The Ninth Daughter aam-1

by Barbara Hamilton

  Though her own market basket was still nearly empty, thanks to her companion’s determination not to let her purchase from any farmer to whom she herself had taken a personal dislike, Abigail—with a backwards glance to make sure the towering Tillet bonnet was still moving among the stalls—hastened her steps around the corner of the market hall and out of sight. A small bridge crossed the opening of the town dock, leading to the tangle of lanes that eventually gave onto Ann Street, then Fish Street, along the brisk and crowded waterfront of the North End. It was a walk of only minutes to the alley that led to Tillet’s Yard, shadowed still with the wet light of the chilly morning.

  The gate was still closed—and still barred, though Tillet and the younger of his two prentice-boys were obliged to help a carter unload several quires of paper, a roll of buckram, and a box of what appeared to be shoes in the street beside the shop’s front door, to the great inconvenience of traffic. But Abigail didn’t need to enter the yard to refresh her memory. Rebecca’s parlor window—shuttered again now—looked out onto the alley, and there was no way that it could be seen from either the main Tillet house, or from the yard.

  Had Queenie seen a man entering Rebecca’s window, either Wednesday night or on some other occasion? Despite the vindictiveness in her voice, the cook’s words had had a ring of truth, before she’d begun to go back on her story and obfuscate . . . What, indeed, would she have been doing in the alley, on a night of threatening rain? On a night, moreover, when her master and mistress were away? Selling a pound or two of the Tillet cornmeal, or a loaf of sugar, to put the money in her own pocket?

  Abigail couldn’t imagine the self-pitying little woman possessed a clandestine lover of her own. Either way, reason enough to come up with any kind of slander to undermine Rebecca’s credibility, had Rebecca, for instance, seen her from that parlor window when she opened it to pull the shutters to. Still—

  The only window of the L-shaped Tillet house that overlooked the alley was the small gable window of the south attic, a room which Abigail knew had for years been given over to storage, after the overhasty marriage (in her opinion) of the youngest daughter of the house. According to Rebecca, the cramped and stuffy little chamber had been shuttered and out of use for years.

  But as she looked up now, she saw—a little to her surprise—that the window’s shutters stood open. And just for a moment—though admittedly the angle of her vision was a narrow one, looking up from the straitened confine of the alley—Abigail thought she saw pale movement behind the dingy glass.

  Mrs. Tillet’s unmistakable voice boomed from the street, shouting to her husband. Abigail moved off further up the alley, to cut through a neighbor’s drying yard and garden, and so out onto Cross Street unobserved.

  There was no message from anyone, by the time she came belatedly home.

  As she swept and cleaned the upstairs rooms, scoured lamps, listened to Nabby and Johnny’s lessons, mixed a batch of bread and prepared dinner—with extra provision for tomorrow’s cold Sabbath meals—Abigail’s mind chased memories.

  Rebecca Malvern at eighteen, coming for the first time into the Brattle Street Meeting-House as a bride. She recalled how the dark, self-consciously sober fabric of her dress had been cut and trimmed with a stylish flare that no Boston woman would ever display. In her own family pew, Abigail had overheard the whispers from the pews on all sides: Maryland . . . dowry . . . Papist . . . Poor little Tamar Malvern told me only yesterday she said, “I’ll teach you to pray to the Virgin and the Pope.” Tamar, mincing with downcast eyes behind her new stepmother, had looked smug; Malvern icy; Rebecca wretched, but head still high.

  October of 1768. Abigail herself, she recalled, had been great with the child who had become Susanna—her precious, fragile girl. That was the week the redcoat troops had first come ashore in Boston, setting up their tents on the Commons, and jostling everywhere in the streets. A group of them had passed the meetinghouse after the service, and while Malvern had paused to ask John some question about the vestry—on which they were both serving that year—Rebecca had commented to Abigail, Are we expecting French invasion, or does the King just think that eight hundred of his armed servants in the town will cause us to sleep better of nights?

