The Ninth Daughter aam-1 Page 5

  Scipio whispered, “What happened?” as he emerged from the book-room, to escort her to the door.

  In the study, Malvern’s voice bellowed, “Scipio!” and the butler flinched.

  “Mrs. Malvern has disappeared,” replied Abigail swiftly, softly—knowing the master’s wrath would descend on the slave’s head if Scipio were one moment late in answering, or if the merchant so much as suspected the butler had spoken with his dishonored guest. “Where would she go, if she sought refuge? To her maidservant? She left Boston, didn’t she? Catherine, I mean—”

  “She did—”

  “Scipio, get in here, damn you!”

  “She might. It’s a long way, I don’t know the name of the place but I’ll—”

  The study door slammed open. Impassive, Scipio opened the outer door for Abigail, held himself straight and correct as she passed through. Only when Abigail glanced back over her shoulder as the door was closing, did she see Charles Malvern seize his slave by the shoulder of his coat and thrust him back against the wall, and strike him with the back of his hand across the face.

  Six

  In wardly shaking from her interview with Malvern—and possessed by what she knew was a fantasy that she would reach home to find a dripping-wet Rebecca huddled beside her kitchen fire—Abigail forced herself to stop in the market on her way back to Queen Street. As surely as she knew her own name, she knew that once she reached her own house, no marketing would get done. John (surely John was home by this time—it was nearly noon by the clock on Faneuil Hall) would demand a minute account of what she had seen in Rebecca’s kitchen, and would also demand to know why she hadn’t stopped Sam, as if anything less than a nine-pound gun could stop Sam once he got going. Poor Pattie would be struggling to finish her own chores and Abigail’s neglected ones, and both Johnny and Nabby—usually at Rebecca’s dame school at this time of the morning—would be underfoot, not to mention the two little ones . . .

  Life on Queen Street was one continuous domestic crisis, with brief breaks for meals and church on Sunday.

  So while her mind tugged and tested at where Rebecca could have taken refuge, at who the dead woman was and how the killer could have gotten into the house, she borrowed a basket from one of the farmwives she knew at the market—her own having been set down at some point in the morning she could no longer recall—and filled it with squash and corn and beans, pears and the best of the available remaining pumpkins, two chickens, and a lobster. She also paid a farthing for molasses candy, for the children and as an offering to Pattie for running off and leaving the poor girl with the whole house to clean and the ironing.

  Not that Pattie was ever resentful or sulky, thank heavens. The girl would never set the world afire with her wits, but when King Solomon had set a good woman’s value above mere rubies he’d clearly displayed his shortcomings as a housekeeper . . . A reliable servant’s is above the stars in the sky.

  Which is what comes of having kings write scripture and not housekeepers.

  I must remember to bake extra tomorrow, and send something to Orion.

  She turned the corner into Queen Street, and saw bright as the blood-stream on Rebecca’s doorstep that morning the scarlet of soldiers’ coats.

  Not for a second did she doubt at whose door the men stood.

  John. There was a list that we didn’t find, and the Watch did . . .

  Abigail went cold down to her toes.

  Over a dozen neighborhood children milled around them, at a safe distance precisely calculated, like blue jays teasing a cat. “Bloody-backs, bloody-backs,” chanted Shimrath Walton, and shied a knob of pig dung at the smaller of the men: not the first such missile, to judge by the state of the boy’s hands and the man’s uniform. The little soldier’s face turned as red as his coat and he took a stride toward the offenders, but they scattered, shrieking with laughter, only to reform a few yards away. “Lobsters for sale!”

  “Sure now, what’ll your Ma say, you chuckin’ your lunch about like that?” retorted the taller soldier, which got a laugh from the children in return.

  “Shimrath,” said Abigail sharply, “come here this moment. You, too, Jed,” she added, picking out the leader of the little band, and before she could single out a third, her own Nabby and Johnny darted out of the alley that ran beside the house:

  “Ma, the redcoats have come to arrest Papa—”

  “We tried to stop them.” Nabby flung plump arms around Abigail’s waist and held her desperately tight. “We tried—”

  “Are they still in there?”

