The Ninth Daughter

by Barbara Hamilton

  “Sorr, I can explain—”

  “I’m sure you can,” he agreed. “I know my daughter is extremely fond of you, girl, and since I can say with certainty that Miss Tamar is going to be both bored and unhappy over the next several months, I would hesitate to add to her distress by obliging her to train a new servant. Do I make myself clear?”

  The girl whispered, “Yes, sorr. But I never forged nuthin’, nor told her to keep no letters—”

  “It’s just a story my daughter made up?”

  “Yes, sorr.”

  “Like other stories she makes up?” His face was mottled crimson with anger, but he kept his voice quiet, more terrifying than a shout.

  “Yes, sorr. She—”

  “I’m going to ask you to do a favor for me, Oonaugh.” He reached into the pocket of his sober gray vest. “Several favors, in fact. I trust you know our conversation is not to be shared with Miss Tamar?”

  “Yes, sorr. I mean, no, sorr.”

  He pitched a coin onto the desk. The maid identified its size and weight in an instant and her black eyes widened. “For a year now I’ve been paying your wages. I want you to remember, from now on, that you are working for me. You tell my daughter that you forgive her for lying about you—”

  Oonaugh’s mouth popped open in protest.

  “—and whatever she tells me, I expect you to come to me with the truth. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sorr.”

  “Now you may go.”

  The girl’s short little fingers nipped up the coin, and she bobbed a curtsey. As she turned to go, Abigail said, “Just a moment, please. Mr. Malvern?”

  He glanced at her, raised one heavy brow, tufted like a bobcat’s.

  “May I have a word with the girl, please?”

  He nodded. “As many as you like. You may cut off her hair and knit stockings out of it—”

  Oonaugh clutched at her cap in alarm.

  “Mistress Oonaugh,” said Abigail. “What is your surname?”

  “Connelley, m’am.”

  “Miss Connelley. Are you acquainted with the maid who worked for Perdita Pentyre?”

  “Oh, that was a horror, m’am! I’ve heard she was—”

  “I know what you’ve heard,” said Abigail grimly. “Do you know her?”

  “We’ve spoke at parties. Down the rooms, you know, when the quality are all up flirtin’ an’ playin’ cards an’ carryin’ on. Thinks the sun shines out her backside, she does, the consayted Frog, but I knows her to speak to.”

  “Would you be so kind as to carry a note to her for me? I should very much like to speak with her.” The handmaid of Jezebel, that was privy to all her ways . . .

  Malvern brought another coin from his pocket, and held it up for Oonaugh to see. “Please tell Miss—”

  “Droux, sorr. Lisette Droux.”

  “Please tell Miss Droux that both Mrs. Adams and I understand how valuable her time is.” There was silence, broken only by the creak of a manservant’s feet in the hall, and the scratching of Abigail’s quill as she penned a hasty note. “Does she read English?”

  “I dunno, sorr.” Oonaugh looked puzzled by the question. “I shouldn’t think so, if she’s French.”

  “Then perhaps you could ask her, if she would meet Mrs. Adams here at her earliest convenience?”

  “That I’ll do, sorr. You can depend on me.”

  “Good.” He laid the second coin on the table. “You may go.” As the door shut behind Oonaugh, he added quietly, “Shall I call Scipio in and have him make more coffee, Mrs. Adams? You look quite exhausted.”

  She could hear the half hour striking on Faneuil Hall, and tried to recall which hour had passed. She felt cold, weary to death, and a little ill. Surely it hadn’t been only that morning that she’d started reading through Rebecca’s letters of the summer before last, before sallying forth to the market to question Queenie.

  “Thank you, sir, no. Thank you,” she said again, as he came around to her, to hand her up from her chair. “More than I can say.” The thick Spanish dollar he’d held up to Miss Connelley would buy, she guessed, any amount of information from Mlle Lisette Droux, and very quickly, if she knew anything of the cupidity of servants—particularly servants who might be facing unemployment in a foreign city.

  He rang the bell nevertheless. Scipio appeared, having evidently disregarded his master’s orders to take himself off to bed. “Have Ulee harness the chaise, to take Mrs. Adams home. I trust,” he added, as the butler turned to obey, “that I have no need to say that I rely on your discretion, about all things concerning the events of this night, Scipio?”

