The Ninth Daughter aam-1

by Barbara Hamilton

  He opened the door to the maid’s room, which was a narrow chamber on the main bedroom floor, between the overdecorated demipalaces allotted to Mrs. Fluckner and her daughter. Philomela’s room was very like the girl herself, Abigail thought. No frills, no fuss, though she probably could have gleaned any number of gaudy castoffs from either of her mistresses. On a little table beside the bed lay a book of Sir Philip Sidney’s poems.

  The more sinister poem in question was, as Philomela had said, under the loose floorboard beside the head of the bed.

  Abigail saw immediately that it was written on the same expensive English paper as had been the note that summoned Perdita Pentyre to her death. Her heart beating hard, she unfolded it, carried it to the window where the last of the daylight still lingered over Boston’s peaked roofs. She remembered what the girls had said of its contents, and braced herself for horrors.

  But the words of those first lines were blanked from her mind by the handwriting itself.

  No. Oh, no.

  She felt sick, almost dizzy with the rush of surmise and horror, pieces of some monstrous mosaic falling into place . . .

  And worse than that, the vertiginous shock of how close she’d stood to the man.

  Dear God in Heaven—!

  “Mrs. Adams?” Coldstone was watching her face narrowly. Quickly she turned to the second page, aware that her fingers were shaking. “Do you know the hand?”

  “No. It’s—” She shook her head, stammered—groped for some other reason to account for her distress. “It’s just that it’s a little like my father’s, at first glance—that rounding of the letters . . . It shocked me for an instant, that’s all.” Had I babbled, ‘Good Heavens, it looks exactly like the Emperor of China’s,’ it would not be so obvious a lie . . .

  “Mrs. Adams.” The officer took the sheets from her hand, and his dark eyes traveled swiftly over the lines. Then he returned his gaze to her, and she looked aside, fighting to keep her thoughts from her face and aware she must be white-lipped and distracted as one who has seen a ghost. “What is it?”

  “Naught.” She could barely get the word out.

  “Naught,” he repeated, and it was the first time she saw emotion—rage—blaze in his eyes, cold as the northern lights. “Even with what you know. Naught.”

  Abigail looked away. “My secrets are not mine to tell.”

  “Nor are mine,” said Coldstone quietly. “Yet I have spoken with those who have been magistrates in London for many years, and on one fact they all agree: that these men do not stop their crimes. How many more women are you willing to have die, Mrs. Adams, before you conclude that protection of the innocent is more important to you than shielding politically suspect friends? May I take these?”

  “Let me keep two pages.” Her voice sounded stifled in her own ears. “In case one of my politically suspect friends recognizes it.”

  Without a word he pocketed the other three sheets, and preceded her down the handsome stairs. Mr. Barnaby glanced at them inquiringly, but neither spoke. At the outer door Coldstone looked up and down the darkening length of Milk Street. At least two dozen of Revere’s North End boys loitered still, hands in pockets, studiously paying not the slightest attention to the two soldiers stationed beside the Fluckner door. “Go on to the wharf,” said Abigail. “You won’t be molested, and there’s enough light left, for you to return to Castle Island. I will circulate these”—she touched her pocket—“and see if the hand is familiar—”

  “And if it belongs to one of the Sons of Liberty, will that be the last I hear of it?”

  He was so angry she could almost see it, coming off him like frozen smoke. In a voice held steady with an effort, Abigail said, “We aren’t savages, Lieutenant. Even as we are not traitors.”

  He faced her in the thin twilight. “You are not a savage, Mrs. Adams,” he replied. “Yet you are devoted to a cause—which you feel to be right—which is being led by men who feel themselves justified in breaking the King’s law. Whether that law is just or unjust is immaterial in the face of the fact that you—and they—believe your cause to be above law. Even as those killers of witches in Salem a generation ago believed theirs to be. Such an attitude, m’am, makes you as dangerous as they.”

  He bowed, and left her on the steps. The circle of patriots followed him and his men, like sharks around a ship’s boat, out of sight in the gloom. When they had gone, young Dr. Warren emerged from the shadows of a nearby alley, raffish-looking in a mechanic’s corduroy jacket and rough boots. “May I escort you home, Mrs. Adams?”

