The Ninth Daughter aam-1

by Barbara Hamilton

  “You’re sure of that, are you?”

  She folded her arms. “Obviously, not having been party to any of my conversations with him, you’re not.”

  Sam’s face seemed to darken in the flickering light. “You’re not to go.”

  “Ah,” said Abigail in an enlightened voice. “You know where Rebecca is, then. I must say, that relieves my mind—”

  “Don’t you be pert with me, Nab—”

  “And don’t you be bossy with me,” she returned. “I’m trying to save a woman who is almost certainly in appalling peril—”

  “And I’m trying to save the liberties of our country. Something I think you’re in danger of forgetting.”

  “Not at all,” responded Abigail. “And the reason we seek to retain our liberties, is so that the life of a single individual—even if she is a mere woman—does not get snuffed out or thrust aside because it isn’t expedient for those in charge to take the time to save her.”

  Sam opened his mouth, glanced sidelong at John—his nose still in Pamela and giving no sign of having heard a word—and seemed to settle a little, like oatmeal taken off the boil. Very quietly, he said, “I have had every patriot in this town searching for her, for seven days now. Cellars, attics, warehouses . . . smuggler hidey-holes and the hulls of ruined ships. You forget that we’re not only hunting for Mrs. Malvern: We’re searching for the book that contains our codes and ciphers, and the lists of our contacts in other colonies where we are perhaps not strong enough to protect those the British would seek to arrest.”

  “I don’t forget.”

  “If you haven’t forgotten, then you’re a fool,” Sam gritted. “You don’t think that every time you open your mouth around that lobsterback pretty boy of yours he isn’t noting down every word and fitting them together like pieces of a mosaic? He only waits until he has a picture complete, to charge me or Hancock or John over there with that murder, or with complicity in covering it up. Do you want the Tories putting it around that John or myself will be hanged not for fighting for our liberties, not for standing up against a monstrous attempt to make the whole of these colonies the personal fiefdom of a fat German princeling, but for murdering a woman of our own organization who disagreed with us?”

  Abigail looked aside.

  “Now Bess tells me you’ve been asking questions about Abednego Sellars, of all people—”

  “Who held a grudge against Richard Pentyre.”

  “Then why didn’t he murder Pentyre?”

  “Why would he have—might he have—murdered a woman in precisely this same hideous fashion fourteen months ago in the North End, a woman he claimed was a witch—”

  “Now you are insane.” Sam’s hand struck flat-palmed on the top of the sideboard next to her, a crack that made her flinch but did not cause John to stir a hair. “You’re accusing everyone, casting about at random, muddying the waters, and putting us all in peril. I forbid you to go.”

  “And I defy you to stay me,” retorted Abigail.

  “And I forbid you to make any inquiry, or put about the slightest suggestion, that any Son of Liberty might have had the slightest involvement in, or knowledge of, Mrs. Pentyre’s death! Good God, woman, that’s all we’d need, at a time like this!”

  “A time like this,” said Abigail, her voice suddenly deadly quiet, “is the time—eight days—that a woman who is my friend, a woman who helped me through a time of grievous pain, is . . . somewhere. Somewhere that your smugglers and patriots and South End boys have not been able to discover, if they have been searching as hard as you say they have and not attending your meetings and carrying pamphlets to every village and town in riding distance to protest against the landing of a cargo of tea. You can’t have it both ways, Sam. Either Rebecca is in hiding with the ciphers in her possession, and afraid to contact the Sons of Liberty for reasons I will leave you to conjecture . . . or she is dead at the bottom of the bay and the ciphers are in the killer’s possession, and have been so for a week. Either a woman’s life is more important to you than ninety thousand dollars’ worth of tea, or it isn’t.”

  “I forbid you to go!” thundered Sam, and turned back to the fire. “John, I order you to bridle this wife of yours and keep her from interfering, either with our own men or with that damned cold-faced Provost! I will not have our endeavor jeopardized, and I warn you, John, kin or not, I’ll take whatever steps I need!”

  And snatching up his hat and cloak from the sideboard, he strode to the door, and vanished into the night.

  Twenty

  “Pa! Mrs. Adams is here.”

