The Ninth Daughter (18 page)

“What is it—?”

“News of Rebecca,” said Catherine softly, and then glanced back at Abigail. “Isn’t it?”

Abigail said, “I’d hoped to find her here.”

Thirteen

Though it was only an hour or two past sunup, Catherine’s sister-in-law—her brother’s third wife—brought them into the big sand-floored keeping room of the log farmhouse, and cut bread and cheese, butter, and cold meat for them. “From all I’ve heard, those Gilead folk are as stingy with the Godless, as they call us, as they are with their own children. For the good of their souls, they’ll tell you,” she added with a sniff. “Sit you down, Mrs. Adams, and rest. You look like you’ve had a cold ride and no mistake.”

A crippled boy of perhaps fourteen—wizened and wasted as a little old man—who was working a spinning wheel next to the fire nodded a greeting to them, and added a few billets of wood to the blaze.

Catherine Moore’s face contracted in horror when Abigail spoke of what she’d found in Rebecca’s house Thursday morning. “Who would do such a thing? And
why
?”

Abigail shook her head. “ ’Tis what I’m trying to learn. ’Twasn’t a madman just wandered in from the street, we do know that,” she added. “The other woman—Mrs. Pentyre, a merchant’s young wife—was lured there, with a note forged in Rebecca’s hand . . . Rebecca didn’t know Mrs. Pentyre before Mrs. Pentyre’s marriage, did she? Her name would have been Parke in those days, Perdita Parke, of New York.”

Mistress Moore shook her head, baffled.

“I know she writes to you—she often speaks of how she treasures your letters. Was there anyone that she spoke of, any friend, any person to whom she might have gone for refuge? Or any name, any circumstance, that by
any
stretch of the imagination might be connected with what happened?”

Catherine sat for a moment, her head tilted to the side, thinking hard though the moment they had seated themselves her hands had taken up sewing on a child’s dress from out of her workbasket, automatically, as if no second must—or could—be left idle. “Nothing,” she said, and setting aside her work, went to the old-fashioned box-bed built into the wall near the great hearth. From the cupboard beneath it she brought out a lap desk, from which she took a packet of letters. “Mostly she wrote of her pupils, and their progress; of your kindness to her; of her labors at learning to cook and keep house, and that Tillet woman trying to turn her into a sewing-slave for her own profit. Once she wrote of her husband, and even then wouldn’t say a word against him.”

A look of wearied bitterness flickered in her eyes, swiftly put aside. What had Malvern said of her, Abigail wondered, that had made it impossible for her to find work as a maid in Boston?

Catherine went on, “She said she understood, how he would mistrust her, and blamed herself that he refused to give her any share of her father’s money. Myself,” she added grimly, “
I
blame that old skinflint, for along with ‘holding’ the income ‘in trust,’ he’s also lending and investing it at 2 percent, and would have been happy enough if she died, so the property would come to him outright and absolutely. Two thousand acres along the Chesapeake?” She sniffed. “He should have thanked her for keeping it in their family when he was too cheap to lay out for it, not punished her. To say nothing of saving her father from a life of beggary.”

She turned her face away, and pressed her hand to her lips, as if what Abigail had told her had only just begun to sink in. Abigail saw how her hand, once the fine deft hand of a quality lady’s maid, had grown brown, and rough with calluses, the fingers beginning to deform with arthritis.

“May I take these?”

“Of course. If you can find anything in them to help, you are welcome.” Outside the thick, uneven glass of the ill-leaded window a horse and wagon could be discerned, drawing up in the yard. A moment later a boy and a young man strode in, halted uncertainly when they saw Abigail, then went to the cold corner of the big room where all this time the youthful Goodwife Moore had been chopping and mixing the meat and fat of what was clearly a recently slaughtered pig for sausage. The murmur of their voices joined the whirr of the spinning wheel, the drifting smell of sage, as a sort of background scrim, a reminder to Abigail of her own duties and children neglected at home while she wandered to and fro in the world.
Now she is without, now in the streets . . .
Catherine took up her sewing again.

