The Ninth Daughter (17 page)

From Boston north to Salem the road was well-traveled and reasonably well-kept, along the dunes and salt grass above the pounding gray sea. The public stage had already ceased its journeys for the winter, and the coach from Ports-mouth wasn’t due for another day. An occasional postrider with newspapers or letters overtook their horses, or a city-bound farm-wagon with salt meat and the autumn’s cheeses broke the monotony, but for the most part there were only the brown fields inland to look at, swept by wind sharp as broken oyster shells.

Being related to the Quincys, Thaxter had from childhood absorbed huge quantities of miscellaneous information about other merchant families with which his own uncles and cousins had to do, and proved a ready source of information about Richard Pentyre. “Everybody in town thinks he’s English,” the young man remarked over midmorning bread, cheese, and smuggled tea at the Lion in Lynn. “With those coats he wears, and spending ten pounds on wigs and powder to put on them. But he was born here—in that very house in Prince’s Street where he lives now, for all his parents went back to London when he was but a little tot, and sent him and his brother to Cambridge with all the sons of English lords, and only his bachelor uncle stayed on here. But he’s a Massachusetts man, back four generations on both sides, and his grandfather was one of the preachers who had a hand in hanging witches hereabouts. Bet the Parliament nobs who think he’s so civilized don’t know
that
one!”

Abigail chuckled, recalling her glimpses of Richard Pentyre, in his a la mode coats of French brocade, and his immaculately powdered wigs tinted a stylish lavender.
Not for him
, she thought,
the voyages that had made his rival Charles Malvern hard: his was a pleasant, long-nosed face just losing the freshness of a prolonged youth
.
Vindictive
, Lisette Droux had said, and clever by the sound of it—and by Thaxter’s present accounts of the man’s manipulations of his relationship with the Governor. Would he have had the wits to decipher the admittedly simple code that Rebecca used to set up meetings with his wife?

More disturbingly, would Lieutenant Coldstone?

And what would those Crown officials, those voters in Parliament, make of this world, she wondered, as they mounted their rested horses, and left the prosperous town of Lynn behind. She was used to thinking of Boston as a great city, with its crooked streets and thronged wharves. Even as a lawyer’s wife, she was able to purchase dress goods as fine as any lawyer’s wife in London if she had a mind, and paint her rooms in bright fashionable hues like Naples yellow and Dutch pink. The education John had obtained at Harvard was equal to any on offer at Oxford or Cambridge, and in the city’s bookstores she could find novels by Fielding and Richardson, plays by Voltaire and Shakespeare, the poetry of Pope and the philosophical writings of Locke.

Yet outside of Boston, the veneer of England vanished like an early frost. Abigail’s girlhood as a minister’s daughter had taught her how primitive were the farms that lay only a few hours’ walk into the countryside, where vessels were still made from the shells of pumpkins or gourds, and families slept all together in lofts above the single “keeping room” downstairs. Where a child might grow to voting age before he ever saw a clock, or a book other than the Bible. Once they reached Salem, and turned westward, this impression deepened, of traversing time as well as distance, as if they had somewhere crossed the line that separated the eighteenth century from the seventeenth. Away from the sea, and the settled lands along the coast, the woods closed in, standing as they had stood since the creation of the continent: gray and black with winter’s coming, fall’s tawny gorgeousness only a fading echo of yellow turning to umber underfoot.

Moreover, once one left the main road, all helpful signposts and milestones ceased. Primordial woods closed around them. The innkeeper in Salem provided an assortment of directions along with more tea, more bread, and more cheese—“You take the Danvers road, m’am, but turn off to your right about two miles past Peabody. You can’t miss the track, for there’s a great oak just a hundred feet down along it, to the left of the way”—but though Abigail jotted what she hoped were the main points on her whale-ivory pocket-tablets, she was disinclined to trust them. “Now, don’t pay no mind to the farm-tracks you’ll pass, but take the bigger way left, after Great Sellars Pond.” “How far?” “Far? Lord, I don’t know—how far would you say it is to the Sellars Pond Road, Jemma?” (This to his wife.) “Two miles?” “Never!—all of four . . .” “Not so far,” protested a one-eyed man at another of the tables near the fire. “Old Sellars used to walk it in half an hour by his watch, and he were a fearful rapid walker. The Sellarses used to have all the land hereabouts, on royal grant. One of ’em married into the Olivers—or was it the Governor’s kin?—that had their holdings all up into Wenham Township and as far as Topsford . . .” “Be sure you don’t take the Topsford Road,” the landlord had agreed. “If you get to the Topsford Farm Road, you’ve gone too far. Old Topsford, he was said to be a warlock, that could raise storms by killing a hare and throwing it in Wenham Pond.”

