The Ninth Daughter

“God, not that horrible thing! He polished that sermon like a jewel—Orion said he must have given it once or twice a year, the whole time Orion was growing up here. Simply vile! All Woman’s fault, that Man sinned—” She stumbled again, with a soft sob of pain.

“Here, m’am, this won’t do.” Muldoon’s voice sounded very close, and by the swish of clothing and the fence- rail brambles, Abigail guessed he’d picked Rebecca up again. “Up you come. You good for another piece, then, Mrs. A?”

Abigail sighed. “Lead on.”

It was harder to speak softly enough for safety, and still be heard. She whispered, “Gilead’s about ten miles from Townsend, but we must stick close to the Salem road. John and others will be coming. I know they’ll be coming.”

“Well, if we start wanderin’ about in the woods we’ve had it for sure,” remarked Muldoon matter-of- factly.

The fence became a stone wall, and they followed the wall in the blackness. The harsh wind carried the smell of open fields and smoke. Behind them, Gilead was a cluster of coals around the dimming ruby of the blockhouse. The trees on their right muttered like live things disturbed in their sleep. Abigail said, “They can’t let us escape.”

And Muldoon said, “Aye. That they can’t.”

“Pentyre owns most of the land under the Gilead fields,” she explained softly, as the young sergeant helped her over the wall. “Bargest was swindled when he bought the place, it sounds like. The case has been in the courts for years—”

“I know. Half those sermons were about how the Chosen of the Lord is being persecuted for his beliefs —”

“For his belief that he can do whatever he likes, maybe—including bigamy and fornication, which Pentyre had him up for as well. Perdita was her husband’s heir, of course. The next heir would never come back to this country to straighten things out. Bargest sent Pentyre a letter, threatening him and Perdita with murder by the Sons of Liberty. Signed with one of John’s names, which he must have got off a pamphlet.”

“Fly old duck,” muttered Muldoon. “You got to admit, ’tis clever.”

“If he’s so clever,” murmured Rebecca, “will he have his men waiting for us at the road?”

Abigail felt as if she were eight years old again, and that her brother had struck her in the wind with a chunk of firewood. Sick, and cold, and suddenly too tired to move another foot. “They’ll have found the horses—”

“That shanty’s a bit off the track,” said the sergeant, as they moved on. “Watch it here, m’am—” A hand groped for her elbow in the dark, supported her where the ground turned to a morass whose surface ice crunched sharply underfoot. “As I said, we can’t leave the road. And if we don’t get ’em, sure they’ll catch us by daylight come mornin’. I been watchin’ for torches coming this way from the village, and seen none, but that doesn’t mean they’re not usin’ a dark-lantern. We’ll just have to take a sharp listen, ’fore we go in for the beasts.”

They trudged in silence. Though Abigail fought to keep her concentration sharp, cold, hunger, daylong fatigue, and bone-deep exhaustion dragged at her thoughts, which kept returning to a gnawing anxiety about where John and the others might be. She found herself a dozen times obsessively calculating how many hours had passed since she’d sent off her notes—good heavens, did any of those notes actually arrive? Had ill befallen Shim, or Jed Paley, or the others in carrying them? Had Orion accomplished Pentyre’s murder after all? Had John and the others all been arrested?

For that matter, had their arrest (if it had taken place) triggered rioting? Was there fighting in Boston? Her mind fretted at the memory of cries and gunfire barely a street away in winter twilight, of running to King Street in the icy night four years ago, to see the bodies lying in the churned-up snow, of the stink of gunfire hanging in the raw air.

Abigail, stop it! she told herself firmly. They’ve just got lost.

A more prosaic and likely reason, and one which just as surely condemned her and her companions to wandering in darkness until the witch-hunters found them. But at least it didn’t involve British cannon opening fire on Boston.

“Bide here.” She heard the rustle of Muldoon’s cloak, and the blanket as he lowered Rebecca to the ground. He took the musket from Abigail’s hand. “The beasts should be hereabouts, t’other side of the road. If I call, Mrs. Adams, you cross the road, follow my voice. If I call, Mrs. Malvern, you know they’re there and they’ve got me.”

“You’re very good at this,” Abigail whispered admiringly.

“Saints, m’am, I spent the whole of me boyhood poachin’ Lord Semphill’s rabbits. Me an’ the other lads, we had it worked to fare-thee-well, how to keep from gettin’ a thrashin’.” With barely a rustle he moved off through the trees. Rebecca’s hand closed over hers, cold as ice, and Abigail groped around them in the darkness until she found what felt like the remains of a deadfall tree. To this she guided her friend, and sat beside her, unbuckling her belt to bring the shuttered lantern between them. She hadn’t dared crack the slide so much as a half inch for light, for most of their flight, but the hot metal was a comfort to fingers nearly frozen.

Above the wind in the trees it was nearly impossible to distinguish smaller sounds.

Then a gun fired like the breaking of Doom, and Muldoon yelled, “Mrs. Malvern, run for it!”

And at half a dozen points around them, dark-lanterns shone out suddenly among the trees.

Thirty-three

Knowing exactly how far the light of her own lantern illuminated the darkness around her—which was not at all—Abigail immediately shoved Rebecca backwards off the log where they sat, snapped open the slide of her lantern, and got to her feet, holding the lantern before her to illuminate her own face and plunge everything around her into still blacker night. At the same time she faced into the woods and shouted, “Rebecca, don’t come any closer!” Rather to her astonishment, five of the dozen or so men coming toward them out of the woods immediately whirled and raced off in that direction, lanterns aloft, shouting, “I see her! I see the witch! Hark how her eyes glow!”

Rebecca, under Muldoon’s dark army cloak, had the good sense to lie perfectly still as Abigail strode away from her to intercept her captors.

“I suppose the Chosen of the Lord is waiting courageously back in the safety of the village?” Abigail demanded briskly. “While you blunder about in the woods to face an armed man? Get your hand off me, sir,” she added, as one of the men moved to seize her arm. “Now that my friend has fled to safety I have no reason to flee from you. You can’t murder every outsider who passes through your village, you know.”

“ ’Tis no crime, to exterminate a witch.” The very tall, very young farmer who faced her seemed to be the leader of this portion of the mob. He had narrow-set eyes, thin mousy hair, and a mouth like an ill-natured dog’s.

“Not according to the Book of Leviticus,” agreed Abigail. “How awkward that the Bible doesn’t give similar instructions for identifying them.”

“By their deeds shall ye know them,” replied Dog-Mouth darkly. “All these days, that the hag’s been lyin’ in the Devil’s sleep, we’ve known. We seen our Reverend growin’ sicker an’ sicker; seen the fires that have broke out, here and there about the town in dead of night; and the very beasts in their stalls struck by plague, since she’s been here.”

Abigail wondered whether the Hand of the Lord had used an accomplice to set the fires and mix nightshade with the fodder, but knew better than to do so aloud.

“Reverend, he wouldn’t hear word against the witch,” said another man, as they ringed Abigail and made their way toward the broken-down shanty. “Not at first, so great is his heart with love.” Torchlight flared in the cracks of the walls, the broken-out holes of what had been windows. “Yet those vexations began, the first night of her bein’ in the blockhouse, and him cryin’ out in his sleep for terror. We knew. All the