The Ninth Daughter (24 page)

“You showed me already, Mother, and they’re beautiful.” A note of desperation crept into his voice. “And I’ll see them again when I return. Damnation—”

A young woman emerged from the house, whom Abigail vaguely recognized as the “girl” indispensible to any household in the town, a lanky, broad-shouldered female with a long, rectangular jaw and dirty hair.

“Son!” pleaded Mrs. Hazlitt, suddenly frantic. “Don’t—” She pulled against the grip of the young woman, clutched at her son’s hands, then the lapels of his coat, as he tried to step away; she began to struggle and weep. “Why have you stopped loving me, son? Why won’t you tell me what I’ve done to make you hate me?
There is a generation that curseth their father, and doth not bless their mother! There is a generation whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives . . .”

The young man turned swiftly, and Abigail walked with him out through the passway to the street. “She’ll forget all this by the time I’m home, you know,” he said quietly, seeing the trouble on Abigail’s face. “I hate it: I hate having to do it. And she—she doesn’t understand. She’s never understood—” He shook his head, as if trying to shake away sacking wrapped around his eyes and brain. “Have you heard anything? Anything at all?”

Abigail debated for a moment about telling him that at least two other women had been murdered in the same fashion as Perdita Pentyre, then put the thought aside. “I know Rebecca hasn’t fled to stay with her maid,” she said. “Her husband—”

He had been wavering, caught between his fear for his mother, and the tug of the tolling bells. Now he grew still. “You’ve seen him?”

“He has been most helpful, Orion.”

“If I had—” he began impulsively, then stopped himself, and stood for a moment, looking past her, his face wooden with anger and distress. “He’s shown before he’ll do anything to possess her, up to and including putting her under lock and key! Do you think you can trust him?” he asked at last.

“I
think
so,” she said slowly.

“Do you ever wish—?” He hesitated, then let his breath out in a rush. When she put her hand on his arm, Abigail was disconcerted to feel him trembling. “Let me know,” he said, “if you learn anything. If you find anything. I know it’s—” He shook his head again, and rubbed his eyes. “Her husband will always be her husband.” He sounded like a man reminding himself. “And Mother will always be my mother. I know that. Yet I can be her friend.”

Wish what?
Abigail watched him stride away down the slope of Wine Lane toward Faneuil Hall. Wish that instead of sitting at home comforting his mother when the rain began Thursday night, he had been still at Rebecca Malvern’s, when Perdita Pentyre’s killer came knocking at the shutter? Asking in a voice she knew, to let him in?

Wish that he had stood at God’s elbow, there at the beginning of Time, and asked that the woman he loved not be given in marriage to a bone-dry merchant with two half-grown children? That he could spend his days with a mother whose grip upon him was an embrace and not a stranglehold?

And in her mind she heard her father’s gentle voice:
But we
were
there, my Nab, at the beginning of Time with God. And we saw, and assented to, every single act and event of the lives He drew up for us, seeing in them His wisdom, before we entered into the human condition of blindness day-to-day
.

The sound of the church bells followed her home.

 

 

 

 

A
t least one portion of her investigation proved easy, and God had pity on her—or perhaps on poor Pattie, condemned to glean behind her erratic reaping these days. John came home to dinner late, when the meeting was done, with the news that none of the consignees had yet resigned his position, and that the Governor was still refusing to let the
Dartmouth
leave port. “Some of the men are returned, from the villages,” he said, ladling the thick stew of chicken out onto the plates held by Johnny to serve parents and siblings. “We’re meeting again, at the Green Dragon, at eight tonight. I beg your pardon, Portia, for deserting you again this way . . .”

“Then unless you wish me to behave like Mrs. Hazlitt,” she said, “and cling weeping to your coat, may I send to Bess, to pass the evening in her company?”

Bess—born and raised, like Sam, in Boston—brought her daughter Hannah with her, a lively girl of seventeen, with her father’s broad shoulders and sturdy build and her father’s quicksilver mind. Both had heard already all about the expedition with Surry into the North End, so there was little explanation necessary. All Abigail had to do was say, at the right point in the exclamations of horror and shock, “The curious thing was, someone spoke of Abednego Sellars as having bought herbs of this Mrs. Fishwire. Surely not Mr. Sellars the chandler? Why, he is a deacon!”

“Nab,” said Bess, wisely shaking her head, “you’re the smartest woman I know, and married to the most long-headed man of my acquaintance, yet it’s plain you come out of a country parsonage. A whited sepulchre,” she said, with an expression that added,
There are plenty of those around
.

Abigail leaned forward in the deep gold light of the work-candles, with an expression of rapt fascination, and had the whole of Abednego Sellars’s business and personal life deposited neatly in her lap.

Abednego Sellars did indeed have a ladyfriend in the North End, though probably not the same ladyfriend he’d had eighteen months ago at the time he’d made an exhibition of himself for the amusement of the inhabitants of the Love Lane Yard. “He’s a man full of juice,” sighed Bess. “When Penny Rucker married him back in ’52, my Ma said he’d make her weep, and it’s sure he has. Even then he liked his dram, for all he’ll get up at meetings of the Session and roar against drunkenness before the face of the Congregation. Goes up to the sailors’ taverns in the North End, where he thinks nobody knows him, as if Sophy Blaylock’s cousin doesn’t run the Queen of Argyll
and
gossip worse than any woman in the town. These days—” She shook her head again, and made a little noise, as if urging on a recalcitrant horse.

Pattie got up to put more hot water in the teapot. Bess had brought a quarter of a brick of good Dutch East India Company oolong, respectably smuggled and ambrosial after many months of coffee and sassafras.

“He’s always seemed so respectable,” lamented Abigail encouragingly.

