The Ninth Daughter

Dr. Warren said, “Good God!” and dropped to his knees beside the body.

“I left her as I found her,” explained Abigail, as the young physician gently lifted back the jumble of petticoats, to reveal the extent of the slashing. Abigail had to turn her eyes away.

Sam called over his shoulder, “Who is she?” on his way into the parlor. Abigail heard him tapping and pushing at the paneling. Though she knew that time was short—anyone could come upon them and call the Watch with who knew what information still lying loose in corners—still she felt her ears get hot with anger, that he did not even pause in his stride.

Carefully, Warren turned the woman over. “Get some water, if you would, please, Mrs. Adams.”

Abigail hesitated, but the sight of those distorted features under their darkening crimson mask sent her to the half-empty jar of clean water beside the hearth. They could do nothing until they’d identified her, after all. As she returned, carefully carrying the soaked rag wrapped in a dry one, she noted the marks of her own pattens on the bricks, where she’d trodden in the blood when first she’d entered that morning. There were a man’s tracks, too, dark and nearly dried.

“What happened?” she whispered in horror, as Dr. Warren wiped the gore from the woman’s cheeks and nose. “She wasn’t—strangled . . . Why does she look like that?”

“She’s been lying on her face.” The young doctor’s fingers brushed the yellowish shoulders, the stiffening curve of the neck, avoiding the gaping red slit that knife or razor had opened from ear to ear. “The blood will sink down through the flesh once the heartbeat ceases, like water oozing out of a sponge. All this”—he gestured toward the slashed legs, the cuts on the cheeks and breasts—“looks as if it were done after she was dead.”

Abigail reached to draw up one of the chairs, then went over gingerly to it, and sat down on it where it stood. Must not disturb anything . . .

“Do you recognize her?” Sam reappeared in the parlor doorway.

Behind him, Revere said quietly, “I doubt her own husband would.”

Only Revere, thought Abigail, seems to have taken note of the broad gold wedding band on the woman’s bloodless hand. She said, “Her pockets should tell us something,” and Dr. Warren—who was in truth very young—looked shocked at the suggestion.

As she came over to his side, her skirts firmly gathered up to avoid the blood, Abigail heard Revere ask Sam quietly, “Anything?”

“Not yet.”

She looked up sharply at the pair of them, Revere dark and burly in the short rough jacket of a laborer, Sam looking like what he was—a slightly down-at-the-heels middle-aged gentleman, until you saw his eyes. It was his eyes—the way he glanced around the kitchen as if seeking something, concerned with something beyond the horror of this woman’s death—that angered her. She said, a little tartly, “I take it Rebecca didn’t simply write poems and broadsides to make fun of the British. Was she a Son—or a Daughter—of Liberty?” The edge on her voice came not only from Sam’s abstraction in the face of death: She, Abigail, would have been a Daughter of Liberty herself, had such an organization existed—and had she not been either carrying a child or nursing one for most of the preceding nine years (thank you, John). It was typical of Sam that he hadn’t even thought to form such a group while organizing the men.

Sam cleared his throat, a little deprecatingly, and it was Revere who answered her question. “Mrs. Malvern handled the communication between our organization and the other Committees of Correspondence in other colonies.”

“That explains, I suppose,” said Abigail drily, “how Rebecca got her information about what passed in the British camp. As to this poor soul—”

Carefully, she worked her hand through the placket in the gray silk overskirt, the embroidered underskirt, and found the pockets—silk, too, by the feel of them—tied around her waist. One contained three keys, a handkerchief, an ivory set of housekeeping tablets with a pencil attached; the other, a single piece of paper folded in quarters.

“That’s ours,” said Dr. Warren, looking over Abigail’s shoulder as she unfolded the paper. Written on it was simply, The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia. “One of our codes, I mean. Linnet is Wednesday. The Oak Tree is midnight.”

“And Cloetia is one of the names Rebecca used, to sign her poems.” Abigail turned the purse over in her fingers, opened it to dump five gold sovereigns and a few cut pieces of Spanish silver into her palm. “Did the Sons give Rebecca money for informers?”

“Patriots have no need for paid spies,” declared Sam indignantly. “There are more than enough good Whigs —true patriots—who have their country’s good at heart, to—”

“So she would not have had a sum of money in the house, for instance, that contributed to this—this obscenity?”

“Ah.” Sam rubbed the side of his nose with his forefinger.

“We do pay for information sometimes,” said Revere. “Though robbery doesn’t seem to have been involved here. Nor, to judge by her earrings, does money seem to have been the reason this woman came here last night.”

“We won’t know what her reason was,” said Abigail softly, clinking the coins in her hand, “until we know who she was, and what she may have brought with her besides what was in her pockets. For all we know, she was wearing a diamond crown, and the killer overlooked the earrings.”

She got to her feet, looked down at the woman, now lying on her back. Her revulsion and horror had dissolved in her anger at Sam, and in the blood, the horrid wound on the throat, the flattened bulge of the engorged and darkened breasts she saw now only the mute plea for vengeance and for help. She handed the purse to Sam, slipped the folded paper into her own pocket.

“In any case you’d probably better see if any more money is in the house, since Rebecca never had a penny of her own to spare. And you might want to sift through the fireplace ashes, to see if anything was burned or half burned that might tell tales to the Watch. John says he’s caught more than one plaintiff in a lie, by scraps he’s found at the back of someone’s hearth. I’m going upstairs to see what I can find.”

Three

The light was stronger in the bedchamber now, as the sun strengthened somewhere beyond the overcast of the sky. The first thing Abigail saw by it as she stepped through the door was the slight depression in the worn pillows, and the stains of mud and wet on the faded green and white counterpane of the bed’s daytime dress.

Someone had lain here. Not Rebecca, Abigail thought, shocked—Rebecca would no more lie down on a made-up bed with her shoes on—and, it looked like, a rain-wet skirt—than she’d have run down Fish Street naked. Yet when she stepped closer, she saw the single hair on the pillow that looked indeed like her friend’s—dark, almost horsehair thick, with a springy curl to it that had been the despair of Rebecca’s maid back in the days when she had a maid. Abigail pursed her lips with vexation that she hadn’t brought her little ivory measuring tape with her, then turned to the sewing basket on the bedside table, heaped with its neat stacks of cut pieces of linen and calico: the unofficial corvee Mrs. Tillet demanded of her husband’s tenant. That sewing, reflected Abigail, and the understanding that Rebecca would attend three services every Sunday with the family at the New Brick Meetinghouse, where Mr. Tillet was a deacon, and help Queenie in the kitchen on those days when one or the other of the Tillet daughters would come to dine with their husband and babies—

In the eighteen months that Rebecca had rented this little house, Abigail had heard everything there was to hear about its landlord and his grasping wife.