The Ninth Daughter

serpents in her shop, besides her poor cats—the harlot. The succubus—the demon female who torments a righteous man’s dreams. Or would he consider Philomela a nightmare? Poor Mrs. Pentyre, riding at the Colonel’s side to review the troops, with her face painted and her head tir’d like Jezebel—”

They walked on, Abigail’s pattens clinking on the cobbles of Kilby Street and her heavy skirts flapping against her legs. Fort Hill loomed before them, pricked with spots of yellow where the few soldiers left on the mainland manned the guns. At the wharves below, ships stirred and creaked, restless wooden animals in the dark.

“Saying it is Orion,” said John quietly. “And saying that he wouldn’t have killed Rebecca . . . How can you be sure that she’s in hiding?”

“I looked in his attic.”

The lantern-light flashed as John turned his head. “You thought then—?”

“No. It was nowhere in my mind. But I’d just realized she might be being held prisoner somewhere, when I went into his house and he sent me upstairs for laudanum for his mother. I had to look up into the nearest attic, to see how possible it would be. I think at that moment I would have run down the street looking into the attics of every house in turn. It’s only a tiny space up there, you know. One can’t stand up in it, even right under the ridgepole, and there’s no other space in the house, where a woman could be kept.”

Across the open ground, and down the hill to their left, they could see the glow of torches around Griffin’s Wharf, where men still sat up, muskets in hand, around the Dartmouth , and now the Eleanor, as they had mounted guard now for ten days. Out in the harbor the Beaver lay at anchor, where the harbormaster had commanded she remain until the members of the crew had either died of the smallpox that had broken out among them, or were recovered enough to be in no danger of spreading the disease. No word yet, of the Governor sending for troops, from either Britain or Halifax, but surely it was only a matter of time . . .

“Oh, good,” Abigail said, as they emerged from the narrow throat of Gridley Lane to see, a few houses down the street, the weak glow of candles behind the shutters in the downstairs room which Abigail knew to be Sam’s study. “At least we won’t be waking him.”

“You’re tender of Sam’s rest, all of a sudden. I’d have thought you’d delight in shooting him out of bed in order to say, I told you so . . .”

“But what a horrid thing to do to Bess. Besides, after all that’s happened today I’m not sure I could support the sight of Sam in his nightshirt.”

Predictably, Sam was not only awake and dressed, but drinking cider with Dr. Warren and Paul Revere, the latter preparing to take over charge of the guard on Griffin’s Wharf at midnight. With them were two or three others of Sam’s South End cabal that guided the Sons of Liberty, including—a bit disconcertingly—Abednego Sellars. These lesser captains retired to the kitchen while John and Abigail laid before Sam the poem: “ ’Tis Hazlitt’s hand, right enough,” said Abigail, and John nodded agreement. Revere lighted half a dozen more candles and brought them close.

“They’re right.” He read the verse before him, and his dark brow plunged down over his nose in shocked disgust; his dark eyes flicked up to meet Abigail’s. “Good God.”

“Not really,” she murmured in response.

“Do you have the note he sent to Mrs. Pentyre? The one supposed to be from Mrs. Malvern?”

Abigail produced it, and the silversmith held them close together, then produced a glass from his pocket to study them in detail. “The light isn’t good enough,” he said at length. “And the hand is well disguised. Would he have jeopardized one of our own?”

“Would one of Jesus’ disciples have jeopardized Him?” retorted Sam, putting on his greatcoat.

“He could be simply too mad to care,” put in Warren.

“We have seen nothing to tell us,” insisted John, “that Orion Hazlitt is in any way involved in the murder of Mrs. Pentyre, or the disappearance of Mrs. Malvern—or of your precious codebook,” he added. “All we can be fairly sure of, is that he was the author of the two crimes, and the man who has pursued Fluckner’s girl. The rest I presume we can ask him about in due time.”

“Will you take Mrs. Adams home, John?” Sam wrapped a scarf around his throat—another madder-red one, Abigail noted automatically: Really, Boston has entirely too many things in it that too many people have . . . “Or will you come?”

“We’ll go home,” said John. “If you’d send someone to let us know the—outcome—of your visit, I think we should both rather hear it tonight, than wait until I see you tomorrow at the meeting. And to add to that, after the meeting this evening, a man told me there’s a rumor afoot, that a ship is coming across from Lynn within a few days, to take the tea off the Beaver before she even comes into harbor.”

“’Tis what Paul and the doctor came just now to tell me,” responded Sam grimly. “ ’Twill have to be looked into, and at once, tomorrow—”

“It can’t be with the Governor’s approval—”

“I wouldn’t put it past him to hire the Devil himself to get the tea landed. Can you meet with us at nine?”

John nodded. As the other men left, he led Abigail once more out into the night. The wind had scattered the clouds; the night’s cold was worse. In most houses, the thin chinks of lamp- and candlelight had failed. The streets lay stark, under the watery blue of the moon.

“And do you think,” asked Abigail softly, “that Sam, and Dr. Warren, and the others, will wait long enough to ask Mr. Hazlitt whether he in fact knows anything of Mrs. Pentyre’s murder? They won’t dare to turn him over to the authorities, you know.”

“I think you’re right about that.”

“Then is this not in fact putting our own cause above the law?”

“Were we in England,” pointed out John, “and did Orion Hazlitt happen to be a friend of the King’s, or a member of the nobility, I doubt he would even be prosecuted. Come,” he added, and put his arm around her shoulders. “One way or another, we shall hear something before morning, and then we will know what we must do.”

But as the chimes of midnight mingled with the tolling of the alarm bells, Paul Revere—looking uncharacteristi cally haggard and shaken in the feeble shudder of the candlelight—brought the news that Orion Hazlitt had fled from his home.

“The place was shut tight as a drum when we got there; Sam broke a window in the printing shed, to get us in,” he said. “He wasn’t about to wait, you understand, for Hazlitt to pick up some rumor in the morning and disappear with Mrs. Malvern’s cipher-book and list of names, always supposing he had them. Hazlitt wasn’t there. Neither was the book. Sam searched the place.”

Of course Sam searched.

“What was there,” went on Revere steadily, “was Mrs. Hazlitt. Dead, like the others.” He was silent a moment, his eyebrows standing out very dark in the dim glow of her lamp, as if his face was still chalky from what he had seen. “Just like the others.”

Abigail put a hand over her mouth, trying to push from her mind the sight of a fresh bite in the wax yellow flesh of Mrs. Pentyre’s shoulder. The serpent, the harlot, the witch, the nightmare . . .

What nightmares had tormented Orion Hazlitt’s sleep, on the trundle at his mother’s bedside while she murmured in opiated slumber?

What nightmare had he sought to flee, in the sanity of friendship with a woman he couldn’t have?

“The Sons are out looking for him,” Revere continued after a few moments. “Sam has asked me to tell you, that this isn’t to go any farther. We’ll look after our own.”

“I will at least send a letter to Miss Fluckner,” responded Abigail, “alerting her slave-girl—whom—” Her throat closed on Orion Hazlitt’s name, as her mind flung up at her a hundred conversations, a hundred memories, of that handsome and quiet young man. “Who was surely marked for the next victim. I will swear Miss Fluckner to secrecy—she is a fierce partisan to our cause—and Sam surely cannot object to that. And if he does,” she added mildly, “assure him that I will spend the next six months weeping with chagrin at his displeasure.”