The Ninth Daughter aam-1

by Barbara Hamilton

  “If he’d left Boston, he might have stood a better chance of mending his ways,” remarked Hannah, bringing two of the work-candles close, so that she could thread up a needle by their light. “Here, if a man wants to make a change, he has to almost abandon all his friends. If he was out in Essex County, it would take a deal of trouble to find gambling houses and bad women.”

  “He would only have ended up seducing his neighbors’ wives.” Bess turned a shirt right-side out, to inspect a darn. “But you may be right. He went back, in any case. I suppose only knowing that it was just a few minutes’ walk, to the Mermaid or the Queen of Argyll, was too much for him. Especially if he didn’t really think there was anything wrong with what he was doing in the first place.”

  “Is he a relation of Richard Pentyre’s, then?” asked Abigail, after the four women had sewed for a time in quiet.

  “Oh, Lord, yes! There was bad blood between them, you see, over the land that Pentyre’s mother inherited: Well, to my mind the bad blood was inherited, too, because it was Abednego’s father that got passed over in the will, not Abednego himself. But it was Pentyre he went to when his son was pressed into the Navy, see—as family, you know. I don’t know a great deal about the British Navy,” she added, setting her sewing down for a moment, to sip her tea. “Nor do I know, how long it takes even for a man who’s a friend of the Crown, to get them to turn loose of a common sailor, even if they can find the man, on all their ships all over the seas. So, I don’t know the right of it. Abednego claims Pentyre was lazy, and put the matter off, as not important to him, for nearly a year, before they even located what ship poor Davy was on. And by then it was too late.”

  Eighteen

  Rain started late that night, raw and cold. Abigail, since childhood a subject to rheumatism, felt the change of weather in her sleep, and turned restlessly, seeking John’s steady warmth, like a heated brick. Seeking, in her dreams, his unquenchable flame of spirit.

  But all her dreams were drawn toward darkness. In her sleep she heard Mrs. Hazlitt’s wailing: All flesh died, that moved upon the earth . . . fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. Though even in her dream her reason told her that the vision was simply a confused old woman’s hallucination, she went to the window and looked out, and saw all of Queen Street drowned in rising waters. Water climbed the brick walls of the opposite houses, rain-pocked in the blackness yet visible with the all-seeing knowledge of dreams. Church bells tolled their wordless warning of danger, and she saw in her dreaming Nabby and Johnny in the next room, clinging together in fright as the water poured silently in over the windowsill. The Dartmouth floated by, laden with its burden of tea, its crewmen waving their cargo manifests and asking to be allowed to vote.

  Rebecca is out there somewhere. A prisoner in one of those attics, with the water rising. She will drown, before we find her. Abigail leaned from the window, feeling the slick wet coldness of the windowsill, the sting of the wind on her face. “Where are you?” she screamed, but her throat would produce no sound. The gale whipped her hair around her face, a vast sable cloud. From the window the whole of the world seemed to be a waste of water, a thousand dark roofs and blind black windows. Rebecca could be trapped behind any one. The bells tolled like thunder, and lightning from the coming storm flickered over the face of the deep.

  “Don’t give up!” Still no sound. She gasped, trying to force the air from her throat. “We’re coming!” And woke upon a gasp, as John touched her shoulder.

  “Nab,” he whispered, and she clung to him in the darkness that seemed so black after the luminous cat-sight of dreaming. “Beloved—”

  At the sound of the church bells she shivered violently. “Who is ringing the bells?” He drew back a little in surprise at the mundane question, and she heard the muffled snort of his chuckle.

  “Sam’s got men at it, turn and turn about,” he said. “All along the waterfront, too, ready in case the Cumberland tries to put in or Leslie brings his men over. Is that what you were dreaming of, dear friend? The bells? Do they trouble you?”

  She shook her head. “Just a dream. They’ll trouble the British a good deal more.” It was good to be able to seek refuge in his arms.

