The Ninth Daughter (25 page)

Again the thought crossed her mind of the Reverend Bargest out in Gilead, rousing his congregation to just such an outcry:
Behold them! Aggh, there she is! Do you not see her? The serpent, with its glaring eyes—Lo, can you not see where the Nightmare comes? There!
There! And everyone in the little congregation wailed,
We see her, we see . . .

You must see! You
must
! Behold the witch! She comes NOW through the wall, glowing with the corpse-light of Hell—!

Only it was Sam’s voice she heard in her mind,
Can you not see the King? He comes through the wall, glowing with the fires of Hell, holding a bayonet to the throats of your children—
!

The case is not the same
, Abigail told herself, vexed that the comparison had even crossed her mind.
In any case Sam doesn’t control the lives of the families of the men who look to him for leadership.
Even if he did get carried away with his rhetoric and start taking liberties with provable facts.

As she’d known would be the case, only Abednego Sellars’s youngest prentice-boy was in the chandlery shop on Milk Street. Bess had informed her—after a few discreet questions—that Penelope Sellars’s sister had recently given birth, so there was little fear of encountering the New South deacon’s wife in the shop, something Abigail felt guiltily unwilling to do. She had been raised to abhor gossip, and made a careful point, in her discussions with her sisters and Bess of the affairs of various friends and acquaintances, not to spread evil rumors unless they could be definitively substantiated, and
then
to put the best face on the matters if possible . . .

But
, she told herself,
the case is not the same here, either
.

Even so, she was glad Penelope Sellars wasn’t in the building.

“It might have been Mr. Sellars,” said the apprentice, to Abigail’s story of a visitor last Wednesday night, just before the rain started, who had been gone before she could be called in from the cowhouse and had left this package, and Pattie had said she thought it might be Mr. Sellars. “In truth he spent that night from home. He was called out to Cambridge, just after dinner, and didn’t return in time, and the gates were closed on him . . .” He glanced around the empty shop, with its neat packages of candles and rope, soap and nails, as if for listening ears. His voice sank to a whisper. “Mrs. Sellars, she wasn’t any too pleased, either. The squawk she set up!”

Abigail said, a little primly, “Well, if Mr. Sellars was in Cambridge Wednesday night, he could not be the man who left this book upon my husband’s doorstep, could he? I think it would be a favor to them both, if you mentioned nothing of this.”

“No, m’am.” He looked like he might have said something else—mentioned the deacon’s latest “ladyfriend” on the North End?—but only repeated after a moment, “No, m’am.”

Drat men.
Abigail’s pattens clinked sharply on Milk Street’s cobblestone paving.
If they have an aversion to a woman, why wed her? If they want to tup harlots, let them marry the hussies to begin with—
then
they’d see there’s more to happiness than four bare legs in a bed.

Orion Hazlitt’s face returned to her, harsh with sudden anger at the thought of Charles Malvern.
Do you ever wish
—?

Yet Rebecca Woodruff had pledged herself to Charles Malvern for her family’s sake, long before her path had ever crossed the young stationer’s.
What God hath joined, let no man put asunder.

Rebecca had said that to her, on her first evening in the new house on Queen Street, when she and John had come back to Boston from Braintree a year ago. Rebecca had helped her, Bess, Hannah, and Pattie scrub every surface with hot water and vinegar, move pots and kettles into the kitchen, make up the beds. After dinner was done for all friends and family, Rebecca had remained, to help clean up, and to tell at greater depth the small events that had made up her life during Abigail’s year and a half of absence from the town. Orion’s name had come up early in the conversation: “He is a good man,” Rebecca had said, perhaps too quickly, when Abigail had mentioned the number of times his name had arisen in her letters. “Cannot a woman take pleasure in a man’s conversation without all the world winking and smirking, if he but walk her home from church?”

Abigail had replied carefully, “If she is living apart from her husband, it behooves her to take care how she shows her pleasure. Either to others, or to him.”

