The Ninth Daughter

As the gray light thickened, they worked their way back to one of the broken fence-lines that crossed the light second growth of what had been fields, the sergeant marking the way by cutting saplings half through with his knife, and bending them down so that they formed a sort of chain as far as the fence. “Even if the moon’s covered, keep a hand on these,” he breathed. “It’ll lead ye’s to the fence. The fence’ll lead us to the ditch and wall round the great fields, and we can follow those to the road. ’Twill be slow going, but once at the road we can keep one foot in a rut, and thirty of my strides’ll take us to that shanty where the horses are tied.”

“I have a lantern—” It had been dragging at her belt all the afternoon.

“Agh, m’am, it won’t shine a foot before us, but’ll show us up for a mile. And, I never did go out poachin’ with a winker but that I managed to drop it and the candle fell out of it.”

“How’ll we find our way from the house to the first sapling?”

“We’ll do like that old Greek feller.” Muldoon tapped the side of his nose with an expression of wisdom. “The one that treated that poor girl so scaly: I misremember his name. But we’ll have to step pretty lively, I’m thinkin’. Night’s fallin’ fast.”

It was, in fact, about the hour that Abigail and Thaxter had entered the village before, when she and Muldoon came opposite its main crossroad again. Lights had been kindled in the House of Repentance, but—as Abigail had feared—few were going inside. Instead they lingered around its doors in the twilight, or gathered, thicker and thicker, before the big and handsome house, whose windows also began to glow. She recognized Damnation among them, by her height and by the relatively stronger color of her dress. She was one of the ones gesturing, talking, passionately it seemed, and pointing back toward the blockhouse.

“Mr. Hazlitt must have sent her away Wednesday evening, just before the town gates were shut,” Abigail whispered, now shivering in earnest as she stood beside the sergeant’s comforting bulk. “I can’t see how she could have come into town much before this morning, even with a few hours’ start on us. I don’t know where she would obtain a horse. What’s going on now?”

The house door opened. Six men emerged, carrying a sort of bier between them, as if for a dead man. But the Reverend Atonement Bargest, the Hand of the Lord, was far from dead. On the bier he writhed, arms threshing, head rolling, and even across the distance Abigail could hear him moan and cry out, though his words were lost to her.

“What the divil—?”

“The divil indeed,” murmured Abigail. “He’s being tormented by witches—invisible, of course—even as those girls were in Salem Village, all those years ago.” She glanced up at Muldoon. “Or your Aunt Bridget. Something tells me we’re here just in time.”

Men, women, a few children and adolescents came hurrying from the houses to join the little procession that crowded around the bier and followed it to the church. A few bore lanterns. Most carried pine-knot torches, the light yellow and wild on their faces, like an uneasy whirlpool of flame. Muldoon signed to Abigail, and the two made their way farther up the edge of the woods, finally breaking cover at a small house that stood a little distance from the old palisade, one of the few in the village which they had observed included no dog. Muldoon led the way across the fallow garden, circled on the side away from the street, and yanked the latchstring to let them in. The downstairs keeping room was a chasm of almost total dark, save for the glow of the banked fire, at which Abigail lighted her lantern’s candle. She’d already guessed what Muldoon sought.

“Good for her, she’s spun a fair bundle of it.” He dug through the willow basket beside the spinning wheel, pulled out hanks of thick yarn, for stockings or scarves rather than the finer thread that would feed the great loom that crouched in the far corner. So the old Greek he had in mind was Theseus, following the thread-clue to the labyrinth’s heart . . . as she had followed first one clue, and then another, to lead her here. “Is there a shed for laundry?”

Abigail shook her head. “She’ll have her clothes-rope strung upstairs in the attic, this time of year. Will we need rope?” She glanced toward the window, her heart beginning to pound with the sense of panic, of time running out, that had driven her from Boston the moment she had seen Bargest’s handwriting on the threat to Pentyre. Orion killed his mother because he knew he would not be returning to care for her . . . because he was going to make his attack on Pentyre last night. She shuddered at the thought: Had he meant only to cut her throat? Was it that blood that triggered his madness, as it triggered his outrages on Perdita Pentyre’s body?

