The Ninth Daughter (10 page)

“Now, Mother,” he said carefully (Abigail was well acquainted with what happened if one contradicted her), “ ’tis only Mrs. Adams. Surely you know Mrs. Adams? It’s quite dark, you just can’t see well—” Which was true. Winter dusk set in at four, and it was pitch-black now, though six was only just striking from the tower of the Meeting House in Brattle Square. A few tallow candles had been lit, but their feeble glow showed Abigail that very little had been accomplished in the way of cleaning. “You shouldn’t have,” he said, when Abigail uncovered her basket, and she thought he looked ready to weep, with exhaustion and gratitude.

“Nonsense. Even whores of Babylon can see when their neighbors need help. I can help you upstairs with her,” she added, glancing toward Mrs. Hazlitt, who had subsided into a stertorous doze. Two of the flat, square black bottles stood on the table, one empty on its side; there was another on the chimney breast. How bad had she been, that he’d needed to dose her so?

“Thank you.” He shook his head. “I think I’ll let her go as late as I can—a few hours anyway. ’Tis easier—you’ll pardon me saying so—taking her out to the privy in this state, than it is managing a chamber pot. She’s just . . .” He flinched, the muscles in his jaw suddenly tight. “It has been a bad day.”

“No word of Rebecca?”

He shook his head. “I was going to ask you the same. I haven’t been out, but Mr. Adams—Sam Adams—must have sent word, if she had . . .” His words fumbled, and he looked aside.
Flinching
, Abigail thought,
from the inevitable conclusion, that the man who has murdered Perdita Pentyre has killed her, too
.

And why not? If she had gotten out of the house, if he had run her down in the alley or the rain-hammered dark of the street,
would
he have carried her body back to the house?

Bracingly, she said, “If he left one body for all the world to find, he would have left two. We’ve learned who the murdered woman was, though: Perdita Pentyre.”

He blinked at her, almost as if he did not recognize the name, then seemed to come to himself a little and said, “
Perdita Pentyre
? Colonel Leslie’s—” He bit back the word
mistress
, as if he thought Abigail had never heard the word and didn’t know what one was, and cleared his throat.

“I’ll tell you of it later.” She glanced at the slumbering woman by the fire. “Will that wretched girl of yours be back tomorrow?”

“I hope so. Damnation isn’t so bad—”

“What?” Abigail blinked at the non sequitur.

“Damnation. That’s her name. Damnation Awaits the Trembling Sinner.” A smile flickered across his face. “I’m lucky my mother had me before joining the congregation I grew up in, or I’d be called something like Breakteeth or Doomed unto Hell. As I say, Damnation isn’t a bad girl, just . . . lacking.” He touched his temple.

“She will perish,” observed Mrs. Hazlitt, waking and regarding them with jade green eyes that seemed very brilliant with the narrowing-down of her pupils. “
Four things the earth cannot bear: A servant when he reigneth; a fool when he is filled with meat; an odious woman when she is married; and a handmaid that is heir to her mistress
. Jezebel the Queen was the daughter of Eve, and the Lord smote her, and with her her handmaid that was privy to all her ways. Have you brought us supper?” she asked, with a sudden, dazzling smile. “How very sweet of you, dear, though not at all necessary. It won’t take me but a moment to put together a green goose pie and some veal fritters; I’m sure my son has told you how well I cook. The prophet of the Lord says that my cooking would be sinful, if I were not so righteous myself.”

And smiling, she fell asleep.

 

 

 

 

W
hen Abigail returned to her house it was to find Sam in the study, talking quietly with John. “Has there been any word?”

Sam shook his head. “I’ve put out word to every patriot in the town,” he said. “And I’ve been to see Hancock. He’s having all his tea smugglers look in every cellar, every hidey-hole, every warehouse along the wharves—every nook and cranny throughout the town. Revere tells me that white-faced pup from the Provost’s office found Pentyre’s chaise sunk off Lee’s shipyard, and the chaise was all they found. No word of the book, either.”

