The Ninth Daughter (36 page)

“Is your mother feeling better?”

His jaw tightened so hard that she thought it must break itself, of its own strength.

“I’m sorry—”

“No, it’s nothing . . . There’s nothing, really, that can be done. I’ve tried to act for the best,” he went on, in a voice taut with frustration and pain. “But I can’t be two people! Sometimes I feel—” He shook his head violently. “And Mr. Adams—Mr. Sam Adams—is on me hammer and tongs about these pamphlets, and this broadside Mr. Revere is engraving. I know the case is urgent. Mother doesn’t understand—”

He stopped himself, took a breath, and with a gallant recovery of a normal tone of voice, and the actions of a man unsavaged by expectations beyond human accomplishment, flourished the market basket he’d brought. “Thank you for bringing food.” He set the basket on the sideboard beside his hat. “Did we dwell in Paradise and were Mother—were Mother as calm and saintly as yourself—Damnation would still be the worst cook in the civilized world. You have once again saved our lives. You have—”

Again he fumbled for words. “You have heard nothing?” In the gray windowlight she saw that he was unshaven, and his green eyes had a restless movement to them, like a man haunted by things that only he could see.

Abigail shook her head. It did not seem to be the time, to speak of Charles Malvern, of her own questions and doubts.
Time enough
, she thought,
when we know Rebecca will be alive to choose
. Only a monster would slam the door of hope on this overburdened young man and leave him in darkness with his nightmare. “You did not tell me you grew up in Gilead.”

He blinked, startled. “I didn’t know you’d ever heard of the place.”

“I was there—”

His eyes widened with alarm.
As well they might . . .

“Was your mother also the Chosen One’s bride?”

He sighed, and looked away. “Can you doubt it?”

“And that was why you fled?”

“Who can tell why one does what one does?” He made a helpless gesture. “I had to get out—had to get away. From her, from him . . . She said she would kill herself, if I ever left her. I knew she wouldn’t—” A wry grin twisted his mouth. “She loves herself far too well. But it was like cutting off my own arm, to leave her, even knowing her the way I do. And in the end I had to sneak away like a thief. I knew Bargest would look after her. It was almost a year, before one of his people here in town saw me, and wrote to him—to them—where I was.”

“His people?”

He sighed again. “Like Damnation. Like me. People who lived on Gilead, whom he can still command.” And seeing her raised brows, he asked more gently, “How do you think I could look after Mother, without his ordering Damnation to live here and help me? Say what you will about him, for better or for worse, he never leaves one of his people to make their way in the world unaided and alone.”

Not even Lucretia Hazlitt, reflected Abigail sadly. Even though her craziness had probably gone beyond what even the Gilead Congregation would put up with. She recalled those boarded-up houses, those shuttered upper stories. The place must have been much bigger, when little Orion and his mother—how old had he been then?—had come there, Lucretia afire with the words of the Chosen One, her “little King” dragged along by the hand. How many others, like Orion, had fled the community there? How many could the Hand of the Lord still call upon for service, here in Boston or in the communities along the bay?

Was it by his command that Orion had opened his house to his mother, despite what he knew it would cost him? Or had it been simply because she was his mother—because of that entangling love?

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and he shook his head again, and made a gesture of pushing some unseen thing away.

“ ’Tis all right. There’s naught to be done, and I’m used to her now. I can’t—” He rubbed his hand over his face, breathed in deep, and made a smile. “I keep thinking there was something else I could have done, but I don’t see what it is. Please don’t think ill of her.”

“No, of course not.”

“Tell Mr. Sam Adams that I’ll have his pamphlets done for him, right enough.” He bowed to her again, lifted his hat. “Now I must get back to her. She doesn’t do well alone.”

Abigail settled the pork and cabbage in the Dutch oven, ringed with potatoes, and buried the whole under shovelfuls of coals. The Reverend Bargest’s father had been a minister, too, she recalled one of her unwilling hosts saying at some point during her night’s stay—clearly one of those who’d believed in the spectral evidence of the devil’s presence in Salem—and she remembered wondering at the time what would become of those young girls she’d shared that cold attic bed with: illiterate as dogs and knowing nothing but labor on the farm, the emotional ecstasies of the House of Repentance, and the Prophet’s authority.