There followed considerable discussion of whether or not the gentleman in question had actually accomplished this feat of meteorology, but no one present seemed to doubt that he could have, had he wished to do so. Neither could anyone be found headed in that direction, to guide the travelers on their way. It was early yet for dinner, and Abigail elected to press on toward Townsend, a decision she regretted some three hours later, with the threat of rain on the wind, and not the slightest idea of whether the muddy, half-frozen cart-track that disappeared into the fading winter twilight before and behind them was indeed the Topsford Road or some other. She and her companion encountered a number of great oak trees, and several small bodies of water that could have been termed
ponds
,
sloughs
, or
pools
, but few signs of habitation. What they had hoped was a farm-road between rock-walled, stubbled fields petered out and disappeared into woods again. “I think that old deadlight back at Salem witched us,” grumbled Thaxter.

It was close to dark when they finally stumbled into a village optimistically called Gilead, barely a hamlet clustered around a dilapidated log church, and begged shelter for the night. Hospitality was freely offered by the town’s minister, but it had to be paid for, Abigail learned, by attendance at the evening sermon: penance enough to one raised in the dual tradition of old-style predestinarianism and well-written doctrinal argument. The Right Reverend Atonement Bargest was a firm believer in the contention that no one could be Saved who did not tremble before the Altar of the Lord, and Abigail and Thaxter spent three hours on the hard, narrow meetinghouse bench (“The House of Repentance, we call it,” confided the Reverend as he escorted them to the front and center seats) while all around them the two hundred or so souls of the congregation trembled, wept, and cried out in terror at apparitions of devils that the preacher pointed to in the candlelit shadows. Thaxter quite frankly dozed off, but Abigail was sorely tried with the effort not to get to her feet in protest as the Reverend pointed and shrieked at the appearance (visible only to himself) of the Nine Daughters of Eve, emerging from Hell to prey on the souls of Righteous Men: the serpent, the nightmare, the witch, the succubus, the harlot, the Priestess of Idols, Jezebel the Queen, the dishonest handmaiden, and most iniquitous of all, the inquisitive woman whose feet are never still.

Women jauntering about the countryside instead of staying home to care for their husbands and children, he implied, would come to no good end. Shivering in her damp cloak, her feet freezing and her thighs cut by the narrowness of the bench on which she sat, Abigail was much inclined to agree with him.

After the sermon was done—it was now pouring rain—the Reverend Bargest arbitrarily assigned a member of his congregation to offer the travelers hospitality, and released them to supper and a bed. As they followed their host to one of the two dozen or so log-built houses within the town’s old palisade—like disused barracks, most of them, their upper floors shuttered and dark—Abigail could feel the disapproving gazes of the congregation on her back. “Have you not a husband nor a home?” one of the littler girls of her host’s family asked her, as the cold supper of corn pudding and molasses was set on the table—and her elder sister swept her away with a hissed admonition and a glance of sullen dread.

Evidently only the word of “the Hand of the Lord,” as they reverently termed their minister, kept Abigail and her escort from being ejected supperless into the road.

Toward the end of the meal the Hand of the Lord made his reappearance with a glowering young man whom he introduced as Brother Mortify. “He shall guide you to Townsend in the morning. It isn’t far—five miles or so.” He smiled charmingly—he had silky white hair and aston ishingly well-preserved teeth for a man in his sixties—and clapped Brother Mortify on the shoulder. “I shall pray for the lessening of the rain, that you may be sped upon your way.” For a man who forty minutes previously had been in seizures of terror at the sight of invisible demons appearing out of the back of the House of Repentance, he seemed to have made a remarkable recovery. Abigail’s hosts were lavish in their praise for “the Chosen One’s” sermon, and the Chosen One nodded grave acknowledgement.
I have only done my duty
, his twinkling dark eyes seemed to say.
Don’t I do it well?