  There was no great difficulty in ascertaining whether Abednego Sellars had passed the previous Thursday evening where others could see him, particularly not with Boston in a ferment and half the merchants in the town absent from their shops. Abigail abstracted a book of sermons from the top shelf of John’s library, wrapped it in rough paper and string, and waited until John left for Old South Church, where the meeting was that day. Though not one of the inner circle of the Sons of Liberty, he was always gone during these gray, louring mornings, at the hour when the countrymen who crowded the streets seemed to vanish as if by magic. Walking from Queen Street down to Milk Street, where Sellars had his chandlery shop, Abigail passed Old South, and saw the backs of men clustered in its doorway, and heard the muffled outcry of voices within. Sam? she wondered. He could always get a crowd going . . .

  Again the thought crossed her mind of the Reverend Bargest out in Gilead, rousing his congregation to just such an outcry: Behold them! Aggh, there she is! Do you not see her? The serpent, with its glaring eyes—Lo, can you not see where the Nightmare comes? There! There! And everyone in the little congregation wailed, We see her, we see . . .

  You must see! You must! Behold the witch! She comes NOW through the wall, glowing with the corpse-light of Hell—!

  Only it was Sam’s voice she heard in her mind, Can you not see the King? He comes through the wall, glowing with the fires of Hell, holding a bayonet to the throats of your children—!

  The case is not the same, Abigail told herself, vexed that the comparison had even crossed her mind. In any case Sam doesn’t control the lives of the families of the men who look to him for leadership. Even if he did get carried away with his rhetoric and start taking liberties with provable facts.

  As she’d known would be the case, only Abednego Sellars’s youngest prentice-boy was in the chandlery shop on Milk Street. Bess had informed her—after a few discreet questions—that Penelope Sellars’s sister had recently given birth, so there was little fear of encountering the New South deacon’s wife in the shop, something Abigail felt guiltily unwilling to do. She had been raised to abhor gossip, and made a careful point, in her discussions with her sisters and Bess of the affairs of various friends and acquaintances, not to spread evil rumors unless they could be definitively substantiated, and then to put the best face on the matters if possible . . .

  But, she told herself, the case is not the same here, either.

  Even so, she was glad Penelope Sellars wasn’t in the building.

  “It might have been Mr. Sellars,” said the apprentice, to Abigail’s story of a visitor last Wednesday night, just before the rain started, who had been gone before she could be called in from the cowhouse and had left this package, and Pattie had said she thought it might be Mr. Sellars. “In truth he spent that night from home. He was called out to Cambridge, just after dinner, and didn’t return in time, and the gates were closed on him . . .” He glanced around the empty shop, with its neat packages of candles and rope, soap and nails, as if for listening ears. His voice sank to a whisper. “Mrs. Sellars, she wasn’t any too pleased, either. The squawk she set up!”

  Abigail said, a little primly, “Well, if Mr. Sellars was in Cambridge Wednesday night, he could not be the man who left this book upon my husband’s doorstep, could he? I think it would be a favor to them both, if you mentioned nothing of this.”

  “No, m’am.” He looked like he might have said something else—mentioned the deacon’s latest “ladyfriend” on the North End?—but only repeated after a moment, “No, m’am.”

  Drat men. Abigail’s pattens clinked sharply on Milk Street’s cobblestone paving. If they have an aversion to a woman, why wed her? If they want to tup harlots, let them marry the hussies to begin with—then they’d
see there’s more to happiness than four bare legs in a bed.

  Orion Hazlitt’s face returned to her, harsh with sudden anger at the thought of Charles Malvern. Do you ever wish—?

  Yet Rebecca Woodruff had pledged herself to Charles Malvern for her family’s sake, long before her path had ever crossed the young stationer’s. What God hath joined, let no man put asunder.