  The servant bowed. “You have no need, sir.”

  “So Mrs. Adams tells me. If I have not said so before,” he went on quietly, “and I may not have, for you know as well as I that I do speak hastily when angry—I value very much the discretion that is natural to you, Scipio; as indeed I value all of your good qualities. Thank you for the help that you have extended to Mrs. Adams, on behalf of-of my good wife.”

  Scipio inclined his head. “Thank you, sir. Mrs. Adams.” And he bowed himself from the room.

  When he escorted her to the door some ten minutes later, Malvern said, “Let me know what you learn, Mrs. Adams. If you would,” he added, like a man recalling a phrase in a foreign tongue. “I’ll have the letters from Woodruff to-to my wife”—again he avoided calling her Mrs. Malvern—“sent over to you next week; I should like to read them myself again. You probably know as much as I do about—about my wife’s family—and in any case it is hard to see, after the lapse of nearly eight years, why someone from her past would choose to do violence against an innocent third party in her house.”

  “I agree,” said Abigail quietly. “Yet the killer has to be someone she knows, and trusted.”

  “Which doesn’t preclude Sam Adams or one of his ilk,” retorted Malvern grimly. “There!” he added. “That’s the three quarters striking! Ulee had best make a little speed, if you’re to be home when the Sabbath begins.”

  Icy wind clawed them as he handed her down the step and into the chaise. Abigail had protested, while they’d waited for it, that the distance was barely five hundred yards to her own door, but in her heart she was grateful, as the glow of the vehicle’s lamps caught on flying spits of rain. “If he’s a few minutes late,” she replied, “I think we can argue, with our Lord, that it comes under the heading of pulling one’s ox from a pit. The Sabbath was made for Man, and not Man for the Sabbath.”

  “Let me know what you learn,” he said. “And how I may help you find—Mrs. Malvern.”

  Quietly, Abigail said, “I will.” But as the chaise rattled up King Street, Abigail reflected on how little she had learned, since she’d waked in the morning’s cold dawn. She had pulled no ox from any pit. And though a small part of her heart rejoiced at what she thought she had heard in Charles Malvern’s voice, she was well aware that she was no closer to knowing Rebecca’s whereabouts than she had been on Thursday morning, watching the Sons of Liberty mop Perdita Pentyre’s blood from Rebecca’s kitchen floor.

  Eleven

  Mrs. Adams

  Mistress Lisette Droux will come to the kitchen of my house to meet you at four o’clock this afternoon, having no day but Sunday, to leave her master’s house. I hope and trust this meets with your approval?

  I remain,

  Your obedient humble etc.

  Charles Malvern

  “I suppose it isn’t to be hoped that Malvern could arrange an interview with Richard Pentyre,” remarked John, when Abigail handed him the note that had awaited them on the sideboard on their return from morning service.

  “On the contrary, I suspect there’s a better chance of getting truth out of the maid than out of the master.” Abigail squatted to kiss Charley and Tommy, who generally had a hard time of it on Sabbath mornings while the rest of the family was at Meeting. Both John and Abigail subscribed to the belief that profane matters of the work-day week included weekda
y toys and games, something Tommy didn’t understand yet and Charley pretended not to. Like many children—Abigail included, at age three—he was deeply puzzled and resentful that God would require him to “sit still and be good” one day out of seven.

  “Haven’t you told me, John, time and again, that eight murders out of ten turn out to be someone known to their victim?” She rose again to her feet, and spoke softly: oxen, pits, and Sabbath notwithstanding, it wasn’t a discussion she wanted small children to overhear. “In spite of the favors and business opportunities that accrued to Mr. Pentyre as a result of his wife’s affair with the commander of the British regiment, the fact remains that she was deceiving him, and doing so before the whole of the town.”

  “And the fact remains that as a firm friend of the Crown, a cousin of our Governor through the Sellars and Oliver families, and a consignee for the East India Company’s tea monopoly, Pentyre had no real need of the Army’s favors,” returned John. “He had, on the other hand, numerous enemies.”

