“How is this?” Abigail dropped, unasked, into the other rush-bottomed chair and puckered her brow in earnest readiness to listen to whatever Queenie had to say—noting, as she did so, that the teacup Queenie was drinking out of was one that she, Abigail, had given Rebecca. Though Nehemiah Tillet had on Monday dropped a small box containing “Mrs. Malvern’s things,” a glance at the sideboard told her that the Tillets had in fact appropriated plates, glasses, and silverware—anything expensive or of good quality—for their own.
“I have warned her,” cried Queenie, shaking her head and pouring Abigail some tea. “She will not listen! Not to me nor to anyone! No good will come of it—”
“Of what, for Heaven’s sake?” She took care to make herself sound profoundly concerned and not ready to grab Queenie by the shoulders and shake the information out of her.
“And the whole thing is simply shredding my nerves, Mrs. Adams! From the moment Mr. Revere shouted to me to come—”
So that’s how they did it—
“There has not been a moment, when I have been free of migraine, or palpitations of the heart, or the sweats . . . Feel my forehead, if you don’t believe me, Mrs. Adams! Last night I could not get a wink of sleep, not one single wink, and what it’s done to my digestion I daren’t think! My husband was the same way, all nerves, poor soul . . . Of course I was stronger then—”
“You have always inspired me with your strength, Mrs. Queensboro,” affirmed Abigail desperately, knowing Mrs. Tillet was not a woman to linger in the marketplace.
“No more.” Queenie shook her head, and raised a sigh so piteous and profound that—as Shakespeare had said—it seemed to shatter all her considerable bulk. “No more. Not since his death, taken as he was in the flower of his prime . . . I have never been the same, you know . . .”
“What is it that she’s done?” asked Abigail, throwing caution to the winds. “Surely she isn’t making you, on top of all else that you have to do to run this household, sew those wretched shirts that she charges the customers seven shillings for?”
And she cast a meaningful eye toward the basket.
“Alas, if it were only that!” Queenie pressed a hand to her eyes. “Even with my migraines, that I get from doing close work—and even the smallest effort at it will set me off for days—”
Heavy footfalls shook the parlor floorboards. Had she not known the yard gate was locked, Abigail would have made a smiling excuse and taken her leave at that point, but she knew she was cornered. She turned toward the parlor door with an expression of pleasure. “Why, Mrs. Tillet—”
“Mrs. Adams.” The linendraper’s wife filled the doorway like the Minotaur emerging from its cave. “To what do we owe this visit?”
“I’m terribly sorry to intrude, m’am, but I was in the neighborhood and Mr. Adams had asked me, about a volume of Tacitus he had lent to Mrs. Malvern some weeks ago. It was not among the things you so kindly sent; I had wondered if by chance it had been mistakenly set aside?”
“If you’re saying we might have stolen it, the answer is no,” snapped the big woman, broad face flushed with anger. She slapped down her market basket on the sideboard. “And what my cook would know about the matter one way or the other I cannot for the life of me think.”
“Mrs. Tillet,” said Abigail, getting up, aggrieved and puzzled. “I’m most dreadfully sorry if I’ve given you reason to think—”
“Well, I’m sorry, too, m’am,” returned Mrs. Tillet coldly. She was resolutely not looking at either the tray with the bread and water, nor the basket of sewing. “I’m sorry that you have nothing better to do with your time—and with growing children in your home!—then to go about the town talking to people’s servants and keeping them from their honest work. Now, good day to you.”
Her face stinging with rising blood as if the other woman had slapped her, Abigail was halfway back to the market square when she remembered the detail that had caught her eye as she’d come out of the shop’s back door, crossed to the kitchen—a difference in detail that had snagged her attention without transmitting, at the time, any meaning.
