The Ninth Daughter (27 page)

“
And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and ra . . . ra-i
”—“Raiment,” whispered Nabby at his side—“
and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace; then shall the Lord be my God: and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house, and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.
”

But it cut both ways, she reflected, her mind straying, yet again, from her son’s childish drone. Now more than ever, Colonel Leslie and the Provost Marshal would be seeking a reason to arrest John—and any other Sons of Liberty they could prove were in collusion with him—for a shocking murder, rather than for standing up for the rights of colonial Englishmen.

“That’s very good, Johnny.” Abigail set aside the shirt she was working on, helped the boy close the heavy book.

“Ma, would God really have forgiven Jacob for cheating his brother, just because Jacob promised him back a tenth of what God gave him?” Johnny sounded worried. “Didn’t God love Esau and Jacob the same?”

“Later on, Jacob cheated his uncle Laban, too,” added Nabby.

Abigail was still disposing of this piece of divine favoritism—not to say bribery—when she heard footsteps in the yard. The door opened to reveal John, with Sam at his side. Her eyes went to the clock—shocked—Yes, it really was half past eight—and she got quickly to her feet. John’s lips were cold as marble, his mantle flecked with the last of the rain. “Now, it’s past time you children should be in bed,” she said, as Johnny and Nabby threw themselves on their father and their uncle Sam. “You may ask your father about Jacob tomorrow,” she added, since the six-year-old showed signs of opening the subject with a more satisfactory authority: understandable, given that, like the much-put-upon Esau, he was the firstborn son. “Now—hot bricks!”

These Pattie had ready by the hearth, each wrapped in layers of towels. Abigail collected a candle from the sideboard, lit it at the work-candles on the table, woke the sleepy Charley from the settle where he’d been curled up, and gathered Tommy from his crib. She kept her voice cheerful, though Sam looked grim and John looked troubled: It was one of her foremost rules of the household, that though politics might be argued and the iniquities of the King freely aired, the darker matters of the Sons of Liberty must be kept separate from these four little souls whom God had elected to launch on their childhoods during this confusing era.

Only when she came down to the kitchen again did she ask, “Sam, what brings you here tonight?”

Sam glanced at John, who looked aside, being a firm believer in letting people fight their own battles. Sam, Abigail had noticed over the years, had a habit of getting between Bess and anyone who wanted to have words with her. She didn’t know whether this was because he considered Bess his property, or because he liked to control the flow of information, and edit it if necessary for the good of all concerned. Taking John’s silence as tacit permission, Sam turned back to Abigail and said, “You do, I’m afraid.”

John sat down on the settle where Charley had been sleeping, and picked up the nearest book, which Abigail had been reading earlier in the day. Had the rest of the house not been freezing he would have left the room. Sam clearly waited for either John or Abigail to make some remark, and when neither did, went on grimly, “John tells me you’re going to Castle Island tomorrow, under the auspices of the British Provost Marshal.”

“Corrupting his servants was proving rather costly, I’m afraid, so I thought I should save money by making my inquiries direct.”

“What have you told that Lieutenant?”

“Nothing,” said Abigail.

“You’re sure of that, are you?”

She folded her arms. “Obviously, not having been party to any of my conversations with him, you’re not.”

Sam’s face seemed to darken in the flickering light. “You’re not to go.”

“Ah,” said Abigail in an enlightened voice. “You know where Rebecca is, then. I must say, that relieves my mind—”

“Don’t you be pert with me, Nab—”

“And don’t you be bossy with me,” she returned. “I’m trying to save a woman who is almost certainly in appalling peril—”

“And I’m trying to save the liberties of our country. Something I think you’re in danger of forgetting.”

“Not at all,” responded Abigail. “And the reason we seek to retain our liberties, is so that the life of a single individual—even if she
is
a
mere woman
—does not get snuffed out or thrust aside because it isn’t expedient for those in charge to take the time to save her.”

Sam opened his mouth, glanced sidelong at John—his nose still in
Pamela
and giving no sign of having heard a word—and seemed to settle a little, like oatmeal taken off the boil. Very quietly, he said, “I have had every patriot in this town searching for her, for seven days now. Cellars, attics, warehouses . . . smuggler hidey-holes and the hulls of ruined ships. You forget that we’re not only hunting for Mrs. Malvern: We’re searching for the book that contains our codes and ciphers, and the lists of our contacts in other colonies where we are perhaps not strong enough to protect those the British would seek to arrest.”

“I don’t forget.”

“If you haven’t forgotten, then you’re a fool,” Sam gritted. “You don’t think that every time you open your mouth around that lobsterback pretty boy of yours he isn’t noting down every word and fitting them together like pieces of a mosaic? He only waits until he has a picture complete, to charge me or Hancock or John over there with that murder, or with complicity in covering it up. Do you want the Tories putting it around that John or myself will be hanged not for fighting for our liberties, not for standing up against a monstrous attempt to make the whole of these colonies the personal fiefdom of a fat German princeling, but for murdering a woman of our own organization who disagreed with us?”

Abigail looked aside.

“Now Bess tells me you’ve been asking questions about Abednego Sellars, of all people—”

“Who held a grudge against Richard Pentyre.”

“Then why didn’t he murder Pentyre?”

“Why would he have—might he have—murdered a woman in precisely this same hideous fashion fourteen months ago in the North End, a woman he claimed was a witch—”

“Now you are insane.” Sam’s hand struck flat-palmed on the top of the sideboard next to her, a crack that made her flinch but did not cause John to stir a hair. “You’re accusing everyone, casting about at random, muddying the waters, and putting us all in peril. I forbid you to go.”

“And I defy you to stay me,” retorted Abigail.