  Later, Abigail recalled that she’d talked with him of something, but didn’t know what, and she was hard-put not to simply answer his remarks at random. Her mind seemed to return, again and again, to two things:

  These men do not stop their crimes.

  And the poem about the slaughter of a red-haired whore, written in Orion Hazlitt’s hand.

  “Will you come with me to Sam’s?” John picked up his boots, which he’d already pulled off by the fire by the time Abigail handed him the two sheets of fe vered verse. “It’s gone beyond choice, now. You didn’t do anything foolish like try to see Hazlitt, did you?”

  “I walked down Hanover Street.” Abigail took off her apron, closed the sewing box that she’d been working on when John had returned home. Upstairs, the children and Pattie slumbered in their beds. “The shop was shuttered, and there was no light in the upstairs windows. I had not the courage to do more.”

  “You had more sense, you mean.” John fetched their coats and cloaks from the pegs beside the door—his own still cold to the touch—while Abigail climbed to the little room Pattie shared with the younger boys and now with Gomer Faulk. She gently woke Pattie, and bid her watch until they returned. Only then, wreathed in scarves and cloaks and hoods and hats, with a lantern bobbing ineffectually from John’s hand, did they step out into the windy night.

  “Is Coldstone right?” asked Abigail softly after a time. “Have we become like the hanging judges years ago? Like medieval Inquisitors, who would kill a man to save his soul? Abrogating to ourselves the right to do so, because we felt it was right?”

  “The only ones who do that,” replied John after thought, “are those who see the world as they did, with only a single answer, not only to that problem, but to all problems. And the single-minded certainly do not number Sam among their ranks, you know. Nor will he condone murder, just because a man has served the liberties of his country.”

  “No,” said Abigail. “No, I know that. Orion—no wonder he didn’t harm Rebecca! And no wonder she went into hiding—”

  “If it was Hazlitt who killed Mrs. Pentyre.” John held aloft the lantern as they entered the square before the State House and the Customs house, where the Massacre had taken place. Every shutter in town was barred, and at this hour, most of the windows behind them were dark. The night watchman’s cries drifted to them from another street, barely to be heard beneath the steady tolling of the bells. The wind made the feeble light sway even in John’s hand, and the waning moon, breaking through the clouds, showed Abigail movement stirring in the alleyways. A chip of light flared, where someone closed a slide over a lantern. “ ’Tis all right,” he said softly, when she caught at his sleeve. “Sam’s boys, most like.”

  “And was it Sam’s boys,” she asked, vexed, “who’ve followed me, when I’ve been abroad at night?”

  “Damn his impertinence,” growled John. “But likely, yes. I’ll have a word to say to him.” They walked on in silence.

  “When you say,” said Abigail after a moment, “if it was Orion who killed Perdita Pentyre—You still think there were two criminals, and two crimes?”

  “I don’t doubt he committed the others, and that it’s he who has been following that poor slave-girl and sending her poems. But killing Mrs. Pentyre—” He shook his head. “To say nothing of throwing the blame off onto me. There are men whose loyalty I’ve doubted, Abigail, men I think Sam needs to be more careful in his d
ealings with . . . but not Hazlitt. For God’s sake, why commit the crime in the house of the woman he loves? And why steal her list of contacts?”

  “What else would he have done with it?” countered Abigail. “Left it for the Watch? Handed it back to Sam?”

  “But in Rebecca’s house—”

  “Where else,” asked Abigail softly, “could he be sure of getting Mrs. Pentyre alone? These other women whom he—he fixed upon, to whom he was drawn in some unholy fashion—these women he convinced himself were the Daughters of Eve. They were, as Lieutenant Coldstone said, common women. Women whom any man could come to and find unprotected . . . or in poor Philomela’s case, a woman whose access he could purchase, though thankfully it was beyond his price. Perdita Pentyre wasn’t. Yet to him she was Jezebel the Queen.”

  “Jezebel—?”

