The Ninth Daughter

July of 1772—a few weeks after the death of their young brother: . . . but since he is gone, could you not come up with some way that it was the Papist’s doing?

January of 1773, shortly after Rebecca’s effort to retrieve her property: I don’t like this talk of divorcement. He’s but four-and-fifty, and there’s juice in him yet. No sense prying one step-mama away from him only to have him wed another, and then it will be all to do again. The next one may not be so Jesuitical or so obliging about leaving her correspondence where they may be found. What about Clara Wheelock, or one of her fair “nieces”? That carroty one (Jenny?) should keep any man alive busy.

Abigail looked up from Piers Woodruff’s dozenth letter begging and bullying his sister Rebecca to send him money as the clock struck ten. Walking home from their meeting with Malvern last November, with Rebecca silent and shaking at her side, she had wished for worms to consume Malvern from the inside out, as they had consumed Herod Agrippa in the Book of Acts. Now seeing his face, she thought, I must never wish such ill again, even in my heart. His was indeed the face of a man whose heart and entrails were being devoured from within.

For the first time in her life, she pitied him. She said, “I’m sorry.”

He laid down his son’s latest missive—containing only lamentations about debts and hangovers, and a request for Tamar to get the old man to see reason about my allowance—and passed a hand over his face. Two hours ago, Malvern had sent his disheveled serving man to Queen Street, with a note to the effect that Mrs. Adams was detained at his house but would return with a suitable escort, and had summoned Scipio from the kitchen to tell him that he need not worry for his position, but should go to bed. “I will see to Miss Malvern, when she comes home,” the father had said.

“Has this accomplished all that you had in mind, Mrs. Adams?” the merchant now asked, visibly struggling to control the anger that seemed to be the only emotion he was capable of feeling. He reached for the coffeepot, but lifting it found it empty (as Abigail had, half an hour previously). For a moment he seemed about to hurl it to the floor, but it was an expensive piece, so he set it down again. His pale eyes burned with exhausted resentment as he looked back at her. “Does the knife go deep enough for you, to avenge the hurt I gave your friend?”

“I did not come seeking vengeance.” Abigail lifted the yellowing sheets, the looping scribbles of the handwriting of that young wastrel and gambler who had made his sister’s life such a misery. “Only information, about who Rebecca might have known, who would have done such a thing to an innocent woman in her house.”

“The woman wasn’t innocent,” grated Malvern. “She was a whore, as her husband is a lying pimp.”

“If she was a whore, her deserving would have been an A sewed to her garment, in the old way, not to have her throat cut and her body mutilated.”

Malvern opened his mouth to shout something about whores and what they deserved, and Abigail steadily met his eyes. After a moment he closed his lips again, settled back into his chair. “You are right, Mrs. Adams,” he said, in a voice like the grind of the sea on pebbles after a storm. “If it was reasonable men we spoke of. Yet the woman did her whoring with the commander of the British troops. And her husband is the Governor’s friend and one of the commissioners who’s been given the Royal Monopoly to sell East India Company tea. I should think it would be obvious, where to seek for her murderers, and why they would do their deed in—in the house that they chose.”

“You think she was killed by the Sons of Liberty, in short,” said Abigail, and raised her brows. “Mr. Malvern, if sexual congress with officers of the Sixty-Fourth regiment was considered grounds for murder by the Sons of Liberty, the city of Boston would be littered with female corpses from Copp’s Hill to the Neck.” She brushed her hand across the letters on the table between them. “I promise you, I have enough friends in the Sons of Liberty to be sure that they were not behind this crime. If I thought they were—or if I knew that Rebecca had run off with them—I would not have risked spending a night in the city gaol trying to find the true culprit. And I certainly would not have risked having an innocent serving man hanged, which I believe is the penalty when a slave robs his master.”

He continued to glare at her, like a bull who has pursued a red flag to exhaustion. “And all that you say could be a ploy to convince me of your lies.”

