The Ninth Daughter

Adonais? Never.” He shook his head. “And yet—he’s never been the same, since word came to him of Davy’s death. In the time between their getting word that he’d been pressed into the Navy, and word of his death —over a year, that was—he was . . . I feared he’d go out of his senses. I think it was that, put a wedge between himself and Penelope. He’d take out his rage on her, then go try to drink himself unconscious, and all the while keeping up his position in the church, and running his business.” He fell silent, and a muscle in his temple stood out, with the clench of his jaw.

In time he said, “He was one of the constables of the Cornhill Ward, during the summer of ’72. He would have heard the details of the other murders. And,” he added with a sigh, “he was in town the night of the twenty-fourth, for all his prentice-boy said he was in Cambridge. I know, because I saw him, drinking at the Green Dragon.”

“At what time?”

“About seven. Long after the gates had been closed.” Revere poured her out tea. “It does seem like two criminals, doesn’t it? One mad—and maybe dead by this time—and the other . . . pretending to be him, for his own ends.”

“And Lieutenant Coldstone is certain—for what reason I don’t know—that that second criminal is John.” She folded her hands around the teacup, grateful for its warmth. “Not you, not Sam, not any of the actual leaders of the Sons of Liberty . . . specifically John. And in all of this, Rebecca has still made no appearance, nor has her body been found. I think—” She turned her face aside, and found herself suddenly having to work to keep her voice level. “I think it would actually be rather difficult to conceal a body in a town this crowded, for this length of time.”

“Easier in winter than in summer,” said Revere gently, and Abigail nodded.

“There is that. Now tell me—” She took a deep breath, and brought her gaze back to his. “Now tell me about Jenny Barry.”

“Jenny Barry.” Revere handed her a two-penny pottery sugar bowl—he who made the most exquisite silver ones in the colony—and sat for a time, collecting his thoughts.

“Myself, I think it was only a matter of time, before she met the end she did,” he said at last. “She was one of your bawdy whores, who reveled in being a disgrace. A big well-made Irish girl, with hair like a bunch of carrots. If she had money she’d spend it, on gimcrack ornaments and rum. I doubt she drew a sober breath since before she was a woman, and she could not have been twenty-five when she died. Everyone on the North End knew her, if not to speak to then by sight: There wasn’t a man who crossed the Mill Creek by day or night she did not approach. There’s a story—” He grinned suddenly at the recollection. “ ’Tis said one day Governor Hutchinson’s coach was stopped by some pigs in the lane, and she climbed in and sat on his knee, and offered him a drink from her bottle. She followed me once the whole length of Ship Street, shouting to the world how I was afraid of a real woman, as she called herself . . .”

“And were you?” asked Abigail, amused.

“Petrified. Still,” he said more quietly, “her death was an obscenity. I don’t know why I didn’t think of her, the moment I saw Mrs. Pentyre.”

“Possibly because hers was a death that falls more often to poor whores, than to rich ones?”

“Possibly.” He sounded sad.

“Lieutenant Coldstone says she was killed somewhere else, and brought to the wharf—”

“Lord, yes. In the summer the whole world’s out on the waterfront ’til all hours.” Revere’s fingers, long and deft, toyed with the carved-horn spoon. “Jem Greenough—he was constable of the ward that summer—said he thought it must have been done at the Queen of Argyll, across the way, which was where she generally took her men-friends. The landlord there is a cold-blooded rascal, and keeps open ’til dawn in the teeth of church and Army and all. He has rooms on his yard that nobody sees who goes in and out; all the girls use them. If he found her in one of them, as we found poor Mrs. Pentyre, he’d have done as we did.”

Abigail sniffed. “At least Sam didn’t put Mrs. Pentyre’s body out in the road. Or was that only because Mrs. Pentyre wasn’t found until daylight?”

“Where Sam is concerned, and the liberties of Englishmen,” returned the silversmith quietly, “I would put nothing past him.”

“You said Abednego Sellars was constable over in the Ninth Ward, in ’72 when Mrs. Barry was killed,” said Abigail after a time of thought. “Davy Sellars was taken in ’68 or ’67, so Sellars would have been frequenting the taverns in the North End pretty heavily by then—”

“Well, he always did,” said Revere. “And he knew Jenny Barry, if that’s the direction I think this is heading. I saw them together on three or four occasions, at the Queen or the Shores of Paradise. Did it mean anything?” Revere shrugged. “For that matter, she’d had a kiss or two off Sam, at a Pope’s Night parade . . . and there was more in one of Mrs. Barry’s kisses than there is to some marriages I’ve seen. Certainly to Abednego’s. But whether that means he’d murder the woman, and two others, and lure one of them to the house of one of our own pamphlet-writers instead of out to someplace like the Commons or the far side of Barton Point . . .”

He looked up at the tinkle of the shop-bell, and the boy’s voice called from the shop, “Pa? It’s Mr. Adams.”

Abigail said, “Drat!” and Revere handed her to her feet, gave her her marketing basket, and led her to the small door to the yard.

“The gate there past the shed will take you out to Wood Lane, by the Cockerel Church.” He pointed. “Just one request, in trade for the information I’ve given you, Mrs. Adams. Talk to me—or to John—before you take any steps.”

She tilted her head warily. “So you can forbid me, for the good of your endeavor?”

“So we can make sure someone goes with you,” he said quietly. “Good luck.” He stood in the rear door of his shop until she was through the little gate.

Abigail turned them over in her mind, as she walked back toward Queen Street. Jenny Barry, Zulieka Fishwire, Perdita Pentyre. Coldstone had spoken several times of the differences between them: In what way, she asked herself, are they alike?

Are we in fact seeking two criminals here, or one?

Just because Perdita Pentyre received a note luring her to the place of her death, it does not mean that the other two did not.

One killed in a tavern, another in her house, a third in the house of a friend. She saw again the single column of smoke rising above the mansarded slates of Richard Pentyre’s mansion; heard the constant soft stirrings and creakings that had murmured at the edges of her interviews with Scipio, with Charles Malvern, with Lisette Droux in the Malvern kitchen.

Maids, butler, grooms at Pentyre’s house had been the guarantee of Perdita Pentyre’s protection. Those servants who knew everything, who slept beneath the same roof albeit in their maze of little attic chambers up beneath the rafters. Had it been chance only, that the murder had taken place on the night the Tillets were away?

A group of men passed her, newly in from the country, rifles on their shoulders and powder horns at their belts. They stepped respectfully out into the center of the street, to let her keep the higher and less mucky ground close to the wall. In their way, they were precisely like the Pentyre servants. Their mere presence was a guarantee of protection. It is when we are alone that we are vulnerable.

She wondered if she were insane, for agreeing—nay, demanding—to go across the harbor to Castle William that afternoon. Of course, she told herself, Colonel Leslie was highly unlikely to clap her into a cell and send word to John to present himself alone and unarmed somewhere at midnight or he’d never see her alive again . . .

Considered in that light, her peril (if there was one) sounded as far-fetched as the situation in Pamela, which always caused Rebecca to roll her eyes at the ceiling. John, too—last night, as they’d gotten into bed, John had said, “That farrago is honestly your favorite novel?” Rather defensively, Abigail had replied, “And why would it not be?”

“You honestly think that a rich and powerful gentleman would—or would be able to—hold a young woman prisoner in the attic of a country house, with the connivance of not one but two entire staffs of servants, and of every other person in the countryside—”