The Ninth Daughter

by Barbara Hamilton

  She raised her voice again, shouted, “Leave them be!” and the men stopped, more startled than actually obedient. She spurred through them and to the side of the two soldiers, Thaxter galloping up in support, and the men, as she’d expected they probably would, scattered back into the trees. A couple of them shouted “Tory bitch!” and similar sentiments, but none of them was ready to attack a woman—particularly not one who came escorted. Someone threw a rock at them, which missed by yards. Ignoring this completely, Abigail dropped from her horse at the soldiers’ side.

  “Is he badly hurt?” She pulled away the dark cloak that covered the fallen man’s crimson coat, and saw to her surprise that it was Lieutenant Coldstone. Looking up quickly, she met young Sergeant Muldoon’s quick glance, before he returned his attention to the darkening woods around them.

  “Dunno, m’am—Mrs. Adams. Him and the horse fell together—”

  Abigail was already feeling beneath the red coat, and pushed back the stiffly powdered white wig to run her fingers through the young officer’s short, fair hair. It was silky as a child’s.

  “No blood. He may only have been stunned by the fall. Thaxter, help me get this man on my horse. You did well, Sergeant, not to fire at your attackers. The last thing we need right now is another murder trial.”

  “I did fire, m’am,” admitted the Sergeant. “I think the powder’s damp.”

  “Here—” Abigail held up a hand as Thaxter shoved his own horse pistol into his pocket and made to lift the Lieutenant. She took her pin-box from her skirt pocket, selected the longest, and drove the point hard into the unconscious man’s leg just below the knee. Coldstone’s leg jerked and he turned his head, gasped, “Damn it—!”

  “Very good,” approved Abigail, as Thaxter helped the fallen man to sit. “He hasn’t broken his neck.” She replaced the pin in her box. “Are you all right, Lieutenant?”

  He was already scanning the woods around them.

  “Gang of hooligans, sir,” reported Muldoon. “They made off—”

  “Can you stand, sir?” Thaxter had risen to his feet and had his pistol at the ready again, though, Abigail reflected, his powder was almost certainly damp as well. She was astonished the attackers had managed to get off a shot. He held down his left arm for the Lieutenant to take hold of, and Coldstone rose, a little shakily, to his feet, and immediately staggered.

  “Where’s my horse?” he asked. “She came down on my ankle, it feels like—”

  “She was well enough to leave the woods at a gallop,” Abigail said. “Sergeant—?”

  Muldoon shook his head, and waved vaguely in the direction his own mount had gone.

  “The innkeeper at the Fish-Tail will advertise a reward,” said Abigail. “I think the sooner you two are back in Boston, the better off you’ll be. The ferry’s stopped running by now—” She glanced worriedly at the gray overcast above the leafless trees.

  Thaxter made a noise of disgust as he brought his horse around for Coldstone to mount. “The cook at the Fish-Tail’s got to have done for twenty men at least—”

  “The ferry will oblige us, in the King’s name.” Coldstone’s face turned wax white when Muldoon boosted him into the saddle, but his expression of arctic calm did not alter. “Thank you, Sergeant.” He took the wig that Muldoon picked up for him, but didn’t put it on; it was covered with mud and leaves. So was his hat, but he did don that. It fit ill, without the wig. “I trust my sergeant and I will be able to command a bed among the men at the battery, if the weather worsens before we can cross back to the Castle. I am much obliged to you, Mrs. Adams. I guessed you to be formidable, but did not realize you were so fearsome in combat.”

  Boosted up by her clerk, Abigail settled herself in her saddle. “It does not do to underestimate Americans, Lieutenant. I’m surprised,” she added, as they reined back toward the road, and the dim yellow lights of Winnisimmet beginning to speck the darkness, “that they chose to attack you in daylight, so close to the town. You haven’t been picking out quarrels with the local worthies, I hope?”

  “If by ‘picking out quarrels,’ you mean, investigating rumors of treason and sedition,” replied Coldstone, “I fear that I have, m’am. As you should well know. And, I am not surprised in the least, that such men would lie in wait for an officer of the King.”