  “I know fifteen Mrs. Adamses.” Paul Revere grinned, emerging in his shirtsleeves from the back room of his shop, an apron around his waist. “Yet somehow, I knew it would be you, m’am.” He winked at his son behind the counter, stepped aside to let Abigail past him, into the wide-windowed little workshop with its shelves and tools and blocks of wax.

  “Because Sam has ordered you not to speak to me?”

  “Of course. I have tea here—” The kettle was hissing and muttering to itself on the edge of a small forge near the back door. No need to ask whether so much as a farthing’s tax had been paid on it. “What do you need to know?”

  It was midmorning, and wind blew icy across the harbor, rattling gently at the windows that formed a band of grayish light, halfway round the workroom. Abigail prayed it would grow less by three, when—with luck—Lieutenant Coldstone would meet her at Rowe’s Wharf. Even now it wasn’t bad enough to keep boats from passing over to the Island, but her stomach did anticipatory flip-flops at the thought of being on the water in such weather. “Were you acquainted with a woman named Jenny Barry?”

  He started to make a good-natured grimace, a comment on the dead woman’s way of life: then she saw in quick succession recollection, angry horror, and sudden speculation fleet across his dark eyes at the name. “She was killed—” he began, and Abigail finished for him, “—eighteen months ago, give or take. Her body was slashed—”

  “—like Mrs. Pentyre’s, after she was dead. Yes. I knew there was something . . . Another woman was killed that same summer, Zulie Fishwire—” His dark brows knit sharply down over his nose.

  “I went to her house the day before yesterday,” said Abigail. “Spoke with her neighbors, which apparently the local constables barely troubled themselves to do at the time. Did you see either of their bodies?”

  “I don’t live in that ward.” Revere shook his head. “I heard of them, of course. Everyone in the neighborhood did. There was a scare, but it seemed to come to nothing after all but tavern-shouting and vows to protect wives and daughters.” He made a little space on the table that occupied most of that room to set a teacup before her, then sank into his barrel-chair. On the table between them Abigail saw pamphlets, engraving plates and tools, sketches of the Dartmouth at anchor on Griffin’s Wharf. On a shelf above them a half-finished set of dentures grinned, discolored ivory in silver wire. Abigail felt a pang of gratitude that even the bearing of five children had left her with her teeth intact.

  “You think it was the same man?”

  “I don’t know,” said Abigail. She told him of her words with Coldstone, of the help Malvern had given her, and the accounts of Zulieka Fishwire’s neighbors. “Sometimes it looks to me like the act of a lunatic, and at others, like a cold-blooded crime masquing as one.”

  “Why the delay?” he asked. “Zulie Fishwire was killed—what? A year ago last September? If it is the same man, why did he stop? And why did he start again?”

  “I thought he might have left Boston and come back. If he were a sailor on a deepwater vessel, for instance, or a whaler. Lieutenant Coldstone is writing to the authorities in Philadelphia and New York. John says he thinks the note we found in Mrs. Pentyre’s pocket, arranging the meeting, is a forgery, but whether that means the killer is in the Sons, or Mrs. Pentyre had simply given him the code for another reason, or whether he just had access to her correspondence, I don’t know.�
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  Quickly, she sketched out to him all that Lisette Droux had told her about the young gentleman, beau comme Adonais, and what the inhabitants of Love Lane had had to say about Abednego Sellars. “I suppose it would lie beyond the bounds of coincidence for him to be Mrs. Pentyre’s mysterious lover—”

  “Not unless Mademoiselle Droux is singularly desperate or singularly blind,” put in Revere. “Abed is a well-looking man—and God only knows what women see in any man—but beau comme Adonais? Never.” He shook his head. “And yet—he’s never been the same, since word came to him of Davy’s death. In the time between their getting word that he’d been pressed into the Navy, and word of his death—over a year, that was—he was . . . I feared he’d go out of his senses. I think it was that, put a wedge between himself and Penelope. He’d take out his rage on her, then go try to drink himself unconscious, and all the while keeping up his position in the church, and running his business.” He fell silent, and a muscle in his temple stood out, with the clench of his jaw.

  In time he said, “He was one of the constables of the Cornhill Ward, during the summer of ’72. He would have heard the details of the other murders. And,” he added with a sigh, “he was in town the night of the twenty-fourth, for all his prentice-boy said he was in Cambridge. I know, because I saw him, drinking at the Green Dragon.”

