The Ninth Daughter (30 page)

“Mr. Pentyre.” Lisette Droux’s voice came back to her:
He laughed and joked his wife about her lovers, yet if any man crossed him in a business way, he make sure that that man became truly sorry that he had done so.
“Thank you for seeing me.”

“The honor is mine.” His eyes were dark, intelligent, and wary: because he knew more than he was saying concerning his wife’s death? Or because he expected that at any moment she would whip a pistol out from beneath her skirts? “Lieutenant Coldstone said that you thought I could be of assistance in some way?”

“I know not if anyone can be,” said Abigail, hoping her voice and expression combined to express wearied resignation. “But I know not where else to turn. I am a friend to Mrs. Malvern—the woman in whose house—”

He raised a hand to stay further words, and turned his face aside. “Yes,” he said quickly, though his expression registered nothing. “I know who Mrs. Malvern was.”

“Pray forgive me for bringing up a subject that I know must grievously distress you.”
Was?
A thoughtless trick of speech? Or—Knowledge of something that others didn’t have? “Yet I—and, I might add, Mr. Malvern—are grasping at straws, in the matter of Mrs. Malvern’s disappearance.”

Annoyance flickered across his face at the mention of Malvern’s name. “Pray believe me, m’am,” he said, “though I sympathize with you in your concern for your friend, I had no idea that my wife had formed so distasteful a connection. While I’m sure Mrs. Malvern was a paragon of virtue and beauty, her husband’s habit of using members of his family—in particular his son and daughter—to obtain information about his trade rivals would have caused me to forbid the acquaintance, had I known of it.”

He was watching her again, with an intentness that she found hard to attribute merely to grief for a wife who had betrayed him. Trying to read her, she thought, as she—her eyes downcast in a counterfeit of confusion—was trying to read him.

“They had no acquaintance in common that you know of?”

“In the past, I’m sure they did. Given Mrs. Malvern’s current circumstances, I can hardly imagine any woman with whom my wife was associated, who would acknowledge the connection.”

The revival of the implication that Rebecca had deserted Charles Malvern out of a craving for low company brought a flush of anger to Abigail’s face, and though she lowered her head in submissive assent, she took a good deal of pleasure in saying meekly, “Of course, sir. And would you know what to make of the story that I have heard, that you were seen in Hull Street, at half past eleven on the Wednesday night, on foot and walking toward the waterfront?”

Pentyre couldn’t stop himself. He threw a fast glance over his shoulder, to see if Coldstone had heard.

“That is a lie,” he said—not loudly enough for the words to carry to the Lieutenant.

“Is it?” said Abigail in a normal tone. “I understood that—”

“I am a man with many enemies, Madame, and as such I cannot hope to keep track of the calumnies that may be circulated about me by the disgruntled. Fortunately, it is well attested—by the sons of Governor Hutchinson—that I was at cards with them, in their father’s mansion on Marlborough Street, quite at the other end of the town.” As he spoke his eyes shifted, and for a moment, behind the wary anger in them, she thought she saw fear.

Why fear?

“I’m sorry that I could not be of more assistance.” He was on his feet. At the other side of the office, looking the tiniest bit surprised, Coldstone rose from his chair.

Hamlet, or Viola, or the wily Odysseus, would have had precisely the right question to call the merchant back, to pique his vanity or his curiosity or his fear of what she might know and thus elicit further revelations . . .

And all she, Abigail Adams, could do was incline her head, and say, “I thank you for your trouble, sir—and for the information you have given me.”

Would a murderer have turned back, asked in not-quite-concealed concern,
And what information was that, pray, my dear Mrs. Adams
?

Richard Pentyre got out of the room as promptly as he was able—she had the impression he only barely kept himself from backing from her presence.

“Please wait here, Mrs. Adams.” Coldstone favored her with a slight bow, and followed him out.

