The door opened inward, without bolt or latch. Only wooden handles.
Abigail stepped into the tiny hall again.
Last week, her daughter Nabby had imprisoned six-year-old Johnny in the bedroom they shared by running a length of light rope washing-line through the door handle on the outside and tying it to the stair rail. Such a rail was indeed visible at the top of the staircase. Johnny, who had John’s gunpowder temper, had wept himself almost sick with rage at his imprisonment, and the family had only the boy’s innate caution to thank that he hadn’t tried to liberate himself through the bedroom window.
Yes, Abigail thought, as the glint of metal caught her eye from a shadowed corner of the hall near the head of the stairs.
Scissors.
From the sewing basket by the bed.
He’d imprisoned her, then. Carried her up to the room, laid her on the bed—bound or unbound—and tied the door shut. She’d regained consciousness, gotten to the sewing basket, used the scissors to cut herself free, and managed to get the door open enough to get a hand through and saw with the blade at the rope. While downstairs—
Abigail shuddered. Whoever he is, I will see him hang.
She descended the stair to the parlor again, stopped on the threshold in fresh horror. “What are you doing?”
Dr. Warren straightened up from his knees, slopped the wad of pink-stained rags back into the bucket that stood on the floor at his side. In the dim gleam of light from the kitchen—the parlor shutters remained closed—the bare bricks glistened damply. “We trod in the blood,” said Sam, sitting at the desk wiping his boot soles with another handful of dripping rags. “You, me, Paul . . . all of us. Watch her head,” he added, as Revere came in from the kitchen, carrying the dead woman in his arms.
Abigail could only stare, openmouthed with outrage.
Acerbically, Sam added, “If the Tillets’ cook saw you in the yard, there has to be a reason you didn’t go to the Watch at once. It can only be that you didn’t see her, or anything amiss in the kitchen. She’s a little hard to miss.”
“You can’t—”
Abigail brushed past Revere and into the kitchen again, to see what the men had wrought in her absence. The floor was clean. The man’s tracks in dried blood were gone. The overset chair, replaced at the table; the fireplaces cleared of ash.
John would have an apoplexy.
And the killer, whoever he was, would go free.
In the parlor behind her she heard Revere say, “She’s starting to stiffen,” as he maneuvered the awkward body into the stairwell.
“I found these.” Sam came to her side, held out to her a handful of scribbled sheets. “She must have had them out last night. They aren’t ours.”
“Rebecca did other things for her living, besides write pamphlets for the Sons of Liberty.” Abigail took them: more scrawled sermons, virulent with descriptions of Hell’s fire and of devils clinging like leeches to the corner of your mouth, to catch the smallest whisper of ill words—O Sinner, do you feel the prick of their claws? “Orion Hazlitt is having her go over these, before he sets the type.”
“Would she have gone to Hazlitt?”
Abigail heard in his voice something more than speculation about Rebecca’s choice of refuge, and saw the glint of gossipy curiosity in his gray eye. She made her voice calmly flat. “’Tis a good ten minutes to Hanover Street. Farther than my house, which lies in the same direction.”
Sam canted a suggestive eyebrow, which made Abigail want to snap at him that Rebecca’s friendship with the young printer wasn’t any of Sam’s business.
Rebecca had endured enough glances of that kind from her husband’s supporters—that assumption that any woman who lived by herself was a slut in her heart—without getting them from the Sons of Liberty as well.
