The Ninth Daughter aam-1

by Barbara Hamilton

  “And does a woman’s poverty or morals make her more deserving of that horror?” She fought the urge to pick up a stick of firewood from the box beside the hearth and smash it over that immaculately powdered wig.

  “No, of course not,” he replied calmly. “But it does make it curious that the third victim was a wealthy woman, a married woman, and a woman who under normal circumstances could not be easily got at by a stranger who did not have an introduction to her.”

  Abigail opened her mouth again to snap a response, then thought about his words, and closed it. Her mind darted at once to Charles Malvern’s house, and how it was never entirely still: always the distant tread of a servant, the sense of other people at call. When Rebecca had taken up her first set of rooms in that cheap lodging house on the North End, after six months of living with the Adamses on Brattle Street, she had said, It feels so queer, to come in from the market, and know I’ll be there alone.

  She said, slowly, “And Mrs. Malvern was poor, and she lived alone . . . as I presume the other two did. And though her landlord had servants and prentice-boys, they were not in the same house with her. She fits the pattern, not Mrs. Pentyre.”

  “Precisely. And, Mrs. Pentyre deliberately took considerable trouble—ordering her husband’s man to harness a chaise for her, and driving herself through the rain on a pitch-black night—to put herself into a locality of danger. Why?”

  Abigail shook her head. The forged note, in the code of the Sons of Liberty, seemed to her mind to be crying out from the drawer in the sideboard where she had put it, like a kitten in a cupboard. “I can’t imagine. Who were the other two?”

  “Zulieka Fishwire was found in her own house, on the floor of her parlor, her throat cut and her body mutilated quite as horribly as Mrs. Pentyre’s was. It was as difficult to tell the circumstances of Jenny Barry’s murder as it was Mrs. Pentyre’s because Jenny Barry was a woman of the town. Like the other two, her throat had been cut with what appears, by the wound, to have been a thin, long-bladed knife. I would guess also that like the other two, she was violated as well as slashed, but given her occupation it is less easy to be certain of that.”

  He spoke matter-of-factly, as if to another man, something Abigail appreciated but found more disconcerting than she had thought she would. John was one of the few men she knew who did not skirt around the subject of the prostitutes who trolled the wharves and serviced the sailors, but he would never have brought the subject up with a woman he had barely met. “Her body was found among the barrels near Scarlett’s Wharf. It had obviously been taken there, because there was no blood on the scene, even”—the Lieutenant’s cold eye rested disapprovingly upon Abigail—“as there was no blood in the house where Mrs. Pentyre’s body was found.”

  Abigail felt a flush mount to her cheeks. What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.

  Not Mrs. Pentyre’s blood—the blood of that passionate, not-always-wise girl who sought to get even with her straying husband and help her country at the same time . . . who had wanted to be the heroine of a novel. But the blood of the next woman to die at the killer’s hand because she, Abigail, would not describe to this man what she had actually seen.

  “I am given also to understand,” the Lieutenant went on drily, “that poverty and solitude were not the only things that Mrs. Malvern had in common with the other two. Which makes it interesting to me—”

  “If by that you mean that you give credence to that poisonous Queensboro woman’s hints that Mrs. Malvern had lovers, it’s a lie.”

  “Is it?” He regarded her without change of expression, but something in his eyes made Abigail realize, with a sudden blast of fury, that Queenie had assumed—because of his legal help, and the fact that for six months Rebecca had lived under his roof—that John was one of them. And that she had told this man so.

  “Who did she name? Orion Hazlitt?”

  “One of them, yes.”

  “Orion Hazlitt has been desperately in love with Rebecca Malvern since they met over printing work he was doing. He’s an intelligent young man but he was not well educated. Mrs. Malvern, who teaches a dame school, helped him with the spelling and arrangement of manuscripts he was given to print. I suppose it’s the fashion to believe calumny rather than innocence, but I have been friends with Mrs. Malvern for six years, and there was no more between them than his longing for someone in his life other than his execrable mother, and Mrs. Malvern’s determination to remain faithful to a husband who treated her like a dog. I take it another of the accused was my husband?”