  Rebecca had said that to her, on her first evening in the new house on Queen Street, when she and John had come back to Boston from Braintree a year ago. Rebecca had helped her, Bess, Hannah, and Pattie scrub every surface with hot water and vinegar, move pots and kettles into the kitchen, make up the beds. After dinner was done for all friends and family, Rebecca had remained, to help clean up, and to tell at greater depth the small events that had made up her life during Abigail’s year and a half of absence from the town. Orion’s name had come up early in the conversation: “He is a good man,” Rebecca had said, perhaps too quickly, when Abigail had mentioned the number of times his name had arisen in her letters. “Cannot a woman take pleasure in a man’s conversation without all the world winking and smirking, if he but walk her home from church?”

  Abigail had replied carefully, “If she is living apart from her husband, it behooves her to take care how she shows her pleasure. Either to others, or to him.”

  Rebecca had reddened a little in the pallor of the winter twilight, but it was anger that sparkled in her dark eyes, not shame. She had bent over her sewing again. “Those who walk with their gaze in the gutters will see mud wherever they look,” she replied after a time. “He tells me his mother is the same. She thinks that any woman who speaks to her son is ‘on the catch’ to take him away from her. She’s never forgiven him for coming to Boston in the first place, he says, As if he were running away from me! Which of course is exactly what he was doing. She thinks the young ladies of the Brattle Street congregation are heretics, let alone me, whether I were married or not. And I am married,” Rebecca went on. “Abigail, I do not forget that. What God hath joined, let no man put asunder . . . not even the man who has cast me out.”

  It had been on Abigail’s lips to ask, What if things were different?

  But they were not different, nor would they be. So she had held her peace.

  “Mrs. Adams?”

  Startled, Abigail turned, as she came into the open space between the Old State House and the Old Meeting House—the very place where, three and a half years ago, British troopers had opened fire on a mob of unarmed civilians—to see a man approaching from the doorway of the State House, wrapped in a thick gray cloak. His hat shadowed the pristine gleam of hair powder, but even before he came close enough for her to see his face her heart leaped to her throat.

  “Heavens, man, are you insane?” She strode over to him, and he removed his hat and bowed: It was Lieutenant Coldstone, sure enough, and in uniform beneath that very military-looking cloak. He wasn’t even accompanied by the faithful Sergeant Muldoon.

  “On the contrary,” said the young officer, “you could scarcely call upon me, m’am. And we are not half a mile from the soldiers at the Battery.”

  “With all of—oh, what is it? Twenty troops? Do you think they’d even turn out, if they heard a mob going after a Tory who wasn’t smart enough to keep off the streets at a time like this? What on earth are you doing here?”

  “My duty,” he responded stiffly, as Abigail caught him by the arm and almost dragged him down King Street toward the relative safety of the Battery. “We were sent to escort the Fluckner family across to Castle Island”—Thomas Fluckner was a crony of Governor Hutchinson’s—“and I thought to improve the occasion by asking if you had had time to pursue inquiries on the North End. I left a note with your girl, that I would return at three. The town seems quiet enough.”

  “That’s because they’re all at Old South Church, listening to my husband’s cousin tell them the Crown has no right to tax British citizens without the consent of their elected representatives in Parliament, or set up a monopoly on any item for the benefit of his personal friends.”

  Coldstone’s lips parted on the words Three pence a pound—and closed again. She thought he might have followed this up with an argument beginning, Nevertheless, it is the law . . . but that look, too, passed from his eyes. He only said, “You are quite right, Mrs. Adams. It was foolish of me.”

  For a moment King Street was quiet indeed, save for the eternal tolling of the bells. Then he continued, “Last night I reviewed the notes I made at the time of the Fishwire murder, and those of my predecessor. The regiment had only just taken up post at Castle William. The previous Provost Marshal seemed to have the attitude that a woman who has been reduced to selling her body deserves whatever befalls her, and merely noted the savagery of the post mortem slashing. I was angry, both that he would make no more of it than he did, and because it was plain to me that his neglect in pursuing the first murder had left the culprit at large to commit a second. For that reason, though it was deemed a civil matter only, when the constable reported it to the Provost Marshal—in his usual weekly report, and thus some days after the event—I asked permission to visit the Fishwire house.”