  “He’s right, m’am,” added Sergeant Muldoon diffidently. “Town’s like a nest of hornets, it is.”

  Coldstone glanced quellingly down at his henchman, but Abigail heard something in the big Irishman’s voice that made her ask, “Why is it like a nest of hornets, Sergeant? What’s happened? We’ve been away,” she added, turning back to Coldstone.

  The officer sniffed. “Have you, indeed? Then you have missed a great deal of excitement. Yesterday the Dartmouth put in from England, with the first shipment of the East India Company’s tea.”

  Fourteen

  Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! That worst of Plagues, the detested tea shipped for this port by the East India Company, is now arrived in the Harbor; the hour of destruction, or manly opposition to the machinations of Tyranny, stares you in the Face; every Friend to his country, to Himself, and to Posterity, is now called upon to meet at Faneuil Hall, at nine o’clock this day, at which time the bells will ring to make united and successful resistance to this last worst and most destructive measure of Administration. Boston, Nov. 29, 1773.

  Movement stirred in every shadow, as Abigail and Lieutenant Coldstone rode down Prince’s Street beneath the high darkening shadow of Copp’s Hill. Though chilly night now covered the city, every alleyway, every courtyard, every intersection jostled with men as if it were noon on market day, and against the dim lights of every tavern door shadows appeared. Voices muttered from within these establishments, grim voices, not the cheery riot of card players and sailors on their sprees, and the murmur of men’s talk grumbled in the night like the fretting of the sea on rocks.

  Now and then Abigail glimpsed rough, badly shaven faces, and the coarse textures of hunting shirts and tattered farm coats in the tavern doorways. They’re coming in from the countryside, she thought, and remembered how Sam and Revere had summoned nearly threescore men to stand in Queen Street when Coldstone arrived to arrest John. Not rioting, not threatening—just standing there. Standing there and outnumbering the little party of British a dozen to one.

  Men shouted at the sight of Sergeant Muldoon’s red coat. Someone threw muck from the roadway at them. On every building, it seemed, the rallying-posters for the meeting at Faneuil Hall had been pasted. A dangerous glitter seemed to fill the air, like the smell of lightning before a storm.

  John sprang up from the kitchen table when Abigail came in, having detoured a little out of their way to accompany Muldoon and Coldstone to the small stone building that housed the crew of the gun emplacement at the end of Ship Street. When she tied up Balthazar in the yard and crossed to the back door she was almost stumbling with weariness. John caught her in his arms as she crossed the threshold: “What happened? You’re frozen!” He was dressed for the meeting already, in his second-best brown suit, the one he wore to plead in the circuit courts, his best wig on his head. Papers covered the big kitchen table. He drew her to the fire, brought up a small table as Johnny darted to drop a swift kiss on her cheek, then dashed through the back door to look after the horse. Nabby left her schoolbook to throw her arms around Abigail’s neck—“We were looking for you for hours!”—and Pattie hurried into the icy scullery, to come back with butter, cheese, bread. “We’ll have coffee in a trice—”

  Abigail cursed the Crown for making it impossible for her to drink tea at this moment.

  John chaffed her hands: “Run fetch your mother some warm slippers, Nabby, and her shawl. Was she there?” he asked more quietly, as their daughter dashed away up the tight-shut little box of the stairway. “Did you learn aught?”

  “Only that there are as many witch-hunters and religious fanatics in Massachusetts as ever there were in the old days.�
�� She put her hand to his cheek as he gently unlaced and drew off her boots and stockings. “Catherine Moore told me nothing of Rebecca’s past or family that I did not know already, from Rebecca herself, or from Scipio and Mr. Malvern. Nor can I find anyone who might have had reason to harm Mrs. Pentyre. The only thing I learned was just how impossible it would be for Rebecca to take refuge with Catherine’s family, always supposing she could get out of the town at all last Wednesday night. And I suppose Sam has found nothing?”

  John shook his head.

  “Has he gotten a man into Rebecca’s old house?”

