The Ninth Daughter

by Barbara Hamilton

  Another of Rebecca’s songs lay near the hearth, the punned names and descriptions of Boston merchants who claimed to be patriots while selling provisions to the British troops unmistakable. I have my sources, Rebecca would say to her, with her grin that made her round face look like a wicked kitten’s. I’ll make them squirm.

  How long, before someone came?

  Abigail put her head cautiously out the kitchen door. She’d heard Hap Flowers—the younger of Nehemiah Tillet’s apprentices—in the yard a few minutes ago, taking advantage of Mrs. Tillet’s absence to use the privy in peace. The linendraper’s wife would watch and wait for the boys—and for the sullen little scullery girl—suspecting them of loitering to avoid work. Any other day at this hour, Abigail knew the cook herself would be in the kitchen starting the day’s work at this time, but with any luck Queenie, too, would be taking advantage of her mistress’s absence, and no one would be near the wide kitchen windows that looked onto the yard.

  There was a shed across the yard, where the prentice-boys left packing crates to be broken up for kindling, sometimes for weeks. Abigail darted out, found a medium-sized one that neatly covered the line of blood across the back step, ducked back inside. With luck the boys—and Queenie, too—would think Rebecca herself had set it there, for purposes of her own.

  In the parlor, a basket held spare slates and chalk, for such of Rebecca’s little pupils as forgot to bring theirs from home. On one of the slates Abigail chalked, NO SCHOOL TODAY, and set it on top of the crate.

  What else?

  She kicked her feet back into her pattens, which she’d stepped out of—the movement automatic, without thinking—in the parlor, to climb the stairs. Slipped outside, closed the door, threaded the latchstring through its hole. She realized all this time she’d still been wearing her heavy green outdoor cloak, barely aware of it, so cold was the little house. The iron lifts of the pattens clanked on the yard’s bricks as she hurried toward the gate, praying the Tillets had not left Medford until that morning. She recalled Rebecca saying, “Thursday,” but didn’t know whether that meant morning or evening: Medford lay a solid day’s journey to the northwest for a wagon such as Tillet owned. Queenie the cook might prefer “resting her bones” and drinking her master’s tea to making the slightest inquiry about her master’s tenant, but upon her return Mrs. Tillet would be on Rebecca’s doorstep before she’d changed out of her travel dress, to collect the sewing that she considered gratis, as a part of Rebecca’s rent of the little house. If the wedding had been Tuesday—

  “Morning, Mrs. Adams!”

  Queenie’s voice from the back door of the Tillet kitchen made Abigail startle like a deer. She turned, smiled, waved at the squat, pock-faced little woman in the doorway, and kept moving. She hoped Queenie didn’t see her stoop in the gate and gather up her market basket as she passed through to the alley.

  She tried not to run.

  It was full daylight now, Thursday, the twenty-fourth of November, 1773. Gulls circled, crying, between the steeples and the gray of the overcast sky. The breeze came in from the harbor laden with salt and wildness. When she glanced to her right down those short streets that led to the waterfront Abigail could see the masts of vessels rocking at anchor, the surge and orderly confusion of stevedores and carters on the wharves. Coastal sloops and fishing-smacks at Burrell’s Wharf and Clark’s Wharf, unloading tobacco from the Virginia colony and the night’s catch from the harbor. Ahead of her she could see tall vessels from England tied up at Hancock’s Wharf, with all those things the mother country manufactured and the colonies were forbidden to produce.

  Glass for windowpanes, porcelain dishes. Nails, scissors, bridle-bits, axheads, knives. Fabric—if one did not want to walk around in drab homespun or spend one’s days and nights at a parlor loom—and the thread and needles to sew it with; ribbons, corset-strings, hats. Sugar that had to be imported from England even though it was manufactured on this side of the Atlantic, in Barbados and Jamaica. Salt for preserving meat; mustard and pepper. Stays and buttons and shoe buckles, coffee and tea.

