The Ninth Daughter

enough to look out for her.”

“Pamela.” Abigail, who had gone to fetch the candles from the table, came back around the screen. “John, tell me if this sounds mad, but—it occurred to me today—is there any chance that the reason Rebecca has not come forward—has not even gotten a message to me or Sam or Orion—is that she’s . . . she’s being held prisoner somewhere?”

He paused in the act of removing his neckcloth, regarded her in the softly flickering light with a kind of gentleness, as if she had an injury that would reawaken in agony if touched. “I think it far likelier that she is dead,” he said.

“I do—I would—because of course in any house in Boston where she could be locked in an attic, she could also be buried in the cellar. Except this man, whoever he is . . . he doesn’t hide the bodies of his victims.”

John took the candles from her hand, set them on the chimney breast. “The man who killed Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Fishwire doesn’t hide the bodies,” he said. “The man who killed Mrs. Pentyre—if he is not the same man—only left in the open the body that he wanted the Watch to find. Why go to pains to imitate a crime, if not to have someone blamed for it? The point of this crime,” he went on, “now does not seem to be to kill Mrs. Pentyre, but to kill me. I admit I will be most curious to see the handwriting on that poem sent to Fluckner’s girl. Now might I persuade you,” he added, “to wash my back for me, before it becomes the Sabbath?”

Twenty-four

A note from Lucy Fluckner awaited John and Abigail on the sideboard when they returned from services the following morning. Either the Fluckner household wasn’t one in which the Sabbath was regarded with Puritan strictness, or its heiress had found some outright heathen among the hangers-on about Castle William to carry her message across the bay. When Abigail broke the seal, she found requests from both Miss Lucy Fluckner and Philomela Strong, that Mr. Barnaby permit the bearer to enter the house and the chamber of Philomela, to take possession of the document they would find hidden under the floorboard near the head of the bed.

Please say nothing of this to Papa, Lucy’s paragraph added. It is from the man who wrote those awful poems to Philomela the summer before last. We have reason to think that he has done something dreadful, and Mr. Adams is looking into the matter on Philomela’s behalf.

“And if I discovered my butler was keeping intrigues like this from me, at the behest of my sixteen-year-old daughter and a servant girl,” remarked John, pocketing the paper, “I’d sack him. We’ll be fortunate if he lets us into the house.”

“You’re known throughout the town as a respectable man,” Abigail replied soothingly.

“I’m known throughout the Tory community as a fo menter of sedition,” grumbled John. “Were I a Royal Commissioner, in hiding from the mob, I wouldn’t let me in the house . . . particularly if my daughter has expressed, as you say she does, leanings toward evil Whiggish doctrines like our right as Englishmen. I wonder who’s been sneaking the girl pamphlets?”

“The other servants, belike.” Abigail put on her apron and went to the pantry, as Johnny and Nabby hurried to set the table. She shook her head in mock disapproval. “It all comes of teaching girls to read—” Both children glanced around at her, and John added gravely, “And of not beating boys soundly enough.”

Solemn Johnny flashed him a rare grin.

After a cold Sabbath dinner they returned to Meeting with Pattie, leaving Nabby and Johnny home to watch the younger boys. As Abigail had suspected would be the case, the sermon, which ostensibly concerned King David, had a great deal more to do with tea and taxation than with the affairs of ancient Judea. Yet through it all her mind roved again and again to attic windows, shuttered or unshuttered, to forged notes and skillfully crafted lies. Though she had long trained her mind to shut out the profane in contemplation of the divine (which was more than Pastor Simmonds seemed inclined to do just now), she found her thoughts drawn again and again to the image of the lovely fifteen-year-old servant girl in Pamela, kept prisoner in the midst of a respectable community . . .

Ridiculous, she reflected uneasily. John is right. She had always justified her fondness for the novel with the argument that it was a paradigm of how every woman was treated, if not physically then emotionally and socially. Never before had she seriously considered whether it would be possible for someone to actually do. I fear to be turned off without a character, one servant quails in the novel; He—meaning the lustful and powerful Mr. B—has it in his power to give or withhold a living from me, another excuses himself.

And in truth, on several occasions Charles Malvern had actually imprisoned Rebecca for periods of days or weeks, when he suspected that she would use her liberty to get in touch with her family (as in fact she had). He was, Abigail reflected, probably holding his daughter under a similar form of house arrest at this very moment, and neither she nor any man in Boston would think twice about his right to do so.

But ’tis a long way from that, to holding a woman captive when you have no legal right to do so—isn’t it?

Resolutely, she tried to force her thoughts to a more sacred direction, though the pastoral tirade on the subject of the rights of God’s chosen to cast off the bonds of unjust rulers hardly qualified as that. The meetinghouse was packed to the walls, as it had been for the morning service, and as they had for the morning service, John and Abigail shared their pew with half a dozen complete strangers, young farmers from Chelsea and Brookline and one from as far away as Worcester, brought into the town by the tolling of the bells and the word that was circulating the countryside: Your Country is in Danger. The King’s demands must be challenged if we are not to be enslaved. These young men listened to the sermon with deep appreciation, shook hands afterwards with John, and said they’d heard him speak at Old South Thursday: “We’re ready for anything, sir.”

Reflecting on the number of things that could go wrong in the eleven days between now and the deadline for the tea’s unloading, Abigail thought, We had better be.

The Fluckners lived in Milk Street, a new and extremely handsome house, suitable to a man who was not only Royal Commissioner of Massachusetts but proprietor of a million acres in the Maine district to the northeast. Beyond a doubt it was crammed to the rafters with expensive furniture, fine silk clothing, costly silver and china, and similar lootable goods. “Sam claims there will be no looting,” murmured John, surveying the tightly shuttered brick facade. “The Sons of Liberty learned their lesson when Governor Hutchinson’s house was gutted; there are standing orders that anyone who loots the houses or goods of the Tories will be punished. If we lower ourselves to the acts of criminals, we will lose our support among men of good character, both here and in England, and justify the Crown in treating us as such.”

“Which includes murder as well as theft.”

“Precisely.” His mouth tightened. “I dearly wish there were a way you could ask to see this ‘Novanglus’ note of Coldstone’s without displaying in turn the one that was on Mrs. Pentyre’s body. ’Twouldn’t take a clever man long to guess the code, if he knew already that she met her end on a Wednesday night at close to midnight. Nor do we know how close they are to unraveling whatever other papers Mrs. Pentyre may have left—including, you say, all Rebecca’s previous notes.” He shook his head, forestalling her unspoken question. “It can’t be risked.” He led the way across the street.

But the knocker had been taken from the Fluckners’ door. When they walked around the side of the house to the carriageway, they found the gate into the back quarters shut and locked. John glared at the shuttered windows, and returning to the front, pounded on the door with his fist.

“The droppings I saw through the gate of the carriageway were fresh,” provided Abigail. “And there’s smoke in the kitchen chimney.”

“Fluckner’s probably given orders to open to no one they don’t recognize.” John gave the portal an impatient and un-Sabbathlike kick. “And it’s too much to hope, that he’d permit his daughter to come back to town to get his servants to open up the house—even to someone who wasn’t under suspicion of treason