Rebecca had reddened a little in the pallor of the winter twilight, but it was anger that sparkled in her dark eyes, not shame. She had bent over her sewing again. “Those who walk with their gaze in the gutters will see mud wherever they look,” she replied after a time. “He tells me his mother is the same. She thinks that any woman who speaks to her son is ‘on the catch’ to take him away from
her
. She’s never forgiven him for coming to Boston in the first place, he says,
As if he were running away from me!
Which of course is exactly what he was doing. She thinks the young ladies of the Brattle Street congregation are heretics, let alone me, whether I were married or not. And I
am
married,” Rebecca went on. “Abigail, I do not forget that.
What God hath joined, let no man put asunder . . .
not even the man who has cast me out.”

It had been on Abigail’s lips to ask,
What if things were different
?

But they were not different, nor would they be. So she had held her peace.

“Mrs. Adams?”

Startled, Abigail turned, as she came into the open space between the Old State House and the Old Meeting House—the very place where, three and a half years ago, British troopers had opened fire on a mob of unarmed civilians—to see a man approaching from the doorway of the State House, wrapped in a thick gray cloak. His hat shadowed the pristine gleam of hair powder, but even before he came close enough for her to see his face her heart leaped to her throat.

“Heavens, man, are you insane?” She strode over to him, and he removed his hat and bowed: It was Lieutenant Coldstone, sure enough, and in uniform beneath that very military-looking cloak. He wasn’t even accompanied by the faithful Sergeant Muldoon.

“On the contrary,” said the young officer, “you could scarcely call upon me, m’am. And we are not half a mile from the soldiers at the Battery.”

“With all of—oh, what is it? Twenty troops? Do you think they’d even turn out, if they heard a mob going after a Tory who wasn’t smart enough to keep off the streets at a time like this? What on earth are you doing here?”

“My duty,” he responded stiffly, as Abigail caught him by the arm and almost dragged him down King Street toward the relative safety of the Battery. “We were sent to escort the Fluckner family across to Castle Island”—Thomas Fluckner was a crony of Governor Hutchinson’s—“and I thought to improve the occasion by asking if you had had time to pursue inquiries on the North End. I left a note with your girl, that I would return at three. The town seems quiet enough.”

“That’s because they’re all at Old South Church, listening to my husband’s cousin tell them the Crown has no right to tax British citizens without the consent of their elected representatives in Parliament,
or
set up a monopoly on any item for the benefit of his personal friends.”

Coldstone’s lips parted on the words
Three pence a pound
—and closed again. She thought he might have followed this up with an argument beginning,
Nevertheless, it is the law
. . . but that look, too, passed from his eyes. He only said, “You are quite right, Mrs. Adams. It was foolish of me.”

For a moment King Street was quiet indeed, save for the eternal tolling of the bells. Then he continued, “Last night I reviewed the notes I made at the time of the Fishwire murder, and those of my predecessor. The regiment had only just taken up post at Castle William. The previous Provost Marshal seemed to have the attitude that a woman who has been reduced to selling her body deserves whatever befalls her, and merely noted the savagery of the post mortem slashing. I was angry, both that he would make no more of it than he did, and because it was plain to me that his neglect in pursuing the first murder had left the culprit at large to commit a second. For that reason, though it was deemed a civil matter only, when the constable reported it to the Provost Marshal—in his usual weekly report, and thus some days after the event—I asked permission to visit the Fishwire house.”

“And did you have dung thrown at you by the local children?” inquired Abigail. When he did not reply, she glanced sidelong up at the young man’s face, and added, more kindly, “There are few enough in Boston who would take such trouble, for a woman who made her living fixing hair and selling herbs.”

“Few in London either.” Coldstone didn’t return her glance. His dark, clear eyes roved to the muddy flats that lay on their left as they emerged from Kilby Street, the rough, open ground on both sides of the Battery March below the slope of Fort Hill, as if seeking signs of danger.

“Are you from London, Lieutenant Coldstone?”

That brought his eyes back to her, and put that little crease back in the corner of his mouth. “Not originally. My parents lived in Kent. They didn’t start bringing me to London with them until I was seven or eight. I’ve always preferred the country. Even as a child, I think I sensed that London was a place where a poor woman could be slashed to death, or a poor child trampled by a rich man’s horse, and no one would really care. This seems to hold true in Boston as well.”

