The Ninth Daughter

a Tory who wasn’t smart enough to keep off the streets at a time like this? What on earth are you doing here?”

“My duty,” he responded stiffly, as Abigail caught him by the arm and almost dragged him down King Street toward the relative safety of the Battery. “We were sent to escort the Fluckner family across to Castle Island”— Thomas Fluckner was a crony of Governor Hutchinson’s—“and I thought to improve the occasion by asking if you had had time to pursue inquiries on the North End. I left a note with your girl, that I would return at three. The town seems quiet enough.”

“That’s because they’re all at Old South Church, listening to my husband’s cousin tell them the Crown has no right to tax British citizens without the consent of their elected representatives in Parliament, or set up a monopoly on any item for the benefit of his personal friends.”

Coldstone’s lips parted on the words Three pence a pound—and closed again. She thought he might have followed this up with an argument beginning, Nevertheless, it is the law . . . but that look, too, passed from his eyes. He only said, “You are quite right, Mrs. Adams. It was foolish of me.”

For a moment King Street was quiet indeed, save for the eternal tolling of the bells. Then he continued, “Last night I reviewed the notes I made at the time of the Fishwire murder, and those of my predecessor. The regiment had only just taken up post at Castle William. The previous Provost Marshal seemed to have the attitude that a woman who has been reduced to selling her body deserves whatever befalls her, and merely noted the savagery of the post mortem slashing. I was angry, both that he would make no more of it than he did, and because it was plain to me that his neglect in pursuing the first murder had left the culprit at large to commit a second. For that reason, though it was deemed a civil matter only, when the constable reported it to the Provost Marshal—in his usual weekly report, and thus some days after the event—I asked permission to visit the Fishwire house.”

“And did you have dung thrown at you by the local children?” inquired Abigail. When he did not reply, she glanced sidelong up at the young man’s face, and added, more kindly, “There are few enough in Boston who would take such trouble, for a woman who made her living fixing hair and selling herbs.”

“Few in London either.” Coldstone didn’t return her glance. His dark, clear eyes roved to the muddy flats that lay on their left as they emerged from Kilby Street, the rough, open ground on both sides of the Battery March below the slope of Fort Hill, as if seeking signs of danger.

“Are you from London, Lieutenant Coldstone?”

That brought his eyes back to her, and put that little crease back in the corner of his mouth. “Not originally. My parents lived in Kent. They didn’t start bringing me to London with them until I was seven or eight. I’ve always preferred the country. Even as a child, I think I sensed that London was a place where a poor woman could be slashed to death, or a poor child trampled by a rich man’s horse, and no one would really care. This seems to hold true in Boston as well.”

“I think it holds true in many places.” Abigail made a wry smile. “As Londoners consider themselves the pattern-cards for the conduct of all the world, I suppose this is as it should be. What did you make of the house when you saw it? Or the victim?”

“Little enough.” Below them, among the scattered buildings around Oliver’s Wharf, two redcoats stood on guard while three British sailors, in their striped jerseys and tarred pigtails, helped the crew of a small sloop unload barrels of provisions. For the men of the Battery, Abigail assumed: the soldiers whose little palisaded barrack stood at the foot of Fort Hill to their left. Just ahead of them on the other side of the Battery March lay the walled park of the guns themselves, thirty-five cannon set to defend the Harbor against the French who had never come.

There were, Abigail observed, more soldiers on guard there than was usual, but not so great a number as to provoke fears of a landing or an invasion. Her estimation of Colonel Leslie’s good sense rose. Beyond the line formed by Milk Street and School Street, the southern portion of the Boston peninsula was but thinly inhabited, open fields, cow pastures, vegetable gardens, builders’ yards, and rope-walks prevailing along the unpaved lanes. In general the soldiers stationed at the Battery kept themselves strictly to themselves, did their drinking on-post, and did not venture into the town even in times of quiet.