On dozens of mornings over the past year she’d crossed from Rebecca’s door to the kitchen door, to ask one thing or another of Queenie, and had noted the small furnishings of the yard repeatedly: hayfork for the cowshed, woodpile in its shelter, line of chamber pots outside the kitchen door, emptied but waiting to be scoured. (More laziness of Queenie’s—Rebecca had always scoured hers with ashes, soap, and boiling water even before breakfast, one of the first things Abigail had taught her when it had become clear that Rebecca was determined to live on her own. Abigail’s mother always said—a saying which Abigail had passed along—Worst goes first.) Rebecca’s chamber pot had been a hand-me-down, like everything else in her house: yellowware with a white and blue stripe around its middle.
This morning it had been sitting in the line of the Tillet household china on the step.
Abigail slowed her steps, calling the picture back to mind. Of course, given Mrs. Tillet’s penny-pinching ways, it was natural that she’d appropriate her vanished tenant’s thunder mug as well as her plates and forks . . . But why? None of the Tillet china had been missing. Half closing her eyes, Abigail was sure of it, because the four Tillet vessels didn’t match one another, either. The Tillets’ blue-and-white chinaware, and three rather plain pottery vessels in different colors for Queenie, the prentice-boys who slept in the shop, and whatever orphan Mrs. Tillet was half starving and working to death that year.
So who was using the other chamber pot?
Twenty-five
“Mr. Butler.” Abigail paused in the door of the cooper’s shop. Mrs. Tillet’s words still smarted in her mind, accompanied by other remarks made by other friends, about people who went around gossiping with servants. A little hesitantly, she said, “Might I beg a few words with Shim?”
The cooper grinned at her. “Nar, I think Shim’s too set on cuttin’ staves to spare a second to rest,” and the boy—already hopping gratefully down from the workbench where he had been performing this tedious and finicking task—grinned back and threw his master a salute. Mr. Cooper opened the door to the shop’s tiny rear parlor for them and went back to fitting hoops to a half-assembled barrel.
At least everyone doesn’t think it’s a sin to want to talk to someone other than the head of the family.
“Shim,” said Abigail softly, setting down her market basket, “do you know any of the prentice-boys along Fish Street on the North End?”
“Yes, m’am.” Small and wiry for his eleven years, Shimrath Walton had a quick mind and a friendly nature, even—up until recently—with the redcoats. Jed Paley—apprenticed to a house-carpenter a little farther up the street, and nearly seventeen—was acknowledged leader of the boys on Queen Street, but Shim combined a tendency to rove everywhere in town with an almost compulsive desire to talk to anybody about anything. He went on, “Zib Fife and Rooster Tamble, we’re going to all go to the meeting after dinner at Old South, about the British injustices and the King trying to make us all slaves. Mr. Butler says we can,” he added quickly, with a glance through the door into the shop.
“Excellent,” approved Abigail. “Do you happen to know the prentices of Tillet the linendraper?”
“Where the murder took place, m’am?” Something altered in the boy’s expression: more than just the eagerness of one who has had a sensation. Almost wariness. A look of putting things together, that he has heard or overheard.
So it isn’t my imagination.
“Yes,” said Abigail quietly. “Listen to me, Shim, this is important—and it’s doubly important that neither Mr. Tillet, nor his prentices, know that you’re asking questions. But I need an agent—a spy.”
Shim nodded, his soul aglow in his eyes.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with the murder,” she said. “Not directly, anyway. But I think there’s something funny going on in that house, and I need to know what it is. Can you fi
nd out for me?”
“Yes, m’am.”
“Can you find out without anyone else knowing that you’re asking? That’s important.”
“Yes, m’am.” The boy nodded again. “If they get word of someone asking, they’ll move what they’re doing away from there, won’t they? Like if they’re meeting with Tory agents, or sending out signals to the British . . . And then you won’t know where to start looking again. Is that it?”
“Something like that,” said Abigail. “But it isn’t Tory agents or signals to the British. And you mustn’t say that, or anything else, to anyone. If I’m wrong, you know how terribly gossip can hurt someone, even if the gossip isn’t true.”
The boy’s face changed again, anger this time, and hurt. “I know that, m’am,” he said quietly. “Ma had a hired girl, and she was not doing anything wrong, but the mother of one of the young men on our street took against her, and started stories—it was terrible, m’am. The old witch! And everyone in the church believed her, just ’cause she was the pastor’s wife! It got so bad, our girl had to go away.”
