The Ninth Daughter

why weep for a victory? Keep an eye on your brothers and help Pattie with dinner—Lord, I’m hungry!—while I talk to your mother. What happened?” His voice dropped to a whisper as he followed Abigail to the sideboard, helped her carry to the table the heavy iron Dutch oven and the crock of lard. “Was he telling the truth? Perdita Pentyre! Did Mrs. Malvern know her?”

“She must have.” Abigail dug in her pocket, brought out the note. “I think she must have been Rebecca’s source, for secrets and scandal in the British camp. I suppose there’s no doubt that it was she, and not another? Her face was . . . much mutilated.”

At the other end of the table, Pattie raised a cleaver and whacked off the head of one of the dinner chickens. The other, decapitated, gutted, pale, and naked, lay on a plate before Abigail already. Her empty stomach turned, and she looked queasily away.

“That officer at least was as sure as he could be,” rumbled John as he unfolded the slip of paper. “Mrs. Pentyre is indeed missing from her home. According to Lieutenant Coldstone, the stableman there says that Mrs. Pentyre took a light chaise out, fairly late in the evening, and its horse was found wandering loose on the Commons this morning. They’re dragging the Mill-Pond for the chaise.” He added drily, “I understand that if Richard Pentyre is unable to identify his wife’s body, Colonel Leslie knows it well enough to do so.”

“It isn’t a matter for jest.” In a low voice Abigail recounted what she had found in Rebecca Malvern’s house that morning, and what she had done about it. “I could have beaten Sam with a broom handle for going through the place as he did,” she finished, as she tucked the chicken into its place in the pot. “The more so now, that any trace of evidence that it wasn’t you has been destroyed. I went to Malvern’s after we left Hazlitt’s printshop.”

“You don’t think she’d have taken refuge with him?”

Abigail shook her head. “No. I think she’d have taken refuge with Revere, or with us, or with Orion Hazlitt. But she didn’t.”

John said, “Hmmn.”

“If she had,” Abigail went on slowly, drying her hands, “I wouldn’t put it past Malvern—I don’t think I’d put it past Malvern—to take her in, and then lock her up again, as he did before—”

He glanced back at her from the note, which he was studying by the stronger light of the kitchen window. “You truly think he would do something like that?”

Abigail hesitated. “I truly don’t know,” she said at last. “One hears of it—and not just in novels,” she added, seeing the corner of his mouth turn down. “He is—a man who will have his own way, no matter what he has to do to get it. Mostly, I wanted to speak with him before the Watch told him of the crime and Rebecca’s disappearance. I knew he’d see no one, afterwards.”

“You’re probably right about that. And much as I hate to admit it, if Sam and the others hadn’t cleared up the scene I suppose Coldstone would have had grounds to arrest me for sedition this morning, instead of being put off with a thirty-pound bond.” At that point in Abigail’s narrative, he’d snatched off his wig and thrown it at the wall; it lay like a dead animal now on the sideboard near his hand. Without it, his face looked even rounder, his blue eyes more protuberant. His mouse brown hair, short-cropped, was graying, and Abigail had to suppress the urge to kiss the thin spots above his forehead. “You say Sam didn’t recognize Mrs. Pentyre? Or know about her?” He turned the note over in his fingers. “Did you take a close look at this?”

She shook her head, set aside the dumplings she was making, and crossed to his side. “When he saw her body, he certainly didn’t have any candidates in mind. There can’t be that many wealthy women who were friends with Rebecca, who would have been using the code of the Sons.” Over his shoulder she studied the paper:

The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia.

And frowned. She dried her hands again, took from a drawer in the sideboard a much-scribbled sheet on which Nabby—with many blots and scratches—had been practicing the fiddling art of writing with a goose-quill. This she held up to John, her thumb at the topmost line, where Rebecca had written:

All Things Work Together for the Good of Them that Love the Lord.

“Is that the same handwriting?” she asked.

John fished in his pocket for a magnifying lens, laid the two papers side by side.

“The capitals are the same,” he said, after a long few minutes. “But look how the small o’s and e’s want to pinch, while Mrs. Malvern’s are naturally round. Not just one or two, but all of them. See there, where the in in Linnet blots and widens, where he’s tried to imitate that little swoop you see in the in in Things. The same on the downstrokes of the capital T’s and L’s: that forced change of angle.” He offered her the glass.

“I’ll tell you what caught my attention,” added John, as Abigail verified the wavery changes of line, the odd thicknesses and blots where the writer’s hand had struggled to imitate angles unfamiliar to it. “Look at the two pieces of paper. No, Rebecca wouldn’t use cold-pressed English notepaper for children’s exercises, but would she have had any of it in the house at all? What did she write her broadsides on?”

“Common foolscap, like this. Sam arranges with Isaiah Thomas at the Spy to provide her with as much as she needs.” She glanced up. “You’re saying Mrs. Pentyre was lured there.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“By someone who knows the code used by the Sons.”

“By someone who knew that this code was used between Mrs. Malvern and Mrs. Pentyre.”

“But Rebecca did wait up for her,” pointed out Abigail. “She was still dressed—at least her day dress and her shoes were gone from the house—and the fire hadn’t been banked, nor the candles extinguished. And they had been snuffed and mended during the evening. She waited for someone. And clearly, she let Mrs. Pentyre in at midnight.”

“And the killer as well, apparently,” murmured John. He folded the note and pocketed it. “I’ll get that,” he offered, as Abigail started to lift the heavy Dutch oven, to carry to the hearth. “What time did the rain start here? Ten?” He dumped a couple of shovelfuls of glowing coals onto the iron lid. “If it was coming down as hard as it was in Salem, it would have been easy for someone to follow Mrs. Pentyre’s chaise from her house. As to how he would have gotten them to open the door—”

“He was known to one or the other,” said Abigail. “He must have been. If he forged the note, he knew the code—”

“And if he forged the note, Mrs. Malvern would not have been still awake,” responded John thoughtfully. He set the fire-shovel back in its place. “What time are the Tillets expected back, my Portia?” he asked, using the name they had used in their letters during courtship: she Portia, he Lysander, like heroine and hero of a classical romance. “Do you feel able for a half-mile walk, to see what the Watch have left of Sam’s handiwork? Or would you rather rest?” he added, scrutinizing her face more closely. “You look—”

“I look like a woman ready to faint away in your arms,” replied Abigail briskly. “Yet in either case my conscience would not let me rest, after what I’ve done to poor Pattie this morning—and burdened her with entertaining that young lout of an Irishman . . .”

“Oh, m’am.” Pattie dimpled shyly from the table where she was scrubbing potatoes. “Sergeant Muldoon meant nobody harm. Not even Mr. Adams, I daresay. You go,” she added. “Mrs. Malvern may even have come back, if what happened there didn’t drive her into brain-fever, so that she’s forgotten who and where she is.”

“If she’s forgotten,” said John softly, putting on his wig again while Abigail took off her apron and stepped into her pattens in their corner by the door, “’tis a curious thing that none of her neighbors found her wandering and reminded her.”

By this hour, Fish Street was a lively confusion of carts and drays coming up from the docks, of pungent smells and the clattering of hammers: shoemakers, coopers, smiths in silver and iron. The North End—technically an island, if you counted the little Mill Creek as a branch of the ocean—was a crowded jumble of rich and poor, of the mansions of merchant families and the tenements offering lodging to those who sailed on their