“And I forbid you to make any inquiry, or put about the slightest suggestion, that any Son of Liberty might have had the slightest involvement in, or knowledge of, Mrs. Pentyre’s death! Good God, woman, that’s all we’d need, at a time like this!”

“A time like this,” said Abigail, her voice suddenly deadly quiet, “is the time—eight days—that a woman who is my friend, a woman who helped me through a time of grievous pain, is . . . somewhere. Somewhere that your smugglers and patriots and South End boys have not been able to discover,
if
they have been searching as hard as you say they have and not attending your meetings and carrying pamphlets to every village and town in riding distance to protest against the landing of a cargo of tea. You can’t have it both ways, Sam. Either Rebecca is in hiding with the ciphers in her possession, and afraid to contact the Sons of Liberty for reasons I will leave
you
to conjecture . . . or she is dead at the bottom of the bay and the ciphers are in the killer’s possession, and have been so for a week. Either a woman’s life is more important to you than ninety thousand dollars’ worth of tea, or it isn’t.”

“I forbid you to go!” thundered Sam, and turned back to the fire. “John, I order you to bridle this wife of yours and keep her from interfering, either with our own men or with that damned cold-faced Provost! I will not have our endeavor jeopardized, and I warn you, John, kin or not, I’ll take whatever steps I need!”

And snatching up his hat and cloak from the sideboard, he strode to the door, and vanished into the night.

Twenty

“Pa! Mrs. Adams is here.”

“I know fifteen Mrs. Adamses.” Paul Revere grinned, emerging in his shirtsleeves from the back room of his shop, an apron around his waist. “Yet somehow, I knew it would be you, m’am.” He winked at his son behind the counter, stepped aside to let Abigail past him, into the wide-windowed little workshop with its shelves and tools and blocks of wax.

“Because Sam has ordered you not to speak to me?”

“Of course. I have tea here—” The kettle was hissing and muttering to itself on the edge of a small forge near the back door. No need to ask whether so much as a farthing’s tax had been paid on it. “What do you need to know?”

It was midmorning, and wind blew icy across the harbor, rattling gently at the windows that formed a band of grayish light, halfway round the workroom. Abigail prayed it would grow less by three, when—with luck—Lieutenant Coldstone would meet her at Rowe’s Wharf. Even now it wasn’t bad enough to keep boats from passing over to the Island, but her stomach did anticipatory flip-flops at the thought of being on the water in such weather. “Were you acquainted with a woman named Jenny Barry?”

He started to make a good-natured grimace, a comment on the dead woman’s way of life: then she saw in quick succession recollection, angry horror, and sudden speculation fleet across his dark eyes at the name. “She was killed—” he began, and Abigail finished for him, “—eighteen months ago, give or take. Her body was slashed—”

“—like Mrs. Pentyre’s, after she was dead. Yes. I knew there was something . . . Another woman was killed that same summer, Zulie Fishwire—” His dark brows knit sharply down over his nose.

“I went to her house the day before yesterday,” said Abigail. “Spoke with her neighbors, which apparently the local constables barely troubled themselves to do at the time. Did you see either of their bodies?”

“I don’t live in that ward.” Revere shook his head. “I heard of them, of course. Everyone in the neighborhood did. There was a scare, but it seemed to come to nothing after all but tavern-shouting and vows to protect wives and daughters.” He made a little space on the table that occupied most of that room to set a teacup before her, then sank into his barrel-chair. On the table between them Abigail saw pamphlets, engraving plates and tools, sketches of the
Dartmouth
at anchor on Griffin’s Wharf. On a shelf above them a half-finished set of dentures grinned, discolored ivory in silver wire. Abigail felt a pang of gratitude that even the bearing of five children had left her with her teeth intact.

“You think it was the same man?”

“I don’t know,” said Abigail. She told him of her words with Coldstone, of the help Malvern had given her, and the accounts of Zulieka Fishwire’s neighbors. “Sometimes it looks to me like the act of a lunatic, and at others, like a cold-blooded crime masquing as one.”

“Why the delay?” he asked. “Zulie Fishwire was killed—what? A year ago last September? If it is the same man, why did he stop? And why did he start again?”

“I thought he might have left Boston and come back. If he were a sailor on a deepwater vessel, for instance, or a whaler. Lieutenant Coldstone is writing to the authorities in Philadelphia and New York. John says he thinks the note we found in Mrs. Pentyre’s pocket, arranging the meeting, is a forgery, but whether that means the killer is in the Sons, or Mrs. Pentyre had simply given him the code for another reason, or whether he just had access to her correspondence, I don’t know.”

Quickly, she sketched out to him all that Lisette Droux had told her about the young gentleman,
beau comme Adonais
, and what the inhabitants of Love Lane had had to say about Abednego Sellars. “I suppose it would lie beyond the bounds of coincidence for him to be Mrs. Pentyre’s mysterious lover—”

“Not unless Mademoiselle Droux is singularly desperate or singularly blind,” put in Revere. “Abed is a well-looking man—and God only knows what women see in any man—but
beau comme Adonais
? Never.” He shook his head. “And yet—he’s never been the same, since word came to him of Davy’s death. In the time between their getting word that he’d been pressed into the Navy, and word of his death—over a year, that was—he was . . . I feared he’d go out of his senses. I think it was that, put a wedge between himself and Penelope. He’d take out his rage on her, then go try to drink himself unconscious, and all the while keeping up his position in the church, and running his business.” He fell silent, and a muscle in his temple stood out, with the clench of his jaw.

In time he said, “He was one of the constables of the Cornhill Ward, during the summer of ’72. He would have heard the details of the other murders. And,” he added with a sigh, “he was in town the night of the twenty-fourth, for all his prentice-boy said he was in Cambridge. I know, because I saw him, drinking at the Green Dragon.”