The Ninth Daughter aam-1

by Barbara Hamilton

  “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You would need to speak to Colonel Leslie, sir . . .”

  Fluckner went back to his carriage and cursed the foot-men. Coldstone returned to Abigail’s side. “Forgive me, m’am.”

  “For doing your duty? Nonsense.”

  “Even so.” He bowed again, as if in a drawing room. “And were Mrs. Fishwire’s neighbors any more forthcoming to you than they were to me, about who they may have seen on the night of her murder?”

  The name of Abednego Sellars flashed through her mind, only to be thrust aside at once. It was ridiculous, and besides, if he were arrested for murder—particularly one he did not commit—once in the Castle Island gaol, the danger of what he might say about the Sons of Liberty wasn’t even to be thought of. “The court is black as a tomb, once dark falls,” she said, in what she hoped was a completely natural tone. “The honest folk that live there—and they are honest folk, who make up the greater part of the North End—close their doors when things begin to get lively at the tavern at the head of the alley. It surprises me none would have come to a woman’s outcry, but I should imagine there’s a great deal of ruckus most nights . . .”

  “And if a man keeps a knife hid up his sleeve or under his coat,” said Coldstone quietly, “all he has to do is wait for a woman to turn her back on him, to seize her. Many times there is no outcry.”

  Abigail looked away. It seemed to her that she could smell the blood in Rebecca’s kitchen again. At the head of the wharf a straggly haired youth loitered, a thief, probably, totting up the value of the trunks. A footman helped first Mrs. Fluckner—stout and pretty and fussing angrily at everyone in sight—from the carriage, then Miss Fluckner, heiress of the house, a tall, strapping, black-haired girl of fifteen in a dress of mustard-colored silk.

  “He killed her cats,” Abigail said after a moment. “Two of them. Slashed them to pieces, as he did her.” But when she looked back at the Lieutenant’s face, there was no more expression there than he would wear if he were playing cards.

  “It seems, then,” he said, “that Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Fishwire were more similar to one another than we had known—that there were those who would consider the latter as reprehensible, in her way, as a woman of the town would have been. And the gap widens between them and Mrs. Pentyre.”

  “One could say that,” returned Abigail levelly, “if one did not regard Mrs. Pentyre as a whore herself.” His back stiffened. Does he truly believe that when a fine lady takes lovers it is different in the eyes of God from the act of some poor woman who is only doing it to buy herself bread? “As some—whom I shall not name—regard Mrs. Malvern.”

  He thought about that for some time before saying, “You are quite right, m’am.”

  “And no politics in sight.”

  Something changed in his eyes, and she knew as if she read it on a piece of paper, that in his mind was whatever it was that made him—and Colonel Leslie—so certain John had a hand in the killing. Whatever it was that he would not tell her.

  As she would not—could not—speak Abednego Sellars’s name to him.

  A pretty black maid, slender as a dark lily, got down from the coachman’s box to collect the odds and ends left in the coach: a book, a scarf, vinaigrette, an overfed lapdog who whined and licked her hands. As if she heard Coldstone’s speculations the maid turned quickly, trying to get a look at the loitering watcher. But the young idler slipped away out of sight. Too many soldiers about? Abigail wondered. Or had he simply been told to report to some master-thief, that the family had indeed departed for Castle Island, and the house could be robbed at leisure?

  “You said to me the other day that killers such as this one—of whom I presume you have heard more in London—invariably continue with their killings,” she said. “Why would he have waited fourteen months, between the second murder and the third? You’re certain there have been none between?”

  “After Mrs. Fishwire’s murder,” said Coldstone quietly, “I have been watching.”

  “Fourteen months is the length of a sea voyage, and a stay in some other land.”

  “I had thought that. I will send to the city magistrates of New York and Philadelphia, to ask if there have been similar crimes.”

  Abigail hesitated, then said carefully, “There is a man—a friend”—not a completely accurate statement, but it was the best she could manage on the spur of the moment—“who got into a quarrel with Mrs. Fishwire, more than once, I understand. He is . . . a connection of the family of Mr. Pentyre’s mother, who were involved in a dispute over property. I cannot give you his name—”

  Coldstone made an impatient gesture.

