The Ninth Daughter

“No,” said Abigail softly. “Of course not.” While Mrs. Gridley, Mrs. Kern, and others explained to Mr. Gridley every detail of Abigail’s story about being the mistress of Mrs. Fishwire’s niece, she walked around the little room, set up now as a tailor’s shop, with boxes to hold the fabric for various jobs and a little rack of spools of thread of various colors. The resemblance between this place and Rebecca’s house lifted the hair on her nape. And yet, she told herself, there was little variation possible in these ramshackle dwellings. It was such a place as any woman obliged to make her own living in the world would take, if she could: a small house on one of Boston’s many inner courts, that would be black as pitch once the sun was down, save for the dull gold chinks of closed shutters . . .

“Were the shutters closed?” she asked. “The night of the murder?”

“Oh, aye.” Mr. Ballagh nodded, from the doorway where he’d gone to stand talking to Mr. Gridley. “With the species of ruffians that spend their time in the Bull, you want to keep things locked up tight, once the sun goes in. The Fishwire’d keep her door open later nor most, for her trade, an’ she was always havin’ trouble with ’em.”

Another neighbor nodded. “We was all ever havin’ trouble with ’em, m’am. One or another—sailors, sometimes, sometimes just the riffraff that unloads the boats—”

“She’d get a gentleman, now an’ now, though.” The informant—swarthy as an Indian with an Irish brogue that could have been cut like cheese with a wire—explained to Abigail. “From the Bull, y’see. Gentlemen’ll come for the cards, an’ maybe so-be-it the deacons of their churches won’t see ’em takin’ a drink—”

“Maybe so-be-it they’re deacons theirselves,” added a Mrs. Bailey, and got a general laugh.

“Well, sailor or gent, they’d come down here, see the light, an’ maybe think it was a whore’s house. Or others’d come and pound on her door and curse at her, and call her witch—”

“I throwed a man out, just the week before the killing happened,” assented Ballagh. “One of the gentlemen, he was, and cursin’ like a sailor at her, because he couldn’t do his rifle-drill—beggin’ your pardon, m’am—with some drab over at the Bull.”

“Lord, yes!” Mrs. Kern laughed. “And he wasn’t the first or the only—You mind Abednego Sellars, that’s deacon at the New South Meeting? He had a ladyfriend lived in rooms at the Mermaid, in Lynn Street; he was here all the time at evening, all cloaked up like he thought nobody here would see his silver shoe buckles, to buy the where-withal to do his doxy justice. Then when things didn’t work out just as he’d planned, he’d be back, midnight sometimes, a-poundin’ on the Fishwire’s door and screamin’ at her that she was a witch who’d put a word on him, to keep him from doin’ the deed.”

There was general laughter, and Abigail traded a startled glance with Surry. Both of them knew Deacon Sellars, if not well, at least for a number of years. He was a pious and prosperous chandler, a pillar of his church and—Abigail knew—likewise a pillar of the Sons of Liberty, whose pamphlets he was in the habit of taking out of Boston in his deliveries of soap and candles to surrounding towns.

While it was true that Boston was a bustling town that seemed both enormous and crowded to her— particularly when first she had come to live there—she realized that in the five years that she’d lived on and off in Boston, she had come to know, at least by sight, scores of its inhabitants to whom she had never spoken, and by reputation, many more. Those who, like Deacon Sellars, had lived all their lives in the town would know its byways, and where to come if they wanted to deceive their wives or play cards or get drunk out of sight of the elders of their respectable churches.

And heaven knew, you couldn’t throw a rock in Boston without hitting someone at least sympathetic to the Sons of Liberty.

On the other hand, she reflected, as she and Surry made their retreat past the Blue Bull and out into Love Lane once more . . . On the other hand, it was curious.

And it might behoove her to find out a little more about Abednego Sellars. And she couldn’t keep herself from mentally adding, Carefully . . .

It was nearly ten in the morning—and poor Pattie was once again saddled with keeping the children at their lessons and beginning preparations for dinner in between her own, heavier tasks—and Abigail turned the corner onto Middle Street with a pang of guilt. A door opened just ahead of her and three men staggered out, dressed for some evening party and laughing with the exhausted silliness of men who’ve spent the night in the back room of a tavern (and the door was, indeed, of that description). Surry leaped nimbly aside. Abigail, less quick, found herself with one of them in her arms.

She stepped back and released him with an exclamation of disgust.

“Pardon, m’am—pardon, m’am,” mumbled the stumbler’s friend, catching the stumbler by the elbow. “M’friend’s not well, not at all well . . .” The third member of the party hooted with laughter.

“There, Percy, you’ve gone and offended a respectable matron! Your wife will have words to say to you!” He caught his two friends by the shoulders, and the three of them staggered away down the hill toward Lynn Street, leaving Abigail gazing after them, not certain if she should be troubled or merely bemused.

The young man who’d spoken to her—drunk as a lord and elegant in a coat of blue satin beneath his caped gray greatcoat—looked a great deal like Jeffrey Malvern.

Seventeen

Scarlett’s Wharf, where the body of the prostitute Jenny Barry had been found, lay barely four hundred yards from Love Lane. “There won’t be anythin’ to see now, m’am,” warned Surry, as they descended the hill, past taverns and tenements, past public houses where men from the country gathered, quietly talking, and when they fell silent, the tolling of the church bells filled in like the heavy scent of lightning in the air.

“I know.”

Had her hair been red? Blonde? Coldstone hadn’t said.

Had she been young? So many of the girls who came and went through the doors of the Queen of Argyll tavern near the head of the wharf seemed, to Abigail’s eyes, barely children. Others had the bitter faces of crones, though probably no older than her youngest sister Betsy, who was barely twenty-three. Despite her decent upbringing and wary loathing of drunkenness, Abigail felt her heart contract with pity at the sight of them. You could not open yourself to six or eight or ten men a day, she thought, without the assistance of alcohol—of something to keep your mind from what you did and what you’d become. Her thoughts went back to Mrs. Kern and her daughters, hanging gentlemen’s shirts on the stretched lines, their hands red with lye. The youngest one—whom Mrs. Kern had sent without a second thought to fetch Mr. Ballagh from the tavern—had looked barely six.

More men loitered on the wharves, waiting their time to take a shift at guarding the Dartmouth’s cargo to prevent it being unloaded. She crossed Ship Street, pattens clanking on the bricks, to the short wooden platform that stretched out over the salt-smelling waters, and behind her caught the words “liberties of Englishmen . . .” “. . . Parliament . . .” “. . . make us slaves, sure as if we was Negroes ourselves!”

From the head of Scarlett’s Wharf the Dartmouth was hidden by the weathered buildings erected on the quarter mile-plus of the Long Wharf and the clusters of masts beyond; by the shoulder of Fort Hill and the gray stone mass of the Battery. “You think the Governor’s gonna call the soldiers, to get that tea ashore, m’am?” asked Surry, when Abigail’s eyes turned in that direction. And what did they make of it, Abigail wondered: the Scipios and Surrys of the world. Men and women who not only could not vote, but whom the law permitted to be bought and sold, as if they were truly the cattle that Virginians sometimes called them. What did they make of all this furor among the whites, over three-pence a pound on tea?

“I shouldn’t like to be the commander of the regiment trying to implement the order.” She nodded toward a group of newly arrived youths, making their way along the quay under the watchful eye of a bearded older man. “I understand that the Dartmouth’s captain has offered to take his cargo back to England, but Governor Hutchinson has ordered the vessel to remain until the tea is unloaded and delivered to its consignees.”

“I will purely like,” remarked Surry, as they turned south and started to walk along Fish Street toward home,