The Ninth Daughter (9 page)

“Common foolscap, like this. Sam arranges with Isaiah Thomas at the
Spy
to provide her with as much as she needs.” She glanced up. “You’re saying Mrs. Pentyre was lured there.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“By someone who knows the code used by the Sons.”

“By someone who knew that this code was used between Mrs. Malvern and Mrs. Pentyre.”

“But Rebecca did wait up for her,” pointed out Abigail. “She was still dressed—at least her day dress and her shoes were gone from the house—and the fire hadn’t been banked, nor the candles extinguished. And they
had
been snuffed and mended during the evening. She waited for
someone
. And clearly, she let Mrs. Pentyre in at midnight.”

“And the killer as well, apparently,” murmured John. He folded the note and pocketed it. “I’ll get that,” he offered, as Abigail started to lift the heavy Dutch oven, to carry to the hearth. “What time did the rain start here? Ten?” He dumped a couple of shovelfuls of glowing coals onto the iron lid. “If it was coming down as hard as it was in Salem, it would have been easy for someone to follow Mrs. Pentyre’s chaise from her house. As to how he would have gotten them to open the door—”

“He was known to one or the other,” said Abigail. “He must have been. If he forged the note, he knew the code—”

“And if he forged the note, Mrs. Malvern would not have been still awake,” responded John thoughtfully. He set the fire-shovel back in its place. “What time are the Tillets expected back, my Portia?” he asked, using the name they had used in their letters during courtship: she Portia, he Lysander, like heroine and hero of a classical romance. “Do you feel able for a half-mile walk, to see what the Watch have left of Sam’s handiwork? Or would you rather rest?” he added, scrutinizing her face more closely. “You look—”

“I look like a woman ready to faint away in your arms,” replied Abigail briskly. “Yet in either case my conscience would not let me rest, after what I’ve done to poor Pattie this morning—
and
burdened her with entertaining that young lout of an Irishman . . .”

“Oh, m’am.” Pattie dimpled shyly from the table where she was scrubbing potatoes. “Sergeant Muldoon meant nobody harm. Not even Mr. Adams, I daresay. You go,” she added. “Mrs. Malvern may even have come back, if what happened there didn’t drive her into brain-fever, so that she’s forgotten who and where she is.”

“If she’s forgotten,” said John softly, putting on his wig again while Abigail took off her apron and stepped into her pattens in their corner by the door, “’tis a curious thing that none of her neighbors found her wandering and reminded her.”

 

 

 

 

B
y this hour, Fish Street was a lively confusion of carts and drays coming up from the docks, of pungent smells and the clattering of hammers: shoemakers, coopers, smiths in silver and iron. The North End—technically an island, if you counted the little Mill Creek as a branch of the ocean—was a crowded jumble of rich and poor, of the mansions of merchant families and the tenements offering lodging to those who sailed on their vessels, of tangled alleyways and unexpected courts and yards. Shop signs and laundry, boat builders, hatters, soap makers, and taverns packed shoulder to shoulder like passengers in a too-small coach as they had been for over a century. Among the waterfront taverns and warehouses the smugglers operated, bringing in cognac and linens and tea from France and Holland in flagrant disregard of the British Crown’s stringent trade regulations; gangs of thieves, too, pilfering goods from the tall English ships and slipping them out almost at once on the numberless tiny coastal traders that brought in hay and firewood, oysters and butter, from a thousand little towns along the coast. It was among the artisans, stevedores, and laborers of the North End that the Boston mobs arose, ready to hammer down Tory doors or launch themselves into bloody battle with the South End boys during the riotous celebrations of Pope’s Day.

Though she would not have wanted to hear that Johnny was playing with the boys from this part of town—or that her brother Will was gambling in any of its many taverns—Abigail liked the North End.

The gate to Tillet’s Yard was closed, and—when they tested it—barred from within. Coming around the corner to the shop, the Adamses found not the prentice-boys Abigail had expected behind its counter, but Nehemiah Tillet himself, a stooped and flaccid-jowled man who reminded her of a spider. “Mrs. Tillet thought it best,” he said in his whispery voice. His hands fumbled uneasily, straightening an already straight stack of his wife’s ready-made shirts. “Every lad in the neighborhood—and men of full years who should have better tasks with which to occupy themselves—wanted to see the place, and broke the lock from the door even, to go in. I spent the best part of the morning turning them away!”