In fact the rain
had
ceased when in predawn darkness the family waked to a frugal breakfast of cold corn pudding and skimmed milk, and Brother Mortify presented himself to put Abigail and Thaxter on their way. “Not many take this way,” was his only comment, when they had to dismount and lead their horses over a stream where the bridge had rotted to nothing. “They’re Godless, in Townsend—as in other places.” He cast a meaningful glower at the travelers.

“And
they’re
the only ones saved and blessed, I suppose,” muttered Thaxter, when their escort finally turned back and the handful of weathered gray buildings that constituted Townsend could be descried through the gray trees. “I wouldn’t have believed it, in this day and age.” He brushed the last fragments of hay out of his hair and scarf-wool. Despite the raw iciness of the night, he’d slept in the barn. Abigail, who had shared a bed with three of the girls of the family in the boarded-up upper floor of the house, wished propriety had permitted her to do so as well.

“You were born in Boston, weren’t you?”

Thaxter nodded. “Born and raised. And Lord, I don’t know how people live in the countryside—I mean out here, not in civilized places like Weymouth or Medford. I didn’t know places like that still existed.”

Abigail sighed. “They exist a good deal closer to Boston than Essex County. They’ve been feuding in Braintree for years over who got chosen for minister—families who used to be friends not speaking a civil word to one another—and there isn’t a county in New England, where a town hasn’t split itself off from its parent settlement, because part of the congregation doesn’t believe in precisely how the other part conceives salvation. Now with these new preachers coming through, these Evangelists, as they call them—this Awakening they speak of—it’s as if all the old arguments over who shall be saved and who damned are all being argued again.

“It wasn’t so long ago—I’ve talked to people who were children at the time—that grown men in Salem, leaders of the community, let themselves be scared like medieval peasants into killing twenty people, on the strength of accusations by a pack of spiteful girls. We think we’ve come so far toward Enlightenment and Reason, yet even in Boston, rational men who read the newspapers still think a Catholic woman is some kind of devil-worshiper, who would steal her husband’s money to give over to the Jesuits.”

The young man looked startled. “Well, with Catholics, that’s different,” he said. “I mean, they
do
have to do as their Pope tells them, whatever it is, don’t they?”

 

 

 

 

A
bigail remembered Catherine Moore as a large, calm, good-looking woman in her late thirties whom she had met several times at the Brattle Street Meeting, walking behind Rebecca and Charles Malvern. Rebecca, Abigail recalled, had never asked her maid to carry either her cloak or her Bible, as so many wealthy ladies did. Odd, she thought, in one who had been waited on by slaves every day of her life. In the early days of the friendship Rebecca would always speak of Catherine’s unwavering loyalty in the gathering nightmare of spying and distrust that her marriage had become.
Unless the friendship is extraordinary
, Lisette Droux had said,
it is too easy for confidence to turn into anger
. And,
I would rather be a good maid than a good friend
. Catherine Moore, Abigail guessed, in the three years she had served Rebecca Malvern, had managed both.

The woman who came out of the dairy when Abigail and her escort rode into the yard at the Moore farm seemed to her, at first glimpse, to be the elder sister, or an aunt, of the woman she had known in those days. She stooped a little, and her face was weather-beaten; the few strands of hair visible beneath her cap were cinder gray. Only at second look did Abigail recognize her as Rebecca’s maid, by her soft little half smile. “Can I help you?” she asked, and the voice—which Abigail had only heard once or twice—was the same.

“Mistress Moore?” She let Thaxter help her from the saddle, her stout boots squishing in half-frozen muck. “I’m Mrs. Adams—”

“Of course!” Mistress Moore’s benevolence warmed to delight. “My lady’s friend. What brings you here to this”—her mouth quirked, half deprecating, half amused—“this wilderness?” And then, her dark eyes changing as she realized how great a distance her visitor had come on purpose, “My lady is all right, is she not? Tell me all is well.” As she said this another woman came out of the dairy behind her, probably just over twenty, Abigail guessed, but looking older, weather-beaten, and tired, with the rounded belly of midterm pregnancy.