  Some in the congregation didn’t hesitate to ascribe her objection to the King’s troops to a secret Papist’s natural sympathy for the Irish, or perhaps the French. But despite the difference in their ages, in Rebecca, Abigail had found a kindred soul. Before long she was inviting the girl to take potluck tea in the kitchen while she herself did the household mending, rather than sit formally in the parlor, and Rebecca had watched in wide-eyed consternation as Abigail performed whatever household tasks needed doing: churning butter or scraping out candlesticks or kneading bread, things that had been done by slaves in the home of Rebecca’s father. Later, when Rebecca was living with them—sharing the bed with Nabby and Johnny in the other small upstairs chamber—they’d laughed together about her dismay. “I wish I’d paid closer attention!” Rebecca had moaned during her first lesson with the butter churn. Abigail had replied in her primmest schoolmistress voice: “At least you’ve seen one before and aren’t frightened.” Rebecca had flicked droplets of the skimmed milk at her from her fingertips, like a schoolgirl, and they’d both laughed.

  How good it had felt to laugh, Abigail remembered, after all those weeks of grieving Susanna’s death.

  John had promised to return from consulting a client in good time to walk Abigail to the Malvern house, a distance of barely a quarter mile. With the Sabbath on the morrow, and John confined by his bond to the town limits of Boston, Abigail didn’t really expect him to conclude his business that quickly, and when the dinner dishes were washed and the pots scoured, the kitchen swept and all the lamps filled and set out ready, she’d gone two doors down Queen Street and made arrangements with young Shim Walton the cooper’s apprentice. “I wouldn’t dream of trespassing on your master’s beliefs, Shim, by asking you to do paid work once the Sabbath Eve has begun! But I’ve had a premonition that I may accidentally drop a halfpenny in the street first thing Monday morning as I go past your master’s shop . . .”

  A carriage was drawn up before Malvern’s front door, as it had been on Thursday afternoon. From across the street, Abigail watched the merchant climb inside, stiff and self-conscious-looking in a satin coat and hair powder. Cloaked shapes that had to be his two surviving children followed him, tall Jeffrey and slender Tamar, trailed by the more robust shape of the giggling maid. Scipio, in his evening livery, bowed them away from the house’s single, shallow step, then turned back inside. As he did so, another servant on the ground floor leaned from a window, and closed the shutters against the night.

  “I’ll be all right now, Shim,” said Abigail softly, but the boy insisted on escorting her across the street and down the carriageway to the yard. Scipio must have come straight from the front step to the kitchen’s door to meet her, his candle glinting on the brass of his livery buttons.

  The fire had already been banked in the kitchen, but the room still pulsed with warmth, exquisite after the night’s brutal cold. The glow of the oil-lamp on its chain dimly outlined cauldrons and skimmers, trammels and oil-jars in the shadows, and the brick floor still smelt of the after-dinner wash up. The butler had kept coffee from dinner for her in the pot on the hob, and served her in one of the family cups: blue English porcelain rather than servants’ pottery.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t come up with the direction of Miss Catherine’s brother any sooner than this, m’am,” Scipio explained, when Abigail had gestured him to sit. Since it was the house he lived in, she felt strange and awkward inviting him to do so, slave or not, even as she stopped herself from inviting him to share with her the coffee he’d made. What is the proper behavior between slave and free in this situation? she asked herself irritably, and concluded that there wasn’t any. A truly proper servant wouldn’t have admitted a stranger to his master’s house in the first place, nor
discussed the family’s affairs with an outsider. “She wrote to me, and to Ulee in the stables, once or twice over the last year. But we had to look through the letters to find mention of the nearest town to her brother’s farm. It’s Townsend, but where that might be I don’t know. Wenham is another place she speaks of, but she writes as if it’s some ways off from her, it sounds like.”

  “Wenham is some ways off from any spot on the civilized earth,” muttered Abigail. “Always supposing Mrs. Malvern could get across the river or through the town gate.”

  “I understand—” Scipio cleared his throat delicately. “I understand that Miss Rebecca had friends who might have skiffs or whaleboats that could get her across the harbor, even on a falling tide and a rainy night—”

  “If she had such,” replied Abigail, with equal tact—since no one in Boston, not even the slaves, admitted to knowing anyone either engaged in smuggling or involved with the Sons of Liberty, “and of course I don’t for a moment imagine she would know such people—I think they would undertake inquiries amongst themselves, and quickly learn if that had in fact been the case. It does not seem to have been.”