Beside her, Coldstone continued, “The constable had already given the landlord leave to clear the place up. Fools—” His brow darkened. “Any sign the killer might have left behind was gone, and of course none of the neighbors had a word to say to me. It was clearly the work of a madman, yet there is something—” He shook his head. “At the risk of sounding like the very men I derided a moment ago, I will say that my observation has been that a harlot—and Mrs. Barry was well known about the wharves, apparently—puts herself in danger by the very nature of her work. It is not at all uncommon, for one to be slashed, or even killed.”

“I suppose in London,” said Abigail softly, “one would see a good deal more of that sort of thing, than here.”

“As you say, Mrs. Adams. But why this man, whoever he was, would have attacked a hairdresser, and a woman of some fifty years to boot—”

“I know not whether this lightens or darkens the issue,” said Abigail. “But dressing hair was not all that Mrs. Fishwire did. She was an herbalist, a healer, and an abortionist. Some called her a witch. It was not unusual for her to have visitors at odd hours, well after dark.”

“Was it not?” Coldstone halted, where a broad flight of wooden steps led down past John Rowe’s warehouses to Rowe’s Wharf. On the wharf itself, two redcoats stood guard over a mountain of trunks, crates, and hatboxes, which servants were loading into a launch. In the roadway before Abigail and her escort, a coach had come to a halt, from which a black manservant was handing a massive, red-faced gentleman in a crimson greatcoat. Thomas Fluckner, Abigail identified him. One of the richest merchants in Boston and the proprietor of a million acres of Crown lands in Maine.

“Excuse me, m’am.” Coldstone bowed, and strode to meet Fluckner, who shook a handful of papers at him and harangued him at some length in his sharp, yapping voice. Abigail caught the words transport . . . rights as citizens . . . adequate guard . . . Milk Street (which was where Abigail knew the Fluckner mansion stood) . . . always supported His Majesty . . .

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You would need to speak to Colonel Leslie, sir . . .”

Fluckner went back to his carriage and cursed the foot-men. Coldstone returned to Abigail’s side. “Forgive me, m’am.”

“For doing your duty? Nonsense.”

“Even so.” He bowed again, as if in a drawing room. “And were Mrs. Fishwire’s neighbors any more forthcoming to you than they were to me, about who they may have seen on the night of her murder?”

The name of Abednego Sellars flashed through her mind, only to be thrust aside at once. It was ridiculous, and besides, if he were arrested for murder—particularly one he did not commit—once in the Castle Island gaol, the danger of what he might say about the Sons of Liberty wasn’t even to be thought of. “The court is black as a tomb, once dark falls,” she said, in what she hoped was a completely natural tone. “The honest folk that live there—and they are honest folk, who make up the greater part of the North End—close their doors when things begin to get lively at the tavern at the head of the alley. It surprises me none would have come to a woman’s outcry, but I should imagine there’s a great deal of ruckus most nights . . .”

“And if a man keeps a knife hid up his sleeve or under his coat,” said Coldstone quietly, “all he has to do is wait for a woman to turn her back on him, to seize her. Many times there is no outcry.”

Abigail looked away. It seemed to her that she could smell the blood in Rebecca’s kitchen again. At the head of the wharf a straggly haired youth loitered, a thief, probably, totting up the value of the trunks. A footman helped first Mrs. Fluckner—stout and pretty and fussing angrily at everyone in sight—from the carriage, then Miss Fluckner, heiress of the house, a tall, strapping, black-haired girl of fifteen in a dress of mustard-colored silk.

“He killed her cats,” Abigail said after a moment. “Two of them. Slashed them to pieces, as he did her.” But when she looked back at the Lieutenant’s face, there was no more expression there than he would wear if he were playing cards.

“It seems, then,” he said, “that Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Fishwire were more similar to one another than we had known—that there were those who would consider the latter as reprehensible, in her way, as a woman of the town would have been. And the gap widens between them and Mrs. Pentyre.”

“One could say that,” returned Abigail levelly, “if one did not regard Mrs. Pentyre as a whore herself.” His back stiffened. Does he truly believe that when a fine lady takes lovers it is different in the eyes of God