  “And did you have dung thrown at you by the local children?” inquired Abigail. When he did not reply, she glanced sidelong up at the young man’s face, and added, more kindly, “There are few enough in Boston who would take such trouble, for a woman who made her living fixing hair and selling herbs.”

  “Few in London either.” Coldstone didn’t return her glance. His dark, clear eyes roved to the muddy flats that lay on their left as they emerged from Kilby Street, the rough, open ground on both sides of the Battery March below the slope of Fort Hill, as if seeking signs of danger.

  “Are you from London, Lieutenant Coldstone?”

  That brought his eyes back to her, and put that little crease back in the corner of his mouth. “Not originally. My parents lived in Kent. They didn’t start bringing me to London with them until I was seven or eight. I’ve always preferred the country. Even as a child, I think I sensed that London was a place where a poor woman could be slashed to death, or a poor child trampled by a rich man’s horse, and no one would really care. This seems to hold true in Boston as well.”

  “I think it holds true in many places.” Abigail made a wry smile. “As Londoners consider themselves the pattern-cards for the conduct of all the world, I suppose this is as it should be. What did you make of the house when you saw it? Or the victim?”

  “Little enough.” Below them, among the scattered buildings around Oliver’s Wharf, two redcoats stood on guard while three British sailors, in their striped jerseys and tarred pigtails, helped the crew of a small sloop unload barrels of provisions. For the men of the Battery, Abigail assumed: the soldiers whose little palisaded barrack stood at the foot of Fort Hill to their left. Just ahead of them on the other side of the Battery March lay the walled park of the guns themselves, thirty-five cannon set to defend the Harbor against the French who had never come.

  There were, Abigail observed, more soldiers on guard there than was usual, but not so great a number as to provoke fears of a landing or an invasion. Her estimation of Colonel Leslie’s good sense rose. Beyond the line formed by Milk Street and School Street, the southern portion of the Boston peninsula was but thinly inhabited, open fields, cow pastures, vegetable gardens, builders’ yards, and rope-walks prevailing along the unpaved lanes. In general the soldiers stationed at the Battery kept themselves strictly to themselves, did their drinking on-post, and did not venture into the town even in times of quiet.

  Beside her, Coldstone continued, “The constable had already given the landlord leave to clear the place up. Fools—” His brow darkened. “Any sign the killer might have left behind was gone, and of course none of the neighbors had a word to say to me. It was clearly the work of a madman, yet there is something—” He shook his head. “At the risk of sounding like the very men I derided a moment ago, I will say that my obs
ervation has been that a harlot—and Mrs. Barry was well known about the wharves, apparently—puts herself in danger by the very nature of her work. It is not at all uncommon, for one to be slashed, or even killed.”

  “I suppose in London,” said Abigail softly, “one would see a good deal more of that sort of thing, than here.”

  “As you say, Mrs. Adams. But why this man, whoever he was, would have attacked a hairdresser, and a woman of some fifty years to boot—”

  “I know not whether this lightens or darkens the issue,” said Abigail. “But dressing hair was not all that Mrs. Fishwire did. She was an herbalist, a healer, and an abortionist. Some called her a witch. It was not unusual for her to have visitors at odd hours, well after dark.”

  “Was it not?” Coldstone halted, where a broad flight of wooden steps led down past John Rowe’s warehouses to Rowe’s Wharf. On the wharf itself, two redcoats stood guard over a mountain of trunks, crates, and hatboxes, which servants were loading into a launch. In the roadway before Abigail and her escort, a coach had come to a halt, from which a black manservant was handing a massive, red-faced gentleman in a crimson greatcoat. Thomas Fluckner, Abigail identified him. One of the richest merchants in Boston and the proprietor of a million acres of Crown lands in Maine.

  “Excuse me, m’am.” Coldstone bowed, and strode to meet Fluckner, who shook a handful of papers at him and harangued him at some length in his sharp, yapping voice. Abigail caught the words transport . . . rights as citizens . . . adequate guard . . . Milk Street (which was where Abigail knew the Fluckner mansion stood) . . . always supported His Majesty . . .