The Ninth Daughter

“You’ve obviously never seen a family putting pressure on a girl to marry a man of property and power whom she doesn’t like,” she’d retorted, and the quibble had passed to other matters. Perhaps it was that discussion which had touched her thoughts, perhaps her dream of rain and darkness.

But as she walked along the street with the morning sky pale pewter beyond the line of the gables above her, she thought, An attic. Sam’s patriots had been poking into cellars, snooping around smuggler-caches, investigating warehouses for nine days, finding nothing . . . All those places where the smugglers hid their packets of tea and casks of cognac and other goods that the English Crown forbade English colonists to buy from any but English merchants. And those places all had this in common: that they could be entered by a stranger from the street.

With the complicity of the household, Rebecca could be hiding—or be hidden in—any house in town.

Or her body could be buried in any cellar.

The thought halted Abigail in her tracks, in the middle of the street; a coldness fell on her like the shadow of a storm. She’s being held.

And the next instant: That’s ridiculous . . .

Isn’t it?

But her heart was beating fast, and she felt as she’d felt when, as a child, she’d grasped the logic that linked mathematical principles, or had understood for the first time why God must know who would be saved and who damned: that sense of seeing gears mesh, of facts falling into place. Before the eye of her mind flashed the open shutters of the Tillet attic, closed for the year that she’d been visiting Rebecca on Fish Street. With the Pentyre household in an uproar over its mistress’s murder, would Lisette Droux even be aware, during that first day or two, of someone being kept in one of those myriad little chambers marked by the stylish mansion’s dormer windows? Would she have thought to mention it? Particularly if some other explanation had been given that required her silence. We must make our nest against a storm—

Ludicrous. The immediate, overpowering sense of reasonableness faded as swiftly as it had come. John was quite right: You honestly think . . .

No. She didn’t. Not honestly.

But the case Mr. Richardson had made—for a young girl who was powerless, with no family connections and no one to inquire after her, being held captive—returned again and again to her mind as she hurried her steps toward home.

She reached Queen Street in time to do her own share of the housekeeping—sweeping, cleaning the lamps and candlesticks, making up the aired beds with Nabby’s assistance—before plucking and dressing the ducks she’d bought and putting into the oven the bread she’d set early that morning to rise. She should have done laundry Monday and Tuesday, while she was out gallivanting through the countryside, she reflected. It must certainly be done this week. And . . . and . . . and . . .

Charley and Tommy clung to her skirts one moment, then caromed off back to their blocks and gourds.

In between all that she ate a quick nuncheon of bread, butter, and cheese, knowing she’d get nothing until supper. When everyone else was eating dinner she, God preserve her, would be on her way across to Castle Island—and probably too seasick to even think of food.

The thought brought another one. Before she left to meet Lieutenant Coldstone, she wrapped up a small crock of butter, a wedge of her mother-in-law’s justly famous cheese, half of one of her new-baked loaves and some of the pears she’d bought, put them in one of her baskets, and left the house slightly early, to give herself time to carry this offering to Hanover Street. The Hazlitt bookshop was closed. When she went round to the back, she could see through the shed windows a great stack of paper beside the printing press, a much smaller pile of finished pamphlets, and a dozen hung up to dry. From the half-open door of the keeping room came the sound of voices, Mrs. Hazlitt’s very fast, running over Orion’s interjections—

“—Don’t interrupt me, darling, you never listen to me now, you used to care what I had to say. Now you don’t even care that I love you. That I have given up everything, everything in my life for love of you—”

“Of course I love you, but—”

“Then listen to me! Please, sit down and listen to me for once—”

“Mother, I always listen—”

“You don’t! You’re always thinking about just dosing me with that horrible laudanum—don’t go looking around the room for it while I’m speaking, please, please, my darling—”

Orion caught Abigail’s eye as she stood in the doorway. He’d clearly been interrupted in the midst of a print run, his sleeves rolled to his biceps, his shirt, apron, flesh all smudged and sticky with ink. He moved his head, with a slight, desperate jerk, toward the open door of the staircase (And with the cost of wood it’s no wonder he can afford no better help than Miss Damnation, with the heat wasted . . .). Remembering what he’d told her about laudanum, Abigail set her basket on the sideboard and moved swiftly to the narrow door.

If the house itself, shop and all, covered more ground than a couple of good-sized tablecloths she would have been surprised. The second floor boasted one moderate bedchamber and a sort of windowless cupboard where paper, ink for the press, and the slender stock for the store were kept. When Abigail had first encountered Orion Hazlitt, upon moving to Boston, he’d had an apprentice who’d slept downstairs in the shop, and an elderly and crotchety housekeeper who’d slept in this cupboard. This good woman had left the household in high dudgeon when Lucretia Hazlitt had arrived, bag and baggage, and had informed her son that she would now live with him and keep his house. The bedchamber that had been Orion’s was, when Abigail ducked into it in quest of the laudanum bottle, crowded with trunks of his mother’s dresses, and the housekeeper’s sleeping-cupboard crammed with printing supplies. Rebecca had written to her that Orion kept that room locked at night and frequently during the day, for his mother had a tendency to go in and dump the contents of the household chamber pots there, if she felt she was being ignored or put off with excuses.

The laudanum bottle stood on the corner of the mantel—a fresh one, by its fullness—and Abigail noted that a cozy fire burned to warm the room despite the fact that Mrs. Hazlitt spent most of her day in the keeping room. The bed had been neither made nor aired nor, by the smell of the room, had the chamber pot been emptied. Poor Orion! There was a trundle bed half pulled out beneath the big one, presumably for Damnation. At a guess, Orion would be sleeping on a pallet in the keeping room . . .

At the head of the stair, laudanum bottle in hand, Abigail paused, her eye caught by the ladder that led up to the attic. On impulse she went back to it, and climbed to the trapdoor—

The tiny space below the steep-slanted roof was crammed with more trunks, all the things Mrs. Hazlitt had bought in the nearly two years she’d lived with her son: dresses, sets of chinaware, clocks, birdcages, an ostrich egg packed in straw. One couldn’t have imprisoned a lapdog up there, let alone a full-grown kidnapped maidservant.

You have indeed read Pamela too many times.

Abigail descended to the keeping room once more.

Mrs. Hazlitt was in tears by the time Abigail emerged from the staircase (and thriftily closed the door after herself), Orion holding her in his arms and covering her face with kisses. But in his own countenance was only exhaustion and revulsion, and the haggard desperation of a man who sees no light at the end of his road. He beckoned Abigail up, and it took the two of them to get his mother to swallow the medicine: She spit the first mouthful at him, cried when he forced her to swallow the second by holding her nose and keeping a hand on her mouth.

“When she gets excited like this, I’m always afraid Damnation will give her too much of the stuff,” he said, when they’d finally guided the stumbling, disheveled woman to her chair by the keeping room fire. “I must finish the pamphlets, and I must get to the meeting this afternoon. Please don’t think—” he began, with a glance back toward his mother. He brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, making the mess worse. “She wasn’t always like this, you know.”

“I know.” Though in fact, Rebecca had written to her last year that according to her son, Mrs. Hazlitt had always been a horror.