  The colony must support the mother country, the Tories said: timber and wheat, potash and salt fish. Unnatural mother, who forbids her children to outgrow their leading-strings! She could almost hear Rebecca saying it, on one of dozens of nights during the six months she’d lived with her and John after leaving Charles Malvern, sitting with them at the kitchen table at the white house on Brattle Street, while John “cooked up” his letters, articles, protests under a dozen different names. What would you or any of your neighbors say of Abigail, sir, if she tried to keep Nabby or Johnny from learning to walk, to run, to one day take their place in the world of grown women and men? And John had grinned at her and dipped his pen in the standish (that had been imported from England—the ink, too!) and had said, That’s good . . . I’ll use that.

  Her mind chased the thought back. Rebecca, still with Charles then, had been in that same kitchen with her in March of ’70, when shots had rung out in the snowy twilight. It was Rebecca who’d stayed with the children—Johnny had been three at the time, Nabby almost five—when Abigail, great with another child, had gone to the end of Brattle Street, and had seen the dead of what had come to be called the “Boston Massacre,” and the dark gouts of blood on the trampled snow.

  Her second daughter—her poor, fragile Suky—had died, barely a year old, only the month before the Massacre. It was Rebecca who had comforted her, talked with her so many nights in that kitchen, when John was away at the distant courts or meeting with the Sons of Liberty—to Rebecca she had been able to say what she would not say to John for fear of opening the wounds of his own raw grief. When Charley was born at the end of that May after the Massacre, Rebecca had been there to care for the other two, and had stayed on until nearly October, before finding rooms of her own in the maze of crowded boardinghouses and tenements in the North End.

  And now she had fled—Where? As she passed North Square Abigail almost turned her steps to Revere’s house, knowing it was there that Rebecca would go, but if Rebecca for some reason had not, then Revere would be at his shop. In any case—

  The shop windows were unshuttered. Smoke issued from the chimney, white and fluffy, a new-lit fire. For one instant, as she opened the shop door, Abigail’s heart leaped, as she recognized wily cousin Sam, and Dr. Warren, standing by the counter. But as she crossed the threshold she heard Sam saying, “Not a man in ten cares about their damned tea monopoly. Not one in fifty cares that the King can declare a monopoly, and then give his friends the only rights in the colony to sell the stuff at whatever the market will—Abigail, my dear!” He had a beautiful voice, deep and convincing, and a way of speaking that could ignite the air even if all he was doing was gleefully relating the latest fight between the household cats. “To what do we owe this pleasure?”

  “Has John returned from Salem?” asked Dr. Warren. “He said he’d—”

  “There’s a dead woman on the floor of Rebecca Malvern’s kitchen,” said Abigail quietly. “Her throat was cut. Rebecca is gone, and I found this”—she held out the list—“near the body.”

  Sam’s pink face turned the color of bad cream.

  Revere said, “I’ll get my hat.”

  Dr. Warren said, “Good God!” and dropped to his knees beside the body.

  “I left her as I found her,” explained Abigail, as the young physician gently lifted back the jumble of petticoats, to reveal the extent of the slashing. Abigail had to turn her eyes away.

  Sam called over his shoulder, “Who is she?” on his way into the parlor. Abigail heard him tapping and pushing at the paneling. Though she knew that time was short—anyone could come upon them and call the Watch with who knew what information still lying loose in corners—still she felt her ears get hot with anger, that he did not even pause in his stride.

  Carefully, Warren turned the woman over. “Get some water, if you would, please, Mrs. Adams.”

  Abigail hesitated, but the sight
of those distorted features under their darkening crimson mask sent her to the half-empty jar of clean water beside the hearth. They could do nothing until they’d identified her, after all. As she returned, carefully carrying the soaked rag wrapped in a dry one, she noted the marks of her own pattens on the bricks, where she’d trodden in the blood when first she’d entered that morning. There were a man’s tracks, too, dark and nearly dried.

  “What happened?” she whispered in horror, as Dr. Warren wiped the gore from the woman’s cheeks and nose. “She wasn’t—strangled . . . Why does she look like that?”

  “She’s been lying on her face.” The young doctor’s fingers brushed the yellowish shoulders, the stiffening curve of the neck, avoiding the gaping red slit that knife or razor had opened from ear to ear. “The blood will sink down through the flesh once the heartbeat ceases, like water oozing out of a sponge. All this”—he gestured toward the slashed legs, the cuts on the cheeks and breasts—“looks as if it were done after she was dead.”

