The Ninth Daughter

back in a few minutes, not much to Abigail’s surprise, considering how quickly dark was falling. With the onset of night, and the brisk wind now setting off the bay, no more boats were putting forth that day.

“But, m’am, they’re saying all along the wharf—and I could hear the men shouting about it in the taverns, too—that the other two East India Company ships have been sighted, the Beaver and the Endeavor. They’ll be at Griffin’s Wharf, they’re saying, with the flow of the tide.”

“I would not have believed it.” John held out his hands to the kitchen fire, rubbing them as if he’d never get his fingers warm again. Most of the household was abed. For an hour Abigail had waited up by the kitchen fire, listening to the monotonous tolling of the church bells that penetrated even the thick walls of the brick house. “Shall I write Pamela’s author a letter of apology?” He raised an eyebrow, which Abigail answered with a wry half smile as she brought up the bowl of bean soup that had been waiting for him on the hob.

“According to Shim—by way of poor little Hap—the south attic, whose window looks onto the alley, was unoccupied and used for storage until Thursday the twenty-fifth. The house was in an uproar that day, of course, with Coldstone and his henchmen questioning Mrs. Tillet, who returned with the luggage at about ten. Hap says, he thinks Mr. Tillet came in later, but he isn’t sure because everything was at sixes and sevens, but at about eleven Mr. Tillet suddenly came downstairs and asked what the commotion was.”

“Came downstairs?”

“As you say,” murmured Abigail. “Hap had just come into the front hall and saw his master come down the stairs and walk straight into the parlor, still in his travel clothes, cloak, and hat. He said, ‘See here, what’s going on?’ and said that he’d just then returned.”

“Whereas in fact he’d returned and gone upstairs—for how long, we don’t know.”

“The following day—the day that you and I spent most of kicking our heels outside Colonel Leslie’s door at Castle William—Hap was in the south wing of the house, where Mr. Tillet has his study, and heard what he thought were footfalls in the attic above. He’d just left both Tillet and Queenie downstairs, and of course being only a little boy—he’s nine, and young for his age I think—he immediately thought it was a ghost. He tiptoed up the attic stairs and found the door locked, which it wasn’t usually up until that time. But from that day the entire attic floor has been kept locked, with only Queenie keeping the key.”

“At least your blameless imbecile Pamela was permitted to go about Mr. B’s house.” Despite his jocular tone, in the firelight John’s eyes were grave. He set the empty soup bowl on the hearth beside him, stared for a time into the low-burning flame. “Madness of a different sort,” he murmured after a time. “And one more difficult to prove, than the kind that carves people up with knives.”

“As you say.” Abigail thrust the poker beneath the logs, sending up a shower of sparks. She would have returned to the settle where she had been, but John put an arm around her waist, drew her to his knee. “Someone—probably this second lover of Mrs. Pentyre’s, but just possibly Richard Pentyre himself—forced the alley window of Rebecca’s house just after the rain began—possibly while Rebecca herself was at the front door asking Queenie just what she was doing lingering by the yard gate. The intruder knew the code and knew that Mrs. Pentyre would be at the house at midnight. When Rebecca came back into the house he struck her over the head, bound her, put her in her bedroom—the best evidence we have, I think, that he had heard about the two murders in ’72, but was not the killer.”

“Were the shutters barred or unbarred?”

“Unbarred, I think they must have been at that point. If Rebecca had sewing to do, or correcting proofs of the Hand of the Lord’s wretched sermons, she would still have been awake when the rain began. He tied the bedroom door shut, then waited downstairs for Mrs. Pentyre to arrive. Rebecca came to her senses, managed to get the scissors from her sewing basket, cut her bonds if she was tied, and got the door open sufficiently to allow her to saw through the rope that held it shut. The murder must have been taking place in the kitchen when Rebecca slipped downstairs. She fled to the Tillet house, quite possibly only semiconscious from her head wound. Queenie let her in, and Rebecca may very well have muttered something about ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ because she remembered that she hadn’t concealed her book of contacts. Queenie got her up to the south attic where she lost consciousness.”