Abigail folded her hands, her heart beating hard. She had touched him on the raw, beyond a doubt; frightened him. It crossed her mind to wonder what he was going to say to Coldstone, who might very well have seen or heard something. Or would it suffice merely to play his trump card:
I am the Governor’s friend. The law does not apply to me
.

In certain matters it didn’t. The fact that the Governor’s friends, like the King’s, could get away with financial peculation and chicanery with the customs was one of the things that most maddened Sam, and John, and others. In a question of murder, however, he was likely to find matters less amenable to influence.

Or was he? The thought was a disconcerting one. In
Pamela
, as John had derisively pointed out, the lustful and demanding Mr. B held his power precisely as Governor Hutchinson held it: because every man’s livelihood depended upon his whim. No one considered a servant girl’s honor more important than keeping a roof over one’s own head or food on one’s family table.

The door opened. Abigail got to her feet, lips parting to ask Coldstone what Pentyre had said—

Only it wasn’t Lieutenant Coldstone in the doorway, but a tall, buxom, black-haired young girl in an overly colorful parakeet green dress.

In fact—Abigail belatedly identified the newcomer—it was the Royal Commissioner’s daughter, Miss Lucy Fluckner.

“Mrs. Adams?” The girl’s husky hesitancy, Abigail guessed at once, was not her usual habit. “We need to speak to you. I-I think it’s on a matter of life and death.”

Twenty-two

The Fluckners had two rooms in what was clearly the officers’ quarters of Castle William: Abigail wondered who had been displaced to make way for them. The suite had obviously been intended to house an officer and his servant, for a door connected its rooms, and in addition each had a door and a window looking out onto the parade ground. A light burned in the window of the smaller chamber, an uneasy reminder that, though daylight remained in the sky, evening was coming on fast. The wind, which, as she had prayed it would, had slackened for her crossing, was now getting up again, and whistled shrilly around the fortress walls. It would be a bitter night for those lodged under canvas. As she crossed the parade in Miss Fluckner’s wake, Abigail checked her watch, reflecting that she had best hold fast to what she had instructed Thaxter to tell Lieutenant Coldstone: that she would return in one hour.

The Lieutenant’s probable reaction, when he returned to the office and found John’s clerk there instead of herself, she put from her mind. Instead she mentally marshaled the arguments she’d have to present to this decisive-looking young lady—or her irascible father—about where she, Abigail, was supposed to spend the night—

And tried to salve her conscience about playing sleuth-hound on the Sabbath yet again.

“No one will believe Philomela when she says she’s in danger,” said Miss Fluckner—who was, Abigail was pleased to see, one of the few women of her acquaintance who walked as briskly as she did herself. “They say—Papa says—she just doesn’t want to be sold, because I indulge her and she’s afraid that another master wouldn’t.” Though Colonel Leslie had clearly given orders that the open parade in the center of the fort was to remain open, all around its edges pens had been set up for sheep, cows, pigs. As they approached the doors Abigail was obliged to gather up her skirts lest they be caught on the corners of makeshift chicken-coops. “Papa says she’s sly, playing on what he calls my ‘romantical fancies.’ Papa says all Negroes are liars.”

“I expect a good number of slaves do learn to lie, if ’tis the only way they’ll escape a beating,” remarked Abigail rather drily. “And since their masters would sooner blame them than themselves for things that go wrong, one can scarcely take issue with this evidence of intelligence on their part. I am pleased that you’re treating your servant’s danger seriously, but what prompted you to come to me? Don’t tell me my reputation for detecting wrongdoing has spread beyond this affair of Mrs. Pentyre?”

“But it
is
about Mrs. Pentyre’s murder.” Miss Fluckner stopped before the door, regarded her with wide eyes of a jewel-like blue. “Mr. Malvern’s Scipio told Philomela that you were looking for the man who did it—that you’d gone to talk to Mrs. Fishwire’s neighbors, because she was killed the same way—”

“Wait a moment,” said Abigail, with a sense of shock. “Are you telling me that your servant Philomela—the young woman I saw with you on Rowe’s Wharf yesterday, I presume—”

Miss Fluckner nodded, black curls bouncing.

