The Ninth Daughter (46 page)

“And he told you,” said Abigail softly, “that God had forged you to be His Weapon?”

Orion nodded, his face ghastly in the flickering yellow light. Soldiers came, knocking grave-dirt from their hands and boots, to help him onto a horse. Abigail wondered if the men of the Gilead Congregation would come at daybreak, to dig the Chosen of the Lord up again and bury him in Gilead itself. The energy that had kept her going through flight and confrontation, scouting the town boundaries and climbing down ropes from the burning blockhouse, was long gone. When someone brought up Balthazar to her, she could only gaze aghast at the saddle; one of the men had to help her mount. She reined him over beside the sturdy middle-aged trooper behind whose saddle Rebecca clung: “Will she be all right?” She was mildly astonished that Rebecca hadn’t fainted long ago.

The trooper saluted her. “I’ll look after ’er, mum, don’t you worry.” He showed her where, under his cloak, he held Rebecca’s wrists tight together against his chest with one big hand. “She starts to shift or slack, I’ll feel it ’fore she feels it ’erself, won’t I, Mrs. M?”

Her head pressed to his back, Rebecca barely had the strength to nod.

Abigail recalled one of Sam’s choice broadsides, about every redcoat being the scum of the London backstreets, whose sole wish was to bayonet every honest American woman he saw.

The little troop started away down the road, one man walking ahead with a torch to light the road. Tarry flakes of fire dripped down from it, to hiss out on the wet earth; the horses moved among rising threads of steam. The world smelled of smoke.

 

 

 

J
ohn and his party finally met them, halfway back to the Salem-Danvers road.

Or, rather, Coldstone’s party was intercepted by a gang of unknown men dressed up and painted to look like Indians, who stopped them at gunpoint and searched the sad dlebags on Orion’s horse, something Lieutenant Coldstone had neglected to do. As one of the Indians—who under all his paint looked suspiciously like Paul Revere—brought out of the bag a brown-backed quarto-sized notebook la beled “Household Expenses,” another—short, chubby, sitting his horse with the uncomfortable stiffness of a man who has his dignity to consider—reined up beside Abigail. Blue, slightly protuberant eyes met hers worriedly from a black-painted face.

Abigail inquired coolly, “Did you get lost?”

The Indian nodded, and said, rather unwillingly, “Ugh.”

“
Ugh
indeed.”

He looked as if he were struggling against strict orders not to say a word in English, and Abigail, relenting, said more quietly, “I’m quite all right,” which was not strictly the truth. She could feel fever coming on her, from chill, exertion, and clothing damp from the wet of the woods. She realized she was very lucky to be alive at all. Rebecca, slumped behind the King’s bloody-back savage, was shivering, too. The Indian reached out a hand to her, but Abigail, mindful of the soldiers watching them, kept her grip on the reins.

In a quiet voice she asked, “I take it you didn’t get my message until the town gates were shut for the night. Was the storm too bad to get a boat across the bay?”

“Ugh.” He looked, first at Rebecca, his eyes filled with pity, then at Orion.

“The Reverend Bargest is dead,” said Abigail. “Hazlitt shot him—goodness knows what his followers are going to do.” She coughed, fighting to still it, then gave the Indian a smile. “It is very good to see you, dearest friend.”

He smiled back, and saluted her with his tomahawk. “Ugh.”

The Indian who looked like Paul Revere slipped the account book into his own saddlebag, and signed to his men. Two of them took the reins of Orion’s horse. Orion turned in the saddle, and sought Rebecca’s eyes, but did not speak. With him among them, the whole tribe disappeared into the night.

Thirty-four

Presumably this same tribe of Indians, five nights later, boarded the three tea ships at Griffin’s Wharf—the
Beaver
having docked, cargo intact, the day before—and dumped some $90,000 worth of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor while six thousand armed countrymen stood around the docks. There was no attempt on Colonel Leslie’s part to interfere.