“Well, I don’t know if what I think is going on is really true or not. That’s why I need someone trustworthy to find out for me. So you must speak of this only to me. Furthermore, I don’t know who’s behind all this, so I don’t know who’s likely to tell on you—and me—if anyone suspects they’re being asked about.”
“Would they kill us?” He could not have been more thrilled had she told him he was in line for the crown of Great Britain.
“They would get you turned out of your apprenticeship without a character,” said Abigail severely, and picked up her market basket again, with its brimming load of turnips and fish. “In which case your father would kill you—and me as well.” She hesitated, not wanting to add to the drama of the occasion but unable to put from her mind the smell of the blood in Rebecca Malvern’s kitchen, or the sight of a small black cat cleaning itself with the stump of a cut-off paw. “The fact is, Shim—the person who’s behind this . . . I don’t know what he’s likely to do, to protect himself. So I want you to be very careful. Don’t take any chances. All right?”
“All right, m’am.” Had it been evening, he would have glowed in the dark.
“Cross your heart?”
“Cross my heart.” The boy did. “I’m true-blue, and will never stain.”
“I would not have asked you”—Abigail smiled, handing him a halfpenny she had saved from her grocery money—“if I thought you were anything else.”
Scouring pots, changing Tommy’s clout, cleaning lamps and chamber pots, sweeping and making the beds that were Abigail’s portion of the housework—all that was one thing. Abigail’s conscience, if not precisely clear on the subject of pursuing her search for Rebecca while Pattie was left home doing all the work, could at least be salved by the reflection that because the girl’s parents had too many children and not enough money, Abigail was in fact providing Pattie with an alternative to labor still harder and more degrading.
But there were no two ways around laundry.
It should have been done last week, when Abigail was wandering around the countryside with young Thaxter and listening to hysterical sermons delivered by the Hand of the Lord. With winter weather threatening, there was no way to tell when it would become impossible to wash the vast and accumulating quantities of shirts, chemises, dish clouts, and rough-rinsed baby dresses. As she and Pattie drew quantities of water from the well, tended the fire under the cauldrons in the yard, and filled tubs with water and lye, Abigail thought despairingly, Forgive me, Rebecca . . .
We are women, and bound as women are bound, to the labor of caring for those they love.
Curiously, the suspicion that had formed in her heart gave her a strange hope. If she’s being held captive in the Tillets’ attic (madness! surely madness!) she at least is safe as long as Mrs. Tillet’s supply of shirts holds out . . .
Tommy tried to eat one of Johnny’s toy soldiers and nearly choked. Charley and Johnny decided they were Indians and ambushed Nabby with clubs of firewood. Messalina threw up a hairball into the drawer of clean shirts.
More wood. More lye. More shirts.
John put in the briefest possible appearance for a dinner of roast pork and apples, then vanished to meet Sam and the others. After cleaning the dishes, scouring the pans, sweeping and washing the kitchen floor, and checking the fires under the cauldrons in the yard, Abigail changed her cap and assembled a dinner for Orion and his mother. “You,” she ordered Pattie, “sit down and crochet or something until I get back. I refuse to have you turn a hand at the laundry until I’m here to help you.”
“Yes, m’am. No, m’am.”
A servant is worthy of his hire—Heaven only knew what riches were Pattie’s true worth, if anyone had that kind of treasure to pay her with.
The printshop on Hanover Street was closed. The girl Damnation was in the keeping room, stolidly cleaning lamps that obviously hadn’t been cleaned in days and should have been scoured that morning: She’ll have the house aflame if the soot in them catches fire, Abigail reflected.
Mr. Hazlitt wasn’t in. Hadn’t been in since early morning. Did Damnation know where Mr. Hazlitt might have gone? No, m’am.
“Mrs. Hazlitt, she’s near to crazy weeping over it. She says, she knows he’s run off and left her, the way he did before.”
And small blame to him. “Oh, I’m sure he’ll be back before nightfall.”
