The Ninth Daughter aam-1

by Barbara Hamilton

  Outside, a child shouted something, and a man’s voice reproved: “Hush, there, Shimmi, we’re not here to make trouble . . .”

  And the voice of the guard, “And what are you here for, then, Rebel?”

  Coldstone, interrupted in the midst of his reply, frowned. As he walked to the window John stepped closer to Abigail’s side, stage-whispered, “You’d price Johnny at thirty pounds?”

  She shrugged, never taking her eyes from the officer’s crimson back as he angled his head to look through the thick panes into the street. “We’ve two other sons.”

  Coldstone looked back sharply over his shoulder at them, narrow face expressionless. Then he stalked to the table, where his sabertache lay, and from it withdrew a sheet of paper. Abigail helpfully fetched her writing box from where it lay on a corner of the mantelpiece, and set it before him. The officer regarded her in hostile silence, then took the quill she offered him, studied the point critically, adjusted it with his penknife, and wrote:

  Mr. John Adams, lawyer, of Queen Street, Boston, is hereby summoned to appear before the Provost Marshal of His Majesty’s forces at Castle William on Friday, 25 November 1773 at noon to post bond for his good conduct in the matter of the murder of Mrs. Richard Pentyre of this town. Lt. J. Coldstone, on His Majesty’s behalf.

  “Do not fail.” He dusted it, poured off the sand, and handed the sheet to John as if he were sorry that it was not poisoned. John inclined his head respectfully.

  “I will not. Thank you for your forbearance, Lieutenant.”

  Coldstone opened the door to the hall, snapped, “Muldoon!” in the direction of the kitchen, and the young man appeared, vastly flustered and with crumbs of molasses candy on his jacket. “Get your musket,” he reminded him disgustedly. “And come.”

  John and Abigail walked them to the front door, emerged onto the step to bow another farewell. From the step it could be seen that Queen Street was filled end to end with men: most of them young, though Abigail recognized Billy Dawes the cobbler and the blacksmith Isaac Greenleaf, who had to be in their thirties and masters of their own shops. None were armed, but all were watching the house, and there were a lot of them. More arriving even as the remaining sentry saluted.

  Knowing Bostonians, the moment Coldstone turned away, John put his finger to his lips for silence—but when the Lieutenant and his two sentries turned the corner into Cornhill, somebody let out a cheer that was taken up for the length of the street.

  Coldstone didn’t turn around.

  Seven

  “We’vemadeanenemy.” John closed the door, after thanking the mob, a little stiffly, for its appearance. John was never comfortable with the idea that it was often Sam’s mobs, rather than the well-reasoned justice of British Law, that got things done in Boston.

  “He was our enemy when he arrived.” Abigail went back into the parlor, picked up a beaker of tepid cider. It was well past noon, and she had intended, she recalled, to share breakfast with Rebecca. “Did he say why he was so certain you were the killer? Other than that your name is Adams?”

  “In that case, why not call on Sam? Which he clearly didn’t, if Sam was able to marshal a mob at short order—”

  The parlor door crashed open, and Pattie and the children swarmed through. “Ma, did you see it? Did you see it? Uncle Sam brought them, and Mr. Dawes, and Mr. Revere, and they made that lobsterback captain look nohow!” “Oh, Mrs. Adams, that Irishman said as they were going to take Mr. Adams up for murder—” “Ma, you should have shot him!”

  Nabby flung herself silently at John, clutched him around the waist, buried her face in his coat, and burst into tears. Tommy, still very uncertain of his balance, did likewise with Abigail.

  “I will say this for Sam,” remarked Abigail, as their family tugged them into the kitchen, “he’s quick.”

  “So was the lad who picked my pocket last month in front of Christ’s Church, but that doesn’t mean I want to see him in charge of the destiny of this colony. I’m quite all right, dear girl.” John put a gentle finger under Nabby’s chin, raised her eyes to his. “Spartan women didn’t shed tears after defeat in battle,” he added with a smile. “So why weep for a victory? Keep an eye on your brothers and help Pattie with dinner—Lord, I’m hungry!—while I talk to your mother. What happened?” His voice dropped to a whisper as he followed Abigail to the sideboard, helped her carry to the table the heavy iron Dutch oven and the crock of lard. “Was he telling the truth? Perdita Pentyre! Did Mrs. Malvern know her?”

