The Ninth Daughter aam-1

by Barbara Hamilton

  “—Oh, and Fleurette—who the bloody ’ell is Fleurette . . .”

  “My dearest wife—”

  “Aargh, ’er and Nan . . . and Margot . . .”

  “I have many wives, mes amis; behold, I am a Mohammedan . . .”

  All stood as Abigail came down the stairs, and Mrs. Purley brought her corn pudding—as befit her more elevated station—and coffee. The horses are ready like you asked, Mrs. Adams—and a nice bit of bread and cheese for you both, and oats for the beasts—Why, thank you, m’am—Will there be anything else, Mrs. Adams?—Yes, we’ll hand it to him as soon as he arrives . . .

  Under a racing cover of cloud, the world was just light enough, at eight, to make out the details of the Danvers road as it turned inland, toward what had once been Salem Village.

  “D’you know the place, then, m’am?” asked Muldoon, as Abigail drew rein. From her last visit to Gilead she remembered the old house that lay a little distance down the overgrown track to their right: remembered it because, in the near-darkness in which she and Thaxter had been riding, she hadn’t been able to see the end of the woods some hundred yards ahead, and had hoped to find shelter.

  Now in midafternoon, with the woods filled with a sickly rinsed-out light, she could glimpse the ruined walls, the holed and sagging ceiling, in clearer detail. As she had on that first visit, she dismounted, and led Balthazar to the broken door. What had been simply a pitch-black cavern on that night showed up now as a primitive keeping room, the puncheon floor—under its carpet of dead leaves—an assurance that they wouldn’t fall through broken boards into an unsuspected cellar.

  She led the horses inside, slipped the bits from their mouths, loosened the saddle cinches, and from the saddlebag poured two little heaps of oats on the floor. Muldoon, who’d lingered in the doorway looking down the road at the fields glimpsed beyond the thinning of the trees, came in to help her: “Is that there Gilead, then, Mrs. A?”

  “Beyond the fields, yes. My impression was that the place was larger ten or fifteen years ago. Several houses looked completely deserted, and many of the inhabited ones had their upper stories shuttered up, even in the daytime when we rode out. But it was the end of daylight when we reached here, my husband’s clerk and I, and we were taken immediately to their House of Repentance for evening services. It was well and truly dark by the time the Hand of the Lord had had his say.”

  “Then we’d best have a careful look round.” The sergeant took his musket in its wrappings of oilcloth from the back of his saddle, and after it, the pistol that John kept in his office desk under lock and key. “How close are the woods to the buildings?”

  With half-closed eyes Abigail summoned back the wet twilight, the impression of trees crowding in on those decaying gray buildings. “A hundred feet?” It was hard to put aside her horrified anger at herself, that she and Thaxter had undoubtedly spent the night only a few dozen feet from where Rebecca—almost certainly—was being kept. “They’ll have gardens, between the houses and the woods, but those will be cleared off now.”

  “Aye, but their fences’ll still be up.” The young man led the way from the house, looked down the road toward open ground, blue eyes narrowed. In Boston, Patrick Muldoon’s air of countrified good nature had made him seem naïve, primitive, and rather harmless despite his imposing size and crimson uniform. Faced with the prospect of an escape through woods in overcast darkness—she knew precisely how far her lantern would cast light and she knew it would be next to useless—Abigail felt suddenly grateful that she was with an Irish farmhand used to the ways of bogs and fields, rather than the cleverest of Boston law clerks. “Moon’s on the wane, too, and them clouds don’t look like breakin’. We’ll barely be able to see, goin’ in. Comin’ out, we’ve got to strike a fence and know which way to follow it, if we’re to make it back here with both feet. Thank Christ the road’s good and rutted.”

  “And that it’s December and cold as a well digger’s elbow,” murmured Abigail. “They’ll all be indoors.”

  As if to mock her words, the crack of a gunshot sounded somewhere in the brown and silver woods, a hunter seeking to make the most of what game there was before the last of the squirrels retired for their winter naps. “Almost all,” she temporized primly, and Muldoon grinned.

