The Ninth Daughter

by Barbara Hamilton

  “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.

  I will advise you, when I hear that he has been apprehended. I do not feel that it will be long.

  Your friend,

  A. Adams

  This note John carried down to the waterfront, to send across to Castle Island, when he left the house in the morning to meet Sam. “Don’t wait dinner for me,” he said as he kissed her. “Nor supper either. The Lord only knows how long it will take, to trace this rumor and find out who exactly is planning to take off the Beaver’s cargo—if indeed anyone is at all.”

  “I shall leave a bowl of food for you on the doorstep,” Abigail promised, neatly tying the tapes on Tommy’s clout. “Right next to Messalina’s.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder and leaned to kiss her nape. “Portia, your price is above rubies.”

  Gomer Faulk, coming in behind Pattie with her arms full of ice-cold linens from the yard, said, “Good-bye, Mr. Adams,” as he passed. Making a place for the big woman in the household would be awkward, reflected Abigail, for the little time she’d be there—I MUST write a letter to Papa today as well, and get Thaxter to take it—but at least she was good-hearted, eager to do what lay within her simple understanding, and loved children.

  “Well, she’s living proof that the Lord does provide,” remarked Pattie, with a twinkle in her eye. “Here she’s come just on the day when we need help with the ironing.”

  AND a letter to the pastor at Medford, to find out who the woman really is related to . . .

  Abigail shivered, as she and Pattie returned to the yard for another load of shirts and sheets, at the thought of how easy it was for a woman with no family connections to drop out of sight without a trace. Her mind roved, not to Pamela in the novel, but to Jenny Barry, to the children of Mrs. Kern the laundrywoman in Love Lane Yard—little six-year-old Nannie who’d been sent down to the tavern to fetch Mr. Ballagh, as casually as if she’d been a grown girl able to defend herself—to Philomela, after whom no one would inquire once money was handed over. Even to the maddening, clinging, outrageous Lucretia Hazlitt, whom everyone avoided if they could . . .

  That, she supposed, in spite of its absurdity, was why she came back to Pamela again and again. Because at its heart, it was true. No one really cared about a girl who was poor, more than they cared about themselves.

  Movement in the passway to the street caught her eye. Turning—her thought going at once to Sam and his “boys”—she saw Sergeant Muldoon. He saluted, and she quickly draped the garments over her big wicker clothes-hamper and hurried across to him: “Good Heavens, man, are you mad? I’m astonished you weren’t set upon, on your way here.”

  “Well, there was a bit of a botheration.” He craned his head around to look over his own shoulder at splotches of fresh horse dung smeared on his back. “But ’twas just bad words, when all’s said, and none tried to stay me. ’Tis early yet. Though I’ll be hopin’,” he added a little shyly, “that you’ll be so kind as to find a minute, to walk me back to the wharves. I’ve this for you, from Himself.”

  He held out a sealed note.

  My very dear Mrs. Adams:

  When we parted yesterday evening I expressed myself harshly, being very angry. Yet on reflection I see that we are equally accessories after the fact.

  If we do not trust one another, at least insofar as this case is concerned, the next victim’s blood will be upon both of our hands. Sooner or later, one of us must surrender the high ground of safety with proof of good intent.

  Therefore, as I am detained today upon the island, I enclose the reason that Colonel Leslie is so sure that it was your husband who was responsible for the murder of Mrs. Pentyre. I trust, first, that you will show this to no one—not to your husband, nor to anyone whom you may know or suspect to be associated with the Sons of Liberty—and that you will return it to me.

  I hope that this gesture will prompt a reciprocal sharing of at least some of the information which I know that you have been keeping from me, concerning the circumstances of Mrs. Pentyre’s murder. I promise you, that I will keep silent concerning what you tell me, save where it touches that which would immediately endanger the lives of the soldiers under Colonel Leslie’s charge. I know you to be a woman of profound integrity, and loyalty to your husband and to his cause; even as I have my loyalty to my King and to my Regiment.

  Your obedient servant,

  Lieutenant Jeremy Coldstone

  King’s 64th Regiment

  She unfolded the enclosed note.

  Pentyre—

  The hand of Liberty lies heavy upon you, and shall crush your wife and yourself for your Sins against your Country and those who Love her.

  Novanglus

  For the second time in just over half a day, Abigail was smitten dizzy with the vertiginous sensation of being bombarded with too much light. As if she had opened a door long closed, and before her a vista of doors slammed open in such swift sequence that the sight of what lay beyond one was immediately overwhelmed by what lay beyond the next. Her breath stopped—she had the sensation it was minutes before she was able to draw it again, and she fought to keep her hands from shaking.

  Rebecca.

  DEAR GOD!!!

