The Ninth Daughter (6 page)

And then
, thought Abigail, as she turned into the waterfront bustle of Merchants’ Row,
there was the matter of Rebecca’s father’s will
.

It was the last occasion upon which she—or as far as she knew, Rebecca—had seen Charles Malvern, except to catch a glimpse of him across the sanctuary of the Brattle Street Meeting-House.

Abigail slowed her steps as she passed the Malvern countinghouse, at the head of his wharf. Not a grand wharf, like Hancock’s, or the marvel of the Long Wharf that stretched half a mile out to sea, but big enough to serve either of Malvern’s oceangoing brigs. The
Fair Althea
stood in port, named for the woman Abigail suspected its owner had never forgiven Rebecca for replacing. Malvern had rebuilt the countinghouse at the wharf’s head, on the site of his grandfather’s original modest structure: two and a half stories of solid Maine timber, with a warehouse behind it for muslins and calicoes, tool-steel and paint.

The tide was out. The sloping shingle below street level was dotted with heaped boxes, rough drays, coils of rope, and wet-dark cargo nets spread to dry. At the nearby Woodman’s Wharf a vessel was loading with kegs of what smelled like potash, stevedores shouting to one another as they worked. Beyond lay the leafless forest of bobbing masts, and the cold air muttered with the creak of ropes, the endless soft knocking of pulley blocks against the mast-wood. The world smelled of seaweed and wet rope. Wind smote her, but it was not colder than Charles Malvern’s wrinkled angry countenance and pale eyes, when last she, and Rebecca, and John had stood before him.

“By the terms of James Woodruff’s will, I am executor of that property.” Malvern had spoken to John, not to Rebecca, his square brown hands folded ungivingly on his desk. The merchant was even shorter than John, and though now in his midfifties, and wiry in build, gave an impression of tremendous, almost threatening, physical strength. His merchant father had sent him to sea in his youth, and he retained the hardness of a man who has had to impose his will by force on other men in order to survive. “It was made over to me as Rebecca’s husband—”

She heard the pause before her friend’s name, heard in that harsh cracked voice the refusal to call her
Mrs. Malvern
. Mrs. Malvern was and forever would be the woman he had lost.

“—and she has but to give over her present mode of life, to regain its use. To hand property to a woman who has forsaken her husband to live upon the town would do neither her nor the community any service, and would provide the worst sort of example.”

“To whom, sir?” demanded Abigail hotly. “To other wives who find it not to their taste to have communications with their families forbidden? Who don’t care to be imprisoned like felons for weeks at a time or to have their books burned and rooms searched?”

“Precisely, Madame,” Malvern had replied. “If my wife cannot tolerate my attempts to better her, but would flee the lesson like a fractious child, then shame upon her as well as upon myself. If I keep watch upon her it is because she has lied to me, both about her faith and about the conduct of my first wife’s children, to whom she has shown nothing but dissembled hatred since first she entered my house. I defy the law, or any man of business, to fault me in separating her from her family, after she has robbed me and given the money to them—to purchase the property whose income she now claims as her own.”

“That is not true!” Rebecca rose, stepped to the desk before which John already stood. It had been early December, as bleak as it was today, and with the smell of snow in the air. Abigail recalled, as much as the interview itself, how cramped and stuffy the little office had felt, and how intrusive had been the noise of the wharves and the street outside, after a year and a half of the farm’s slow-paced peace. “That land was my father’s,” Rebecca said. “And his father’s, before that—”

“Which would have been sold to pay your father’s debts,” responded Malvern, “had you not helped yourself to the household money entrusted to you, and pledged my good name in a loan, to salvage it. And if your client”—here he had turned his bitter pale eyes back to John—“wishes those facts to be aired at large before the General Court of the colony, along with her father’s will, which clearly places the property in my hands in trust for her
as my wife
, I will certainly oblige her and you, Mr. Adams, by so doing. In the meantime she has but to return to my roof, to fulfill her own portion of a contract of which she is now in violation.”

Tears glittering sharply in her brown eyes, Rebecca had said, “I would sooner take up my abode in Hell.”

