The rain puddle by the window; would opening the shutters account for that amount of water on her skirt? She’d known the Tillets would be away. And yet—Abigail frowned. Rebecca knew that Queenie spied and told tales. With Mr. Tillet loitering in her house whenever he had the chance, and Mrs. Tillet seething with jealousy and annoyance over how many shirts she thought Rebecca should be sewing for her gratis, would Rebecca have risked using her house for so small a purpose?
Particularly when there were any number of women on the North End who did not have problems with their land-ladies, equally willing to accommodate would-be multiple adulteresses.
Something did not fit. “Do you have any idea who this young Adonis is?”
Lisette shook her head. “She would have notes from him, I think, from a woman she always met by chance when she went out walking. A little curly-haired woman, dark, with a snub nose—”
“Rebecca,” said Abigail.
“I do not know her name, Madame. The notes were always of commonplaces—trees, or birds, or flowers. But for two women who only met in the streets, I thought they corresponded a great deal about trees, or birds, or flowers. I think it was a cipher, en effet—”
“She showed you these notes?”
“Madame.” Mademoiselle Droux gave her another look of pitying patience. “M’sieu Pentyre paid me two dollars each month, to tell him all the correspondence that came to my lady. It is done in all households, Madame,” she added, a note of concern in her voice at Abigail’s startled reaction, as if reassuring a simpleton that the booming kettledrums in a military parade were not in fact real thunder. “A man is a fool, who does not pay his wife’s maidservant—and a woman a fool, who does not pay them even more. One must build one’s nest against the storm, particularly if one is thirty-seven years old, and looks as I do.”
I want you to remember from now on that you are working for me, Charles Malvern had said to Oonaugh.
The sinister Mr. B of Pamela was not so unreal as Rebecca had thought.
“I know everything that my lady received, and tucked away in the hiding places that she thought were so clever, behind the pictures and beneath the mattress of her bed. Thus I know that no one sent my lady these letters of threat that our maiden-faced Provost kept pressing me to say that she had. And so I told him. Was this woman then she in whose house my lady was killed? This Mrs. Malvern, whose name the Provost kept demanding did I know?”
“That is she,” said Abigail slowly. “What did Mr. Pentyre have to say of this other man? A Regimental Colonel is one thing—and useful to a merchant, be he never so wealthy. Was he angry over this good-looking stranger?”
“Now you ask me to speculate on the contents of a man’s heart, Madame. He laughed and joked his wife about her lovers, yet if any man crossed him in a business way—even a farmer who cheated him a little on the cost of oats for his horses—he make sure that that man became truly sorry that he had done so. He would have his agents find out, had this man ever broken a law? And voilà, the sheriffs would be at that man’s door. Or, a rumor would start in the taverns that the man was, what do you call?—was a Tory, and suddenly these Sons of Liberty would break the windows of that man’s shop the next time they rioted. Or the man’s horses would be hamstrung one night, and blame would fall on these same Fils du Liberté. Would such a man truly shrug his shoulders, if his wife lay with another man?” She spread her hands. “That I do not know.”
“And where was Mr. Pentyre, on Wednesday night?”
Something—a little glint like a malicious star—twinkled in the lizard black eyes. “He was not at home, Madame. He told the imbecile officer that he was playing cards with the sons of the Governor, but myself, I believe he was at the house of his mistress. She is a lady of the West Indies, named Belle-Isle; she has a little house on Hull Street, near to the cimitiere. Would Madame wish me to ask her maid, if indeed M’sieu Pentyre paid such a call that night?”
Quite casually, she extended a hand as she spoke. It was only a momentary gesture, as if accepting a coin. Four generations of Yankee ancestors cried out in Abigail’s heart at such venality, particularly since there was nothing to assure her that she would be getting the truth for her money. But she replied, “If you would, Mademoiselle, I thank you. I shall—er—make arrangements with Mr. Malvern.”
The maid smiled, and nodded appreciation of her tact. “Merci, Madame.”
