The Ninth Daughter (31 page)

Abigail pinched her lips on the words,
And what possible business could it have been of yours
or
your mother’s?
If Pattie had acquired an “admirer” in Boston, she herself would certainly want to know if the man was a thief who only wanted access to the household. She settled for, “Of course. You both acted very properly. Did you keep the poems?”

“At first I did,” said Philomela. “Though they weren’t very good, I didn’t think. The first two were just about how beautiful he thought I was—” Her voice stammered a little over the words. “Then he started writing how I came to him in his dreams at night, and the things I said . . . and things we did.” The room was too dim, and her complexion too dark, to show her blush. “Not the way some gentlemen write, that they dreamed of me lying in their arms and how beautiful I was in the moonlight and all how it would be a good idea if I’d make their dream come true. You know that kind of poem—”

She caught herself a little guiltily, but Abigail smiled, and said, “I have received such, yes. And very tiresome I found them.”

A dimple flicked into place beside the girl’s perfect mouth: vanished in a flexure of uneasy disgust. “This man wrote as if I’d truly come to him, while he was asleep and dreaming. As if that was truly
me
who’d said I loved him, who’d given herself to him, and not . . . not just a phantom out of his own head. And as if
I
—the real me—was held accountable for what his dream-me had said and done. But since I didn’t know even who he was I couldn’t tell him,
Grow up
.
It’s just your dream.
I thought then he might have been a young boy, you know how they get, when they’ve never had a woman . . .”

She caught herself again and glanced at Abigail’s face, as if worried she’d gone too far, but again Abigail nodded. “I know.” She remembered her brother William at fifteen, in poetical ecstasies over one of the local Weymouth belles. Like Romeo on the subject of Rosalind—a state that had ended abruptly when William’s good-for-nothing friends had taken him to one of the Boston brothels.

“And he’d write how he watched me, going about my business in the town. Not like Mr. Petrarch writing about his Laura,
I saw you crossing the bridge today and my heart stood still
. . . Specific things.
The way Mrs. Fluckner handed you that basket of apples at the market . . . How, you look so beautiful in that yellow dress with the blue flowers.
He was watching me, Mrs. Adams. I can’t tell you how that made me feel. And then he wrote that in his room the night before, I’d turned away from his mirror so that he guessed that I was a demon; that I was feeding on his love, and his love would damn him. But, he said, he loved me anyway, though I was the devil’s minion and his soul was in peril because—”

She stammered a little, and turned her eyes aside. Then she finished, “Because he enjoyed it when I raped him.”

Abigail said softly, “Oh.” And felt it to be true, in that instant, that whoever he was, he had indeed killed the others. And the awareness turned her sick with fear.

“After that I watched for him,” Philomela said softly. “I burned that poem, and all the others. You know how it is, when you’re scared? Everything seems . . . distorted. You almost can’t tell what’s real and what you only imagine. Every man on the street could have been him. There was a man I’m pretty certain
was
him—handsome, dark-haired—he’d sometimes be on Milk Street when we’d come out and get into the carriage, and he didn’t seem to have much business there. But of course I only glimpsed him. And I was afraid to turn and look harder, in case it
was
him and that made him think I was in love with him, or whatever it was he thought. About a week after that Mr. Fluckner got an offer to buy me, from a Mr. Merryweather, who’s a dealer in slaves and bloodstock horses and such things. Acting for someone else, our butler said. And I knew it had to be him.”

“When was this? What month?”

“June,” said Philomela. “The middle of June, 1772. About two days after I heard there’d been an offer for me, I heard about there’d been a murder near the docks, a woman—Mrs. Barry—killed and slashed up; I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, I was shocked, of course, but I didn’t think it was the same man. Then not long after that I got a long poem, an awful poem, talking about how sometimes a man has to strike down the thing he loves, to save his soul. Two of the verses talked about killing a red-haired demon with a woman’s face.”

“Do you still have the poem?”

