A group of men passed her, newly in from the country, rifles on their shoulders and powder horns at their belts. They stepped respectfully out into the center of the street, to let her keep the higher and less mucky ground close to the wall. In their way, they were precisely like the Pentyre servants. Their mere presence was a guarantee of protection. It is when we are alone that we are vulnerable.
She wondered if she were insane, for agreeing—nay, demanding—to go across the harbor to Castle William that afternoon. Of course, she told herself, Colonel Leslie was highly unlikely to clap her into a cell and send word to John to present himself alone and unarmed somewhere at midnight or he’d never see her alive again . . .
Considered in that light, her peril (if there was one) sounded as far-fetched as the situation in Pamela, which always caused Rebecca to roll her eyes at the ceiling. John, too—last night, as they’d gotten into bed, John had said, “That farrago is honestly your favorite novel?” Rather defensively, Abigail had replied, “And why would it not be?”
“You honestly think that a rich and powerful gentleman would—or would be able to—hold a young woman prisoner in the attic of a country house, with the connivance of not one but two entire staffs of servants, and of every other person in the countryside—”
“You’ve obviously never seen a family putting pressure on a girl to marry a man of property and power whom she doesn’t like,” she’d retorted, and the quibble had passed to other matters. Perhaps it was that discussion which had touched her thoughts, perhaps her dream of rain and darkness.
But as she walked along the street with the morning sky pale pewter beyond the line of the gables above her, she thought, An attic. Sam’s patriots had been poking into cellars, snooping around smuggler-caches, investigating warehouses for nine days, finding nothing . . . All those places where the smugglers hid their packets of tea and casks of cognac and other goods that the English Crown forbade English colonists to buy from any but English merchants. And those places all had this in common: that they could be entered by a stranger from the street.
With the complicity of the household, Rebecca could be hiding—or be hidden in—any house in town.
Or her body could be buried in any cellar.
The thought halted Abigail in her tracks, in the middle of the street; a coldness fell on her like the shadow of a storm. She’s being held.
And the next instant: That’s ridiculous . . .
Isn’t it?
But her heart was beating fast, and she felt as she’d felt when, as a child, she’d grasped the logic that linked mathematical principles, or had understood for the first time why God must know who would be saved and who damned: that sense of seeing gears mesh, of facts falling into place. Before the eye of her mind flashed the open shutters of the Tillet attic, closed for the year that she’d been visiting Rebecca on Fish Street. With the Pentyre household in an uproar over its mistress’s murder, would Lisette Droux even be aware, during that first day or two, of someone being kept in one of those myriad little chambers marked by the stylish mansion’s dormer windows? Would she have thought to mention it? Particularly if some other explanation had been given that required her silence. We must make our nest against a storm—
Ludicrous. The immediate, overpowering sense of reasonableness faded as swiftly as it had come. John was quite right: You honestly think . . .
No. She didn’t. Not honestly.
But the case Mr. Richardson had made—for a young girl who was powerless, with no family connections and no one to inquire after her, being held captive—returned again and again to her mind as she hurried her steps toward home.
She reached Queen Street in time to do her own share of the housekeeping—sweeping, cleaning the lamps and candlesticks, making up the aired beds with Nabby’s assistance—before plucking and dressing the ducks she’d bought and putting into the oven the bread she’d set early that morning to rise. She should have done laundry Monday and Tuesday, while she was out gallivanting through the countryside, she reflected. It must certainly be done this week. And . . . and . . . and . . .
Charley and Tommy clung to her skirts one moment, then caromed off back to their blocks and gourds.
In between all that she ate a quick nuncheon of bread, butter, and cheese, knowing she’d get nothing until supper. When everyone else was eating dinner she, God preserve her, would be on her way across to Castle Island—and probably too seasick to even think of food.
