The Ninth Daughter

in the years that her own sister Mary and her husband had lived in Salem. “Remind me of it tomorrow . . . And no, all is well, Sergeant Muldoon is inquiring after another matter . . . Would you know,” she asked artlessly, “the name of that girl who was slashed to death so horribly, about ten years ago out toward Townsend?”

1763—or thereabouts—was, she knew, the year that Orion Hazlitt had come to Boston.

Jemma Purley’s round face clouded, and Abigail knew before she spoke, that she was right.

But Mrs. Purley asked, “Which one?” and Abigail stared at her, aghast.

“There was more than one?”

“Oh, dear, yes.” Mrs. Purley set down her pitcher, dried her hands in her apron as she looked down at Abigail with sorrow and anger in her eyes. “The one from Gilead, we only heard rumor of: Those Gilead folks has always kept their doings to themselves. Purley says, nobody would ever have heard of it at all, except for it being Rose of Sharon Topsford that found the body, and the poor thing has never been quite right after that, seeing what had been done to the girl. But Frankincense Banister—” She shook her head. “It doesn’t do to speak ill of the dead, and whatever the poor girl’s failings—and it was only foolishness, and having her head turned, so pretty as she was—the way she would flirt, and with boys she didn’t know well, we were all afraid she’d find herself in trouble one day, though of course no one expected . . . Is that who you meant?”

“Yes,” said Abigail tonelessly. “I-I knew it was some name of the kind. From a farm, wasn’t she? Near Wenham?”

“A few miles south of Wenham Pond, yes.”

Within a few miles of Gilead.

“And did anyone try bearding that wretch Bargest in his den about it?”

At the mention of the Hand of the Lord, Mrs. Purley’s mouth tightened up. “Well, as I recall it, every single one of his flock was accounted for, the day the poor girl disappeared. But there’s more than one hereabouts, who’ll be pleased when that court case is resolved, and those Boston folks that own that land put the sheriffs onto them and turn them out. Their title’s no good to about three quarters of their fields,” she added, in reply to Abigail’s inquiring look—though in fact Abigail had ascertained nearly as much from Penelope Sellars before leaving Boston. “The case has been dragging on for years, with some Boston merchant whose mother was old Antoninus Sellars’s grand-daughter—and who’s put the sheriffs onto old Bargest’s ‘Chosen Brides.’ A disgrace, the lot of them.” She shook her head.

No other women were traveling abroad that dismal night, so Abigail had the smaller upstairs chamber and its cold—but dry, aired, and bug-free—bed to herself. There was even a small fire in its fireplace. She wrote out the orders from Coldstone to Muldoon, then blew out her candle and lay awake, listening for horses in the court beneath the drumming of the rain.

Though rain, and wind, and the rattling of the window sash were all the sounds that broke the deep stillness, she dreamed of church bells.

Thirty

In darkness she woke—with the instincts of one who has milked cows for most of her thirty years—and in darkness dressed. Downstairs she heard the small sounds of the inn servants making fires, tidying the ordinary, taking bread from the oven.

The wind was less; the rain had ceased. Abigail’s bones ached with the damp.

You will not be sick, she told herself firmly. Descending to the ordinary, she congratulated herself that she’d written a note to John and his reinforcements last night, while she still had candles and the room was still warm enough that she could hold a pen.

Male voices drifted up the stairway, and for one moment her heart gave a leap. But of course it was only Muldoon and the other male guests, consuming bread and cheese and joking one another about who snored and whose names got amorously murmured in sleep.

“—Oh, and Fleurette—who the bloody ’ell is Fleurette . . .”

“My dearest wife—”

“Aargh, ’er and Nan . . . and Margot . . .”

“I have many wives, mes amis; behold, I am a Mohammedan . . .”

All stood as Abigail came down the stairs, and Mrs. Purley brought her corn pudding—as befit her more elevated station—and coffee. The horses are ready like you asked, Mrs. Adams—and a nice bit of bread and cheese for you both, and oats for the beasts—Why, thank you, m’am—Will there be anything else, Mrs. Adams?—Yes, we’ll hand it to him as soon as he arrives . . .

Under a racing cover of cloud, the world was just light enough, at eight, to make out the details of the Danvers road as it turned inland, toward what had once been Salem Village.

“D’you know the place, then, m’am?” asked Muldoon, as Abigail drew rein. From her last visit to Gilead she remembered the old house that lay a little distance down the overgrown track to their right: remembered it because, in the near-darkness in which she and Thaxter had been riding, she hadn’t been able to see the end of the woods some hundred yards ahead, and had hoped to find shelter.

Now in midafternoon, with the woods filled with a sickly rinsed-out light, she could glimpse the ruined walls, the holed and sagging ceiling, in clearer detail. As she had on that first visit, she dismounted, and led Balthazar to the broken door. What had been simply a pitch-black cavern on that night showed up now as a primitive keeping room, the puncheon floor—under its carpet of dead leaves—an assurance that they wouldn’t fall through broken boards into an unsuspected cellar.

She led the horses inside, slipped the bits from their mouths, loosened the saddle cinches, and from the saddlebag poured two little heaps of oats on the floor. Muldoon, who’d lingered in the doorway looking down the road at the fields glimpsed beyond the thinning of the trees, came in to help her: “Is that there Gilead, then, Mrs. A?”

“Beyond the fields, yes. My impression was that the place was larger ten or fifteen years ago. Several houses looked completely deserted, and many of the inhabited ones had their upper stories shuttered up, even in the daytime when we rode out. But it was the end of daylight when we reached here, my husband’s clerk and I, and we were taken immediately to their House of Repentance for evening services. It was well and truly dark by the time the Hand of the Lord had had his say.”

“Then we’d best have a careful look round.” The sergeant took his musket in its wrappings of oilcloth from the back of his saddle, and after it, the pistol that John kept in his office desk under lock and key. “How close are the woods to the buildings?”

With half-closed eyes Abigail summoned back the wet twilight, the impression of trees crowding in on those decaying gray buildings. “A hundred feet?” It was hard to put aside her horrified anger at herself, that she and Thaxter had undoubtedly spent the night only a few dozen feet from where Rebecca—almost certainly—was being kept. “They’ll have gardens, between the houses and the woods, but those will be cleared off now.”

“Aye, but their fences’ll still be up.” The young man led the way from the house, looked down the road toward open ground, blue eyes narrowed. In Boston, Patrick Muldoon’s air of countrified good nature had made him seem naive, primitive, and rather harmless despite his imposing size and crimson uniform. Faced with the prospect of an escape through woods in overcast darkness—she knew precisely how far her lantern would cast light and she