The Ninth Daughter

should be, then whispered, “She and the Colonel was good friends, if you take my meaning . . . good friends.” She winked. “But Mr. Pentyre, as often as not he’d come dine with them, or ask the Colonel over to that big house he has in Boston, and why should he play dog-in-the-manger? T’wasn’t as if he was sittin’ home alone weepin’ into his beer, nights.”

“Really?” Abigail leaned forward, discreetly agog.

Pleased, Mrs. Gill said, “That’s the truth, mum. A West Indian lady, a Mrs. Belle-Isle, that he set up in a house not two streets from his own, and has had brought over here—and got her a room for herself, when respectable people are doin’ without or livin’ in tents behind the cow pens—for fear that if riotin’ breaks out in the town over this Donny brook over the tea—and what on earth would Americans balk at? You can’t get it at home for such a price!—there’s some that would give her her deservin’ for the way she lives.”

“You don’t say?”

“I do say.” Mrs. Gill handed her back her bodice with a self-righteous nod. “The jewelry he’s given that woman—and her not half as pretty as poor Mrs. P!—and the airs she’s taken on herself . . . and casting eyes on Major Gray and Major Garrick, and even the Colonel himself, poor man.”

“Was the Colonel very grieved?”

“He was shocked, of course.” Mrs. Gill started to lace her up again, neat and swift as a chambermaid. “You can’t not be, you know, even if you barely know someone, who’s killed sudden and terrible like that. Why, our Captain when we was stationed in Halifax, he robbed the men somethin’ cruel, holdin’ back their pay and sellin’ their rations to pocket the money himself, an’ havin’ my Fred flogged when he complained of it to the Colonel . . . yet when the Hurons killed him, I swear to you I cried, and not the only one in the regiment neither. And Mrs. P was a sweet young lady. The Colonel liked her by him. He had her ride with him in town like she was a queen. She’d stand at his side when he reviewed the soldiers, all pink and pretty—not like these Boston ladies who go about with faces like boot-scrapers as if a bit of rouge has got to be the Mark of the Devil, beggin’ your pardon, m’am, and to each ’er own I says. Even Mr. P would joke, that she’d become queen over the regiment. But still, you know, mum, Colonel Leslie is a soldier; and these things come and go. ’Tisn’t as if she thought he’d marry her, or either thought it would last. She flung herself at him, when all’s said—and he didn’t duck.”

“Well.” Primly, Abigail shook out her petticoat. “She sounds like a bit of a flirt to me, God rest her. If the Congregation didn’t frown upon gossip, I’d wonder if Mrs. Pentyre gave the Colonel cause to be jealous as well.”

“As to that, I’m sure I never saw sign of it.” Mrs. Gill sighed. “Even when the other young officers would be gallant—as they are, you know, being so far from home, how can you blame them?—she’d let them know it was the Colonel who had her heart, at least for the time being. And as for the Congregation,” she added with a grin, “if good men haven’t anything better to frown at in this sorry world, m’am, I say, Let ’em frown, eh? Gives their face a bit of exercise, not meaning no disrespect.”

Abigail permitted herself a smile. “And none taken, I’m sure.”

Like nearly everyone else in Boston, Abigail had seen Richard Pentyre from a distance. Like nearly everyone, she had for years thought him an Englishman, and the caricature of one, at that: slight, girlish, excessively tailored and intensely peruked. He bowed to Abigail with great polite-ness, and took a seat on the opposite side of the heavy table like a man who providentially finds the chairs so arranged, rather than one who has insisted on their placement to keep the greatest distance from his caller. He said, “Mrs. Adams,” in his wisp of a voice, but did not offer to touch her hand.

“Mr. Pentyre.” Lisette Droux’s voice came back to her: He laughed and joked his wife about her lovers, yet if any man crossed him in a business way, he make sure that that man became truly sorry that he had done so. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“The honor is mine.” His eyes were dark, intelligent, and wary: because he knew more than he was saying concerning his wife’s death? Or because he expected that at any moment she would whip a pistol out from beneath her skirts? “Lieutenant Coldstone said that you thought I could be of assistance in some way?”