  “—because he has been so unwise as to speak out against the King’s Governor in the past . . . not an uncommon topic of conversation, in this colony. Because of the situation of his poor wife”—Would he care for this argument? She didn’t think so—“I fear lest he be harassed, merely on suspicion of this crime. Have you had the opportunity to ask Mr. Pentyre if he is willing to speak with me, so that I may ask him of this?”

  “Of this?” He raised one eyebrow. “Or to further your personal theory that he might be the murderer himself?”

  “Lieutenant!” Mr. Fluckner strode back up the wooden steps to street level again, swinging his silver-headed cane. “Lieutenant, I have twice indicated to you that we are ready to depart! Need I remind you—”

  “Forgive me.” Lieutenant Coldstone turned quickly toward the red-faced merchant. “I came ashore to accomplish two duties, and am guilty of neglecting the one in pursuit of the other.”

  Fluckner glanced at Abigail, his thick lips wry, as if gauging both her politics and her morals from the cost of her plain green wool cloak, the muslin cap visible beneath her hood. He said, “M’am,” but didn’t sound enthusiastic about it, and touched the brim of his hat.

  “Mr. Fluckner, Mrs. Adams,” Coldstone introduced them, as the daughter came up, followed by the mother’s querulous voice.

  “They’re not going to come rushing out of the town to shoot us on sight, you know, Papa,” the girl protested, as she reached her father’s side. “All they’re asking for is their rights as citizens.” She stared with fiery fifteen-year-old defiance at Coldstone, and Fluckner said sharply, “Hush, girl. The only rights they’re interested in is the right to take property from those who’ve worked for it. Begging your pardon, Mrs. Adams,” he added, turning back to Abigail. “We’ll miss the tide if we linger.” By the smoldering suspicion in his eyes—presumably at the name of Adams—he was clearly considering the possibility that she was delaying their departure until the protest meeting was finished and a concerted attack could be arranged.

  “I fear Mr. Fluckner is quite correct.” Coldstone turned back to her. “If you can cross tomorrow at this time,” he said, “I can arrange an introduction. Would that satisfy you?”

  “Thank you. I am very sensible of your assistance.”

  “Enough to share with me the results of the interview?”

  She smiled. “Even that.”

  He bowed over her hand. “Until tomorrow then, m’am. Curtis—” He signaled one of the soldiers on the wharf. “Please escort Mrs. Adams back to Queen Street—”

  “Good heavens, do you want the poor man killed?” Abigail stepped back. “This is Massachusetts, Lieutenant, not London. Women are quite safe to go about by themselves.”

  “Not all of them,” returned Coldstone quietly. “But have it as you will, Mrs. Adams.”

  He followed the merchant and his daughter down the steps to the wharf, where the last of the baggage had been loaded onto the launch. Mrs. Fluckner had gone aboard, too, and stood, cradling her lapdog, unwilling—for whatever reason—to set foot once more in the place that had become so suddenly dangerous for her and hers. Abigail stood for a time on the roadway, looking down at the gray green water lapping around the piers and the vessel’s black-wet sides, the bloody splashes of the soldiers’ uniforms, the brilliant hues of Miss Fluckner’s skirt where
the wind took her cloak aside. Last of all the black maid was handed into the boat, and for a moment stopped and turned back.

  And what does she think of it, who has not Scipio’s position in the household, nor Surry’s unshakeable trust in Sam’s ability to keep his family safe? Does she wonder what will become of her, should the family suffer financial reverses in the course of this unrest over the tea? In such circumstances, Abigail was well aware, frequently the first luxuries to be sold off were the chattel servants.

  And yet for the briefest moment, Abigail had the feeling that the young woman was not looking at Boston, but at her.

  Mr. Fluckner’s voice snapped, an angry and audible shout, “Philomela, get down here! Your mistress is calling!”