  “Better watch out for them behind us, then, if they take it into their heads we’re the divil’s henchmen. All over the barrack, they say colonials grow up with guns in their hands, an’ don’t have to be taught to shoot ’em, like we do that the landlords have up for poachin’ if we so much as throw a rock. Lead on, m’am.”

  For nearly a mile they skirted the edge of the open fields that lay to the eastern side of the village. The rain had been much less here, inland from the sea, but the going was slow, wet leaves and broken branches treacherous underfoot. The thicker undergrowth along the edge of the woods screened them from sight of the village itself, but within the woods the ground was clearer, the world bathed in a cold shadowless light. Now and then Abigail and her escort would work their way through the knots of hazel and bindweed, to the ditch that demarcated the fields. Beyond the ditch, low stone walls kept wild pigs, deer, and—probably more effectively—saplings and creepers at bay.

  “Looks a right mess to get a plow through,” whispered Muldoon, gazing across the brown field with its pocked, uneven ground. “What do they grow hereabouts?”

  “Maize—Indian corn—mostly, and beans and pumpkins between the rows. The Indians used to not plow at all, just make hills for each plant, and bury a dead fish in each hill, to put heart into the plant. We grow corn on our farm—south of Boston, in Braintree—as well as wheat and rye, but ’tis a hard crop on the soil. If you’re to grow corn you need three times the land you’re going to plant, plus meadows for hay.”

  “And it all belongs to somebody else anyway, you say?”

  “A great deal of it. It isn’t that unusual, for boundaries to get mixed up, especially if the land goes through the hands of a speculator. When Bargest originally sought out land for his congregation he bought what was cheapest without looking into title too closely.” Abednego Sellars himself had been absent when Abigail had called at the chandlery on her way out of Boston—evidently a good many of the Sons of Liberty were out investigating the rumor that the Beaver was going to be surreptitiously unloaded at sea. But Penelope Sellars had provided a wealth of detail about her detested in-laws’ legal troubles, with considerable spiteful satisfaction, including the information that indeed, the case was scheduled to be settled at the next General Court. Legal details aside, Abigail couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that the decision would go against a good friend of the Crown who dined regularly with the Governor.

  ‘And I will give unto thee the land wherein thou art a stranger, for an everlasting possession,’ the little woman had told her; That’s what their Hand of the Lord wrote on his court deposition, when they asked him for proof of where he’d got title to have his folks farming those acres. And, ‘This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed . . .’ just as if HE were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all rolled into one. AND he had his congregation run off the bailiffs, that Pentyre had sent out—just as if the man wasn’t in a position to have this Hand of the Lord taken up for debt and bigamy, too . . .

  What had Thaxter said of Richard Pentyre? God help you if you cross him . . .

  And God help you, thought Abigail uneasily, if you cross the Hand of the Lord.

  And Perdita Pentyre, who would have inherited the lands were her husband to die, had been merely a detail to be cleared from the path of the righteous.

  The woods grew thinner around them, sumac and sapling pine replacing the immemorial heaviness of hickory and oak. The ground became more even underfoot, and the broken remains of a wall slanted away before them. Following the woods’ edge, Abigail saw the houses of the village much closer, and the remains of what had been a palisade in the days when Indian attack w
as a real possibility. Above the gray overcast, the sun had passed noon.

  “Well, that place looks a fair mansion, anyway—”

  “The Reverend Bargest’s, at a guess,” Abigail murmured. It was the handsomest and best-kept in the village. Troublingly, men and women stood about in front of it with an air of people waiting for news. Now and then someone would emerge from one of the other houses, cross to the waiting knots. Even at this distance, Abigail could see the tension of question and reply.

  “Would he be ill, then?”

  “What, he?” Despite her uneasiness, Abigail couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Surely he can cure himself of anything with a touch? Perhaps his most recent Bride has gone into labor.” But the sight filled her with dismay. She had counted on three solid hours of the Chosen One’s evening sermon, to allow her to get in, release Rebecca, and make good an escape before total darkness set in. The possibility that the Reverend would be ill and unable to preach had never crossed her mind.