  “Remember Bargest’s sermons that I told you of? About the Nine Daughters of Eve, that lie in wait to destroy a man’s soul? The serpent, the witch—we know Mrs. Fishwire had any number of serpents in her shop, besides her poor cats—the harlot. The succubus—the demon female who torments a righteous man’s dreams. Or would he consider Philomela a nightmare? Poor Mrs. Pentyre, riding at the Colonel’s side to review the troops, with her face painted and her head tir’d like Jezebel—”

  They walked on, Abigail’s pattens clinking on the cobbles of Kilby Street and her heavy skirts flapping against her legs. Fort Hill loomed before them, pricked with spots of yellow where the few soldiers left on the mainland manned the guns. At the wharves below, ships stirred and creaked, restless wooden animals in the dark.

  “Saying it is Orion,” said John quietly. “And saying that he wouldn’t have killed Rebecca . . . How can you be sure that she’s in hiding?”

  “I looked in his attic.”

  The lantern-light flashed as John turned his head. “You thought then—?”

  “No. It was nowhere in my mind. But I’d just realized she might be being held prisoner somewhere, when I went into his house and he sent me upstairs for laudanum for his mother. I had to look up into the nearest attic, to see how possible it would be. I think at that moment I would have run down the street looking into the attics of every house in turn. It’s only a tiny space up there, you know. One can’t stand up in it, even right under the ridgepole, and there’s no other space in the house, where a woman could be kept.”

  Across the open ground, and down the hill to their left, they could see the glow of torches around Griffin’s Wharf, where men still sat up, muskets in hand, around the Dartmouth , and now the Eleanor, as they had mounted guard now for ten days. Out in the harbor the Beaver lay at anchor, where the harbormaster had commanded she remain until the members of the crew had either died of the smallpox that had broken out among them, or were recovered enough to be in no danger of spreading the disease. No word yet, of the Governor sending for troops, from either Britain or Halifax, but surely it was only a matter of time . . .

  “Oh, good,” Abigail said, as they emerged from the narrow throat of Gridley Lane to see, a few houses down the street, the weak glow of candles behind the shutters in the downstairs room which Abigail knew to be Sam’s study. “At least we won’t be waking him.”

  “You’re tender of Sam’s rest, all of a sudden. I’d have thought you’d delight in shooting him out of bed in order to say, I told you so . . .”

  “But what a horrid thing to do to Bess. Besides, after all that’s happened today I’m not sure I could support the sight of Sam in his nightshirt.”

  Predictably, Sam was not only awake and dressed, but drinking cider with Dr. Warren and Paul Revere, the latter preparing to take over charge of the guard on Griffin’s Wharf at midnight. With them were two or three others of Sam’s South End cabal that guided the Sons of Liberty, including—a bit disconcertingly—Abednego Sellars. These lesser captains retired to the kitchen while John and Abigail laid before Sam the poem: “ ’Tis Hazlitt’s hand, right enough,” said Abigail, and John nodded agreement. Revere lighted half a dozen more candles and brought them close.

  “They’re right.” He read the verse before him, and his dark brow plunged down over his nose in shocked disgust; his dark eyes flicked up to meet Abigail’s. “Good God.”

  “Not really,” she murmured in response.

  “Do you have the note he sent to Mrs. Pentyre? The one supposed to be from Mrs. Malvern?”

  Abigail produced it, and the silversmith held them close together, then produced a glass from his pocket to study them in detail. “The light isn’t good enough,” he said at length. “And the hand is well disguised. Would he have jeopardized one of our own?”

  “Would one of Jesus’ disciples have jeopardized Him?” retorted Sam, putting on his greatcoat.

  “He could be simply too mad to care,” put in Warren.

  “We have seen nothing to tell us,” insisted John, “that Orion Hazlitt is in any way involved in the murder of Mrs. Pentyre, or the disappearance of Mrs. Malvern—or of your precious codebook,” he added. “All we can be fairly sure of, is that he was the author of the two crimes, and the man who has pursued Fluckner’s girl. The rest I presume we can ask him about in due time.”

  “Will you take Mrs. Adams home, John?” Sam wrapped a scarf around his throat—another madder-red one, Abigail noted automatically: Really, Boston has entirely too many things in it that too many people have . . . “Or will you come?”