  The slave turned away, and disappeared among the confusion of men as they made sail. Abigail tightened her scarves about her throat, and made her way back along the Battery March toward the town.

  Nineteen

  “You are crossing to Castle Island?” John set the basin of hot water on the corner of the table, brows diving down over his blunt nose the way they did in court when opposing counsel tried to slip some fact by him in a millrace of rhetoric. Abigail gathered up the last of the forks.

  “Lieutenant Coldstone has offered to arrange an interview between myself and Richard Pentyre. I could ask you to escort me, but since I had rather our children did not grow up as proscribed orphans in the wake of your hanging, I think it would be better for all if Thaxter came with me instead.”

  “And what will you ask Mr. Pentyre when you see him?” inquired John sarcastically. “If he murdered his wife?”

  “Something of the kind.” Instead of coming back directly from the Battery that morning, Abigail had taken a long detour to the North End again, and had stood for some time on Prince’s Street, studying the bland brick frontage of Pentyre’s handsome house. Of the original dwelling, only the lintel over the door remained unchanged: ANTONINUS SELLARS—1697. The stylish slate roof with its numerous tiny dormers towered above the older gables of its neighbors, but of the half-dozen chimneys, only one—probably that of the kitchen—vented a drift of smoke.

  Abigail wondered if Lisette Droux still remained in residence, or whether she had gone on, to feather her nest elsewhere. Now you ask me to speculate on the contents of a man’s heart . . .

  A short walk took her thence to Hull Street, and a few inquiries among the neighbors had identified the residence of Mrs. Belle-Isle, likewise closed. Unlike the immense Pentyre house, the modest two-story dwelling—set back, like Rebecca’s and Mrs. Fishwire’s, behind a larger building, but infinitely more snug and stylish—bore the appearance of complete desertion. A young woman crossing the yard from the bigger house to what appeared to be a small hen-coop affirmed that indeed Mrs. Belle-Isle had taken her servant girl with her when she’d left.

  “It may be a complete coincidence, that he left his mistress’s house not long before his straying spouse was due to arrive at the home of his enemy’s wife,” Abigail went on as she laid the dinner dishes beside the basin, dipped up a little soft-soap onto her rag. “As it may be mere happenstance, that he arranged with his friends—and fellow tea consignees—the Hutchinson boys, to swear that he was playing cards with them until three thirty in the morning, which is when he returned to his house. If that be the case—and his quite natural grief for a wife he was betraying is genuine—I would not scrape salt into his wounds by accusing him of doing such a deed himself.

  “And indeed,” she added thoughtfully, and set out the washed cups on a towel on the opposite side of the basin, “there’s no reason that Richard Pentyre has to have done the killing himself. He’s a wealthy man. He could have hired someone . . . As I suppose you could have found another Son of Liberty to do the murder while you were at Purley’s Tavern—”

  “Always supposing I—or Richard Pentyre—didn’t mind paying blackmail for the rest of our lives,” snapped John.

  “There is that,” Abigail agreed. “But answer me this, John. If a woman has been betraying her husband quite profitably with the Colonel of a regiment—who can provide the husband with contracts and protection for his property if he happens to be about to take a whacking great consignment of tea from the East India Company—and that woman then becomes entangled with a young Adonis to whom Colonel Obliging may take exception, whose whereabouts would it be more reasonable to inquire after when she’s found dead? The twice-betrayed husband who may be about to lose both contracts and protection due to his wife’s romantic self-will, or a total stranger who has done nothing worse than object to the import of tea?”

  “A hit, Portia.” John’s hand closed over her wet and soapy one. “A palpable hit. Yet I remind you that your Lieutenant Coldstone is not a stupid man, and what you have told me, he already knows. And yet whatever else he knows—or thinks he knows—causes him to believe that I, and not the deceived husband, wielded the knife.”

  “I wonder if there’s a way to ask the Lieutenant to be in the room with me when I speak to Pentyre?” said Abigail. “I’m sure there is. For I’m very curious what Pentyre’s reaction will be when I mention that someone of my acquaintance saw him—or someone very like him—walking down Hull Street at eleven thirty Wednesday night, only a half mile from where his wife was found dead. I don’t expect he’ll cry out or anything, but as Hamlet says, If he but blench . . .”

