Of her account of Richard Pentyre’s reaction to being asked about his movements on the night of the twenty-third, he said, “In truth it’s no more than I expected. Even if he didn’t murder his wife, he might have been up to a dozen things he’d rather the Provost Marshal didn’t know about. The fact that he’s a friend of the Crown and a consignee for the East India Company’s tea doesn’t mean he isn’t elbow-deep in smuggling cognac, silk, and paint-pigment from the French.”
“Is that something Sam could find out about?”
“I suppose.” John poured molasses over the corn-pudding. “If you feel like explaining to him that you’re still investigating this murder.”
“I do,” said Abigail grimly. “While on the island I spoke to Lucy Fluckner—”
“What, Tom Fluckner’s heiress?”
“And a true-blue Whig, it sounds like,” said Abigail. “She told me that at the time Mrs. Fishwire and Mrs. Barry were murdered, a third woman—the Fluckners’ maidservant Philomela—was having horrible poems sent to her, and was being followed, by a man whom she suspects was the killer.”
“Suspects—?”
“Because of something in one of the poems, about killing a red-haired woman. A few days ago—less than a week after Mrs. Pentyre’s murder, in other words—he started following her again.”
John whispered, “Damn. Is she sure? Not that it’s the killer, but that it’s the same man who followed her the summer before last?”
“She’s sure.” Quickly she outlined all that the girls had told her. “There was no time to seek out Lieutenant Coldstone after I learned this, or I would have been stranded on the island for the night, and Heaven only knows what Sam would have had to say. I’ll write him tomorrow. Coldstone, I mean, not Sam. At least she shall be safe there at the fort . . .”
“If the man isn’t a Tory himself, and there among them,” murmured John, and carried his plate to the sideboard. “Or masquerading as one. With the island that crowded, and people coming and going on business to the town, it would be easy. It does sound as if he’s been away, doesn’t it?”
Together they brought the tin tub from the corner where she and Pattie had stood it earlier, brought up the screen to protect it from drafts, and poured the hot water in. “There’s nothing to tell us that he lives in Boston and not New York or Halifax, for that matter,” said John, as he took off his coat. “In fact, nothing in any of this indicates that the man who killed Perdita Pentyre has anything to do with the man who killed the others and now, apparently, has resumed his pursuit of another woman who, like your precious Pamela, has neither friends nor family strong enough to look out for her.”
“Pamela.” Abigail, who had gone to fetch the candles from the table, came back around the screen. “John, tell me if this sounds mad, but—it occurred to me today—is there any chance that the reason Rebecca has not come forward—has not even gotten a message to me or Sam or Orion—is that she’s . . . she’s being held prisoner somewhere?”
He paused in the act of removing his neckcloth, regarded her in the softly flickering light with a kind of gentleness, as if she had an injury that would reawaken in agony if touched. “I think it far likelier that she is dead,” he said.
“I do—I would—because of course in any house in Boston where she could be locked in an attic, she could also be buried in the cellar. Except this man, whoever he is . . . he doesn’t hide the bodies of his victims.”
John took the candles from her hand, set them on the chimney breast. “The man who killed Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Fishwire doesn’t hide the bodies,” he said. “The man who killed Mrs. Pentyre—if he is not the same man—only left in the open the body that he wanted the Watch to find. Why go to pains to imitate a crime, if not to have someone blamed for it? The point of this crime,” he went on, “now does not seem to be to kill Mrs. Pentyre, but to kill me. I admit I will be most curious to see the handwriting on that poem sent to Fluckner’s girl. Now might I persuade you,” he added, “to wash my back for me, before it becomes the Sabbath?”
Twenty-four
A note from Lucy Fluckner awaited John and Abigail on the sideboard when they returned from services the following morning. Either the Fluckner household wasn’t one in which the Sabbath was regarded with Puritan strictness, or its heiress had found some outright heathen among the hangers-on about Castle William to carry her message across the bay. When Abigail broke the seal, she found requests from both Miss Lucy Fluckner and Philomela Strong, that Mr. Barnaby permit the bearer to enter the house and the chamber of Philomela, to take possession of the document they would find hidden under the floorboard near the head of the bed.