“There’s a good many men in this town who
seem
respectable,” chimed in Hannah. Like her mother, she didn’t seem particularly put out by this fact. Abigail wondered if she guessed about her father and Surry.

The picture emerged of a man of lusty appetites, of quick temper, of sharp acumen where money and business were concerned; a man disinclined to keep rules where they interfered with what he considered his rights as a man, whether those rules were laid down by the Crown or the Congregation. He had many cronies, and made friends easily; was on good terms with one of his daughters, but the other two tended to be bitter over his way of life. His one son had gone to sea, and had been taken from his uncle’s ship off Barbados, and pressed into the British Navy. Steps had been taken to get him out, but he had died before he could return home.

Abigail asked, “When was this?” no longer wondering at the man’s dedication to the cause of rights for the colonists.

“Three years ago?” Bess paused in her sewing—baskets of sheets, shirts, the children’s clothing lay on the big kitchen table between them, the eternal work of a household. Abigail didn’t wonder at it, that Mrs. Tillet had pressed poor Rebecca into servitude to keep up with extra stitching for money. “Sixty-nine, maybe? I remember he vowed then that he’d mend his way of life—that was the same year there was trouble with the elders of the Congregation. But it takes great strength, to alter the way a man lives. The hunger for the old ways grew on him, I guess.”

“If he’d left Boston, he might have stood a better chance of mending his ways,” remarked Hannah, bringing two of the work-candles close, so that she could thread up a needle by their light. “Here, if a man wants to make a change, he has to almost abandon all his friends. If he was out in Essex County, it would take a deal of trouble to find gambling houses and bad women.”

“He would only have ended up seducing his neighbors’ wives.” Bess turned a shirt right-side out, to inspect a darn. “But you may be right. He went back, in any case. I suppose only knowing that it was just a few minutes’ walk, to the Mermaid or the Queen of Argyll, was too much for him. Especially if he didn’t really think there was anything wrong with what he was doing in the first place.”

“Is he a relation of Richard Pentyre’s, then?” asked Abigail, after the four women had sewed for a time in quiet.

“Oh, Lord, yes! There was bad blood between them, you see, over the land that Pentyre’s mother inherited: Well, to my mind the bad blood was inherited, too, because it was Abednego’s father that got passed over in the will, not Abednego himself. But it was Pentyre he went to when his son was pressed into the Navy, see—as family, you know. I don’t know a great deal about the British Navy,” she added, setting her sewing down for a moment, to sip her tea. “Nor do I know, how long it takes even for a man who’s a friend of the Crown, to get them to turn loose of a common sailor, even if they can find the man, on all their ships all over the seas. So, I don’t know the right of it. Abednego claims Pentyre was lazy, and put the matter off, as not important to him, for nearly a year, before they even located what ship poor Davy was on. And by then it was too late.”

Eighteen

Rain started late that night, raw and cold. Abigail, since childhood a subject to rheumatism, felt the change of weather in her sleep, and turned restlessly, seeking John’s steady warmth, like a heated brick. Seeking, in her dreams, his unquenchable flame of spirit.

But all her dreams were drawn toward darkness. In her sleep she heard Mrs. Hazlitt’s wailing:
All flesh died, that moved upon the earth . . . fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered
. Though even in her dream her reason told her that the vision was simply a confused old woman’s hallucination, she went to the window and looked out, and saw all of Queen Street drowned in rising waters. Water climbed the brick walls of the opposite houses, rain-pocked in the blackness yet visible with the all-seeing knowledge of dreams. Church bells tolled their wordless warning of danger, and she saw in her dreaming Nabby and Johnny in the next room, clinging together in fright as the water poured silently in over the windowsill. The
Dartmouth
floated by, laden with its burden of tea, its crewmen waving their cargo manifests and asking to be allowed to vote.

Rebecca is out there somewhere. A prisoner in one of those attics, with the water rising. She will drown, before we find her.
Abigail leaned from the window, feeling the slick wet coldness of the windowsill, the sting of the wind on her face. “Where are you?” she screamed, but her throat would produce no sound. The gale whipped her hair around her face, a vast sable cloud. From the window the whole of the world seemed to be a waste of water, a thousand dark roofs and blind black windows. Rebecca could be trapped behind any one. The bells tolled like thunder, and lightning from the coming storm flickered over the face of the deep.

“Don’t give up!” Still no sound. She gasped, trying to force the air from her throat. “We’re coming!” And woke upon a gasp, as John touched her shoulder.

“Nab,” he whispered, and she clung to him in the darkness that seemed so black after the luminous cat-sight of dreaming. “Beloved—”

At the sound of the church bells she shivered violently. “Who is ringing the bells?” He drew back a little in surprise at the mundane question, and she heard the muffled snort of his chuckle.

“Sam’s got men at it, turn and turn about,” he said. “All along the waterfront, too, ready in case the
Cumberland
tries to put in or Leslie brings his men over. Is that what you were dreaming of, dear friend? The bells? Do they trouble you?”

She shook her head. “Just a dream. They’ll trouble the British a good deal more.” It was good to be able to seek refuge in his arms.

 

 

 

 

T
here was no great difficulty in ascertaining whether Abednego Sellars had passed the previous Thursday evening where others could see him, particularly not with Boston in a ferment and half the merchants in the town absent from their shops. Abigail abstracted a book of sermons from the top shelf of John’s library, wrapped it in rough paper and string, and waited until John left for Old South Church, where the meeting was that day. Though not one of the inner circle of the Sons of Liberty, he was always gone during these gray, louring mornings, at the hour when the countrymen who crowded the streets seemed to vanish as if by magic. Walking from Queen Street down to Milk Street, where Sellars had his chandlery shop, Abigail passed Old South, and saw the backs of men clustered in its doorway, and heard the muffled outcry of voices within.
Sam?
she wondered.
He could always get a crowd going . . .