  “At what time?”

  “About seven. Long after the gates had been closed.” Revere poured her out tea. “It does seem like two criminals, doesn’t it? One mad—and maybe dead by this time—and the other . . . pretending to be him, for his own ends.”

  “And Lieutenant Coldstone is certain—for what reason I don’t know—that that second criminal is John.” She folded her hands around the teacup, grateful for its warmth. “Not you, not Sam, not any of the actual leaders of the Sons of Liberty . . . specifically John. And in all of this, Rebecca has still made no appearance, nor has her body been found. I think—” She turned her face aside, and found herself suddenly having to work to keep her voice level. “I think it would actually be rather difficult to conceal a body in a town this crowded, for this length of time.”

  “Easier in winter than in summer,” said Revere gently, and Abigail nodded.

  “There is that. Now tell me—” She took a deep breath, and brought her gaze back to his. “Now tell me about Jenny Barry.”

  “Jenny Barry.” Revere handed her a two-penny pottery sugar bowl—he who made the most exquisite silver ones in the colony—and sat for a time, collecting his thoughts.

  “Myself, I think it was only a matter of time, before she met the end she did,” he said at last. “She was one of your bawdy whores, who reveled in being a disgrace. A big well-made Irish girl, with hair like a bunch of carrots. If she had money she’d spend it, on gimcrack ornaments and rum. I doubt she drew a sober breath since before she was a woman, and she could not have been twenty-five when she died. Everyone on the North End knew her, if not to speak to then by sight: There wasn’t a man who crossed the Mill Creek by day or night she did not approach. There’s a story—” He grinned suddenly at the recollection. “ ’Tis said one day Governor Hutchinson’s coach was stopped by some pigs in the lane, and she climbed in and sat on his knee, and offered him a drink from her bottle. She followed me once the whole length of Ship Street, shouting to the world how I was afraid of a real woman, as she called herself . . .”

  “And were you?” asked Abigail, amused.

  “Petrified. Still,” he said more quietly, “her death was an obscenity. I don’t know why I didn’t think of her, the moment I saw Mrs. Pentyre.”

  “Possibly because hers was a death that falls more often to poor whores, than to rich ones?”

  “Possibly.” He sounded sad.

  “Lieutenant Coldstone says she was killed somewhere else, and brought to the wharf—”

  “Lord, yes. In the summer the whole world’s out on the waterfront ’til all hours.” Revere’s fingers, long and deft, toyed with the carved-horn spoon. “Jem Greenough—he was constable of the ward that summer—said he thought it must have been done at the Queen of Argyll, across the way, which was where she generally took her men-friends. The landlord there is a cold-blooded rascal, and keeps open ’til dawn in the teeth of church and Army and all. He has rooms on his yard that nobody sees who goes in and out; all the girls use them. If he found her in one of them, as we found poor Mrs. Pentyre, he’d have done as we did.”

  Abigail sniffed. “At least Sam didn’t put Mrs. Pentyre’s body out in the road. Or was that only because Mrs. Pentyre wasn’t found until daylight?”

  “Where Sam is concerned, and the liberties of Englishmen,” returned the silversmith quietly, “I would put nothing past him.”

  “You said Abednego Sellars was constable over in the Ninth Ward, in ’72 when Mrs. Barry was killed,” said Abigail after a time of thought. “Davy Sellars was taken in ’68 or ’67, so Sellars would have been frequenting the taverns in the North End pretty heavily by then—”

  “Well, he always did,” said Revere. “And he knew Jenny Barry, if that’s the direction I think this is heading. I saw them together on three or four occasions, at the Queen or the Shores of Paradise. Did it mean anything?” Revere shrugged. “For that matter, she’d had a kiss or two off Sam, at a Pope’s Night parade . . . and there was more in one of Mrs. Barry’s kisses than there is to some marriages I’ve seen. Certainly to Abednego’s. But whether that means he’d murder the woman, and two others, and lure one of them to the house of one of our own pamphlet-writers instead of out to someplace like the Commons or the far side of Barton Point . . .”

  He looked up at the tinkle of the shop-bell, and the boy’s voice called from the shop, “Pa? It’s Mr. Adams.”

