“All this is nothing, m’am. Not to what you see if you’re a slave in Barbados, where I was born.”
Abigail, gathering her skirts aside to draw out the trundle bed from beneath the great bed, looked aside from him, ashamed. Scipio set the candelabra on the little se cretaire by the window, and came to help her. The trundle was made up with fresh linen. Either Tamar didn’t like to be alone for one minute of the day or night, or her father didn’t want her to be. A night rail was laid out ready on the pink silk counterpane of the main bed, the linen as light as silk.
“Does she get love letters?”
“Dozens,” affirmed the butler resignedly. “Some she keeps in the desk, but the ones she doesn’t want her father to see—or know about—she has delivered to the lady who runs the hat shop at the end of her father’s wharf, and sends Miss Oonaugh—that’s her maid—down to get them for her. You think they’re under the bed?” At Abigail’s gestures, the two of them had maneuvered the low bed away from the large one, and Abigail now knelt near the main bed’s head.
“’Tis where I hid mine. Not that I set up clandestine flirts,” she hastened to add, as the butler grinned. “But when I was young my father considered political pamphlets inappropriate reading for well-bred girls, and I had my older sister’s beau smuggle them to me. Dreadfully badly written they were,” she went on reminiscently, easing down onto her stomach and reaching as far toward the head of the bed as she could. “And shockingly ill-reasoned, some of them. After a time my conscience grew so bad that I confessed the whole to—Ah!” Her fingers brushed what felt like the corner of a largish box. She flattened herself further, squirmed beneath the tall frame, reaching with both arms and thanking the heavens that Scipio kept the cham bermaids strictly up to their work: no nonsense about sweeping only as much of the floor as showed and letting dust kittens breed with abandon in the dark.
She drew it out, sat back on her heels. More quietly, she asked, “Did you ever try to tell their father that Tamar and Jeffrey were telling him lies about Rebecca? About her trying to convert them to Catholicism, or punishing them for not praying to the Virgin?”
Scipio opened his mouth, closed it, then sighed. “You’ll think me a coward, m’am. And I daresay I am. But I didn’t dare. None of us did. What man would believe his new young wife over his daughter? What man wouldn’t believe his daughter, if she—” He hesitated. “If she decided to lie about a slave? And a man-slave?”
Abigail thought about that, and felt her face heat with anger. Hotter, even, than when Rebecca had come to her weeping about the way her stepdaughter had used to twist her every action and word.
“He knew I’d been raised a Catholic,” Scipio went on gently. “Miss Rebecca spoke up for me, early in her marriage here, which was a mistake, when Mr. Malvern gets going on one of his rages. He said, we’d conspire, if one of us spoke for the other, after that. Then, too,” he went on, “there were those things Miss Rebecca truly did, that were unwise. Things she did for those she loved.”
Abigail sighed, and turned the box over in her lap. Twelve inches by twelve, and nearly that deep, with a little hasp and padlock. The sort of thing gentlemen kept case bottles of cognac in, locked away from their servants. When she shook it, both its heft and the dry, whispery rattle inside spoke of folded paper. “I think you’re right to tread carefully around Mistress Tamar,” she said. “For you, it isn’t a case of simply being turned out without a character and having to find a new employer, is it?”
“No, m’am.”
How dare the man buy and sell another? How dare any man put another in the position of being bought and sold like a donkey?
She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself against the rage that swept her. In a studiedly neutral tone, she asked, “You wouldn’t happen to know if any of Rebecca’s other letters survived, would you?”
“He burned them all, m’am. And cursed her name as he did it. Since then, Miss Tamar will every now and then come up with, I didn’t tell you this at the time, but she used to do thus-and-such—threaten her with a red-hot curling iron, I think was one of them. I can always tell when she’s done it. I wish she wouldn’t. Not just for Miss Rebecca’s sake, but for his.”
“Well, we have it on the authority of Scripture that the Lord shall avenge the stripes of the righteous, and uphold his children against those who slander them.” Abigail sighed. “Though sometimes I wish Scripture were a little more specific about when, exactly, these events will take place. In the meantime, do you know where Miss Tamar keeps the key to this?”
