The Ninth Daughter

“Why then do you lock the door on her instead?” Coldstone took the key, and opened the door. “Strange charity, m’am.”

The woman seated on the bed had already staggered to her feet—probably at the sound of footsteps and strange voices—and dropped the chemise she was sewing, flung herself on her knees in front of Coldstone, and threw her arms around his legs. “Please, sir, please, tell her it wasn’t my fault I didn’t get them done!” she babbled. Her long blonde hair, pale as flax, hid her face, and the marks the dog-whip had left stood out purple on her cold- reddened arms. “I couldn’t help! ’Tis I couldn’t hold a needle right with the cold, and I did try! Please tell her!”

The room was like an icehouse. Coldstone reached down and grasped the woman’s arm—she wore only a chemise, with the bed’s single blanket wrapped over it—and brought her to her feet. Tears poured down from her eyes, and snot from her nose, and her fingers left little traces of blood on the officer’s white gloves as she clutched at his hands.

“Make her let me go, sir! I promise I’ll do whatever she asks, but tell her to let me out!”

Coldstone turned to Abigail. “Is this Mrs. Malvern?” With a gentle hand he brushed back the greasy strings of graying blonde hair from a face square, broad, and slightly animal-looking, with its level bar of dark brow and its sloping forehead.

Abigail had already come forward with her handkerchief, gently wiping at the tears, stroking the woman’s shoulder in a way that she hoped was reassuring. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

Twenty-eight

It was well past dinnertime by the time it was agreed that Gomer Faulk—that was the woman’s name— would be taken to Abigail’s house for the next few days, until it could be decided what to do with her. Hester Tillet had a great deal to say, at the top of her lungs, about her “niece’s” inborn inability to tell the truth on any subject whatsoever, and bawled that Abigail would hear from her lawyers for taking from her household one of its members, though as Gomer was a good thirty-five years of age and, according to the disgusted Magistrate Goss, no relation whatsoever to the Tillets, it was hard to discover on what grounds Hester thought she had jurisdiction over her.

“Faulk? Nobody named Faulk in the family. There was a Faulk out in Medford—a drunk good-for-nothing who abandoned his family, as I recall it—but they were no connection of ours, thank God . . .”

Gomer herself clung alternately to Abigail and Lieutenant Coldstone, shivering and wiping her nose with her fingers. “Just don’t let her lock me up again. There’s rats at night, sir, m’am, big ’uns, and they talks to me. I’ll sew for you all you want m’am, sir, just don’t let her whip me again.” She was clearly, as Orion Hazlitt had said of his servant girl Damnation, “lacking.” She couldn’t recall the names of her parents other than Ma and Pa, but said that she’d lived with one family and another in the farms around Medford, the most recent being that of Nehemiah Tillet’s sister and brother-in-law. “They hit me now and now, but they didn’t lock me up. Let me sleep in the cowshed. I like cows, m’am. I takes good care of ’em . . .

“She and that man”—she pointed to Tillet—“come to my uncle Reb’s wedding, and Uncle Reb and Miss Eliza, they said they had to go away, and I couldn’t come with ’em—”

“Someone had to look after the girl,” protested Tillet. “My wife was unsatisfied with the woman then helping her with sewing for the shop—”

Like the crippled boy turning the spinning wheel at Moore’s Farm out in Essex County, reflected Abigail sadly. Handed off, to provide labor to whoever would support him. At least Kemiah Moore and his wife appeared to be willing to feed that boy the same rations they gave their own family, and let him sit among the kitchen’s distractions. But maybe, her darker soul whispered, that was only because he was incapable of wandering away.

“An unfortunate story,” said Coldstone, as they walked back along Fish Street in the gathering dusk. “But not a new one.”

“A letter to Medford will yield more information on the subject,” said Abigail. Her head ached—she prayed Pattie had made some kind of dinner for John and the children, and had thought to save some for her—and she felt infinitely tired. Though she knew Mrs. Tillet’s spew of invective had been simply that—the vomiting forth of a poisoned mind—she felt as if she were physically smeared with filth every time the young Lieutenant turned his eyes upon her. “I do beg your pardon, Lieutenant.”

“For using the King’s authority as it should be used?” he asked. “As a tool to protect those incapable of protecting themselves?” He glanced back at Gomer, walking between Sergeant Muldoon and Trooper Yarrow, seemingly oblivious that her ankles were exposed by the hem of Queenie’s borrowed dress. “What will you do with her? She’s obviously incapable of looking after herself.”

“I’ll write to my father,” said Abigail. “He’s the pastor at Weymouth, across the bay to the south. He’ll know a good family who can take her in and will treat her decently. She seems willing enough to work.”

“Oh, I’ll work, m’am,” provided Gomer, hurrying her steps to close the distance between them. “Just please don’t lock me up with the rats. I got so hungry up there in the attic, and cold. I’ll even sew for you, but I’m no good at it.”

Abigail thought about the single slice of thinly buttered bread, the jug of water. Even the harsh laws of Leviticus enjoined the Hebrews to look after their beasts, and to treat the lowest of their households with common humanity. Which obviously—since the frugal Tillets had smuggled her into their attic while the rest of the household was in turmoil on the day of the murder—they had had no intention of doing, even from the first. Free labor, and the cheapest possible food . . .

At least the slave Philomela, thought Abigail, was worth four hundred dollars to somebody.

She stopped, and laid a hand on Lieutenant Coldstone’s arm. “Lieutenant,” she said, “might I impose upon you for one more favor? And this one,” she added, “will advance us on our way, to finding the murderer of Mrs. Pentyre.”

She had the notes from both Philomela and Lucy Fluckner still in her pocket, but the Fluckner butler Mr. Barnaby barely glanced at them. “A shocking thing it was, m’am,” he said. “Well, there’s always young men who’ll try to get up an affaire with a maidservant, especially one as beautiful as Miss Philomela, and some of them do send poems. Terrible lot of tosh, most of them.” He glanced back at Coldstone, who followed them up the stair—a broad and handsome flight, open in the fashion of wealthy English houses where presumably there was more money to be spent on heating. “But this, sir—m’am—there was something about these, after the first two or three, that made my blood run cold. I didn’t know Miss Philomela had kept that last one. Terrible frightened she was over it—and no wonder! The first few weeks after she got it, I thought she was like to faint, going outside the house.”

He opened the door to the maid’s room, which was a narrow chamber on the main bedroom floor, between the overdecorated demipalaces allotted to Mrs. Fluckner and her daughter. Philomela’s room was very like the girl herself, Abigail thought. No frills, no fuss, though she probably could have gleaned any number of gaudy castoffs from either of her mistresses. On a little table beside the bed lay a book of Sir Philip Sidney’s poems.

The more sinister poem in question was, as Philomela had said, under the loose floorboard beside the head of the bed.

Abigail saw immediately that it was written on the same expensive English paper as had been the note that summoned Perdita Pentyre to her death. Her heart beating hard, she unfolded it, carried it to the window where the last of the daylight still lingered over Boston’s peaked roofs. She remembered what the girls had said of its contents, and braced herself for horrors.

But the words of those first lines were blanked from her mind by the handwriting itself.

No. Oh, no.