The Ninth Daughter (43 page)

Herself a Daughter of Eve—the ninth and worst, she recalled: the woman who goes about the town poking her long nose into things that weren’t her affair—Abigail would have given much, to tiptoe down the empty village street and put her head through the door of the House of Repentance. She recalled how an uncle of hers described the girls at the Salem trials, screaming in agony and pointing at the old woman whom the jury had just voted as innocent: It was she, she, who was doing this to them! Did they not see her glowing spirit, squatting on their chests, strangling and pinching and grinning? The jury had reversed their verdict, and old Mrs. Nurse had been hanged.

Sergeant Muldoon’s footfalls crunched in the dark, but Abigail saw nothing of him until he appeared suddenly, a yard from her, in the lantern’s feeble light. The sky was black overcast, thin wind running like scared rats over the fallow fields. The sergeant tied the end of his yarn-clue to a sliver of kindling, which he rammed between the logs at the corner of the house. “Let’s not lose that,” he said.

Abigail shut the lantern-slide. The dark was absolute. They followed the log wall of the blockhouse back around to their right, and Abigail almost broke her shin on the pile of firewood by the door. Opening the slide, they could just see the latchstring.

The remains of a fire glowed in the hearth of what had been a keeping room downstairs, long as two ordinary rooms and smelling of dirt and mold. Searching for the stairway, Abigail had the dim impression of a big table, a litter of broken baskets entangled with the knots and slag-ends of wool. Broken shuttles, and a whittled wood “wheel-finger,” told her that at some point this room had contained spinning wheels and probably a couple of looms, where the women of the village had pursued the wholesale task of cloth-making. Neither looms nor wheels remained. Along the back wall lay the stairs, a sort of heavy ladder that it would have taken all of Abigail’s strength to raise to its place alone. The room was as cold as a tomb.

The ladder, put in its place, hooked onto pegs in the wall just beneath a bolted trapdoor in the ceiling. This opened into darkness only warmer by the most minute degree, a darkness that smelled of dirty blankets, mice, decades of mold, and of chamber pots long uncleaned.

Abigail said, “Rebecca?”

There was no reply.

The dark lantern showed only edges, spots, and then only when Abigail had cautiously advanced to be nearly on top of what she saw. The room was a large one, lined—Abigail saw as she moved toward the wall—with two tiers of roughly constructed bunks. Some of these retained mattresses of ticking stuffed with what had once been straw. On others, only heaps of mousy-smelling husks remained. Wild skittering at the other end of the long room, and the lantern-beam glittered on a half-hundred little mousy eyes. Abigail walked toward the place, the light held out before her, knowing what she’d find close to that many mice.

And she did. A bowl of porridge and a hunk of bread, comprehensively chewed by the vermin. A red pottery pitcher of water. The rinsed-out chamber pot, and the trailing end of a very dirty striped blanket.

She held the lantern higher and closer.

Rebecca.
Asleep.

Thirty-two

Abigail saw her breast rise and fall beneath the blankets. Someone had thrown a couple of those thin straw mattresses over her, for extra warmth. Rebecca was so emaciated as to be almost unrecognizable, her black hair cut off short and a dark, bruised area just back of her right temple, a half-healed cut in its center. A black bottle—and two dead mice—lay beside the bed. Another bottle stood next to it, exactly the same as she had seen in Orion Hazlitt’s house.

Abigail knelt beside the bed. “Rebecca, wake up.” She shook her, gently but urgently.
“Wake up!”

She hefted the upright bottle. Nearly full. Concussion would have made laudanum almost redundant, though she suspected Orion had poured at least some down Rebecca’s throat the first night he’d carried her to his house, to keep her silent as the dead while he sent Damnation back to Gilead with the message:
I have done as you asked but you must keep this woman safe, or I will do no more
. She remembered herself downstairs, with Sam and Revere and Dr. Warren, like an utter fool talking with Orion while his mother, stupefied into near-unawareness, argued with customers and sat in the keeping room.

“Rebecca!” She dipped her hand into the pitcher—checking first that there was no mouse within it—and first flicked, then splashed water on her friend’s face. Muldoon prowled from window to window—there were three on the street side of the upper room, and one at one of the gable ends—trying to open a casement, to relieve the stuffiness of the atmosphere. It could scarcely get any colder: No wonder, in Rebecca’s state, it was nearly impossible to wake her. “You have to wake up!” All four of the windows were shuttered, and the shutters padlocked. Muldoon set aside his musket and the rope he still carried, and worked his knife beneath the iron hasp. “Rebecca!”

“Abigail?” Rebecca turned her face from the cold of the almost-frozen water. “Stop it.”

“You have to wake up.”

The brown eyes opened, blinked up at her, sleepy and incurious. Abigail held the candle close and saw the pupils wide, not narrow with opiates. Rebecca flinched from the light, then gasped, “Abigail!” and clutched suddenly at Abigail’s wrist. “Oh, God!”

“We have to get out of here. Now, this minute. Can you sit up?”

“I did—Yesterday—first time.” Rebecca groped for her shoulder, dragged herself up. “Mary Mother of
God
, it’s cold—”

Abigail pulled her own small clasp knife from her pocket, dragged the blanket from beneath the ragged mattresses and cut a slit in it, so that it went over Rebecca’s head like a crude garment. All they had left her was her chemise. It was filthy, but nowhere was it marked with blood.

“Cut one of those ticks.” Muldoon turned his head from the window, and tossed Abigail the coil of clothes-rope, followed by his cloak. “Wrap up her feet.”

“Who’s he?” Rebecca’s eyes were wide at the unmistakable cut and color—visible when his arm came near to the light—of a British infantry coat.