  Both children nodded. Nabby was a silent girl, even at eight years of age worrisomely withdrawn. Her composure shattered, she looked like she’d been weeping: She adored her father. All Johnny’s blunt-spoken sarcasm seemed to have deserted him as well.

  “Nabby.” Abigail bent down to her daughter to whisper, “You run at once to Mr. Revere’s shop—Johnny, you go with her”—Johnny would never tolerate seeing his sister dispatched on an errand if he were not given one as well, and never mind that he was barely out of dresses—“and tell Mr. Revere that soldiers are here—How many are there?”

  “These two and an officer inside,” reported Johnny promptly. “He’s from the Provost Marshal.” In addition to studying Latin and the beginnings of Greek under his father’s eye, the pale, fair-haired boy had lately become the neighborhood expert on the facing-colors and insignia of the regiment stationed on Castle Island.

  “Tell Mr. Revere that. He’ll know what to do. Shimrath, run tell Mr. Sam Adams. He may be at his house again and he may still be at Mrs. Malvern’s house in Tillet’s Yard—Jed, you go to Tillet’s Yard. I’ll hold them here.”

  The children bolted in all directions. The shorter guard, not having been privy to Abigail’s murmured instructions, grunted, “Thank you, m’am. Those brats are a nuisance, no error.” The taller—a young man with a snub nose and wide-set blue eyes—regarded Abigail worriedly as she moved toward the mouth of the little alley that led to the yard behind.

  “Sorry, m’am.” He stepped in front of her. “Just but family permitted in.” His English was one step from Gaelic, and not much of a step at that. “Lieutenant’ll be done in a minute—”

  “I am Mrs. Adams.” Abigail handed him her shopping basket and the pumpkin. “If you would be so good as to carry this in for me?”

  The young man cast a disconcerted glance back over his shoulder, and the older one waved him impatiently, adding, “And keep hold of your damn musket!” when he would have set it against the wall.

  “Yes, sorr. Sorry, sorr.” With his weapon tucked awkwardly under one arm, the pumpkin under the other, and the heavy basket in both hands, he followed Abigail around to the yard and the kitchen door.

  “Put it there.” Abigail nodded toward the broad table of scrubbed oak in the center of the big room: kitchen, workroom, dining-hall, nursery, schoolroom, and stillroom combined, the warm heart of the house where everything of importance was accomplished. When the children were in bed it was here she and John would work on pamphlets, letters, reports to the Committees of Correspondence in other colonies, and it was here, upon occasion, that members of the small, unofficial committee that headed up the Sons of Liberty sometimes met as well.

  At the moment Pattie, bless her faithful heart, was finishing with the lamps for the day, setting the cleaned tin triangles aside on their shelf—wicks neatly trimmed—to await the fall of night. This task she abandoned, face flooded with relief, at her mistress’s entrance. “Oh, Mrs. Adams—!” At the same instant three-year-old Charley—ordinarily the household’s most outspoken supporter of the Sons of Liberty and Death to King George—flung himself against Abigail’s skirts and buried his face in her cloak, clearly not up to the task of fighting full-grown British soldiers after all. Tommy, sixteen months old and Charley’s most loyal follower, wasn’t far behind.

  “Flogged them, have you?” Abigail pressed both fair little heads reassuringly, and regarded the abashed soldier
with a chilly eye.

  “M’am, I swear—”

  “Never mind. Pattie, I abase myself with shame for having abandoned you so heartlessly; there’s molasses candy in the basket which this nice young representative of His Majesty’s government has so kindly carried in for me. It is for you and for them. Is that cider I smell heating? Please pour some out for—what is your name?—Please pour some out for Mr. Muldoon, and bring in three cups of it on a tray to the parlor: the good cups. Don’t set your musket down there, young man, unless you want my son to shoot either himself or you with it—not on the table, either, if you please. We’re going to prepare food there. Pattie, may I trespass upon your good nature still further and ask you to start getting the chickens ready to roast and the lobster to boil, and the pumpkin to cook with apples and corn? I shall be in to help you as soon as matters have been dealt with in the parlor. And fetch one of the clean rags and lay it on the sideboard for that fearsome piece of artillery. Charley, you and Tommy may help Pattie with that.”

