The Ninth Daughter

One corner of that wry little mouth turned down: Eh, bien, what will these Americans think next? “Oh. Madame. He was quite fond of her—men usually are, if a good-looking woman will consent to go to bed with them. I have heard he is genuinely grieved, and swears that he will hang every Son of Liberty in the colony for the crime. But she—” Lisette shrugged again. “He is the second son of a Scots Earl. Myself, I think my lady was jealous. It was not a month before, that M’sieu took a mistress for himself—”

Abigail tried hard not to look shocked.

“And though he was just as generous to her as he had been before, as I say, she is—she was—very young.”

Abigail closed her eyes briefly, seeing—as if with the memory of a nightmare—the blood-engorged face, the bitten shoulders and neck. So distorted had the features been by the blood pooling in the tissues it would have been hard to tell the woman’s age. But it was very much a young girl’s trick, to throw herself at the commander of the occupying troops—a man of power, moderately good-looking, and, as Mademoiselle Droux had pointed out, an Earl’s second son. To seduce him with her gay youth, with her beautiful hair: telling herself that her adventure was for her country’s sake, like the heroine of a play. Yes. She had been very young.

“How old was she?”

“Seventeen, Madame, when she married M’sieu Pentyre. She was twenty when she died.”

Abigail drew in a breath, and let it out, thinking about that very young girl. Had it been her husband taking a mistress, that had determined her on revenge? Yesterday morning, rereading Rebecca’s letters, she had found several accounts of trips to Castle Island, in quest of pamphlet-worthy gossip at the camp. Perdita Pentyre would have seen in her first a kindred spirit, then a link with the Sons of Liberty themselves, the organization whose writings she read with such eagerness. M’sieu would laugh, and kiss her, and she would be wild with indignation, and storm away out of the house . . .

She could almost hear her daughter Nabby shouting at her one day in fury, I’ll show you—!

She was from New York, Abigail recalled; without friends or close connections here to distract her from her adventure. And Colonel Leslie, as she had glimpsed him yesterday, was a well-enough-looking man, and younger than one might expect.

As if she discerned the sadness in Abigail’s face, Mademoiselle Droux said, “Eh bien, Madame, it is not as if the Colonel was her only lover.”

Abigail snapped sharply from her reverie. “Was he not?” and at the same moment a flash of disgust went through her. As if her sort stops at one, Queenie had sniffed, and standing there in the market yesterday, Abigail had been ready to snatch the cook’s cap off, and pull her hair. The one she let in through her parlor window . . . This Mrs. Pentyre, if she . . . had someone else she wanted to meet . . .

So it was only a sordid assignation after all.

Oh, Rebecca, no. How could you?

Perdita Pentyre may not have had any connection with the Sons of Liberty at all.

Rebecca had only used their code, as the most convenient one to hand, to help another woman as unhappily wed as she herself had been. No wonder Sam had known nothing about her.

Only it wasn’t Rebecca, who had written that note.

Abigail turned the matter over in her mind while Mademoiselle Droux went on. “Mrs. Pentyre, she knew it is bad ton, to have two lovers at a time; it smacks of excess. She never spoke of him to me. But, mercredi soir was not the first time that she would have Gerald put the chaise to for her—and pay him well, to keep his mouth shut.” Her lips pinched a little: disapproval, or merely the ordering of her thoughts? “I have seen him, this young gentleman, beau comme Adonais, watching her so jealously. And when all is said, the Colonel is five-and-thirty. To a girl of twenty . . .” She shrugged.

The rain puddle by the window; would opening the shutters account for that amount of water on her skirt? She’d known the Tillets would be away. And yet—Abigail frowned. Rebecca knew that Queenie spied and told tales. With Mr. Tillet loitering in her house whenever he had the chance, and Mrs. Tillet seething with jealousy and annoyance over how many shirts she thought Rebecca should be sewing for her gratis, would Rebecca have risked using her house for so small a purpose?

Particularly when there were any number of women on the North End who did not have problems with their land-ladies, equally willing to accommodate would-be multiple adulteresses.

Something did not fit. “Do you have any idea who this young Adonis is?”

Lisette shook her head. “She would have notes from him, I think, from a woman she always met by chance when she went out walking. A little curly-haired woman, dark, with a snub nose—”

“Rebecca,” said Abigail.

“I do not know her name, Madame. The notes were always of commonplaces—trees, or birds, or flowers. But for two women who only met in the streets, I thought they corresponded a great deal about trees, or birds, or flowers. I think it was a cipher, en effet—”

“She showed you these notes?”

“Madame.” Mademoiselle Droux gave her another look of pitying patience. “M’sieu Pentyre paid me two dollars each month, to tell him all the correspondence that came to my lady. It is done in all households, Madame,” she added, a note of concern in her voice at Abigail’s startled reaction, as if reassuring a simpleton that the booming kettledrums in a military parade were not in fact real thunder. “A man is a fool, who does not pay his wife’s maidservant—and a woman a fool, who does not pay them even more. One must build one’s nest against the storm, particularly if one is thirty-seven years old, and looks as I do.”

I want you to remember from now on that you are working for me, Charles Malvern had said to Oonaugh.

The sinister Mr. B of Pamela was not so unreal as Rebecca had thought.

“I know everything that my lady received, and tucked away in the hiding places that she thought were so clever, behind the pictures and beneath the mattress of her bed. Thus I know that no one sent my lady these letters of threat that our maiden-faced Provost kept pressing me to say that she had. And so I told him. Was this woman then she in whose house my lady was killed? This Mrs. Malvern, whose name the Provost kept demanding did I know?”

“That is she,” said Abigail slowly. “What did Mr. Pentyre have to say of this other man? A Regimental Colonel is one thing—and useful to a merchant, be he never so wealthy. Was he angry over this good-looking stranger?”

“Now you ask me to speculate on the contents of a man’s heart, Madame. He laughed and joked his wife about her lovers, yet if any man crossed him in a business way—even a farmer who cheated him a little on the cost of oats for his horses—he make sure that that man became truly sorry that he had done so. He would have his agents find out, had this man ever broken a law? And voila, the sheriffs would be at that man’s door. Or, a rumor would start in the taverns that the man was, what do you call?—was a Tory, and suddenly these Sons of Liberty would break the windows of that man’s shop the next time they rioted. Or the man’s horses would be hamstrung one night, and blame would fall on these same Fils du Liberte. Would such a man truly shrug his shoulders, if his wife lay with another man?” She spread her hands. “That I do not know.”

“And where was Mr. Pentyre, on Wednesday night?”

Something—a little glint like a malicious star—twinkled in the lizard black eyes. “He was not at home, Madame. He told the imbecile officer that he was playing cards with the sons of the Governor, but myself, I believe he was at the house of his mistress. She is a lady of the West Indies, named Belle-Isle; she has a little house on Hull Street, near to the cimitiere. Would Madame wish me to ask her maid, if indeed M’sieu Pentyre paid such a call that night?”

Quite casually, she extended a hand as she spoke. It was only a momentary gesture, as if accepting a coin. Four generations of Yankee ancestors cried out in Abigail’s heart at such venality, particularly since there was nothing to assure her that she would be getting the truth for her money. But she replied, “If you would, Mademoiselle, I thank you. I shall—er—make arrangements with Mr. Malvern.”

The maid smiled, and nodded appreciation of her tact. “Merci, Madame.”