“She was hurt,” said Abigail tightly. “I found blood on her pillow. I think the killer must have struck her on the head. She managed to get out of here, but if he saw her—if he knew she saw him—”
“Hrm.” Sam frowned. “It was dark as Erebus, remember, and raining oceans. She could have given him the slip, easily enough. She knew the neighborhood and he didn’t—”
“And what makes you think he didn’t?” retorted Abigail. “Any one of your North End toughs who thinks it’s a good joke to tie a burning stick to a dog’s tail—any one of the sailors from the docks who’d rather fight with the Watch than eat his dinner—”
“Now, a little rioting on Pope’s Day isn’t the same as this”—Sam nodded back toward the kitchen—“and you know it. Mrs. Malvern has to have gotten away because if she didn’t, one of the neighbors would have found her body as soon as it grew light. They’d have brought word of it to me or to Paul or to the Watch . . . and none of those things happened. By the same token, if Mrs. Malvern was hurt as badly as you fear, and fell, at daybreak she’d have been found by a neighbor. Orion Hazlitt—”
The stairwell door opened: Revere and Dr. Warren emerged. Warren went to collect their coats from the chair beside the desk—Of course, Abigail noted wrathfully, the puddle of rainwater beneath the window has been mopped away with everything else. Revere moved to close up a hinged niche in the paneling that Abigail had not seen before, close to the fireplace in the room’s darkest corner. A secret niche—empty now, but Abigail could see how a paper or two, dropped by someone standing before it, could easily whisk through the kitchen door.
Rebecca’s hidey-hole for unwritten poems—and incriminating lists.
“When you first came in here,” said Sam quietly, “you didn’t take anything, did you? Other than the list that you brought me?”
Exasperated, Abigail replied, “John has always told me that if you want a hope of solving a crime, never remove or alter anything from its scene until you’ve had a chance to examine everything there.”
“Well, the next time someone’s murdered in the house of one of the Sons of Liberty,” retorted Sam, “we’ll have John talk to the Watch . . . if he deigns to be in town for the occasion. In the meantime, when you were here this morning, you didn’t happen to see a brown ledger, about so big—” His hands sketched a quarto-sized rectangle, about half the size of the green-backed household ledger that still lay on the corner of Rebecca’s desk. “It would have ‘House hold Expenses’ written on the cover.”
“And I collect,” said Abigail, “it does not contain anything to do with the cost of candles and flour?”
There was another silence, as the men looked at one another. Then Sam nodded toward the niche as Paul fiddled shut its catch, and his heavy jaw set hard. “The rest of the papers in there had mostly to do with Rebecca’s pamphle teering, and her sources of gossip within the British camp. But the brown ledger held the names of our men in the British camp—and the ciphers we use to communicate with them and with the Committees of Correspondence in Virginia and elsewhere. If those fall into the British commander’s hands, we’re all going to be in a great deal of trouble.”
Four
“ orHeaven’s sake, woman, don’t march out of here as if you were leading a troop of dragoons!”
Half past nine striking from Old South Meeting-House. Abigail—who had simply put her head out the rear door to ascertain whether Queenie was in the Tillet kitchen—could see no sign of activity in the house, but the sounds of passing footsteps, of sailors shouting to one another in Fish Street, of peddlers and stevedores along the wharves, came clearly to her. She drew back inside, where Sam, Revere, and Dr. Warren clustered nervously behind her.
“Give me the count of three hundred. That should give me time to go around to the shop, and ask the boys if Queenie or that scullery girl is there, and draw them out of the back of the house. You can empty the water and the rags into the outhouse as you go out, and I’ll keep them talking for a while, before we come back here and find the body. I’ll try to have Queenie with me when I—”
“No!” Sam’s big hand flinched in a shushing gesture. “We go to Hazlitt’s first. Then we
call the Watch.”
“ ou really think that mother of his would have let Mrs. Malvern through the door?” Revere asked, a few minutes later, as the four of them made their way along Middle Street trying to look like people out pursuing their lawful business.
“A woman crying for help, on a pitch-black night, in the pouring rain?” By his disbelieving frown, Abigail deduced that Dr. Warren hadn’t heard Lucretia Hazlitt on the subject of Babylonian harlots who deserted honest husbands in order to seduce her innocent son. “For that matter, why wouldn’t Mrs. Malvern have simply run to the nearest watchman—?”
“Perhaps because it was pitch-black and pouring rain,” replied Sam, “and the nearest watchman was huddled next to the common-room fire at the Sheep and Lamb—”
“At midnight?” protested Warren—who obviously thought that all taverns along the Boston waterfront obeyed the city ordinances about closing times.
