The Ninth Daughter

There was a measuring tape tucked in at a corner of the basket, and the measure, from hair to the muddy smudges, marked the height of the woman who had lain there at something just over five feet. Rebecca’s height. And the dampness corresponded in extent to a woman’s skirt: not wet as if she’d been soaked, but she’d definitely been out in last night’s rain. As Abigail laid the tape-end to the pillow, she saw on the worn linen a red brown dot of blood.

Dense in its center, clouded at its edges as if diffused by hair. Damp in the center, dry at the edges, as if it soaked deep: an investigation of the pillow within the sham confirmed this.

A slow bleed, over a period of time.

How much time?

Abigail couldn’t imagine how she would calculate it, but it was clear Rebecca had lain in one position for a long while. Dazed? Unconscious?

Bound?

Cold inside and breathless as she had been when first she’d entered the kitchen downstairs, Abigail looked around the room again, slowly, seeking anything out of the ordinary.

A simple bureau. A single cane-backed chair. No candle on the bedside table—she had not come up for the night, then, when she’d been brought up here, laid upon her bed—whose linen, thankfully, showed no sign of violence or struggle. The faint smudges of dirtied water—as if Rebecca had stepped briefly on her own doorstep after the rain had begun—were barely an inch long, in one place only.

Trembling, Abigail made herself draw a deep breath, and focus her mind: a discipline learned in the course of a year of dealing with a strong-willed and unwilling five-year-old boy in church when she was trying to concentrate on the sermon. The candle hadn’t been brought up but the shutters had been closed and latched, probably when first the evening’s cold had settled in. Rebecca had left her sewing by the bed, gone back downstairs to the kitchen where it was warm.

Rebecca’s Sunday dress hung on its peg, her Sunday underskirt beside it. She had no shoes, but what she wore every day, and those, like her everyday dress, were missing. Abigail recalled the mustard yellow frock her friend had worn, trimmed and flounced in blue and edged with rich lace, when she’d appeared on Abigail’s doorstep that night in April of 1770: I have left him, I have left him, I won’t go back . . .

Too fine for a woman to wear to work about the house. Abigail had lent her her own second-best everyday bodice and skirt. Rebecca had sold the lace-trimmed dress, she remembered, and bought stockings and cloth for chemises with the money. Everything she had put on her body from that time had been castoffs, worn-out, turned, recut. Charles, Abigail recalled, had tried to sue Rebecca for the money he had spent on the dress.

The bed, the chair, the bureau were likewise castoffs, from friends, or members of Abigail’s wide-ranging merchant family. The rag rug had come from the Brattle Street Meeting-House’s parlor—

The rug. It had been thrust aside from its usual position between the bed and the door. Kneeling beside the door itself, Abigail saw three more blood droplets on the worn planks, just at the opening edge.

No trail of drips from the bed. The wound hadn’t been bleeding freely, then. She’d remained beside the door —doing what? What would she have been doing, that the drops had fallen onto the floor and not her shoulder?

The door opened inward, without bolt or latch. Only wooden handles.

Abigail stepped into the tiny hall again.

Last week, her daughter Nabby had imprisoned six-year-old Johnny in the bedroom they shared by running a length of light rope washing-line through the door handle on the outside and tying it to the stair rail. Such a rail was indeed visible at the top of the staircase. Johnny, who had John’s gunpowder temper, had wept himself almost sick with rage at his imprisonment, and the family had only the boy’s innate caution to thank that he hadn’t tried to liberate himself through the bedroom window.

Yes, Abigail thought, as the glint of metal caught her eye from a shadowed corner of the hall near the head of the stairs.

Scissors.

From the sewing basket by the bed.

He’d imprisoned her, then. Carried her up to the room, laid her on the bed—bound or unbound—and tied the door shut. She’d regained consciousness, gotten to the sewing basket, used the scissors to cut herself free, and managed to get the door open enough to get a hand through and saw with the blade at the rope. While downstairs—

Abigail shuddered. Whoever he is, I will see him hang.

She descended the stair to the parlor again, stopped on the threshold in fresh horror. “What are you doing?”

Dr. Warren straightened up from his knees, slopped the wad of pink-stained rags back into the bucket that stood on the floor at his side. In the dim gleam of light from the kitchen—the parlor shutters remained closed—the bare bricks glistened damply. “We trod in the blood,” said Sam, sitting at the desk wiping his boot soles with another handful of dripping rags. “You, me, Paul . . . all of us. Watch her head,” he added, as Revere came in from the kitchen, carrying the dead woman in his arms.

Abigail could only stare, openmouthed with outrage.

Acerbically, Sam added, “If the Tillets’ cook saw you in the yard, there has to be a reason you didn’t go to the Watch at once. It can only be that you didn’t see her, or anything amiss in the kitchen. She’s a little hard to miss.”

“You can’t—”

Abigail brushed past Revere and into the kitchen again, to see what the men had wrought in her absence. The floor was clean. The man’s tracks in dried blood were gone. The overset chair, replaced at the table; the fireplaces cleared of ash.

John would have an apoplexy.

And the killer, whoever he was, would go free.

In the parlor behind her she heard Revere say, “She’s starting to stiffen,” as he maneuvered the awkward body into the stairwell.

“I found these.” Sam came to her side, held out to her a handful of scribbled sheets. “She must have had them out last night. They aren’t ours.”

“Rebecca did other things for her living, besides write pamphlets for the Sons of Liberty.” Abigail took them: more scrawled sermons, virulent with descriptions of Hell’s fire and of devils clinging like leeches to the corner of your mouth, to catch the smallest whisper of ill words—O Sinner, do you feel the prick of their claws? “Orion Hazlitt is having her go over these, before he sets the type.”

“Would she have gone to Hazlitt?”

Abigail heard in his voice something more than speculation about Rebecca’s choice of refuge, and saw the glint of gossipy curiosity in his gray eye. She made her voice calmly flat. “’Tis a good ten minutes to Hanover Street. Farther than my house, which lies in the same direction.”

Sam canted a suggestive eyebrow, which made Abigail want to snap at him that Rebecca’s friendship with the young printer wasn’t any of Sam’s business.

Rebecca had endured enough glances of that kind from her husband’s supporters—that assumption that any woman who lived by herself was a slut in her heart—without getting them from the Sons of Liberty as well.

“She was hurt,” said Abigail tightly. “I found blood on her pillow. I think the killer must have struck her on the head. She managed to get out of here, but if he saw her—if he knew she saw him—”

“Hrm.” Sam frowned. “It was dark as Erebus, remember, and raining oceans. She could have given him the slip, easily enough. She knew the neighborhood and he didn’t—”

“And what makes you think he didn’t?” retorted Abigail. “Any one of your North End toughs who thinks it’s a good joke to tie a burning stick to a dog’s tail—any one of the sailors from the docks who’d rather fight with the Watch than eat his dinner—”

“Now, a little rioting on Pope’s Day isn’t the same as this”—Sam nodded back toward the kitchen—“and you know it. Mrs. Malvern has to have gotten away because if she didn’t, one of the neighbors would have found her body as soon as it grew light. They’d have brought word of it to me or to Paul or to the Watch . . . and none of those things happened. By the same token, if Mrs. Malvern was hurt as badly as you fear, and fell, at daybreak