The Ninth Daughter (39 page)

Across the open ground, and down the hill to their left, they could see the glow of torches around Griffin’s Wharf, where men still sat up, muskets in hand, around the
Dartmouth
, and now the
Eleanor
, as they had mounted guard now for ten days. Out in the harbor the
Beaver
lay at anchor, where the harbormaster had commanded she remain until the members of the crew had either died of the smallpox that had broken out among them, or were recovered enough to be in no danger of spreading the disease. No word yet, of the Governor sending for troops, from either Britain or Halifax, but surely it was only a matter of time . . .

“Oh, good,” Abigail said, as they emerged from the narrow throat of Gridley Lane to see, a few houses down the street, the weak glow of candles behind the shutters in the downstairs room which Abigail knew to be Sam’s study. “At least we won’t be waking him.”

“You’re tender of Sam’s rest, all of a sudden. I’d have thought you’d delight in shooting him out of bed in order to say,
I told you so . . .”

“But what a horrid thing to do to Bess. Besides, after all that’s happened today I’m not sure I could support the sight of Sam in his nightshirt.”

Predictably, Sam was not only awake and dressed, but drinking cider with Dr. Warren and Paul Revere, the latter preparing to take over charge of the guard on Griffin’s Wharf at midnight. With them were two or three others of Sam’s South End cabal that guided the Sons of Liberty, including—a bit disconcertingly—Abednego Sellars. These lesser captains retired to the kitchen while John and Abigail laid before Sam the poem: “ ’Tis Hazlitt’s hand, right enough,” said Abigail, and John nodded agreement. Revere lighted half a dozen more candles and brought them close.

“They’re right.” He read the verse before him, and his dark brow plunged down over his nose in shocked disgust; his dark eyes flicked up to meet Abigail’s. “Good God.”

“Not really,” she murmured in response.

“Do you have the note he sent to Mrs. Pentyre? The one supposed to be from Mrs. Malvern?”

Abigail produced it, and the silversmith held them close together, then produced a glass from his pocket to study them in detail. “The light isn’t good enough,” he said at length. “And the hand is well disguised.
Would
he have jeopardized one of our own?”

“Would one of Jesus’ disciples have jeopardized
Him
?” retorted Sam, putting on his greatcoat.

“He could be simply too mad to care,” put in Warren.

“We have seen nothing to tell us,” insisted John, “that Orion Hazlitt is in any way involved in the murder of Mrs. Pentyre, or the disappearance of Mrs. Malvern—or of your precious codebook,” he added. “All we can be
fairly
sure of, is that he was the author of the two crimes, and the man who has pursued Fluckner’s girl. The rest I presume we can ask him about in due time.”

“Will you take Mrs. Adams home, John?” Sam wrapped a scarf around his throat—another madder-red one, Abigail noted automatically:
Really, Boston has entirely too many things in it that too many people have
. . . “Or will you come?”

“We’ll go home,” said John. “If you’d send someone to let us know the—outcome—of your visit, I think we should both rather hear it tonight, than wait until I see you tomorrow at the meeting. And to add to that, after the meeting this evening, a man told me there’s a rumor afoot, that a ship is coming across from Lynn within a few days, to take the tea off the
Beaver
before she even comes into harbor.”

“’Tis what Paul and the doctor came just now to tell me,” responded Sam grimly. “ ’Twill have to be looked into, and at once, tomorrow—”

“It can’t be with the Governor’s approval—”

“I wouldn’t put it past him to hire the Devil himself to get the tea landed. Can you meet with us at nine?”

John nodded. As the other men left, he led Abigail once more out into the night. The wind had scattered the clouds; the night’s cold was worse. In most houses, the thin chinks of lamp- and candlelight had failed. The streets lay stark, under the watery blue of the moon.

“And do you think,” asked Abigail softly, “that Sam, and Dr. Warren, and the others, will wait long enough to ask Mr. Hazlitt whether he in fact knows anything of Mrs. Pentyre’s murder? They won’t dare to turn him over to the authorities, you know.”

“I think you’re right about that.”

“Then is this not in fact putting our own cause above the law?”

“Were we in England,” pointed out John, “and did Orion Hazlitt happen to be a friend of the King’s, or a member of the nobility, I doubt he would even be prosecuted. Come,” he added, and put his arm around her shoulders. “One way or another, we shall hear something before morning, and then we will know what we must do.”

But as the chimes of midnight mingled with the tolling of the alarm bells, Paul Revere—looking uncharacteristi cally haggard and shaken in the feeble shudder of the candlelight—brought the news that Orion Hazlitt had fled from his home.

