The Ninth Daughter

forth to anyone who’ll listen these past three years, I’d be curious to see how he takes it.”

How indeed? Abigail followed the men back into the shop. Sam was still fretting about the missing “Household Expenses” book, demanding of Orion where Rebecca would have gone, if not to the Tillets or Revere, to the Adams house or the printshop—? Little enough chance I’ll have to even speak to him, once the Watch has given him the news . . .

Great Heavens, surely they wouldn’t detain him?

What is it John said, that of all murders done, the culprit is usually known to the victim? Would the Watch be such fools as to think that—as the missing woman’s estranged husband—Charles Malvern had had anything to do with such a crime? She recalled the little merchant’s anger-crimsoned face, when last she’d seen him, those cold eyes like gray buckshot . . .

“Are you coming, Mrs. Adams?” Sam opened the shop door for her. “We need you to discover the body, and summon the Watch.”

Something in Sam’s briskness—or perhaps only his preoccupation with his precious book of contacts—raised the hackles on her neck as it had in Rebecca’s kitchen earlier. She stepped back from him, pulled her scarf more tightly around her throat. “Discover it yourself, Sam,” she said briefly. “I think I need to pay a visit to Rebecca’s husband, and tell him that his wife has vanished—and see if he has aught to say, about where she might have gone.”

Five

He hounds me. Rebecca had wiped her eyes as she’d said it, on an evening in summer—the summer before last, one afternoon when Rebecca had crossed the bay to Braintree with some of Abigail’s Smith cousins, and they’d spent the day in the summer tasks of threading leather britches beans to dry, and bottling blackberries from the woods behind the orchard. Abigail had been heavy yet again with child—baby Tommy, old enough now to stagger sturdily about the kitchen. Walking swiftly through the market, thrusting guilt from her heart as she would have brushed falling rain from her face, Abigail earnestly hoped that Pattie—the fourteen-year-old farm-girl who’d lived with the family since their return to Boston a year ago—was keeping an eye on him . . . on Charley, too. There were simply too many things a pair of enterprising little boys could get into, in a kitchen on a freezing day.

He hounds me. He has always considered me his property, like his horses or the corn in his ships. He questions the servants about everything I do, he opens and reads my letters, he demands accounting of every penny I spend and he has imprisoned me under lock and key as if I were a disobedient child. Yet he has said, he will not let me go.

And Orion Hazlitt had cried: If ever there was a case of God’s hand being needed in mortal affairs—

Abigail shook her head, her heart aching at the desperation in the young man’s voice.

The clock in the brick turret of Faneuil Hall chimed ten thirty. Abigail drew her skirts aside from barrows of country apples, wet from the rain. Pens of sheep blocked her way; crates of fish, drying now and several hours out of the sea: By the time I can do my marketing they’ll be stale, and the best will be gone . . .

But her steps did not pause. If I am to see him at all, I must see him first. Before the Watch.

Her mind chased Rebecca’s voice back along a corridor of memory.

They’re spying on me. I know they’re spying on me. All except Catherine—my maid—and he has the other servants spy on her. I dread he’ll send her away, and get some creature of his own, like that horrid Mrs. Jewkes in Pamela. That had been earlier, before she’d left Charles Malvern’s house: only weeks after she and Abigail had first met. When she’d wept then, the lace border of her handkerchief had been wider than the linen it surrounded.

I used to laugh at Pamela, but I swear I feel like that wretched ninny these days. Rebecca had never had much use for Abigail’s favorite novel, or its saintly heroine. He actually did lock me up, for nearly a week. He’s said he will again, if he hears I’ve come here to see you. “I will not be defied in my own house,” he says. The servants seemed to think nothing of it. And no one will help, because like Pamela’s Mr. B, he can hurt them in their pocketbooks—

And it was true, Abigail knew, that the innkeeper from whom Rebecca had first rented chambers in October of ’70 had been nearly driven out of business by the prices Malvern and his network of merchant cronies had demanded of him for victuals and wood. The same thing had happened to the second room she had rented, early in the summer of ’72. The Adamses had returned to Braintree by then and Abigail had asked her to move into the crowded little farmhouse, but again Rebecca had refused. I can’t live with you and John forever, she’d said, but Abigail had been aware at the time that Charles Malvern’s youngest child, four-year-old Nathan, had been ill. Though Rebecca was estranged from her little stepson’s father, still she would not leave Boston. She had found the little house behind the Tillets’—who loathed Malvern over the politics of their respective congregations—but by what Orion had just told her, Malvern had not ceased his efforts to make his estranged wife’s life as difficult as possible.

And then, thought Abigail, as she turned into the waterfront bustle of Merchants’ Row, there was the matter of Rebecca’s father’s will.

It was the last occasion upon which she—or as far as she knew, Rebecca—had seen Charles Malvern, except to catch a glimpse of him across the sanctuary of the Brattle Street Meeting-House.

Abigail slowed her steps as she passed the Malvern countinghouse, at the head of his wharf. Not a grand wharf, like Hancock’s, or the marvel of the Long Wharf that stretched half a mile out to sea, but big enough to serve either of Malvern’s oceangoing brigs. The Fair Althea stood in port, named for the woman Abigail suspected its owner had never forgiven Rebecca for replacing. Malvern had rebuilt the countinghouse at the wharf’s head, on the site of his grandfather’s original modest structure: two and a half stories of solid Maine timber, with a warehouse behind it for muslins and calicoes, tool-steel and paint.

The tide was out. The sloping shingle below street level was dotted with heaped boxes, rough drays, coils of rope, and wet-dark cargo nets spread to dry. At the nearby Woodman’s Wharf a vessel was loading with kegs of what smelled like potash, stevedores shouting to one another as they worked. Beyond lay the leafless forest of bobbing masts, and the cold air muttered with the creak of ropes, the endless soft knocking of pulley blocks against the mast-wood. The world smelled of seaweed and wet rope. Wind smote her, but it was not colder than Charles Malvern’s wrinkled angry countenance and pale eyes, when last she, and Rebecca, and John had stood before him.

“By the terms of James Woodruff’s will, I am executor of that property.” Malvern had spoken to John, not to Rebecca, his square brown hands folded ungivingly on his desk. The merchant was even shorter than John, and though now in his midfifties, and wiry in build, gave an impression of tremendous, almost threatening, physical strength. His merchant father had sent him to sea in his youth, and he retained the hardness of a man who has had to impose his will by force on other men in order to survive. “It was made over to me as Rebecca’s husband—”

She heard the pause before her friend’s name, heard in that harsh cracked voice the refusal to call her Mrs. Malvern . Mrs. Malvern was and forever would be the woman he had lost.

“—and she has but to give over her present mode of life, to regain its use. To hand property to a woman who has forsaken her husband to live upon the town would do neither her nor the community any service, and would provide the worst sort of example.”

“To whom, sir?” demanded Abigail hotly. “To other wives who find it not to their taste to have communications with their families forbidden? Who don’t care to be imprisoned like felons for weeks at a time or to have their books burned and rooms searched?”

“Precisely, Madame,” Malvern had replied. “If my wife cannot tolerate my attempts to better her, but would