  “Not a bad idea,” agreed John. “And I’ve done the same myself in courtrooms. Yet I urge you to remember, Portia, what happens to Hamlet at the end of Act Five.”

  Once the dishes were washed up John wrapped himself in cloak and scarves and vanished into the slow drizzle of the rain. Colonel Leslie had proclaimed a curfew on the town but no one was keeping it: John calculated that some four thousand countrymen had come into Boston so far. As she stitched at the mountain of household mending—and tried to keep her attention on her children’s reading—Abigail reflected that the tea crisis and subsequent presence of the mob in Boston may have been the only reason John hadn’t been arrested for the Pentyre murder already, if Coldstone were that certain of whatever it was that he refused to tell her.

  “And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and ra . . . ra-i”—“Raiment,” whispered Nabby at his side—“and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace; then shall the Lord be my God: and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house, and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.”

  But it cut both ways, she reflected, her mind straying, yet again, from her son’s childish drone. Now more than ever, Colonel Leslie and the Provost Marshal would be seeking a reason to arrest John—and any other Sons of Liberty they could prove were in collusion with him—for a shocking murder, rather than for standing up for the rights of colonial Englishmen.

  “That’s very good, Johnny.” Abigail set aside the shirt she was working on, helped the boy close the heavy book.

  “Ma, would God really have forgiven Jacob for cheating his brother, just because Jacob promised him back a tenth of what God gave him?” Johnny sounded worried. “Didn’t God love Esau and Jacob the same?”

  “Later on, Jacob cheated his uncle Laban, too,” added Nabby.

  Abigail was still disposing of this piece of divine favoritism—not to say bribery—when she heard footsteps in the yard. The door opened to reveal John, with Sam at his side. Her eyes went to the clock—shocked—Yes, it really was half past eight—and she got quickly to her feet. John’s lips were cold as marble, his mantle flecked with the last of the rain. “Now, it’s past time you children should be in bed,” she said, as Johnny and Nabby threw themselves on their father and their uncle Sam. “You may ask your father about Jacob tomorrow,” she added, since the six-year-old showed signs of opening the subject with a more satisfactory authority: understandable, given that, like the much-put-upon Esau, he was the firstborn son.
“Now—hot bricks!”

  These Pattie had ready by the hearth, each wrapped in layers of towels. Abigail collected a candle from the sideboard, lit it at the work-candles on the table, woke the sleepy Charley from the settle where he’d been curled up, and gathered Tommy from his crib. She kept her voice cheerful, though Sam looked grim and John looked troubled: It was one of her foremost rules of the household, that though politics might be argued and the iniquities of the King freely aired, the darker matters of the Sons of Liberty must be kept separate from these four little souls whom God had elected to launch on their childhoods during this confusing era.

  Only when she came down to the kitchen again did she ask, “Sam, what brings you here tonight?”

  Sam glanced at John, who looked aside, being a firm believer in letting people fight their own battles. Sam, Abigail had noticed over the years, had a habit of getting between Bess and anyone who wanted to have words with her. She didn’t know whether this was because he considered Bess his property, or because he liked to control the flow of information, and edit it if necessary for the good of all concerned. Taking John’s silence as tacit permission, Sam turned back to Abigail and said, “You do, I’m afraid.”

  John sat down on the settle where Charley had been sleeping, and picked up the nearest book, which Abigail had been reading earlier in the day. Had the rest of the house not been freezing he would have left the room. Sam clearly waited for either John or Abigail to make some remark, and when neither did, went on grimly, “John tells me you’re going to Castle Island tomorrow, under the auspices of the British Provost Marshal.”

  “Corrupting his servants was proving rather costly, I’m afraid, so I thought I should save money by making my inquiries direct.”

  “What have you told that Lieutenant?”

  “Nothing,” said Abigail.