Abigail herself only heard the men go by in the street, from the bed where she lay in the weak aftermath of fever. Though her window was closed and shuttered by that time, still the tramp of their feet came to her, quiet and well-disciplined, though some of them sang.
Not a mob
, she thought.
An army.

“And not so much as a belaying-pin on any of those three ships was stolen or damaged,” Rebecca Malvern reported the next morning, when she came after breakfast with fresh-baked scones and a hot ginger tisane. “The Indians even swept the decks clean afterwards.”

“How very tidy of them.” Abigail—dressed for the first time since being put to bed with a feverish cold—tugged her several shawls closer about her shoulders, and sipped the tisane. “Sam does nice work.”

“It makes me wish I could write a poem about it.” Rebecca smiled, and drew over to herself the papers that Thaxter had left on the big kitchen table for them: notes copied from the Essex County court records, which showed just how much of the Gilead congregation’s lands actually belonged to the Sellars family, and through them, to Richard Pentyre.

Abigail looked across at her, and raised an inquiring brow. After being sick herself for two days, nursed by Gomer Faulk in the tiny chamber from which Tommy and Charley had been temporarily evicted, Rebecca had been on her feet again and helping Gomer and Pattie nurse Abigail—thus Abigail had witnessed the meeting between her friend and Charles Malvern.

It had been awkward—no self-respecting novelist would have produced the fumbling dialog between the elderly merchant and his estranged and rescued wife—but, Abigail thought, not painful. The afternoon following—which was Wednesday—Malvern had called again, and Wednesday evening, Scipio had arrived with a light gig, to take Rebecca home.

Rebecca continued, “Perhaps I will write a poem, at that. I’ll keep it in my desk drawer, until—until we know how any of this will turn out.” She smoothed the folds of the dark wool dress she wore, a dress that bore the signs of neat refitting and was laced as close as it would draw around her wasted body. Framed in the neat dark wig she wore, her strong-boned, triangular face had a waifish look.

Still, she’d been enough herself to smile and laugh when Johnny and Nabby had greeted her back with embraces, and demanded help with their sums, at which they were working at the other end of the table: “Will you be teaching us again?” Nabby had wanted to know. “I’ve told Gomer she can come to your school, too.” And Rebecca had replied, “I would love to have you again—and you, too, Mistress Faulk—but it may not answer, now that I’m to be Mr. Malvern’s wife again.”

Now Abigail asked, “And what does Mr. Malvern say to last night’s events?”

“Everything that he always did.” Rebecca’s smile turned a little wry. “I knew his promise not to speak of politics wouldn’t hold—I think he’d go off in an apoplexy if he tried to keep it. But at least so far he does remember, that we have ‘agreed to disagree.’ Having Tamar gone helps,” she added. “She went on a great deal about prisons and convents, when her father broke it to her she was being sent to her aunt’s. But I think the prospect of living in New York cheered her, before she even got on the boat. I still keep to my own room, and Mr. Malvern to his.” She turned on her wrist the little bracelet of pearls, that Abigail did not remember among her things before. “And we will see, how it all answers, in time.”

Silence lay between them, and Abigail drank her tisane. Pattie and the children went out into the scullery—Pattie had promised to make a syllabub for after dinner—and the kitchen was quiet. Oddly so, it seemed, without the church bells that had rung over Boston for two weeks. Indeed, the silence seemed a little ominous.

“I must say I’m a little surprised, that the Indians unloaded all three ships,” remarked Abigail after a moment. “What came of the rumor that someone was going to unload the
Beaver
secretly—?”

Rebecca laughed, and flung up one hand in exasperation: “Do you know who was behind that?
Richard Pentyre.
Sam told me only yesterday: ’tis what Pentyre was trying to arrange on the Wednesday night, that his wife—” Her voice faltered, and she put her hand quickly to her lips.

To call her thoughts back, Abigail said, “He guessed there’d be trouble, and sneaked off after seeing his mistress, to hire smugglers to circumvent it?”

Rebecca nodded, and made herself smile. Abigail saw the tears flood to her eyes.

