The Ninth Daughter

and murder. Always supposing,” he added, as he came down the single brick step, “that telling Fluckner of the poem in the first place wouldn’t cause him to sell the poor girl out of hand, to spare himself trouble.”

“For something she couldn’t help?” Abigail stopped in her tracks, half inclined to go back and have another try at the door. “For receiving poems that she didn’t want, from a man who is clearly insane? Knock again, John, they might—”

“And pigs might fly.” He put his hand at her back, started to lead her down the street. “I’ve argued in the Commonwealth courts for thirteen years, my girl, and if I had a shilling for every man who would sell a slave rather than deal with more than an hour’s ‘nonsense,’ as men like to call it, from people that slave might attract to the household . . . Well, I’d have bought you a house as big as that one, and a new lace cap to wear in it.”

They turned the corner onto Cornhill. It was barely four, yet lamplight shone in many windows, where children in their Sabbath best sat politely in parlor chairs while mothers read the Scripture to them, or told them Bible stories as Abigail’s father had told them to her. The taverns and ordinaries were of course closed, yet in every one they passed, Abigail saw lights behind the shutters, where the men lodged there gathered, muttering with talk.

It is a dangerous game they’re playing, Sam and Mr. Hancock and Dr. Warren and the others, she thought. All those meetings, at Old South and Faneuil Hall, were not just to keep spirits roused and angry—and to keep that potential mob of farmers and countrymen in town—until the date passed on which the tea must be confiscated.

The Sons of Liberty had to keep that anger just below the boiling point. To keep it from erupting into uncontrolled violence, from giving the Governor an excuse to call in extra troops, an excuse to say, These men are criminals, not defenders of Englishmen’s rights as they claim.

Her hand sought John’s. “Should I try if I can get Lieutenant Coldstone to help us open Fluckner’s door?”

“If you think we can guarantee he won’t make that poem disappear, since it proves I’m not the killer.”

“In other words, we need a witness to its discovery.”

“We need a witness who won’t be intimidated by a British threat,” said John. “That is, always supposing the poem has any bearing on the Pentyre matter at all. It may not.”

“Do you doubt that it does?” asked Abigail, surprised.

“Not the slightest.”

Abigail looked for Queenie the next day at the market, turning in her mind possibilities that seemed, when viewed from one angle, to be the fantasies of a schoolgirl dream. Yet her mind kept returning to the lakes of blood on Rebecca’s kitchen floor, to the stains of mud and dampness on the green and white counterpane, the glint of scissor-blades in the shadows of the hall, and she knew that the lunacy which she suspected possessed Hester Tillet was as nothing compared with the madness whose existence could not be denied.

Even a man who would deliberately mimic such crimes, for whatever goal of politics or vengeance, is no more sane than the devil who originally perpetrated them.

As if that brief glimpse of madness had opened some terrible inner door, she seemed now to be conscious of lunacy everywhere. What had Lucy Fluckner said? You know how easy it is to think, ‘Were we really making that up . . . ?’

She didn’t know.

All she knew was that she wanted, by hook or by crook, to get into the Tillet house and have a look at the south attic.

Queenie was nowhere to be found at the market. Abigail spotted Mrs. Tillet’s tall, starched cap almost at once among the stalls, and kept well clear of her. The cook could be ill—according to Rebecca, Queenie was a determined malingerer. Yet, Mrs. Tillet was an even more determined taskmistress, and ferociously disinclined to let any member of her household abdicate their duty.

Curious.

I’m going to feel very silly indeed, Abigail reflected as she moved swiftly, lightly away from the market square—her basket still empty—in the direction of Fish Street, if I find that there is some perfectly simple explanation to the yard being kept locked up, the rear house going unrented, and the Tillets’ obvious desire to keep people away.

The gate into Tillet’s Yard was still locked when Abigail reached the alley. Stepping back until her shoulders touched the opposite wall, she craned her neck to look up, and saw the south attic’s shutters had been opened again. The inner sides, folded back against the rain-wetted dark of the gable, were dry, the glass beneath them unbeaded with any trace of last night’s showers.

Surely it isn’t possible. Mrs. Tillet isn’t that mad.

She pulled her hood up to conceal her face, and moved inconspicuously to the end of the alley, in time to see a porter with a laden handcart engaged in an argument with Nehemiah Tillet outside the door of his shop. The handcart blocked traffic, but Tillet was gesturing impatiently to have it unloaded into the shop, as before, instead of into the yard.

Of course, she reflected as she retraced her steps down the alley, to circle around through somebody’s garden and pig-yard into Broad Alley and thence to Fish Street on the other side of the Tillet shop . . . Of course a violent murder in his rental house could have changed his mind about leaving the gate open. But surely not in broad daylight?

It didn’t seem to have affected the landlords of Zulieka Fishwire’s house—or that residence’s ultimate rentability.

As she approached the shop from the other direction, Tillet, his apprentice, and the porter were struggling with a large box. Abigail slipped casually into the shop, and passed through it to its rear door and into the yard. Though she was tempted to investigate Rebecca’s house—closed-up and forlorn near the locked alley gate—she made her way instead to the kitchen, where Queenie was as usual sitting at her ease at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea.

“Mrs. Adams!” She sprang to her feet and looked immediately—her face contracted with guilt—at the tray that rested on the other end of the table. Wicker—like everything else in the kitchen rather battered and grimed and clearly picked up secondhand from someplace else—and bearing a pottery pitcher of water, and a pottery plate on which lay one slice of bread, rimed with the barest film of butter. Beside it sat an enormous basket, stacked with cut and folded packets of muslin and calico: the component parts of shirts.

“My dear, I’ve been sick with worry over you!” cried Abigail. “I was afraid you were ill, knowing how sensitive your system is to horrors and strain!”

“If only you knew the whole!” groaned Queenie, and passed her wrist over her sweatless brow, with the air of an enslaved Child of Israel stealing momentary respite from the task of building the Great Pyramid single- handedly. “I know not where ’twill end! And Mrs. Tillet is like a woman possessed!”

“How is this?” Abigail dropped, unasked, into the other rush-bottomed chair and puckered her brow in earnest readiness to listen to whatever Queenie had to say—noting, as she did so, that the teacup Queenie was drinking out of was one that she, Abigail, had given Rebecca. Though Nehemiah Tillet had on Monday dropped a small box containing “Mrs. Malvern’s things,” a glance at the sideboard told her that the Tillets had in fact appropriated plates, glasses, and silverware—anything expensive or of good quality—for their own.

“I have warned her,” cried Queenie, shaking her head and pouring Abigail some tea. “She will not listen! Not to me nor to anyone! No good will come of it—”

“Of what, for Heaven’s sake?” She took care to make herself sound profoundly concerned and not ready to grab Queenie by the shoulders and shake the information out of her.