The Ninth Daughter

“Don’t give up!” Still no sound. She gasped, trying to force the air from her throat. “We’re coming!” And woke upon a gasp, as John touched her shoulder.

“Nab,” he whispered, and she clung to him in the darkness that seemed so black after the luminous cat-sight of dreaming. “Beloved—”

At the sound of the church bells she shivered violently. “Who is ringing the bells?” He drew back a little in surprise at the mundane question, and she heard the muffled snort of his chuckle.

“Sam’s got men at it, turn and turn about,” he said. “All along the waterfront, too, ready in case the Cumberland tries to put in or Leslie brings his men over. Is that what you were dreaming of, dear friend? The bells? Do they trouble you?”

She shook her head. “Just a dream. They’ll trouble the British a good deal more.” It was good to be able to seek refuge in his arms.

There was no great difficulty in ascertaining whether Abednego Sellars had passed the previous Thursday evening where others could see him, particularly not with Boston in a ferment and half the merchants in the town absent from their shops. Abigail abstracted a book of sermons from the top shelf of John’s library, wrapped it in rough paper and string, and waited until John left for Old South Church, where the meeting was that day. Though not one of the inner circle of the Sons of Liberty, he was always gone during these gray, louring mornings, at the hour when the countrymen who crowded the streets seemed to vanish as if by magic. Walking from Queen Street down to Milk Street, where Sellars had his chandlery shop, Abigail passed Old South, and saw the backs of men clustered in its doorway, and heard the muffled outcry of voices within. Sam? she wondered. He could always get a crowd going . . .

Again the thought crossed her mind of the Reverend Bargest out in Gilead, rousing his congregation to just such an outcry: Behold them! Aggh, there she is! Do you not see her? The serpent, with its glaring eyes—Lo, can you not see where the Nightmare comes? There! There! And everyone in the little congregation wailed, We see her, we see . . .

You must see! You must! Behold the witch! She comes NOW through the wall, glowing with the corpse-light of Hell—!

Only it was Sam’s voice she heard in her mind, Can you not see the King? He comes through the wall, glowing with the fires of Hell, holding a bayonet to the throats of your children—!

The case is not the same, Abigail told herself, vexed that the comparison had even crossed her mind. In any case Sam doesn’t control the lives of the families of the men who look to him for leadership. Even if he did get carried away with his rhetoric and start taking liberties with provable facts.

As she’d known would be the case, only Abednego Sellars’s youngest prentice-boy was in the chandlery shop on Milk Street. Bess had informed her—after a few discreet questions—that Penelope Sellars’s sister had recently given birth, so there was little fear of encountering the New South deacon’s wife in the shop, something Abigail felt guiltily unwilling to do. She had been raised to abhor gossip, and made a careful point, in her discussions with her sisters and Bess of the affairs of various friends and acquaintances, not to spread evil rumors unless they could be definitively substantiated, and then to put the best face on the matters if possible . . .

But, she told herself, the case is not the same here, either.

Even so, she was glad Penelope Sellars wasn’t in the building.

“It might have been Mr. Sellars,” said the apprentice, to Abigail’s story of a visitor last Wednesday night, just before the rain started, who had been gone before she could be called in from the cowhouse and had left this package, and Pattie had said she thought it might be Mr. Sellars. “In truth he spent that night from home. He was called out to Cambridge, just after dinner, and didn’t return in time, and the gates were closed on him . . .” He glanced around the empty shop, with its neat packages of candles and rope, soap and nails, as if for listening ears. His voice sank to a whisper. “Mrs. Sellars, she wasn’t any too pleased, either. The squawk she set up!”

Abigail said, a little primly, “Well, if Mr. Sellars was in Cambridge Wednesday night, he could not be the man who left this book upon my husband’s doorstep, could he? I think it would be a favor to them both, if you mentioned nothing of this.”

“No, m’am.” He looked like he might have said something else—mentioned the deacon’s latest “ladyfriend” on the North End?—but only repeated after a moment, “No, m’am.”

Drat men. Abigail’s pattens clinked sharply on Milk Street’s cobblestone paving. If they have an aversion to a woman, why wed her? If they want to tup harlots, let them marry the hussies to begin with—then they’d see there’s more to happiness than four bare legs in a bed.

Orion Hazlitt’s face returned to her, harsh with sudden anger at the thought of Charles Malvern. Do you ever wish—?

Yet Rebecca Woodruff had pledged herself to Charles Malvern for her family’s sake, long before her path had ever crossed the young stationer’s. What God hath joined, let no man put asunder.

Rebecca had said that to her, on her first evening in the new house on Queen Street, when she and John had come back to Boston from Braintree a year ago. Rebecca had helped her, Bess, Hannah, and Pattie scrub every surface with hot water and vinegar, move pots and kettles into the kitchen, make up the beds. After dinner was done for all friends and family, Rebecca had remained, to help clean up, and to tell at greater depth the small events that had made up her life during Abigail’s year and a half of absence from the town. Orion’s name had come up early in the conversation: “He is a good man,” Rebecca had said, perhaps too quickly, when Abigail had mentioned the number of times his name had arisen in her letters. “Cannot a woman take pleasure in a man’s conversation without all the world winking and smirking, if he but walk her home from church?”

Abigail had replied carefully, “If she is living apart from her husband, it behooves her to take care how she shows her pleasure. Either to others, or to him.”

Rebecca had reddened a little in the pallor of the winter twilight, but it was anger that sparkled in her dark eyes, not shame. She had bent over her sewing again. “Those who walk with their gaze in the gutters will see mud wherever they look,” she replied after a time. “He tells me his mother is the same. She thinks that any woman who speaks to her son is ‘on the catch’ to take him away from her. She’s never forgiven him for coming to Boston in the first place, he says, As if he were running away from me! Which of course is exactly what he was doing. She thinks the young ladies of the Brattle Street congregation are heretics, let alone me, whether I were married or not. And I am married,” Rebecca went on. “Abigail, I do not forget that. What God hath joined, let no man put asunder . . . not even the man who has cast me out.”

It had been on Abigail’s lips to ask, What if things were different?

But they were not different, nor would they be. So she had held her peace.

“Mrs. Adams?”

Startled, Abigail turned, as she came into the open space between the Old State House and the Old Meeting House—the very place where, three and a half years ago, British troopers had opened fire on a mob of unarmed civilians—to see a man approaching from the doorway of the State House, wrapped in a thick gray cloak. His hat shadowed the pristine gleam of hair powder, but even before he came close enough for her to see his face her heart leaped to her throat.

“Heavens, man, are you insane?” She strode over to him, and he removed his hat and bowed: It was Lieutenant Coldstone, sure enough, and in uniform beneath that very military-looking cloak. He wasn’t even accompanied by the faithful Sergeant Muldoon.

“On the contrary,” said the young officer, “you could scarcely call upon me, m’am. And we are not half a mile from the soldiers at the Battery.”

“With all of—oh, what is it? Twenty troops? Do you think they’d even turn out, if they heard a mob going after