The Ninth Daughter
( Abigail Adams Mystery - 1 )
Barbara Hamilton
From Publishers Weekly
At the start of Hamilton's exceptional debut, set in Boston in 1773, Abigail Adams stumbles on an unknown woman's bloody corpse while paying a call on her friend and fellow patriot, Rebecca Malvern, who later goes missing. When it looks as if Abigail's irascible husband, John, may be accused of the murder, she sets out to clear his name. The trail takes her through the streets of colonial Boston and into the surrounding towns. Meanwhile, political unrest and opposition to the English crown grows. Working with both the Sons of Liberty and loyalists, Abigail bridges the gap between them as she investigates the murder and searches for Rebecca. While bringing to life such historical figures as Sam Adams and Paul Revere, Hamilton transports the reader to another time and place with close attention to matters like dress, menus and the monumental task of doing laundry. Historical fans will eagerly look forward to the next in this promising series.
Not the usual suspects . . .
Abigail looked at the paper as she moved to put it in the pocket of her skirt.
It wasn’t a poem.
It was a list of names. Her eye picked out John’s, close to the top. Above it was that of John Hancock, one of the wealthiest merchants in Boston and known throughout the colony as the man to go to if you wanted good quality tea without the added expense of British excise tax. Her good friend—and John’s—Paul Revere the silversmith, and young Dr. Warren, Rob Newman who was sexton of the Old North Church, Billy Dawes the cobbler . . .
Names Abigail knew.
She knew the handwriting on the list, too, and felt a chill start behind her breastbone, spreading to her hands and feet.
The handwriting was that of John’s wily cousin Sam: Sam who was the head of the secret society dedicated to organizing all who wished for the overthrow of the King’s government in the colonies. The Sons of Liberty.
It was a list of the names of about twenty of the Sons.
All of whom would, if the list fell into the government’s hands, beyond the shadow of a doubt be hanged.
For Gene L. with thanks
One
A bigail Adams smelled the blood before she saw the door was open.
In November, Boston didn’t reek the way it did in summer, especially down here in Fish Street. The coppery blood-stink cut the more prosaic pong of fish-heads and privies from the moment she stepped through the gate into Tillet’s Yard, the way the single thread of gore seemed to shriek at her against the gray of the wet morning, trickling down Rebecca Malvern’s doorstep.
For that first instant, Abigail thought: One of the cats.
Or maybe Nehemiah Tillet’s cook had been clumsy, gutting a chicken.
Only then did she see the open door.
The British—
Her marketing basket slipped from her hands and she gathered her skirts, strode to the place, heart in her throat.
Rebecca—
It wasn’t the first time blood had been shed in Boston. Before Abigail’s eyes flashed the red-spattered snow of King Street, three and a half years ago now but alive in her mind as if it were yesterday. For an instant she heard again the shouting of the King’s soldiers and the mob, smelled powder-smoke thick in the air.
Rebecca’s broadsides against the King and the King’s troops were absolutely scathing. If someone told them who she was, and where she could be found—
Abigail froze in the doorway, hand pressed to her mouth.
Her first impression was that the whole floor of the tiny kitchen had been flooded with blood. It pooled in the hollows of the worn bricks, overspilled the threshold. Yet it wasn’t the first thing that slashed her mind, seized her eyes.
A woman lay facedown close to the overturned table. Gray dress, dark hair; skirt and petticoats turned up to her waist. Her bare buttocks and thighs were crisscrossed with knife slits. One shoe of fine green leather had been kicked off, lay on its side like a tiny wrecked boat against the irons of the hearth.
“Rebecca—”
Abigail’s vision grayed.
The British—
Then against her will the words came to her mind—or Charles Malvern?
He wouldn’t! She groped for the doorframe, thoughts momentarily frozen at even a mental accusation of such a thing. Charles Malvern was a pinchpenny, moneygrubbing Tory, violent of temper and outspoken in his opinion that the Crown had every right to kill traitors where they stood. Yet surely, surely, he would never do this to the woman who had walked out of his bed and house.