  Abigail reached to draw up one of the chairs, then went over gingerly to it, and sat down on it where it stood. Must not disturb anything . . .

  “Do you recognize her?” Sam reappeared in the parlor doorway.

  Behind him, Revere said quietly, “I doubt her own husband would.”

  Only Revere, thought Abigail, seems to have taken note of the broad gold wedding band on the woman’s bloodless hand. She said, “Her pockets should tell us something,” and Dr. Warren—who was in truth very young—looked shocked at the suggestion.

  As she came over to his side, her skirts firmly gathered up to avoid the blood, Abigail heard Revere ask Sam quietly, “Anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  She looked up sharply at the pair of them, Revere dark and burly in the short rough jacket of a laborer, Sam looking like what he was—a slightly down-at-the-heels middle-aged gentleman, until you saw his eyes. It was his eyes—the way he glanced around the kitchen as if seeking something, concerned with something beyond the horror of this woman’s death—that angered her. She said, a little tartly, “I take it Rebecca didn’t simply write poems and broadsides to make fun of the British. Was she a Son—or a Daughter—of Liberty?” The edge on her voice came not only from Sam’s abstraction in the face of death: She, Abigail, would have been a Daughter of Liberty herself, had such an organization existed—and had she not been either carrying a child or nursing one for most of the preceding nine years (thank you, John). It was typical of Sam that he hadn’t even thought to form such a group while organizing the men.

  Sam cleared his throat, a little deprecatingly, and it was Revere who answered her question. “Mrs. Malvern handled the communication between our organization and the other Committees of Correspondence in other colonies.”

  “That explains, I suppose,” said Abigail drily, “how Rebecca got her information about what passed in the British camp. As to this poor soul—”

  Carefully, she worked her hand through the placket in the gray silk overskirt, the embroidered underskirt, and found the pockets—silk, too, by the feel of them—tied around her waist. One contained three keys, a handkerchief, an ivory set of housekeeping tablets with a pencil attached; the other, a single piece of paper folded in quarters.

  “That’s ours,” said Dr. Warren, looking over Abigail’s shoulder as she unfolded the paper. Written on it was simply, The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia. “One of our codes, I mean. Linnet is Wednesday. The Oak Tree is midnight.”

  “And Cloetia is one of the names Rebecca used, to sign her poems.” Abigail turned the purse over in her fingers, opened it to dump five gold sovereigns and a few cut pieces of Spanish silver into her palm. “Did the Sons give Rebecca money for informers?”

  “Patriots have no need for paid spies,” declared Sam indignantly. “There are more than enough good Whigs—true patriots—who have their country’s good at heart, to—”

  “So she would not have had a sum of money in the house, for instance, that contributed to this—this obscenity?”

  “Ah.” Sam rubbed the side of his nose with his forefinger.

  “We do pay for information sometimes,” said Revere. “Though robbery doesn’t seem to have been involved here. Nor, to judge by her earrings, does money seem to have been the reason this woman came here last night.”

  “We won’t know what her reason was,” said Abigail softly, clinking the coins in her hand, “until we know who she was, and what she may have brought with her besides what was in her pockets. For all we know, she was wearing a diamond crown, and the killer overlooked the earrings.”

  She got to her feet, looked down at the woman, now lying on her back. Her revulsion and horror had dissolved in her anger at Sam, and in the blood, the horrid wound on the throat, the flattened bulge of the engorged and darkened breasts she saw now only the mute plea for vengeance and for help. She handed the purse to Sam, slipped the folded paper into her own pocket.

  “In any case you’d probably better see if any more money is in the house, since Rebecca never had a penny of her own to spare. And you might want to sift through the fireplace ashes, to see if anything was burned or half burned that might tell tales to the Watch. John says he’s caught more than one plaintiff in a lie, by scraps he’s found at the back of someone’s hearth. I’m going upstairs to see what I can find.”

  Three

  The light was stronger in the bedchamber now, as the sun strengthened somewhere beyond the overcast of the sky. The first thing Abigail saw by it as she stepped through the door was the slight depression in the worn pillows, and the stains of mud and wet on the faded green and white counterpane of the bed’s daytime dress.