“On a ribbon,” said a man’s harsh voice from the doorway. “I should imagine it’s the blue one, knotted at her waist with her watch.”
Abigail slewed around on her heels, aghast. Scipio got hastily to his feet, the dark beyond the single candle’s light cloaking, Abigail suspected, the ashen hue of his face.
Charles Malvern said, “You may go, Scipio.”
“Sir, I—”
“You may go.”
Scipio stayed long enough to help Abigail to her feet. “Mr. Malvern,” she said, as the servant’s footsteps retreated down the stair, “I beg you not to blame Scipio in this.”
“And in what way is a trusted servant not to be blamed, who admits robbers to his master’s house while the family is away?” He put his head a little to one side, and the pale eyes that regarded her shrieked rage in a face as calm as stone. “Don’t tell me Scipio, too, has been corrupted by this talk of colonial liberties that your husband and his friends vomit forth. Or does he merely seek a share of my daughter’s jewelry?” He reached for the bellpull, and Abigail impulsively extended her hand to stop his.
“This isn’t jewelry, sir—”
“If it was garden dirt,” said Malvern, yanking the bell, “it would still not excuse burglary.”
“Mr. Malvern,” said Abigail desperately, “I have reason to believe this box contains clandestine correspondence of your daughter’s.” She felt sick at the thought of Scipio being taken to one of the taverns by the Long Wharf, where dealers bid for slaves to carry south to Virginia. Even if the little merchant went so far as to actually have her locked up in the gaol house by the law-counts for part of the night—with every thief and prostitute in Boston—John would get her out, with no worse effects than perhaps lice in her hair and bugs in her skirts from the bedding.
Scipio was not in the law’s hands, but the hands of his master.
Malvern’s eyes narrowed: “A girl’s love notes.” For a moment she thought he was going to snap at her, My daughter does not receive any such thing . . .
Of course any father would seek to protect his daughter by knowing who was courting her—particularly a man of wealth like Malvern. Yet it crossed her mind to wonder if he sought to control his daughter’s thoughts and movements as totally as he had sought to control Rebecca’s.
Footsteps sounded on the back stairs. Dim yellow light mottled the creamy plaster visible through the hall door, making the vines stenciled there seem to stir in soundless wind.
“I pray so, sir,” she said, keeping her voice steady with an effort. “Because I fear this box contains evidence of a conspiracy against both yourself, and your wife.”
For one instant, familiar with the uncontrollable first rush of his rages, she would not have been surprised had he struck her. Malvern only stood, staring, mouth half open and eyes glittering with fury. Then his lips closed hard, and he stepped to her, and yanked the box from her hands.
A manservant appeared in the doorway, hastily adjusting a badly tied neckcloth. “Sir?”
Malvern was silent for a moment, studying Abigail’s face. “Bring me a chisel to my study,” he said at last. And he added, as if the words were forced from him at gunpoint, “And bring coffee for myself and Mrs. Adams.”
In November of 1770, a few months after starting at Harvard, Jeffrey Malvern had written to Tamar, Father spoke today of the Papist. It sounded like he begins to have regard for her for making her own way
. This does not sound promising. Can you not find him a mistress? There is a woman here named Mrs. Bell, who would be willing but has the appearance of great respectability.
John’s clerk, young Mr. Thaxter, had told Abigail things about Mrs. Bell of Cambridge, and Abigail thought young Mr. Jeffrey grossly underestimated his father’s gullibility, if he supposed the merchant hadn’t heard them, too.
March of 1771: What earthly reason did you give, for not complaining to him at the time, if she indeed threatened you with a hot coal in your face? Surely even for the Whore of Babylon, that is extreme?
July of 1772—a few weeks after the death of their young brother: . . . but since he is gone, could you not come up with some way that it was the Papist’s doing?
January of 1773, shortly after Rebecca’s effort to retrieve her property: I don’t like this talk of divorcement. He’s but four-and-fifty, and there’s juice in him yet. No sense prying one step-mama away from him only to have him wed another, and then it will be all to do again. The next one may not be so Jesuitical or so obliging about leaving her correspondence where they may be found. What about Clara Wheelock, or one of her fair “nieces”? That carroty one (Jenny?) should keep any man alive busy.