What was it Bess had said, in another context, a few days ago?
It is almost impossible to change one’s way of life . . .

She and Nabby were clearing up after dinner when Shim Walton appeared at the back door.

“Mrs. Adams,” he said worriedly as she stepped out into the bedsheet maze in the yard with him, “I remembered what you said, about not telling a soul, and I haven’t. But since I talked to Tim Flowers this morning—he’s the brother to Hap, that’s Mr. Tillet’s junior apprentice—I’ve been thinking about it, and thinking about it, and if you don’t tell someone I’m going to have to tell Mr. Butler. Because Tim says, that Hap says, that Mr. Tillet is keeping a lady locked up in his attic.”

Twenty-seven

Nehemiah Tillet’s brother-in-law was the magistrate of the Third Ward, and Abigail knew instinctively that he would speak to Tillet before paying a visit to the house.

Thus, Abigail wrote a note to Lieutenant Coldstone, and after a word with Mrs. Butler—Shim’s master being already gone to the ward meeting with John—she dispatched Shim to find a boat over to Castle Island. The boy was back in a few minutes, not much to Abigail’s surprise, considering how quickly dark was falling. With the onset of night, and the brisk wind now setting off the bay, no more boats were putting forth that day.

“But, m’am, they’re saying all along the wharf—and I could hear the men shouting about it in the taverns, too—that the other two East India Company ships have been sighted, the
Beaver
and the
Endeavor
. They’ll be at Griffin’s Wharf, they’re saying, with the flow of the tide.”

 

 

 

 

“
I
would not have believed it.” John held out his hands to the kitchen fire, rubbing them as if he’d never get his fingers warm again. Most of the household was abed. For an hour Abigail had waited up by the kitchen fire, listening to the monotonous tolling of the church bells that penetrated even the thick walls of the brick house. “Shall I write
Pamela
’s author a letter of apology?” He raised an eyebrow, which Abigail answered with a wry half smile as she brought up the bowl of bean soup that had been waiting for him on the hob.

“According to Shim—by way of poor little Hap—the south attic, whose window looks onto the alley, was unoccupied and used for storage until Thursday the twenty-fifth. The house was in an uproar that day, of course, with Coldstone and his henchmen questioning Mrs. Tillet, who returned with the luggage at about ten. Hap says, he thinks Mr. Tillet came in later, but he isn’t sure because everything was at sixes and sevens, but at about eleven Mr. Tillet suddenly came downstairs and asked what the commotion was.”

“Came
downstairs
?”

“As you say,” murmured Abigail. “Hap had just come into the front hall and saw his master come down the stairs and walk straight into the parlor, still in his travel clothes, cloak, and hat. He said, ‘See here, what’s going on?’ and said that he’d just then returned.”

“Whereas in fact he’d returned and gone upstairs—for how long, we don’t know.”

“The following day—the day that you and I spent most of kicking our heels outside Colonel Leslie’s door at Castle William—Hap was in the south wing of the house, where Mr. Tillet has his study, and heard what he thought were footfalls in the attic above. He’d just left both Tillet and Queenie downstairs, and of course being only a little boy—he’s nine, and young for his age I think—he immediately thought it was a ghost. He tiptoed up the attic stairs and found the door locked, which it wasn’t usually up until that time. But from that day the entire attic floor has been kept locked, with only Queenie keeping the key.”

“At least your blameless imbecile Pamela was permitted to go about Mr. B’s house.” Despite his jocular tone, in the firelight John’s eyes were grave. He set the empty soup bowl on the hearth beside him, stared for a time into the low-burning flame. “Madness of a different sort,” he murmured after a time. “And one more difficult to prove, than the kind that carves people up with knives.”

