The Ninth Daughter (2 page)

She opened the casements inward and shot the bolt of the outer shutters, pushed them back in a sharp sprinkling of last night’s raindrops; turned swiftly and saw—

Nothing out of the ordinary. The parlor looked as it always did. The door to the stairway above stood open. As Abigail crossed to it—two steps—she noticed the puddle of rainwater on the floor beneath the window. “Rebecca?”

She went to the hearth, took up the poker, and noted as she did so the ashes heaped there, untidy, no sign of the fire having been banked for the night.
Too much wood burned
, she thought.
Why would she have sat up so late? Why the parlor, and not the warmer kitchen where she usually worked?
Every candle on the mantelpiece was burned short.

No smell of blood in the stairwell. Every tread creaked.
If he was here I’d have heard him . . .

Still her hands were cold with fright as she came out into the minuscule upstairs hall. Barely a foyer between stairways, with the door of Rebecca’s chamber to her left, open into shuttered darkness.

The attic trapdoor at the top of its ladder was shut. Abigail strode to the bedroom door, peered inside. “Rebecca?”

Narrow bed neatly made. Nothing—her mind evaded a specific. Nothing
untoward
on the floor. The attic’s tiny window would be shuttered and there was no bedroom candle on the sewing table by the bed. After a moment’s hesitation, Abigail climbed the attic ladder, opened the trap, and put her head through. “Rebecca!”

Mr. Tillet—or, more truly, Mrs. Tillet, who appeared to use her husband as a sort of hand puppet for the transaction of legal business—rented out this house behind the main premises, but reserved the attic for the storage of Tillet family property: boxes of old account books, crates of chipped and disused dishes, sheets that had been turned too many times to be of any use to anyone yet that Mrs. Tillet would not surrender to the ragbag. A set of carpenter’s tools against which Mr. Tillet had lent one of his sons-in-law money, and had foreclosed upon. Only dark shapes in darkness as Abigail looked around her, yet the smell of dust was thick, and she saw no mark of hand or knee in the thin layer of it around the trap.

The Tillets
, she thought as she descended. Yet the Tillet house had been quiet. Even with the Tillets gone—
What had Rebecca said yesterday? A family wedding in Medford?
—surely Queenie the cook would have summoned the Watch, if Rebecca came beating on her door last night—

In the pouring rain? Would Queenie have heard her?
The cook slept in the west attic of the big L-shaped house, Abigail recalled.
Would I have stood there, pounding the door and shouting, with the man who perpetrated this horror still in my house?

Even the thought of doing so tightened her chest with panic.

She came through the door at the foot of the enclosed stairwell, saw—with the greater light in the parlor from the window unshuttered—a half dozen sheets of paper, littered on the floor. Abigail bent to pick them up, reflecting that John’s admonitions notwithstanding, the sarcastic political broadsides that Rebecca wrote under names like
Cloetia
and
Mrs. Country Goodheart
, at least, should not be left here for the Watch to find.

She looked at the paper as she moved to put it into the pocket of her skirt.

It wasn’t a poem.

Her glance picked out John’s name, close to the top of the list, and after it
Novanglus, Mohawk, Patriot
. . . the various pseudonyms under which he, like Rebecca, penned criticisms of Britain’s rule of the Massachusetts Commonwealth. Other names on the list had similar pseudonyms appended, but many did not. She noted John Hancock’s name, one of the wealthiest merchants in Boston and known throughout the colony as the man to go to if you wanted good quality tea without the added expense of the British excise tax. Below it was the name of her friend Paul Revere the silversmith, and young Dr. Warren—with his various noms de plume—and Rob Newman, sexton of the Old North Church. Billy Dawes the cobbler, Ben Edes the printer (with the names of all the various seditious pamphlets for which
he
was responsible, good Heavens!), even poor mad splendid Jamie Otis—

She knew the handwriting, too. It was the unmistakable, strong scrawl of John’s wily cousin Sam: Sam who was the head of the secret society dedicated to organizing all who wished for the overthrow of the King’s government in the colony. The Sons of Liberty.

Every name she recognized on the list—and there were a good many that she did not—was a man she knew as belonging to the Sons.

All of whom, if the list fell into the hands of the Governor, would certainly be jailed, and would quite possibly be hanged.

Two

Sam Adams lived in Purchase Street, in what was now called the South End: that portion of Boston which had been open fields and grazing land not very long ago. It was twenty minutes’ walk along the waterfront—crowded and busy, even now on the threshold of the winter’s storms—and twenty minutes back.

Too far.

From the brick steeples of Faneuil Hall, Old North Church, Old South, King’s Chapel, all the bells were tolling eight.

Paul Revere would be at his shop by now, and it was only a few hundred yards to the head of Hancock’s Wharf.

Hurriedly, Abigail looked around the parlor for more papers: two of Rebecca’s mocking jingles and half a dozen sheets of the volume of sermons she was editing as yet another means of making enough to keep a roof over her head. With John’s voice ringing in her mind,
Don’t touch a thing, woman!
she gathered the broadsides, left the sermons where they were—

Skirts held gingerly high, she stepped into the kitchen again. She saw now that what had first appeared to be a battlefield of blood was in fact blood mixed with water. A costly brown cloak lay sodden with last night’s rain between the body and the door. The water it had released had mingled with the single thick ribbon of blood that emerged from beneath the corpse.

The woman’s dark hair was neatly coiffed: not even death had disarrayed it. What had to be diamonds glimmered in her earlobes. A love-bite a few days old darkened the waxy flesh of her bare shoulder, and there was another beside it, white and savage yet curiously bloodless-looking. Her legs lay spread obscenely.
I’m sorry
, Abigail whispered, fighting the urge to straighten the body, pull down the petticoats, cover her from the stares of the Watch that she knew would come.
To leave you thus will speed vengeance, on him who did this to you.

