The Ninth Daughter

hired girl, and she was not doing anything wrong, but the mother of one of the young men on our street took against her, and started stories—it was terrible, m’am. The old witch! And everyone in the church believed her, just ’cause she was the pastor’s wife! It got so bad, our girl had to go away.”

“Well, I don’t know if what I think is going on is really true or not. That’s why I need someone trustworthy to find out for me. So you must speak of this only to me. Furthermore, I don’t know who’s behind all this, so I don’t know who’s likely to tell on you—and me—if anyone suspects they’re being asked about.”

“Would they kill us?” He could not have been more thrilled had she told him he was in line for the crown of Great Britain.

“They would get you turned out of your apprenticeship without a character,” said Abigail severely, and picked up her market basket again, with its brimming load of turnips and fish. “In which case your father would kill you—and me as well.” She hesitated, not wanting to add to the drama of the occasion but unable to put from her mind the smell of the blood in Rebecca Malvern’s kitchen, or the sight of a small black cat cleaning itself with the stump of a cut-off paw. “The fact is, Shim—the person who’s behind this . . . I don’t know what he’s likely to do, to protect himself. So I want you to be very careful. Don’t take any chances. All right?”

“All right, m’am.” Had it been evening, he would have glowed in the dark.

“Cross your heart?”

“Cross my heart.” The boy did. “I’m true-blue, and will never stain.”

“I would not have asked you”—Abigail smiled, handing him a halfpenny she had saved from her grocery money—“if I thought you were anything else.”

Scouring pots, changing Tommy’s clout, cleaning lamps and chamber pots, sweeping and making the beds that were Abigail’s portion of the housework—all that was one thing. Abigail’s conscience, if not precisely clear on the subject of pursuing her search for Rebecca while Pattie was left home doing all the work, could at least be salved by the reflection that because the girl’s parents had too many children and not enough money, Abigail was in fact providing Pattie with an alternative to labor still harder and more degrading.

But there were no two ways around laundry.

It should have been done last week, when Abigail was wandering around the countryside with young Thaxter and listening to hysterical sermons delivered by the Hand of the Lord. With winter weather threatening, there was no way to tell when it would become impossible to wash the vast and accumulating quantities of shirts, chemises, dish clouts, and rough-rinsed baby dresses. As she and Pattie drew quantities of water from the well, tended the fire under the cauldrons in the yard, and filled tubs with water and lye, Abigail thought despairingly, Forgive me, Rebecca . . .

We are women, and bound as women are bound, to the labor of caring for those they love.

Curiously, the suspicion that had formed in her heart gave her a strange hope. If she’s being held captive in the Tillets’ attic (madness! surely madness!) she at least is safe as long as Mrs. Tillet’s supply of shirts holds out . . .

Tommy tried to eat one of Johnny’s toy soldiers and nearly choked. Charley and Johnny decided they were Indians and ambushed Nabby with clubs of firewood. Messalina threw up a hairball into the drawer of clean shirts.

More wood. More lye. More shirts.

John put in the briefest possible appearance for a dinner of roast pork and apples, then vanished to meet Sam and the others. After cleaning the dishes, scouring the pans, sweeping and washing the kitchen floor, and checking the fires under the cauldrons in the yard, Abigail changed her cap and assembled a dinner for Orion and his mother. “You,” she ordered Pattie, “sit down and crochet or something until I get back. I refuse to have you turn a hand at the laundry until I’m here to help you.”

“Yes, m’am. No, m’am.”

A servant is worthy of his hire—Heaven only knew what riches were Pattie’s true worth, if anyone had that kind of treasure to pay her with.

The printshop on Hanover Street was closed. The girl Damnation was in the keeping room, stolidly cleaning lamps that obviously hadn’t been cleaned in days and should have been scoured that morning: She’ll have the house aflame if the soot in them catches fire, Abigail reflected.

Mr. Hazlitt wasn’t in. Hadn’t been in since early morning. Did Damnation know where Mr. Hazlitt might have gone? No, m’am.

“Mrs. Hazlitt, she’s near to crazy weeping over it. She says, she knows he’s run off and left her, the way he did before.”

And small blame to him. “Oh, I’m sure he’ll be back before nightfall.”

“Yes, m’am.” The girl dipped her cleaning rag into a little basin of sand that had been reused so frequently that the sand was nearly the color of the soot it was intended to eradicate, and continued to rub doggedly at the nearly coal black surface of the brass. “He’d have told me, if he’d gone back off to Gilead.”

“Gilead?” Having set her basket on the corner of the table, Abigail paused on her way to the door.

“Yes, m’am. The Hand of the Lord, he’s wrote to Mr. Hazlitt two and three times to come. He grows main angry, when I bring him letters from Mr. Hazlitt saying as how he can’t.” She went to the sideboard, produced from among the litter of papers there half a dozen ragged sheets, clearly endpapers torn from the backs of books, decorated with the same virulent scrawl Abigail recognized at once from the sermons Rebecca was preparing for print. Words leaped out at her—further excuses . . . turn thy face for the work of the Lord . . . scorn his Chosen One and set up idols before thee . . .

Heaven forbid, reflected Abigail sourly, that even the fate of English justice and English liberties should come before the sacred cogitations of the Hand of the Lord.

A hundred things Orion had said to her about the conditions under which he’d grown up now returned, with the recollection of those shut-up, weathered buildings, of the hysterical atmosphere in the “House of Repentance” where sinners trembled and shrieked before the Chosen One’s version of the Lord. Rather smugly, Damnation added, “I was a bride of the Chosen One,” and Abigail didn’t even feel surprise. Only a kind of outraged disgust.

“Are you indeed?” she asked in what she hoped was a polite voice.

“Oh, not no more, m’am. The Lord became displeased with me, and told Reverend Bargest to put me aside, because my spirit used to walk abroad in the night and pinch the babies in their cradles, and let the mice into the kitchens. I tried not to let it,” she added worriedly. “Nights I’d lie awake, trying to hold my bad spirit in.” She clenched her sooty fists illustratively, pressed them together against her breast. “But it always did get away, the Reverend said, and walked about the world doing evil. He saw it, he said, and others did, too. So he had to put me aside.”

When she outgrew childish prettiness? Abigail studied her face. She could not have been as much as nineteen now. Had I known, she thought, I would have slept in the woods rather than take the man’s hospitality. “And did he turn you out of your home, as well as put you aside?”

“Oh, no, m’am.” Damnation seemed shocked at the suggestion. “The Hand of the Lord would never turn out one of his children! It was for us that God gave us the land we live on, so that none of us can ever be turned away. The last time Mr. Hazlitt came to Gilead, the Reverend Bargest commanded me to come here to take care of Mrs. Hazlitt, in return for Mr. Hazlitt printing his sermons for him. But this Realm of Iniquities is not my home.”

“My child—” The stairway door opened. Lucretia Hazlitt stepped out. Perfectly dressed, hair coiffed beneath a lace cap, she moved steadily, except for her head, which had a slight waver to it, as if the world before her eyes was in constant motion and needed to be tracked. When she came close—to take Damnation’s arm—Abigail saw by the last fading light of evening that despite the gloom, the pupils of her eyes were narrowed to pinpricks with opium. “My child, I’m going out,” she announced. “I shall be back in a few minutes—”

“I’m afraid you can’t, m’am,” said Damnation. “Mr. Hazlitt told me I wasn’t to let you, and—”