“Yes, m’am.” The girl dipped her cleaning rag into a little basin of sand that had been reused so frequently that the sand was nearly the color of the soot it was intended to eradicate, and continued to rub doggedly at the nearly coal black surface of the brass. “He’d have told me, if he’d gone back off to Gilead.”
“Gilead?” Having set her basket on the corner of the table, Abigail paused on her way to the door.
“Yes, m’am. The Hand of the Lord, he’s wrote to Mr. Hazlitt two and three times to come. He grows main angry, when I bring him letters from Mr. Hazlitt saying as how he can’t.” She went to the sideboard, produced from among the litter of papers there half a dozen ragged sheets, clearly endpapers torn from the backs of books, decorated with the same virulent scrawl Abigail recognized at once from the sermons Rebecca was preparing for print. Words leaped out at her—further excuses . . . turn thy face for the work of the Lord . . . scorn his Chosen One and set up idols before thee . . .
Heaven forbid, reflected Abigail sourly, that even the fate of English justice and English liberties should come before the sacred cogitations of the Hand of the Lord.
A hundred things Orion had said to her about the conditions under which he’d grown up now returned, with the recollection of those shut-up, weathered buildings, of the hysterical atmosphere in the “House of Repentance” where sinners trembled and shrieked before the Chosen One’s version of the Lord. Rather smugly, Damnation added, “I was a bride of the Chosen One,” and Abigail didn’t even feel surprise. Only a kind of outraged disgust.
“Are you indeed?” she asked in what she hoped was a polite voice.
“Oh, not no more, m’am. The Lord became displeased with me, and told Reverend Bargest to put me aside, because my spirit used to walk abroad in the night and pinch the babies in their cradles, and let the mice into the kitchens. I tried not to let it,” she added worriedly. “Nights I’d lie awake, trying to hold my bad spirit in.” She clenched her sooty fists illustratively, pressed them together against her breast. “But it always did get away, the Reverend said, and walked about the world doing evil. He saw it, he said, and others did, too. So he had to put me aside.”
When she outgrew childish prettiness? Abigail studied her face. She could not have been as much as nineteen now. Had I known, she thought, I would have slept in the woods rather than take the man’s hospitality. “And did he turn you out of your home, as well as put you aside?”
“Oh, no, m’am.” Damnation seemed shocked at the suggestion. “The Hand of the Lord
would never turn out one of his children! It was for us that God gave us the land we live on, so that none of us can ever be turned away. The last time Mr. Hazlitt came to Gilead, the Reverend Bargest commanded me to come here to take care of Mrs. Hazlitt, in return for Mr. Hazlitt printing his sermons for him. But this Realm of Iniquities is not my home.”
“My child—” The stairway door opened. Lucretia Hazlitt stepped out. Perfectly dressed, hair coiffed beneath a lace cap, she moved steadily, except for her head, which had a slight waver to it, as if the world before her eyes was in constant motion and needed to be tracked. When she came close—to take Damnation’s arm—Abigail saw by the last fading light of evening that despite the gloom, the pupils of her eyes were narrowed to pinpricks with opium. “My child, I’m going out,” she announced. “I shall be back in a few minutes—”
“I’m afraid you can’t, m’am,” said Damnation. “Mr. Hazlitt told me I wasn’t to let you, and—”
Lucretia Hazlitt’s face convulsed suddenly, swiftly, with an expression of agony, and her green eyes turned wide and desperate. “You must let me go,” she said. “My son is dead. He met with an accident, a terrible misfortune. I saw him.”
“Mrs. Hazlitt,” said Damnation gently, “you know that wasn’t really him.”
“It was!” she insisted. “He came to me, blue and glowing. He sat beside my bed and took my hand, and I saw then that a great beam of wood had been driven into his chest! I saw the blood, my child! I saw the bruises on his face, where it had been crushed in—”
“M’am, that isn’t true.” The girl took her mistress’s hand in one hand, and gripped her arm with the other. “You know it isn’t.” She turned to Abigail, added in a whisper, “That didn’t really happen, m’am. It’s just the opium, that makes her see things. It wasn’t a real spirit.”
The Ninth Daughter Page 25