Another of Rebecca’s songs lay near the hearth, the punned names and descriptions of Boston merchants who claimed to be patriots while selling provisions to the British troops unmistakable.
I have my sources
, Rebecca would say to her, with her grin that made her round face look like a wicked kitten’s.
I’ll make them squirm.

How long, before someone came?

Abigail put her head cautiously out the kitchen door. She’d heard Hap Flowers—the younger of Nehemiah Tillet’s apprentices—in the yard a few minutes ago, taking advantage of Mrs. Tillet’s absence to use the privy in peace. The linendraper’s wife would watch and wait for the boys—and for the sullen little scullery girl—suspecting them of loitering to avoid work. Any other day at this hour, Abigail knew the cook herself would be in the kitchen starting the day’s work at this time, but with any luck Queenie, too, would be taking advantage of her mistress’s absence, and no one would be near the wide kitchen windows that looked onto the yard.

There was a shed across the yard, where the prentice-boys left packing crates to be broken up for kindling, sometimes for weeks. Abigail darted out, found a medium-sized one that neatly covered the line of blood across the back step, ducked back inside. With luck the boys—and Queenie, too—would think Rebecca herself had set it there, for purposes of her own.

In the parlor, a basket held spare slates and chalk, for such of Rebecca’s little pupils as forgot to bring theirs from home. On one of the slates Abigail chalked, NO SCHOOL TODAY, and set it on top of the crate.

She kicked her feet back into her pattens, which she’d stepped out of—the movement automatic, without thinking—in the parlor, to climb the stairs. Slipped outside, closed the door, threaded the latchstring through its hole. She realized all this time she’d still been wearing her heavy green outdoor cloak, barely aware of it, so cold was the little house. The iron lifts of the pattens clanked on the yard’s bricks as she hurried toward the gate, praying the Tillets had not left Medford until that morning. She recalled Rebecca saying, “Thursday,” but didn’t know whether that meant morning or evening: Medford lay a solid day’s journey to the northwest for a wagon such as Tillet owned. Queenie the cook might prefer “resting her bones” and drinking her master’s tea to making the slightest inquiry about her master’s tenant, but upon her return Mrs. Tillet would be on Rebecca’s doorstep before she’d changed out of her travel dress, to collect the sewing that she considered gratis, as a part of Rebecca’s rent of the little house. If the wedding had been Tuesday—

“Morning, Mrs. Adams!”

Queenie’s voice from the back door of the Tillet kitchen made Abigail startle like a deer. She turned, smiled, waved at the squat, pock-faced little woman in the doorway, and kept moving. She hoped Queenie didn’t see her stoop in the gate and gather up her market basket as she passed through to the alley.

She tried not to run.

It was full daylight now, Thursday, the twenty-fourth of November, 1773. Gulls circled, crying, between the steeples and the gray of the overcast sky. The breeze came in from the harbor laden with salt and wildness. When she glanced to her right down those short streets that led to the waterfront Abigail could see the masts of vessels rocking at anchor, the surge and orderly confusion of stevedores and carters on the wharves. Coastal sloops and fishing-smacks at Burrell’s Wharf and Clark’s Wharf, unloading tobacco from the Virginia colony and the night’s catch from the harbor. Ahead of her she could see tall vessels from England tied up at Hancock’s Wharf, with all those things the mother country manufactured and the colonies were forbidden to produce.

Glass for windowpanes, porcelain dishes. Nails, scissors, bridle-bits, axheads, knives. Fabric—if one did not want to walk around in drab homespun or spend one’s days and nights at a parlor loom—and the thread and needles to sew it with; ribbons, corset-strings, hats. Sugar that had to be imported from England even though it was manufactured on this side of the Atlantic, in Barbados and Jamaica. Salt for preserving meat; mustard and pepper. Stays and buttons and shoe buckles, coffee and tea.

The colony must support the mother country
, the Tories said: timber and wheat, potash and salt fish.
Unnatural mother, who forbids her children to outgrow their leading-strings!
She could almost hear Rebecca saying it, on one of dozens of nights during the six months she’d lived with her and John after leaving Charles Malvern, sitting with them at the kitchen table at the white house on Brattle Street, while John “cooked up” his letters, articles, protests under a dozen different names.
What would you or any of your neighbors say of Abigail, sir, if she tried to keep Nabby or Johnny from learning to walk, to run, to one day take their place in the world of grown women and men?
And John had grinned at her and dipped his pen in the standish (that had been imported from England—the ink, too!) and had said,
That’s good . . . I’ll use that.

Her mind chased the thought back. Rebecca, still with Charles then, had been in that same kitchen with her in March of ’70, when shots had rung out in the snowy twilight. It was Rebecca who’d stayed with the children—Johnny had been three at the time, Nabby almost five—when Abigail, great with another child, had gone to the end of Brattle Street, and had seen the dead of what had come to be called the “Boston Massacre,” and the dark gouts of blood on the trampled snow.

Her second daughter—her poor, fragile Suky—had died, barely a year old, only the month before the Massacre. It was Rebecca who had comforted her, talked with her so many nights in that kitchen, when John was away at the distant courts or meeting with the Sons of Liberty—to Rebecca she had been able to say what she would not say to John for fear of opening the wounds of his own raw grief. When Charley was born at the end of that May after the Massacre, Rebecca had been there to care for the other two, and had stayed on until nearly October, before finding rooms of her own in the maze of crowded boardinghouses and tenements in the North End.