The Ninth Daughter (29 page)

At the head of the stair, laudanum bottle in hand, Abigail paused, her eye caught by the ladder that led up to the attic. On impulse she went back to it, and climbed to the trapdoor—

The tiny space below the steep-slanted roof was crammed with more trunks, all the things Mrs. Hazlitt had bought in the nearly two years she’d lived with her son: dresses, sets of chinaware, clocks, birdcages, an ostrich egg packed in straw. One couldn’t have imprisoned a lapdog up there, let alone a full-grown kidnapped maidservant.

You have indeed read
Pamela
too many times.

Abigail descended to the keeping room once more.

Mrs. Hazlitt was in tears by the time Abigail emerged from the staircase (and thriftily closed the door after herself), Orion holding her in his arms and covering her face with kisses. But in his own countenance was only exhaustion and revulsion, and the haggard desperation of a man who sees no light at the end of his road. He beckoned Abigail up, and it took the two of them to get his mother to swallow the medicine: She spit the first mouthful at him, cried when he forced her to swallow the second by holding her nose and keeping a hand on her mouth.

“When she gets excited like this, I’m always afraid Damnation will give her too much of the stuff,” he said, when they’d finally guided the stumbling, disheveled woman to her chair by the keeping room fire. “I
must
finish the pamphlets, and I
must
get to the meeting this afternoon. Please don’t think—” he began, with a glance back toward his mother. He brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, making the mess worse. “She wasn’t always like this, you know.”

“I know.” Though in fact, Rebecca had written to her last year that according to her son, Mrs. Hazlitt had always been a horror.

“Bless you—” He lifted the napkin from the basket, his tired face lighting up. “You are indeed an angel, Mrs. Adams. Now I must fly—” His face altered, suddenly twisted with dread, fatigue, grief. “You have heard nothing, I suppose?”

Looking up at him, she wondered when he had last slept. She shook her head. Now was not the time, she knew, to lay upon him her own inconclusive findings and nightmare surmises. He was a man who bore trouble enough.

“It will be over soon.” Abigail placed her hands over his, on the basket’s plaited handle. “I’ll make a little extra for dinner tonight, and send Pattie over with it. John tells me the
Dartmouth
must unload her tea by Saturday—a week from today—else it will all be confiscated to pay the harbor tolls. Whatever happens, it will only be a week.”

He caught her wrist as she was turning away, looking up at her with ravaged eyes. “And then what?” he asked softly. “Rebecca—Mrs. Malvern—”

Saved or endangered, dead or alive,
femme seule
or spouse abused . . . Rebecca would always be some other man’s wife.

Abigail said quietly, “God knows. But God
does
know—and will inform us, in due time.”

Twenty-one

Visiting Castle Island on the previous Friday, Abigail had received the impression of crowding and bustle, in the brick corridors of the little fortress, and in the village of tents, huts, cow-byres, sheep pens, and laundry-lines that had grown up around its walls. When the two sailors from the
Cumberland
landed her there today—in company with the family of an English customs clerk named Burrell, two gentlemen related to the Olivers, and towering mountains of luggage—Abigail saw her earlier error. It seemed to her that at least as many tents and huts again had been newly erected, not only for the servants of the refugee Tories but for all the lesser officers and their clerks and servants who had been displaced from the fort, so that the likes of the Hutchinsons, Olivers, and Fluckners could have its sturdier roof over their heads. Smoke from cook-fires wreathed the walls and stung Abigail’s eyes as she and Thaxter picked their way up from the dock. Every step was impeded by camp servants putting up shelters, sheep penned in the thoroughfare, bales of provisions, and prostitutes. The whole place smelled like a privy.

Lieutenant Coldstone met her a few yards from Castle William’s gate.

“Mrs. Adams.” He bowed over her hand. “I beg your pardon. I had meant to come to fetch you—”

“Good heavens, Lieutenant, with this many soldiers shifting their arrangements about I’m astonished you have a few minutes to meet me here. Did you have civilians quartered upon you?”

