The Ninth Daughter (32 page)

“Well, you can scarce blame him, can you?” remarked Thaxter, as the freezing draft dragged at Abigail’s cloak and they entered the lamplit tunnel of the gate. “Between the lawsuit over the Sellars land that’s to be decided next month, and being served notice by the Sons of Liberty to—”

“What lawsuit?”

“Up in Essex County, m’am. If all this isn’t solved, the thing looks to be dragging on into another session. It’s been up in the courts, or some other nuisance suit that he’s brought in aid of it, every time Mr. Adams and I have had a case on the docket there.”

“Not—” She glanced at Muldoon, stopped herself from saying,
Abednego Sellars
, and to turn the subject said instead, “Not likely to be settled soon, if trouble comes of this tea business. I know he had notice to report to the Liberty Tree and resign his position, but I’d scarcely consider that grounds for having his visitors searched before they’re permitted to see him.”

“Damn it!” They emerged from the gate, into the mucky chaos of the camp around the walls. With a hasty, “Excuse me, m’am!” Thaxter dashed ahead, to intercept two sailors in striped jerseys and tarred pigtails, making their way up the torchlit path. Presumably, guessed Abigail, with deep forboding, the men who were to take her back to Boston. Their obvious reluctance to have anything further to do with the project was understandable: Darkness was closing in, and beyond the range of each smoky little campfire among the close-crowded jumble of tents and wash-lines, virtually nothing could be seen but a sense of movement in the shadows, and the occasional flash of an animal eye. Around Thaxter and the sailors, more civilians were coming up the path from the wharf: not rich merchants, but ordinary citizens of the town. Angry and harried-looking, they bore makeshift bundles and glanced right and left at the chaos with the expression of people who have been cheated of their rights. A small child was crying.

We have all been cheated of our rights
, thought Abigail, pitying them yet knowing there was no good answer to their distress.
We
will
all be cheated of our rights, unless we take a stand against the Crown while yet we have a little freedom to do so.

Beside her, Muldoon said, “T’cha! Searchin’—that’s goin’ a bit far, beggin’ your pardon, m’am, note or no note.”

“Note?” Abigail turned her head sharply, her mind still running on poems stuffed through shutters, hidden under floorboards. “What note?”

“The note Mr. Pentyre had, m’am. About how the Sons of Liberty were going to kill him and his wife both.”

She stared at him, aghast, and Thaxter came striding back up the path, coat flapping. “They say they’ll do it, Mrs. Adams, but you must come
now
.”

“Where did they get it? Who sent it?” She took Thaxter’s arm, her pattens slipping in the mud as they descended another two yards of path, turned a corner around a makeshift tavern, found themselves suddenly at the dock itself.

Muldoon shook his head. “That I don’t know, m’am, I’m sorry.”

“Does Coldstone have it in his possession?”

“Mrs. Adams, you
must
come—”

“I don’t know, m’am. I’ll ask him—”

She allowed herself to be helped into the boat, what was called in New England a whaleboat: like a large rowboat with a sail. Scarcely what one wanted to be on the water in, on an overcast winter evening with wind howling down the bay straight from the North Pole . . .

“Who signed the note?” she asked, standing up precariously as the boat moved from the dock. “Whose name was on it?”

Muldoon looked puzzled, fishing in his memory. “Something Latin,” he said. “No-vangelus?”

Novanglus.
New Englander.

John’s pseudonym.

 

 

 

 

A
nd John, of course, was away at a meeting when Thaxter finally walked her up from Rowe’s Wharf to Queen Street again. “Mrs. Adams, you must be froze!” Pattie almost dragged her and Thaxter indoors. The warmth of the kitchen—redolent of soap and wet bricks, for Pattie had Johnny and Charley in the tub before the fire and Nabby was drying her long blonde hair—wrapped her like a shadowy amber blanket. Woozy as she was with residual sea-sickness from the crossing, Abigail was suddenly, crashingly conscious that she had consumed nothing since the bread-and-butter nuncheon just after two.

On that thought came another, of the promise she’d made poor Orion. It was nearly full-dark—the sailors had grumbled about having to spend the night with the little Battery garrison, instead of rowing back to the safety of Castle Island—and Abigail was almost certain that for the pious Hazlitt household, the Sabbath had well and truly begun. Still, she reflected, she could but try.

And she knew she’d better try now, because if she so much as sat down and took off her pattens, she knew she wouldn’t want to stand up again.

“Hercules—” She put her hand on Thaxter’s arm. “Could I trouble you for one more Labor before you turn in for the night?”

 

 

 

 

A
bigail suspected that this particular Labor would be in vain, and so it proved. The little house on Hanover Street was closed up tight, the feeblest glimmer of candlelight leaking through the cracks in the rear shutters visible only by the comparative blackness of the yard when she and Thaxter groped their way to the back door. No one answered her knock, though she thought she heard the droning voice within pause in its reading of Scripture.

When it resumed, she sighed. “No sense adding to the poor man’s trouble by leaving bait out for rats.” She settled the basket more firmly on her arm. “But, I couldn’t sleep tonight, without having tried.”

Wind screamed along Hanover Street as they made their way back, cutting through Abigail’s cloak and jacket as if she wore gauze and lace. This corner of Boston, along the footslopes of Beacon Hill, was but thinly built-upon yet, and the neighborhood along Hanover Street lacked the crowded liveliness of the North End. With all shutters closed, and the moon hidden in cloud-wrack, the darkness was abyssal, swallowing the wan flicker of Thaxter’s lantern and causing Abigail to wonder what people did, who were abroad in such darkness who didn’t know the way.
Even thieves
, she reflected,
would have a hard time
—

She stopped, and turned to look back.

“What is it, m’am?”