Sam and Revere gave him glances that pitied his naïveté. They crossed the Mill Creek on its little bridge, the waters low now on the slack tide, though when the tide was running it could make a respectable enough torrent to turn the water mill that reared up to their right. Abigail couldn’t keep herself from glancing down at the gray stream and tried to put from her mind what this street would be like on such a night as last night had been, with every house shuttered tight and the rain hammering down, no starlight, no moonlight, only the rush of the tidal flow in the stream to guide a woman groping in the darkness.
“ other, I’m quite sure that Deacon Curtin has heard every one of the arguments for Mankind’s Salvation by good works,” Orion Hazlitt was saying as Sam and Abigail entered his tiny shop.
His mother neatly sidestepped the gentle hand that he put out, and planted herself before the customer, whose face was growing alarmingly red. “Forgetting those things that are behind, the Apostle says, and reaching forth unto those things that are before, I press toward the mark.” Still dazzlingly beautiful, for all the silvering of the raven hair beneath her house-cap, Lucretia Hazlitt shook a finger at the elderly man whom Abigail recognized as one of the Deacons of New South Church. “Now, if the truth revealed unto the Apostle had been, I sit still, knowing that God hath already saved me without the slightest stir on my part toward salvation, would he not have said, I sit still, knowing—”
“Please.” Hazlitt took his mother’s hand, began to lead her toward the shop’s rear door, which led, Abigail knew, into an even tinier “keeping room.” These little kitchen-cum-parlors backed most Boston shops whose upper floors housed the shopkeepers’ families. His strained smile did nothing to change the outraged deacon’s glare, but he tried anyway. “My mother doesn’t always know what she is saying.”
“So I should hope,” retorted the man drily.
“I know without some hypocrite roarer to tell me, my son, that Faith without Works is dead—”
“Exactly so, Mrs. Hazlitt.” Abigail stepped neatly to Mrs. Hazlitt’s other side, and took her hand. “Yet, m’am, I have wanted for a long time to ask you, how do you reconcile what the Lord said to Ezekiel, about my comeliness that I had put upon you . . . ?” Though Abigail loved few things more than she loved a good discussion of well-reasoned theology, she knew she wasn’t going to get one from Mrs. Hazlitt. She hoped, as the widow poured an excited torrent of Scripture, personal visions, and the revelations of her own favorite pastors over her, that Sam would conclude his questioning of Orion promptly and come to her rescue.
And the part of her mind that wasn’t silently protesting the view of God the Eternal Tally-Keeper—silently, because Mrs. Hazlitt never permitted anyone to interrupt the flow of her revelations and opinion—raised a disbelieving eyebrow and asked, Sam?
“The Devil speaks through the mouths of sinners,” proclaimed Mrs. Hazlitt, pacing back and forth before the unswept, ash-piled hearth. “The Devil sends them into the world to tempt and try us, and to argue us out of our faith!” Glancing around her at the uncleared table, the market basket still sitting empty on the sideboard, the empty woodbox, Abigail wondered if the latest in the line of “girls” hired to help the household had quit—or been released—or was simply more slack than most about her duties. Prior to his mother’s arrival to share his house, Abigail knew that Orion Hazlitt had managed, on the slender proceeds of his printing and stationery shop, to pay an elderly housekeeper . . . an arrangement which had concluded within three days of Mrs. Hazlitt’s appearance on the doorstep.
“The Devil sends tempters to call my poor son away from me, to take him from my side.” The lovely widow stopped directly before Abigail, stared at her with tears suddenly brimming in her emerald eyes. “He wouldn’t forsake me of his own volition, and I tremble for him, tremble at his sin! Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land that God hath given thee!”
“Of course, m’am.” It was no wonder, Abigail reflected, that for two years now the printing business had been in slow decline, and the shop, with its few books and boxes of stationery, wore a dusty and neglected look. Too many days Abigail had walked down Hanover Street and seen the shutters up while Orion, with superhuman patience, reasoned with this woman, or cleaned up the messy destruction that resulted from her moments of fury.