“Not with me,” said Philomela. “I hid it. I didn’t want to look at it, didn’t want to think about it.”

“He also talked about killing her,” said Lucy Fluckner somberly. “In the same poem, about killing her as they made love. But it was all so flowery, if you didn’t know what was going on, you wouldn’t know what was going on . . . if you know what I mean. Not just in the poem, I mean, but the whole situation. And this Mr. Merryweather who was trying to buy Philomela from Papa, they couldn’t come to an agreement about price. Papa’s incredibly stingy. He paid four hundred dollars for Philomela, and he wasn’t going to take a penny less. Mr. Merryweather—and I guess his client—was very persistent for about two months. Then he stopped sending notes.” Lucy shrugged.

“Two months.”

September, 1772. Apple-picking time, when Tommy was born.

“I think his last note came just before Mrs. Fishwire was killed,” said Lucy after a moment. “Philomela and I were just terrified, because I’d already talked to Papa about not selling her and he gave me his lecture about how she wanted to stay with us only because I spoiled her, and all Negroes lie, etc. etc. And Mama gave me
her
lecture about how that wasn’t any of my business anyway, and young ladies shouldn’t concern themselves with men’s business etc. etc.” She reached across the short distance that separated them, and gripped her servant’s hand.

“And after that,” said Philomela quietly, “nothing. This man I’d thought was him . . . I didn’t see him anymore. But for a year and a half now, every time I go outside, it’s terrible. That poem is still under a floorboard in my room, but it’s like a burning coal, that I smell the smoke of, every waking moment.”

“It’s like the Sword of Damocles in the story,” agreed Lucy. “For months—over a year—we’ve been waiting for the thread to break, and the blade to drop. But at the same time, you know how easy it is, to think,
Were we really making that up? Did that
truly
happen
? Or was it like the games you play when you’re little, about being a princess in danger, and all the time you know that nobody
really
gets carried off and held captive in a big house far from anywhere, and has their captor fall madly in love with them. And then Philomela told me about Mrs. Pentyre.”

“From whom did you hear that?”

“The woman who comes to help with the laundry, the next day. I was scared, and when I went to the market Saturday I asked about. And Mrs. Adams, it truly sounded like the same man who’d killed the others. Then a few days later Scipio told me you were asking about it, because of Mrs. Malvern disappearing, and that you’d talked to Mrs. Pentyre’s French maid, and were really looking, the way the constables and the magistrates never did . . . Scipio’s a sort of friend of mine,” she added. “He lived for years in the same part of Virginia I come from—though he was long gone from there before I was ever born. But he knew a lot of the people I grew up with. I didn’t know you by sight, but on the wharf yesterday, Miss Lucy heard the officer introduce you to her father, and knew you would be coming here today.”

“And you thought you would tell me what you know of the matter? Can you remember—”

“It isn’t just that,” Lucy broke in.

After a slight pause—because no well-bred servant would follow into even someone else’s interruption of a white lady—Philomela said, “The day before yesterday, I saw him again. Watching me the way he used to, on the way to the market.”

Twenty-three

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” There was not a shadow of doubt in her voice. “But the problem is, m’am, I can’t
be
sure. When he would watch me, the summer before last, he wore summer things: a blue coat with a good trim cut to it, and stockings and shoes, not boots. Thursday he was muffled up in a greatcoat, and boots, and a scarf, for ’twas bitter cold. But it was the man. I saw his face, and the way he stood and moved. It was the man.”

Abigail was silent for a time. Throughout this recital she’d held her watch cradled in her palm, and the time stood very near four thirty. Light was nearly gone from the sky. Yet if she could not cross back to Boston, then neither could Thaxter, or anyone. With matters as they stood, would John have the good sense to wait until morning? Would he show up, alone and unarmed, in the boat of one of Sam’s smuggler friends, like the hero of a gothic romance to attempt a rescue? Under ordinary circumstances, of course—

She looked back at the two young women, Lucy in her gaudy silk, Philomela who wore her extraordinary beauty like a nimbus of light.
What other victims has this man sought? Is this man still seeking?