The thought brought another one. Before she left to meet Lieutenant Coldstone, she wrapped up a small crock of butter, a wedge of her mother-in-law’s justly famous cheese, half of one of her new-baked loaves and some of the pears she’d bought, put them in one of her baskets, and left the house slightly early, to give herself time to carry this offering to Hanover Street. The Hazlitt bookshop was closed. When she went round to the back, she could see through the shed windows a great stack of paper beside the printing press, a much smaller pile of finished pamphlets, and a dozen hung up to dry. From the half-open door of the keeping room came the sound of voices, Mrs. Hazlitt’s very fast, running over Orion’s interjections—
“—Don’t interrupt me, darling, you never listen to me now, you used to care what I had to say. Now you don’t even care that I love you. That I have given up everything, everything in my life for love of you—”
“Of course I love you, but—”
“Then listen to me! Please, sit down and listen to me for once—”
“Mother, I always listen—”
“You don’t! You’re always thinking about just dosing me with that horrible laudanum—don’t go looking around the room for it while I’m speaking, please, please, my darling—”
Orion caught Abigail’s eye as she stood in the doorway. He’d clearly been interrupted in the midst of a print run, his sleeves rolled to his biceps, his shirt, apron, flesh all smudged and sticky with ink. He moved his head, with a slight, desperate jerk, toward the open door of the staircase (And with the cost of wood it’s no wonder he can afford no better help than Miss Damnation, with the heat wasted . . .). Remembering what he’d told her about laudanum, Abigail set her basket on the sideboard and moved swiftly to the narrow door.
If the house itself, shop and all, covered more ground than a couple of good-sized tablecloths she would have been surprised. The second floor boasted one moderate bedchamber and a sort of windowless cupboard where paper, ink for the press, and the slender stock for the store were kept. When Abigail had first encountered Orion Hazlitt, upon moving to Boston, he’d had an apprentice who’d slept downstairs in the shop, and an elderly and crotchety housekeeper who’d slept in this cupboard. This good woman had left the household in high dudgeon when Lucretia Hazlitt had arrived, bag and baggage, and had informed her son that she would now live with him and keep his house. The bedchamber that had been Orion’s was, when Abigail ducked into it in quest of the laudanum bottle, crowded with trunks of his mother’s dresses, and the housekeeper’s sleeping-cupboard crammed with printing supplies. Rebecca had written to her that Orion kept that room locked at night and frequently during the day, for his mother had a tendency to go in and dump the contents of the household chamber pots there, if she felt she was being ignored or put off with excuses.
The laudanum bottle stood on the corner of the mantel—a fresh one, by its fullness—and Abigail noted that a cozy fire burned to warm the room despite the fact that Mrs. Hazlitt spent most of her day in the keeping room. The bed had been neither made nor aired nor, by the smell of the room, had the chamber pot been emptied. Poor Orion! There was a trundle bed half pulled out beneath the big one, presumably for Damnation. At a guess, Orion would be sleeping on a pallet in the keeping room . . .
At the head of the stair, laudanum bottle in hand, Abigail paused, her eye caught by the ladder that led up to the attic. On impulse she went back to it, and climbed to the trapdoor—
The tiny space below the steep-slanted roof was crammed with more trunks, all
the things Mrs. Hazlitt had bought in the nearly two years she’d lived with her son: dresses, sets of chinaware, clocks, birdcages, an ostrich egg packed in straw. One couldn’t have imprisoned a lapdog up there, let alone a full-grown kidnapped maidservant.
You have indeed read Pamela too many times.
Abigail descended to the keeping room once more.
Mrs. Hazlitt was in tears by the time Abigail emerged from the staircase (and thriftily closed the door after herself), Orion holding her in his arms and covering her face with kisses. But in his own countenance was only exhaustion and revulsion, and the haggard desperation of a man who sees no light at the end of his road. He beckoned Abigail up, and it took the two of them to get his mother to swallow the medicine: She spit the first mouthful at him, cried when he forced her to swallow the second by holding her nose and keeping a hand on her mouth.
“When she gets excited like this, I’m always afraid Damnation will give her too much of the stuff,” he said, when they’d finally guided the stumbling, disheveled woman to her chair by the keeping room fire. “I must finish the pamphlets, and I must get to the meeting this afternoon. Please don’t think—” he began, with a glance back toward his mother. He brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, making the mess worse. “She wasn’t always like this, you know.”
