The Ninth Daughter

you, and accompany me. You and I are going on a little journey.”

Dearest Friend,

I pray this letter will reach you quickly. Shim Walton is good at finding people in the North End. I have sent another like it to Sam, and a third—suitably excised—to Lt. Coldstone.

The man who wrote a threat of death, under your name, to Mr. and Mrs. Pentyre was the Hand of the Lord Atonement Bargest, for the simple reason (I will confirm this with Abednego Sellars or his wife before I leave for Gilead this morning) that the Gilead congregation has been in a lawsuit with Pentyre over the former Sellars lands in Essex County, lands upon which much of Gilead stands. The suit as I recall is coming up for final judgment at the next Session. To kill Pentyre alone would be insufficient, as Mrs. Pentyre would inherit the lands— and the lawsuit—in the event of her husband’s death. The next heir—Pentyre’s brother—lives, with the remainder of the family, in England.

Therefore, you must undertake at once to protect Richard Pentyre, and to find Orion Hazlitt before he reaches him. He will, I assume, have gone to Castle William.

I am not sure, but I suspect that Hazlitt may have killed someone—probably a young woman—at Gilead years ago, and that Bargest knows it. Certainly he has a hold of some kind over the man, beyond mere superstition. I don’t believe Hazlitt even knows that Bargest wrote the threat, directing suspicion toward the Sons of Liberty (and away from Gilead).

My fear is, that Rebecca, having escaped imprisonment in her room, saw Orion, and was apprehended by him before she could get out of the house. If he did not immediately kill her—and I do not believe he did or would—the only place he could have sent her was to Gilead itself, keeping her and his mother both dosed with laudanum while he dispatched Damnation to the settlement with instructions to Bargest to send (or come) to fetch her from one of the smuggler-barns across the bay from Boston, to which Hazlitt could take her one night. I think she must have been in the bedroom overhead, unconscious, even as I talked to Orion and his mother on Thursday, and that she was in one of the deserted dwellings in Gilead when Thaxter and I passed through there the following Monday night.

For this reason I have commandeered Sergeant Muldoon—who is under the impression that he is obeying his commanding officer’s orders—and am on my way to Gilead even now. I beg of you, send reinforcements after us at once, for should Bargest discover that he has been implicated in this crime, I do not put it past him to incite violence against us, to protect his own position.

Likewise I have warned Thaxter, Gomer, and Pattie to keep the children close to home, and to let no one see them until you have given them word.

I trust that you (and suitable assistance) will catch us up on the road.

Your own,

Portia

They spent the night in Salem. The modern seaport town had had little to do with the witchcraft trials that had spread over Essex County like a poison-rash not quite eighty years before. “They weren’t in this town at all, then?” Sergeant Muldoon sounded disappointed.

Rain rattled the darkening casements of Purley’s Tavern, as Mrs. Purley—who always reminded Abigail of a dried apple-doll—set before them a dish of stew and a fresh-baked loaf of bread. Wind shrieked around the eaves. Abigail gratefully drank the landlady’s excellent cider, feeling that she would never get warm again.

“There may have been one or two here, once the accusations were started,” she said. “When people found they could accuse their personal enemies of sending out their spirits to do evil, when the accused themselves were demonstrably elsewhere, a great many found they knew people who must be witches . . . But the accusations themselves began in Salem Village, about eight miles west of here. They changed the name of that settlement to Danvers.”

“I can see why they’d do.” The young man shook his head, and mopped busily at the gravy. The men at the other table—clerks and supercargoes, they looked like, from one of the many ships at anchor—burst into talk and laughter over some witticism, their voices loud in the ordinary-room that had no other customers. After a time he asked, “ ’Tis what this Hand of the Lord told this Hazlitt, then, isn’t it? That Mrs. Pentyre was a witch, and had sent her spirit to do some wicked thing?”