  “She must have.” Abigail dug in her pocket, brought out the note. “I think she must have been Rebecca’s source, for secrets and scandal in the British camp. I suppose there’s no doubt that it was she, and not another? Her face was . . . much mutilated.”

  At the other end of the table, Pattie raised a cleaver and whacked off the head of one of the dinner chickens. The other, decapitated, gutted, pale, and naked, lay on a plate before Abigail already. Her empty stomach turned, and she looked queasily away.

  “That officer at least was as sure as he could be,” rumbled John as he unfolded the slip of paper. “Mrs. Pentyre is indeed missing from her home. According to Lieutenant Coldstone, the stableman there says that Mrs. Pentyre took a light chaise out, fairly late in the evening, and its horse was found wandering loose on the Commons this morning. They’re dragging the Mill-Pond for the chaise.” He added drily, “I understand that if Richard Pentyre is unable to identify his wife’s body, Colonel Leslie knows it well enough to do so.”

  “It isn’t a matter for jest.” In a low voice Abigail recounted what she had found in Rebecca Malvern’s house that morning, and what she had done about it. “I could have beaten Sam with a broom handle for going through the place as he did,” she finished, as she tucked the chicken into its place in the pot. “The more so now, that any trace of evidence that it wasn’t you has been destroyed. I went to Malvern’s after we left Hazlitt’s printshop.”

  “You don’t think she’d have taken refuge with him?”

  Abigail shook her head. “No. I think she’d have taken refuge with Revere, or with us, or with Orion Hazlitt. But she didn’t.”

  John said, “Hmmn.”

  “If she had,” Abigail went on slowly, drying her hands, “I wouldn’t put it past Malvern—I don’t think I’d put it past Malvern—to take her in, and then lock her up again, as he did before—”

  He glanced back at her from the note, which he was studying by the stronger light of the kitchen window. “You truly think he would do something like that?”

  Abigail hesitated. “I truly don’t know,” she said at last. “One hears of it—and not just in novels,” she added, seeing the corner of his mouth turn down. “He is—a man who will have his own way, no matter what he has to do to get it. Mostly, I wanted to speak with him before the Watch told him of the crime and Rebecca’s disappearance. I knew he’d see no one, afterwards.”

  “You’re probably right about that. And much as I hate to admit it, if Sam and the others hadn’t cleared up the scene I suppose Coldstone would have had grounds to arrest me for sedition this morning, instead of being put off with a thirty-pound bond.” At that point in Abigail’s narrative, he’d snatched off his wig and thrown it at the wall; it lay like a dead animal now on the sideboard near his hand. Without it, his face looked even rounder, his blue eyes more protuberant. His mouse brown hair, short-cropped, was graying, and Abigail had to suppress the urge to kiss the thin spots above his forehead. “You say Sam didn’t recognize Mrs. Pentyre? Or know about her?” He turned the note over in his fingers. “Did you take a close look at this?”

  She shook her head, set aside the dumplings she was making, and crossed to his side. “When he saw her body, he certainly didn’t have any candidates in mind. There can’t be that many wealthy women who were friends with Rebecca, who would have been using the code of the Sons.” Over his shoulder she studied the paper:

  The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia.

  And frowne
d. She dried her hands again, took from a drawer in the sideboard a much-scribbled sheet on which Nabby—with many blots and scratches—had been practicing the fiddling art of writing with a goose-quill. This she held up to John, her thumb at the topmost line, where Rebecca had written:

  All Things Work Together for the Good of Them that Love the Lord.

  “Is that the same handwriting?” she asked.

  John fished in his pocket for a magnifying lens, laid the two papers side by side.

  “The capitals are the same,” he said, after a long few minutes. “But look how the small o’s and e’s want to pinch, while Mrs. Malvern’s are naturally round. Not just one or two, but all of them. See there, where the in in Linnet blots and widens, where he’s tried to imitate that little swoop you see in the in in Things. The same on the downstrokes of the capital T’s and L’s: that forced change of angle.” He offered her the glass.