What had it been?
She stood for a moment, wondering if she should say anything . . . “I thought I saw a light behind us,” she said.

“There’s naught now.” Thaxter raised his lantern—not that the single candle inside could have put out enough light to show up a regiment of dragoons at ten feet. The two of them might have been sewn up in a sack, for all either could see.

With the wind, the whole of the night seemed to be in motion: creakings from shop-signs, the constant whispered rattle of shutters in the darkness.

“Could have been a cat,” the young man opined.

It could have.

“Or there’s no reason that we’re the only ones abroad tonight.”

None.

It was only a few hundred feet, to the narrow passway that led back into the Adams yard and the warmth of the kitchen door. Abigail looked back over her shoulder half a dozen times, but never saw a thing in the darkness.

 

 

 

 

When John came home and heard what Sergeant Muldoon had said about the threat made in the name of Novanglus, his face took on that congealed, heavy look of rage that Abigail knew so well—then he shook his head, and let it go. “I must say I’m a little insulted, that the British believe I’d be such a booby as to announce murderous intentions under the name that pretty much everyone in New England knows is mine.” He pulled off his wig, folded it carefully, and laid it on the corner of the table, then vigorously scratched his scalp. A small pot of cider—and two larger ones of hot water—steamed gently over the fire, and Abigail went to fetch cold chicken and a couple of slices of corn-pudding for him from the crocks where tomorrow’s cold Sabbath dinner waited, cooked and ready.

Of her account of Richard Pentyre’s reaction to being asked about his movements on the night of the twenty-third, he said, “In truth it’s no more than I expected. Even if he didn’t murder his wife, he might have been up to a dozen things he’d rather the Provost Marshal didn’t know about. The fact that he’s a friend of the Crown and a consignee for the East India Company’s tea doesn’t mean he isn’t elbow-deep in smuggling cognac, silk, and paint-pigment from the French.”

“Is that something Sam could find out about?”

“I suppose.” John poured molasses over the corn-pudding. “If you feel like explaining to him that you’re still investigating this murder.”

“I do,” said Abigail grimly. “While on the island I spoke to Lucy Fluckner—”

“What, Tom Fluckner’s heiress?”

“And a true-blue Whig, it sounds like,” said Abigail. “She told me that at the time Mrs. Fishwire and Mrs. Barry were murdered, a third woman—the Fluckners’ maidservant Philomela—was having horrible poems sent to her, and was being followed, by a man whom she suspects was the killer.”

“Suspects—?”

“Because of something in one of the poems, about killing a red-haired woman. A few days ago—less than a week after Mrs. Pentyre’s murder, in other words—he started following her again.”

John whispered, “Damn. Is she sure? Not that it’s the killer, but that it’s the same man who followed her the summer before last?”

“She’s sure.” Quickly she outlined all that the girls had told her. “There was no time to seek out Lieutenant Coldstone after I learned this, or I would have been stranded on the island for the night, and Heaven only knows what Sam would have had to say. I’ll write him tomorrow. Coldstone, I mean, not Sam. At least she shall be safe there at the fort . . .”

“If the man isn’t a Tory himself, and there among them,” murmured John, and carried his plate to the sideboard. “Or masquerading as one. With the island that crowded, and people coming and going on business to the town, it would be easy. It does sound as if he’s been away, doesn’t it?”

Together they brought the tin tub from the corner where she and Pattie had stood it earlier, brought up the screen to protect it from drafts, and poured the hot water in. “There’s nothing to tell us that he lives in Boston and not New York or Halifax, for that matter,” said John, as he took off his coat. “In fact, nothing in any of this indicates that the man who killed Perdita Pentyre has anything to do with the man who killed the others and now, apparently, has resumed his pursuit of another woman who, like your precious Pamela, has neither friends nor family strong enough to look out for her.”

“Pamela.” Abigail, who had gone to fetch the candles from the table, came back around the screen. “John, tell me if this sounds mad, but—it occurred to me today—is there any chance that the reason Rebecca has not come forward—has not even gotten a message to me or Sam or Orion—is that she’s . . . she’s being
held prisoner
somewhere?”

He paused in the act of removing his neckcloth, regarded her in the softly flickering light with a kind of gentleness, as if she had an injury that would reawaken in agony if touched. “I think it far likelier that she is dead,” he said.

“I do—I would—because of course in any house in Boston where she could be locked in an attic, she could also be buried in the cellar. Except this man, whoever he is . . . he doesn’t hide the bodies of his victims.”

John took the candles from her hand, set them on the chimney breast. “The man who killed Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Fishwire doesn’t hide the bodies,” he said. “The man who killed Mrs. Pentyre—if he is
not
the same man—only left in the open the body that he
wanted
the Watch to find. Why go to pains to imitate a crime, if not to have someone blamed for it? The point of this crime,” he went on, “now does not seem to be to kill Mrs. Pentyre, but to kill
me
. I admit I will be most curious to see the handwriting on that poem sent to Fluckner’s girl. Now might I persuade you,” he added, “to wash my back for me, before it becomes the Sabbath?”

Twenty-four

A note from Lucy Fluckner awaited John and Abigail on the sideboard when they returned from services the following morning. Either the Fluckner household wasn’t one in which the Sabbath was regarded with Puritan strictness, or its heiress had found some outright heathen among the hangers-on about Castle William to carry her message across the bay. When Abigail broke the seal, she found requests from both Miss Lucy Fluckner and Philomela Strong, that Mr. Barnaby permit the bearer to enter the house and the chamber of Philomela, to take possession of the document they would find hidden under the floorboard near the head of the bed.

Please say nothing of this to Papa
, Lucy’s paragraph added.
It is from the man who wrote those awful poems to Philomela the summer before last. We have reason to think that he has done something dreadful, and Mr. Adams is looking into the matter on Philomela’s behalf.