The Ninth Daughter

A reasonable man, she corrected herself. The man who wielded that knife was no reasonable man.

But would a madman forge a note? Think to dispose of the chaise? Turn the horse free onto the Commons? Why had he not then disposed of the body as well?

Would a madman take Rebecca’s “housekeeping” book of codes? Or had Rebecca done that herself when she’d fled, to keep it from falling into the murderer’s hands?

Am I looking at madness here? Or treason? Or something else?

At this point Goodman Moore came in, shaking the morning dampness from his hat and glaring suspiciously at his sister and her guest. Both women rose, and Catherine said, “Kem, this is Mrs. Adams, from Boston, a dear friend to my Mrs. Malvern—”

“And is she a Papist, too?”

Exasperated, Abigail said, “Does not anyone in Massachusetts believe that a conversion can be sincere? Mrs. Malvern took instruction and satisfied the elders of the Brattle Street congregation, in order to be confirmed. I am honestly curious as to what a woman—or a man, for that matter,” she added, thinking as well of Orion Hazlitt, “must do, to convince people that she or he has indeed changed faith.”

Catherine’s brother regarded both women before him with a kind of chilly contempt, as if confronted with the idiot child of someone he didn’t like. “Faith a’nt something you change. If this woman were truly one of the Saints, she would have been born into a family of the Congregation, where her earliest steps would have been put on the path. She wasn’t.”

“Now, you can’t say—” began Abigail indignantly, and Goodman Moore reared his head back slightly, as if shocked that any woman would contradict him with his thought not yet fully revealed in all its glory.

Abigail bit her underlip and reminded herself that this man had sweated to grow the corn and cut the wood that went to make the bread she had just eaten; heaved fodder and mucked out cowsheds, that she might have milk.

“Conversion—” He shook his head heavily, like a bear with a fly in its ear. “Conversion, all you get is those Godless heathens over Gilead way, with all their nonsense about knowing God—as if that’s going to do a body a single jot of good!—and working toward salvation . . . Working? Pah! Salvation must be given a man, through no strength of his own . . . And laying claim to old Sellars’s fields that should rightfully have gone to the Townsend Congregation! Even so did King Ahab conspire to seize the vineyard of Naboth, and seek to do harm unto the Prophet of the Lord who spake against his conspiring—!”

By which Abigail deduced that—as in so much of Massachusetts politics—the disputed fields loomed a good deal larger in her host’s mind than the Gilead congregation’s doctrinal divagations.

Both Catherine and her brother pressed Abigail to remain and share their early, farm- style dinner, but neither were surprised or offended when she declined. Though it was only midmorning, Abigail well knew that last night’s rain would have rendered the roads nearly impassable, and the going would be slow. She had no desire to spend a second night from home, and John, she knew, would worry if she weren’t back by the time the town gates were shut and the ferry ceased to run.

Despite their prompt departure, this almost came to pass in any case. The rain had been worse toward the coast, and as she and Thaxter slogged their way toward the main Danvers road the half-frozen morass grew deeper, the horses’ hooves sliding in it and the clerk dismounting half a dozen times to scrape the balls of half- frozen clay from the beasts’ feet. Icy wind blew into their faces as they reached Salem in time for an early dinner, and though the main road was a little better, it was still closing in on evening when the travelers sighted Winnisimmet’s roofs through the trees. “If the ferry’s closed down for the night, I’ll hang myself,” muttered her escort gloomily, as he dismounted once again on the last slope of Chelsea Hill to clear what seemed like monstrous clay boots from his horse’s feet. “There isn’t an inn on this side of the water that I’d spend a night in.” Which wasn’t entirely fair, reflected Abigail—but she could sympathize. Across the bay, she could see Boston’s tall hills, and the dark spread of houses around their feet. Closer, the British cruiser Cumberland moved among the little islands, silent as a dark bird. Allegedly it had been sent to “defend” the town, but everyone knew that like the British regiments on Castle Island, the ship was truly there to put down the kind of insurrection that had shaken the city six years ago, when the King had taken control of colonial officials away from the colonial assemblies and into his own hands, and had eliminated jury trials for anyone even suspected of smuggling: a wide category, in Massachusetts.

No lights twinkled yet in any window, nor in the nearer dwellings of Winnisimmet.

She leaned down to pat the wet, steaming neck of her horse. “Well, I won’t spur these poor fellows to a gallop to make the last ferry,” she said. “Always supposing we could. We—”

Flat and soggy in the wet air, a shot cracked out. A horse burst from the woods nearby, running loose with empty saddle and trailing reins; among the trees themselves, a dim confusion of shouts. Abigail turned in her saddle and glimpsed something red in the brown shadows of the woods, a single British soldier bringing up his musket like a club as half a dozen men closed in on him.

Abigail exclaimed, “For shame!” and spurred toward the woods. Thaxter scrambled into his own saddle to follow. Hard as old Balthazar had been ridden all day, the animal responded nobly, and Abigail raised her voice in a shout, “Get away from him, you louts!” before she had any clear idea of what she’d do if those louts didn’t. They seemed to be, she could see as she got closer, the rougher types who made up the rank and file of the Sons of Liberty: the poorer class of farmer, out-of-work laborers from the docks of Boston, and two big lads who looked like apprentices playing truant from their work. Such young men followed Cousin Sam and Andy Mackintosh in the violent street battles by which the North End boys and the South End boys celebrated “Pope’s Day”—the anniversary of the Catholic Plot to blow up England’s Parliament in 1605. At the moment, instead of tearing effigy monks and priests to pieces, they seemed bent on doing the same to the redcoat, who was standing—Abigail saw now—over a fallen comrade in a dark cloak.

She raised her voice again, shouted, “Leave them be!” and the men stopped, more startled than actually obedient. She spurred through them and to the side of the two soldiers, Thaxter galloping up in support, and the men, as she’d expected they probably would, scattered back into the trees. A couple of them shouted “Tory bitch!” and similar sentiments, but none of them was ready to attack a woman—particularly not one who came escorted. Someone threw a rock at them, which missed by yards. Ignoring this completely, Abigail dropped from her horse at the soldiers’ side.

“Is he badly hurt?” She pulled away the dark cloak that covered the fallen man’s crimson coat, and saw to her surprise that it was Lieutenant Coldstone. Looking up quickly, she met young Sergeant Muldoon’s quick glance, before he returned his attention to the darkening woods around them.

“Dunno, m’am—Mrs. Adams. Him and the horse fell together—”

Abigail was already feeling beneath the red coat, and pushed back the stiffly powdered white wig to run her fingers through the young officer’s short, fair hair. It was silky as a child’s.

“No blood. He may only have been stunned by the fall. Thaxter, help me get this man on my horse. You did well, Sergeant, not to fire at your attackers. The last thing we need right now is another murder trial.”

“I did fire, m’am,” admitted the Sergeant. “I think the powder’s damp.”

“Here—” Abigail held up a hand as Thaxter shoved his own horse pistol into his pocket and made to lift the Lieutenant. She took her pin-box from her skirt pocket, selected the longest, and drove the point hard into the unconscious man’s leg just below the knee. Coldstone’s leg jerked and he turned his head, gasped, “Damn it —!”

“Very good,” approved Abigail, as Thaxter helped the fallen man to sit. “He hasn’t broken his neck.” She replaced the pin in her box. “Are you all right, Lieutenant?”

He was already scanning the woods around them.

“Gang of hooligans, sir,” reported Muldoon. “They made off—”

“Can you stand, sir?” Thaxter had risen to his feet and had his pistol at the ready again, though, Abigail reflected, his powder was almost certainly damp as well. She was astonished the attackers had managed to get off