Abigail looked up from Piers Woodruff’s dozenth letter begging and bullying his sister Rebecca to send him money as the clock struck ten. Walking home from their meeting with Malvern last November, with Rebecca silent and shaking at her side, she had wished for worms to consume Malvern from the inside out, as they had consumed Herod Agrippa in the Book of Acts. Now seeing his face, she thought, I must never wish such ill again, even in my heart. His was indeed the face of a man whose heart and entrails were being devoured from within.
For the first time in her life, she pitied him. She said, “I’m sorry.”
He laid down his son’s latest missive—containing only lamentations about debts and hangovers, and a request for Tamar to get the old man to see reason about my allowance—and passed a hand over his face. Two hours ago, Malvern had sent his disheveled serving man to Queen Street, with a note to the effect that Mrs. Adams was detained at his house but would return with a suitable escort, and had summoned Scipio from the kitchen to tell him that he need not worry for his position, but should go to bed. “I will see to Miss Malvern, when she comes home,” the father had said.
“Has this accomplished all that you had in mind, Mrs. Adams?” the merchant now asked, visibly struggling to control the anger that seemed to be the only emotion he was capable of feeling. He reached for the coffeepot, but lifting it found it empty (as Abigail had, half an hour previously). For a moment he seemed about to hurl it to the floor, but it was an expensive piece, so he set it down again. His pale eyes burned with exhausted resentment as he looked back at her. “Does the knife go deep enough for you, to avenge the hurt I gave your friend?”
“I did not come seeking vengeance.” Abigail lifted the yellowing sheets, the looping scribbles of the handwriting of that young wastrel and gambler who had made his sister’s life such a misery. “Only information, about who Rebecca might have known, who would have done such a thing to an innocent woman in her house.”
“The woman wasn’t innocent,” grated Malvern. “She was a whore, as her husband is a lying pimp.”
“If she was a whore, her deserving would have been an A sewed to her garment, in the old way, not to have her throat cut and her body mutilated.”
Malvern opened his mouth to shout something about whores and what they deserved, and Abigail steadily met his eyes. After a moment he closed his lips again, settled back into his chair. “You are right, Mrs. Adams,” he said, in a voice like the grind of the sea on pebbles after a storm. “If it was reasonable men we spoke of. Yet the woman did her whoring with the commander of the British troops. And her husband is the Governor’s friend and one of the commissioners who’s been given the Royal Monopoly to sell East India Company tea. I should think it would be obvious, where to seek for her murderers, and why they would do their deed in—in the house that they chose.”
“You think she was killed by the Sons of Liberty, in short,” said Abigail, and raised her brows. “Mr. Malvern, if sexual congress with officers of the Sixty-Fourth regiment was considered grounds for murder by the Sons of Liberty, the city of Boston would be littered with female corpses from Copp’s Hill to the Neck.” She brushed her hand across the letters on the table between them. “I promise you, I have enough friends in the Sons of Liberty to be sure that they were not behind this crime. If I thought they were—or if I knew that Rebecca had run off with them—I would not have risked spending a night in the city gaol trying to find the true culprit. And I certainly would not have risked having an innocent serving man hanged, which I believe is the penalty when a slave robs his master.”
He continued to glare at her, like a bull who has pursued a red flag to exhaustion. “And all that you say could be a ploy to convince me of your lies.”
“Mr. Malvern,” said Abigail, “everyone in town knows that you cannot be convinced of anything.”
To her surprise he laughed, a single explosive sputter, then put his face in his hands, so that they hid whatever expression had come over his mouth. He sat that way for some time, staring at his wife’s letters, and his son’s.