The chilly reserve broke into a grin at this reversal of the usual civilian complaint of the military being quartered in private homes, swiftly repressed: His eyes still smiled. “I have lived under canvas before, m’am; and that, recently enough that it is no catastrophe. The civilians forced to take refuge here, from fear of the mobs in Boston, have been neither trained to it, nor are they for the most part physically suited to such hardships. Not only the men by whom your husband and his friends feel wronged, but their wives, who have surely wronged no one, and children as well.”

“And, as the Lord says to Jonah,
also much cattle
,” remarked Abigail, stepping out of the way of a girl in a dirty skirt, driving half a dozen pigs through the gate. “Lieutenant Coldstone, you recall Mr. Thaxter, my husband’s clerk? I assume Mr. Pentyre has consented to see me?” She took Thaxter’s arm again and followed Coldstone after the pigs up to the gate, the muck of the path sucking and clinging to her pattens.

“With certain stipulations, yes.”

“Stipulations?” Abigail raised her brows, and got an enigmatic glance over Coldstone’s epauletted shoulder in reply.

“He has asked that I be present at the interview—at a sufficient distance that conversation in a low voice should be private enough if you choose,” he added, anticipating Abigail’s protest, though in fact what she felt was relief that she would not be obliged either to broach or explain the matter of his presence herself. “And he has requested that you be searched.”

Abigail stopped short under the low brick tunnel of the gate.
“Searched?”

“With all due decency.” Coldstone’s voice, like his features, seemed wrought of polished marble, ungiving and absolutely smooth. “I have asked the wives of five of the sergeants major here: respectable women, and honest. You may choose which of them you will, to perform the office. He would not meet you, else.”

Abigail opened her mouth, outraged, then closed it again.
Why would he ask that?
Her eyes searched the face of the man before her. “He sounds like a man in fear for his life.”

“Were he not,” replied Coldstone civilly, “he would not be living in a single clerk’s room on this island. Nor would any of the other lawyers, Crown officers, merchants, and their families currently eating Army rations. Your husband is, I might remind you, known as one of the leaders of the Boston mob—”

“He is
not
!”

“Forgive me for contradicting a lady, m’am, but he is indeed
known
as such, whatever his true position might be. And if he will take such a position, his wife must needs suffer for it, even as Mrs. Oliver and Mrs. Fluckner and the Apthorp ladies do—and, I might add, suffer to a considerably lesser degree. Will you agree to submit to the conditions?”

Abigail smiled. “I would not miss it for worlds.”

 

 

 

 

T
he wives of the sergeants major were red-faced, thick-armed, good-natured-looking women of the kind one would meet in the marketplace any day, not the slatternly trulls described in pamphlets from one end of New England to the other (
I
have
been listening to too many of Sam’s diatribes
). Abigail selected the one who looked most talkative, and remarked, as they retired behind a screen (there being no spare rooms in the fortress at all besides this single office), “I had no idea I was considered so formidable. Does Mr. Pentyre truly expect me to assault him?”

“That I don’t know, mum. He’s sure no so fussy about others that see him—and his poor wife
did
come to a terrible end.”

“Were you acquainted with her, Mrs.—?”

“Gill. Maria Gill. And only to give a good day to; as sweet and condescending a lady as you could ask, which is somethin’ you don’t often find in Americans, begging your pardon, mum. Not like that nasty—” She stopped herself. Abigail could not but wonder if the next words out of her mouth would have been,
that nasty Mrs. Belle-Isle
. “She’d often stop and talk with us, or with the women who did laundry or sewing here—not the girls that do for the men, you understand, but the town women who do fine work for the gentlemen. She had what my mum used to call ‘the common touch’: permittin’ no liberties, of course, but not bein’ so high in the instep as some I could name, that treats honest women as if they were the dirt in the streets.”

“She was here fairly often, was she?” Abigail stepped out of her skirt and stood back while Mrs. Gill pinched and shook her petticoats (“With your permission, mum—”), turned her bodice inside out, and conscientiously removed and held up every item in her pockets and set them on the chair in their screened sanctum (“Are you sure you’re warm enough, mum?”).

