The Ninth Daughter

Do they honestly think you would be capable of performing those acts—”

“They don’t know that.” John’s voice was grim. “Thanks to Sam, all they saw was her body—slashed, yes, but laid neatly out on a bed, and the blood all mopped away. And we cannot tell them otherwise. You’re frozen,” he added, chaffing her gloved hand as they descended the muddy path to the little wharf where Linus Logan waited for them in the Katrina. “You should not have—”

“They gave me very nice coffee,” replied Abigail. “And had I not come, in all this time waiting I’d have gone mad at home, and murdered the children in my rage, and then wouldn’t we both have felt silly when you came back safe after all.”

No message had come from Sam, or Revere, or Orion Hazlitt in their absence. But after a dinner of yesterday’s chicken stewed, when Abigail had milked “the girls” (as she called Semiramis and Cleopatra) and was pouring out milk by lantern light in the icy scullery, Pattie came in with a note. “A boy brought it, m’am. Is it about Mrs. Malvern?” Her elfin face puckered anxiously, as she watched Abigail unfold the scrap of kitchen paper and angle it to the light.

Mrs. Adams—

Forgive me the inconvenience to you entailed in a meeting at six thirty tomorrow evening, in the yard of Mr. Malvern’s house, to tell you what I know of Mrs. Moore’s whereabouts. These are the only time and place available to me. I will arrange that the gate be open, and that an escort is provided to see you to your home.

I am your ob’t etc,

Scipio Carter

Nine

Whatever Charles Malvern might feel—and say—about those would-be imitators of English society who ate their dinners by lamplight, Abigail guessed that with a fashionably minded daughter and son in the house, six thirty was probably the earliest any servant there was going to have a moment’s leisure. Which was, she supposed, to the good. Her conscience nagged her painfully about her own work, neglected or, more reprehensibly, shuffled off onto poor Pattie’s slim shoulders.

Yet the next morning, instead of setting briskly forth to the market the moment Nabby and Johnny led the cows out of the yard toward what little pasturage the Common offered these days, Abigail brought out her writing desk, and began reading through the twoscore letters that Rebecca had sent to her, in the eighteen months between the family’s removal to the Adams farm in Braintree in April of ’71, and their return to Boston nineteen months later, in November of ’72, scanning for names. In hundreds of desultory conversations, Abigail recalled her speaking occasionally of friends, cousins, her brother’s comrades from Baltimore, to any one of whom she would have opened her door on a rainy night. Names Abigail recalled only vaguely, and sought now, in the letters, grimly fighting the temptation to linger on the memories they stirred.

Her anger came back to her, reading of how Charles Malvern had harried her from first one set of chambers and then another; the sadness and pity, at that letter when Rebecca spoke of Orion Hazlitt’s growing love for her; grief at the account of little Nathan Malvern’s death. And like a mirror in her friend’s words, the recollection of her own days on the farm, with John’s two brothers and their wives and children, John’s indomitable little mother and her easygoing second husband . . . No lying jealousies about stepparents there.

It was well and truly eight o’clock before she set out for the market. Coincidentally, just about the time the Tillet cook Queenie—in Abigail’s mind one of the laziest women in New England—generally made her appearance there.

“Wait your turn, you pushy slattern!” the stout little woman shrilled at a young housemaid who was trying to get past her to a golden heap of pears. “The nerve of some people!” she added, loudly, as Abigail came up beside her. “Think they own the market—not that these nasty things have any more juice to them than ninepins, or flavor either. And a penny the slut wants for two of them! Why would anyone want two of the things, or one either—don’t you pay her prices, Mrs. Adams, I refuse to stand by and let a good woman be cheated.” She dragged Abigail away. “What Mrs. T will say sweetening the fruit, with sugar at three shillings for a loaf, and blaming me that there’s nothing fit for the family to eat—”

“How horrible for you,” sympathized Abigail warmly, “after the shocking day you had Thursday! I had meant to come yesterday, to see how you did—and I confess I’m astonished you were not felled by it all!—but that vain, arrogant officer dared to come and order John to go out to the camp, only because he was Mrs. Malvern’s lawyer—”

“Oh, my dear, you don’t know,” gasped Queenie. “You can’t know how things have been since then! That horrible Lieutenant Coldstone, and those dreadful soldiers, asking me if I’d heard anything in the middle of the night—What would I have heard, sleeping as I do in the west attic and the whole house locked up, and at midnight, too?—and Mrs. Tillet coming home in the midst of it all, and such a row there was, with all the luggage brought in, I swear my head was pounding fit to split! You know the headaches I get—”

“Oh, dear, yes!” agreed Abigail, having been treated to minute descriptions of every single headache whenever she came to call on Rebecca over the course of the past year. If Nehemiah Tillet had a habit of dropping in on his tenant to advise her on how best to arrange the wood in her fireplace, and Mrs. Tillet was constantly in and out of Rebecca’s little house to bring shirts for Rebecca to sew and errands for her husband that could not be put off, Queenie was just as intrusive, crossing the yard a dozen times in the course of preparing dinner, with items of gossip, complaints about her health and the ill treatment she was obliged to endure, or simply queries: Who was that who was just here? Is he a gentleman friend of yours? Don’t think I didn’t see Mrs. Wallace coming to call on you—is it true she’s a spendthrift who has nearly bankrupted her husband . . . ?

But when Abigail interrupted the catalog of further symptoms to ask, was there anyone Rebecca had spoken of, to whom she might have fled, the cook only bristled, and snapped, “Belike she’s run off with her man—after all her talk of how she’s pure as driven snow—”

“Her man?” asked Abigail, startled. “Not Mr. Hazlitt—”

“As if her sort stops at one.” Queenie sniffed. “The one she let in through her parlor window from the alley.”

“Did you see him? Was this at midnight? It could have been—”

The protuberant brown eyes shifted suddenly, and Queenie said, “No, of course not! That is, it wasn’t at midnight—What would I have been doing in the alley at midnight? It wasn’t Wednesday night at all. I mean to say, I’ve seen her do so at other times, many other times, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it, too!” she added defensively. “What I mean to say is, this Mrs. Pentyre, if she was carrying on with the Colonel of the British Regiment, and had someone else she wanted to meet, a woman like the Malvern is just the one who’d have let her use her house. And I’m sorry to say it,” she went on doggedly, as Abigail opened her mouth to protest, “being as I know you were taken in by her cozening ways, but taken in you were, Mrs. Adams.”

“No!” Abigail stopped still in the midst of the market crowd. “How dare—That is,” she collected herself, seeing Queenie’s face redden dangerously, “how could I have been so deceived? Are you sure of this man you saw?”

“Other nights,” said the cook. “Dozens of other—”

“Mrs. Queensboro!”