“Was there anyone else? Anyone who might have wished your young lady ill? Either here, or back in New York?”
“All young ladies have their mortal foes, Madame. Oh, such a one has stolen my hairdresser away from me, I shall claw out her eyes with my fingernails, so! Ah, such another has got herself sat next to that most divine preacher at tea, I will strangle her in her own hair-ribbons! Does one pay heed to such trivialities?”
“One must, in the circumstances.”
“One must, if my lady were found with her eyes scratched out, or strangled in her hair-ribbons,” said the older woman somberly. “I saw her body, Madame. I took the clothes off her, and washed her, and dressed her in her prettiest night-dress, that her husband gave her when they were wed, and Madame, I would not admit M’sieu Pentyre into the room until I was done. Even then I kept a cloth over my young lady’s face. What was done to her was done by the Devil himself.”
Abigail whispered, “Amen,” and Mademoiselle Droux crossed herself. “And was she ever afraid of what she could not define? Afraid without reason, of a shadow, or a pas serby?”
“En effet, Madame, my lady was twenty years old, and the young do not frighten easily. If she had such fears, she did not speak of them to me. I did not make of myself a confidante, as so many maids do, except at the very beginning, when she was lonely and her empty-headed mother and sisters in New York did not write to her, if they could write, which I doubt. But I would sooner be a good maid than a good friend. Unless the friendship is extraordinary, it is too easy for confidence to turn into anger, and then one is on the street again, with nowhere to go.”
Abigail thought about Catherine Moore, turned out of her job and obliged to return to the farm of her brother, near Townsend (wherever that was) somewhere in the wooded wilds of Essex County.
In the high kitchen windows the light was fading. This woman would have her duties, back at the great brick Pentyre mansion on Prince’s Street. “These notes that Mrs. Pentyre received from the woman in the street. Did she keep them?”
“She locked them away, yes, Madame. Indeed, she took greater care of them, than commonplaces about trees and birds and flowers warranted.” She shrugged. “I copied them for M’sieu Pentyre, and the originals, our pretty Provost took away with him. What he shall make of them, I do not know.”
“Mademoiselle Droux,” she said, “you have been very kind, and your observations extremely helpful.”
“When one is forbidden by one’s employment to marry,” remarked the maid, rising and taking Abigail’s proffered hand, “and obliged in it to occupy oneself wholly with the life and concerns of another—and that other, often a person who considers herself the most important object in Creation—one must take amusement in observation, or perish. I hope that I have helped you, Madame. My lady was young and foolish, and a little spoilt as girls are who have never been obliged to work for their livings. But she had no malice in her, which cannot be said of many ladies whom I have served. She did not deserve her fate—Jezebel herself would not deserve such an end. The heathen Greeks had goddesses armed with spears, who hunted down men who did such things to women, and gave them their deserving. I wish you good hunting, Madame.”
She made her curtsey again, and signed to Scipio at his little table in the corner, to summon one of the servants to escort her home.
Twelve
“Could you not send a letter?” asked John, following Abigail into the kitchen in the predawn gloom the following morning, where her small portmanteau, cloak, and scarves were heaped, ready to be strapped onto Balthazar’s saddle. Young M
r. Thaxter—a stout and good-natured youth related to Abigail through the Quincys—was saddling up in the yard. She felt guilty about not only deserting her husband but taking his horse as well. Still, under the terms of his bond to the Provost Marshal, John wouldn’t be going anywhere he couldn’t walk to in the next several days. “ ’Tis a very long way. Thaxter could take it, as easily as escort yourself.”
“Indeed, he could,” agreed Abigail equably. She walked to the sideboard where John’s leather portfolio lay, along with several letters to clients in Roxbury and Cambridge explaining why it would be impossible for him to attend on them until next week or the week after. “Could not Thaxter also take these depositions for you, instead of bearing Mr. Sweet and Mr. Duggan excuses for postponement?”