  “We’ll go home,” said John. “If you’d send someone to let us know the—outcome—of your visit, I think we should both rather hear it tonight, than wait until I see you tomorrow at the meeting. And to add to that, after the meeting this evening, a man told me there’s a rumor afoot, that a ship is coming across from Lynn within a few days, to take the tea off the Beaver before she even comes into harbor.”

  “’Tis what Paul and the doctor came just now to tell me,” responded Sam grimly. “ ’Twill have to be looked into, and at once, tomorrow—”

  “It can’t be with the Governor’s approval—”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him to hire the Devil himself to get the tea landed. Can you meet with us at nine?”

  John nodded. As the other men left, he led Abigail once more out into the night. The wind had scattered the clouds; the night’s cold was worse. In most houses, the thin chinks of lamp- and candlelight had failed. The streets lay stark, under the watery blue of the moon.

  “And do you think,” asked Abigail softly, “that Sam, and Dr. Warren, and the others, will wait long enough to ask Mr. Hazlitt whether he in fact knows anything of Mrs. Pentyre’s murder? They won’t dare to turn him over to the authorities, you know.”

  “I think you’re right about that.”

  “Then is this not in fact putting our own cause above the law?”

  “Were we in England,” pointed out John, “and did Orion Hazlitt happen to be a friend of the King’s, or a member of the nobility, I doubt he would even be prosecuted. Come,” he added, and put his arm around her shoulders. “One way or another, we shall hear something before morning, and then we will know what we must do.”

  But as the chimes of midnight mingled with the tolling of the alarm bells, Paul Revere—looking uncharacteristi cally haggard and shaken in the feeble shudder of the candlelight—brought the news that Orion Hazlitt had fled from his home.

  “The place was shut tight as a drum when we got there; Sam broke a window in the printing shed, to get us in,” he said. “He wasn’t about to wait, you understand, for Hazlitt to pick up some rumor in the morning and disappear with Mrs. Malvern’s cipher-book and list of names, always supposing he had them. Hazlitt wasn’t there. Neither was the book. Sam searched the place.”

  Of course Sam searched.

  “What was there,” went on Revere steadily, “was Mrs. Hazlitt. Dead, like the others.” He was silent a moment, his eyebrows standing out very dark in the dim glow of her lamp, as if his face was still chalky from what he had seen. “Just like the others.”

 
Abigail put a hand over her mouth, trying to push from her mind the sight of a fresh bite in the wax yellow flesh of Mrs. Pentyre’s shoulder. The serpent, the harlot, the witch, the nightmare . . .

  What nightmares had tormented Orion Hazlitt’s sleep, on the trundle at his mother’s bedside while she murmured in opiated slumber?

  What nightmare had he sought to flee, in the sanity of friendship with a woman he couldn’t have?

  “The Sons are out looking for him,” Revere continued after a few moments. “Sam has asked me to tell you, that this isn’t to go any farther. We’ll look after our own.”

  “I will at least send a letter to Miss Fluckner,” responded Abigail, “alerting her slave-girl—whom—” Her throat closed on Orion Hazlitt’s name, as her mind flung up at her a hundred conversations, a hundred memories, of that handsome and quiet young man. “Who was surely marked for the next victim. I will swear Miss Fluckner to secrecy—she is a fierce partisan to our cause—and Sam surely cannot object to that. And if he does,” she added mildly, “assure him that I will spend the next six months weeping with chagrin at his displeasure.”

  Despite his look of having quietly thrown up his supper not long before, Revere managed a wry grin. “Depend upon me to do so, m’am.”

  Twenty-nine

  My dear Miss Fluckner,

  Thank you for the help you have given us, beyond what I can express.

  The man who wrote the poems to Philomela is a printer named Orion Hazlitt. He is being sought by authorities now, for yet another crime. My suspicion is that he will flee the district, yet the possibility remains that he may attempt to cross over to the Island. Please be alert, and both you and Mistress Philomela take care about going anywhere alone. Yet I beg you, for reasons which you must take on trust, do not speak of this, or show this letter, to anyone, unless you should return to the mainland, or see him on the Island.