  “I’ll tell you what caught my attention,” added John, as Abigail verified the wavery changes of line, the odd thicknesses and blots where the writer’s hand had struggled to imitate angles unfamiliar to it. “Look at the two pieces of paper. No, Rebecca wouldn’t use cold-pressed English notepaper for children’s exercises, but would she have had any of it in the house at all? What did she write her broadsides on?”

  “Common foolscap, like this. Sam arranges with Isaiah Thomas at the Spy to provide her with as much as she needs.” She glanced up. “You’re saying Mrs. Pentyre was lured there.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “By someone who knows the code used by the Sons.”

  “By someone who knew that this code was used between Mrs. Malvern and Mrs. Pentyre.”

  “But Rebecca did wait up for her,” pointed out Abigail. “She was still dressed—at least her day dress and her shoes were gone from the house—and the fire hadn’t been banked, nor the candles extinguished. And they had been snuffed and mended during the evening. She waited for someone. And clearly, she let Mrs. Pentyre in at midnight.”

  “And the killer as well, apparently,” murmured John. He folded the note and pocketed it. “I’ll get that,” he offered, as Abigail started to lift the heavy Dutch oven, to carry to the hearth. “What time did the rain start here? Ten?” He dumped a couple of shovelfuls of glowing coals onto the iron lid. “If it was coming down as hard as it was in Salem, it would have been easy for someone to follow Mrs. Pentyre’s chaise from her house. As to how he would have gotten them to open the door—”

  “He was known to one or the other,” said Abigail. “He must have been. If he forged the note, he knew the code—”

  “And if he forged the note, Mrs. Malvern would not have been still awake,” responded John thoughtfully. He set the fire-shovel back in its place. “What time are the Tillets expected back, my Portia?” he asked, using the name they had used in their letters during courtship: she Portia, he Lysander, like heroine and hero of a classical romance. “Do you feel able for a half-mile walk, to see what the Watch have left of Sam’s handiwork? Or would you rather rest?” he added, scrutinizing her face more closely. “You look—”

  “I look like a woman ready to faint away in your arms,” replied Abigail briskly. “Yet in either case my conscience would not let me rest, after what I’ve done to poor Pattie this morning—and burdened her with entertaining that young lout of an Irishman . . .”

  “Oh, m’am.” Pattie dimpled shyly from the table where she was scrubbing potatoes. “Sergeant Muldoon meant nobody harm. Not even Mr. Adams, I daresay. You go,” she added. “Mrs. Malvern may even have come back, if what happened there didn’t drive her into brain-fever, so that she’s forgotten who and where she is.”

  “If she’s forgotten,” said John softly, putting on his wig again while Abigail took off her apron and stepped into her pattens in their corner by the door, “’tis a curious thing that none of her neighbors found her wandering and reminded her.”

  By this hour, Fish Street was a lively confusion of carts and drays coming up from the docks, of pungent smells and the clattering of hammers: shoemakers, coopers, smiths in silver and iron. The North End—technically an island, if you counted the little Mill Creek as a branch of the ocean—was a crowded jumble of rich and poor, of the mansions of merchant families and the tenements offering lodging to those who sailed on their vessels, of tangled alleyways and unexpected courts and yards. Shop signs and laundry, boat builders, hatters, soap makers, and taverns packed shoulder to shoulder like passengers in a too-small coach as they had been for over a century. Among the waterfront taverns and warehouses the smugglers operated, bringing in cognac and linens and tea from France and Holland in flagrant disregard of the British Crown’s stringent trade regulations; gangs of thieves, too, pilfering goods from the tall English ships and slipping them out almost at once on the numberless tiny coastal traders that brought in hay and firewood, oysters and butter, from a thousand little towns along the coast. It was among the artisans, stevedores, and laborers of the North End that the Boston mobs arose, ready to hammer down Tory doors or launch themselves into bloody battle with the South End boys during the riotous celebrations of Pope’s Day.

