The Ninth Daughter

“Was there anyone else? Anyone who might have wished your young lady ill? Either here, or back in New York?”

“All young ladies have their mortal foes, Madame. Oh, such a one has stolen my hairdresser away from me, I shall claw out her eyes with my fingernails, so! Ah, such another has got herself sat next to that most divine preacher at tea, I will strangle her in her own hair-ribbons! Does one pay heed to such trivialities?”

“One must, in the circumstances.”

“One must, if my lady were found with her eyes scratched out, or strangled in her hair-ribbons,” said the older woman somberly. “I saw her body, Madame. I took the clothes off her, and washed her, and dressed her in her prettiest night-dress, that her husband gave her when they were wed, and Madame, I would not admit M’sieu Pentyre into the room until I was done. Even then I kept a cloth over my young lady’s face. What was done to her was done by the Devil himself.”

Abigail whispered, “Amen,” and Mademoiselle Droux crossed herself. “And was she ever afraid of what she could not define? Afraid without reason, of a shadow, or a pas serby?”

“En effet, Madame, my lady was twenty years old, and the young do not frighten easily. If she had such fears, she did not speak of them to me. I did not make of myself a confidante, as so many maids do, except at the very beginning, when she was lonely and her empty-headed mother and sisters in New York did not write to her, if they could write, which I doubt. But I would sooner be a good maid than a good friend. Unless the friendship is extraordinary, it is too easy for confidence to turn into anger, and then one is on the street again, with nowhere to go.”

Abigail thought about Catherine Moore, turned out of her job and obliged to return to the farm of her brother, near Townsend (wherever that was) somewhere in the wooded wilds of Essex County.

In the high kitchen windows the light was fading. This woman would have her duties, back at the great brick Pentyre mansion on Prince’s Street. “These notes that Mrs. Pentyre received from the woman in the street. Did she keep them?”

“She locked them away, yes, Madame. Indeed, she took greater care of them, than commonplaces about trees and birds and flowers warranted.” She shrugged. “I copied them for M’sieu Pentyre, and the originals, our pretty Provost took away with him. What he shall make of them, I do not know.”

“Mademoiselle Droux,” she said, “you have been very kind, and your observations extremely helpful.”

“When one is forbidden by one’s employment to marry,” remarked the maid, rising and taking Abigail’s proffered hand, “and obliged in it to occupy oneself wholly with the life and concerns of another—and that other, often a person who considers herself the most important object in Creation—one must take amusement in observation, or perish. I hope that I have helped you, Madame. My lady was young and foolish, and a little spoilt as girls are who have never been obliged to work for their livings. But she had no malice in her, which cannot be said of many ladies whom I have served. She did not deserve her fate—Jezebel herself would not deserve such an end. The heathen Greeks had goddesses armed with spears, who hunted down men who did such things to women, and gave them their deserving. I wish you good hunting, Madame.”

She made her curtsey again, and signed to Scipio at his little table in the corner, to summon one of the servants to escort her home.

Twelve

“Could you not send a letter?” asked John, following Abigail into the kitchen in the predawn gloom the following morning, where her small portmanteau, cloak, and scarves were heaped, ready to be strapped onto Balthazar’s saddle. Young Mr. Thaxter—a stout and good-natured youth related to Abigail through the Quincys—was saddling up in the yard. She felt guilty about not only deserting her husband but taking his horse as well. Still, under the terms of his bond to the Provost Marshal, John wouldn’t be going anywhere he couldn’t walk to in the next several days. “ ’Tis a very long way. Thaxter could take it, as easily as escort yourself.”

“Indeed, he could,” agreed Abigail equably. She walked to the sideboard where John’s leather portfolio lay, along with several letters to clients in Roxbury and Cambridge explaining why it would be impossible for him to attend on them until next week or the week after. “Could not Thaxter also take these depositions for you, instead of bearing Mr. Sweet and Mr. Duggan excuses for postponement?”

John slewed around, blue eyes almost bulging. “Thaxter’s a boy! He wouldn’t know—” He broke off, realizing that Abigail knew perfectly well why a youthful clerk, be he ever so honest, could not be trusted with the task.

“Wouldn’t know what questions to ask?”

John sniffed, and picked up her cloak. “Townsend’s barely a handful of houses at the end of a farm-track,” he said as he laid it around her shoulders. “I doubt they have such a thing as an inn. I don’t like to think of you hunting for shelter there, or in the woods between it and Wenham, if it should come on to snow.”

“And I don’t like to think of the man who killed Perdita Pentyre coming to the same conclusion that I have, that Rebecca might have taken shelter with her maid.”

Though it was Abigail’s lifelong contention that in America any woman could travel alone through the countryside without fear of robbery or assault—a situation unthinkable in the Home Country—during the final week of November such a solitary excursion was inadvisable for other reasons. The harsh northeast winds and threat of snow that had made John insist that she take the escort of his clerk likewise precluded shortening the trip to the settlement of Townsend by taking one of her uncle Isaac’s little coastwise trading vessels as far as Salem. Moreover, Thaxter’s mother had kin in western Essex County, and had provided him with clear instructions for getting to Townsend, whence they could inquire for Kemiah Moore’s farm.

From Boston north to Salem the road was well-traveled and reasonably well-kept, along the dunes and salt grass above the pounding gray sea. The public stage had already ceased its journeys for the winter, and the coach from Ports-mouth wasn’t due for another day. An occasional postrider with newspapers or letters overtook their horses, or a city-bound farm-wagon with salt meat and the autumn’s cheeses broke the monotony, but for the most part there were only the brown fields inland to look at, swept by wind sharp as broken oyster shells.

Being related to the Quincys, Thaxter had from childhood absorbed huge quantities of miscellaneous information about other merchant families with which his own uncles and cousins had to do, and proved a ready source of information about Richard Pentyre. “Everybody in town thinks he’s English,” the young man remarked over midmorning bread, cheese, and smuggled tea at the Lion in Lynn. “With those coats he wears, and spending ten pounds on wigs and powder to put on them. But he was born here—in that very house in Prince’s Street where he lives now, for all his parents went back to London when he was but a little tot, and sent him and his brother to Cambridge with all the sons of English lords, and only his bachelor uncle stayed on here. But he’s a Massachusetts man, back four generations on both sides, and his grandfather was one of the preachers who had a hand in hanging witches hereabouts. Bet the Parliament nobs who think he’s so civilized don’t know that one!”

Abigail chuckled, recalling her glimpses of Richard Pentyre, in his a la mode coats of French brocade, and his immaculately powdered wigs tinted a stylish lavender. Not for him, she thought, the voyages that had made his rival Charles Malvern hard: his was a pleasant, long-nosed face just losing the freshness of a prolonged youth. Vindictive, Lisette Droux had said, and clever by the sound of it—and by Thaxter’s present accounts of the man’s manipulations of his relationship with the Governor. Would he have had the wits to decipher the admittedly simple code that Rebecca used to set up meetings with his wife?

More disturbingly, would Lieutenant Coldstone?