She took a deep breath. “What color greatcoat?”

“Gray. A sort of stone gray.”

The same color as John’s. And Orion Hazlitt’s. And Charles Malvern’s. And Paul Revere’s and Nehemiah Tillet’s and Mr. Ballagh on Love Lane and several score more of Abigail’s male acquaintance both in and out of Boston. “Caped?”

Philomela closed her eyes, calling the scene back. “Yes. I think so, yes.”

Voices sounded suddenly loud in the other room, two women bewailing the inconveniences of the island and the savage barbarity of the traitors whose insanity had taken over Boston. One of them expressed a strident hope that Sam would be hanged. Recalling Sam’s outright command to John to keep her from this expedition today—and his probable reaction if John came to him with the news that Abigail had not returned—she felt inclined to agree. “And the scarf?”

Philomela’s forehead puckered, trying to call back a moment that she would rather forget. “Red? Dull red, I think. What we’d dye wool at home, with madder-root.”

Abigail owned three of that color, including the one she had on at the moment. “I must go,” she said, rising. A man’s voice cut through those of the ladies next door, gruff and rumbling. “Else I won’t be able to get home at all. Is there anyone left at your father’s house, Miss Fluckner?” And when she nodded, “You say this poem is under the floorboard in your room?”

“Yes, m’am. ’Tis on the second floor, between Miss Lucy’s room and her mother’s. There’s a loose board beside the head of the bed, near the wall. Mrs. Adams, thank you—”

“Don’t thank me yet. Miss Fluckner, can you send me a note, as soon as may be, authorizing me to whoever is in charge at your father’s house? We live in Queen Street, anyone there will know where. I must—”

A knock on the connecting door: “Lucy, dearest? Are you ready?”

“Drat it—tea with Commander Leslie—” Lucy bounded off the bed, turned her back on Philomela. “Get me unlaced . . .”

“Lucy?” bellowed Mr. Fluckner’s voice.

“I’ll be dressed in a moment, Papa.”

Abigail curtseyed and left through the outer door. Behind her, framed in the lamplight, she saw Philomela rapidly divesting the girl of her brilliant day-gown in a cloud of green and yellow silk.

John Thaxter was pacing the bricks fretfully outside the commander’s office, looking in all directions. When he saw Abigail across the parade he strode toward her, followed by the sturdy, towering figure of Sergeant Muldoon. Rather despairingly, Abigail added Thaxter to the list of men she knew who owned caped gray greatcoats. “M’am, I’ve been to the wharf, the men say—”

“We’re going,” promised Abigail, and obediently turned her steps toward the castle gate. Distantly, the tolling of Boston’s church bells carried over the three miles of tumbled gray harbor, dreary and ominous in the failing light. “Is Lieutenant Coldstone—?”

“He’s with Colonel Leslie, m’am.” Muldoon saluted her respectfully as he spoke. “In a rare taking he is, and the Provost Marshal, too, and trying to get shut of a mountain of business before the Colonel’s to take tea with the Royal Commissioners and the wives of all these rich nobs from Boston, beggin’ your pardon, m’am.” He nodded toward a small group of men crossing the parade, the torchlight borne by the soldier who preceded them glittering on the bullion that decked the Colonel’s dress uniform, gleaming on the marble smoothness of powdered hair. Beside the Colonel, resplendent in a caped greatcoat of some dark hue that could have been liver brown or indigo in the darkness, walked Richard Pentyre, gesturing with his quizzing glass and speaking with what appeared to be a ferocious intensity.

No sign of Coldstone.
Drat it.

“I hope your talk with Mr. Pentyre went as you hoped it would, m’am?”

Abigail shook her head. “It wasn’t a wasted trip, but Mr. Pentyre was hardly forthcoming.”