“Did she ever write to you about politics? About her political friends?”

“Not in so many words, no.” Catherine’s breath went out of her in a sigh. “I knew—Well, you know what a poison that was, between Mr. Malvern and her. Myself . . .” She shrugged. “I’m as loyal as the next woman, I suppose, but it strikes me as only reasonable, that the King nor Parliament neither can understand what goes on here, and what we need. But that’s a matter of men of education, men who’re trained to it, not for a plain woman—and not meaning disrespect, not for a lady who’s trying to get on with her husband, and build a home for him and his children. But she never would see it that way. And as time went on, and Miss Tamar told lies about her to divide her from her husband, it was a refuge to her, though it only made the situation worse.”

Sadly, she shook her head, and Abigail pursed her lips and reminded herself that an indignant demand about whether men who made their money out of Crown offices were more to be trusted in government than the plain men and plain women whose pockets were picked by those trained and educated gentlemen, would only lead the discussion far astray. She asked instead, “Did she speak about the Sons of Liberty?”

“I knew she was thick with them.” The maidservant sounded grieved. “I feared . . . But surely,” she said, looking up from her needle, “surely not one of them would have caused her harm, no matter how heated this politics got. ’Tis only politics, when all’s said.”

No
, Abigail thought.
It isn’t politics.
She recalled things Rebecca had told her, things Cousin Sam had said. A man probably wouldn’t kill over politics, but he would kill to protect himself, if there were treason in the wind.

A reasonable man
, she corrected herself. The man who wielded that knife was no reasonable man.

But would a madman forge a note? Think to dispose of the chaise? Turn the horse free onto the Commons? Why had he not then disposed of the body as well?

Would a madman take Rebecca’s “housekeeping” book of codes? Or had Rebecca done that herself when she’d fled, to keep it from falling into the murderer’s hands?

At this point Goodman Moore came in, shaking the morning dampness from his hat and glaring suspiciously at his sister and her guest. Both women rose, and Catherine said, “Kem, this is Mrs. Adams, from Boston, a dear friend to my Mrs. Malvern—”

“And is she a Papist, too?”

Exasperated, Abigail said, “Does not
anyone
in Massachusetts believe that a conversion can be sincere? Mrs. Malvern took instruction and satisfied the elders of the Brattle Street congregation, in order to be confirmed. I am honestly curious as to what a woman—or a man, for that matter,” she added, thinking as well of Orion Hazlitt, “must do, to convince people that she or he has indeed changed faith.”

Catherine’s brother regarded both women before him with a kind of chilly contempt, as if confronted with the idiot child of someone he didn’t like. “Faith a’nt something you change. If this woman were truly one of the Saints, she would have been born into a family of the Congregation, where her earliest steps would have been put on the path. She wasn’t.”

“Now, you can’t say—” began Abigail indignantly, and Goodman Moore reared his head back slightly, as if shocked that any woman would contradict him with his thought not yet fully revealed in all its glory.

Abigail bit her underlip and reminded herself that this man had sweated to grow the corn and cut the wood that went to make the bread she had just eaten; heaved fodder and mucked out cowsheds, that she might have milk.

“Conversion—” He shook his head heavily, like a bear with a fly in its ear. “Conversion, all you get is those Godless heathens over Gilead way, with all their nonsense about knowing God—as if
that’s
going to do a body a single jot of good!—and working toward salvation . . .
Working
? Pah! Salvation must be
given
a man, through no strength of his own . . .
And
laying claim to old Sellars’s fields that should rightfully have gone to the Townsend Congregation! Even so did King Ahab conspire to seize the vineyard of Naboth, and seek to do harm unto the Prophet of the Lord who spake against his conspiring—!”