  Though she would not have wanted to hear that Johnny was playing with the boys from this part of town—or that her brother Will was gambling in any of its many taverns—Abigail liked the North End.

  The gate to Tillet’s Yard was closed, and—when they tested it—barred from within. Coming around the corner to the shop, the Adamses found not the prentice-boys Abigail had expected behind its counter, but Nehemiah Tillet himself, a stooped and flaccid-jowled man who reminded her of a spider. “Mrs. Tillet thought it best,” he said in his whispery voice. His hands fumbled uneasily, straightening an already straight stack of his wife’s ready-made shirts. “Every lad in the neighborhood—and men of full years who should have better tasks with which to occupy themselves—wanted to see the place, and broke the lock from the door even, to go in. I spent the best part of the morning turning them away!”

  “How shocking for you,” sympathized Abigail, who had never liked the man. “To return home to find the place full of soldiers.”

  “I was very much overset.” He fiddled at the edges of the bolts that lay on the crowded counter: linen, cotton, Holland cloth. “Very much so.”

  “And you’ve heard nothing from Mrs. Malvern? She’s not returned?”

  Moist pale eyes regarded them warily under heavy, lash-less lids, then glanced aside. “No. No, she hasn’t.” Again his eyes avoided hers.

  And little wonder, reflected Abigail, annoyed. From the first time she’d visited Rebecca here, she’d suspected that Tillet lusted after her friend. This was no great surprise, given Mrs. Tillet’s aggressively unpleasant nature—for the past eighteen months, every time she’d come by to visit, Mr. Tillet had found some excuse to knock on Rebecca’s door, with advice, or to share some snippet from a newspaper or church business. “He’s worse than Charles,” Rebecca had said, more than once, exasperated. “He wants to know who my friends are, and whom I visit. I used to think Mrs. T. put him up to it, to see if she could squeeze another five minutes’ work out of me, sewing those wretched shirts the customers pay her for. The way he looks at me—” She’d grimaced. “I can’t well push him out of the house, since he owns it. And I would rather be here, and put up with the pair of them,” she’d added, when Abigail had shown signs of walking across the yard and giving Mr. Tillet a piece of her mind, “than go back to Charles.”

  Reluctantly, Abigail had agreed. Between Charles Malvern’s vindictiveness, and the general Boston attitude that a woman who left her husband must have done so from a preference for profligacy, it had been difficult enough for Rebecca to find a place to live where she might ply any trade other than prostitution. Sewing endless mountains of shirts for Mrs. Tillet and attending three sermons every Sunday at the New Brick Meeting-House were part of what she had to do, to go on living in her little house.

  “May we go back there
?” John asked now.

  “There’s naught to be seen,” Tillet responded immediately. “The boys coming through after the soldiers, they’ve tracked all up, and carried away what they could, belike.”

  “Mrs. Malvern is our friend,” persisted Abigail. “If nothing else, we’d like to—”

  “There’s naught back there.” Mrs. Hester Tillet emerged from the back parlor of the shop, a woman of commanding height and substantial girth, with arms like a stonecutter’s from a lifetime of carrying bolts of cloth. “Nor will there be. ’Twas the last straw, and I’d had enough of her weeks ago. Disobliging, lazy slut, always finding some reason why she couldn’t do a little of the work she contracted to do as part of us giving her the place so cheap. If I can turn out a handsome shirt in an hour it’s sure anyone can, who puts their mind to it, and nobody needs more than a few hours’ sleep at night: I certainly don’t. And now she’s run off, and left me with twenty orders to fill. I’ve had enough, and will have no more.”

  “You can’t turn her out for what happened!” protested Abigail, and Mrs. Tillet turned upon her, arms akimbo and jaw protruding like a bulldog getting ready to bite.

  “So you’re telling me what I can do with my own property now, Mrs. Adams? Well, I’m telling you, I can’t and won’t put up with a woman who brings such friends onto my property the minute our backs are turned, to murder one another and bring the whole neighborhood tramping through. We have a position to uphold in our church and in this community, and we won’t stand for it.” And, seeing her husband looking wretched, she added, “Will we, Mr. Tillet?”