The Ninth Daughter

house—the last time Sam had let a mob get away from his control. Governor Hutchinson and his daughter had escaped out a back window, she had heard later, and fled through the winding alleyways of the North End to take refuge with friends. What horror—!

Trembling, she dropped the musket down out the window, tied the lantern to her waist, the heat of the metal palpable even through several petticoats and a quilted skirt, wrapped the rope around her arm as she’d been shown and hoped fervently she was doing correctly—

“There they go!” screamed someone, and as Abigail swung herself out the window—and the rope constricted like an agonizing garrote around her arm—two or three men came around the corner of the house. “She’s getting away!”

Muldoon has time for one shot. The thought passed, very coolly, through Abigail’s mind and, bracing her feet on the house-wall, she began to lower herself as rapidly as she could. Someone fired a shot, then another, followed by a great deal of shouting and cursing and Muldoon’s voice bellowing, very unlike his usual good-natured self, “And the next one goes between the eyes of the first man steps forward!”

He has John’s pistol.

Then she was on the ground. She ran to the sergeant’s side, scooped up the musket that he’d dropped to the ground to draw the pistol: “Go!” he said, and she went. The yarn-clue was there, and she fled along it, the musket weighing pounds in her hand, the spreading firelight showing her up. At the thicket she waited, gasping, hearing shots behind her in the dark and seeing the black figures of men and woman silhouetted on the red glare of the fire.

Men and women both. The words ran in a circle in her head. Men and women both . . .

The way she herself, and Rebecca—and poor Mrs. Pentyre—had arrayed themselves at the sides of the men, in their fight for the colony’s rights?

She shoved the thought from her as she’d have struck a mouse away that tried to climb her skirts: We’re following the principles of justice! The rights that Englishmen have fought for—

But she knew perfectly well that many members of the Sons of Liberty were in the organization simply because they were following Sam Adams.

It isn’t the same. She knew it in the marrow of her bones.

His recent outburst against her notwithstanding, would Sam hesitate to order killed a man he saw as a threat to the Sons?

It isn’t the same.

But at that moment, kneeling, gasping, in the wet ground by the hazel thicket, it seemed frighteningly close.

“Mrs. Adams?” “Abigail?”

Whispered voices, hoarse with exertion and fear. “Here.” She shot the slide back for one instant, then closed it again.

“Bide,” said Muldoon.

Rebecca caught at her arm, her shoulder, her weight frighteningly slight. How few days ago had she wakened and been able to eat and drink? At the same moment the pistol was put into her hand, the musket taken, and she heard the oily snick of the lock, the faint noise of a cartridge being ripped. A moment later, the clink of the rod rammed home: once, twice, thrice. Every man in the militia whined like a schoolboy about drill—How many times we got to show them we know how to load our bloody guns?

It wasn’t until she heard Muldoon loading his rifle in seconds, by touch, in the dark, with the torchlight coming toward them, that she understood why British foot soldiers had to drill for hours. So that you load your rifle— cartridge, ball, powder, patch, ram—with no more hesitation than you bring your spoon to your mouth; the way she, or her mother, could knit in the dark.

The blockhouse was ablaze. The light covers that had blocked the rifle-slits inside had burned away; flame jetted out like the emanations of demon eyes. A single great column of fire roared from the broken roof. Rebecca’s hand clutched tighter on Abigail’s arm. Deeply as she had been asleep, thought Abigail, she would not have waked until the fire had climbed into the room. Her hand closed hard around her friend’s.

Across the dark meadow, torches were beginning to spread out.

Muldoon said, “We ain’t out of the woods yet, ladies.”

The night was freezing, the darkness absolute. Though she’d put on her gloves, Abigail’s fingers were numb with the cold and it was nearly impossible sometimes to distinguish the branches and saplings Muldoon had cut and bent during the day; she stumbled repeatedly on the uneven ground, the bent roots and old stones of the wood-land edge. Thorns tore and grabbed at her skirt, her hair, her face. Through the thickets to her left she glimpsed the fire of the burning blockhouse, and sometimes the moving yellow flare of a torch. But no light penetrated the thin woods through which she and her companions moved. Had Muldoon not spoken softly to her she would have despaired a dozen times: She wanted to cry, Don’t leave me! like a child. But every time she reached the end of one sapling, and couldn’t find the next, she managed to keep her voice adult and level and soft—“Sergeant?” “Here, m’am. This way.” He must think I’m a complete idiot—

They reached the fences. Knots of torchlight flitted from tree to tree in the blackness, but nothing close. Abigail leaned on the first fence-post, trembling, and very near her, heard that light Irish voice ask, “You still with us, Mrs. M?”

“I regret—I am,” whispered Rebecca. “Hoped—I was dreaming—all those other dreams. What is this? Who are those people? Orion—Orion killed Perdita—” Her voice cracked a little, and Muldoon said, “Have a bit of this. Mrs. A?”

“I was rather hoping it was a dream as well.” Abigail dug in her skirt pockets for the remains of the bread and cheese they’d been given by Mrs. Purley. They’d eaten most of it, watching in the woods that afternoon. “I know what Orion did, dearest. We’ve been looking for you for two weeks.” She divided the cheese—pitifully tiny morsels, when pulled into three—and handed the others chunks of the bread. In return she received Muldoon’s canteen, and a smaller flask which proved to be half full of British Army rum. “You’ve been in Gilead—”

“That horrid place where Orion grew up?” Her voice was weak, but she sounded very much herself. “Then—it wasn’t a dream—”

“What wasn’t?”

“The Hand of the Lord. Bargest. He was standing by my bed. Not that I ever saw him in my life, but he looked exactly like”—her voice stuck a little on his name—“as Orion described him to me.”

“He spoke to you of him, then?”

“Heavens, yes. I’ve been helping him edit those nasty sermons of his for a year and a half now. Poisonous, dirty-minded, and so vain.” She leaned against the fence-rails: Abigail felt them shift in their sockets, smelled the moldy stink of the blanket she wore. “I asked him, why did he put up with that man’s interference. Constant finicking—nothing ever right. Everything we’d settle on, Orion would ride back there for approval and there was always something wrong. I knew he was getting nothing for it. He said, I owe the Reverend more than I can ever say.”

“What he owed him,” said Abigail softly, “is that the Reverend knew that Orion had killed a girl here. Two girls.”

She heard the hiss of Rebecca’s breath, and felt slight movement through the fence-rail. Wondered if her friend had so far forgotten her conversion, as to cross herself.

Rebecca whispered, “He is mad.”

“Bargest, or Orion?”

They moved off again, following the line of fence-rails. “I think—both. Orion—it wasn’t a nightmare, was it?” Rebecca stumbled, and Abigail, immediately behind her, caught her.

“No. I think Bargest told him that Mrs. Pentyre was one of the Nine Daughters of Eve—”