“Well”—Mrs. Gill half hid a little conspiratorial smile—“all those town ladies, they were back and forth to dine, of course. And the officers would invite them sailing, or to reviews, or to hear the regimental band. So yes, Mrs. Pentyre was often here.”

“With her husband?”

“Not always.” The stout woman cast a quick glance at Abigail’s face, as if asking herself how discreet she should be, then whispered, “She and the Colonel was good friends, if you take my meaning . . .
good
friends.” She winked. “But Mr. Pentyre, as often as not he’d come dine with them, or ask the Colonel over to that big house he has in Boston, and why should he play dog-in-the-manger? T’wasn’t as if he was sittin’ home alone weepin’ into his beer, nights.”

“Really?” Abigail leaned forward, discreetly agog.

Pleased, Mrs. Gill said, “That’s the truth, mum. A West Indian lady, a Mrs. Belle-Isle, that he set up in a house not two streets from his own, and has had brought over here—
and
got her a room for herself, when respectable people are doin’ without or livin’ in tents behind the cow pens—for fear that if riotin’ breaks out in the town over this Donny brook over the tea—and what on earth would Americans balk at? You can’t get it at home for such a price!—there’s some that would give her her deservin’ for the way she lives.”

“You don’t say?”

“I
do
say.” Mrs. Gill handed her back her bodice with a self-righteous nod. “The jewelry he’s given that woman—and her not half as pretty as poor Mrs. P!—and the airs she’s taken on herself . . . and casting eyes on Major Gray and Major Garrick, and even the Colonel himself, poor man.”

“Was the Colonel very grieved?”

“He was shocked, of course.” Mrs. Gill started to lace her up again, neat and swift as a chambermaid. “You can’t not be, you know, even if you barely know someone, who’s killed sudden and terrible like that. Why, our Captain when we was stationed in Halifax, he robbed the men somethin’ cruel, holdin’ back their pay and sellin’ their rations to pocket the money himself, an’ havin’ my Fred flogged when he complained of it to the Colonel . . . yet when the Hurons killed him, I swear to you I cried, and not the only one in the regiment neither. And Mrs. P was a sweet young lady. The Colonel liked her by him. He had her ride with him in town like she was a queen. She’d stand at his side when he reviewed the soldiers, all pink and pretty—not like these Boston ladies who go about with faces like boot-scrapers as if a bit of rouge has got to be the Mark of the Devil, beggin’ your pardon, m’am, and to each ’er own I says. Even Mr. P would joke, that she’d become queen over the regiment. But still, you know, mum, Colonel Leslie is a soldier; and these things come and go. ’Tisn’t as if she thought he’d marry her, or either thought it would last. She flung herself at him, when all’s said—and he didn’t duck.”

“Well.” Primly, Abigail shook out her petticoat. “She sounds like a bit of a flirt to me, God rest her. If the Congregation didn’t frown upon gossip, I’d wonder if Mrs. Pentyre gave the Colonel cause to be jealous as well.”

“As to that, I’m sure I never saw sign of it.” Mrs. Gill sighed. “Even when the other young officers would be gallant—as they are, you know, being so far from home, how can you blame them?—she’d let them know it was the Colonel who had her heart, at least for the time being. And as for the Congregation,” she added with a grin, “if good men haven’t anything better to frown at in this sorry world, m’am, I say, Let ’em frown, eh? Gives their face a bit of exercise, not meaning no disrespect.”

Abigail permitted herself a smile. “And none taken, I’m sure.”

Like nearly everyone else in Boston, Abigail had seen Richard Pentyre from a distance. Like nearly everyone, she had for years thought him an Englishman, and the caricature of one, at that: slight, girlish, excessively tailored and intensely peruked. He bowed to Abigail with great polite-ness, and took a seat on the opposite side of the heavy table like a man who providentially finds the chairs so arranged, rather than one who has insisted on their placement to keep the greatest distance from his caller. He said, “Mrs. Adams,” in his wisp of a voice, but did not offer to touch her hand.