bull, and the wide variety of Mrs. Fishwire’s clientele, this was scarcely surprising. Mrs. Gridley, whose husband now rented the shop, added that it had costed the landlord six months’ rent, that killing had, as no one would rent the place, and she and her man wouldn’t have, neither, except the asking price came down so cheap, and then they’d got Father Scully that looked after the Irish in His Majesty’s Forces to come over from Castle Island and say prayers, and Mrs. Gridley
still
wouldn’t go into that room after dark, not for ready money.

“Slack your fire, lass,” said Mr. Gridley easily, from where he sat beside the front window stitching a waistcoat of yellow silk. “There’s no such a thing as ghosts.” He nodded a genial greeting to Abigail and the rest of the procession that followed her in, agog to display their knowledge of the old crime.

The floor was sanded, after the old country habit, and the ceiling low. The building itself was even more rickety than Rebecca Malvern’s dwelling, so that the dashing footsteps of several little Gridleys (there were at least four of them that Abigail could see, and Mrs. Gridley didn’t herself look old enough to be out without her own mother) almost vibrated the house. Nails and hooks had been driven into the walls of the small front room: “She had strings back and forth between ’em, with her herbs dryin’,” provided Mrs. Kern. When Abigail looked up at the little cluster of hooks in the low ceiling, the washerwoman added, “She’d hang skins up there. Snakeskins, enough to make a Christian’s flesh creep. Mornin’s, she’d go out to the Commons and catch ’em by the Mill-Pond, or pay the boys hereabouts. Lizards, too. She’d have ’em up there to keep the cats from ’em.”

“Had she many?”

“Three,” said George Ballagh. “My lad Pirate was one of ’em—” He looked out the open door of the little house, and pointed to a thin, rather delicate-looking black cat sitting on an upper windowsill of a tenement opposite, washing itself with the stump of a missing forepaw. “He a’n’t crossed this threshold since that day, an’ I can’t say as I blame him.”

“Because he still smells the blood, do you think?” Abigail knew plenty of people who’d disagree with the enlightened Mr. Gridley and attribute such reaction in an animal to ghosts.

The little ex-soldier’s face hardened with hate. “Blood my arse. The man who did it killed the other two, and I found my poor lad hid behind the cupboard with his paw all but sliced off, and cuts on his back where the man’d gone after him as he ran about. There was blood on the step”—he nodded toward the scuffed oak threshold, the shallow brick step outside—“where they three would sit after dark, waitin’ for the Fishwire to let ’em in for their dinners, an’ the two of ’em gutted like fish here in this room, an’ the poor old Fishwire herself in the doorway there, that goes to the back-kitchen. I was one of them as helped clear the dead from Fort William Henry, after the Abenaki had massacred the settlers there.” He shook his head. “This was near as bad.”

“That Father Scully,” put in Mrs. Gridley insistently, “he blessed both this room and the kitchen, and the doorway between ’em. There’s nought of evil, that remains here of the deed.”

“No,” said Abigail softly. “Of course not.” While Mrs. Gridley, Mrs. Kern, and others explained to Mr. Gridley every detail of Abigail’s story about being the mistress of Mrs. Fishwire’s niece, she walked around the little room, set up now as a tailor’s shop, with boxes to hold the fabric for various jobs and a little rack of spools of thread of various colors. The resemblance between this place and Rebecca’s house lifted the hair on her nape. And yet, she told herself, there was little variation possible in these ramshackle dwellings. It was such a place as any woman obliged to make her own living in the world would take, if she could: a small house on one of Boston’s many inner courts, that would be black as pitch once the sun was down, save for the dull gold chinks of closed shutters . . .

“Were the shutters closed?” she asked. “The night of the murder?”