Would he?
Someone had.
Not Charles! Not Rebecca—!
Abigail took a deep breath, feeling as if her knees would give way. Stepped across the great pool of gore on the threshold, stumbled to the side of . . .
Not Rebecca. The words that had sprung to her mind as a frantic plea to God suddenly rearranged themselves, and she thought, with an odd calm, No, in fact, it isn’t Rebecca.
Or at least, that isn’t Rebecca’s dress.
She dropped to her knees.
Dear God, forgive me for feeling relief. It was certainly some poor woman who had been used this way.
Hands shaking with reaction and guilt, she reached to turn the woman over to see her face, then made herself draw back.
John—her beloved, self-important, irascible John, the hero of her heart, husband of her bosom, and occasional bane of her existence—was forever coming home from the colony courts fuming at the imbecility of police constables who dragged furniture about in burgled houses, who stepped on footprints left by thieves, who casually tossed out broken dishes or torn rags or any of a thousand things by which, he said, any reasonable man could reconstruct who, exactly, had broken into someone’s barn or rifled someone’s strong room. Nincompoops! (This observation was usually made at the top of his lungs and accompanied by hurling his wig against the kitchen wall.) You’d think the lot of them were in the pay of horse thieves themselves!
Abigail took a deep breath, folded her arms on her knees, and bent her body to try to see the woman’s face.
She was obliged to straighten up again and swallow hard. Not only the woman’s backside and thighs had been slashed, but her face, from what Abigail could see of it, had, too. It was difficult to be sure, because of the blood that covered it from her cut throat.
But the dress at least certainly wasn’t Rebecca’s. Her friend had, in truth, owned gowns as fine as that heavy gray silk with its sprigs of pink and green. But she had left them in her husband’s house, when she had walked out of it for good in April of 1770. In the three and a half years since then, the frock Rebecca had worn when she left had gone the way of all flesh, replaced by whatever castoffs her friends, or the parents of the pupils she taught, cared to give her.
The dead woman’s dress, and the layers of blood boltered petticoats obscenely visible piled up on her back, were new.
And her hands were not Rebecca’s hands.
Abigail had spent the first six months of Rebecca’s new freedom salving and binding cuts, blisters, burns, and scrapes while Rebecca learned to do her own cooking and her own washing, she who had never wielded anything more harsh than a quill pen in her pampered life. Rebecca’s hands were short-fingered and covered with wrinkles, though she was over half a decade younger than Abigail’s thirty years. These days, Rebecca’s hands were perpetually stained with ink from the poetry and political pamphlets she wrote at night, and with chalk from teaching a dame school to earn enough to buy herself bread. This dead woman’s hands were as Rebecca’s hands once had been: soft and white, each nail pampered like those of a Spanish in fanta.
Abigail sat
back, and breathed again. Not Rebecca. Not her friend.
But in that case—?
Sick shock, as her eyes went to the door of the little parlor. No—
She made herself rise, and reached it in two steps. The little house that had been built behind Tillet the linendraper’s shop had begun its life as a storage building, with the kitchen tacked onto one side and a bedroom and an attic added on top; Abigail liked to say that her daughter Nabby’s dolls were more spaciously housed. The parlor was dim, its single window that looked onto the alleyway shuttered tight, but as she stepped into it Abigail’s straining eyes could see nothing out of place, no humped dark shape in any corner.
She opened the casements inward and shot the bolt of the outer shutters, pushed them back in a sharp sprinkling of last night’s raindrops; turned swiftly and saw—
Nothing out of the ordinary. The parlor looked as it always did. The door to the stairway above stood open. As Abigail crossed to it—two steps—she noticed the puddle of rainwater on the floor beneath the window. “Rebecca?”
Dear Heaven, what if he’s still in the house?