  Coldstone inclined his head.

  “As too close a party to the case any testimony of mine would be disbelieved,” said Abigail, “so I will not waste your time with trying to prove a negative. And the third, I suppose, was Mr. Tillet—”

  “Who owned the house she lived in, which he could have rented for considerably more than she paid him—”

  “Had his wife not had in her so convenient a slave for sewing shirts. Mrs. Queensboro is a woman who lives in furtiveness and spite, Lieutenant. I would weigh very carefully any testimony she gives you.”

  “Including the fact that you were at Mrs. Malvern’s door Thursday morning, long before the Watch was called?”

  “I had contracted with Mrs. Malvern to do some sewing for me,” replied Abigail steadily. “And, as I said to you that morning, I passed by to ask, was there anything I could purchase for her at the market, as I knew it was difficult for her to do so because of teaching.”

  Coldstone regarded her in silence, his head a little on one side. He still bore a bruise on his forehead, where he’d struck his head when his horse had come down with him Tuesday; its edges were starting to turn yellowy green. Pattie knocked at the parlor door, then entered bearing a tray nobly laden with coffeepot, bread and butter, new cream, and a small dish of hunks of brown Jamaican sugar. The girl laid her burden on the small table that she drew up between them, curtseyed, and withdrew again, and it was some moments before Coldstone spoke.

  “Mrs. Adams,” he said, “I apologize if I have angered you. I did not mean to do so. I came here seeking your help—”

  “To put my husband’s neck in a noose?”

  “To keep it out of one,” said Coldstone. “The Provost Marshal has quite good reason to believe that your husband either did the murder himself, or knows a great deal more about it than any honest man has any business knowing—” He held up his hand as Abigail opened her mouth to snap a protest. “Yet having bettered my acquaintance with you, I cannot believe that you would be party to such a crime, nor that Mr. Adams could succeed in keeping it from you. Much less so, because of its connection with the other two.”

  “No woman would be.”

  He was silent a moment. Then, “A few years ago I would have agreed with you, m’am. But one doesn’t cross the Atlantic Ocean in the same troopship with British Army camp followers, without coming into contact with the sort of people I had previously assumed existed only in the plays of Euripides. As I was taught in Gray’s Inn, I can only speak to what I know ‘of my own knowledge.’ I do not trust your motives, m’am, nor your loyalties, but I do trust your judgment of the man to whom you are married. I think that you would very likely cover over a murder that Mr. Adams did—but not this murder.”

  “No,” said Abigail softly. “I would not.” And then, “Bread and butter, Lieutenant?”

  “Thank you, m’am. It has been some time,” he added after a moment, “since I have tasted either that was not adulterated by Army contractors. Your skills as a housewife do you great honor.”

  She thought, Oh, the poor boy, her heart melting—and mentally slapped her own wrist in disgust. Knows more than any honest man has any business knowing indeed!

  “What makes your Provost Marshal so sure that it could have been my husband?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not at liberty to disclose it, m’am. Physically, he could have committed the crime—” />
  “He could not.” She paused with the coffeepot suspended over a cup, silently wishing she could pour the steaming liquid into her guest’s pristine white lap. “He would not.”

  “There is a difference between those two things, Mrs. Adams, as I’m sure, as a lawyer’s wife, you are aware. Your husband is in the thick of organizations whose stated goal is to disrupt the smooth working of His Majesty’s government here in the colony. He is moreover the associate of men involved in large-scale smuggling operations which aid Britain’s enemies. Your husband did indeed spend Wednesday night at the Purley’s Tavern outside of Salem, yet a smuggler-craft could have brought him to Boston in an hour—”

  “Not in that weather, it couldn’t.”

  “You underrate their skill, m’am. He moreover is good friends with the woman in whose house the body was found: a woman separated from her husband, who has lived under Mr. Adams’s protection and whose legal affairs Mr. Adams has looked after, pro bono. Had he wished to harm Mrs. Pentyre, what safer way to do so, than to mimic the methods of a lunatic who has killed two other women and has gone untaken? He chooses a night on which the Tillets are known to be absent. The renter of the house then flees, and you—Mr. Adams being bonded to remain in Boston and being moreover under suspicion—undertake a two-day journey into the backcountry, where an officer of the Crown would take his life in his hands to go—to warn or inform her—”

  “Do you honestly think that’s what happened?” demanded Abigail, appalled.