  “Well, let’s get in a smitch closer, and sit and watch a spell. ‘Mostly you don’t need to ask questions,’ me mother always says, ‘if you’ll just hold your peace and keep your eyes open.’ ”

  “She sounds like a wise woman, your mother.”

  “Ach.” He shook his head. “When I’d tell her so, she’d roll up her eyes at the rafters an’ say, ‘I’m scarcely that, boy-o; I married your Da’, didn’t I?’ Yet she always did give me the best advice.” He fell silent, as they moved closer yet to the buildings. There were perhaps forty houses, not counting cowsheds and outbuildings, straggling along a single rutted lane which perished in the yard of the last dwelling in the town. Another lane crossed it, joining the Reverend’s house (as Abigail surmised it) with the House of Repentance. Nearly half of these dwellings clustered within the ruined quadrangle of the old palisade, and three appeared to have been part of its curtain wall.

  As she watched the inhabitants of the village moved about their circumscribed winter chores—cutting kindling or hauling in sledges of wood from the surrounding wilderness; feeding chickens in their coops or tending boiling pots where by the stink of it soap was being rendered. Most, Abigail knew, would be laboring at indoor winter tasks: spinning, weaving, carding, sharpening tools, and mending harness. Orion grew up here.

  She could almost see him, toddling adoringly at his mother’s heels down that muddy street. Beautiful, like her, with her raven hair and green eyes. And she’d thought nothing of dragging him along with her to live under the domination of her monomaniacal lover. And he, who had only his love to use, to draw her back to him, had been trapped in the sticky webs of neediness and domination.

  I’ve tried to act for the best, but I can’t be two people!

  Would things have been different, if he had been brought up in anything approaching normal circumstances?

  Or with madness, did it make a difference?

  Yet while her mind ran on all this, Abigail’s gaze moved over the squalid little settlement, picked out details. Who went into which doors, who came out, how long they remained. Which houses had the look of habitation—cows, chickens, dogs, gardens harvested recently, smoke in the chimneys, outhouses that smelled of use—and which did not. She and Muldoon shifted their position several times in the course of the afternoon, watching patiently as hunters, not even knowing quite what they looked for.

  “You say he kept her stupefied with laudanum before he took her across the bay—”

  “He had plenty in his house. I don’t see how else he would have kept her quiet.”

  “Oh, aye. Our landlord’s mother had the habit of it, and God knows she didn’t know Easter from Christmas for months on end. But you had to watch her. Lord Semphill, he’d keep her locked in her room, but you couldn’t leave a candle with her, and they had to bar the windows, for she’d sometimes try to break ’em. Would they still have her under it now, d’ye think, ten days later?”

  “I have reason to think she was struck over the head,” Abigail murmured back. She shifted her cloak, where it had become entangled with the small horn lantern at her belt, and its little satchel of candles. “I don’t know how badly. Nor can I guess what the Reverend Bargest told whatever family is in charge of caring for her. They must be well and truly under his sway, for if she’s capable of speech, what she tells them will be disquieting to say the least. And they’ll see—they must see—how harmless she is . . . In the end, he knows he’s going to have to kill her.”

  “Oh, aye,” said the young man again, as if it needed no saying. “Just as soon as he knows Mr. Pentyre’s been took care of, belike. They won’t have done for the poor lady already, d’ye think?”

  Abigail shook her head, not shifting her gaze from the village down the hill. She’d already thought of that. “If he did bring her here, it would be because she saw him. She knew him. Whatever Bargest told him about why Perdita Pentyre must die, Orion had clearly made up his mind not to harm Rebecca. The Hand of the Lord must have had a nasty shock,” she added grimly, “when his chosen weapon came back to him with a witness, saying, You keep her safe, or I won’t kill Pentyre.”

  “It’s mad. Your boy must have known the old man couldn’t let her live.”