“I know not if anyone can be,” said Abigail, hoping her voice and expression combined to express wearied resignation. “But I know not where else to turn. I am a friend to Mrs. Malvern—the woman in whose house—”

He raised a hand to stay further words, and turned his face aside. “Yes,” he said quickly, though his expression registered nothing. “I know who Mrs. Malvern was.”

“Pray forgive me for bringing up a subject that I know must grievously distress you.” Was? A thoughtless trick of speech? Or—Knowledge of something that others didn’t have? “Yet I—and, I might add, Mr. Malvern—are grasping at straws, in the matter of Mrs. Malvern’s disappearance.”

Annoyance flickered across his face at the mention of Malvern’s name. “Pray believe me, m’am,” he said, “though I sympathize with you in your concern for your friend, I had no idea that my wife had formed so distasteful a connection. While I’m sure Mrs. Malvern was a paragon of virtue and beauty, her husband’s habit of using members of his family—in particular his son and daughter—to obtain information about his trade rivals would have caused me to forbid the acquaintance, had I known of it.”

He was watching her again, with an intentness that she found hard to attribute merely to grief for a wife who had betrayed him. Trying to read her, she thought, as she—her eyes downcast in a counterfeit of confusion—was trying to read him.

“They had no acquaintance in common that you know of?”

“In the past, I’m sure they did. Given Mrs. Malvern’s current circumstances, I can hardly imagine any woman with whom my wife was associated, who would acknowledge the connection.”

The revival of the implication that Rebecca had deserted Charles Malvern out of a craving for low company brought a flush of anger to Abigail’s face, and though she lowered her head in submissive assent, she took a good deal of pleasure in saying meekly, “Of course, sir. And would you know what to make of the story that I have heard, that you were seen in Hull Street, at half past eleven on the Wednesday night, on foot and walking toward the waterfront?”

Pentyre couldn’t stop himself. He threw a fast glance over his shoulder, to see if Coldstone had heard.

If he but blench . . .

“That is a lie,” he said—not loudly enough for the words to carry to the Lieutenant.

“Is it?” said Abigail in a normal tone. “I understood that—”

“I am a man with many enemies, Madame, and as such I cannot hope to keep track of the calumnies that may be circulated about me by the disgruntled. Fortunately, it is well attested—by the sons of Governor Hutchinson—that I was at cards with them, in their father’s mansion on Marlborough Street, quite at the other end of the town.” As he spoke his eyes shifted, and for a moment, behind the wary anger in them, she thought she saw fear.

Why fear?

“I’m sorry that I could not be of more assistance.” He was on his feet. At the other side of the office, looking the tiniest bit surprised, Coldstone rose from his chair.

Hamlet, or Viola, or the wily Odysseus, would have had precisely the right question to call the merchant back, to pique his vanity or his curiosity or his fear of what she might know and thus elicit further revelations . . .

And all she, Abigail Adams, could do was incline her head, and say, “I thank you for your trouble, sir—and for the information you have given me.”

Would a murderer have turned back, asked in not-quite-concealed concern, And what information was that, pray, my dear Mrs. Adams?

Richard Pentyre got out of the room as promptly as he was able—she had the impression he only barely kept himself from backing from her presence.

“Please wait here, Mrs. Adams.” Coldstone favored her with a slight bow, and followed him out.

Abigail folded her hands, her heart beating hard. She had touched him on the raw, beyond a doubt; frightened him. It crossed her mind to wonder what he was going to say to Coldstone, who might very well have seen or heard something. Or would it suffice merely to play his trump card: I am the Governor’s friend. The law does not apply to me.

In certain matters it didn’t. The fact that the Governor’s friends, like the King’s, could get away with financial peculation and chicanery with the customs was one of the things that most maddened Sam, and John, and others. In a question of murder, however, he was likely to find matters less amenable to influence.

Or was he? The thought was a disconcerting one. In Pamela, as John had derisively