  “Impossible. The Tillets are refusing to rent to anyone. To tell the truth, once the Dartmouth was sighted—and that was but two hours after you left—neither Sam, nor Revere, nor any of us has had many minutes to spare. Griffin’s Wharf is surrounded. One customs man tried to force his way through to examine the cargo and was tarred and feathered—”

  Abigail flinched, sickened at her recollection of the single time she’d seen that form of mutilation done.

  “Not being idiots, the stevedores sent to unload the tea didn’t even make the attempt. Sam sent men out to Cambridge, Roxbury, and Dorchester the moment the ship was sighted, and more messengers went out as soon as the time and place for the meeting tonight were set. There’s a man on top of Beacon Hill, watching Castle Island, but Colonel Leslie hasn’t stirred. I pray God he does not,” he added grimly. “The last thing we need is to give the men aboard the Cumberland reason to start shelling the town.”

  “They wouldn’t!”

  “They won’t if they think doing so would cause more damage than rioters. I must go,” he added, as Nabby scampered back into the kitchen with Abigail’s knitted wool slippers and stoutest shawl. “We’re meeting at the Green Dragon at eight: Sam, Revere, Warren, Church, Hancock, and I. The Faneuil meeting later will be a bear-garden. We need to know in advance what measures to propose. Sam at least knows that we have to move carefully, if we’re to keep support in England and not be dismissed as hooligans out for nothing but loot.”

  Abigail nodded again. She had been aware for years that despite the cries of Democracy, the heads of the Sons of Liberty took care to plan their strategies closely, and leave as little as possible to the whims of the rank and file. Sam kept a finger on the pulse of the poor men, the laborers, the dispossessed and discontented, but he knew well that they could be swayed by the urgings of other men as easily as by his own. John was his balance wheel, his gauge for what would work and what only sounded well.

  “By the by, this came for you this morning.” He held out a thick little letter, addressed in Scipio’s neat hand. The outer sheet enclosed a second missive on much finer paper—though not, she observed, anything like that of the forged note. In nearly illegible French handwriting, it informed her that M. Pentyre had indeed visited the house of Mme. Belle-Isle Wednesday night, leaving shortly after eleven. Clarice, the maid of Mme. Belle-Isle, would not drink rum and so Lisette had been obliged to purchase a bottle of smuggled French cognac for two dollars with which to ply her to obtain this information.

  Feeling as if she had stumbled into a more than usually tawdry novel, Abigail brought up a couple of tallow work-candles and wrote out a little invoice for Charles Malvern: I feel the woman’s information is truthful, so far as she has been told the truth. If nothing else, it clears the ground for further inquiry . She then brought out the packet of letters that Catherine Moore had given her.

  Though they—and the remainder of Rebecca’s letters to herself, that she’d started to read the previous Saturday—brought back clearly the memories of those times, and stirred anew her anxiety for her friend, they told her nothing new. Rebecca rarely mentioned her family, or the friends she had known in Maryland in her youth. Those were very much of the “Jess will be old enough to start school now,” variety—whoever Jess might be.

  Abigail blushed once to find her own name, coupled with grateful praise: “She is so patient with my stupidity in the kitchen . . . One day I hope to have her steadiness of heart . . .”

  If you think my heart is steady, my dear, it’s only because you haven’t been around when Charley pissed in the kitchen fireplace. Abigail lowered the page to her lap. In the overcast dark, church bells all over the city had begun to toll, summoning Friends, Brethren, and Countrymen to Faneuil Hall. The strange, slow ringing had a sinister note, profoundly unlike the brisk music of Sunday. Could Rebecca hear them, wherever she was? Sam had had word out for a week now, for all those Friends, Brethren, etc. to be looking for her, and there had been no word of her nor word of her body.

  If she were free to leave Boston, why would she not have come to me?

