The Ninth Daughter

The young man looked startled. “Well, with Catholics, that’s different,” he said. “I mean, they do have to do as their Pope tells them, whatever it is, don’t they?”

Abigail remembered Catherine Moore as a large, calm, good-looking woman in her late thirties whom she had met several times at the Brattle Street Meeting, walking behind Rebecca and Charles Malvern. Rebecca, Abigail recalled, had never asked her maid to carry either her cloak or her Bible, as so many wealthy ladies did. Odd, she thought, in one who had been waited on by slaves every day of her life. In the early days of the friendship Rebecca would always speak of Catherine’s unwavering loyalty in the gathering nightmare of spying and distrust that her marriage had become. Unless the friendship is extraordinary, Lisette Droux had said, it is too easy for confidence to turn into anger. And, I would rather be a good maid than a good friend. Catherine Moore, Abigail guessed, in the three years she had served Rebecca Malvern, had managed both.

The woman who came out of the dairy when Abigail and her escort rode into the yard at the Moore farm seemed to her, at first glimpse, to be the elder sister, or an aunt, of the woman she had known in those days. She stooped a little, and her face was weather-beaten; the few strands of hair visible beneath her cap were cinder gray. Only at second look did Abigail recognize her as Rebecca’s maid, by her soft little half smile. “Can I help you?” she asked, and the voice—which Abigail had only heard once or twice—was the same.

“Mistress Moore?” She let Thaxter help her from the saddle, her stout boots squishing in half-frozen muck. “I’m Mrs. Adams—”

“Of course!” Mistress Moore’s benevolence warmed to delight. “My lady’s friend. What brings you here to this”—her mouth quirked, half deprecating, half amused—“this wilderness?” And then, her dark eyes changing as she realized how great a distance her visitor had come on purpose, “My lady is all right, is she not? Tell me all is well.” As she said this another woman came out of the dairy behind her, probably just over twenty, Abigail guessed, but looking older, weather-beaten, and tired, with the rounded belly of midterm pregnancy.

“What is it—?”

“News of Rebecca,” said Catherine softly, and then glanced back at Abigail. “Isn’t it?”

Abigail said, “I’d hoped to find her here.”

Thirteen

Though it was only an hour or two past sunup, Catherine’s sister-in-law—her brother’s third wife—brought them into the big sand-floored keeping room of the log farmhouse, and cut bread and cheese, butter, and cold meat for them. “From all I’ve heard, those Gilead folk are as stingy with the Godless, as they call us, as they are with their own children. For the good of their souls, they’ll tell you,” she added with a sniff. “Sit you down, Mrs. Adams, and rest. You look like you’ve had a cold ride and no mistake.”

A crippled boy of perhaps fourteen—wizened and wasted as a little old man—who was working a spinning wheel next to the fire nodded a greeting to them, and added a few billets of wood to the blaze.

Catherine Moore’s face contracted in horror when Abigail spoke of what she’d found in Rebecca’s house Thursday morning. “Who would do such a thing? And why?”

Abigail shook her head. “ ’Tis what I’m trying to learn. ’Twasn’t a madman just wandered in from the street, we do know that,” she added. “The other woman—Mrs. Pentyre, a merchant’s young wife—was lured there, with a note forged in Rebecca’s hand . . . Rebecca didn’t know Mrs. Pentyre before Mrs. Pentyre’s marriage, did she? Her name would have been Parke in those days, Perdita Parke, of New York.”

Mistress Moore shook her head, baffled.

“I know she writes to you—she often speaks of how she treasures your letters. Was there anyone that she spoke of, any friend, any person to whom she might have gone for refuge? Or any name, any circumstance, that by any stretch of the imagination might be connected with what happened?”

Catherine sat for a moment, her head tilted to the side, thinking hard though the moment they had seated themselves her hands had taken up sewing on a child’s dress from out of her workbasket, automatically, as if no second must—or could—be left idle. “Nothing,” she said, and setting aside her work, went to the old-fashioned box-bed built into the wall near the great hearth. From the cupboard beneath it she brought out a lap desk, from which she took a packet of letters. “Mostly she wrote of her pupils, and their progress; of your kindness to her; of her labors at learning to cook and keep house, and that Tillet woman trying to turn her into a sewing-slave for her own profit. Once she wrote of her husband, and even then wouldn’t say a word against him.”

A look of wearied bitterness flickered in her eyes, swiftly put aside. What had Malvern said of her, Abigail wondered, that had made it impossible for her to find work as a maid in Boston?

Catherine went on, “She said she understood, how he would mistrust her, and blamed herself that he refused to give her any share of her father’s money. Myself,” she added grimly, “I blame that old skinflint, for along with ‘holding’ the income ‘in trust,’ he’s also lending and investing it at 2 percent, and would have been happy enough if she died, so the property would come to him outright and absolutely. Two thousand acres along the Chesapeake?” She sniffed. “He should have thanked her for keeping it in their family when he was too cheap to lay out for it, not punished her. To say nothing of saving her father from a life of beggary.”

She turned her face away, and pressed her hand to her lips, as if what Abigail had told her had only just begun to sink in. Abigail saw how her hand, once the fine deft hand of a quality lady’s maid, had grown brown, and rough with calluses, the fingers beginning to deform with arthritis.

“May I take these?”

“Of course. If you can find anything in them to help, you are welcome.” Outside the thick, uneven glass of the ill-leaded window a horse and wagon could be discerned, drawing up in the yard. A moment later a boy and a young man strode in, halted uncertainly when they saw Abigail, then went to the cold corner of the big room where all this time the youthful Goodwife Moore had been chopping and mixing the meat and fat of what was clearly a recently slaughtered pig for sausage. The murmur of their voices joined the whirr of the spinning wheel, the drifting smell of sage, as a sort of background scrim, a reminder to Abigail of her own duties and children neglected at home while she wandered to and fro in the world. Now she is without, now in the streets . . . Catherine took up her sewing again.

“Did she ever write to you about politics? About her political friends?”

“Not in so many words, no.” Catherine’s breath went out of her in a sigh. “I knew—Well, you know what a poison that was, between Mr. Malvern and her. Myself . . .” She shrugged. “I’m as loyal as the next woman, I suppose, but it strikes me as only reasonable, that the King nor Parliament neither can understand what goes on here, and what we need. But that’s a matter of men of education, men who’re trained to it, not for a plain woman —and not meaning disrespect, not for a lady who’s trying to get on with her husband, and build a home for him and his children. But she never would see it that way. And as time went on, and Miss Tamar told lies about her to divide her from her husband, it was a refuge to her, though it only made the situation worse.”

Sadly, she shook her head, and Abigail pursed her lips and reminded herself that an indignant demand about whether men who made their money out of Crown offices were more to be trusted in government than the plain men and plain women whose pockets were picked by those trained and educated gentlemen, would only lead the discussion far astray. She asked instead, “Did she speak about the Sons of Liberty?”

“I knew she was thick with them.” The maidservant sounded grieved. “I feared . . . But surely,” she said, looking up from her needle, “surely not one of them would have caused her harm, no matter how heated this politics got. ’Tis only politics, when all’s said.”

No, Abigail thought. It isn’t politics. She recalled things Rebecca had told her, things Cousin Sam had said. A man probably wouldn’t kill over politics, but he would kill to protect himself, if there were treason in the wind.