The Ninth Daughter (28 page)

“At what time?”

“About seven. Long after the gates had been closed.” Revere poured her out tea. “It does seem like two criminals, doesn’t it? One mad—and maybe dead by this time—and the other . . . pretending to be him, for his own ends.”

“And Lieutenant Coldstone is certain—for what reason I don’t know—that that second criminal is John.” She folded her hands around the teacup, grateful for its warmth. “Not you, not Sam, not any of the actual leaders of the Sons of Liberty . . . specifically John. And in all of this, Rebecca has still made no appearance, nor has her body been found. I think—” She turned her face aside, and found herself suddenly having to work to keep her voice level. “I think it would actually be rather difficult to conceal a body in a town this crowded, for this length of time.”

“Easier in winter than in summer,” said Revere gently, and Abigail nodded.

“There is that. Now tell me—” She took a deep breath, and brought her gaze back to his. “Now tell me about Jenny Barry.”

“Jenny Barry.” Revere handed her a two-penny pottery sugar bowl—he who made the most exquisite silver ones in the colony—and sat for a time, collecting his thoughts.

“Myself, I think it was only a matter of time, before she met the end she did,” he said at last. “She was one of your bawdy whores, who reveled in being a disgrace. A big well-made Irish girl, with hair like a bunch of carrots. If she had money she’d spend it, on gimcrack ornaments and rum. I doubt she drew a sober breath since before she was a woman, and she could not have been twenty-five when she died. Everyone on the North End knew her, if not to speak to then by sight: There wasn’t a man who crossed the Mill Creek by day or night she did not approach. There’s a story—” He grinned suddenly at the recollection. “ ’Tis said one day Governor Hutchinson’s coach was stopped by some pigs in the lane, and she climbed in and sat on his knee, and offered him a drink from her bottle. She followed me once the whole length of Ship Street, shouting to the world how I was afraid of a real woman, as she called herself . . .”

“And were you?” asked Abigail, amused.

“Petrified. Still,” he said more quietly, “her death was an obscenity. I don’t know why I didn’t think of her, the moment I saw Mrs. Pentyre.”

“Possibly because hers was a death that falls more often to poor whores, than to rich ones?”

“Possibly.” He sounded sad.

“Lieutenant Coldstone says she was killed somewhere else, and brought to the wharf—”

“Lord, yes. In the summer the whole world’s out on the waterfront ’til all hours.” Revere’s fingers, long and deft, toyed with the carved-horn spoon. “Jem Greenough—he was constable of the ward that summer—said he thought it must have been done at the Queen of Argyll, across the way, which was where she generally took her men-friends. The landlord there is a cold-blooded rascal, and keeps open ’til dawn in the teeth of church and Army and all. He has rooms on his yard that nobody sees who goes in and out; all the girls use them. If he found her in one of them, as we found poor Mrs. Pentyre, he’d have done as we did.”

Abigail sniffed. “At least Sam didn’t put Mrs. Pentyre’s body out in the road. Or was that only because Mrs. Pentyre wasn’t found until daylight?”

“Where Sam is concerned, and the liberties of Englishmen,” returned the silversmith quietly, “I would put nothing past him.”

“You said Abednego Sellars was constable over in the Ninth Ward, in ’72 when Mrs. Barry was killed,” said Abigail after a time of thought. “Davy Sellars was taken in ’68 or ’67, so Sellars would have been frequenting the taverns in the North End pretty heavily by then—”

“Well, he always did,” said Revere. “And he knew Jenny Barry, if that’s the direction I think this is heading. I saw them together on three or four occasions, at the Queen or the Shores of Paradise. Did it mean anything?” Revere shrugged. “For that matter, she’d had a kiss or two off Sam, at a Pope’s Night parade . . . and there was more in one of Mrs. Barry’s kisses than there is to some marriages I’ve seen. Certainly to Abednego’s. But whether that means he’d murder the woman, and two others, and lure one of them to the house of one of our own pamphlet-writers instead of out to someplace like the Commons or the far side of Barton Point . . .”

He looked up at the tinkle of the shop-bell, and the boy’s voice called from the shop, “Pa? It’s Mr. Adams.”