  “Ah.” Scipio nodded. “I didn’t think you would be asking after Miss Catherine, if it had. Mr. Adams—”

  “—has some fairly low acquaintances. Did Lieutenant Coldstone ask about Mrs. Malvern’s possible friends?”

  The slave shook his head. “Not of me, he didn’t. And I think if he had asked Mr. Jeffrey or Miss Tamar, I would have heard. Myself, I don’t even know for a fact if she had such friends, though I know that being friends with Mr. Adams, and Mr. Revere, and reading the newspapers and arguing with Mr. Malvern as she did, I shouldn’t be surprised to hear of it. As to what Mr. Jeffrey or Miss Tamar might have told him—or their father—I can’t answer for that.”

  Abigail was silent for a time, gazing into the dense shadows of the kitchen. Even under the relatively strong glow of the oil-lamp overhead, the long sideboards, the sturdy bin-table and homely water-jars were barely distinguishable in the gloom. After a time she asked, “Do they hate her so much still?”

  The butler sighed. “Not hate, I don’t think, so much, Mrs. Adams,” he said. “They were her enemies before they even met her. I think Miss Tamar talked herself into hating her—and talked Mr. Jeffrey into it—because it’s easier to do evil to someone you hate, than to admit to yourself you’re only telling lies and making trouble because you don’t want another little brother or sister to come along and cut into your inheritance. That’s what it came down to.”

  “Rebecca—Mrs. Malvern—told me once that Tamar would search her room while she was away, and stole her letters. She said she always suspected it was Tamar who learned, and told Mr. Malvern, about her arranging to pay her brother’s gambling debts with part of the household money, and backing her father’s bills with Mr. Malvern’s name. Mrs. Malvern said she knew she shouldn’t have done it, but—”

  “People do foolish things for those they love.” Scipio poured her a little more coffee. “It’s true Miss Tamar doesn’t like the idea of having her father’s estate cut up into five or six rather than just in two, but it’s for Mr. Jeffrey that she started working to turn her father against Miss Rebecca. For Mr. Jeffrey and little Master Nathan—she did her possible, to turn that poor little boy against Miss Rebecca, for his own good, as she said. He’ll thank me for it, she said, ’specially after Miss Rebecca left. But when he was ill there at the end,” added the butler softly, “it was Miss Rebecca he would call for.”

  And it was for Nathan, Abigail knew well, that Rebecca had chosen to remain in Boston, the summer of ’72. Hoping against hope that she would have the opportunity to go to the child’s bedside.

  “Does Miss Tamar still have Miss Rebecca’s letters?” asked Abigail. And, when Scipio looked uncertain, she went on, “I’m not fishing for servant-hall gossip, Scipio. Mrs. Pentyre was deliberately lured to Rebecca’s house—I know this,” she added, seeing the surprise in his face. “Believe me, it is true. She was lured there, and murdered, by someone who knew Rebecca: someone who knew that he could get Rebecca to let him into the house, one way or another. I think she saw him, and I think that’s why she fled. It may be someone she knew in Boston—someone I would know, or Mr. Adams, or even you . . . and it may be someone she knew before she married Mr. Malvern.”

  “Who?” asked Scipio, baffled. “Most of her people—her brother and her father—are dead. The rest of her family cut ties with her, when she gave up her faith.”

  “That’s why I need to see her letters,” said Abigail. “Because whoever he is, I suspect that he knows she saw him. And unless we find him—and find her—he may reach her first.”

  Ten

  “What I don’t understand, m’am, is how Miss Rebecca even knew this Mrs. Pentyre.” Scipio kept his voice to a near-whisper as he led Abigail up the servants’ backstairs to the upper floor. “She was only a young girl, not even wed to Mr. Pentyre when Miss Rebecca left this house. Unless Mr. Pentyre for some reason thought to learn something from Miss Rebecca, that would damage Mr. Malvern—”

  Abigail said, “Good Heavens!” It was something she hadn’t even considered. “Would he? I’ve never met the man—”

  “Nor I.” They reached a tiny landing and the butler opened the little door there. The hall was near pitch-dark, save for the dim glow of the candles he bore in a pewter branch, and cold as the back corridors of Hell. “Ulee—that’s the head groom—has a cousin in Pentyre’s stables, though, so every time Mr. Malvern sues Pentyre, or Mr. Pentyre gets the Governor or the Royal Port Commissioner to fine Mr. Malvern or hold up one of his cargoes to search—”

  “My goodness. I had no idea. Every time . . . Is this a common occurrence? Do they hate one another so?”