  She folded up both notes. She was almost surprised, to see her yard with its mazes of clothes-ropes exactly as it had been five minutes before. “Can you read, Sergeant Muldoon?” she inquired in her sweetest voice.

  “Oh, not me, m’am. I can put me name good and prop
er, but more’n that our priest never did manage to teach me.”

  “Hmm,” said Abigail. “Well, Lieutenant Coldstone writes here that you are to disregard all former orders to you, and accompany me. You and I are going on a little journey.”

  Dearest Friend,

  I pray this letter will reach you quickly. Shim Walton is good at finding people in the North End. I have sent another like it to Sam, and a third—suitably excised—to Lt. Coldstone.

  The man who wrote a threat of death, under your name, to Mr. and Mrs. Pentyre was the Hand of the Lord Atonement Bargest, for the simple reason (I will confirm this with Abednego Sellars or his wife before I leave for Gilead this morning) that the Gilead congregation has been in a lawsuit with Pentyre over the former Sellars lands in Essex County, lands upon which much of Gilead stands. The suit as I recall is coming up for final judgment at the next Session. To kill Pentyre alone would be insufficient, as Mrs. Pentyre would inherit the lands—and the lawsuit—in the event of her husband’s death. The next heir—Pentyre’s brother—lives, with the remainder of the family, in England.

  Therefore, you must undertake at once to protect Richard Pentyre, and to find Orion Hazlitt before he reaches him. He will, I assume, have gone to Castle William.

  I am not sure, but I suspect that Hazlitt may have killed someone—probably a young woman—at Gilead years ago, and that Bargest knows it. Certainly he has a hold of some kind over the man, beyond mere superstition. I don’t believe Hazlitt even knows that Bargest wrote the threat, directing suspicion toward the Sons of Liberty (and away from Gilead).

  My fear is, that Rebecca, having escaped imprisonment in her room, saw Orion, and was apprehended by him before she could get out of the house. If he did not immediately kill her—and I do not believe he did or would—the only place he could have sent her was to Gilead itself, keeping her and his mother both dosed with laudanum while he dispatched Damnation to the settlement with instructions to Bargest to send (or come) to fetch her from one of the smuggler-barns across the bay from Boston, to which Hazlitt could take her one night. I think she must have been in the bedroom overhead, unconscious, even as I talked to Orion and his mother on Thursday, and that she was in one of the deserted dwellings in Gilead when Thaxter and I passed through there the following Monday night.

  For this reason I have commandeered Sergeant Muldoon—who is under the impression that he is obeying his commanding officer’s orders—and am on my way to Gilead even now. I beg of you, send reinforcements after us at once, for should Bargest discover that he has been implicated in this crime, I do not put it past him to incite violence against us, to protect his own position.

  Likewise I have warned Thaxter, Gomer, and Pattie to keep the children close to home, and to let no one see them until you have given them word.

  I trust that you (and suitable assistance) will catch us up on the road.

  Your own,

  Portia

  They spent the night in Salem. The modern seaport town had had little to do with the witchcraft trials that had spread over Essex County like a poison-rash not quite eighty years before. “They weren’t in this town at all, then?” Sergeant Muldoon sounded disappointed.

  Rain rattled the darkening casements of Purley’s Tavern, as Mrs. Purley—who always reminded Abigail of a dried apple-doll—set before them a dish of stew and a fresh-baked loaf of bread. Wind shrieked around the eaves. Abigail gratefully drank the landlady’s excellent cider, feeling that she would never get warm again.

  “There may have been one or two here, once the accusations were started,” she said. “When people found they could accuse their personal enemies of sending out their spirits to do evil, when the accused themselves were demonstrably elsewhere, a great many found they knew people who must be witches . . . But the accusations themselves began in Salem Village, about eight miles west of here. They changed the name of that settlement to Danvers.”

  “I can see why they’d do.” The young man shook his head, and mopped busily at the gravy. The men at the other table—clerks and supercargoes, they looked like, from one of the many ships at anchor—burst into talk and laughter over some witticism, their voices loud in the ordinary-room that had no other customers. After a time he asked, “ ’Tis what this Hand of the Lord told this Hazlitt, then, isn’t it? That Mrs. Pentyre was a witch, and had sent her spirit to do some wicked thing?”

  “I think he must have. Or something very like it.” Abigail glanced at the window as the wind shook it again, praying at every moment that each sound was John—with a suitable troop of Sons of Liberty at his back—coming to her assistance. “Mrs. Pentyre and her husband, who evilly contested God’s will that had given the land to the Gilead Congregation. How could such ill-intentioned people not be in league with the Devil?”

