The Ninth Daughter

pointed out, the lustful and demanding Mr. B held his power precisely as Governor Hutchinson held it: because every man’s livelihood depended upon his whim. No one considered a servant girl’s honor more important than keeping a roof over one’s own head or food on one’s family table.

The door opened. Abigail got to her feet, lips parting to ask Coldstone what Pentyre had said—

Only it wasn’t Lieutenant Coldstone in the doorway, but a tall, buxom, black-haired young girl in an overly colorful parakeet green dress.

In fact—Abigail belatedly identified the newcomer—it was the Royal Commissioner’s daughter, Miss Lucy Fluckner.

“Mrs. Adams?” The girl’s husky hesitancy, Abigail guessed at once, was not her usual habit. “We need to speak to you. I-I think it’s on a matter of life and death.”

Twenty-two

The Fluckners had two rooms in what was clearly the officers’ quarters of Castle William: Abigail wondered who had been displaced to make way for them. The suite had obviously been intended to house an officer and his servant, for a door connected its rooms, and in addition each had a door and a window looking out onto the parade ground. A light burned in the window of the smaller chamber, an uneasy reminder that, though daylight remained in the sky, evening was coming on fast. The wind, which, as she had prayed it would, had slackened for her crossing, was now getting up again, and whistled shrilly around the fortress walls. It would be a bitter night for those lodged under canvas. As she crossed the parade in Miss Fluckner’s wake, Abigail checked her watch, reflecting that she had best hold fast to what she had instructed Thaxter to tell Lieutenant Coldstone: that she would return in one hour.

The Lieutenant’s probable reaction, when he returned to the office and found John’s clerk there instead of herself, she put from her mind. Instead she mentally marshaled the arguments she’d have to present to this decisive-looking young lady—or her irascible father—about where she, Abigail, was supposed to spend the night—

And tried to salve her conscience about playing sleuth-hound on the Sabbath yet again.

A matter of life and death?

“No one will believe Philomela when she says she’s in danger,” said Miss Fluckner—who was, Abigail was pleased to see, one of the few women of her acquaintance who walked as briskly as she did herself. “They say— Papa says—she just doesn’t want to be sold, because I indulge her and she’s afraid that another master wouldn’t.” Though Colonel Leslie had clearly given orders that the open parade in the center of the fort was to remain open, all around its edges pens had been set up for sheep, cows, pigs. As they approached the doors Abigail was obliged to gather up her skirts lest they be caught on the corners of makeshift chicken-coops. “Papa says she’s sly, playing on what he calls my ‘romantical fancies.’ Papa says all Negroes are liars.”

“I expect a good number of slaves do learn to lie, if ’tis the only way they’ll escape a beating,” remarked Abigail rather drily. “And since their masters would sooner blame them than themselves for things that go wrong, one can scarcely take issue with this evidence of intelligence on their part. I am pleased that you’re treating your servant’s danger seriously, but what prompted you to come to me? Don’t tell me my reputation for detecting wrongdoing has spread beyond this affair of Mrs. Pentyre?”

“But it is about Mrs. Pentyre’s murder.” Miss Fluckner stopped before the door, regarded her with wide eyes of a jewel-like blue. “Mr. Malvern’s Scipio told Philomela that you were looking for the man who did it—that you’d gone to talk to Mrs. Fishwire’s neighbors, because she was killed the same way—”

“Wait a moment,” said Abigail, with a sense of shock. “Are you telling me that your servant Philomela—the young woman I saw with you on Rowe’s Wharf yesterday, I presume—”

Miss Fluckner nodded, black curls bouncing.

“—believes herself to be in danger from the same man who killed those other women? How does she know this? Has she seen him?”

“She thinks so. She doesn’t know, Mrs. Adams, but she’s mortally afraid.” Miss Fluckner opened the door.

Philomela got to her feet. Abigail’s impression of yesterday was confirmed. Slender and graceful, even in the neat chintz frock and mobcap of a maidservant, she was probably the most beautiful woman Abigail had ever seen. She sank into a curtsey as Miss Fluckner said, “Mrs. Adams, this is Philomela.”

“Thank you, m’am, for coming.” The young woman’s voice was as lovely as her face, and her golden brown eyes were not those of a girl who indulges in “romantical fancies.” “And thank you for believing me, and Miss Fluckner. For a swear to you as I’m born, I’m telling the truth, so far as I know it.”

“And what is the truth?” At Miss Fluckner’s gesture Abigail took a seat in one of the room’s two cane- bottomed chairs; Miss Fluckner herself sat on the bed. Rods had been rigged from the ceiling, and calico curtains, in an approximation of a half-tester—cryingly necessary, thought Abigail, given the chill of the room and the doll-like pe titeness of the fireplace. “That the man who murdered Jenny Barry, Zulieka Fishwire, and Perdita Pentyre seeks also to kill you? What makes you think this? Please speak freely,” she added, seeing the automatic look of reserve —so common to even the best-treated of slaves—that flickered across the back of Philomela’s eyes. Abigail glanced at Miss Fluckner for confirmation, then said, “Nothing that you say will be repeated, or will be held against you.”

A ridiculous assertion, she railed at herself the instant the words were out of her mouth. Even the most trusting bonds-woman wasn’t about to state some of her real opinions in the presence of members of a race who could get her whipped if they didn’t like what they heard. But it seemed to reassure Philomela.

“I don’t know about Mrs. Pentyre, m’am,” said the servant after a moment. “And I don’t know why this is happening to me. I swear, I have never spoken to this man in my life. Even as I say it, it sounds—” She shook her head, peeped apologetically at her young mistress. “It sounds like something out of the novels Miss Lucy is always reading.”

And Miss Lucy—to Abigail’s relief and doubtless Philomela’s as well—only grinned in good-natured acknowledgment.

Philomela took a deep breath, let it out. “This is what happened. It doesn’t sound like much.”

And it didn’t. And yet—thought Abigail, the hair prickling on her nape. And yet . . .

Philomela’s master in Virginia had sold her to Thomas Fluckner in April of 1772, because Mrs. Fluckner’s maid had had a child, and could no longer (Mrs. Fluckner said) devote herself to the interests of her mistress as she properly should. When Philomela had been in the household about six weeks, someone started sending her poems.

“They’d be slipped in under the kitchen door at night, or poked through the cracks in the shutters. Mr. Barnaby—Mr. Fluckner’s butler—would bring them to me, and joke me about having an admirer, and that’s all I thought they were.”

“You do read, then?”

“Oh, yes, m’am. Back home, my mistress liked to be read to. And one of my mistress’s sons would write me poems—one of his friends, too. That’s all I thought these were: young gentlemen’s foolishness.” She looked aside slightly, and down, her bronze lips tightening in a way that told Abigail that these offerings were probably not the only young gentlemen’s foolishness that Philomela had had to put up with in her old mistress’s home. She wondered how much those first poems had had to do with the decision to sell Philomela . . . far away from Virginia.

“I did show Miss Lucy,” Philomela added quickly. “And I asked her, Should I show Mrs. Fluckner? I didn’t want to do wrong, yet I did fear Miss Lucy’s mother might blame me, for having an admirer, though I didn’t know who this man was.”

Lucy Fluckner put in, “Mama would have said, Philomela was encouraging him, and would have asked Papa to