“How shocking for you,” sympathized Abigail, who had never liked the man. “To return home to find the place full of soldiers.”

“I was very much overset.” He fiddled at the edges of the bolts that lay on the crowded counter: linen, cotton, Holland cloth. “Very much so.”

“And you’ve heard nothing from Mrs. Malvern? She’s not returned?”

Moist pale eyes regarded them warily under heavy, lash-less lids, then glanced aside. “No. No, she hasn’t.” Again his eyes avoided hers.

And little wonder
, reflected Abigail, annoyed. From the first time she’d visited Rebecca here, she’d suspected that Tillet lusted after her friend. This was no great surprise, given Mrs. Tillet’s aggressively unpleasant nature—for the past eighteen months, every time she’d come by to visit, Mr. Tillet had found some excuse to knock on Rebecca’s door, with advice, or to share some snippet from a newspaper or church business. “He’s worse than Charles,” Rebecca had said, more than once, exasperated. “He wants to know who my friends are, and whom I visit. I used to think Mrs. T. put him up to it, to see if she could squeeze another five minutes’ work out of me, sewing those wretched shirts the customers pay her for. The way he looks at me—” She’d grimaced. “I can’t well push him out of the house, since he owns it. And I would rather be here, and put up with the pair of them,” she’d added, when Abigail had shown signs of walking across the yard and giving Mr. Tillet a piece of her mind, “than go back to Charles.”

Reluctantly, Abigail had agreed. Between Charles Malvern’s vindictiveness, and the general Boston attitude that a woman who left her husband must have done so from a preference for profligacy, it had been difficult enough for Rebecca to find a place to live where she might ply any trade other than prostitution. Sewing endless mountains of shirts for Mrs. Tillet and attending three sermons every Sunday at the New Brick Meeting-House were part of what she had to do, to go on living in her little house.

“May we go back there?” John asked now.

“There’s naught to be seen,” Tillet responded immediately. “The boys coming through after the soldiers, they’ve tracked all up, and carried away what they could, belike.”

“Mrs. Malvern is our friend,” persisted Abigail. “If nothing else, we’d like to—”

“There’s naught back there.” Mrs. Hester Tillet emerged from the back parlor of the shop, a woman of commanding height and substantial girth, with arms like a stonecutter’s from a lifetime of carrying bolts of cloth. “Nor will there be. ’Twas the last straw, and I’d had enough of her weeks ago. Disobliging, lazy slut, always finding some reason why she couldn’t do a little of the work she contracted to do as part of us giving her the place so cheap. If
I
can turn out a handsome shirt in an hour it’s sure anyone can, who puts their mind to it, and nobody needs more than a few hours’ sleep at night: I certainly don’t. And now she’s run off, and left me with twenty orders to fill. I’ve had enough, and will have no more.”

“You can’t turn her out for what happened!” protested Abigail, and Mrs. Tillet turned upon her, arms akimbo and jaw protruding like a bulldog getting ready to bite.

“So you’re telling me what I can do with my own property now, Mrs. Adams? Well,
I’m
telling
you
, I can’t and won’t put up with a woman who brings such friends onto my property the minute our backs are turned, to murder one another and bring the whole neighborhood tramping through. We have a position to uphold in our church and in this community, and we won’t stand for it.” And, seeing her husband looking wretched, she added, “Will we, Mr. Tillet?”

“No. Of course not.”

“The woman asked for what was coming to her and was asking for it for some time. I don’t wish to seem coldhearted, but I think we all know the difference between the trials that God sends to prove the righteous, and the deserved punishment that befalls those who deliberately put themselves in the way of sinners.”

“Do you, Mrs. Tillet?” The stuffy air of the shop made Abigail’s head ache, and the woman’s grating voice was an iron file on her nerves. “I honor your wisdom, then, because that’s something I’ve never had the presumption to assume that I could determine—nor the callousness to withhold the benefit of the doubt.”