  Having kicked off her pattens, hung up her cloak, removed her bonnet, straightened her day-cap, and donned a clean apron while she spoke, Abigail made her way through the door and into the parlor where John stood facing the representative of the British Army’s military law.

  “Mr. Adams,” she greeted the short, chubby, round-faced little man beside the cold fireplace. “The house appears to be singularly well-protected today. To what do we owe the honor of this visitation?”

  “Mrs. Adams.” John took her hand. “Allow me to present Lieutenant Coldstone, of His Majesty’s Provost Guard. Lieutenant, my wife.”

  “I am honored.” Coldstone bowed.

  He was well-named, Abigail reflected. His features had the appearance of something carved from marble: delicate, icy, and rigidly composed. The snow-white powder of his wig somehow added to the colorlessness of his features, rather than showing them up pinker, as the (admittedly ill-powdered) Muldoon’s did. His eyes were dark, and chilly as a well digger’s backside.

  “The Provost Marshal,” said John, lifting from the mantelpiece a folded sheet of paper, “seems to believe I have some knowledge of the death of Mrs. Perdita Pentyre, if no worse involvement, and the disappearance of Mrs. Malvern, in whose house Mrs. Pentyre’s body was found. Did you know anything about this?”

  Perdita Pentyre! The name left Abigail momentarily breathless. She closed her mouth on a gasped demand, Are you sure? Because obviously both John and Lieutenant Coldstone were very sure. Perdita—

  “I heard that a body had been found, yes.” Abigail collected her thoughts, her heart sinking. “And that Mrs. Malvern had disappeared.” And still has not come forth . . .

  “From whom did you hear this,” asked Coldstone, “and where?”

  “In Fish Street, at about ten this morning when I was doing the marketing.” And thank goodness that, like King Solomon, this impeccably uniformed young man knew nothing about housekeeping and would be unlikely to ask why a woman whose home was as neat as Abigail’s would leave her marketing until so advanced an hour.

  “Fish Street doesn’t lie between here and the market,” pointed out Coldstone.

  Not so ignorant, after all. “Mrs. Malvern is a close friend. Situated as she is—obliged to teach a dame school, and without a servant—I went there to ask if there were anything I could obtain for her. Thank you, Pattie—”

  The girl came in, laid the tray with its three tall beakers of cider on the parlor table, cast a glance at Coldstone as if she expected him to arrest her as well, and ducked from the room.

  Coldstone ignored the cider. “Did Mrs. Malvern ever speak of Mrs. Pentyre? To your knowledge, were they acquainted?”

  “They may have known one another by sight,” responded Abigail, still trying to take it in, that the young and lovely wife of one of the richest merchants in Boston had known Rebecca well enough to have her throat cut in her kitchen. She stammered a little: “Mrs. Malvern had left her husband by the time Mrs. Pentyre—Miss Parke, as she was then—married Richard Pentyre. Coming as she did from Baltimore, and Mrs. Pentyre from New York, I doubt Mrs. Malvern would have known Mrs. Pentyre as a girl.”

  Perdita Pentyre!

  The silk dress. The diamond earrings. It made sense. Richard Pentyre, every inch the picture of an English gentleman, was bosom-crony to Governor Hutchinson and recipient of every favor and perquisite available to a loyal friend of the King.

  And why not? His young and lovely wife was mistress to Colonel Leslie, commander of the garrison on Castle Island.

  Her hand did not move, but she could almost feel through the fabric of her pocket and petticoats the note she had taken from the woman’s dishonored body. The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia.

  One of ours, Dr. Warren had said.

  Perdita Pentyre, an agent of the Sons of Liberty.

  Who would have thought it?

  “I beg your pardon.” She was aware that Lieutenant Coldstone had said, Mrs. Adams? with a note of interrogation in his voice. “My mind was otherwhere. Mrs. Malvern is, as I said, a close friend to our family. She lived with us, when first she was obliged to leave her husband’s house—”

  “So she is close to both your husband and yourself.”

