The Ninth Daughter

She felt sick, almost dizzy with the rush of surmise and horror, pieces of some monstrous mosaic falling into place . . .

And worse than that, the vertiginous shock of how close she’d stood to the man.

Dear God in Heaven—!

“Mrs. Adams?” Coldstone was watching her face narrowly. Quickly she turned to the second page, aware that her fingers were shaking. “Do you know the hand?”

“No. It’s—” She shook her head, stammered—groped for some other reason to account for her distress. “It’s just that it’s a little like my father’s, at first glance—that rounding of the letters . . . It shocked me for an instant, that’s all.” Had I babbled, ‘Good Heavens, it looks exactly like the Emperor of China’s,’ it would not be so obvious a lie . . .

“Mrs. Adams.” The officer took the sheets from her hand, and his dark eyes traveled swiftly over the lines. Then he returned his gaze to her, and she looked aside, fighting to keep her thoughts from her face and aware she must be white-lipped and distracted as one who has seen a ghost. “What is it?”

“Naught.” She could barely get the word out.

“Naught,” he repeated, and it was the first time she saw emotion—rage—blaze in his eyes, cold as the northern lights. “Even with what you know. Naught.”

Abigail looked away. “My secrets are not mine to tell.”

“Nor are mine,” said Coldstone quietly. “Yet I have spoken with those who have been magistrates in London for many years, and on one fact they all agree: that these men do not stop their crimes. How many more women are you willing to have die, Mrs. Adams, before you conclude that protection of the innocent is more important to you than shielding politically suspect friends? May I take these?”

“Let me keep two pages.” Her voice sounded stifled in her own ears. “In case one of my politically suspect friends recognizes it.”

Without a word he pocketed the other three sheets, and preceded her down the handsome stairs. Mr. Barnaby glanced at them inquiringly, but neither spoke. At the outer door Coldstone looked up and down the darkening length of Milk Street. At least two dozen of Revere’s North End boys loitered still, hands in pockets, studiously paying not the slightest attention to the two soldiers stationed beside the Fluckner door. “Go on to the wharf,” said Abigail. “You won’t be molested, and there’s enough light left, for you to return to Castle Island. I will circulate these”—she touched her pocket—“and see if the hand is familiar—”

“And if it belongs to one of the Sons of Liberty, will that be the last I hear of it?”

He was so angry she could almost see it, coming off him like frozen smoke. In a voice held steady with an effort, Abigail said, “We aren’t savages, Lieutenant. Even as we are not traitors.”

He faced her in the thin twilight. “You are not a savage, Mrs. Adams,” he replied. “Yet you are devoted to a cause—which you feel to be right—which is being led by men who feel themselves justified in breaking the King’s law. Whether that law is just or unjust is immaterial in the face of the fact that you —and they—believe your cause to be above law. Even as those killers of witches in Salem a generation ago believed theirs to be. Such an attitude, m’am, makes you as dangerous as they.”

He bowed, and left her on the steps. The circle of patriots followed him and his men, like sharks around a ship’s boat, out of sight in the gloom. When they had gone, young Dr. Warren emerged from the shadows of a nearby alley, raffish-looking in a mechanic’s corduroy jacket and rough boots. “May I escort you home, Mrs. Adams?”

Later, Abigail recalled that she’d talked with him of something, but didn’t know what, and she was hard-put not to simply answer his remarks at random. Her mind seemed to return, again and again, to two things:

These men do not stop their crimes.

And the poem about the slaughter of a red-haired whore, written in Orion Hazlitt’s hand.

“Will you come with me to Sam’s?” John picked up his boots, which he’d already pulled off by the fire by the time Abigail handed him the two sheets of fe vered verse. “It’s gone beyond choice, now. You didn’t do anything foolish like try to see Hazlitt, did you?”

“I walked down Hanover Street.” Abigail took off her apron, closed the sewing box that she’d been working on when John had returned home. Upstairs, the children and Pattie slumbered in their beds. “The shop was shuttered, and there was no light in the upstairs windows. I had not the courage to do more.”

“You had more sense, you mean.” John fetched their coats and cloaks from the pegs beside the door—his own still cold to the touch—while Abigail climbed to the little room Pattie shared with the younger boys and now with Gomer Faulk. She gently woke Pattie, and bid her watch until they returned. Only then, wreathed in scarves and cloaks and hoods and hats, with a lantern bobbing ineffectually from John’s hand, did they step out into the windy night.

“Is Coldstone right?” asked Abigail softly after a time. “Have we become like the hanging judges years ago? Like medieval Inquisitors, who would kill a man to save his soul? Abrogating to ourselves the right to do so, because we felt it was right?”

“The only ones who do that,” replied John after thought, “are those who see the world as they did, with only a single answer, not only to that problem, but to all problems. And the single-minded certainly do not number Sam among their ranks, you know. Nor will he condone murder, just because a man has served the liberties of his country.”

“No,” said Abigail. “No, I know that. Orion—no wonder he didn’t harm Rebecca! And no wonder she went into hiding—”

“If it was Hazlitt who killed Mrs. Pentyre.” John held aloft the lantern as they entered the square before the State House and the Customs house, where the Massacre had taken place. Every shutter in town was barred, and at this hour, most of the windows behind them were dark. The night watchman’s cries drifted to them from another street, barely to be heard beneath the steady tolling of the bells. The wind made the feeble light sway even in John’s hand, and the waning moon, breaking through the clouds, showed Abigail movement stirring in the alleyways. A chip of light flared, where someone closed a slide over a lantern. “ ’Tis all right,” he said softly, when she caught at his sleeve. “Sam’s boys, most like.”

“And was it Sam’s boys,” she asked, vexed, “who’ve followed me, when I’ve been abroad at night?”

“Damn his impertinence,” growled John. “But likely, yes. I’ll have a word to say to him.” They walked on in silence.

“When you say,” said Abigail after a moment, “if it was Orion who killed Perdita Pentyre—You still think there were two criminals, and two crimes?”

“I don’t doubt he committed the others, and that it’s he who has been following that poor slave-girl and sending her poems. But killing Mrs. Pentyre—” He shook his head. “To say nothing of throwing the blame off onto me. There are men whose loyalty I’ve doubted, Abigail, men I think Sam needs to be more careful in his dealings with . . . but not Hazlitt. For God’s sake, why commit the crime in the house of the woman he loves? And why steal her list of contacts?”

“What else would he have done with it?” countered Abigail. “Left it for the Watch? Handed it back to Sam?”

“But in Rebecca’s house—”

“Where else,” asked Abigail softly, “could he be sure of getting Mrs. Pentyre alone? These other women whom he—he fixed upon, to whom he was drawn in some unholy fashion—these women he convinced himself were the Daughters of Eve. They were, as Lieutenant Coldstone said, common women. Women whom any man could come to and find unprotected . . . or in poor Philomela’s case, a woman whose access he could purchase, though thankfully it was beyond his price. Perdita Pentyre wasn’t. Yet to him she was Jezebel the Queen.”

“Jezebel—?”

“Remember Bargest’s sermons that I told you of? About the Nine Daughters of Eve, that lie in wait to destroy a man’s soul? The serpent, the witch—we know Mrs. Fishwire had any number of