She stalked from the shop, expecting John to follow her. He did not, and as the door closed behind her she heard his voice, quick and low, “You must excuse her . . . overwrought . . . closest of friends . . .” She was within an ace of turning back and asking how dared he take their side against her, but was too angry even for that. She strode as far as the corner of Cross Street, then stopped, her temper ebbing and leaving her feeling cold and rather drained.

A few moments later she heard John’s step on the cobbles. In a marveling voice, he murmured, “You’ve
never
withheld the benefit of the doubt?”

“Only from those who don’t deserve it,” she retorted. Then, blushed. “
Thank you
for covering my retreat. The woman never fails to enrage me, and I won’t say my words were uncalled-for because they
were
called-for . . . but I would shake poor Nabby to pieces if she’d said them. I don’t know what got into me. I must go back and apologize . . .”

“If you make the attempt I shall put you over my shoulder and carry you bodily home.” John took her elbow, guided her firmly in the direction of Queen Street. “I stayed only to keep Mrs. Tillet from following you into the street and pulling your hair out. Send her a note tomorrow, when she’ll have cooled down—except that I don’t think she ever cools down. As to what got into you,” he added grimly, “after this morning’s events, I’m astonished you’re not in bed with the vapors. I asked if I could come next week and collect Rebecca’s things—”

“You can’t let her—” Furious, she tried to turn back, and John’s hand tightened on her arm.

“I can’t very well stop her from doing what she is determined to do. What I
can
do is keep her from selling them at a slopshop. She said she’d have them ready for me.”

“After taking out what she considers she’s
entitled to
in payment of rent,” Abigail grumbled. “Secure in the knowledge that with so many strangers tramping through, the absence of this little thing or that, can be blamed on others and not herself. Who will miss a trifle?”

“If Rebecca returns safe to miss them,” replied John, “I shall be on my knees, giving thanks to God. Now come home and rest.”

 

 

 

 

A
bigail wasn’t certain she would be able to close her eyes, after what she had seen that morning, and the anxiety about Rebecca’s possible whereabouts that gnawed her; nor was she entirely willing to make the experiment. Finding Pattie still (
at three in the afternoon!
) cleaning grates and emptying ashes—with the enthusiastic help of Nabby and Johnny, who were seldom permitted to get themselves that dirty—Abigail would have changed her dress to help her: “If you don’t lie down on your bed and be quiet I shall dose you with laudanum and oblige you to be quiet,” John threatened. Then, seeing her uncertain face, he added so softly that only she could hear, “I shall stay there with you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I have briefs to read. What I should have done this morning—and, God help me, what I should be doing tomorrow morning when I’ll be out at the British camp.”

So Abigail rested, and found herself, as she had feared, back in Rebecca’s house, climbing the dark stairs with the stink of blood all around her; hearing Rebecca sobbing in her bedroom, with the door tied shut, and horrible sounds drifting up from the floor below. But when she unraveled the knotted clothes-rope, and got the door open, Rebecca’s bed was empty, and instead of that tiny blood-spot on the pillow, the whole of the counterpane was soaked with gore.

 

 

 

 

D
inner over—dishes washed, pots scoured, scouring-sand swept up from the floor, floor washed, Tommy prevented from falling into the fire—Abigail wrapped up a few pieces of chicken and the extra potatoes she had cooked, added half a loaf of bread and a small crock of butter, and carried this meal to Hanover Street in her marketing basket for Orion Hazlitt. As she’d suspected she would, she found the shop shuttered and the young printer, haggard and distracted, in the keeping room, trying to get his mother to drink another glass of laudanum and water.

“You remember how we used to play in the marshes?” Mrs. Hazlitt murmured sleepily. “You’d pick daisies and mallows, and we’d make long strings of them, you and I . . . We’d both come to evening service wearing crowns of them, my little King.” She pushed aside the cup, and framed his face with her hands. “You’re still my little King.”

“I know, Mother.”

“Am I still your Queen?”

“Of course you are.”

“And she”—she pointed an unsteady finger at Abigail as she stepped quietly through the rear door—“
she
is the whore of Babylon, the daughter of Eve . . . the worst of Eve’s nine daughters. The Meddling Woman, going about the streets, asking what doesn’t concern her.
She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house
—”