His brow clouded further when John told him of their visit to the Tillets’, and Mrs. Tillet’s declaration that all Rebecca’s things would be put out of the house. “I’ll see what I can do, about getting one of our men to rent it,” he said. “That way it can be searched properly.”

“If you can find someone pious enough to suit Tillet,” muttered John.

“Doesn’t have to be pious, my boy.” Sam grinned, putting on his hat. “Just an enemy of someone—like Charles Malvern—whom Tillet hates.”

When Sam was gone, John put an arm around Abigail’s shoulders. The kitchen was quiet: the children engaged in playing with wooden soldiers near the hearth, Pattie working at her tatting, a task which to Abigail’s baffled disbelief gave her pleasure. The gray tabby cat, Messalina, purred by the fire, dreaming of the slaughter of mice.
Precisely as things had been last night
, thought Abigail: when she’d known her friend was safe, when the doors that looked into households of pain, and sourness, and distrust had all been shut. When she knew that she might sleep and dream of gardening, not blood.

“She’ll return.” John rocked her softly in the clasp of his arm. “If harm had come to her, they would have found some sign of it by now.”

Abigail put her hand over his. “I think you’re right,” she replied. “Which leads me to wonder—
Why has she neither been found, nor come forth
? And I can think of only two reasons. One is that she received a concussion when she was hit on the head—yet if that were so, would not the people who found her know her? Or at least, have heard by this time that she was being sought?”

“I agree,” said John. “Furthermore, if she had been so severely injured, she could not have got far. And the second?”

“Barring the romantical chance that she hid herself in the hold of a ship that is now on its way to China . . . She is hiding because she recognized the man who did it. And he knows she did.”

Eight

From Griffin’s Wharf it was a voyage of about half an hour to Castle Island. Dozens of small skiffs and sloops made the trip daily over the choppy gray waters of the harbor, bearing provisions for the men and fodder for the horses, firewood to heat the brick corridors of the squat fortress of Castle William and tailors, boot makers, wig makers, and wine merchants to make sure its officers had everything they needed for a comfortable stay. These little craft bore also the friends of the Crown, who were likewise friends of its representatives: the customs officials who relied on the soldiers to enforce His Majesty’s duties, the clerks who surrounded the Governor (a large number of them his relatives), the Royal Commissioners who carried out the King’s decrees. And, most recently, they carried the consignees to whom the Crown had given the monopoly on the East India Company’s tea.

“The Company’s on the verge of bankruptcy, from paying for its own troops to take over land in India,” said John, as he handed Abigail down into the sloop of a farmer named Logan, who had agreed to carry them to the island. “The King’s lowered the customs duty on the tea, so that he can put the smugglers—like Mr. Hancock—out of business . . . it’ll barely be three pence a pound. Once it arrives here, there is no way it will not be sold—and then the King and Parliament will have their precedent, that it is legal for the King to tax goods that come to us, without our consent to the tax.”

“And who cares about their constitutional right to consent to be taxed,” murmured Abigail, “if it means cheap tea?” She gripped the rail as the cold wind caught the
Katrina
’s sails, fixed her eye on the pine and granite tuft of Bird Island, the nearest of the small eyots that dotted the harbor’s deep channel. The clammy cold seemed to seep into her joints, and the pitching of the sea turned her stomach.

“Are you all right?” John pulled his own scarf higher and tighter about his throat. “I will be quite safe, you know.” As Abigail had feared, she slept little. When John had come to bed after midnight she had been lying with open eyes, fearing what she would see when she closed them.

“I know you can slay any number of British troopers with your bare hands,” she replied gravely. “Yet you may need someone to untie the boat, while you battle your way to the wharf.”

John slapped his forehead. “I had forgot, we might have to fight our way out.” His eyes danced as they met hers. But there was a sober worry in them, that answered the fear in hers, and neither needed to speak of what they both knew. On Castle Island, there was no chance that Sam could summon up a convenient armed mob to outnumber the available British troops. The only thing that might prevent Lieutenant Coldstone from arresting John the moment he set foot on Castle Island would be the fact that if he wished to do so secretly, he would have to detain Abigail as well.