“Mr. Malvern,” said Abigail, “everyone in town knows that you cannot be convinced of anything.”

To her surprise he laughed, a single explosive sputter, then put his face in his hands, so that they hid whatever expression had come over his mouth. He sat that way for some time, staring at his wife’s letters, and his son’s.

“Rebecca has been missing for three days now,” Abigail went on. “For three days the Sons of Liberty have been seeking her—so I am told—about the city, and have found no trace of her. For all I know this man, this killer, whoever he is, seeks her, too. I’d hoped to find something in her correspondence with her family that might help me. She had made few friends here in Boston—”

“She had that printer!” Malvern’s hand smote the table with a violence that made Abigail jump. “For all her talk of my misdeeds, and my mistrust, while she—”

“In the years you have been apart,” Abigail said slowly, “your wife and I have been as near as sisters. And I will swear an oath on the Testament that she has never regarded herself as anything other than your wife. She has spoken of you in anger—sometimes in very great anger—but never in disrespect . . . Which is more, I’m afraid, than can be said of me.”

“It isn’t what I’ve heard.”

“From whom did you hear it?”

He was silent again, and in the silence hooves could be heard in the street outside, and the clatter of harness as a carriage came to a halt before the house’s outer door. Malvern’s eyes moved toward the hall, then returned to Abigail, weary and angry, yet to her the anger seemed to smolder deeper—an inner pain, not a wall against opposition. “You’re not telling me all of the truth, Mrs. Adams. You’re mired to the neck in the bog of Sam Adams’s making—as you mired my wife.”

“What I believe—and what she believes—about the rights of the colonies doesn’t mean that she isn’t in danger now. It doesn’t mean that the man who perpetrated a monstrous crime isn’t looking for her. Or that I would not move Heaven and Earth, if I could, to find her before he gets to her.”

A serving man’s shoe-heels clacked in the hall, lamp flame juddering across the papered walls. Abigail’s eye slid to Malvern’s face, then away as a bright jumble of hushed giggles sounded, a girl’s voice crying, “He is not my sweet-heart!” and a young man’s, “Oh, so you go kiss in alcoves just any officer you happen to meet?” “Faith, how’d ye know that, Master Jeff? Ye weren’t out of the card-room but only long enough to piss in Mrs. Fluckner’s rose-bed!”

“Good heavens, hand me that sponge, girl! This is what comes of trying to take rouge off in the carriage—” “Don’t be silly, Jeff, the old man’s asleep by this time . . .”

And the three of them stood framed, suddenly, in the door of the study—Mistress Tamar in her pink and silver ball dress, her maid a step behind with her arms full of cloaks and her black hair disheveled, handsome Jeffrey with the laughter dying out of his face as they took in the pile of letters on the table, the open box, the grim set of their father’s mouth. Tamar took a half step into the room, said, “Papa—?” and cast an uncertain glance at Abigail, then another at the box, and the letters from Jeffrey that lay beside her father’s hand.

Then she turned back to her father, tears welling to her eyes, streaming down her face. “Oh, Papa, I can explain! I knew I shouldn’t have kept them, but—”

“We’ll speak in the morning, child.” Malvern held up the letters in Piers Woodruff’s Italianate hand. “And before you protest on the subject of whose correspondence is whose business in this house, please be prepared to explain how you came to have possession of letters written to your stepmother by her brother and her father. I trust you enjoyed Mrs. Fluckner’s rout-party?” He unpocketed and held out to her a large, clean handkerchief as she began to cry, and his eyes, as he studied her face in the servant’s candlelight, held not pity, but a weary disgust and disbelief.

“Please, Papa, please, it was Oonaugh who made me keep them! Oonaugh said she’d—”

“I never!” protested the servant girl, genuinely indignant, and Abigail, watching Jeffrey’s face, saw the young man’s expression go from surprise to bemusement to sudden, earnest concern.

“Father, I must say that I’ve long deplored—”