“I think it holds true in many places.” Abigail made a wry smile. “As Londoners consider themselves the pattern-cards for the conduct of all the world, I suppose this is as it should be. What did you make of the house when you saw it? Or the victim?”

“Little enough.” Below them, among the scattered buildings around Oliver’s Wharf, two redcoats stood on guard while three British sailors, in their striped jerseys and tarred pigtails, helped the crew of a small sloop unload barrels of provisions. For the men of the Battery, Abigail assumed: the soldiers whose little palisaded barrack stood at the foot of Fort Hill to their left. Just ahead of them on the other side of the Battery March lay the walled park of the guns themselves, thirty-five cannon set to defend the Harbor against the French who had never come.

There were, Abigail observed, more soldiers on guard there than was usual, but not so great a number as to provoke fears of a landing or an invasion. Her estimation of Colonel Leslie’s good sense rose. Beyond the line formed by Milk Street and School Street, the southern portion of the Boston peninsula was but thinly inhabited, open fields, cow pastures, vegetable gardens, builders’ yards, and rope-walks prevailing along the unpaved lanes. In general the soldiers stationed at the Battery kept themselves strictly to themselves, did their drinking on-post, and did not venture into the town even in times of quiet.

Beside her, Coldstone continued, “The constable had already given the landlord leave to clear the place up. Fools—” His brow darkened. “Any sign the killer might have left behind was gone, and of course none of the neighbors had a word to say to me. It was clearly the work of a madman, yet there is something—” He shook his head. “At the risk of sounding like the very men I derided a moment ago, I will say that my observation has been that a harlot—and Mrs. Barry was well known about the wharves, apparently—puts herself in danger by the very nature of her work. It is not at all uncommon, for one to be slashed, or even killed.”

“I suppose in London,” said Abigail softly, “one would see a good deal more of that sort of thing, than here.”

“As you say, Mrs. Adams. But why this man, whoever he was, would have attacked a
hairdresser
, and a woman of some fifty years to boot—”

“I know not whether this lightens or darkens the issue,” said Abigail. “But dressing hair was not all that Mrs. Fishwire did. She was an herbalist, a healer, and an abortionist. Some called her a witch. It was not unusual for her to have visitors at odd hours, well after dark.”

“Was it not?” Coldstone halted, where a broad flight of wooden steps led down past John Rowe’s warehouses to Rowe’s Wharf. On the wharf itself, two redcoats stood guard over a mountain of trunks, crates, and hatboxes, which servants were loading into a launch. In the roadway before Abigail and her escort, a coach had come to a halt, from which a black manservant was handing a massive, red-faced gentleman in a crimson greatcoat. Thomas Fluckner, Abigail identified him. One of the richest merchants in Boston and the proprietor of a million acres of Crown lands in Maine.

“Excuse me, m’am.” Coldstone bowed, and strode to meet Fluckner, who shook a handful of papers at him and harangued him at some length in his sharp, yapping voice. Abigail caught the words
transport
. . .
rights as citizens
. . .
adequate guard
. . .
Milk Street
(which was where Abigail knew the Fluckner mansion stood) . . .
always supported His Majesty
. . .

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You would need to speak to Colonel Leslie, sir . . .”

Fluckner went back to his carriage and cursed the foot-men. Coldstone returned to Abigail’s side. “Forgive me, m’am.”

“For doing your duty? Nonsense.”

“Even so.” He bowed again, as if in a drawing room. “And were Mrs. Fishwire’s neighbors any more forthcoming to you than they were to me, about who they may have seen on the night of her murder?”

The name of Abednego Sellars flashed through her mind, only to be thrust aside at once. It was ridiculous, and besides, if he were arrested for murder—particularly one he did not commit—once in the Castle Island gaol, the danger of what he might say about the Sons of Liberty wasn’t even to be thought of. “The court is black as a tomb, once dark falls,” she said, in what she hoped was a completely natural tone. “The honest folk that live there—and they
are
honest folk, who make up the greater part of the North End—close their doors when things begin to get lively at the tavern at the head of the alley. It surprises me none would have come to a woman’s outcry, but I should imagine there’s a great deal of ruckus most nights . . .”