Exhausted as she had been by the time she’d lain down last night, Abigail had remained awake by the light of her single candle, picturing over and over in her mind every room of Rebecca’s house, both before and after Sam and the others had gone over it.
What did they forget? What could Coldstone have found that convinced him of John’s guilt?
No list, no fragment of paper . . . Had she, Abigail, dropped her handkerchief, for someone to deduce John’s presence from? Yet why (her overtired mind had picked endlessly at this detail) would John have been carrying his wife’s handkerchief?

If they had found the brown-backed “Household Expenses” book, they would have gone to Sam, or Revere.

The same could be said if their only ground for suspicion was that Richard Pentyre—that wealthy and fashionable friend of the Crown—was one of the consignees to whom a monopoly of the East India Company tea had been granted. John had always held himself aloof from the darker doings of the Sons of Liberty. Even his pamphlets argued in terms of reason and the Constitutional Rights of Englishmen, not Sam’s flamboyant demagoguery.

Now, in the gray daylight, with the walls of Castle William bobbing ahead of them, Abigail shivered at the thought,
What did they find in Mrs. Pentyre’s room
?

In addition to the four hundred men of the Sixty-Fourth Foot, and the some sixty female “camp followers” supported on regimental half rations, Castle William—the brick fortress on the island to which the British troops had retired after the Massacre three and a half years ago—housed an assortment of servants, sutlers, animals, munitions, and supplies. These in turn engendered the need for offices and service buildings, so that what had originally been a castle indeed on the round-topped green island now had more the appearance of a grubby village, complete with cattle, chickens, children underfoot, and laundry hanging between the rough wooden dwellings of the men. The office of the Provost Marshal was in the fort itself, but as Abigail had feared, she and John were kept waiting for nearly three hours, on a bench in the chilly brick-paved corridor that circled the parade ground. Through a wide archway they watched the men come and go: clerks, grooms, batmen carrying officers’ bedding to air. A couple of soldiers edged by them with a crate of wine bottles. Another, brisk and military despite a rather unsoldierly smock, bore a brace of ducks toward the kitchen.

Did Perdita Pentyre have her own rooms here at the fortress? Was that a perquisite of the Colonel’s mistress?
Abigail wondered who she could decently ask.

And her momentary, reflexive cheer at the answer to her question turned instantly to the haunted pain of dread.

While she’d washed in the icy predawn cold, gone to the stables to milk Semiramis and Cleopatra, she’d strained her ears, listening for footfalls in the yard, for Young Sam or Young Paul:
Mrs. Malvern’s at my Pa’s, safe . . .

Nothing.
Orion Hazlitt will be listening, too
, she thought. Waiting as she had waited, in that dark little house as he got his mother up, dressed her for the day, made coffee to go with the bread she’d sent . . .
How well I cook
, forsooth! Mrs. Hazlitt could barely boil an egg. Rebecca had often shaken her head and laughed at Orion’s tales of his mother’s accounts of her skills as a housewife.
The Lord smote her, and with her her handmaid that was privy to all her ways . . .

Abigail frowned as that soft voice snagged in her mind.
The handmaid that is heir to her mistress . . .

She watched the servants come and go. The more smartly dressed looked haughtily down their noses at the mere camp cooks and herdsmen, as was the way, Abigail had seen, of upper servants almost everywhere. What had Perdita Pentyre’s handmaid been heir to? To what ways, what secrets, had she been privy?

Her mind turned from the dead woman’s hypothetical servant to the known reality of that plump, giggling, sloe-eyed girl who followed Tamar Malvern into the coach in King Street. She would be after Rebecca’s time. Abigail recalled, over the five years of their acquaintance, how often her friend had spoken or written of Catherine Moore, her own maid.