The Ninth Daughter

The fire had already been banked in the kitchen, but the room still pulsed with warmth, exquisite after the night’s brutal cold. The glow of the oil-lamp on its chain dimly outlined cauldrons and skimmers, trammels and oil- jars in the shadows, and the brick floor still smelt of the after-dinner wash up. The butler had kept coffee from dinner for her in the pot on the hob, and served her in one of the family cups: blue English porcelain rather than servants’ pottery.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come up with the direction of Miss Catherine’s brother any sooner than this, m’am,” Scipio explained, when Abigail had gestured him to sit. Since it was the house he lived in, she felt strange and awkward inviting him to do so, slave or not, even as she stopped herself from inviting him to share with her the coffee he’d made. What is the proper behavior between slave and free in this situation? she asked herself irritably, and concluded that there wasn’t any. A truly proper servant wouldn’t have admitted a stranger to his master’s house in the first place, nor discussed the family’s affairs with an outsider. “She wrote to me, and to Ulee in the stables, once or twice over the last year. But we had to look through the letters to find mention of the nearest town to her brother’s farm. It’s Townsend, but where that might be I don’t know. Wenham is another place she speaks of, but she writes as if it’s some ways off from her, it sounds like.”

“Wenham is some ways off from any spot on the civilized earth,” muttered Abigail. “Always supposing Mrs. Malvern could get across the river or through the town gate.”

“I understand—” Scipio cleared his throat delicately. “I understand that Miss Rebecca had friends who might have skiffs or whaleboats that could get her across the harbor, even on a falling tide and a rainy night—”

“If she had such,” replied Abigail, with equal tact—since no one in Boston, not even the slaves, admitted to knowing anyone either engaged in smuggling or involved with the Sons of Liberty, “and of course I don’t for a moment imagine she would know such people—I think they would undertake inquiries amongst themselves, and quickly learn if that had in fact been the case. It does not seem to have been.”

“Ah.” Scipio nodded. “I didn’t think you would be asking after Miss Catherine, if it had. Mr. Adams—”

“—has some fairly low acquaintances. Did Lieutenant Coldstone ask about Mrs. Malvern’s possible friends?”

The slave shook his head. “Not of me, he didn’t. And I think if he had asked Mr. Jeffrey or Miss Tamar, I would have heard. Myself, I don’t even know for a fact if she had such friends, though I know that being friends with Mr. Adams, and Mr. Revere, and reading the newspapers and arguing with Mr. Malvern as she did, I shouldn’t be surprised to hear of it. As to what Mr. Jeffrey or Miss Tamar might have told him—or their father—I can’t answer for that.”

Abigail was silent for a time, gazing into the dense shadows of the kitchen. Even under the relatively strong glow of the oil-lamp overhead, the long sideboards, the sturdy bin-table and homely water-jars were barely distinguishable in the gloom. After a time she asked, “Do they hate her so much still?”

The butler sighed. “Not hate, I don’t think, so much, Mrs. Adams,” he said. “They were her enemies before they even met her. I think Miss Tamar talked herself into hating her—and talked Mr. Jeffrey into it—because it’s easier to do evil to someone you hate, than to admit to yourself you’re only telling lies and making trouble because you don’t want another little brother or sister to come along and cut into your inheritance. That’s what it came down to.”

“Rebecca—Mrs. Malvern—told me once that Tamar would search her room while she was away, and stole her letters. She said she always suspected it was Tamar who learned, and told Mr. Malvern, about her arranging to pay her brother’s gambling debts with part of the household money, and backing her father’s bills with Mr. Malvern’s name. Mrs. Malvern said she knew she shouldn’t have done it, but—”

“People do foolish things for those they love.” Scipio poured her a little more coffee. “It’s true Miss Tamar doesn’t like the idea of having her father’s estate cut up into five or six rather than just in two, but it’s for Mr. Jeffrey that she started working to turn her father against Miss Rebecca. For Mr. Jeffrey and little Master Nathan— she did her possible, to turn that poor little boy against Miss Rebecca, for his own good, as she said. He’ll thank me for it, she said, ’specially after Miss Rebecca left. But when he was ill there at the end,” added the butler softly, “it was Miss Rebecca he would call for.”

