The Ninth Daughter

was made up with fresh linen. Either Tamar didn’t like to be alone for one minute of the day or night, or her father didn’t want her to be. A night rail was laid out ready on the pink silk counterpane of the main bed, the linen as light as silk.

“Does she get love letters?”

“Dozens,” affirmed the butler resignedly. “Some she keeps in the desk, but the ones she doesn’t want her father to see—or know about—she has delivered to the lady who runs the hat shop at the end of her father’s wharf, and sends Miss Oonaugh—that’s her maid—down to get them for her. You think they’re under the bed?” At Abigail’s gestures, the two of them had maneuvered the low bed away from the large one, and Abigail now knelt near the main bed’s head.

“’Tis where I hid mine. Not that I set up clandestine flirts,” she hastened to add, as the butler grinned. “But when I was young my father considered political pamphlets inappropriate reading for well-bred girls, and I had my older sister’s beau smuggle them to me. Dreadfully badly written they were,” she went on reminiscently, easing down onto her stomach and reaching as far toward the head of the bed as she could. “And shockingly ill-reasoned, some of them. After a time my conscience grew so bad that I confessed the whole to—Ah!” Her fingers brushed what felt like the corner of a largish box. She flattened herself further, squirmed beneath the tall frame, reaching with both arms and thanking the heavens that Scipio kept the cham bermaids strictly up to their work: no nonsense about sweeping only as much of the floor as showed and letting dust kittens breed with abandon in the dark.

She drew it out, sat back on her heels. More quietly, she asked, “Did you ever try to tell their father that Tamar and Jeffrey were telling him lies about Rebecca? About her trying to convert them to Catholicism, or punishing them for not praying to the Virgin?”

Scipio opened his mouth, closed it, then sighed. “You’ll think me a coward, m’am. And I daresay I am. But I didn’t dare. None of us did. What man would believe his new young wife over his daughter? What man wouldn’t believe his daughter, if she—” He hesitated. “If she decided to lie about a slave? And a man-slave?”

Abigail thought about that, and felt her face heat with anger. Hotter, even, than when Rebecca had come to her weeping about the way her stepdaughter had used to twist her every action and word.

“He knew I’d been raised a Catholic,” Scipio went on gently. “Miss Rebecca spoke up for me, early in her marriage here, which was a mistake, when Mr. Malvern gets going on one of his rages. He said, we’d conspire, if one of us spoke for the other, after that. Then, too,” he went on, “there were those things Miss Rebecca truly did, that were unwise. Things she did for those she loved.”

Abigail sighed, and turned the box over in her lap. Twelve inches by twelve, and nearly that deep, with a little hasp and padlock. The sort of thing gentlemen kept case bottles of cognac in, locked away from their servants. When she shook it, both its heft and the dry, whispery rattle inside spoke of folded paper. “I think you’re right to tread carefully around Mistress Tamar,” she said. “For you, it isn’t a case of simply being turned out without a character and having to find a new employer, is it?”

“No, m’am.”

How dare the man buy and sell another? How dare any man put another in the position of being bought and sold like a donkey?

She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself against the rage that swept her. In a studiedly neutral tone, she asked, “You wouldn’t happen to know if any of Rebecca’s other letters survived, would you?”

“He burned them all, m’am. And cursed her name as he did it. Since then, Miss Tamar will every now and then come up with, I didn’t tell you this at the time, but she used to do thus-and-such— threaten her with a red-hot curling iron, I think was one of them. I can always tell when she’s done it. I wish she wouldn’t. Not just for Miss Rebecca’s sake, but for his.”

“Well, we have it on the authority of Scripture that the Lord shall avenge the stripes of the righteous, and uphold his children against those who slander them.” Abigail sighed. “Though sometimes I wish Scripture were a little more specific about when, exactly, these events will take place. In the meantime, do you know where Miss Tamar keeps the key to this?”

“On a ribbon,” said a man’s harsh voice from the doorway. “I should imagine it’s the blue one, knotted at her waist with her watch.”

Abigail slewed around on her heels, aghast. Scipio got hastily to his feet, the dark beyond the single candle’s light cloaking, Abigail suspected, the ashen hue of his face.

Charles Malvern said, “You may go, Scipio.”

“Sir, I—”

“You may go.”

Scipio stayed long enough to help Abigail to her feet. “Mr. Malvern,” she said, as the servant’s footsteps retreated down the stair, “I beg you not to blame Scipio in this.”

“And in what way is a trusted servant not to be blamed, who admits robbers to his master’s house while the family is away?” He put his head a little to one side, and the pale eyes that regarded her shrieked rage in a face as calm as stone. “Don’t tell me Scipio, too, has been corrupted by this talk of colonial liberties that your husband and his friends vomit forth. Or does he merely seek a share of my daughter’s jewelry?” He reached for the bellpull, and Abigail impulsively extended her hand to stop his.

“This isn’t jewelry, sir—”

“If it was garden dirt,” said Malvern, yanking the bell, “it would still not excuse burglary.”

“Mr. Malvern,” said Abigail desperately, “I have reason to believe this box contains clandestine correspondence of your daughter’s.” She felt sick at the thought of Scipio being taken to one of the taverns by the Long Wharf, where dealers bid for slaves to carry south to Virginia. Even if the little merchant went so far as to actually have her locked up in the gaol house by the law-counts for part of the night—with every thief and prostitute in Boston—John would get her out, with no worse effects than perhaps lice in her hair and bugs in her skirts from the bedding.

Scipio was not in the law’s hands, but the hands of his master.

Malvern’s eyes narrowed: “A girl’s love notes.” For a moment she thought he was going to snap at her, My daughter does not receive any such thing . . .

Of course any father would seek to protect his daughter by knowing who was courting her—particularly a man of wealth like Malvern. Yet it crossed her mind to wonder if he sought to control his daughter’s thoughts and movements as totally as he had sought to control Rebecca’s.

Footsteps sounded on the back stairs. Dim yellow light mottled the creamy plaster visible through the hall door, making the vines stenciled there seem to stir in soundless wind.

“I pray so, sir,” she said, keeping her voice steady with an effort. “Because I fear this box contains evidence of a conspiracy against both yourself, and your wife.”

For one instant, familiar with the uncontrollable first rush of his rages, she would not have been surprised had he struck her. Malvern only stood, staring, mouth half open and eyes glittering with fury. Then his lips closed hard, and he stepped to her, and yanked the box from her hands.

A manservant appeared in the doorway, hastily adjusting a badly tied neckcloth. “Sir?”

Malvern was silent for a moment, studying Abigail’s face. “Bring me a chisel to my study,” he said at last. And he added, as if the words were forced from him at gunpoint, “And bring coffee for myself and Mrs. Adams.”

In November of 1770, a few months after starting at Harvard, Jeffrey Malvern had written to Tamar, Father spoke today of the Papist. It sounded like he begins to have regard for her for making her own way. This does not sound promising. Can you not find him a mistress? There is a woman here named Mrs. Bell, who would be willing but has the appearance of great respectability.

John’s clerk, young Mr. Thaxter, had told Abigail things about Mrs. Bell of Cambridge, and Abigail thought young Mr. Jeffrey grossly underestimated his father’s gullibility, if he supposed the merchant hadn’t heard them, too.

March of 1771: What earthly reason did you give, for not complaining to him at the time, if she indeed threatened you with a hot coal in your face? Surely even for the Whore of Babylon, that is extreme?