  Abigail said, “Drat!” and Revere handed her to her feet, gave her her marketing basket, and led her to the small door to the yard.

  “The gate there past the shed will take you out to Wood Lane, by the Cockerel Church.” He pointed. “Just one request, in trade for the information I’ve given you, Mrs. Adams. Talk to me—or to John—before you take any steps.”

  She tilted her head warily. “So you can forbid me, for the good of your endeavor?”

  “So we can make sure someone goes with you,” he said quietly. “Good luck.” He stood in the rear door of his shop until she was through the little gate.

  Abigail turned them over in her mind, as she walked back toward Queen Street. Jenny Barry, Zulieka Fishwire, Perdita Pentyre. Coldstone had spoken several times of the differences between them: In what way, she asked herself, are they alike?

  Are we in fact seeking two criminals here, or one?

  Just because Perdita Pentyre received a note luring her to the place of her death, it does not mean that the other two did not.

  One killed in a tavern, another in her house, a third in the house of a friend. She saw again the single column of smoke rising above the mansarded slates of Richard Pentyre’s mansion; heard the constant soft stirrings and creakings that had murmured at the edges of her interviews with Scipio, with Charles Malvern, with Lisette Droux in the Malvern kitchen.

  Maids, butler, grooms at Pentyre’s house had been the guarantee of Perdita Pentyre’s protection. Those servants who knew everything, who slept beneath the same roof albeit in their maze of little attic chambers up beneath the rafters. Had it been chance only, that the murder had taken place on the night the Tillets were away?

  A group of men passed her, newly in from the country, rifles on their shoulders and powder horns at their belts. They stepped respectfully out into the center of the street, to let her keep the higher and less mucky ground close to the wall. In their way, they were precisely like the Pentyre servants. Their mere presence was a guarantee of protection. It is when we are alone that we are vulnerable.

  She wondered if she were insane, for agreeing—nay, demanding—to go across the harbor to Castle William that afternoon. Of course, she told herself, Colonel Leslie was highly unlikel
y to clap her into a cell and send word to John to present himself alone and unarmed somewhere at midnight or he’d never see her alive again . . .

  Considered in that light, her peril (if there was one) sounded as far-fetched as the situation in Pamela, which always caused Rebecca to roll her eyes at the ceiling. John, too—last night, as they’d gotten into bed, John had said, “That farrago is honestly your favorite novel?” Rather defensively, Abigail had replied, “And why would it not be?”

  “You honestly think that a rich and powerful gentleman would—or would be able to—hold a young woman prisoner in the attic of a country house, with the connivance of not one but two entire staffs of servants, and of every other person in the countryside—”

  “You’ve obviously never seen a family putting pressure on a girl to marry a man of property and power whom she doesn’t like,” she’d retorted, and the quibble had passed to other matters. Perhaps it was that discussion which had touched her thoughts, perhaps her dream of rain and darkness.

  But as she walked along the street with the morning sky pale pewter beyond the line of the gables above her, she thought, An attic. Sam’s patriots had been poking into cellars, snooping around smuggler-caches, investigating warehouses for nine days, finding nothing . . . All those places where the smugglers hid their packets of tea and casks of cognac and other goods that the English Crown forbade English colonists to buy from any but English merchants. And those places all had this in common: that they could be entered by a stranger from the street.

  With the complicity of the household, Rebecca could be hiding—or be hidden in—any house in town.

  Or her body could be buried in any cellar.

  The thought halted Abigail in her tracks, in the middle of the street; a coldness fell on her like the shadow of a storm. She’s being held.

  And the next instant: That’s ridiculous . . .

  Isn’t it?

  But her heart was beating fast, and she felt as she’d felt when, as a child, she’d grasped the logic that linked mathematical principles, or had understood for the first time why God must know who would be saved and who damned: that sense of seeing gears mesh, of facts falling into place. Before the eye of her mind flashed the open shutters of the Tillet attic, closed for the year that she’d been visiting Rebecca on Fish Street. With the Pentyre household in an uproar over its mistress’s murder, would Lisette Droux even be aware, during that first day or two, of someone being kept in one of those myriad little chambers marked by the stylish mansion’s dormer windows? Would she have thought to mention it? Particularly if some other explanation had been given that required her silence. We must make our nest against a storm—