“Why would God have given Mankind Commandments, if as that—that deplorable and desolate Worldly-Man out there—has said, that some are saved from the beginnings of Time? Honor thy father and thy mother, and yet he thrusts me away from him! He leaves his own mother to be drowned in the Flood, while he chases after the Daughters of Babylon, the Daughters of Eve! The serpent, the harlot—”
“Now, Mother.” To Abigail’s infinite relief, the door through to the shop opened and Orion came in, trailed by Sam. “Wasn’t I there to hold your hand, the moment the rain began?”
Mrs. Hazlitt flinched at the word, and shivered. “Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail,” she whispered, “and the mountains were covered.” Her long, slender hands clutched at her son’s coat-facings, and she pressed her face to his breast. “All flesh died, that moved upon the earth.”
“Mrs. Adams,” whispered Orion, with a nod in the direction of the cold fireplace. “Could you bring me that vial, there on the corner of the mantle . . . Just a drop, in a cup of water . . . only a drop . . . Mother,” he said gently, in the voice of one trying to coax a much-loved child, “Mother, it’s all right, I’m here. I’ve been here all the time. There’s nothing to fear. Your little king is here.”
Sam stood with folded arms in the doorway, watching with a combination of exasperation and pity. He wasn’t insensitive, Abigail knew. Only swept, like a prophet, with a sense of his mission, and at the moment, his mission was to protect the cause of colonial liberties—the Sons of Liberty—from being absolutely undone by having the Watch come into Rebecca Malvern’s house and somehow stumble upon the book of names that he hadn’t been able to find. Orion looked fagged to death, as if he had had very little sleep, and if the state of his mother’s mind at the mention of rain was anything to go by, the night must have been a trying one.
“The waters prevailed,” she murmured, sinking down into her chair, “and all the high hills under heaven were covered. But you were there to save me and comfort me. Don’t ever leave me, my son.” She looked up at Abigail. “My son is a good son. A child of righteousness,” she whispered, and transferred her grip to Orion’s hands as he put the cup to her lips. “I pray every day that he will be delivered out of the snares of Evil, and find his way back to Salvation before it is too late. Save me and comfort me . . . How could a boy who is so good run after the ways of Sinners, and stuff himself in the trough of Hell?” She began to nod.
“What happened?” Orion asked over her head in a low voice. “Mr. Adams tells me you found a woman—dead—in-in—He said that Rebecca—that Mrs. Malvern,” he corrected himself shakily, “—is-is gone, fled—”
“Did you see her yesterday?” asked Abigail.
“Yesterday evening, yes.
That’s what I was telling Mr. Adams. I went there just after eight, to pick up the proofs for the sermons she is correcting for me, and a broadside about the meeting Tuesday against the tea tax.” Just about the only printing business that remained to him, Abigail knew, was that done for the Sons of Liberty. And even in that he was becoming less and less reliable, as he struggled to balance caring for his mother with making a living.
“Did Mrs. Malvern say anything about meeting someone there later?”
Hazlitt shook his head. “She said she had sewing yet to finish for that Tillet harpy, and after that was going to bed. I was ashamed to keep her up, waiting even that late for me. But that wretched witch Queenie spies on her. The Tillets would put her out, if they thought she was meeting a man. The woman you found—”
“We have no idea who she is. Clearly she’s wealthy. She had on diamond earrings—”
“They threw her down from the window.” Mrs. Hazlitt raised her head, blinked sleepily up at Abigail. “She tir’d her head, and painted her face, and called out to Jehu as he drove his chariot into the court. They threw her down from the window. Her blood was sprinkled on the wall and on the legs of the horses, and the horses trode her underfoot. When they came to bury her, there was naught left of Jezebel the Queen, save her skull, and her feet, and the palms of her hands.” She tucked her son’s hand a little more closely beneath her cheek, and drifted off again into her dreams.
Abigail looked around the little room again, at the messy hearth, and the candlesticks clotted with tallow and the few dishes containing nothing but bread crumbs and butter-smears. There was a stain on the whitewashed plaster of the wall, where food had been recently thrown. “Have you no one to look after her?” she asked. “Or yourself, for that matter—”
The Ninth Daughter Page 3