And it was for Nathan, Abigail knew well, that Rebecca had chosen to remain in Boston, the summer of ’72. Hoping against hope that she would have the opportunity to go to the child’s bedside.

“Does Miss Tamar still have Miss Rebecca’s letters?” asked Abigail. And, when Scipio looked uncertain, she went on, “I’m not fishing for servant-hall gossip, Scipio. Mrs. Pentyre was deliberately lured to Rebecca’s house—I know this,” she added, seeing the surprise in his face. “Believe me, it is true. She was lured there, and murdered, by someone who knew Rebecca: someone who knew that he could get Rebecca to let him into the house, one way or another. I think she saw him, and I think that’s why she fled. It may be someone she knew in Boston—someone I would know, or Mr. Adams, or even you . . . and it may be someone she knew before she married Mr. Malvern.”

“Who?” asked Scipio, baffled. “Most of her people—her brother and her father—are dead. The rest of her family cut ties with her, when she gave up her faith.”

“That’s why I need to see her letters,” said Abigail. “Because whoever he is, I suspect that he knows she saw him. And unless we find him—and find her—he may reach her first.”

Ten

“What I don’t understand, m’am, is how Miss Rebecca even knew this Mrs. Pentyre.” Scipio kept his voice to a near-whisper as he led Abigail up the servants’ backstairs to the upper floor. “She was only a young girl, not even wed to Mr. Pentyre when Miss Rebecca left this house. Unless Mr. Pentyre for some reason thought to learn something from Miss Rebecca, that would damage Mr. Malvern—”

Abigail said, “Good Heavens!” It was something she hadn’t even considered. “Would he? I’ve never met the man—”

“Nor I.” They reached a tiny landing and the butler opened the little door there. The hall was near pitch-dark, save for the dim glow of the candles he bore in a pewter branch, and cold as the back corridors of Hell. “Ulee— that’s the head groom—has a cousin in Pentyre’s stables, though, so every time Mr. Malvern sues Pentyre, or Mr. Pentyre gets the Governor or the Royal Port Commissioner to fine Mr. Malvern or hold up one of his cargoes to search—”

“My goodness. I had no idea. Every time . . . Is this a common occurrence? Do they hate one another so?”

“Like a horse hates a snake, m’am—only each of them thinks he’s the horse, and the other’s the snake. Mr. Malvern’s daddy hated Mr. Pentyre’s uncle, that was the merchant in the family and he left Mr. Pentyre all his ships and money; they undersell each other’s cargoes, they slander each other’s goods. You know how Mr. Malvern won’t let a matter rest, if he thinks he’s been wronged, and Mr. Pentyre, for all he looks like he doesn’t have the red blood in him to do up his shoe buckles, is the same. Only, bein’ related to the Governor, he’ll use that to make trouble for those that make trouble for him.”

Halfway down the silent hallway he opened a door. The darkness beyond it was warmer, and breathed of sandalwood and dried rose petals. The candles’ light briefly caressed sat inwood bedposts, the Venetian glass of an expensive toilet-mirror.

“Back in August, it was Mr. Pentyre who had his agents buy up all Mr. Jeffrey’s gaming debts, and call them in, close to a thousand pounds’ worth. Then Mr. Malvern put the rumor about that Pentyre was smuggling, and got one of his cargoes seized, and Miss Tamar tried to bribe one of the kitchen staff at Pentyre’s to poison Mrs. Pentyre’s little dog, in revenge.”

“What a charming picture you servants must have of the lives of your masters,” Abigail murmured, and a ghost of a smile tugged the slender man’s mouth.

“All this is nothing, m’am. Not to what you see if you’re a slave in Barbados, where I was born.”

Abigail, gathering her skirts aside to draw out the trundle bed from beneath the great bed, looked aside from him, ashamed. Scipio set the candelabra on the little se cretaire by the window, and came to help her. The trundle