“And this wretch of a cook wouldn’t have spoken even to you, whom she knows to be Rebecca’s closest friend, when she saw you at Rebecca’s door next morning?”

“At all events she didn’t,” said Abigail. “If Rebecca were groggy she may very well have begged Queenie to tell no one, and Queenie took her at her word. Then, too, Queenie may have made up her mind to have a look through the place herself before telling anyone anything.”

“Was there any evidence she’d done so before you, Sam, and Sam’s jolly henchmen returned to completely obfuscate any sign of who the killer might have been?”

“I saw none, but then, I was so shaken by what I’d seen that I may well have missed something. Then, too, the family was due back that day. If I know Queenie, the Tillet house hadn’t been properly cleaned since they’d left for Medford, and it was market day into the bargain. She could well have gone to the market while we four were at the house, and returned just in time to have Sam and the others ‘call on Rebecca’ so that they all went in and ‘discov ered’ the corpse in the bed where Sam had left it.”

“And still didn’t tell Sam or the Watch.”

“That all depends on what Rebecca said to her,” said Abigail. “And what she thought she could make out of the matter. The fact remains that when the Tillets returned to find the Watch and the Provost Marshal’s men going over Rebecca’s house and questioning the servants, Queenie did confide in her mistress, who sent Mr. Tillet upstairs at once to investigate. She herself—Mrs. Tillet, I mean—strode in and claimed to Coldstone that she had just arrived with the luggage, and Mr. Tillet would be along shortly.”

“And Mr. Tillet—or more likely Mrs. Tillet—decided that as long as Rebecca Malvern had disappeared without a trace, now might be an excellent time to acquire a permanent sewing woman who had no family and very few friends to inquire as to her whereabouts?”

Something in his voice made Abigail ask flatly, “You think it’s absurd, don’t you?”

“Actually,” said John, “I don’t.” He shifted her weight on his lap, dug in his pocket for pipe and tobacco. “Your father’s parish at Weymouth is in a long-settled and peaceable town—”

“Hmph. You weren’t there for the last uproar by those who don’t approve of his views on Arminianism.”

“Well, at least your neighbors are a fairly civilized crew. I’ve been trying cases for years in the backwoods circuit courts, in Essex and Worcester and on up into Maine. And you do find men—mostly in isolated settlements, isolated farms—who consider themselves perfectly justified in all kinds of outrageous behavior, that somehow always redounds to their material benefit: keeping sons and daughters as virtual indentured servants; robbing and killing Indians and kidnapping their children to raise in kennels like dogs . . . sometimes taking multiple wives, like your friend the Hand of the Lord, because God told them they might.”

He leaned around Abigail to reach the tongs, brought up a coal from the fire to light his pipe. The sweet- cured scent of the tobacco mingled with the smell of the bread slowly baking in the oven. “God knows, with sufficient justification on their side, even men of accredited sanity, in Virginia, will have girls of twelve and fourteen whipped for stealing food from the kitchens, or locked up for weeks in conditions one wouldn’t make a dog endure, only because those girls happen to be Negroes, and not one of their neighbors thinks twice of it. Rebecca Malvern had left her husband—branding herself a Daughter of Eve in no uncertain terms. She ‘owed’ Mrs. Tillet sewing work, she had been ‘slack’ and ‘not doing her share,’ in an effort that Mrs. Tillet obviously sees as necessary to the material welfare of her family. And, as you say, with the murder she would be presumed dead: She would be officially accounted for. Therefore, no one was likely to search the Tillet house. Is the boy sure?”

“I am sure.” She told him of the attic window, unshuttered now after years closed, and of the dim shape she had seen behind it; of the basket of sewing, the jug of water, the bread on the plate, the extra chamber pot beside the door. “Hap says that he’s seen his mistress carrying bread, water, and sewing up to the attic two or three times in the past week, and once he sneaked up the attic stair, and thought he heard a woman weeping.”