The Ninth Daughter (35 page)

“Gilead?” Having set her basket on the corner of the table, Abigail paused on her way to the door.

“Yes, m’am. The Hand of the Lord, he’s wrote to Mr. Hazlitt two and three times to come. He grows main angry, when I bring him letters from Mr. Hazlitt saying as how he can’t.” She went to the sideboard, produced from among the litter of papers there half a dozen ragged sheets, clearly endpapers torn from the backs of books, decorated with the same virulent scrawl Abigail recognized at once from the sermons Rebecca was preparing for print. Words leaped out at her—
further excuses . . . turn thy face for the work of the Lord . . . scorn his Chosen One and set up idols before thee
. . .

Heaven forbid
, reflected Abigail sourly,
that even the fate of English justice and English liberties should come before the sacred cogitations of the Hand of the Lord
.

A hundred things Orion had said to her about the conditions under which he’d grown up now returned, with the recollection of those shut-up, weathered buildings, of the hysterical atmosphere in the “House of Repentance” where sinners trembled and shrieked before the Chosen One’s version of the Lord. Rather smugly, Damnation added, “I was a bride of the Chosen One,” and Abigail didn’t even feel surprise. Only a kind of outraged disgust.

“Are you indeed?” she asked in what she hoped was a polite voice.

“Oh, not no more, m’am. The Lord became displeased with me, and told Reverend Bargest to put me aside, because my spirit used to walk abroad in the night and pinch the babies in their cradles, and let the mice into the kitchens. I tried not to let it,” she added worriedly. “Nights I’d lie awake, trying to hold my bad spirit in.” She clenched her sooty fists illustratively, pressed them together against her breast. “But it always did get away, the Reverend said, and walked about the world doing evil. He saw it, he said, and others did, too. So he had to put me aside.”

When she outgrew childish prettiness? Abigail studied her face. She could not have been as much as nineteen now.
Had I known
, she thought,
I would have slept in the woods rather than take the man’s hospitality
. “And did he turn you out of your home, as well as put you aside?”

“Oh, no, m’am.” Damnation seemed shocked at the suggestion. “The Hand of the Lord would never turn out one of his children! It was for us that God gave us the land we live on, so that none of us can ever be turned away. The last time Mr. Hazlitt came to Gilead, the Reverend Bargest commanded me to come here to take care of Mrs. Hazlitt, in return for Mr. Hazlitt printing his sermons for him. But this Realm of Iniquities is not my home.”

“My child—” The stairway door opened. Lucretia Hazlitt stepped out. Perfectly dressed, hair coiffed beneath a lace cap, she moved steadily, except for her head, which had a slight waver to it, as if the world before her eyes was in constant motion and needed to be tracked. When she came close—to take Damnation’s arm—Abigail saw by the last fading light of evening that despite the gloom, the pupils of her eyes were narrowed to pinpricks with opium. “My child, I’m going out,” she announced. “I shall be back in a few minutes—”

“I’m afraid you can’t, m’am,” said Damnation. “Mr. Hazlitt told me I wasn’t to let you, and—”

Lucretia Hazlitt’s face convulsed suddenly, swiftly, with an expression of agony, and her green eyes turned wide and desperate. “You must let me go,” she said. “My son is dead. He met with an accident, a terrible misfortune. I saw him.”

“Mrs. Hazlitt,” said Damnation gently, “you know that wasn’t really him.”

“It was!” she insisted. “He came to me, blue and glowing. He sat beside my bed and took my hand, and I saw then that a great beam of wood had been driven into his chest! I saw the blood, my child! I saw the bruises on his face, where it had been crushed in—”

“M’am, that isn’t true.” The girl took her mistress’s hand in one hand, and gripped her arm with the other. “You know it isn’t.” She turned to Abigail, added in a whisper, “That didn’t really happen, m’am. It’s just the opium, that makes her see things. It wasn’t a
real
spirit.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” said Abigail, startled at the girl’s assumption that it could have been and that Abigail would probably believe it.