  Coldstone was silent, studying her face, she realized, as she had studied Charles Malvern’s, when she had broken the news to him of Rebecca’s disappearance. She didn’t flee, she wanted to shout at him. She was imprisoned in her room, her blood was on the pillow of her bed, and on the floor beside the door—

  And Paul Revere and Dr. Warren had neatly mopped it away. She found herself trembling all over.

  “No,” he said after a time. “No, I don’t. All these things—these possibilities—are like objects in a room, like furnishings well arranged. But there is another room, and in that room is the possibility that the same man who killed Mrs. Fishwire and Jenny Barry has started killing again. As all such men invariably will.”

  “And that matters to you.”

  “Yes. It does.”

  Silence again. Abigail handed him the cup of coffee, and looked around for the bell with which Pattie could be summoned to the parlor. Of course it was missing—Charley and Johnny were forever taking it to sound the alarm against imaginary Indian attacks—so she murmured, “Excuse me,” went to the door, and called, “Pattie, dearest? Could you bring us some of my marmalade? Do you like marmalade, Lieutenant? And some of your gingerbread, if it’s ready—” She returned to her chair beside the fire.

  “These other women who were killed. When did it happen? I think I would have heard—”

  “Jenny Barry was killed in June of 1772. Zulieka Fishwire in September of the same year.”

  September of ’72. The month Tommy was born. The same month, she remembered, that word had finally reached Rebecca that her father had died the previous May. They had still been at the farm in Braintree then. None of her Smith or Quincy aunts or cousins would have written to her about the murder of a woman with a name like Zulieka Fishwire; certainly not about the death of a prostitute. Common women—she heard Coldstone’s light, cool voice say the words again. So worthless are women’s deaths held. “And none since?”

  “None that have come to the ears of authority.” He stretched his hands to the fire again, his face as inexpressive as stone. “I am certain the owner of the brothel or tavern where the Barry woman met her end hid the circumstances, lest his trade be hurt. There may have been others, between that time and the murder of Mrs. Fishwire.”

  “Did they know one another? Or have acquaintance in common?”

  “That I don’t know. They lived in the same part of the town, Mrs. Fishwire on Love Lane, and Mrs. Barry somewhere nearby along the waterfront.”

  “And Scarlett’s Wharf lies not a quarter mile from the Tillet house,” murmured Abigail.

  “Was Mrs. Malvern acquainted with Mrs. Pentyre? Her maid said, not.”

  “Her maid didn’t know Mrs. Malvern’s name,” said Abigail. “In fact they knew one another slightly—chance met at Mr. Hazlitt’s stationery store, at a guess.”

  A slight crease flickered into existence between the Lieutenant’s pale, perfect eyebrows; he reached into his coat and brought out a folded half sheet, which he held out to her. “Would this be Mrs. Malvern’s handwriting?”

  Forgive my error beneath the elms on the Common. Your precious Finch. Abigail remembered vaguely that error was a meeting, but knew that the Common wasn’t really the Commons—she forgot what the transposition was. She shook her head. “It does not look familiar.” She could always plead nearsightedness if later caught in the lie. “Is this one of the notes that Mademoiselle Droux spoke of her mistress receiving?”

  “You’ve spoken to her, then?”

  “Of course. Servants are our shadows, Lieutenant Coldstone. They see ladies without their paint, and gentlemen before they don their wigs in the morning. If one cannot talk to a man about an event, the next best thing is to ask his servants.”

  “Sometimes the best thing, Mrs. Adams.” The cold seraph face suddenly turned human and young with a quick smile. “The man himself is doubtless lying. And did you in fact ride all the way out to Danvers, to speak with Mrs. Malvern’s former maid?”