Abigail said, “Drat!” and Revere handed her to her feet, gave her her marketing basket, and led her to the small door to the yard.

“The gate there past the shed will take you out to Wood Lane, by the Cockerel Church.” He pointed. “Just one request, in trade for the information I’ve given you, Mrs. Adams. Talk to me—or to John—before you take any steps.”

She tilted her head warily. “So you can forbid me, for the good of your endeavor?”

“So we can make sure someone goes with you,” he said quietly. “Good luck.” He stood in the rear door of his shop until she was through the little gate.

 

 

 

 

A
bigail turned them over in her mind, as she walked back toward Queen Street. Jenny Barry, Zulieka Fishwire, Perdita Pentyre. Coldstone had spoken several times of the differences between them:
In what way
, she asked herself,
are they alike
?

Just because Perdita Pentyre received a note luring her to the place of her death, it does not mean that the other two did not
.

One killed in a tavern, another in her house, a third in the house of a friend. She saw again the single column of smoke rising above the mansarded slates of Richard Pentyre’s mansion; heard the constant soft stirrings and creakings that had murmured at the edges of her interviews with Scipio, with Charles Malvern, with Lisette Droux in the Malvern kitchen.

Maids, butler, grooms at Pentyre’s house had been the guarantee of Perdita Pentyre’s protection. Those servants who knew everything, who slept beneath the same roof albeit in their maze of little attic chambers up beneath the rafters. Had it been chance only, that the murder had taken place on the night the Tillets were away?

A group of men passed her, newly in from the country, rifles on their shoulders and powder horns at their belts. They stepped respectfully out into the center of the street, to let her keep the higher and less mucky ground close to the wall. In their way, they were precisely like the Pentyre servants. Their mere presence was a guarantee of protection.
It is when we are alone that we are vulnerable.

She wondered if she were insane, for agreeing—nay, demanding—to go across the harbor to Castle William that afternoon. Of course, she told herself, Colonel Leslie was highly unlikely to clap her into a cell and send word to John to present himself alone and unarmed somewhere at midnight or he’d never see her alive again . . .

Considered in that light, her peril (if there was one) sounded as far-fetched as the situation in
Pamela
, which always caused Rebecca to roll her eyes at the ceiling. John, too—last night, as they’d gotten into bed, John had said, “That farrago is
honestly
your favorite novel?” Rather defensively, Abigail had replied, “And why would it not be?”

“You honestly think that a rich and powerful gentleman would—or would be able to—hold a young woman prisoner in the attic of a country house, with the connivance of not one but two entire staffs of servants,
and
of every other person in the countryside—”

“You’ve obviously never seen a family putting pressure on a girl to marry a man of property and power whom she doesn’t like,” she’d retorted, and the quibble had passed to other matters. Perhaps it was that discussion which had touched her thoughts, perhaps her dream of rain and darkness.

But as she walked along the street with the morning sky pale pewter beyond the line of the gables above her, she thought,
An attic
. Sam’s patriots had been poking into cellars, snooping around smuggler-caches, investigating warehouses for nine days, finding nothing . . . All those places where the smugglers hid their packets of tea and casks of cognac and other goods that the English Crown forbade English colonists to buy from any but English merchants. And those places all had this in common: that they could be entered by a stranger from the street.

With the complicity of the household, Rebecca could be hiding—or be hidden in—any house in town.

Or her body could be buried in any cellar.

The thought halted Abigail in her tracks, in the middle of the street; a coldness fell on her like the shadow of a storm.
She’s being held.

And the next instant:
That’s ridiculous
. . .

But her heart was beating fast, and she felt as she’d felt when, as a child, she’d grasped the logic that linked mathematical principles, or had understood for the first time why God
must
know who would be saved and who damned: that sense of seeing gears mesh, of facts falling into place. Before the eye of her mind flashed the open shutters of the Tillet attic, closed for the year that she’d been visiting Rebecca on Fish Street. With the Pentyre household in an uproar over its mistress’s murder, would Lisette Droux even be aware, during that first day or two, of someone being kept in one of those myriad little chambers marked by the stylish mansion’s dormer windows? Would she have thought to mention it? Particularly if some other explanation had been given that required her silence.
We must make our nest against a storm—

Ludicrous. The immediate, overpowering sense of reasonableness faded as swiftly as it had come. John was quite right:
You honestly think
. . .