  Someone had lain here. Not Rebecca, Abigail thought, shocked—Rebecca would no more lie down on a made-up bed with her shoes on—and, it looked like, a rain-wet skirt—than she’d have run down Fish Street naked. Yet when she stepped closer, she saw the single hair on the pillow that looked indeed like her friend’s—dark, almost horsehair thick, with a springy curl to it that had been the despair of Rebecca’s maid back in the days when she had a maid. Abigail pursed her lips with vexation that she hadn’t brought her little ivory measuring tape with her, then turned to the sewing basket on the bedside table, heaped with its neat stacks of cut pieces of linen and calico: the unofficial corveé Mrs. Tillet demanded of her husband’s tenant. That sewing, reflected Abigail, and the understanding that Rebecca would attend three services every Sunday with the family at the New Brick Meetinghouse, where Mr. Tillet was a deacon, and help Queenie in the kitchen on those days when one or the other of the Tillet daughters would come to dine with their husband and babies—

  In the eighteen months that Rebecca had rented this little house, Abigail had heard everything there was to hear about its landlord and his grasping wife.

  There was a measuring tape tucked in at a corner of the basket, and the measure, from hair to the muddy smudges, marked the height of the woman who had lain there at something just over five feet. Rebecca’s height. And the dampness corresponded in extent to a woman’s skirt: not wet as if she’d been soaked, but she’d definitely been out in last night’s rain. As Abigail laid the tape-end to the pillow, she saw on the worn linen a red brown dot of blood.

  Dense in its center, clouded at its edges as if diffused by hair. Damp in the center, dry at the edges, as if it soaked deep: an investigation of the pillow within the sham confirmed this.

  A slow bleed, over a period of time.

  How much time?

  Abigail couldn’t imagine how she would calculate it, but it was clear Rebecca had lain in one position for a long while. Dazed? Unconscious?

  Bound?

  Cold inside and breathless as she had been when first she’d entered the kitchen downstairs, Abigail looked around the room again, slowly, seeking anything out of the ordinary.

  A simple bureau. A single cane-backed chair. No candle on the bedside table—she had not come up for the night, then, when she’d been brought
up here, laid upon her bed—whose linen, thankfully, showed no sign of violence or struggle. The faint smudges of dirtied water—as if Rebecca had stepped briefly on her own doorstep after the rain had begun—were barely an inch long, in one place only.

  Trembling, Abigail made herself draw a deep breath, and focus her mind: a discipline learned in the course of a year of dealing with a strong-willed and unwilling five-year-old boy in church when she was trying to concentrate on the sermon. The candle hadn’t been brought up but the shutters had been closed and latched, probably when first the evening’s cold had settled in. Rebecca had left her sewing by the bed, gone back downstairs to the kitchen where it was warm.

  Rebecca’s Sunday dress hung on its peg, her Sunday underskirt beside it. She had no shoes, but what she wore every day, and those, like her everyday dress, were missing. Abigail recalled the mustard yellow frock her friend had worn, trimmed and flounced in blue and edged with rich lace, when she’d appeared on Abigail’s doorstep that night in April of 1770: I have left him, I have left him, I won’t go back . . .

  Too fine for a woman to wear to work about the house. Abigail had lent her her own second-best everyday bodice and skirt. Rebecca had sold the lace-trimmed dress, she remembered, and bought stockings and cloth for chemises with the money. Everything she had put on her body from that time had been castoffs, worn-out, turned, recut. Charles, Abigail recalled, had tried to sue Rebecca for the money he had spent on the dress.

  The bed, the chair, the bureau were likewise castoffs, from friends, or members of Abigail’s wide-ranging merchant family. The rag rug had come from the Brattle Street Meeting-House’s parlor—

  The rug. It had been thrust aside from its usual position between the bed and the door. Kneeling beside the door itself, Abigail saw three more blood droplets on the worn planks, just at the opening edge.

  No trail of drips from the bed. The wound hadn’t been bleeding freely, then. She’d remained beside the door—doing what? What would she have been doing, that the drops had fallen onto the floor and not her shoulder?