“Rebecca has been missing for three days now,” Abigail went on. “For three days the Sons of Liberty have been seeking her—so I am told—about the city, and have found no trace of her. For all I know this man, this killer, whoever he is, seeks her, too. I’d hoped to find something in her correspondence with her family that might help me. She had made few friends here in Boston—”
“She had that printer!” Malvern’s hand smote the table with a violence that made Abigail jump. “For all her talk of my misdeeds, and my mistrust, while she—”
“In the years you have been apart,” Abigail said slowly, “your wife and I have been as near as sisters. And I will swear an oath on the Testament that she has never regarded herself as anything other than your wife. She has spoken of you in anger—sometimes in very great anger—but never in disrespect . . . Which is more, I’m afraid, than can be said of me.”
“It isn’t what I’ve heard.”
“From whom did you hear it?”
He was silent again, and in the silence hooves could be heard in the street outside, and the clatter of harness as a carriage came to a halt before the house’s outer door. Malvern’s eyes moved toward the hall, then returned to Abigail, weary and angry, yet to her the anger seemed to smolder deeper—an inner pain, not a wall against opposition. “You’re not telling me all of the truth, Mrs. Adams. You’re mired to the neck in the bog of Sam Adams’s making—as you mired my wife.”
“What I believe—and what she believes—about the rights of the colonies doesn’t mean that she isn’t in danger now. It doesn’t mean that the man who perpetrated a monstrous crime isn’t looking for her. Or that I would not move Heaven and Earth, if I could, to find her before he gets to her.”
A serving man’s shoe-heels clacked in the hall, lamp flame juddering across the papered walls. Abigail’s eye slid to Malvern’s face, then away as a bright jumble of hushed giggles sounded, a girl’s voice crying, “He is not my sweet-heart!” and a young man’s, “Oh, so you go kiss in alcoves just any officer you happen to meet?” “Faith, how’d ye know that, Master Jeff? Ye weren’t out of the card-room but only long enough to piss in Mrs. Fluckner’s rose-bed!”
“Good heavens, hand me that sponge, girl! This is what comes of trying to take rouge off in the carriage—” “Don’t be silly, Jeff, the old man’s asleep by this time . . .”
And the three of them stood framed, suddenly, in the door of the study—Mistress Tamar in her pink and silver ball dress, her maid a step behind with her arms full of cloaks and her black hair disheveled, handsome Jeffrey with the laughter dying out of his face as they took in the pile of letters on the table, the open box, the grim set of their father’s mouth. Tamar took a half st
ep into the room, said, “Papa—?” and cast an uncertain glance at Abigail, then another at the box, and the letters from Jeffrey that lay beside her father’s hand.
Then she turned back to her father, tears welling to her eyes, streaming down her face. “Oh, Papa, I can explain! I knew I shouldn’t have kept them, but—”
“We’ll speak in the morning, child.” Malvern held up the letters in Piers Woodruff’s Italianate hand. “And before you protest on the subject of whose correspondence is whose business in this house, please be prepared to explain how you came to have possession of letters written to your stepmother by her brother and her father. I trust you enjoyed Mrs. Fluckner’s rout-party?” He unpocketed and held out to her a large, clean handkerchief as she began to cry, and his eyes, as he studied her face in the servant’s candlelight, held not pity, but a weary disgust and disbelief.
“Please, Papa, please, it was Oonaugh who made me keep them! Oonaugh said she’d—”
“I never!” protested the servant girl, genuinely indignant, and Abigail, watching Jeffrey’s face, saw the young man’s expression go from surprise to bemusement to sudden, earnest concern.
“Father, I must say that I’ve long deplored—”
“We’ll talk of it in the morning,” Malvern repeated, as Tamar showed signs of dissolving into hysterical tears. “Jeffrey, take your sister to her room. Oonaugh, if you’d be so good as to stay?”
“Papa, don’t believe her! Please don’t believe her! When I found she was forging those letters from Jeffrey—”
“I never!” protested the maid, as Abigail closed the study door behind Jeffrey and Tamar.
“Of course you never forged these things, girl,” said Malvern harshly. “Don’t you think I know you can barely write your own name?” From the litter on the table he picked up a handful of the spicier billets-doux Scipio had told her of, addressed to Tamar by a variety of young gentlemen and containing nothing more incriminating than some of the worst sonnets Abigail had ever read. “And I take it you have no idea how these came into my daughter’s possession either?”
The Ninth Daughter Page 10