He. The one who did that—
She went to the hearth, took up the poker, and noted as she did so the ashes heaped there, untidy, no sign of the fire having been banked for the night. Too much wood burned, she thought. Why would she have sat up so late? Why the parlor, and not the warmer kitchen where she usually worked? Every candle on the mantelpiece was burned short.
No smell of blood in the stairwell. Every tread creaked. If he was here I’d have heard him . . .
Still her hands were cold with fright as she came out into the minuscule upstairs hall. Barely a foyer between stairways, with the door of Rebecca’s chamber to her left, open into shuttered darkness.
The attic trapdoor at the top of its ladder was shut. Abigail strode to the bedroom door, peered inside. “Rebecca?”
Narrow bed neatly made. Nothing—her mind evaded a specific. Nothing untoward on the floor. The attic’s tiny window would be shuttered and there was no bedroom candle on the sewing table by the bed. After a moment’s hesitation, Abigail climbed the attic ladder, opened the trap, and put her head through. “Rebecca!”
Mr. Tillet—or, more truly, Mrs. Tillet, who appeared to use her husband as a sort of hand puppet for the transaction of legal business—rented out this house behind the main premises, but reserved the attic for the storage of Tillet family property: boxes of old account books, crates of chipped and disused dishes, sheets that had been turned too many times to be of any use to anyone yet that Mrs. Tillet would not surrender to the ragbag. A set of carpenter’s tools against which Mr. Tillet had lent one of his sons-in-law money, and had foreclosed upon. Only dark shapes in darkness as Abigail looked around her, yet the smell of dust was thick, and she saw no mark of hand or knee in the thin layer of it around the trap.
The Tillets, she thought as she descended. Yet the Tillet house had been quiet. Even with the Tillets gone—What had Rebecca said yesterday? A family wedding in Medford?—surely Queenie the cook would have summoned the Watch, if Rebecca came beating on her door last night—
In the pouring rain? Would Queenie have heard her? The cook slept in the west attic of the big L-shaped house, Abigail recalled. Would I have stood there, pounding the door and shouting, with the man who perpetrated this horror still in my house?
Even the thought of doing so tightened her chest with panic.
Where, then? And—
She came through the door at the foot of the enclosed stairwell, saw—with the greater light in the parlor from the window unshuttered—a half dozen sheets of paper, littered on the floor. Abigail bent to pick them up, reflecting that John’s admonitions notwithstanding, the sarcastic political broadsides that Rebecca wrote under names like Cloetia and Mrs. Country Goodheart, at least, should not be left here for the Watch to find.
Before I leave I’d best have a look around, to make sure I have them all. The last thing I need is for Rebecca to escape the madman who did murder in her house, only to be sought by the Crown Provost Marshal for fomenting sedition—
She looked at the paper as she moved to put it into the pocket of her skirt.
It wasn’t a poem.
Her glance picked out John’s name, close to the top of the list, and after it Novanglus, Mohawk, Patriot . . . the various pseudonyms under which he, like Rebecca, penned criticisms of Britain’s rule of the Massachusetts Commonwealth. Other names on the list had similar pseudonyms appended, but many did not. She noted John Hancock’s name, one of the wealthiest merchants in Boston and known throughout the colony as the man to go to if you wanted good quality tea without the added expense of the British excise tax. Below it was the name of her friend Paul Revere the silversmith, and young Dr. Warren—with his various noms de plume—and Rob Newman, sexton of the Old North Church. Billy Dawes the cobbler, Ben Edes the printer (with the names of all the various seditious pamphlets for which he was responsible, good Heavens!), even poor mad splendid Jamie Otis—
She knew the handwriting, too. It was the unmistakable, strong scrawl of John’s wily cousin Sam: Sam who was the head of the secret society dedicated to organizing all who wished for the overthrow of the King’s government in the colony. The Sons of Liberty.
Every name she recognized on the list—and there were a good many that she did not—was a man she knew as belonging to the Sons.
All of whom, if the list fell into the hands of the Governor, would certainly be jailed, and would quite possibly be hanged.
