The Ninth Daughter (40 page)

She folded up both notes. She was almost surprised, to see her yard with its mazes of clothes-ropes exactly as it had been five minutes before. “Can you read, Sergeant Muldoon?” she inquired in her sweetest voice.

“Oh, not me, m’am. I can put me name good and proper, but more’n that our priest never did manage to teach me.”

“Hmm,” said Abigail. “Well, Lieutenant Coldstone writes here that you are to disregard all former orders to you, and accompany me. You and I are going on a little journey.”

They spent the night in Salem. The modern seaport town had had little to do with the witchcraft trials that had spread over Essex County like a poison-rash not quite eighty years before. “They weren’t in this town at all, then?” Sergeant Muldoon sounded disappointed.

Rain rattled the darkening casements of Purley’s Tavern, as Mrs. Purley—who always reminded Abigail of a dried apple-doll—set before them a dish of stew and a fresh-baked loaf of bread. Wind shrieked around the eaves. Abigail gratefully drank the landlady’s excellent cider, feeling that she would never get warm again.

“There may have been one or two here, once the accusations were started,” she said. “When people found they could accuse their personal enemies of sending out their spirits to do evil, when the accused themselves were demonstrably elsewhere, a great many found they knew people who
must
be witches . . . But the accusations themselves began in Salem
Village
, about eight miles west of here. They changed the name of that settlement to Danvers.”

“I can see why they’d do.” The young man shook his head, and mopped busily at the gravy. The men at the other table—clerks and supercargoes, they looked like, from one of the many ships at anchor—burst into talk and laughter over some witticism, their voices loud in the ordinary-room that had no other customers. After a time he asked, “ ’Tis what this Hand of the Lord told this Hazlitt, then, isn’t it? That Mrs. Pentyre was a witch, and had sent her spirit to do some wicked thing?”

“I think he must have. Or something very like it.” Abigail glanced at the window as the wind shook it again, praying at every moment that each sound was John—with a suitable troop of Sons of Liberty at his back—coming to her assistance. “Mrs. Pentyre and her husband, who evilly contested God’s will that had given the land to the Gilead Congregation. How could such ill-intentioned people not be in league with the Devil?”

Muldoon said, “T’cha!” and reached for another hunk of bread with an enthusiasm that gave Abigail a very bad impression of His Majesty’s generosity to his servants. “Sounds like me Aunt Bridget,” he added. “She’s got it well in her head, that the Divil’s got naught to do but spend his days urgin’ folks on to make her life harder for her. Says she can see him, in the shape of a black bird, or a black cat, or sometimes a spider, whisperin’ in the ear of Grinder Givern—that’s our landlord’s rent-agent—or Mrs. O’Toole the tavern keeper’s wife, just before they go ask her to pay up her bills or whate’er it is that she’s diviled about that day. She’s still got friends that believe her, mostly ’cause she tells them she sees the Divil urgin’ on folks to make
their
lives miserable, too, but mostly in Ballyseigh—that’s home—they just say, ‘Well, there’s Bridget Muldoon on a tear again.’ She’s never told any to go do no murder.”

He shrugged back his cloak in the warmth of the hearth, and one or two of the men who shared the ordinary-room with them glanced warily at his red coat. He had accepted Abigail’s assurance that Coldstone’s note to her was in fact orders to him to accompany her and obey her commands, and didn’t seem in the least troubled by the fact that the whole northeast section of Massachusetts had for two weeks been flooded with pamphlets describing the British troops as murderers intent upon enslaving the population in the name of the King.
No imagination
? she wondered. Or simply a stolid sense of duty as unshakeable as Coldstone’s own. Perhaps the fact that he was alone—and clearly acting the role of bodyguard to a civilian woman—lessened the chances of random assault, but Abigail was very aware of being watched, and undoubtedly discussed in whispers in the shadows of the ill-lit inn.

“Bein’ that the Hand of the Lord did tell him,” he went on after a worried silence, “sure and he didn’t tell him to . . . to cut her up the way he did, and all the rest of it. He wouldn’t have told him
that
.”

“I’m sure he did not.” Abigail put her hands around her mug of cider, slowly feeling the warmth returning to them. “Being unable to see beyond his own vanity, to the point of madness, himself, I’m sure it never crossed his mind that a man who is mad cannot control the shape his madness takes, nor when it will seize on him.”

She was silent a moment, remembering a man named James Otis—a great thinker, a great organizer, a pillar of the Sons of Liberty, who had slowly gone mad as a bedbug. His sister—to whom Abigail still wrote—had spoken to her of his torments, knowing that he could no longer be trusted, of her wretchedness at watching that brilliant mind eclipsed, and knowing that there was nothing anyone could do to save him.