The following week, Abigail recalled, two clients—both merchants connected with Malvern—had withdrawn their business from John, even as John had lost half a dozen during the months that Rebecca had lived beneath their roof.

 

 

 

 

T
he Malvern house, like the countinghouse, was solid. Modest in its way, it had clearly been built to proclaim the extent to which God had favored the endeavors of the family. Three stories high, it was fashioned of both timber and bricks, and kept the old diamond-glass windows of an earlier day. As Abigail approached it a carriage was brought to its door, and the two surviving Malvern children emerged, followed by a black manservant and Miss Malvern’s plump, giggling maid.
They lie about me to their father
, Rebecca had whispered desperately.
They carry tales—terrible things!—and he believes them . . .

And what parent would take the word of a new young wife, before that of his own daughter and son?

Jeffrey must be twenty now. From the opposite side of King Street Abigail watched them. Rebecca had written to her that the young man had begun at Harvard. Taller than his father, he favored the first Mrs. Malvern’s pale beauty, especially when he threw back his head and laughed at one of the maid’s flirtatious sallies. Mistress Tamar Malvern tapped her brother sharply on the sleeve with her fan, but laughed as well. From a sharp-faced little vixen of eleven when her father had married Rebecca, she had grown into a lovely peaches-and-cream brunette, with the air of a girl who is quite aware that men swoon at her feet. Neither gave the manservant so much as a glance as he opened the carriage door for them. The servant stepped back sharply to avoid being splashed as the carriage pulled away.

“Mrs. Adams.” He saw her across the street and smiled, teeth very white in a fine-boned ebony face. His name, Abigail recalled, was Scipio; he’d greet her with his sunny smile at the Brattle Street Meeting, if he was sure his master wasn’t looking. Sure enough, he glanced back at the house as if to make sure he was unobserved before crossing to her. “Are you well, m’am? And Mrs. Malvern: Is all well with her?”

“No,” said Abigail softly. “I am sorry to say a shocking thing has happened, and I was coming now, to let your master know of it. As far as I know she’s all right,” she added, seeing how the man’s eyes widened with alarm. “It wouldn’t be right to tell you details before I’ve spoken to him—”

“No, of course not.” He collected himself quickly, hastened ahead of her, to open the house door. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

No fire burned in the grate of the book-room where he left her, though there were Turkey carpets on the brick floor. Charles Malvern was not a man to heat rooms when they were not in use. A portrait of the Fair Althea hung on the wall, very like Jeffrey but with kindliness rather than wit in her smile. Beside it hung a painting of Tamar, done recently, where once Rebecca’s pen-sketch of little Nathan had been displayed: the child whose birth had cost his mother her life. Abigail remembered that Nathan had been fascinated with it, had sat, too, looking up at the likeness of the mother he had never seen. The sketch was gone. Abigail wondered whether Malvern had disposed of it when Rebecca had left, or after the boy had died.

“Mrs. Adams?” Scipio reappeared in the doorway, to usher her across the hall.

“Good day to you, m’am.” Charles Malvern rose from his desk when the butler admitted her, came around himself to bring up a chair. His wide-skirted dark coat and plain Ramilles wig were not one shilling more costly than they had to be, to let others know of his consequence in the world of trade and business. Their former encounter and her championship of his estranged wife flickered like malign fire in his eyes, but he asked politely, “Will you take tea? ’Tis a raw morning.”

“Thank you, no.” Any number of Abigail’s friends observed the boycott but made it a point to call on their less political friends for a cup of Hyson or Bohea in the course of a cold afternoon. That, in Abigail’s opinion, was cheating.

He didn’t offer the acceptable Whig alternative of coffee, but signed Scipio from the room. “To what do I owe this honor, m’am?”

“A shocking thing has happened.” He was walking back around his desk as she spoke, and Abigail couldn’t keep herself from waiting until she had a good view of his face, to see how he would take the news. “There was a murder done last night, at the house where Mrs. Malvern is now living—”

He turned back, eyes flaring, as Scipio’s had, and she saw in them for one second not just surprise, but apprehension and even fear. She went on swiftly, “A woman: We don’t know who.”