  “Like a horse hates a snake, m’am—only each of them thinks he’s the horse, and the other’s the snake. Mr. Malvern’s daddy hated Mr. Pentyre’s uncle, that was the merchant in the family and he left Mr. Pentyre all his ships and money; they undersell each other’s cargoes, they slander each other’s goods. You know how Mr. Malvern won’t let a matter rest, if he thinks he’s been wronged, and Mr. Pentyre, for all he looks like he doesn’t have the red blood in him to do up his shoe buckles, is the same. Only, bein’ related to the Governor, he’ll use that to make trouble for those that make trouble for him.”

  Halfway down the silent hallway he opened a door. The darkness beyond it was warmer, and breathed of sandalwood and dried rose petals. The candles’ light briefly caressed sat inwood bedposts, the Venetian glass of an expensive toilet-mirror.

  “Back in August, it was Mr. Pentyre who had his agents buy up all Mr. Jeffrey’s gaming debts, and call them in, close to a thousand pounds’ worth. Then Mr. Malvern put the rumor about that Pentyre was smuggling, and got one of his cargoes seized, and Miss Tamar tried to bribe one of the kitchen staff at Pentyre’s to poison Mrs. Pentyre’s little dog, in revenge.”

  “What a charming picture you servants must have of the lives of your masters,” Abigail murmured, and a ghost of a smile tugged the slender man’s mouth.

  “All this is nothing, m’am. Not to what you see if you’re a slave in Barbados, where I was born.”

  Abigail, gathering her skirts aside to draw out the trundle bed from beneath the great bed, looked aside from him, ashamed. Scipio set the candelabra on the little se cretaire by the window, and came to help her. The trundle was made up with fresh linen. Either Tamar didn’t like to be alone for one minute of the day or night, or her father didn’t want her to be. A night rail was laid out ready on the pink silk counterpane of the main bed, the linen as light as silk.

  “Does she get love letters?”

  “Dozens,” affirmed the butler resignedly. “Some she keeps in the desk, but the ones she doesn’t want her father to see—or know about—she has delivered to the lady who runs the hat shop at the end of her father’s wharf, and sends Miss Oonaugh—that’s her maid—down to get them for her. You think the
y’re under the bed?” At Abigail’s gestures, the two of them had maneuvered the low bed away from the large one, and Abigail now knelt near the main bed’s head.

  “’Tis where I hid mine. Not that I set up clandestine flirts,” she hastened to add, as the butler grinned. “But when I was young my father considered political pamphlets inappropriate reading for well-bred girls, and I had my older sister’s beau smuggle them to me. Dreadfully badly written they were,” she went on reminiscently, easing down onto her stomach and reaching as far toward the head of the bed as she could. “And shockingly ill-reasoned, some of them. After a time my conscience grew so bad that I confessed the whole to—Ah!” Her fingers brushed what felt like the corner of a largish box. She flattened herself further, squirmed beneath the tall frame, reaching with both arms and thanking the heavens that Scipio kept the cham bermaids strictly up to their work: no nonsense about sweeping only as much of the floor as showed and letting dust kittens breed with abandon in the dark.

  She drew it out, sat back on her heels. More quietly, she asked, “Did you ever try to tell their father that Tamar and Jeffrey were telling him lies about Rebecca? About her trying to convert them to Catholicism, or punishing them for not praying to the Virgin?”

  Scipio opened his mouth, closed it, then sighed. “You’ll think me a coward, m’am. And I daresay I am. But I didn’t dare. None of us did. What man would believe his new young wife over his daughter? What man wouldn’t believe his daughter, if she—” He hesitated. “If she decided to lie about a slave? And a man-slave?”

  Abigail thought about that, and felt her face heat with anger. Hotter, even, than when Rebecca had come to her weeping about the way her stepdaughter had used to twist her every action and word.