The Ninth Daughter

“You will admit that those who are known to be engaged in smuggling would be less likely to question a ‘friend’ if he asked them to lie.”

“I will admit that they might oblige if asked for an untruth, but I will not admit that they’re readier to such a lie than anyone else in Boston, up to and including members of the Governor’s family.”

It was probably physically impossible for Lieutenant Coldstone’s natural stiffness to increase by much, but the slight turn of his head, the flare of his nostrils, informed Abigail that Lisette Droux had at least told her the truth about Pentyre’s alibi. She went on, “If I’m wrong, of course, and Mr. Pentyre is genuinely distraught at what happened, I would be the last person to press him with questions about whether he had a hand in it. It is one reason that I do want to see him, if it’s possible. Not to ask if he killed his wife, but to see if he knows anything about where my friend may have fled: any fact about the connection between his wife and Mrs. Malvern. Because I very much fear that Mrs. Malvern saw the killer, and that is why she has gone into hiding. We must find her, before the killer finds her first.”

There was something about her words that made Coldstone’s eyes shift. Something that made him hesitate.

At length he said, “Mr. Pentyre has removed to Castle Island. The families of all the tea consignees, and of every Crown official and clerk in Boston, have been crossing to the island all the morning, asking for the protection of the King’s troops against rioting and insult in the wake of agitation by the political organization to which your husband—and apparently Mrs. Malvern, and you yourself—belong. Surely you saw the broadsides,” he added drily, “demanding that Mr. Pentyre and the others present themselves at this Liberty Tree and resign their commissions to sell the tea?”

“And yet,” returned Abigail quietly, “you—or at least the Provost Marshal—were convinced that Mr. Adams had to do with the murder, while the Dartmouth was yet far out at sea and no broadside had yet appeared on any wall.”

Coldstone set plate and cup aside—the handle of the cup, Abigail noted, lining up perfectly with the edge of the table. “Mrs. Adams,” he said. “You and I are like card players, each guarding the contents of their hand from the other, because there is too much at stake on the table to lay it down. I think—” His frown deepened, as if at the command of that interior blackmailer who was forcing the words from him. “I need your help. I do not think I can find this man without it. And, I think you want to help me, both as a woman, and as a seeker after truth.”

“If truth is indeed what you seek, Lieutenant.”

Coldstone looked for a moment as if he would have said something else—perhaps, she reflected uncomfortably, turned her statement back upon her. But he only nodded. “I seek the man who would do this to a woman,” he said. “I have seen cases like this in London, and such a man will go on killing, until he is stopped. Will you help me find that man, whoever he may be?”

“I will,” she said, “if I can. If you will—No.” She stopped herself. “I will help you, regardless.”

He inclined his head. “Thank you.”

“Who was this Mrs. Fishwire? What do you know about her?”

“Only that she was a hairdresser: what they call a woman of the people, meaning she was poor. She was close to fifty, a mulatto from Virginia. The office of the Provost Marshal wasn’t concerned in the matter, and only took the report of the city Watch.”

“No Mr. Fishwire?”

“None in the report. She was found by a neighbor, a Mr. Ballagh.”

Found in the same tight-packed labyrinth of alleys and byways that Rebecca Malvern had perforce made her home. Did that mean anything, or not? Did it mean anything that Richard Pentyre’s handsome house lay not half a mile distant, as so many wealthy houses did?

Whose hair had she dressed? Perdita Pentyre’s?

“It was over two years ago,” Coldstone went on. “Yet surely there will be people in the neighborhood still, who remember the circumstances. If I can track the man from that end of the trail—”

“You?” Abigail’s eyebrows shot up. “Lieutenant Coldstone, I may be a suspected traitor, but I am nevertheless a Christian woman. I would not want it on my conscience, that I had sent a British officer into the North End, with or without escort, tea ship or no tea ship.”

Stiffly, Coldstone reproved, “I would not go in uniform.”

“With that voice and that posture and hair cropped for a military wig, you would not need to. They’ll cut you to pieces and feed you to their pigs, Lieutenant. Best let me see to this.”

Sixteen

To Abigail, the tight-tangled alleys and narrow, anonymous rights-of-way that made up the North End always smacked more of the village Boston had been a hundred and fifty years ago, than of the thriving colonial city it had become. In fall and spring, the bustle and variety in the crowded streets went to her head like a glass of wine: book-shops, silversmiths’, the closeness of the wharves with their tall ships; the smells of sea salt and pine. In the stench and heat of summer, with pigs and chickens and the occasional milk-goat blocking the narrow alleys, she invariably felt a longing for the green quiet and fresh food of Braintree, and today—with winter closing in, and the bells of the city tolling, and an edge of violence in the air—it seemed to her that here in this cramped islet could be found the concentrated solution of the worst of what Boston was.

Boston was a seaport town: sailors, both coastal and deep-water, were to be seen everywhere. The tenements that crowded these narrow streets housed them in their hundreds and—cheek-by-jowl with them—the chandler ies, slopshops, and harlots that made up their world.

Boston was a wealthy town: Amid the crumbling squalor of dockside poverty, handsome brick mansions reared, where merchant families had held land for generations while the neighborhood decayed around them. Up until eight years ago, Governor Hutchinson had resided here with his family, in a splendid house up the hill from his wharf. Then in ’65—enraged by Britain’s arbitrary decision to tax everything printed, from bills of lading to playing cards—rioters had gutted the building, burned the Governor’s painstakingly collected library of the colony’s oldest documents, and driven his family out into the night. The family lived in Milton now, in the countryside, and the Governor, when in town, had a newer and larger brick mansion on Marlborough Street close to the Commons. The Olivers—relations of the Hutchinsons and the Governor’s appointees to the most lucrative colonial posts—had a house on the North End as well, but as Abigail passed it, she noted that its shutters were up, and the knocker taken from its door.

Boston was a town of passions: for religion, for liberty, for riotous street fighting that broke out every fifth of November—Pope’s Day—in parades, brawls, battles between North-Enders and South-Enders. As she followed Sam’s maid Surry along the cobbled pavement, Abigail could hear voices arguing in taverns, in tenements, in alleyways. In addition to the homes of the rich, the North End held a large concentration of Boston’s poor, and though it outraged Abigail’s Christian soul, she knew that the refuge of the poor (if they have not the spiritual mettle to either resign their souls or to better their condition) was drink, of which plenty was available. The liveliness that elsewhere characterized Boston seemed here to be only a step from violence. On this very cold morning most of the local dwellers were on their way to or from the market in North Square, but gangs and groups of countrymen clustered around the inns and taverns, with rifles on their backs, tomahawks at their belts, and little parcels of clean shirts and spare stockings under their arms.

“Do you remember hearing of the two murders, three summers ago?” she asked her companion, and the slave-woman nodded.

“Was there two? I only heard of the one. Kitta—Mrs. Blaylock’s cook”—Mrs. Blaylock was Sam Adams’s neighbor—“says Mrs. Fishwire was cut up something horrible. A judgment on her, Kitta says, though to my mind that don’t show much of the Christian charity she’s always braggin’ on that she has.” Having been the property of Sam Adams for many years, Surry was easy-tempered and virtually unshockable: a pretty mulatto woman of about Abigail’s own age, to whose speech still clung the lazy accent of Virginia.

“Why a judgment? I thought Mrs. Fishwire was a hairdresser.”