The Ninth Daughter

“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?”