  “Yet he lives.” Abigail hung her cloak on its peg, poured out water to wash her hands: The table for the cold and early Sabbath dinner had been set last night, the food prepared. At three the afternoon service would begin: Young Mr. Thaxter, John’s clerk, had agreed to come by with his mother to escort Pattie, Nabby, and Johnny back to the Meeting-House while John remained with the little ones and Abigail embarked on her un-Sabbathlike quest for information. “Why take such pains to lure his wife into a trap?”

  “Why would Malvern’s daughter bribe servants to murder Mrs. Pentyre’s dog?” John’s face was somber as he picked up Tommy and carried him to the table, where the other children were already taking their places. “There is such a thing as vindictiveness in the world, Portia. I don’t suppose, in your conversation with the Malvern servants last night, that you asked after their master’s whereabouts on Wednesday night?”

  Abigail stared at him, taken aback. “He would not—”

  “And I would not,” said John. “And yet, someone did.”

  Lisette Droux was a tiny, dark-haired Frenchwoman in her thirties, with buck teeth and a complexion so pitted by smallpox as to defeat the eye of any but the most willing of suitors. She rose and curtseyed as Scipio showed Abigail into the Malvern kitchen.

  “Madame.”

  “Mistress Droux.” A small fire burned on the hearth and warmed the big room, but the neatly stacked dishes, the absence of pans or cooking smells, told her that Charles Malvern held to the Puritan way beneath his own roof. The fire—and the kettle bubbling softly over it—were concessions to Tamar’s more fashionable cravings for tea and comforts: Abigail noticed Scipio had provided tea for the maidservant as well. “Did Miss Connelley tell you anything of what I wish to ask you about?”

  “No, Madame.” At Abigail’s gestured invitation, she seated herself on the other side of the table. “Nor would I believe that Irish cocotte if she told me the sun rose in the East. But Scipio tells me you are a friend of the woman in whose house Mrs. Pentyre met her death, the woman who has now disappeared: fled, he says, and perhaps in fear for her life. And since this imbecile from the office of the Provost Marshal seems to think of nothing but that there is a political conspiracy to murder both M’sieu and Madame over this question of tea—”

  Abigail said, “What?” and the woman raised her dark, straight brows.

  “The imbecile,” she explained. “With the pale face and the little nose like a girl’s.” Her own was a noble organ; had her uneasy shock at this confirmation of Coldstone’s inquiries been less, Abigail would have smiled at the description of her adversary’s dainty features. “He asked, did anyone follow Madame, did anyone hide themselves about the stables while Gerald was taking out the chaise for her, did she receive letters threatening her life from such a one, or such a one—”

  “Which such-ones?” asked Abigail. “Do you recall any names?”

  The maidservant considered the matter, with aloof dis passion that seemed to be native to her. It was difficult to tell whether her dark bombazine dress was intended to constitute mourning for her mistress; Abigail was inclined to think not. “Son of Liberty,” Lisette said at length, pronouncing the words with care. “That was one. Mohawk was another he asked after; and Adam. And Novanglus—that is Latin for . . .”

  “New Englander,” Abigail finished softly. “Yes, I know.” Adam. Or Adams? A mistake would be easy. Mohawk, Son of Liberty, and Novanglus were all names under which John had written pamphlets and articles for the Gazette and the Spy.

  “It is politics.” Lisette shrugged. “It is nothing. One does not do murder over politics. You must take tea, Madame, or coffee if you will—”

  Scipio brought a small pot over to the table, and a cup. Abigail in fact found coffee’s bitterness unpleasant and cursed the Crown for its tax that had pushed the colony into a boycott of her favorite comforter in the late afternoons, but knew she had to accustom herself to drink the stuff. In Malvern’s respectable house there was no hope that the tea had been smuggled in by the Dutch, tax-free.

  “How long had you been in Madame Pentyre’s employment?”

  “Three years, Madame. I was taken on at the time of her marriage. These pamphlets, these Sons of Liberty”—she made a very Gallic gesture with one hand—“When first she married M’sieu Pentyre, my lady read them all, these pamphlets. She would stamp her pretty foot and fling up her hands, so! and shake her hair about. She had lovely hair.” A trace of sadness came into her voice, like a woman mourning the loss of some particularly fine roses in a childhood home. “And she would call M’sieu a Tory and a dish-licking dog. M’sieu would laugh, and kiss her, and she would be wild with indignation, and storm away out of the house . . . She was very young, Madame. When M’sieu learned that she had fallen in love with Colonel Leslie, and become his mistress, how he laughed! ‘All it takes is a red coat after all,’ he says, and she colors up, and pouts, but we hear no more about the Sons of Liberty.”