Was that the message he’d sent here with Damnation? To tell the Hand of the Lord that his Will would be done?

Then Bargest would know that his tool—his human weapon—would either not be returning here at all—that he would be killed—or that he would return, and demand Rebecca’s release. Either way, Rebecca would be no longer of use.

The attic was crammed with supplies—sacks of corn, barrels of apples, smoke-black hams hanging from the rafters to keep them away from mice—but no clothesline. By the attenuated glimmer of the single gable window, and the weak flicker of Abigail’s candle, they eventually located a stout coil of it downstairs in the porch, after what felt like half an hour of hunting. By that time the ground outside was a mere blur of iron gray, the sky barely to be distinguished above the coal-black line of the trees. “Can you find the thicket?” Abigail slipped the lantern-slide shut on her candle, and Muldoon nodded. “Then go now, and rig a line to the blockhouse,” she whispered. “I don’t know what I’ll find there, or how long it’ll take.”

“Stand at the corner of the house toward the wood, then,” whispered the sergeant, “with the lantern-slide open toward me, or I’ll never find the place comin’ back.”

Abigail obeyed. As she stood waiting, she could hear the drift of sound from the House of Repentance, a single voice, crying out in terror, shrieking in horror at the spirit of the witch that assailed him. Now and then, like the gust of wind in the trees, the congregation gasped or screamed in response.

Like the Sons of Liberty, she reflected, when Sam would shout at them, Do you want to see your homes overrun, your goods plundered, your children at the point of British bayonets . . . ?

No—! Like the hammer of the sea . . . or the slow tolling of Boston’s bells . . .

For a time she could make out the black shape of the sergeant, his heavy military cloak belling out behind him, moving over the paler ground. Then she blinked, and could see him no more. She herself could scarcely find the blockhouse, though she oriented herself carefully toward the dark bulk of it against the final limmerance of sky. She followed its wall around, opened the lantern-slide, pointed it out toward the wood.

Herself a Daughter of Eve—the ninth and worst, she recalled: the woman who goes about the town poking her long nose into things that weren’t her affair—Abigail would have given much, to tiptoe down the empty village street and put her head through the door of the House of Repentance. She recalled how an uncle of hers described the girls at the Salem trials, screaming in agony and pointing at the old woman whom the jury had just voted as innocent: It was she, she, who was doing this to them! Did they not see her glowing spirit, squatting on their chests, strangling and pinching and grinning? The jury had reversed their verdict, and old Mrs. Nurse had been hanged.

Sergeant Muldoon’s footfalls crunched in the dark, but Abigail saw nothing of him until he appeared suddenly, a yard from her, in the lantern’s feeble light. The sky was black overcast, thin wind running like scared rats over the fallow fields. The sergeant tied the end of his yarn-clue to a sliver of kindling, which he rammed between the logs at the corner of the house. “Let’s not lose that,” he said.

Abigail shut the lantern-slide. The dark was absolute. They followed the log wall of the blockhouse back around to their right, and Abigail almost broke her shin on the pile of firewood by the door. Opening the slide, they could just see the latchstring.

The remains of a fire glowed in the hearth of what had been a keeping room downstairs, long as two ordinary rooms and smelling of dirt and mold. Searching for the stairway, Abigail had the dim impression of a big table, a litter of broken baskets entangled with the knots and slag-ends of wool. Broken shuttles, and a whittled wood “wheel-finger,” told her that at some point this room had contained spinning wheels and probably a couple of looms, where the women of the village had pursued the wholesale task of cloth-making. Neither looms nor wheels remained. Along the back wall lay the stairs, a sort of heavy ladder that it would have taken all of Abigail’s strength to raise to its place alone. The room was as cold as a tomb.

The ladder, put in its place, hooked onto pegs in the wall just beneath a bolted trapdoor in the ceiling. This opened into darkness only warmer by the most minute degree, a darkness that smelled of dirty blankets, mice, decades of mold, and of chamber pots long uncleaned.