  It was nearly midnight when John returned. Abigail, still reading by the fireplace, looked up at the sound of the latch. The men slipped through like fugitives: all the group who met at the Green Dragon regularly over matters of coordinating the patriots in the various Boston wards, and corresponding with like-minded men in far-flung colonies like New York, Philadelphia, Virginia. Her fair-haired, delicate-looking cousin Josiah Quincy, young Dr. Warren, smooth-voiced Dr. Church, and dark Ben Edes, Sam rubbing his hands and smiling with a self-satisfied twinkle in his eye, for all the world like the Reverend Atonement Bargest out in Gilead, soaking up praise for his excellent sermon on the dangers of demons that only he could see.

  The resemblance doesn’t end there, thought Abigail, smiling a little to herself as the men clustered around her, gripped her hand, all talking a mile a minute and all about their own affairs. She could have been Queen Charlotte or Helen of Troy for all they actually saw her, so preoccupied were they about the announcement to go out tomorrow that all the East India Company consignees for the Dartmouth’s tea must report to the Liberty Tree—at the head of the Neck—to resign their appointments, and the plan to have riders go out to farther-flung towns. So many hundred pamphlets from Edes, so many from Hazlitt, so many from Thomas over at the Spy—meet again tomorrow to coordinate details—John, you’ll get us up a draft of what we’re to say to the harbormaster about refusing to unload the ship . . .

  Sam smiling at this man, clapping that one on the shoulder, or gripping that one’s arm. She could almost see him commanding Brother Lament-Sin to put her and Thaxter up for the night (in that atrocious, freezing loft with his daughters), or directing Brother Mortify to guide them on their way again.

  And Sam would react, thought Abigail uneasily as she bade them good-night, exactly as the Hand of the Lord would react to the smallest suggestion of unbelief, should she, Abigail, say to him: I think Perdita Pentyre’s killer is a Son of Liberty. I think your organization numbers a madman in its midst.

  John was gone in the morning. Whether under bond for thirty pounds or three hundred, reflected Abigail wryly, it wouldn’t keep him from committing sedition against the Crown right here in Boston. Her two days of absence had left a staggering backlog of tasks which Pattie had simply not had the time to accomplish—from cleaning lamps and candlesticks to bringing the household account books up to date—so although her bones ached with weariness and rheumatism, Abigail forced herself to rise when John did, milk the cows, and set about making breakfast while Pattie rinsed and scalded the milk-pails. John kissed her when she brought his cider and oatmeal to the kitchen table: “ ’Tis good to have you home.” And then vanished through the back door, to meet with Sam and the others before the main meeting of Friends, Brethren, etc. at nine.

  The bells had tolled all night, and were tolling still. A warning of peril, of invasion, their sound would carry across the bay to Charles Town and Winnisimmet, to Braintree and Lynn; inland to Medford and Concord. Summoning Friends, Brethren, and Countrymen into Boston, to make their stand against the King’s assumption that he could arbitrarily clap a tax on whatever goods he thought people couldn’t do without—that he could with a scratch of his pen inform the colonists that they must buy their goods only from his friends.

  In Scotland, in times of invasion, the me
n of the clans would burn a cross on the highest hill, that the men of the clan would know to assemble in arms. Even so, thought Abigail, as she dipped water from the boiler on the hearth into the washbowl for the dishes—even so the sound of the bells went out, to that great clan that Cousin Sam had formed with his skill and his charm and his wily understanding of human nature. And in Medford and Dorchester, Cambridge and Lynn, men were turning the management of their farms and shops over to their wives and mothers, and starting out for Boston.

  Is it someone in the Sons of Liberty? She probed and tested at the thought, as if trying to untangle a necklace without breaking its delicate links. Is that why he bound Rebecca, shut her up in her room? Or did he do that because he wanted her alive, wanted her to return to him . . .

  Yet she couldn’t imagine Charles Malvern taking a knife to a girl of twenty. Exposing her affaire with this second Adonis—if indeed such an affaire were not merely Lisette’s rather Gallic interpretation of an innocent admiration—certainly. And possibly Malvern’s vindictiveness would have extended to spying on Rebecca, by which means he’d have learned of the misdeeds of his rival’s flighty bride in the first place. But further than that . . .