The Ninth Daughter (42 page)

“Damnation indeed.” He raised an eyebrow curiously at Abigail, as the tall young woman made her way along the muddy street. Abigail nodded assent, and cautiously they moved through the brown tangles of dead fern and leafless hackberry, where the edge of the woods paralleled the way. Beyond the broken stumps of the palisade, and the last cowsheds and woodpiles of the village proper, lay half a dozen houses, farther and farther apart; one of these, two stories tall, had the look of an old defensive blockhouse. Its upper floor projected over its lower, and its walls were stoutly constructed of squared logs. The sheds around it stood empty, and what had been its garden was a knotted thicket of dead weeds, ringed by straggly fence-posts whose rails had long since been taken away for other purposes.

Before this house Damnation halted, and stood staring up at its upper windows. Across the road and with a field between them, Abigail couldn’t see the woman’s face. But she did see her walk back and forth before the house, and partway around both sides, looking.

Muldoon touched Abigail’s arm, pointed. By the door, Abigail saw, were three little piles of cut wood, as if someone had been assigned to bring an armload to the place, and had simply dumped their burden and gone away.

Abigail said, “That’s it.”

Thirty-one

A oman came out of the house nearest the one that had attracted Damnation’s attention—which lay nearly fifty feet away—aproned and wrapped in a heavy shawl. Though the servant woman’s brown dress was the plainest serge obtainable in town, still it looked modish and new against the villager’s crude homespun. The village woman caught Damnation’s arm, explained something to her, with gestures and shakings of her head. As she led Damnation away, back toward the main village crossroad, the servant looked back over her shoulder at the empty house.

“A closer inspection, Sergeant?”

To avoid crossing the road under the eyes of possible watchers in the two nearest houses, Abigail and her escort had to work their way for nearly thirty minutes along the edge of the woods, past the last house in the village (which was occupied, Abigail noted—What half-believing heart had settled thus far from his neighbors?) and so back to the rear of that closed-up former blockhouse. Even so, nearly a hundred feet of open ground lay between the woods and the rear of the house. Its original defensive purpose was clearest on that side, for there were no windows at all on the ground floor, and only rifle-slits above, facing the fields.

It was so wholly and indisputably a prison that Abigail shivered, and wondered,
Is his Word so paramount to them, that they’ll follow him even in that? Incarcerating someone only because he says they should?

Fifteen centuries of religious histories in her father’s books, and John’s, snickered up their sleeves at her:
You think that’s odd
? The Salem witches shook their heads at her naïveté.

She’s a born liar and a conniver
, the wicked Mrs. Jewkes in
Pamela
had said to the other servants,
don’t believe a word that she says
. Or had the Hand of the Lord chosen Mrs. Tillet’s justification?
I know more about this than you do . . .

Dark as it had been when she and Thaxter had come out of the evening service, she doubted she’d even been able to see this house.

Yet still, unreasonably, she felt,
I should have known
. . .

The more closely she observed the house, the more certain she was.

Only once in the course of the short, fading afternoon did anyone go near the place. The same woman who had drawn Damnation away returned some hours later, a basket on her arm. Going in, she reemerged almost at once—without the basket—and fetched in a few sticks of the firewood. A few moments later, Abigail saw the white puffs of new smoke rise from the chimney.
Good Heavens, it must be like an icehouse in there—!

She came out again to bring in a pail of water, and to empty a chamber pot, which she rinsed briefly with another splash of water drawn from the well, but didn’t wash. This she carried back inside, then reemerged, picked up her empty basket, and hastened away down the darkening street toward the groups gathered outside the house of the Chosen of the Lord.

By that time, the wintry daylight was almost gone. At times Abigail barely noticed that she was shivering, so violent was her rage, shock, horror; at other times she felt a kind of bone-deep exhaustion coming over her and thought,
I’m going to get sick if I’m not careful
. But there was nothing to be done about that. She and Muldoon worked their way along the edge of the woods, observing every house in the town, but they all appeared to be normal—

“Or as normal as this place can be, under the command of a hypocritical madman!” whispered Abigail, when they returned to their post among a thicket of young hazel, opposite the old blockhouse.

“Who may be dying,” breathed back Muldoon. Men came in from the woods—some with wood, others carrying braces of dead squirrels or groundhogs—and the anxious groups keeping watch around that handsome house coalesced into a crowd. Though at that distance it was difficult to be sure, Abigail thought the watchers kept turning, looking in the direction of the blockhouse. Several pointed.

“You don’t think she had the smallpox, and has give it to him?”

“If she had, the Tillets would have it as well,” Abigail whispered back. “As would Mr. Hazlitt, and I myself.”

“Did she bite him, d’you think, and it’s mortifyin’?”

“Serve him right if it were.” But her chuckle swiftly died. “They would kill her.”

“T’cha!”

“If she were responsible for his death, or his illness? For robbing them of his counsel? Of course they would.” As she spoke the words a cold suspicion took her heart, as to what was actually going on in the village.

John—Where was John?
Or—though she could not imagine that John wouldn’t come to aid her himself, and be damned to the Provost Marshal’s thirty-pound bond—where were those he would, he
must
, send? She had listened all day for them, consumed with dread lest they ride straight into Gilead and let themselves be talked into leaving, having given the game away . . .

“Don’t worry after ’em, Mrs. Adams,” whispered Muldoon. “We can get the poor lady out of there right enough. All we need’s a bit of time to get ourselves ready.”

