The Ninth Daughter

flee the lesson like a fractious child, then shame upon her as well as upon myself. If I keep watch upon her it is because she has lied to me, both about her faith and about the conduct of my first wife’s children, to whom she has shown nothing but dissembled hatred since first she entered my house. I defy the law, or any man of business, to fault me in separating her from her family, after she has robbed me and given the money to them—to purchase the property whose income she now claims as her own.”

“That is not true!” Rebecca rose, stepped to the desk before which John already stood. It had been early December, as bleak as it was today, and with the smell of snow in the air. Abigail recalled, as much as the interview itself, how cramped and stuffy the little office had felt, and how intrusive had been the noise of the wharves and the street outside, after a year and a half of the farm’s slow-paced peace. “That land was my father’s,” Rebecca said. “And his father’s, before that—”

“Which would have been sold to pay your father’s debts,” responded Malvern, “had you not helped yourself to the household money entrusted to you, and pledged my good name in a loan, to salvage it. And if your client”—here he had turned his bitter pale eyes back to John—“wishes those facts to be aired at large before the General Court of the colony, along with her father’s will, which clearly places the property in my hands in trust for her as my wife, I will certainly oblige her and you, Mr. Adams, by so doing. In the meantime she has but to return to my roof, to fulfill her own portion of a contract of which she is now in violation.”

Tears glittering sharply in her brown eyes, Rebecca had said, “I would sooner take up my abode in Hell.”

The following week, Abigail recalled, two clients—both merchants connected with Malvern—had withdrawn their business from John, even as John had lost half a dozen during the months that Rebecca had lived beneath their roof.

The Malvern house, like the countinghouse, was solid. Modest in its way, it had clearly been built to proclaim the extent to which God had favored the endeavors of the family. Three stories high, it was fashioned of both timber and bricks, and kept the old diamond-glass windows of an earlier day. As Abigail approached it a carriage was brought to its door, and the two surviving Malvern children emerged, followed by a black manservant and Miss Malvern’s plump, giggling maid. They lie about me to their father, Rebecca had whispered desperately. They carry tales—terrible things!—and he believes them . . .

And what parent would take the word of a new young wife, before that of his own daughter and son?

Jeffrey must be twenty now. From the opposite side of King Street Abigail watched them. Rebecca had written to her that the young man had begun at Harvard. Taller than his father, he favored the first Mrs. Malvern’s pale beauty, especially when he threw back his head and laughed at one of the maid’s flirtatious sallies. Mistress Tamar Malvern tapped her brother sharply on the sleeve with her fan, but laughed as well. From a sharp-faced little vixen of eleven when her father had married Rebecca, she had grown into a lovely peaches-and-cream brunette, with the air of a girl who is quite aware that men swoon at her feet. Neither gave the manservant so much as a glance as he opened the carriage door for them. The servant stepped back sharply to avoid being splashed as the carriage pulled away.

“Mrs. Adams.” He saw her across the street and smiled, teeth very white in a fine-boned ebony face. His name, Abigail recalled, was Scipio; he’d greet her with his sunny smile at the Brattle Street Meeting, if he was sure his master wasn’t looking. Sure enough, he glanced back at the house as if to make sure he was unobserved before crossing to her. “Are you well, m’am? And Mrs. Malvern: Is all well with her?”

“No,” said Abigail softly. “I am sorry to say a shocking thing has happened, and I was coming now, to let your master know of it. As far as I know she’s all right,” she added, seeing how the man’s eyes widened with alarm. “It wouldn’t be right to tell you details before I’ve spoken to him—”

“No, of course not.” He collected himself quickly, hastened ahead of her, to open the house door. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

No fire burned in the grate of the book-room where he left her, though there were Turkey carpets on the brick floor. Charles Malvern was not a man to heat rooms when they were not in use. A portrait of the Fair Althea hung on the wall, very like Jeffrey but with kindliness rather than wit in her smile. Beside it hung a painting of Tamar, done recently, where once Rebecca’s pen-sketch of little Nathan had been displayed: the child whose birth had cost his mother her life. Abigail remembered that Nathan had been fascinated with it, had sat, too, looking up at the likeness of the mother he had never seen. The sketch was gone. Abigail wondered whether Malvern had disposed of it when Rebecca had left, or after the boy had died.

“Mrs. Adams?” Scipio reappeared in the doorway, to usher her across the hall.

“Good day to you, m’am.” Charles Malvern rose from his desk when the butler admitted her, came around himself to bring up a chair. His wide-skirted dark coat and plain Ramilles wig were not one shilling more costly than they had to be, to let others know of his consequence in the world of trade and business. Their former encounter and her championship of his estranged wife flickered like malign fire in his eyes, but he asked politely, “Will you take tea? ’Tis a raw morning.”

“Thank you, no.” Any number of Abigail’s friends observed the boycott but made it a point to call on their less political friends for a cup of Hyson or Bohea in the course of a cold afternoon. That, in Abigail’s opinion, was cheating.

He didn’t offer the acceptable Whig alternative of coffee, but signed Scipio from the room. “To what do I owe this honor, m’am?”

“A shocking thing has happened.” He was walking back around his desk as she spoke, and Abigail couldn’t keep herself from waiting until she had a good view of his face, to see how he would take the news. “There was a murder done last night, at the house where Mrs. Malvern is now living—”

He turned back, eyes flaring, as Scipio’s had, and she saw in them for one second not just surprise, but apprehension and even fear. She went on swiftly, “A woman: We don’t know who.”

“Not Mrs. Malvern?” That first instant’s horror—like the echo of her own cry, Not Rebecca! —disappeared and was replaced by suspicion: the wary anger of a man who has been cheated by a mountebank, and looks out lest he be cheated again.

“No. But Mrs. Malvern has disappeared—”

“Has she?” He settled back in his chair, and his voice was dry again. “I daresay she’s run to that heretic printer my daughter tells me she’s dallying with.”

“If it is Mr. Hazlitt you mean,” said Abigail, feeling the blood rising in her cheeks, “I have come from there just now.” Heretic, in Charles Malvern’s mental lexicon, meant, Abigail knew, anyone of less than stringently double predestinarian Calvinist belief. Even a convert, like Orion Hazlitt, from a less doctrinaire sect was forever suspect, much less a former Catholic like Rebecca. “Inasmuch as she has assisted him with the text of the sermons he is printing—”

“Sermons forsooth!” He almost spit the words at her. “By whom? One of those lying unbelievers at the New Brick Meeting-House? What woman was killed? How did she come into the house, if not for ill purposes? And at night, you say? Was she another like my wife, who’d go about the town alone—?”

“We don’t know,” repeated Abigail, seeing the seamed little face opposite her darkening a dangerous crimson with rage. “She was found in Rebecca’s”—she bit back the word kitchen, remembering that she was only supposed to have this from hearsay, and finished—“house this morning, slashed to death, and used most horribly.”

“Then she had her deserving.” Malvern almost shouted the words at her. “If she was one of Sam Adams’s gang of traitors. A trollop, as they’d have Rebecca be, for their dirty sakes. Belike it was one of them that did the murder—”

“I don’t think so.” Abigail fought to keep her own temper under control. “I’m trying to find who she was —”

“Why ask me, then? That lying Papist turned her back on any decent females she knew when she left this house, and the truly decent ones turned their backs on her. Surely you would know, her dear good friend, her almost-sister, her only true friend in the world . .