No. She didn’t. Not honestly.

But the case Mr. Richardson had made—for a young girl who was powerless, with no family connections and no one to inquire after her, being held captive—returned again and again to her mind as she hurried her steps toward home.

 

 

 

 

S
he reached Queen Street in time to do her own share of the housekeeping—sweeping, cleaning the lamps and candlesticks, making up the aired beds with Nabby’s assistance—before plucking and dressing the ducks she’d bought and putting into the oven the bread she’d set early that morning to rise. She should have done laundry Monday and Tuesday, while she was out gallivanting through the countryside, she reflected.
It must certainly be done this week.
And . . . and . . . and . . .

Charley and Tommy clung to her skirts one moment, then caromed off back to their blocks and gourds.

In between all that she ate a quick nuncheon of bread, butter, and cheese, knowing she’d get nothing until supper. When everyone else was eating dinner she, God preserve her, would be on her way across to Castle Island—and probably too seasick to even think of food.

The thought brought another one. Before she left to meet Lieutenant Coldstone, she wrapped up a small crock of butter, a wedge of her mother-in-law’s justly famous cheese, half of one of her new-baked loaves and some of the pears she’d bought, put them in one of her baskets, and left the house slightly early, to give herself time to carry this offering to Hanover Street. The Hazlitt bookshop was closed. When she went round to the back, she could see through the shed windows a great stack of paper beside the printing press, a much smaller pile of finished pamphlets, and a dozen hung up to dry. From the half-open door of the keeping room came the sound of voices, Mrs. Hazlitt’s very fast, running over Orion’s interjections—

“—Don’t interrupt me, darling, you never listen to me now, you used to care what I had to say. Now you don’t even care that I love you. That I have given up everything, everything in my life for love of you—”

“Of course I love you, but—”

“Then listen to me! Please, sit down and listen to me for once—”

“Mother, I always listen—”

“You don’t! You’re always thinking about just dosing me with that horrible laudanum—don’t go looking around the room for it while I’m speaking, please, please, my darling—”

Orion caught Abigail’s eye as she stood in the doorway. He’d clearly been interrupted in the midst of a print run, his sleeves rolled to his biceps, his shirt, apron, flesh all smudged and sticky with ink. He moved his head, with a slight, desperate jerk, toward the open door of the staircase (
And with the cost of wood it’s no wonder he can afford no better help than Miss Damnation, with the heat wasted
. . .). Remembering what he’d told her about laudanum, Abigail set her basket on the sideboard and moved swiftly to the narrow door.

If the house itself, shop and all, covered more ground than a couple of good-sized tablecloths she would have been surprised. The second floor boasted one moderate bedchamber and a sort of windowless cupboard where paper, ink for the press, and the slender stock for the store were kept. When Abigail had first encountered Orion Hazlitt, upon moving to Boston, he’d had an apprentice who’d slept downstairs in the shop, and an elderly and crotchety housekeeper who’d slept in this cupboard. This good woman had left the household in high dudgeon when Lucretia Hazlitt had arrived, bag and baggage, and had informed her son that she would now live with him and keep his house. The bedchamber that had been Orion’s was, when Abigail ducked into it in quest of the laudanum bottle, crowded with trunks of his mother’s dresses, and the housekeeper’s sleeping-cupboard crammed with printing supplies. Rebecca had written to her that Orion kept that room locked at night and frequently during the day, for his mother had a tendency to go in and dump the contents of the household chamber pots there, if she felt she was being ignored or put off with excuses.

The laudanum bottle stood on the corner of the mantel—a fresh one, by its fullness—and Abigail noted that a cozy fire burned to warm the room despite the fact that Mrs. Hazlitt spent most of her day in the keeping room. The bed had been neither made nor aired nor, by the smell of the room, had the chamber pot been emptied.
Poor Orion!
There was a trundle bed half pulled out beneath the big one, presumably for Damnation. At a guess, Orion would be sleeping on a pallet in the keeping room . . .