“I know.” Though in fact, Rebecca had written to her last year that according to her son, Mrs. Hazlitt had always been a horror.
“Bless you—” He lifted the napkin from the basket, his tired face lighting up. “You are indeed an angel, Mrs. Adams. Now I must fly—” His face altered, suddenly twisted with dread, fatigue, grief. “You have heard nothing, I suppose?”
Looking up at him, she wondered when he had last slept. She shook her head. Now was not the time, she knew, to lay upon him her own inconclusive findings and nightmare surmises. He was a man who bore trouble enough.
“It will be over soon.” Abigail placed her hands over his, on the basket’s plaited handle. “I’ll make a little extra for dinner tonight, and send Pattie over with it. John tells me the Dartmouth must unload her tea by Saturday—a week from today—else it will all be confiscated to pay the harbor tolls. Whatever happens, it will only be a week.”
He caught her wrist as she was turning away, looking up at her with ravaged eyes. “And then what?” he asked softly. “Rebecca—Mrs. Malvern—”
Saved or endangered, dead or alive, femme seule or spouse abused . . . Rebecca would always be some other man’s wife.
Abigail said quietly, “God knows. But God does know—and will inform us, in due time.”
Twenty-one
Visiting Castle Island on the previous Friday, Abigail had received the impression of crowding and bustle, in the brick corridors of the little fortress, and in the village of tents, huts, cow-byres, sheep pens, and laundry-lines that had grown up around its walls. When the two sailors from the Cumberland landed her there today—in company with the family of an English customs clerk named Burrell, two gentlemen related to the Olivers, and towering mountains of luggage—Abigail saw her earlier error. It seemed to her that at least as many tents and huts again had been newly erected, not only for the servants of the refugee Tories but for all the lesser officers and their clerks and servants who had been displaced from the fort, so that the likes of the Hutchinsons, Olivers, and Fluckners could have its sturdier roof over their heads. Smoke from cook-fires wreathed the walls and stung Abigail’s eyes as she and Thaxter picked their way up from the dock. Every step was impeded by camp servants putting up shelters, sheep penned in the thoroughfare, bales of provisions, and prostitutes. The whole place smelled like a privy.
Lieutenant Coldstone met her a few yards from Castle William’s gate.
“Mrs. Adams.” He bowed over her hand. “I beg your pardon. I had meant to come to fetch you—”
“Good heavens, Lieutenant, with this many soldiers shifting their arrangements about I’m astonished you have a few minutes to meet me here. Did you have civilians quartered upon you?”
The chilly reserve broke into a grin at this reversal of the usual civilian complaint of the military being quartered in private homes, swiftly repressed: His eyes still smiled. “I have lived under canvas before, m’am; and that, recently enough that it is no catastrophe. The civilians forced to take refuge here, from fear of the mobs in Boston, have been neither trained to it, nor are they for the most part physically suited to such hardships. Not only the men by whom your husband and his friends feel wronged, but their wives, who have surely wronged no one, and children as well.”
“And, as the Lord says to Jonah, also much cattle,” remarked Abigail, stepping out of the way of a girl in a dirty skirt, driving half a dozen pigs through the gate. “Lieutenant Coldstone, you recall Mr. Thaxter, my husband’s clerk? I assume Mr. Pentyre has consented to see me?” She took Thaxter’s arm again and followed Coldstone after the pigs up to the gate, the muck of the path sucking and clinging to her pattens.
“With certain stipulations, yes.”
“Stipulations?” Abigail raised her brows, and got an enigmatic glance over Coldstone’s epauletted shoulder in reply.
“He has asked that I be present at the interview—at a sufficient distance that conversation in a low voice should be private enough if you choose,” he added, anticipating Abigail’s protest, though in fact what she felt was relief that she would not be obliged either to broach or explain the matter of his presence herself. “And he has requested that you be searched.”