  “He knew for two years that she was another man’s wife,” said Abigail. “Yet he hoped that things would somehow turn out right in the end. But—” She broke off, and said, “Damnation!”

  “What?” Muldoon grinned. “An’ don’t think it ain’t a treat, to find a good Puritan lady will swear now and then—”

  “No,” whispered Abigail indignantly. “That woman there, coming out of that house . . . It’s Damnation Awaits the Trembling Sinner. The servant to the Hazlitts.”

  “Damnation indeed.” He raised an eyebrow curiously at Abigail, as the tall young woman made her way along the muddy street. Abigail nodded assent, and cautiously they moved through the brown tangles of dead fern and leafless hackberry, where the edge of the woods paralleled the way. Beyond the broken stumps of the palisade, and the last cowsheds and woodpiles of the village proper, lay half a dozen houses, farther and farther apart; one of these, two stories tall, had the look of an old defensive blockhouse. Its upper floor projected over its lower, and its walls were stoutly constructed of squared logs. The sheds around it stood empty, and what had been its garden was a knotted thicket of dead weeds, ringed by straggly fence-posts whose rails had long since been taken away for other purposes.

  Before this house Damnation halted, and stood staring up at its upper windows. Across the road and with a field between them, Abigail couldn’t see the woman’s face. But she did see her walk back and forth before the house, and partway around both sides, looking.

  Muldoon touched Abigail’s arm, pointed. By the door, Abigail saw, were three little piles of cut wood, as if someone had been assigned to bring an armload to the place, and had simply dumped their burden and gone away.

  Abigail said, “That’s it.”

  Thirty-one

  A oman came out of the house nearest the one that had attracted Damnation’s attention—which lay nearly fifty feet away—aproned and wrapped in a heavy shawl. Though the servant woman’s brown dress was the plainest serge obtainable in town, still it looked modish and new against the villager’s crude homespun. The village woman caught Damnation’s arm, explained something to her, with gestures and shakings of her head. As she led Damnation away, back toward the main village crossroad, the servant looked back over her shoulder at the empty house.

  “A closer inspection, Sergeant?”

  To avoid crossing the road under the eyes of possible watchers in the two nearest houses, Abigail and her escort had to work their way for nearly thirty minutes along the edge of the woods, past the last house in the village (which was occupied, Abigail noted—What half-believing heart had settled thus far from his neighbors?) and so back to the rear of that closed-up former blockhouse. Even so, nearly a hundred feet of open ground lay between the woods and the rear of the hou
se. Its original defensive purpose was clearest on that side, for there were no windows at all on the ground floor, and only rifle-slits above, facing the fields.

  It was so wholly and indisputably a prison that Abigail shivered, and wondered, Is his Word so paramount to them, that they’ll follow him even in that? Incarcerating someone only because he says they should?

  Fifteen centuries of religious histories in her father’s books, and John’s, snickered up their sleeves at her: You think that’s odd? The Salem witches shook their heads at her naïveté.

  She’s a born liar and a conniver, the wicked Mrs. Jewkes in Pamela had said to the other servants, don’t believe a word that she says. Or had the Hand of the Lord chosen Mrs. Tillet’s justification? I know more about this than you do . . .

  Dark as it had been when she and Thaxter had come out of the evening service, she doubted she’d even been able to see this house.

  Yet still, unreasonably, she felt, I should have known . . .

  The more closely she observed the house, the more certain she was.

  Only once in the course of the short, fading afternoon did anyone go near the place. The same woman who had drawn Damnation away returned some hours later, a basket on her arm. Going in, she reemerged almost at once—without the basket—and fetched in a few sticks of the firewood. A few moments later, Abigail saw the white puffs of new smoke rise from the chimney. Good Heavens, it must be like an icehouse in there—!

  She came out again to bring in a pail of water, and to empty a chamber pot, which she rinsed briefly with another splash of water drawn from the well, but didn’t wash. This she carried back inside, then reemerged, picked up her empty basket, and hastened away down the darkening street toward the groups gathered outside the house of the Chosen of the Lord.