  His eyes were on John as he spoke, and Abigail, with a warning ringing oddly in her mind, like the smell of smoke in the night, glanced swiftly at John’s face. He wore an expression of wariness, such as she’d seen on him when he played chess with an unfamiliar opponent. Only grimmer.

  She answered, “Yes.”

  John added, quietly, “As I’ve told you.”

  “And she is not an intimate friend to Mrs. Pentyre, so far as you know?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  “Does she share your husband’s political opinions?”

  Abigail’s glance went to John again, and this time the tension in him was unmistakable. Not a chess game. A fencing-match, she thought, like the one in Hamlet: the rapiers unbuttoned, and one blade poisoned. “We met at church,” she said. “Like both of us, and many others, Mrs. Malvern believes that the colonies have the right to a voice in their own government, though what that has to do with such a crime being committed beneath her roof I am at a loss to imagine.”

  “Are you, m’am? At what time did your husband come in last night?”

  “He did not,” replied Abigail. “He has been pleading a case in Essex County since Monday. He was to have returned last night, but I presume was delayed until after the time that the gates are shut and the ferry closed down for the night. When I left for the market this morning he had not yet come in.”

  “As I told you also,” added John, whose cheeks had developed red blotches of anger. “I expect my children will say the same, if you care to interrogate them.”

  “John,” said Abigail sharply, “what does—?”

  Coldstone held up a staying hand. “What time was that?”

  Queenie saw me outside Rebecca’s door. “Nearly half past seven. Daylight.”

  “And you have only just returned from your marketing?”

  “I went first to Mrs. Malvern’s house to see if there was anything I might get for her, and found a slate by her door, saying, No School. I thought she might have been ill, and walked on to return a book I had borrowed from a friend in the North End; I returned by way of Fish Street again, to see if she was awake and in need of anything. ’Twas then I heard that a woman had been found in her house, dead, and no one could say what had happened to Mrs. Malvern or where she might be. I have been seeking word of her.”

  “In preference to a reunion with your husband?”

  “My dear Lieutenant,” said John, with a half grin that did not reach his eyes, “Mrs. Adams is the original Eve for curiosity. She knew where she would be able to locate me, when she needed me.”

  Past the Lieutenant’s shoulder, Abigail saw a man cross the window on the outside, a distorted shape in the uneven diamonds of glass. The fourth or fifth to do so, she thought, in
five minutes—unusual for Queen Street at this time of a weekday morning.

  “As I have told you already,” John went on, “I spent last night at Purley’s Tavern in Salem, my horse having strained a fetlock a number of miles from the ferry—”

  “You could tell me you spent last night in Constantin ople, and be away from Boston by the time I’d sent Sergeant Muldoon there to check your story.”

  “You can certainly send Sergeant Muldoon to check with the ferryman as to the time I crossed this morning.”

  “As a lawyer, Mr. Adams—and the cousin of the man who heads up the Sons of Liberty—you know quite well that there are other ways into this city than the Winnisimmet Ferry or the gate at the Neck . . . and other ways that a man might have to do with a woman’s death, than wielding the knife himself. I—and Colonel Leslie—would prefer to have you where we know we can lay our hands on you.”

  With a shock Abigail realized that Johnny had not been exaggerating. The Provost Marshal’s man was, indeed, here to arrest John—for the murder.

  Cold panic flooded her, then hot rage. Seditious the Crown might well call him—as it called all its enemies. But that anyone would even consider for an instant that he had had or could have had anything to do with a crime of that nature left her breathless. She glanced at the window again, and though the flawed glass made it difficult to make out details, she saw that there definitely were at least five men, loitering in the street in front of the house.

  She said, “Surely, Lieutenant,” in her most reasonable voice, “if your commander simply wishes Mr. Adams to be available for further questioning, would not a bond serve as well?” She tucked her hands beneath her apron, mostly to keep the officer from seeing them ball into unwomanly fists. “We are simple folk, and not so wealthy that my husband can afford to flee and leave thirty pounds in your hands—I believe thirty pounds is the usual bond for good conduct? Unless you would rather take our firstborn son, but I really wouldn’t want to do that to whoever would have to look after him.”