Abigail stopped short under the low brick tunnel of the gate. “Searched?”
“With all due decency.” Coldstone’s voice, like his features, seemed wrought of polished marble, ungiving and absolutely smooth. “I have asked the wives of five of the sergeants major here: respectable women, and honest. You may choose which of them you will, to perform the office. He would not meet you, else.”
Abigail opened her mouth, outraged, then closed it again. Why would he ask that? Her eyes searched the face of the man before her. “He sounds like a man in fear for his life.”
“Were he not,” replied Coldstone civilly, “he would not be living in a single clerk’s room on this island. Nor would any of the other lawyers, Crown officers, merchants, and their families currently eating Army rations. Your husband is, I might remind you, known as one of the leaders of the Boston mob—”
“He is not!”
“Forgive me for contradicting a lady, m’am, but he is indeed known as such, whatever his true position might be. And if he will take such a position, his wife must needs suffer for it, even as Mrs. Oliver and Mrs. Fluckner and the Apthorp ladies do—and, I might add, suffer to a considerably lesser degree. Will you agree to submit to the conditions?”
Abigail smiled. “I would not miss it for worlds.”
The wives of the sergeants major were red-faced, thick-armed, good-natured-looking women of the kind one would meet in the marketplace any day, not the slatternly trulls described in pamphlets from one end of New England to the other (I have been listening to too many of Sam’s diatribes). Abigail selected the one who looked most talkative, and remarked, as they retired behind a screen (there being no spare rooms in the fortress at all besides this single office), “I had no idea I was considered so formidable. Does Mr. Pentyre truly expect me to assault him?”
“That I don’t know, mum. He’s sure no so fussy about others that see him—and his poor wife did come to a terrible end.”
“Were you acquainted with her, Mrs.—?”
“Gill. Maria Gill. And only to give a good day to; as sweet and condescending a lady as you could ask, which is somethin’ you don’t often find in Americans, begging your pardon, mum. Not like that nasty—” She stopped herself. Abigail could not but wonder if the next words out of her mouth would have been, that nasty Mrs. Belle-Isle. “She’d often stop and talk with us, or with the women who did laundry or sewing here—not the girls that do for the men, you understand, but the town women who do f
ine work for the gentlemen. She had what my mum used to call ‘the common touch’: permittin’ no liberties, of course, but not bein’ so high in the instep as some I could name, that treats honest women as if they were the dirt in the streets.”
“She was here fairly often, was she?” Abigail stepped out of her skirt and stood back while Mrs. Gill pinched and shook her petticoats (“With your permission, mum—”), turned her bodice inside out, and conscientiously removed and held up every item in her pockets and set them on the chair in their screened sanctum (“Are you sure you’re warm enough, mum?”).
“Well”—Mrs. Gill half hid a little conspiratorial smile—“all those town ladies, they were back and forth to dine, of course. And the officers would invite them sailing, or to reviews, or to hear the regimental band. So yes, Mrs. Pentyre was often here.”
“With her husband?”
“Not always.” The stout woman cast a quick glance at Abigail’s face, as if asking herself how discreet she should be, then whispered, “She and the Colonel was good friends, if you take my meaning . . . good friends.” She winked. “But Mr. Pentyre, as often as not he’d come dine with them, or ask the Colonel over to that big house he has in Boston, and why should he play dog-in-the-manger? T’wasn’t as if he was sittin’ home alone weepin’ into his beer, nights.”
“Really?” Abigail leaned forward, discreetly agog.
Pleased, Mrs. Gill said, “That’s the truth, mum. A West Indian lady, a Mrs. Belle-Isle, that he set up in a house not two streets from his own, and has had brought over here—and got her a room for herself, when respectable people are doin’ without or livin’ in tents behind the cow pens—for fear that if riotin’ breaks out in the town over this Donny brook over the tea—and what on earth would Americans balk at? You can’t get it at home for such a price!—there’s some that would give her her deservin’ for the way she lives.”
The Ninth Daughter Page 21