  “I did. It wasn’t Danvers, but Townsend, a hamlet in that direction—and in fact it wasn’t even in the village, but some distance away. A vile journey.” She shivered at the recollection of those shuttered-up houses in Gilead, of the twisted little cripple-boy working the spinning wheel with his withered hands, a task he would pursue, Abigail guessed, for life, having nowhere else to go nor any worth to anyone save for that simple chore. “Mistress Moore told me that there was none she could think of, who would have wished Mrs. Malvern harm. But if it is a madman, it would not be—might not be—anyone she knows.”

  Except of course that it was, she thought, seeing in her mind the dim glow of firelight in the rain as shutters were opened into the alley, the pinched o and slightly twisted in of the forged note. The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia.

  “I take it,” she said after a time, “that you have spoken to Mr. Pentyre?”

  “I have,” said the Lieutenant.

  “And did he have an account of his own whereabouts on the night of his wife’s death?”

  “He did.”

  “Did you believe it?”

  “Madame,” said Coldstone, “there is no question of Pentyre’s involvement in his wife’s death—”

  “Why is there no question?” asked Abigail. “Because Mr. Pentyre is the Governor’s friend?”

  One corner of Coldstone’s mouth turned down, hard, a prim fold of exasperation.

  “Why are you so convinced that my husband—and not, I notice, any more obvious member of the Sons of Liberty—had a hand in the killing?”

  “Perhaps because the only people who claim to have been with your husband at the time of Mrs. Pentyre’s death are known to be speakers of sedition, if no worse, against His Majesty’s government?”

  “Ah. And only traitors will lie to cover the movements of their friends?”

  “You will admit that those who are known to be engaged in smuggling would be less likely to question a ‘friend’ if he asked them to lie.”

  “I will admit that they might oblige if asked for an untruth, but I will not admit that they’re readier to such a lie than anyone else in Boston, up to and including members of the Governor’s family.”

  It was probably physically impossible for Lieutenant Coldstone’s natural stiffness to increase by much, but the slight turn of his head, the flare of his nostrils, informed Abigail that Lisette Droux had at least told her the truth about Pentyre’s alibi. She went on, “If I’m wrong, of course, and Mr. Pentyre is
genuinely distraught at what happened, I would be the last person to press him with questions about whether he had a hand in it. It is one reason that I do want to see him, if it’s possible. Not to ask if he killed his wife, but to see if he knows anything about where my friend may have fled: any fact about the connection between his wife and Mrs. Malvern. Because I very much fear that Mrs. Malvern saw the killer, and that is why she has gone into hiding. We must find her, before the killer finds her first.”

  There was something about her words that made Coldstone’s eyes shift. Something that made him hesitate.

  At length he said, “Mr. Pentyre has removed to Castle Island. The families of all the tea consignees, and of every Crown official and clerk in Boston, have been crossing to the island all the morning, asking for the protection of the King’s troops against rioting and insult in the wake of agitation by the political organization to which your husband—and apparently Mrs. Malvern, and you yourself—belong. Surely you saw the broadsides,” he added drily, “demanding that Mr. Pentyre and the others present themselves at this Liberty Tree and resign their commissions to sell the tea?”

  “And yet,” returned Abigail quietly, “you—or at least the Provost Marshal—were convinced that Mr. Adams had to do with the murder, while the Dartmouth was yet far out at sea and no broadside had yet appeared on any wall.”

  Coldstone set plate and cup aside—the handle of the cup, Abigail noted, lining up perfectly with the edge of the table. “Mrs. Adams,” he said. “You and I are like card players, each guarding the contents of their hand from the other, because there is too much at stake on the table to lay it down. I think—” His frown deepened, as if at the command of that interior blackmailer who was forcing the words from him. “I need your help. I do not think I can find this man without it. And, I think you want to help me, both as a woman, and as a seeker after truth.”

  “If truth is indeed what you seek, Lieutenant.”

  Coldstone looked for a moment as if he would have said something else—perhaps, she reflected uncomfortably, turned her statement back upon her. But he only nodded. “I seek the man who would do this to a woman,” he said. “I have seen cases like this in London, and such a man will go on killing, until he is stopped. Will you help me find that man, whoever he may be?”