“And of course he guessed there’d be trouble because that wretch Bargest had sent him a note, threatening his life.”

Rebecca drew breath, to steady herself, and let it out again. “ ’Tis lucky he had the note, or he’d have been a suspect himself.”

“Don’t think I didn’t suspect him.” Abigail refilled her cup. The silence returned.

At length Rebecca said, “I dreamed about it last night. Again. In daytime I barely remember it, but at night—”

“ ’Twill pass.”

“I know.” Rebecca pressed her hands to her eyes for a moment, and sighed again. “I don’t even know if the things I see in my dreams really happened or not. I remember—I think I remember—waking up lying on my bed with my hands tied, in the dark, but I have no idea how I got there. Orion had come earlier, of course, with some more of the Hand of the Lord’s wretched sermons, but I know he left. And I remember going out a little later, and seeing Queenie standing in the alley gate, talking to one of the men who buys kitchen leftovers—grease and suet and such, only of course Mrs. T. forbade her to sell them. The way she started when I spoke to her, I suspect she was selling other things, like the odd spoon, or a few ounces of Mr. T’s cognac.”

Abigail sniffed. “I wondered if ’twas something like that. The way she lied and prevaricated about having been in the alley, or having talked to you—”

“Miserable woman. I suppose,” she added, “that living under the same roof with Mrs. Tillet would make anyone miserable, let alone a thief and a liar. I remember talking to her, and going back into the house as the rain was starting, but nothing after that.”

“We think—John and I,” Abigail said slowly, “that Orion must have unlatched the window in the parlor when he was there earlier, and slipped back in that way while you were out talking to Queenie by the gate. Yours was the only house, you see, that he knew he could get Mrs. Pentyre to come to alone.”

It was the blood
, Orion had said.
I thought I could kill her without . . . But then I saw the blood. Smelled its smell . . .

Had Bargest told him,
You’re a Weapon in the Hand of the Lord, but for God’s sake don’t go crazy and cut the woman to pieces like you did those others
. . . ?

A Weapon in the Hand of the Lord.

Was Sam? Was she herself, as Lisette Droux had hoped?

“I dreamed—I don’t know even if this really happened,” whispered Rebecca. “I dreamed I saw him through the kitchen door, standing above her body . . . Blood all over his hands—”

“Don’t—”

She shook her head, pressing on as if driven to purge the scene from her thought. “Blood all over his hands, and he looked down at them, at her, as if he knew not for a moment how it had got there. Then he looked up, and in my dream I swear I saw the light of Heaven, falling from far-off on his face, and he cried,
Why have you done this to me
?
Why did you create me this way?
Abigail, why
would
God create a man that way? Will he be punished—is he now in Hell—for being as God made him?”

Abigail murmured, “Only God knows what was in his heart.”

“That’s no answer.” Her brown eyes blazed with anger, with helplessness—with a passion, Abigail thought, that would never let her rest.

“No more than ’tis to say,
The man was born a monster, for reasons no one knows
. But ’tis the only answer God gave Job, when he spoke to him out of the whirlwind. And poor Orion was not the worst monster in the case.”

She looked up as John walked into the kitchen, passed through it catching up his hat and greatcoat, and on out into the yard. “I see Lieutenant Coldstone has come to call,” she remarked.

An instant later, Thaxter appeared in the hall doorway. “Mrs. Adams? Lieutenant Coldstone is here.”

“Is there a fire in the parlor?” She tidied up the legal notes, the morning papers with their account of the drowning of the East India Company’s precious tea. “Well, I suppose ’twill warm up soon—Pattie, would you bring us some coffee? Lieutenant,” she greeted him, as she and Rebecca entered the small—and icily cold—chamber where the officer was trying to warm his hands before the newly kindled hearth. “I’m sorry Mr. Adams is away—”

“You astonish me, Madame,” said Coldstone drily. “Your servant, Mrs. Malvern. I hope you are recovered? And yourself, Mrs. Adams—”