Two
Sam Adams lived in Purchase Street, in what was now called the South End: that portion of Boston which had been open fields and grazing land not very long ago. It was twenty minutes’ walk along the waterfront—crowded and busy, even now on the threshold of the winter’s storms—and twenty minutes back.
Too far.
From the brick steeples of Faneuil Hall, Old North Church, Old South, King’s Chapel, all the bells were tolling eight.
Paul Revere would be at his shop by now, and it was only a few hundred yards to the head of Hancock’s Wharf.
Hurriedly, Abigail looked around the parlor for more papers: two of Rebecca’s mocking jingles and half a dozen sheets of the volume of sermons she was editing as yet another means of making enough to keep a roof over her head. With John’s voice ringing in her mind, Don’t touch a thing, woman! she gathered the broadsides, left the sermons where they were—
What else?
Skirts held gingerly high, she stepped into the kitchen again. She saw now that what had first appeared to be a battlefield of blood was in fact blood mixed with water. A costly brown cloak lay sodden with last night’s rain between the body and the door. The water it had released had mingled with the single thick ribbon of blood that emerged from beneath the corpse.
The woman’s dark hair was neatly coiffed: not even death had disarrayed it. What had to be diamonds glimmered in her earlobes. A love-bite a few days old darkened the waxy flesh of her bare shoulder, and there was another beside it, white and savage yet curiously bloodless-looking. Her legs lay spread obscenely. I’m sorry, Abigail whispered, fighting the urge to straighten the body, pull down the petticoats, cover her from the stares of the Watch that she knew would come. To leave you thus will speed vengeance, on him who did this to you.
What else?
Another of Rebecca’s songs lay near the hearth, the punned names and descriptions of Boston merchants who claimed to be patriots while selling provisions to the British troops unmistakable. I have my sources, Rebecca would say to her, with her grin that made her round face look like a wicked kitten’s. I’ll make them squirm.
How long, before someone came?
Abigail put her head cautiously out the kitchen door. She’d heard Hap Flowers—the younger of Nehemiah Tillet’s apprentices—in the yard a few minutes ago, taking advantage of Mrs. Tillet’s absence to use the privy in peace. The linendraper’s wife would watch and wait for the boys—and for
the sullen little scullery girl—suspecting them of loitering to avoid work. Any other day at this hour, Abigail knew the cook herself would be in the kitchen starting the day’s work at this time, but with any luck Queenie, too, would be taking advantage of her mistress’s absence, and no one would be near the wide kitchen windows that looked onto the yard.
There was a shed across the yard, where the prentice-boys left packing crates to be broken up for kindling, sometimes for weeks. Abigail darted out, found a medium-sized one that neatly covered the line of blood across the back step, ducked back inside. With luck the boys—and Queenie, too—would think Rebecca herself had set it there, for purposes of her own.
In the parlor, a basket held spare slates and chalk, for such of Rebecca’s little pupils as forgot to bring theirs from home. On one of the slates Abigail chalked, NO SCHOOL TODAY, and set it on top of the crate.
What else?
She kicked her feet back into her pattens, which she’d stepped out of—the movement automatic, without thinking—in the parlor, to climb the stairs. Slipped outside, closed the door, threaded the latchstring through its hole. She realized all this time she’d still been wearing her heavy green outdoor cloak, barely aware of it, so cold was the little house. The iron lifts of the pattens clanked on the yard’s bricks as she hurried toward the gate, praying the Tillets had not left Medford until that morning. She recalled Rebecca saying, “Thursday,” but didn’t know whether that meant morning or evening: Medford lay a solid day’s journey to the northwest for a wagon such as Tillet owned. Queenie the cook might prefer “resting her bones” and drinking her master’s tea to making the slightest inquiry about her master’s tenant, but upon her return Mrs. Tillet would be on Rebecca’s doorstep before she’d changed out of her travel dress, to collect the sewing that she considered gratis, as a part of Rebecca’s rent of the little house. If the wedding had been Tuesday—
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