When Orion is sane
, she wondered,
does he know that he’s mad
?

When Muldoon excused himself to her and rose, and crossed to the other table to make the acquaintance of the men with whom he’d share one of the beds in the big chamber upstairs that night, Abigail sat for a time in thought. She should, she knew, put in a half hour with quill and paper, composing orders purportedly from Lieutenant Coldstone to Sergeant Muldoon instructing him to go where she told him and do what she said, in case it later occurred to him to ask someone else to verify the document she’d shown him.

Instead, when Mrs. Purley came in with another pitcher of steaming cider, Abigail beckoned her. “My dear, I hope that soldier with you doesn’t mean your Mr. Adams is still in trouble with His Majesty?” said the innkeeper’s wife softly. “What a
fuss
they made, over that horse he left here lame—and by the by, Mr. Thaxter left his pipe here on accident when he came to fetch the beast, and we’ve got it saved for him in the pantry—”

“Thank you.” Abigail smiled, and clasped the woman’s hand. She’d become well acquainted with Mrs. Purley in the years that her own sister Mary and her husband had lived in Salem. “Remind me of it tomorrow . . . And no, all is well, Sergeant Muldoon is inquiring after another matter . . . Would
you
know,” she asked artlessly, “the name of that girl who was slashed to death so horribly, about ten years ago out toward Townsend?”

1763—or thereabouts—was, she knew, the year that Orion Hazlitt had come to Boston.

Jemma Purley’s round face clouded, and Abigail knew before she spoke, that she was right.

But Mrs. Purley asked, “Which one?” and Abigail stared at her, aghast.

“There was more than one?”

“Oh, dear, yes.” Mrs. Purley set down her pitcher, dried her hands in her apron as she looked down at Abigail with sorrow and anger in her eyes. “The one from Gilead, we only heard rumor of: Those Gilead folks has always kept their doings to themselves. Purley says, nobody would ever have heard of it at all, except for it being Rose of Sharon Topsford that found the body, and the poor thing has never been quite right after that, seeing what had been done to the girl. But Frankincense Banister—” She shook her head. “It doesn’t do to speak ill of the dead, and whatever the poor girl’s failings—and it
was
only foolishness, and having her head turned, so pretty as she was—the way she would flirt, and with boys she didn’t know well, we were all afraid she’d find herself in trouble one day, though of course no one expected . . . Is that who you meant?”

“Yes,” said Abigail tonelessly. “I-I knew it was some name of the kind. From a farm, wasn’t she? Near Wenham?”

“A few miles south of Wenham Pond, yes.”

Within a few miles of Gilead.

“And did anyone try bearding that wretch Bargest in his den about it?”

At the mention of the Hand of the Lord, Mrs. Purley’s mouth tightened up. “Well, as I recall it, every single one of his flock was accounted for, the day the poor girl disappeared. But there’s more than one hereabouts, who’ll be pleased when that court case is resolved, and those Boston folks that own that land put the sheriffs onto them and turn them out. Their title’s no good to about three quarters of their fields,” she added, in reply to Abigail’s inquiring look—though in fact Abigail had ascertained nearly as much from Penelope Sellars before leaving Boston. “The case has been dragging on for years, with some Boston merchant whose mother was old Antoninus Sellars’s grand-daughter—
and
who’s put the sheriffs onto old Bargest’s ‘Chosen Brides.’ A disgrace, the lot of them.” She shook her head.

 

 

 

 

N
o other women were traveling abroad that dismal night, so Abigail had the smaller upstairs chamber and its cold—but dry, aired, and bug-free—bed to herself. There was even a small fire in its fireplace. She wrote out the orders from Coldstone to Muldoon, then blew out her candle and lay awake, listening for horses in the court beneath the drumming of the rain.

Though rain, and wind, and the rattling of the window sash were all the sounds that broke the deep stillness, she dreamed of church bells.

Thirty

In darkness she woke—with the instincts of one who has milked cows for most of her thirty years—and in darkness dressed. Downstairs she heard the small sounds of the inn servants making fires, tidying the ordinary, taking bread from the oven.

The wind was less; the rain had ceased. Abigail’s bones ached with the damp.

You will
not
be sick
, she told herself firmly. Descending to the ordinary, she congratulated herself that she’d written a note to John and his reinforcements last night, while she still had candles and the room was still warm enough that she could hold a pen.

Male voices drifted up the stairway, and for one moment her heart gave a leap. But of course it was only Muldoon and the other male guests, consuming bread and cheese and joking one another about who snored and whose names got amorously murmured in sleep.