  Muldoon said, “T’cha!” and reached for another hunk of bread with an enthusiasm that gave Abigail a very bad impression of His Majesty’s generosity to his servants. “Sounds like me Aunt Bridget,” he added. “She’s got it well in her head, that the Divil’s got naught to do but spend his days urgin’ folks on to make her life harder for her. Says she can see him, in the shape of a black bird, or a black cat, or sometimes a spider, whisperin’ in the ear of Grinder Givern—that’s our landlord’s rent-agent—or Mrs. O’Toole the tavern keeper’s wife, just before they go ask her to pay up her bills or whate’er it is that she’s diviled about that day. She’s still got friends that believe her, mostly ’cause she tells them she sees the Divil urgin’ on folks to make their lives miserable, too, but mostly in Ballyseigh—that’s home—they just say, ‘Well, there’s Bridget Muldoon on a tear again.’ She’s never told any to go do no murder.”

  He shrugged back his cloak in the warmth of the hearth, and one or two of the men who shared the ordinary-room with them glanced warily at his red coat. He had accepted Abigail’s assurance that Coldstone’s note to her was in fact orders to him to accompany her and obey her commands, and didn’t seem in the least troubled by the fact that the whole northeast section of Massachusetts had for two weeks been flooded with pamphlets describing the British troops as murderers intent upon enslaving the population in the name of the King. No imagination? she wondered. Or simply a stolid sense of duty as unshakeable as Coldstone’s own. Perhaps the fact that he was alone—and clearly acting the role of bodyguard to a civilian woman—lessened the chances of random assault, but Abigail was very aware of being watched, and undoubtedly discussed in whispers in the shadows of the ill-lit inn.

  “Bein’ that the Hand of the Lord did tell him,” he went on after a worried silence, “sure and he didn’t tell him to . . . to cut her up the way he did, and all the rest of it. He wouldn’t have told him that.”

  “I’m sure he did not.” Abigail put her hands around her mug of cider, slowly feeling the warmth returning to them. “Being unable to see beyond his own vanity, to the point of madness, himself, I’m sure it never crossed his mind that a man who is mad cannot control the shape his madness takes, nor when it will seize on him.”

  She was silent a moment, remembering a man named James Otis—a great thinker, a great organizer, a pillar of the Sons of Liberty, who had slowly gone mad as a bedbug. His sister—to whom Abigail still wrote—had spoken to her of his torments, knowing that he could no longer be trusted, of her wretchedness at watching that brilliant mind eclipsed, and knowing that there was nothing anyone could do to save him.

  When Orion is sane, she wondered, does he know that he’s mad?

  Or does he only suspect it in his dreams?

  When Muldoon excused himself to her and rose, and crossed to the other table to make the acquaintance of the men with whom he’d share one of the beds in the big chamber upstairs that night, Abigail sat for a time in thought. She should, she knew, put in a half hour with quill and paper, composing orders purportedly from Lieutenant Coldstone to Sergeant Muldoon instructing him to go where she told him and do what she said, in case it later occurred to him to ask someone el
se to verify the document she’d shown him.

  Instead, when Mrs. Purley came in with another pitcher of steaming cider, Abigail beckoned her. “My dear, I hope that soldier with you doesn’t mean your Mr. Adams is still in trouble with His Majesty?” said the innkeeper’s wife softly. “What a fuss they made, over that horse he left here lame—and by the by, Mr. Thaxter left his pipe here on accident when he came to fetch the beast, and we’ve got it saved for him in the pantry—”

  “Thank you.” Abigail smiled, and clasped the woman’s hand. She’d become well acquainted with Mrs. Purley in the years that her own sister Mary and her husband had lived in Salem. “Remind me of it tomorrow . . . And no, all is well, Sergeant Muldoon is inquiring after another matter . . . Would you know,” she asked artlessly, “the name of that girl who was slashed to death so horribly, about ten years ago out toward Townsend?”

  1763—or thereabouts—was, she knew, the year that Orion Hazlitt had come to Boston.

  Jemma Purley’s round face clouded, and Abigail knew before she spoke, that she was right.

  But Mrs. Purley asked, “Which one?” and Abigail stared at her, aghast.

  “There was more than one?”

  “Oh, dear, yes.” Mrs. Purley set down her pitcher, dried her hands in her apron as she looked down at Abigail with sorrow and anger in her eyes. “The one from Gilead, we only heard rumor of: Those Gilead folks has always kept their doings to themselves. Purley says, nobody would ever have heard of it at all, except for it being Rose of Sharon Topsford that found the body, and the poor thing has never been quite right after that, seeing what had been done to the girl. But Frankincense Banister—” She shook her head. “It doesn’t do to speak ill of the dead, and whatever the poor girl’s failings—and it was only foolishness, and having her head turned, so pretty as she was—the way she would flirt, and with boys she didn’t know well, we were all afraid she’d find herself in trouble one day, though of course no one expected . . . Is that who you meant?”