The Ninth Daughter

knew it would be next to useless—Abigail felt suddenly grateful that she was with an Irish farmhand used to the ways of bogs and fields, rather than the cleverest of Boston law clerks. “Moon’s on the wane, too, and them clouds don’t look like breakin’. We’ll barely be able to see, goin’ in. Comin’ out, we’ve got to strike a fence and know which way to follow it, if we’re to make it back here with both feet. Thank Christ the road’s good and rutted.”

“And that it’s December and cold as a well digger’s elbow,” murmured Abigail. “They’ll all be indoors.”

As if to mock her words, the crack of a gunshot sounded somewhere in the brown and silver woods, a hunter seeking to make the most of what game there was before the last of the squirrels retired for their winter naps. “Almost all,” she temporized primly, and Muldoon grinned.

“Better watch out for them behind us, then, if they take it into their heads we’re the divil’s henchmen. All over the barrack, they say colonials grow up with guns in their hands, an’ don’t have to be taught to shoot ’em, like we do that the landlords have up for poachin’ if we so much as throw a rock. Lead on, m’am.”

For nearly a mile they skirted the edge of the open fields that lay to the eastern side of the village. The rain had been much less here, inland from the sea, but the going was slow, wet leaves and broken branches treacherous underfoot. The thicker undergrowth along the edge of the woods screened them from sight of the village itself, but within the woods the ground was clearer, the world bathed in a cold shadowless light. Now and then Abigail and her escort would work their way through the knots of hazel and bindweed, to the ditch that demarcated the fields. Beyond the ditch, low stone walls kept wild pigs, deer, and—probably more effectively—saplings and creepers at bay.

“Looks a right mess to get a plow through,” whispered Muldoon, gazing across the brown field with its pocked, uneven ground. “What do they grow hereabouts?”

“Maize—Indian corn—mostly, and beans and pumpkins between the rows. The Indians used to not plow at all, just make hills for each plant, and bury a dead fish in each hill, to put heart into the plant. We grow corn on our farm—south of Boston, in Braintree—as well as wheat and rye, but ’tis a hard crop on the soil. If you’re to grow corn you need three times the land you’re going to plant, plus meadows for hay.”

“And it all belongs to somebody else anyway, you say?”

“A great deal of it. It isn’t that unusual, for boundaries to get mixed up, especially if the land goes through the hands of a speculator. When Bargest originally sought out land for his congregation he bought what was cheapest without looking into title too closely.” Abednego Sellars himself had been absent when Abigail had called at the chandlery on her way out of Boston—evidently a good many of the Sons of Liberty were out investigating the rumor that the Beaver was going to be surreptitiously unloaded at sea. But Penelope Sellars had provided a wealth of detail about her detested in-laws’ legal troubles, with considerable spiteful satisfaction, including the information that indeed, the case was scheduled to be settled at the next General Court. Legal details aside, Abigail couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that the decision would go against a good friend of the Crown who dined regularly with the Governor.

‘And I will give unto thee the land wherein thou art a stranger, for an everlasting possession,’ the little woman had told her; That’s what their Hand of the Lord wrote on his court deposition, when they asked him for proof of where he’d got title to have his folks farming those acres. And, ‘This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed . . .’ just as if HE were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all rolled into one. AND he had his congregation run off the bailiffs, that Pentyre had sent out—just as if the man wasn’t in a position to have this Hand of the Lord taken up for debt and bigamy, too . . .

What had Thaxter said of Richard Pentyre? God help you if you cross him . . .

And God help you, thought Abigail uneasily, if you cross the Hand of the Lord.

And Perdita Pentyre, who would have inherited the lands were her husband to die, had been merely a detail to be cleared from the path of the righteous.

The woods grew thinner around them, sumac and sapling pine replacing the immemorial heaviness of hickory and oak. The ground became more even underfoot, and the broken remains of a wall slanted away before them. Following the woods’ edge, Abigail saw the houses of the village much closer, and the remains of what had been a palisade in the days when Indian attack was a real possibility. Above the gray overcast, the sun had passed noon.

“Well, that place looks a fair mansion, anyway—”

“The Reverend Bargest’s, at a guess,” Abigail murmured. It was the handsomest and best-kept in the village. Troublingly, men and women stood about in front of it with an air of people waiting for news. Now and then someone would emerge from one of the other houses, cross to the waiting knots. Even at this distance, Abigail could see the tension of question and reply.

“Would he be ill, then?”

“What, he?” Despite her uneasiness, Abigail couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Surely he can cure himself of anything with a touch? Perhaps his most recent Bride has gone into labor.” But the sight filled her with dismay. She had counted on three solid hours of the Chosen One’s evening sermon, to allow her to get in, release Rebecca, and make good an escape before total darkness set in. The possibility that the Reverend would be ill and unable to preach had never crossed her mind.

“Well, let’s get in a smitch closer, and sit and watch a spell. ‘Mostly you don’t need to ask questions,’ me mother always says, ‘if you’ll just hold your peace and keep your eyes open.’ ”

“She sounds like a wise woman, your mother.”

“Ach.” He shook his head. “When I’d tell her so, she’d roll up her eyes at the rafters an’ say, ‘I’m scarcely that, boy-o; I married your Da’, didn’t I?’ Yet she always did give me the best advice.” He fell silent, as they moved closer yet to the buildings. There were perhaps forty houses, not counting cowsheds and outbuildings, straggling along a single rutted lane which perished in the yard of the last dwelling in the town. Another lane crossed it, joining the Reverend’s house (as Abigail surmised it) with the House of Repentance. Nearly half of these dwellings clustered within the ruined quadrangle of the old palisade, and three appeared to have been part of its curtain wall.

As she watched the inhabitants of the village moved about their circumscribed winter chores—cutting kindling or hauling in sledges of wood from the surrounding wilderness; feeding chickens in their coops or tending boiling pots where by the stink of it soap was being rendered. Most, Abigail knew, would be laboring at indoor winter tasks: spinning, weaving, carding, sharpening tools, and mending harness. Orion grew up here.

She could almost see him, toddling adoringly at his mother’s heels down that muddy street. Beautiful, like her, with her raven hair and green eyes. And she’d thought nothing of dragging him along with her to live under the domination of her monomaniacal lover. And he, who had only his love to use, to draw her back to him, had been trapped in the sticky webs of neediness and domination.

I’ve tried to act for the best, but I can’t be two people!

Would things have been different, if he had been brought up in anything approaching normal circumstances?

Or with madness, did it make a difference?

Yet while her mind ran on all this, Abigail’s gaze moved over the squalid little settlement, picked out details. Who went into which doors, who came out, how long they remained. Which houses had the look of habitation— cows, chickens, dogs, gardens harvested recently, smoke in the chimneys, outhouses that smelled of use—and which did not. She and Muldoon shifted their position several times in the course of the afternoon, watching patiently as hunters, not even knowing quite what they looked for.

“You say he kept her stupefied with laudanum before he took her across the bay—”

“He had plenty in his house. I don’t see how else he would have kept her quiet.”

“Oh, aye. Our landlord’s mother had the habit of it, and God knows she didn’t know Easter from Christmas for months on end. But you had to watch her. Lord Semphill, he’d keep her locked in her room, but you couldn’t leave a candle with her, and they had to bar the windows, for she’d sometimes try to break ’em. Would they still have her under it now, d’ye think, ten days later?”

“I have reason to think she was struck over the head,” Abigail murmured back. She shifted her cloak, where it had become entangled with the small horn lantern at her belt, and its little satchel of candles. “I don’t know how badly. Nor can I guess what the Reverend Bargest told whatever family is in charge of caring for her. They must be