“You must let me go find him!” pleaded Mrs. Hazlitt, as Damnation steered her firmly toward her chair. “You must let me speak to him, beg his forgiveness before it is too late—”

“Of course, m’am, but first you sit down—”

Without being told, Abigail checked the mantelpiece and the sideboard for the opium bottle, then darted upstairs to the bedroom. As before, the bottle stood on the mantelpiece there; as before, a brisk fire burned in the grate, warming the room; and as before, though it was close to nightfall, nobody had cleaned the room or tidied the bed that day, nor even pushed the trundle bed away out of sight. Lying across the foot of the trundle bed, discarded at waking presumably, was a man’s nightshirt. Yesterday’s stockings, that lay on the floor by the trundle’s foot, were a pair of yellow ones that Abigail recognized as Orion’s.

She returned downstairs, and helped Damnation dose the struggling, weeping woman beside the fire, despite wailed threats that the Lord would smite them both and cast them down with Jezebel from the window to be eaten by dogs, and pleas that she had seen her son begging for her to come to him.

Walking home in the early falling darkness, Abigail tried to put aside the lingering distaste of that frowsy, smelly room. The nightshirt and stockings called up other images, of Mrs. Hazlitt dragging her son’s lips down to hers:
my treasure
, she had called him,
my King
. . .

No wonder the poor man threw himself into his work for the Sons of Liberty with such passion. Anything to be doing something other than what his life was with her . . . anything to have even the illusion of real life.

Abigail found herself wondering very much what the Lord saw when He looked on Nehemiah Tillet’s heart.

Twenty-six

Midmorning—the first break she had in transferring garment after waterlogged garment from the lye-tubs in which they’d soaked all night to the cauldrons of boiling rinse-water—Abigail changed her dress, smoothed her hair, and walked with John—who had himself spent the morning with Thaxter trying to catch up on legal papers neglected in favor of leading meetings and writing pamphlets—to Milk Street again. She had hoped that yesterday would have brought a letter from Miss Fluckner to Mr. Barnaby, but though the whiff of smoke still floated from what Abigail guessed to be the kitchen chimney, no window was unshuttered, and no footman opened to John’s repeated pounding at the door.

“I’ll write to Coldstone,” said Abigail, as they walked back home. “Sam can change his precious codes—or explain to Philomela, on Judgment Day, after she is murdered by this monster, why he thought their preservation as they stand was more important than her life.”

She thought John might have said something about how short the time was until the seventeenth—the day by which the
Dartmouth
’s cargo must be confiscated to pay the harbor dues—but he remained silent.

Shortly after she, Pattie, Nabby, and Johnny commenced the horrendous task of lifting out each dripping, steaming shirt, sheet, chemise, or baby-clout from the slowly cooling rinse-water to wring and hang to dry, Thaxter appeared in the kitchen door with the information that Mr. Malvern was here to see her.

As it had been during Lieutenant Coldstone’s call last Wednesday, the parlor was arctically cold, but as on last Wednesday, Pattie—by some miracle of efficiency—had already that morning swept the grate and laid a fire. Flames crackled cheerily as Abigail entered to receive a bow from her guest. She had been used to thinking of the tough, grim-faced little merchant as old before his time, yet seeing him now she was struck by how facile her earlier judgment had been. A week and a half ago, he had been merely weatherworn and wrinkled. Now he was old. His shoulders bowed, and the lines of his face had not merely deepened but slackened under the burden of dread.

Abigail cried, “Sir!” in consternation, and instead of curtseying, clasped his hands. “You ought not to have come.”