“Not Mrs. Malvern?” That first instant’s horror—like the echo of her own cry,
Not Rebecca!
—disappeared and was replaced by suspicion: the wary anger of a man who has been cheated by a mountebank, and looks out lest he be cheated again.

“No. But Mrs. Malvern has disappeared—”

“Has she?” He settled back in his chair, and his voice was dry again. “I daresay she’s run to that heretic printer my daughter tells me she’s dallying with.”

“If it is Mr. Hazlitt you mean,” said Abigail, feeling the blood rising in her cheeks, “I have come from there just now.”
Heretic
, in Charles Malvern’s mental lexicon, meant, Abigail knew, anyone of less than stringently double predestinarian Calvinist belief. Even a convert, like Orion Hazlitt, from a less doctrinaire sect was forever suspect, much less a former Catholic like Rebecca. “Inasmuch as she has assisted him with the text of the sermons he is printing—”

“Sermons forsooth!” He almost spit the words at her. “By whom? One of those lying unbelievers at the New Brick Meeting-House? What woman was killed? How did she come into the house, if not for ill purposes? And at night, you say? Was she another like my wife, who’d go about the town alone—?”

“We don’t know,” repeated Abigail, seeing the seamed little face opposite her darkening a dangerous crimson with rage. “She was found in Rebecca’s”—she bit back the word
kitchen
, remembering that she was only supposed to have this from hearsay, and finished—“house this morning, slashed to death, and used most horribly.”

“Then she had her deserving.” Malvern almost shouted the words at her. “If she was one of Sam Adams’s gang of traitors. A trollop, as they’d have Rebecca be, for their dirty sakes. Belike it was one of them that did the murder—”

“I don’t think so.” Abigail fought to keep her own temper under control. “I’m trying to find who she was—”

“Why ask me, then? That lying Papist turned her back on any decent females she knew when she left this house, and the truly decent ones turned their backs on her. Surely
you
would know, her dear good friend, her
almost-sister
,
her only true friend in the world . . .”

He is jealous of you
, Rebecca had said, on another of those occasions when she had sneaked from her husband’s house, to take refuge in Abigail’s kitchen.
Of my father, of the secrets I tell my maid. Even of little Nathan. He wants me to be his completely . . .

“But, I do not,” said Abigail, keeping her voice level with an effort. “And I doubt you would say this woman had her deserving, if you—” She bit off her words once more.
You weren’t there . . .

“If I what?” shouted Malvern. “If I were willing to wink at treason, at sedition, at the creatures your husband and his cousin play upon to get their way? Don’t tell me she wasn’t hand in glove with these Sons of Liberty—Sons of Belial, more like! You ask your husband, if you want to know who this bitch was that was murdered, or where my wife might have run off to. And so I’ll tell the Watch, when they come—if they come, and this isn’t all another of Sam Adams’s lies. And as for you, Mrs. Adams, shame on you, a mother of children, and shame on your husband for permitting you to walk about the town like the harlot of the Scripture:
Now is she without, and now in the streets . . . her feet go down to hell
. To Hell is where you have led my wife, Mrs. Adams, in dragging her into the affairs of your so-called friends. And for that I will never forgive you, or them. Now get out of my house.”

 

 

 

 

S
cipio whispered, “What happened?” as he emerged from the book-room, to escort her to the door.

In the study, Malvern’s voice bellowed, “Scipio!” and the butler flinched.

“Mrs. Malvern has disappeared,” replied Abigail swiftly, softly—knowing the master’s wrath would descend on the slave’s head if Scipio were one moment late in answering, or if the merchant so much as suspected the butler had spoken with his dishonored guest. “Where would she go, if she sought refuge? To her maidservant? She left Boston, didn’t she? Catherine, I mean—”

“She did—”

“Scipio, get in here, damn you!”

“She might. It’s a long way, I don’t know the name of the place but I’ll—”

The study door slammed open. Impassive, Scipio opened the outer door for Abigail, held himself straight and correct as she passed through. Only when Abigail glanced back over her shoulder as the door was closing, did she see Charles Malvern seize his slave by the shoulder of his coat and thrust him back against the wall, and strike him with the back of his hand across the face.

Six