As the gray light thickened, they worked their way back to one of the broken fence-lines that crossed the light second growth of what had been fields, the sergeant marking the way by cutting saplings half through with his knife, and bending them down so that they formed a sort of chain as far as the fence. “Even if the moon’s covered, keep a hand on these,” he breathed. “It’ll lead ye’s to the fence. The fence’ll lead us to the ditch and wall round the great fields, and we can follow those to the road. ’Twill be slow going, but once at the road we can keep one foot in a rut, and thirty of my strides’ll take us to that shanty where the horses are tied.”

“I have a lantern—” It had been dragging at her belt all the afternoon.

“Agh, m’am, it won’t shine a foot before us, but’ll show us up for a mile. And, I never did go out poachin’ with a winker but that I managed to drop it and the candle fell out of it.”

“How’ll we find our way from the house to the first sapling?”

“We’ll do like that old Greek feller.” Muldoon tapped the side of his nose with an expression of wisdom. “The one that treated that poor girl so scaly: I misremember his name. But we’ll have to step pretty lively, I’m thinkin’. Night’s fallin’ fast.”

It was, in fact, about the hour that Abigail and Thaxter had entered the village before, when she and Muldoon came opposite its main crossroad again. Lights had been kindled in the House of Repentance, but—as Abigail had feared—few were going inside. Instead they lingered around its doors in the twilight, or gathered, thicker and thicker, before the big and handsome house, whose windows also began to glow. She recognized Damnation among them, by her height and by the relatively stronger color of her dress. She was one of the ones gesturing, talking, passionately it seemed, and pointing back toward the blockhouse.

“Mr. Hazlitt must have sent her away Wednesday evening, just before the town gates were shut,” Abigail whispered, now shivering in earnest as she stood beside the sergeant’s comforting bulk. “I can’t see how she could have come into town much before this morning, even with a few hours’ start on us. I don’t know where she would obtain a horse. What’s going on now?”

The house door opened. Six men emerged, carrying a sort of bier between them, as if for a dead man. But the Reverend Atonement Bargest, the Hand of the Lord, was far from dead. On the bier he writhed, arms threshing, head rolling, and even across the distance Abigail could hear him moan and cry out, though his words were lost to her.

“What the divil—?”

“The divil indeed,” murmured Abigail. “He’s being tormented by witches—invisible, of course—even as those girls were in Salem Village, all those years ago.” She glanced up at Muldoon. “Or your Aunt Bridget. Something tells me we’re here just in time.”

Men, women, a few children and adolescents came hurrying from the houses to join the little procession that crowded around the bier and followed it to the church. A few bore lanterns. Most carried pine-knot torches, the light yellow and wild on their faces, like an uneasy whirlpool of flame. Muldoon signed to Abigail, and the two made their way farther up the edge of the woods, finally breaking cover at a small house that stood a little distance from the old palisade, one of the few in the village which they had observed included no dog. Muldoon led the way across the fallow garden, circled on the side away from the street, and yanked the latchstring to let them in. The downstairs keeping room was a chasm of almost total dark, save for the glow of the banked fire, at which Abigail lighted her lantern’s candle. She’d already guessed what Muldoon sought.

“Good for her, she’s spun a fair bundle of it.” He dug through the willow basket beside the spinning wheel, pulled out hanks of thick yarn, for stockings or scarves rather than the finer thread that would feed the great loom that crouched in the far corner.
So the old Greek he had in mind was Theseus, following the thread-clue to the labyrinth’s heart . . .
as she had followed first one clue, and then another, to lead her here. “Is there a shed for laundry?”

Abigail shook her head. “She’ll have her clothes-rope strung upstairs in the attic, this time of year. Will we need rope?” She glanced toward the window, her heart beginning to pound with the sense of panic, of time running out, that had driven her from Boston the moment she had seen Bargest’s handwriting on the threat to Pentyre.
Orion killed his mother because he knew he would not be returning to care for her . . . because he was going to make his attack on Pentyre last night.
She shuddered at the thought:
Had he meant only to cut her throat? Was it that blood that triggered his madness, as it triggered his outrages on Perdita Pentyre’s body?

Then Bargest would know that his tool—his human weapon—would either not be returning here at all—that he would be killed—or that he
would
return, and demand Rebecca’s release.
Either way, Rebecca would be no longer of use.

The attic was crammed with supplies—sacks of corn, barrels of apples, smoke-black hams hanging from the rafters to keep them away from mice—but no clothesline. By the attenuated glimmer of the single gable window, and the weak flicker of Abigail’s candle, they eventually located a stout coil of it downstairs in the porch, after what felt like half an hour of hunting. By that time the ground outside was a mere blur of iron gray, the sky barely to be distinguished above the coal-black line of the trees. “Can you find the thicket?” Abigail slipped the lantern-slide shut on her candle, and Muldoon nodded. “Then go now, and rig a line to the blockhouse,” she whispered. “I don’t know what I’ll find there, or how long it’ll take.”

“Stand at the corner of the house toward the wood, then,” whispered the sergeant, “with the lantern-slide open toward me, or I’ll never find the place comin’ back.”

Abigail obeyed. As she stood waiting, she could hear the drift of sound from the House of Repentance, a single voice, crying out in terror, shrieking in horror at the spirit of the witch that assailed him. Now and then, like the gust of wind in the trees, the congregation gasped or screamed in response.

Like the Sons of Liberty, she reflected, when Sam would shout at them,
Do you want to see your homes overrun, your goods plundered, your children at the point of British bayonets
. . . ?

No—!
Like the hammer of the sea . . . or the slow tolling of Boston’s bells . . .

For a time she could make out the black shape of the sergeant, his heavy military cloak belling out behind him, moving over the paler ground. Then she blinked, and could see him no more. She herself could scarcely find the blockhouse, though she oriented herself carefully toward the dark bulk of it against the final limmerance of sky. She followed its wall around, opened the lantern-slide, pointed it out toward the wood.