  So much, reflected Abigail, for The Husband’s Revenge. “And when was this?”

  “Almost a year, Madame. They become lovers at the New Year, at a ball at the house of the Governor, in the pantry where the silverware is cleaned. I found some of the cleaning-sand in her petticoat-lace afterwards. But since first she is introduced to him, in the summer at a picnic in honor of the officers of the regiment, she has—what is the word? She has set her hat in his direction.”

  “Did she love him?” asked Abigail. “Or he her?”

  One corner of that wry little mouth turned down: Eh, bien, what will these Americans think next? “Oh. Madame. He was quite fond of her—men usually are, if a good-looking woman will consent to go to bed with them. I have heard he is genuinely grieved, and swears that he will hang every Son of Liberty in the colony for the crime. But she—” Lisette shrugged again. “He is the second son of a Scots Earl. Myself, I think my lady was jealous. It was not a month before, that M’sieu took a mistress for himself—”

  Abigail tried hard not to look shocked.

  “And though he was just as generous to her as he had been before, as I say, she is—she was—very young.”

  Abigail closed her eyes briefly, seeing—as if with the memory of a nightmare—the blood-engorged face, the bitten shoulders and neck. So distorted had the features been by the blood pooling in the tissues it would have been hard to tell the woman’s age. But it was very much a young girl’s trick, to throw herself at the commander of the occupying troops—a man of power, moderately good-looking, and, as Mademoiselle Droux had pointed out, an Earl’s second son. To seduce him with her gay youth, with her beautiful hair: telling herself that her adventure was for her country’s sake, like the heroine of a play. Yes. She had been very young.

  “How old was she?”

  “Seventeen, Madame, when she married M’sieu Pentyre. She was twenty when she died.”

  Abigail drew in a breath, and let it out, thinking about that very young girl. Had it been her husband taking a
mistress, that had determined her on revenge? Yesterday morning, rereading Rebecca’s letters, she had found several accounts of trips to Castle Island, in quest of pamphlet-worthy gossip at the camp. Perdita Pentyre would have seen in her first a kindred spirit, then a link with the Sons of Liberty themselves, the organization whose writings she read with such eagerness. M’sieu would laugh, and kiss her, and she would be wild with indignation, and storm away out of the house . . .

  She could almost hear her daughter Nabby shouting at her one day in fury, I’ll show you—!

  She was from New York, Abigail recalled; without friends or close connections here to distract her from her adventure. And Colonel Leslie, as she had glimpsed him yesterday, was a well-enough-looking man, and younger than one might expect.

  As if she discerned the sadness in Abigail’s face, Mademoiselle Droux said, “Eh bien, Madame, it is not as if the Colonel was her only lover.”

  Abigail snapped sharply from her reverie. “Was he not?” and at the same moment a flash of disgust went through her. As if her sort stops at one, Queenie had sniffed, and standing there in the market yesterday, Abigail had been ready to snatch the cook’s cap off, and pull her hair. The one she let in through her parlor window . . . This Mrs. Pentyre, if she . . . had someone else she wanted to meet . . .

  So it was only a sordid assignation after all.

  Oh, Rebecca, no. How could you?

  Perdita Pentyre may not have had any connection with the Sons of Liberty at all.

  Rebecca had only used their code, as the most convenient one to hand, to help another woman as unhappily wed as she herself had been. No wonder Sam had known nothing about her.

  Only it wasn’t Rebecca, who had written that note.

  Abigail turned the matter over in her mind while Mademoiselle Droux went on. “Mrs. Pentyre, she knew it is bad ton, to have two lovers at a time; it smacks of excess. She never spoke of him to me. But, mercredi soir was not the first time that she would have Gerald put the chaise to for her—and pay him well, to keep his mouth shut.” Her lips pinched a little: disapproval, or merely the ordering of her thoughts? “I have seen him, this young gentleman, beau comme Adonais, watching her so jealously. And when all is said, the Colonel is five-and-thirty. To a girl of twenty . . .” She shrugged.