“As you say.” Abigail thrust the poker beneath the logs, sending up a shower of sparks. She would have returned to the settle where she had been, but John put an arm around her waist, drew her to his knee. “Someone—probably this second lover of Mrs. Pentyre’s, but just possibly Richard Pentyre himself—forced the alley window of Rebecca’s house just after the rain began—possibly while Rebecca herself was at the front door asking Queenie just what she was doing lingering by the yard gate. The intruder knew the code and knew that Mrs. Pentyre would be at the house at midnight. When Rebecca came back into the house he struck her over the head, bound her, put her in her bedroom—the best evidence we have, I think, that he had heard about the two murders in ’72, but was not the killer.”

“Were the shutters barred or unbarred?”

“Unbarred, I think they must have been at that point. If Rebecca had sewing to do, or correcting proofs of the Hand of the Lord’s wretched sermons, she would still have been awake when the rain began. He tied the bedroom door shut, then waited downstairs for Mrs. Pentyre to arrive. Rebecca came to her senses, managed to get the scissors from her sewing basket, cut her bonds if she was tied, and got the door open sufficiently to allow her to saw through the rope that held it shut. The murder must have been taking place in the kitchen when Rebecca slipped downstairs. She fled to the Tillet house, quite possibly only semiconscious from her head wound. Queenie let her in, and Rebecca may very well have muttered something about ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ because she remembered that she hadn’t concealed her book of contacts. Queenie got her up to the south attic where she lost consciousness.”

“And this wretch of a cook wouldn’t have spoken even to you, whom she knows to be Rebecca’s closest friend, when she saw you at Rebecca’s door next morning?”

“At all events she
didn’t
,” said Abigail. “If Rebecca were groggy she may very well have begged Queenie to tell no one, and Queenie took her at her word. Then, too, Queenie may have made up her mind to have a look through the place herself before telling anyone anything.”

“Was there any evidence she’d done so before you, Sam, and Sam’s jolly henchmen returned to completely obfuscate any sign of who the killer might have been?”

“I saw none, but then, I was so shaken by what I’d seen that I may well have missed something. Then, too, the family was due back that day. If I know Queenie, the Tillet house hadn’t been properly cleaned since they’d left for Medford, and it was market day into the bargain. She could well have gone to the market while we four were at the house, and returned just in time to have Sam and the others ‘call on Rebecca’ so that they all went in and ‘discov ered’ the corpse in the bed where Sam had left it.”

“And still didn’t tell Sam or the Watch.”

“That all depends on what Rebecca said to her,” said Abigail. “And what she thought she could make out of the matter. The fact remains that when the Tillets returned to find the Watch and the Provost Marshal’s men going over Rebecca’s house and questioning the servants, Queenie
did
confide in her mistress, who sent Mr. Tillet upstairs at once to investigate. She herself—Mrs. Tillet, I mean—strode in and claimed to Coldstone that she had just arrived with the luggage, and Mr. Tillet would be along shortly.”

“And Mr. Tillet—or more likely Mrs. Tillet—decided that as long as Rebecca Malvern had disappeared without a trace, now might be an excellent time to acquire a permanent sewing woman who had no family and very few friends to inquire as to her whereabouts?”

Something in his voice made Abigail ask flatly, “You think it’s absurd, don’t you?”

“Actually,” said John, “I don’t.” He shifted her weight on his lap, dug in his pocket for pipe and tobacco. “Your father’s parish at Weymouth is in a long-settled and peaceable town—”

“
Hmph
. You weren’t there for the last uproar by those who don’t approve of his views on Arminianism.”

“Well, at least your neighbors are a fairly civilized crew. I’ve been trying cases for years in the backwoods circuit courts, in Essex and Worcester and on up into Maine. And you do find men—mostly in isolated settlements, isolated farms—who consider themselves perfectly justified in all kinds of outrageous behavior, that somehow always redounds to their material benefit: keeping sons and daughters as virtual indentured servants; robbing and killing Indians and kidnapping their children to raise in kennels like dogs . . . sometimes taking multiple wives, like your friend the Hand of the Lord, because God told them they might.”