“I think he must have. Or something very like it.” Abigail glanced at the window as the wind shook it again, praying at every moment that each sound was John—with a suitable troop of Sons of Liberty at his back—coming to her assistance. “Mrs. Pentyre and her husband, who evilly contested God’s will that had given the land to the Gilead Congregation. How could such ill-intentioned people not be in league with the Devil?”

Muldoon said, “T’cha!” and reached for another hunk of bread with an enthusiasm that gave Abigail a very bad impression of His Majesty’s generosity to his servants. “Sounds like me Aunt Bridget,” he added. “She’s got it well in her head, that the Divil’s got naught to do but spend his days urgin’ folks on to make her life harder for her. Says she can see him, in the shape of a black bird, or a black cat, or sometimes a spider, whisperin’ in the ear of Grinder Givern—that’s our landlord’s rent-agent—or Mrs. O’Toole the tavern keeper’s wife, just before they go ask her to pay up her bills or whate’er it is that she’s diviled about that day. She’s still got friends that believe her, mostly ’cause she tells them she sees the Divil urgin’ on folks to make their lives miserable, too, but mostly in Ballyseigh—that’s home—they just say, ‘Well, there’s Bridget Muldoon on a tear again.’ She’s never told any to go do no murder.”

He shrugged back his cloak in the warmth of the hearth, and one or two of the men who shared the ordinary-room with them glanced warily at his red coat. He had accepted Abigail’s assurance that Coldstone’s note to her was in fact orders to him to accompany her and obey her commands, and didn’t seem in the least troubled by the fact that the whole northeast section of Massachusetts had for two weeks been flooded with pamphlets describing the British troops as murderers intent upon enslaving the population in the name of the King. No imagination? she wondered. Or simply a stolid sense of duty as unshakeable as Coldstone’s own. Perhaps the fact that he was alone—and clearly acting the role of bodyguard to a civilian woman —lessened the chances of random assault, but Abigail was very aware of being watched, and undoubtedly discussed in whispers in the shadows of the ill-lit inn.

“Bein’ that the Hand of the Lord did tell him,” he went on after a worried silence, “sure and he didn’t tell him to . . . to cut her up the way he did, and all the rest of it. He wouldn’t have told him that.”

“I’m sure he did not.” Abigail put her hands around her mug of cider, slowly feeling the warmth returning to them. “Being unable to see beyond his own vanity, to the point of madness, himself, I’m sure it never crossed his mind that a man who is mad cannot control the shape his madness takes, nor when it will seize on him.”

She was silent a moment, remembering a man named James Otis—a great thinker, a great organizer, a pillar of the Sons of Liberty, who had slowly gone mad as a bedbug. His sister—to whom Abigail still wrote—had spoken to her of his torments, knowing that he could no longer be trusted, of her wretchedness at watching that brilliant mind eclipsed, and knowing that there was nothing anyone could do to save him.

When Orion is sane, she wondered, does he know that he’s mad?

Or does he only suspect it in his dreams?

When Muldoon excused himself to her and rose, and crossed to the other table to make the acquaintance of the men with whom he’d share one of the beds in the big chamber upstairs that night, Abigail sat for a time in thought. She should, she knew, put in a half hour with quill and paper, composing orders purportedly from Lieutenant Coldstone to Sergeant Muldoon instructing him to go where she told him and do what she said, in case it later occurred to him to ask someone else to verify the document she’d shown him.

Instead, when Mrs. Purley came in with another pitcher of steaming cider, Abigail beckoned her. “My dear, I hope that soldier with you doesn’t mean your Mr. Adams is still in trouble with His Majesty?” said the innkeeper’s wife softly. “What a fuss they made, over that horse he left here lame—and by the by, Mr. Thaxter left his pipe here on accident when he came to fetch the beast, and we’ve got it saved for him in the pantry—”

“Thank you.” Abigail smiled, and clasped the woman’s hand. She’d become well acquainted with Mrs. Purley