The Ninth Daughter

Fifteen

“In the past eighteen months, two other women have been killed in the same fashion as Mrs. Pentyre.” Lieutenant Coldstone stretched his hands to the small blaze in the parlor hearth, newly kindled and struggling, but his coffee-dark gaze remained on Abigail’s face.

Abigail stared at him, feeling as if she had been struck. Two—? And then, sickened that she had not thought earlier to ask, Why did I think she was the only one?

She took a deep breath, yet could think of nothing to say.

“One was a whore, the other a hairdresser—common women—”

“And does a woman’s poverty or morals make her more deserving of that horror?” She fought the urge to pick up a stick of firewood from the box beside the hearth and smash it over that immaculately powdered wig.

“No, of course not,” he replied calmly. “But it does make it curious that the third victim was a wealthy woman, a married woman, and a woman who under normal circumstances could not be easily got at by a stranger who did not have an introduction to her.”

Abigail opened her mouth again to snap a response, then thought about his words, and closed it. Her mind darted at once to Charles Malvern’s house, and how it was never entirely still: always the distant tread of a servant, the sense of other people at call. When Rebecca had taken up her first set of rooms in that cheap lodging house on the North End, after six months of living with the Adamses on Brattle Street, she had said, It feels so queer, to come in from the market, and know I’ll be there alone.

She said, slowly, “And Mrs. Malvern was poor, and she lived alone . . . as I presume the other two did. And though her landlord had servants and prentice-boys, they were not in the same house with her. She fits the pattern, not Mrs. Pentyre.”

“Precisely. And, Mrs. Pentyre deliberately took considerable trouble—ordering her husband’s man to harness a chaise for her, and driving herself through the rain on a pitch-black night—to put herself into a locality of danger. Why?”

Abigail shook her head. The forged note, in the code of the Sons of Liberty, seemed to her mind to be crying out from the drawer in the sideboard where she had put it, like a kitten in a cupboard. “I can’t imagine. Who were the other two?”

“Zulieka Fishwire was found in her own house, on the floor of her parlor, her throat cut and her body mutilated quite as horribly as Mrs. Pentyre’s was. It was as difficult to tell the circumstances of Jenny Barry’s murder as it was Mrs. Pentyre’s because Jenny Barry was a woman of the town. Like the other two, her throat had been cut with what appears, by the wound, to have been a thin, long-bladed knife. I would guess also that like the other two, she was violated as well as slashed, but given her occupation it is less easy to be certain of that.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, as if to another man, something Abigail appreciated but found more disconcerting than she had thought she would. John was one of the few men she knew who did not skirt around the subject of the prostitutes who trolled the wharves and serviced the sailors, but he would never have brought the subject up with a woman he had barely met. “Her body was found among the barrels near Scarlett’s Wharf. It had obviously been taken there, because there was no blood on the scene, even”—the Lieutenant’s cold eye rested disapprovingly upon Abigail—“as there was no blood in the house where Mrs. Pentyre’s body was found.”

Abigail felt a flush mount to her cheeks. What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.

Not Mrs. Pentyre’s blood—the blood of that passionate, not-always-wise girl who sought to get even with her straying husband and help her country at the same time . . . who had wanted to be the heroine of a novel. But the blood of the next woman to die at the killer’s hand because she, Abigail, would not describe to this man what she had actually seen.

“I am given also to understand,” the Lieutenant went on drily, “that poverty and solitude were not the only things that Mrs. Malvern had in common with the other two. Which makes it interesting to me—”

“If by that you mean that you give credence to that poisonous Queensboro woman’s hints that Mrs. Malvern had lovers, it’s a lie.”

“Is it?” He regarded her without change of expression, but something in his eyes made Abigail realize, with a sudden blast of fury, that Queenie had assumed—because of his legal help, and the fact that for six months Rebecca had lived under his roof—that John was one of them. And that she had told this man so.

“Who did she name? Orion Hazlitt?”

“One of them, yes.”

“Orion Hazlitt has been desperately in love with Rebecca Malvern since they met over printing work he was doing. He’s an intelligent young man but he was not well educated. Mrs. Malvern, who teaches a dame school, helped him with the spelling and arrangement of manuscripts he was given to print. I suppose it’s the fashion to believe calumny rather than innocence, but I have been friends with Mrs. Malvern for six years, and there was no more between them than his longing for someone in his life other than his execrable mother, and Mrs. Malvern’s determination to remain faithful to a husband who treated her like a dog. I take it another of the accused was my husband?”

Coldstone inclined his head.

“As too close a party to the case any testimony of mine would be disbelieved,” said Abigail, “so I will not waste your time with trying to prove a negative. And the third, I suppose, was Mr. Tillet—”

“Who owned the house she lived in, which he could have rented for considerably more than she paid him —”

“Had his wife not had in her so convenient a slave for sewing shirts. Mrs. Queensboro is a woman who lives in furtiveness and spite, Lieutenant. I would weigh very carefully any testimony she gives you.”

“Including the fact that you were at Mrs. Malvern’s door Thursday morning, long before the Watch was called?”

“I had contracted with Mrs. Malvern to do some sewing for me,” replied Abigail steadily. “And, as I said to you that morning, I passed by to ask, was there anything I could purchase for her at the market, as I knew it was difficult for her to do so because of teaching.”

Coldstone regarded her in silence, his head a little on one side. He still bore a bruise on his forehead, where he’d struck his head when his horse had come down with him Tuesday; its edges were starting to turn yellowy green. Pattie knocked at the parlor door, then entered bearing a tray nobly laden with coffeepot, bread and butter, new cream, and a small dish of hunks of brown Jamaican sugar. The girl laid her burden on the small table that she drew up between them, curtseyed, and withdrew again, and it was some moments before Coldstone spoke.

“Mrs. Adams,” he said, “I apologize if I have angered you. I did not mean to do so. I came here seeking your help—”

“To put my husband’s neck in a noose?”

“To keep it out of one,” said Coldstone. “The Provost Marshal has quite good reason to believe that your husband either did the murder himself, or knows a great deal more about it than any honest man has any business knowing—” He held up his hand as Abigail opened her mouth to snap a protest. “Yet having bettered my acquaintance with you, I cannot believe that you would be party to such a crime, nor that Mr. Adams could succeed in keeping it from you. Much less so, because of its connection with the other two.”

“No woman would be.”

He was silent a moment. Then, “A few years ago I would have agreed with you, m’am. But one doesn’t cross the Atlantic Ocean in the same troopship with British Army camp followers, without coming into contact with the sort of people I had previously assumed existed only in the plays of Euripides. As I was taught in Gray’s Inn, I can only speak to what I know ‘of my own knowledge.’ I do not trust your motives, m’am, nor your loyalties, but I do trust your judgment of the man to whom you are married. I think that you would very likely cover over a murder that Mr. Adams did—but not this murder.”