“Mrs. Malvern, may I present Sergeant Patrick Muldoon of the King’s Sixty-Fourth Regiment of Foot? Sergeant Muldoon, Mrs. Malvern—the sergeant has been good enough to escort me here, and I hope at some point John and others will—”

“Damn!”
Muldoon pulled the shutters to instants after he got them open. “Here they come!”

“Who?” gasped Rebecca shakily, as Abigail left her to dart to the window. “Abigail, where
am
I? I saw—Oh, God! Orion—”

“I know all about it.” Abigail peered grimly through the crack in the shutters. Her training held good and she said, “
Oh
!” instead of some of the more choice expressions Muldoon was using, but rage swept her, almost drowning out fear at the sight of the thirty or so men striding down the unpaved lane toward the blockhouse, burning billets of firewood aloft in their hands. The women—perhaps two thirds of the Congregation—swarmed among them, crying and shouting and pointing. The man in the lead wasn’t Bargest, but rather the dark-browed Brother Mortify, who had guided her and Thaxter out of the village lands.

She flung herself back to Rebecca, pulled her to her feet, and threw Muldoon’s cloak around her. “They’ll see us use the door—”

He was already working, ripping and levering at the hasp that locked the shutters of the single window in the gable wall. It faced at an angle, away from the street. Through the shutters on the street-side windows the torchlight showed up fiercely yellow, and Abigail heard the crash of the door opening downstairs. But instead of footsteps on the floor below, there was only the light, sharp crack of torches flung in, followed at once by billows of acrid smoke. Someone shouted, “Stand ready! She may fly!”

“I’ve my gun—”

“There she is! There she is!” screamed a woman—Rebecca was still leaning on Abigail’s shoulder, nowhere near any of the windows. “I see her! Look, she’s flying!”

Rebecca muttered, “I wish I might!” She took a step, staggered, and someone outside fired a gun. “Don’t tell me they think I’m a witch!”

“Yes.”

Someone else yelled, “There she is!” and more guns boomed. At the same moment Muldoon flung open the gable window. Smoke was now pouring up the stair, and through the open trapdoor Abigail could see the red flare of firelight.

“Give her here.” Muldoon jerked the knot tight on the doubled rope, wrapped around the nearest bunk-frame, crossed himself, scooped Rebecca up, and put her over one shoulder like a sack of meal. “Hang on, m’am, if ever you did. Mrs. Adams, wrap the rope around your arm like this, play it out, put your feet on the wall and lean back—”

Abigail said, “Oh, dear God . . .”

“Throw me down me musket to me first. And don’t drop that winker!”

Dear God
—She fought panic at the thought of descending as Muldoon descended, playing out the rope around his arm. The distance wasn’t fearful—she’d fallen from higher trees as a girl. But in the blackness, with the red wildness of firelight reflected from the front of the house and flame beginning to crawl up the dry wood of the ladder—for a moment she could think nothing but,
I’ll be killed. I’ll be killed
—

Her mind flashed, blindingly, to the night a number of years ago, when one of the wild mobs of the North End, stirred up by Sam’s furious pamphlets against the Stamp Act, had mobbed, broken into, and gutted the Governor’s house—the last time Sam had let a mob get away from his control. Governor Hutchinson and his daughter had escaped out a back window, she had heard later, and fled through the winding alleyways of the North End to take refuge with friends.
What horror—!

Trembling, she dropped the musket down out the window, tied the lantern to her waist, the heat of the metal palpable even through several petticoats and a quilted skirt, wrapped the rope around her arm as she’d been shown and hoped fervently she was doing correctly—

“There they go!” screamed someone, and as Abigail swung herself out the window—and the rope constricted like an agonizing garrote around her arm—two or three men came around the corner of the house. “She’s getting away!”

Muldoon has time for one shot.
The thought passed, very coolly, through Abigail’s mind and, bracing her feet on the house-wall, she began to lower herself as rapidly as she could. Someone fired a shot, then another, followed by a great deal of shouting and cursing and Muldoon’s voice bellowing, very unlike his usual good-natured self, “And the next one goes between the eyes of the first man steps forward!”

Then she was on the ground. She ran to the sergeant’s side, scooped up the musket that he’d dropped to the ground to draw the pistol: “Go!” he said, and she went. The yarn-clue was there, and she fled along it, the musket weighing pounds in her hand, the spreading firelight showing her up. At the thicket she waited, gasping, hearing shots behind her in the dark and seeing the black figures of men and woman silhouetted on the red glare of the fire.

Men and women both.
The words ran in a circle in her head.
Men and women both . . .

The way she herself, and Rebecca—and poor Mrs. Pentyre—had arrayed themselves at the sides of the men, in their fight for the colony’s rights?

She shoved the thought from her as she’d have struck a mouse away that tried to climb her skirts:
We’re following the principles of justice! The rights that Englishmen have fought for—

But she knew perfectly well that many members of the Sons of Liberty were in the organization simply because they were following Sam Adams.

It isn’t the same.
She knew it in the marrow of her bones.

His recent outburst against her notwithstanding, would Sam hesitate to order killed a man he saw as a threat to the Sons?

But at that moment, kneeling, gasping, in the wet ground by the hazel thicket, it seemed frighteningly close.

“Mrs. Adams?” “Abigail?”

Whispered voices, hoarse with exertion and fear. “Here.” She shot the slide back for one instant, then closed it again.

“Bide,” said Muldoon.

Rebecca caught at her arm, her shoulder, her weight frighteningly slight. How few days ago had she wakened and been able to eat and drink? At the same moment the pistol was put into her hand, the musket taken, and she heard the oily snick of the lock, the faint noise of a cartridge being ripped. A moment later, the clink of the rod rammed home: once, twice, thrice. Every man in the militia whined like a schoolboy about drill—
How many times we got to show them we know how to load our bloody guns
?