The Ninth Daughter

“No,” said Abigail softly. “I would not.” And then, “Bread and butter, Lieutenant?”

“Thank you, m’am. It has been some time,” he added after a moment, “since I have tasted either that was not adulterated by Army contractors. Your skills as a housewife do you great honor.”

She thought, Oh, the poor boy, her heart melting—and mentally slapped her own wrist in disgust. Knows more than any honest man has any business knowing indeed!

“What makes your Provost Marshal so sure that it could have been my husband?”

He shook his head. “I’m not at liberty to disclose it, m’am. Physically, he could have committed the crime —”

“He could not.” She paused with the coffeepot suspended over a cup, silently wishing she could pour the steaming liquid into her guest’s pristine white lap. “He would not.”

“There is a difference between those two things, Mrs. Adams, as I’m sure, as a lawyer’s wife, you are aware. Your husband is in the thick of organizations whose stated goal is to disrupt the smooth working of His Majesty’s government here in the colony. He is moreover the associate of men involved in large-scale smuggling operations which aid Britain’s enemies. Your husband did indeed spend Wednesday night at the Purley’s Tavern outside of Salem, yet a smuggler-craft could have brought him to Boston in an hour—”

“Not in that weather, it couldn’t.”

“You underrate their skill, m’am. He moreover is good friends with the woman in whose house the body was found: a woman separated from her husband, who has lived under Mr. Adams’s protection and whose legal affairs Mr. Adams has looked after, pro bono. Had he wished to harm Mrs. Pentyre, what safer way to do so, than to mimic the methods of a lunatic who has killed two other women and has gone untaken? He chooses a night on which the Tillets are known to be absent. The renter of the house then flees, and you—Mr. Adams being bonded to remain in Boston and being moreover under suspicion—undertake a two-day journey into the backcountry, where an officer of the Crown would take his life in his hands to go—to warn or inform her—”

“Do you honestly think that’s what happened?” demanded Abigail, appalled.

Coldstone was silent, studying her face, she realized, as she had studied Charles Malvern’s, when she had broken the news to him of Rebecca’s disappearance. She didn’t flee, she wanted to shout at him. She was imprisoned in her room, her blood was on the pillow of her bed, and on the floor beside the door—

And Paul Revere and Dr. Warren had neatly mopped it away. She found herself trembling all over.

“No,” he said after a time. “No, I don’t. All these things—these possibilities—are like objects in a room, like furnishings well arranged. But there is another room, and in that room is the possibility that the same man who killed Mrs. Fishwire and Jenny Barry has started killing again. As all such men invariably will.”

“And that matters to you.”

“Yes. It does.”

Silence again. Abigail handed him the cup of coffee, and looked around for the bell with which Pattie could be summoned to the parlor. Of course it was missing—Charley and Johnny were forever taking it to sound the alarm against imaginary Indian attacks—so she murmured, “Excuse me,” went to the door, and called, “Pattie, dearest? Could you bring us some of my marmalade? Do you like marmalade, Lieutenant? And some of your gingerbread, if it’s ready—” She returned to her chair beside the fire.

“These other women who were killed. When did it happen? I think I would have heard—”

“Jenny Barry was killed in June of 1772. Zulieka Fishwire in September of the same year.”

September of ’72. The month Tommy was born. The same month, she remembered, that word had finally reached Rebecca that her father had died the previous May. They had still been at the farm in Braintree then. None of her Smith or Quincy aunts or cousins would have written to her about the murder of a woman with a name like Zulieka Fishwire; certainly not about the death of a prostitute. Common women—she heard Coldstone’s light, cool voice say the words again. So worthless are women’s deaths held. “And none since?”

“None that have come to the ears of authority.” He stretched his hands to the fire again, his face as inexpressive as stone. “I am certain the owner of the brothel or tavern where the Barry woman met her end hid the circumstances, lest his trade be hurt. There may have been others, between that time and the murder of Mrs. Fishwire.”

“Did they know one another? Or have acquaintance in common?”

“That I don’t know. They lived in the same part of the town, Mrs. Fishwire on Love Lane, and Mrs. Barry somewhere nearby along the waterfront.”

“And Scarlett’s Wharf lies not a quarter mile from the Tillet house,” murmured Abigail.

“Was Mrs. Malvern acquainted with Mrs. Pentyre? Her maid said, not.”

“Her maid didn’t know Mrs. Malvern’s name,” said Abigail. “In fact they knew one another slightly—chance met at Mr. Hazlitt’s stationery store, at a guess.”

A slight crease flickered into existence between the Lieutenant’s pale, perfect eyebrows; he reached into his coat and brought out a folded half sheet, which he held out to her. “Would this be Mrs. Malvern’s handwriting?”

Forgive my error beneath the elms on the Common. Your precious Finch. Abigail remembered vaguely that error was a meeting, but knew that the Common wasn’t really the Commons—she forgot what the transposition was. She shook her head. “It does not look familiar.” She could always plead nearsightedness if later caught in the lie. “Is this one of the notes that Mademoiselle Droux spoke of her mistress receiving?”

“You’ve spoken to her, then?”

“Of course. Servants are our shadows, Lieutenant Coldstone. They see ladies without their paint, and gentlemen before they don their wigs in the morning. If one cannot talk to a man about an event, the next best thing is to ask his servants.”

“Sometimes the best thing, Mrs. Adams.” The cold seraph face suddenly turned human and young with a quick smile. “The man himself is doubtless lying. And did you in fact ride all the way out to Danvers, to speak with Mrs. Malvern’s former maid?”

“I did. It wasn’t Danvers, but Townsend, a hamlet in that direction—and in fact it wasn’t even in the village, but some distance away. A vile journey.” She shivered at the recollection of those shuttered-up houses in Gilead, of the twisted little cripple-boy working the spinning wheel with his withered hands, a task he would pursue, Abigail guessed, for life, having nowhere else to go nor any worth to anyone save for that simple chore. “Mistress Moore told me that there was none she could think of, who would have wished Mrs. Malvern harm. But if it is a madman, it would not be—might not be—anyone she knows.”

Except of course that it was, she thought, seeing in her mind the dim glow of firelight in the rain as shutters were opened into the alley, the pinched o and slightly twisted in of the forged note. The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia.

“I take it,” she said after a time, “that you have spoken to Mr. Pentyre?”

“I have,” said the Lieutenant.

“And did he have an account of his own whereabouts on the night of his wife’s death?”

“He did.”

“Did you believe it?”

“Madame,” said Coldstone, “there is no question of Pentyre’s involvement in his wife’s death—”

“Why is there no question?” asked Abigail. “Because Mr. Pentyre is the Governor’s friend?”

One corner of Coldstone’s mouth turned down, hard, a prim fold of exasperation.

“Why are you so convinced that my husband—and not, I notice, any more obvious member of the Sons of Liberty—had a hand in the killing?”

“Perhaps because the only people who claim to have been with your husband at the time of Mrs. Pentyre’s death are known to be speakers of sedition, if no worse, against His Majesty’s government?”

“Ah. And only traitors will lie to cover the movements of their friends?”