John slewed around, blue eyes almost bulging. “Thaxter’s a boy! He wouldn’t know—” He broke off, realizing that Abigail knew perfectly well why a youthful clerk, be he ever so honest, could not be trusted with the task.
“Wouldn’t know what questions to ask?”
John sniffed, and picked up her cloak. “Townsend’s barely a handful of houses at the end of a farm-track,” he said as he laid it around her shoulders. “I doubt they have such a thing as an inn. I don’t like to think of you hunting for shelter there, or in the woods between it and Wenham, if it should come on to snow.”
“And I don’t like to think of the man who killed Perdita Pentyre coming to the same conclusion that I have, that Rebecca might have taken shelter with her maid.”
Though it was Abigail’s lifelong contention that in America any woman could travel alone through the countryside without fear of robbery or assault—a situation unthinkable in the Home Country—during the final week of November such a solitary excursion was inadvisable for other reasons. The harsh northeast winds and threat of snow that had made John insist that she take the escort of his clerk likewise precluded shortening the trip to the settlement of Townsend by taking one of her uncle Isaac’s little coastwise trading vessels as far as Salem. Moreover, Thaxter’s mother had kin in western Essex County, and had provided him with clear instructions for getting to Townsend, whence they could inquire for Kemiah Moore’s farm.
From Boston north to Salem the road was well-traveled and reasonably well-kept, along the dunes and salt grass above the pounding gray sea. The public stage had already ceased its journeys for the winter, and the coach from Ports-mouth wasn’t due for another day. An occasional postrider with newspapers or letters overtook their horses, or a city-bound farm-wagon with salt meat and the autumn’s cheeses broke the monotony, but for the most part there were only the brown fields inland to look at, swept by wind sharp as broken oyster shells.
Being related to the Quincys, Thaxter had from childhood absorbed huge quantities of miscellaneous information about other merchant families with which his own uncles and cousins had to do, and proved a ready source of information about Richard Pentyre. “Everybody in town thinks he’s English,” the young man remarked over midmorning bread, cheese, and smuggled tea at the Lion in Lynn. “With those coats he wears, and spending ten pounds on wigs and powder to put on them. But he was born here—in that very house in Prince’s Street where he lives now, for all his parents went back to London when he was but a little tot, and sent him and his brother to Cambridge with all the sons of English lords, and only his bachelor uncle stayed on here. But he’s a Massachusetts man, back four generations on both sides, and his grandfather was one of the preachers who had a hand in hanging witches hereabouts. Bet the Parliament nobs who think he’s so civilized don’t know that one!”
Abigail chuckled, recalling her glimpses of Richard Pentyre, in his a la mode coats of French brocade, and his immaculately powdered wigs tinted a stylish lavender. Not for him, she thought, the voyages that had made his rival Charles Malvern hard: his was a pleasant, long-nosed face just losing the freshness of a prolonged youth. Vindictive, Lisette Droux had said, and clever by the sound of it—and by Thaxter’s present accounts of the man’s manipulations of his relationship with the Governor. Would he have had the wits to decipher the admittedly simple code that Rebecca used to set up meetings with his wife?
More disturbingly, would Lieutenant Coldstone?
And what would those Crown officials, those voters in Parliament, make of this world, she wondered, as they mounted their rested horses, and left the prosperous town of Lynn behind. She was used to thinking of Boston as a great city, with its crooked streets and thronged wharves. Even as a lawyer’s wife, she was able to purchase dress goods as fine as any lawyer’s wife in London if she had a mind, and paint her rooms in bright fashionable hues like Naples yellow and Dutch pink. The education John had obtained at Harvard was equal to any on offer at Oxford or Cambridge, and in the city’s bookstores she could find novels by Fielding and Richardson, plays by Voltaire and Shakespeare, the poetry of Pope and the philosophical writings of Locke.