By which Abigail deduced that—as in so much of Massachusetts politics—the disputed fields loomed a good deal larger in her host’s mind than the Gilead congregation’s doctrinal divagations.

 

 

 

 

B
oth Catherine and her brother pressed Abigail to remain and share their early, farm-style dinner, but neither were surprised or offended when she declined. Though it was only midmorning, Abigail well knew that last night’s rain would have rendered the roads nearly impassable, and the going would be slow. She had no desire to spend a second night from home, and John, she knew, would worry if she weren’t back by the time the town gates were shut and the ferry ceased to run.

Despite their prompt departure, this almost came to pass in any case. The rain had been worse toward the coast, and as she and Thaxter slogged their way toward the main Danvers road the half-frozen morass grew deeper, the horses’ hooves sliding in it and the clerk dismounting half a dozen times to scrape the balls of half-frozen clay from the beasts’ feet. Icy wind blew into their faces as they reached Salem in time for an early dinner, and though the main road was a little better, it was still closing in on evening when the travelers sighted Winnisimmet’s roofs through the trees. “If the ferry’s closed down for the night, I’ll hang myself,” muttered her escort gloomily, as he dismounted once again on the last slope of Chelsea Hill to clear what seemed like monstrous clay boots from his horse’s feet. “There isn’t an inn on this side of the water that I’d spend a night in.” Which wasn’t entirely fair, reflected Abigail—but she could sympathize. Across the bay, she could see Boston’s tall hills, and the dark spread of houses around their feet. Closer, the British cruiser
Cumberland
moved among the little islands, silent as a dark bird. Allegedly it had been sent to “defend” the town, but everyone knew that like the British regiments on Castle Island, the ship was truly there to put down the kind of insurrection that had shaken the city six years ago, when the King had taken control of colonial officials away from the colonial assemblies and into his own hands, and had eliminated jury trials for anyone even suspected of smuggling: a wide category, in Massachusetts.

No lights twinkled yet in any window, nor in the nearer dwellings of Winnisimmet.

She leaned down to pat the wet, steaming neck of her horse. “Well, I won’t spur these poor fellows to a gallop to make the last ferry,” she said. “Always supposing we could. We—”

Flat and soggy in the wet air, a shot cracked out. A horse burst from the woods nearby, running loose with empty saddle and trailing reins; among the trees themselves, a dim confusion of shouts. Abigail turned in her saddle and glimpsed something red in the brown shadows of the woods, a single British soldier bringing up his musket like a club as half a dozen men closed in on him.

Abigail exclaimed, “For shame!” and spurred toward the woods. Thaxter scrambled into his own saddle to follow. Hard as old Balthazar had been ridden all day, the animal responded nobly, and Abigail raised her voice in a shout, “Get away from him, you louts!” before she had any clear idea of what she’d do if those louts didn’t. They seemed to be, she could see as she got closer, the rougher types who made up the rank and file of the Sons of Liberty: the poorer class of farmer, out-of-work laborers from the docks of Boston, and two big lads who looked like apprentices playing truant from their work. Such young men followed Cousin Sam and Andy Mackintosh in the violent street battles by which the North End boys and the South End boys celebrated “Pope’s Day”—the anniversary of the Catholic Plot to blow up England’s Parliament in 1605. At the moment, instead of tearing effigy monks and priests to pieces, they seemed bent on doing the same to the redcoat, who was standing—Abigail saw now—over a fallen comrade in a dark cloak.

She raised her voice again, shouted, “Leave them be!” and the men stopped, more startled than actually obedient. She spurred through them and to the side of the two soldiers, Thaxter galloping up in support, and the men, as she’d expected they probably would, scattered back into the trees. A couple of them shouted “Tory bitch!” and similar sentiments, but none of them was ready to attack a woman—particularly not one who came escorted. Someone threw a rock at them, which missed by yards. Ignoring this completely, Abigail dropped from her horse at the soldiers’ side.