“The place was shut tight as a drum when we got there; Sam broke a window in the printing shed, to get us in,” he said. “He wasn’t about to wait, you understand, for Hazlitt to pick up some rumor in the morning and disappear with Mrs. Malvern’s cipher-book and list of names, always supposing he had them. Hazlitt wasn’t there. Neither was the book. Sam searched the place.”

“What
was
there,” went on Revere steadily, “was Mrs. Hazlitt. Dead, like the others.” He was silent a moment, his eyebrows standing out very dark in the dim glow of her lamp, as if his face was still chalky from what he had seen. “
Just
like the others.”

Abigail put a hand over her mouth, trying to push from her mind the sight of a fresh bite in the wax yellow flesh of Mrs. Pentyre’s shoulder.
The serpent, the harlot, the witch, the nightmare . . .

What nightmares had tormented Orion Hazlitt’s sleep, on the trundle at his mother’s bedside while she murmured in opiated slumber?

What nightmare had he sought to flee, in the sanity of friendship with a woman he couldn’t have?

“The Sons are out looking for him,” Revere continued after a few moments. “Sam has asked me to tell you, that this isn’t to go any farther. We’ll look after our own.”

“I will at least send a letter to Miss Fluckner,” responded Abigail, “alerting her slave-girl—whom—” Her throat closed on Orion Hazlitt’s name, as her mind flung up at her a hundred conversations, a hundred memories, of that handsome and quiet young man. “Who was surely marked for the next victim. I will swear Miss Fluckner to secrecy—she is a fierce partisan to our cause—and Sam surely cannot object to that. And if he does,” she added mildly, “assure him that I will spend the next six months weeping with chagrin at his displeasure.”

Despite his look of having quietly thrown up his supper not long before, Revere managed a wry grin. “Depend upon me to do so, m’am.”

Twenty-nine

This note John carried down to the waterfront, to send across to Castle Island, when he left the house in the morning to meet Sam. “Don’t wait dinner for me,” he said as he kissed her. “Nor supper either. The Lord only knows how long it will take, to trace this rumor and find out who exactly is planning to take off the
Beaver
’s cargo—if indeed anyone is at all.”

“I shall leave a bowl of food for you on the doorstep,” Abigail promised, neatly tying the tapes on Tommy’s clout. “Right next to Messalina’s.”

He put a hand on her shoulder and leaned to kiss her nape. “Portia, your price is above rubies.”

Gomer Faulk, coming in behind Pattie with her arms full of ice-cold linens from the yard, said, “Good-bye, Mr. Adams,” as he passed. Making a place for the big woman in the household would be awkward, reflected Abigail, for the little time she’d be there—
I MUST write a letter to Papa today as well, and get Thaxter to take it
—but at least she was good-hearted, eager to do what lay within her simple understanding, and loved children.

“Well, she’s living proof that the Lord does provide,” remarked Pattie, with a twinkle in her eye. “Here she’s come just on the day when we need help with the ironing.”

Abigail shivered, as she and Pattie returned to the yard for another load of shirts and sheets, at the thought of how easy it was for a woman with no family connections to drop out of sight without a trace. Her mind roved, not to Pamela in the novel, but to Jenny Barry, to the children of Mrs. Kern the laundrywoman in Love Lane Yard—little six-year-old Nannie who’d been sent down to the tavern to fetch Mr. Ballagh, as casually as if she’d been a grown girl able to defend herself—to Philomela, after whom no one would inquire once money was handed over. Even to the maddening, clinging, outrageous Lucretia Hazlitt, whom everyone avoided if they could . . .

That, she supposed, in spite of its absurdity, was why she came back to
Pamela
again and again. Because at its heart, it was true. No one really cared about a girl who was poor, more than they cared about themselves.

Movement in the passway to the street caught her eye. Turning—her thought going at once to Sam and his “boys”—she saw Sergeant Muldoon. He saluted, and she quickly draped the garments over her big wicker clothes-hamper and hurried across to him: “Good Heavens, man, are you mad? I’m astonished you weren’t set upon, on your way here.”

“Well, there was a bit of a botheration.” He craned his head around to look over his own shoulder at splotches of fresh horse dung smeared on his back. “But ’twas just bad words, when all’s said, and none tried to stay me. ’Tis early yet. Though I’ll be hopin’,” he added a little shyly, “that you’ll be so kind as to find a minute, to walk me back to the wharves. I’ve this for you, from Himself.”

He held out a sealed note.

She unfolded the enclosed note.

For the second time in just over half a day, Abigail was smitten dizzy with the vertiginous sensation of being bombarded with too much light. As if she had opened a door long closed, and before her a vista of doors slammed open in such swift sequence that the sight of what lay beyond one was immediately overwhelmed by what lay beyond the next. Her breath stopped—she had the sensation it was minutes before she was able to draw it again, and she fought to keep her hands from shaking.