Yet outside of Boston, the veneer of England vanished like an early frost. Abigail’s girlhood as a minister’s daughter had taught her how primitive were the farms that lay only a few hours’ walk into the countryside, where vessels were still made from the shells of pumpkins or gourds, and families slept all together in lofts above the single “keeping room” downstairs. Where a child might grow to voting age before he ever saw a clock, or a book other than the Bible. Once they reached Salem, and turned westward, this impression deepened, of traversing time as well as distance, as if they had somewhere crossed the line that separated the eighteenth century from the seventeenth. Away from the sea, and the settled lands along the coast, the woods closed in, standing as they had stood since the creation of the continent: gray and black with winter’s coming, fall’s tawny gorgeousness only a fading echo of yellow turning to umber underfoot.
Moreover, once one left the main road, all helpful signposts and milestones ceased. Primordial woods closed around them. The innkeeper in Salem provided an assortment of directions along with more tea, more bread, and more cheese—“You take the Danvers road, m’am, but turn off to your right about two miles past Peabody. You can’t miss the track, for there’s a great oak just a hundred feet down along it, to the left of the way”—but though Abigail jotted what she hoped were the main points on her whale-ivory pocket-tablets, she was disinclined to trust them. “Now, don’t pay no mind to the farm-tracks you’ll pass, but take the bigger way left, after Great Sellars Pond.” “How far?” “Far? Lord, I don’t know—how far would you say it is to the Sellars Pond Road, Jemma?” (This to his wife.) “Two miles?” “Never!—all of four . . .” “Not so far,” protested a one-eyed man at another of the tables near the fire. “Old Sellars used to walk it in half an hour by his watch, and he were a fearful rapid walker. The Sellarses used to have all the land hereabouts, on royal grant. One of ’em married into the Olivers—or was it the Governor’s kin?—that had their holdings all up into Wenham Township and as far as Topsford . . .” “Be sure you don’t take the Topsford Road,” the landlord had agreed. “If you get to the Topsford Farm Road, you’ve gone too far. Old Topsford, he was said to be a warlock, that could raise storms by killing a hare and throwing it in Wenham Pond.”
There followed considerable discussion of whether or not the gentleman in question had actually accomplished this feat of meteorology, but no one present seemed to doubt that he could have, had he wished to do so. Neither could anyone be found headed in that direction, to guide the travelers on their way. It was early yet for dinner, and Abigail elected to press on toward Townsend, a decision she regretted some three hours later, with the threat of rain on the wind, and not the slightest idea of whether the muddy, half-frozen cart-track that disappeared into the fading winter twilight before and behind them was indeed the Topsford Road or some other. She and her companion encountered a number of great oak trees, and several small bodies of water that could have been termed ponds, sloughs, or pools, but few signs of habitation. What they had hoped was a farm-road between rock-walled, stubbled fields p
etered out and disappeared into woods again. “I think that old deadlight back at Salem witched us,” grumbled Thaxter.
It was close to dark when they finally stumbled into a village optimistically called Gilead, barely a hamlet clustered around a dilapidated log church, and begged shelter for the night. Hospitality was freely offered by the town’s minister, but it had to be paid for, Abigail learned, by attendance at the evening sermon: penance enough to one raised in the dual tradition of old-style predestinarianism and well-written doctrinal argument. The Right Reverend Atonement Bargest was a firm believer in the contention that no one could be Saved who did not tremble before the Altar of the Lord, and Abigail and Thaxter spent three hours on the hard, narrow meetinghouse bench (“The House of Repentance, we call it,” confided the Reverend as he escorted them to the front and center seats) while all around them the two hundred or so souls of the congregation trembled, wept, and cried out in terror at apparitions of devils that the preacher pointed to in the candlelit shadows. Thaxter quite frankly dozed off, but Abigail was sorely tried with the effort not to get to her feet in protest as the Reverend pointed and shrieked at the appearance (visible only to himself) of the Nine Daughters of Eve, emerging from Hell to prey on the souls of Righteous Men: the serpent, the nightmare, the witch, the succubus, the harlot, the Priestess of Idols, Jezebel the Queen, the dishonest handmaiden, and most iniquitous of all, the inquisitive woman whose feet are never still.
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