“—believes herself to be in danger from the same man who killed those other women? How does she know this? Has she seen him?”

“She thinks so. She doesn’t know, Mrs. Adams, but she’s mortally afraid.” Miss Fluckner opened the door.

Philomela got to her feet. Abigail’s impression of yesterday was confirmed. Slender and graceful, even in the neat chintz frock and mobcap of a maidservant, she was probably the most beautiful woman Abigail had ever seen. She sank into a curtsey as Miss Fluckner said, “Mrs. Adams, this is Philomela.”

“Thank you, m’am, for coming.” The young woman’s voice was as lovely as her face, and her golden brown eyes were not those of a girl who indulges in “romantical fancies.” “And thank you for believing me, and Miss Fluckner. For a swear to you as I’m born, I’m telling the truth, so far as I know it.”

“And what is the truth?” At Miss Fluckner’s gesture Abigail took a seat in one of the room’s two cane-bottomed chairs; Miss Fluckner herself sat on the bed. Rods had been rigged from the ceiling, and calico curtains, in an approximation of a half-tester—cryingly necessary, thought Abigail, given the chill of the room and the doll-like pe titeness of the fireplace. “That the man who murdered Jenny Barry, Zulieka Fishwire, and Perdita Pentyre seeks also to kill you? What makes you think this? Please speak freely,” she added, seeing the automatic look of reserve—so common to even the best-treated of slaves—that flickered across the back of Philomela’s eyes. Abigail glanced at Miss Fluckner for confirmation, then said, “Nothing that you say will be repeated, or will be held against you.”

A ridiculous assertion
, she railed at herself the instant the words were out of her mouth. Even the most trusting bonds-woman wasn’t about to state some of her real opinions in the presence of members of a race who could get her whipped if they didn’t like what they heard. But it seemed to reassure Philomela.

“I don’t know about Mrs. Pentyre, m’am,” said the servant after a moment. “And I don’t know why this is happening to me. I swear, I have never spoken to this man in my life. Even as I say it, it sounds—” She shook her head, peeped apologetically at her young mistress. “It sounds like something out of the novels Miss Lucy is always reading.”

And Miss Lucy—to Abigail’s relief and doubtless Philomela’s as well—only grinned in good-natured acknowledgment.

Philomela took a deep breath, let it out. “This is what happened. It doesn’t sound like much.”

And it didn’t.
And yet
—thought Abigail, the hair prickling on her nape.
And yet . . .

Philomela’s master in Virginia had sold her to Thomas Fluckner in April of 1772, because Mrs. Fluckner’s maid had had a child, and could no longer (Mrs. Fluckner said) devote herself to the interests of her mistress as she properly should. When Philomela had been in the household about six weeks, someone started sending her poems.

“They’d be slipped in under the kitchen door at night, or poked through the cracks in the shutters. Mr. Barnaby—Mr. Fluckner’s butler—would bring them to me, and joke me about having an admirer, and that’s all I thought they were.”

“You do read, then?”

“Oh, yes, m’am. Back home, my mistress liked to be read to. And one of my mistress’s sons would write me poems—one of his friends, too. That’s all I thought these were: young gentlemen’s foolishness.” She looked aside slightly, and down, her bronze lips tightening in a way that told Abigail that these offerings were probably not the only
young gentlemen’s foolishness
that Philomela had had to put up with in her old mistress’s home. She wondered how much those first poems had had to do with the decision to sell Philomela . . . far away from Virginia.

“I did show Miss Lucy,” Philomela added quickly. “And I asked her, Should I show Mrs. Fluckner? I didn’t want to do wrong, yet I did fear Miss Lucy’s mother might blame me, for having an admirer, though I didn’t know who this man was.”

Lucy Fluckner put in, “Mama would have said, Philomela was encouraging him, and would have asked Papa to sell her. I thought as long as I knew, it was all right.”