“You think I fear the rabble that have flooded into this town?” He sniffed, and took the seat that Coldstone had, only after Abigail herself sat down. “The lascars in Singapore would eat the lot of them for breakfast, and I managed to deal with
them
smartly enough. If His Majesty—” He caught himself, took a deep breath, as if forcing down the crimson anger rising to his face. “I’m quite well, Mrs. Adams,” he added, in a quieter voice.
He will never be capable of gentleness
, she thought. But she had the impression of looking at a granite slab that had been broken, to let the first shoots of green peep through. “And feeling a bit of a poke-nose, for I know had you learned anything—anything at all—you would have writ me, as you said.”

“And so I would,” said Abigail. “In the past week I have run up one blind alley and down another, chasing spec ters—”

Like poor Mrs. Hazlitt, conversing with the glowing blue ghost of her son, conjured by her frenzied need not to let him from her sight?
She pushed the thought from her mind, though it made her stammer a little.

“I take it communication with Mrs. Moore yielded nothing?”

Abigail shook her head.

“Might—Forgive a man who’s lived hard, for his suspicions—You do not think Mrs. Malvern might have instructed her to write that she was not there, when in fact she was?”

He brought the words out carefully, not like a story thought-out beforehand but like phrases in a foreign language, recently learned: an effort to break a long-held pattern of rough and hasty speech that touched Abigail strangely. Whether this new learning would hold the first time he lost his temper was another matter—she knew how desperately hard it was, to break a habit even as trivial as biting one’s cuticles—but he was clearly trying. She wondered who he’d asked for pointers. Scipio?

“I think not, sir,” she replied. “I made the journey out to Townsend myself—”

“Good God, woman! In this weather?” His old self slammed out of the shadows of self-imposed restraint. “It’s at the ends of the bloody earth!”

“So I learned.” She hid a smile. “Yet I had to be sure.”

“Of all the damfool harebrained—” He caught himself in hand, and added, “Thank you. I would not for the world have asked it of you. No, no,” he added, as she reached for the handbell—in its proper place, for a marvel, not that Pattie or anyone else was in the kitchen to answer it—“I can see I’ve taken you in the midst of your work, and will not keep you from it. I just—”

He was silent a moment, big hands clenched, staring into the fire. Then his hard gray eyes flicked up to Abigail’s again and he said, “If you—when you . . . Please let her know that I stand ready to protect her, with all that I have, from anything, no questions asked. I am her husband,” he added. “It is my duty—and my desire.”

“I’ll tell her. I pray I will have the opportunity.”

He took a deep breath. “Tell her that I was wrong, to treat her as I did.” He pulled out the words like arrowheads from flesh.

A few weeks ago Abigail would have sniffed,
Well, there’s a first!
Now she said, “You were deceived, sir. That’s all.”

“I was deceived,” he said, anger hardening his face at that recollection. Then he sighed. “But I was also wrong.” He stood, and Abigail rose, too. He grasped her hand again, a brief, businesslike grip. “I’ll not trouble Mr. Adams,” he added, as Abigail handed him his hat and gloves. “I reckon he’s got
his
work cut out for him. You may tell him from me that I hope it fails. Good day, m’am. Thank you—for standing a friend to Mrs. Malvern.”

She said, “We all need friends.”

 

 

 

 

M
ore shirts. More sheets. The gray overcast of the sky thinned, engendering hopes that the garments would all actually dry this afternoon and tomorrow. The yard took on the aspect of a labyrinth of clothes-rope and poles, of linen flapping slowly, like sails in the doldrums, in such dreary puffs of wind as sneaked down the passways between the houses. As always, a path was left to the cowhouse, down which in due time Johnny would herd Semiramis and Cleopatra after an unprofitable day on the Commons. Abigail had just gone into the house to put together a scratch washday dinner of pork and cabbage—early, because John would be meeting with the chiefs of the Eighth Ward again—when the kitchen door darkened behind her and she heard Orion Hazlitt’s knock.

“I can’t stay.” He set his hat on the sideboard with a hand so uncertain that it almost fell. “I only wanted to thank you for helping Damnation with Mother yesterday. She told me—Damnation did—”