Please say nothing of this to Papa, Lucy’s paragraph added. It is from the man who wrote those awful poems to Philomela the summer before last. We have reason to think that he has done something dreadful, and Mr. Adams is looking into the matter on Philomela’s behalf.
“And if I discovered my butler was keeping intrigues like this from me, at the behest of my sixteen-year-old daughter and a servant girl,” remarked John, pocketing the paper, “I’d sack him. We’ll be fortunate if he lets us into the house.”
“You’re known throughout the town as a respectable man,” Abigail replied soothingly.
“I’m known throughout the Tory community as a fo menter of sedition,” grumbled John. “Were I a Royal Commissioner, in hiding from the mob, I wouldn’t let me in the house . . . particularly if my daughter has expressed, as you say she does, leanings toward evil Whiggish doctrines like our right as Englishmen. I wonder who’s been sneaking the girl pamphlets?”
“The other servants, belike.” Abigail put on her apron and went to the pantry, as Johnny and Nabby hurried to set the table. She shook her head in mock disapproval. “It all comes of teaching girls to read—” Both children glanced around at her, and John added gravely, “And of not beating boys soundly enough.”
Solemn Johnny flashed him a rare grin.
After a cold Sabbath dinner they returned to Meeting with Pattie, leaving Nabby and Johnny home to watch the younger boys. As Abigail had suspected would be the case, the sermon, which ostensibly concerned King David, had a great deal more to do with tea and taxation than with the affairs of ancient Judea. Yet through it all her mind roved again and again to attic windows, shuttered or unshuttered, to forged notes and skillfully crafted lies. Though she had long trained her mind to shut out the profane in contemplation of the divine (which was more than Pastor Simmonds seemed inclined to do just now), she found her thoughts drawn again and again to the image of the lovely fifteen-year-old servant girl in Pamela, kept prisoner in the midst of a respectable community . . .
Ridiculous, she reflected uneasily. John is right. She had always justified her fondness for the novel with the argument that it was a paradigm of how every woman was treated, if not physically then emotionally and socially. Never before had she seriously considered whether it would be possible for someone to actually do. I fear to be turned off without a character, one servant quails in the novel; He—meaning the lustful and powerful Mr. B—has it in his power to give or withhold a living from me, another excuses himself.
And in truth, on several occasions Charles Malvern had actually imprisoned Rebecca for periods of days or weeks, when he suspected that she would use her liberty to get in touch with her family (as in fact she had). He was, Abigail reflected, probably holding his daughter under a similar form of house arrest at this very moment, and neither she nor any man in Boston would think twice about his right to do so.
But ’tis a long way from that, to holding a woman captive when you have no legal right to do so—isn’t it?
Resolutely, she tried to force her thoughts to a more sacred direction, though the pastoral tirade on the subject of the rights of God’s chosen to cast off the bonds of unjust rulers hardly qualified as that. The meetinghouse was packed to the walls, as it had been for the morning service, and as they had for the morning service, John and Abigail shared t
heir pew with half a dozen complete strangers, young farmers from Chelsea and Brookline and one from as far away as Worcester, brought into the town by the tolling of the bells and the word that was circulating the countryside: Your Country is in Danger. The King’s demands must be challenged if we are not to be enslaved. These young men listened to the sermon with deep appreciation, shook hands afterwards with John, and said they’d heard him speak at Old South Thursday: “We’re ready for anything, sir.”
Reflecting on the number of things that could go wrong in the eleven days between now and the deadline for the tea’s unloading, Abigail thought, We had better be.
The Fluckners lived in Milk Street, a new and extremely handsome house, suitable to a man who was not only Royal Commissioner of Massachusetts but proprietor of a million acres in the Maine district to the northeast. Beyond a doubt it was crammed to the rafters with expensive furniture, fine silk clothing, costly silver and china, and similar lootable goods. “Sam claims there will be no looting,” murmured John, surveying the tightly shuttered brick façade. “The Sons of Liberty learned their lesson when Governor Hutchinson’s house was gutted; there are standing orders that anyone who loots the houses or goods of the Tories will be punished. If we lower ourselves to the acts of criminals, we will lose our support among men of good character, both here and in England, and justify the Crown in treating us as such.”
“Which includes murder as well as theft.”
“Precisely.” His mouth tightened. “I dearly wish there were a way you could ask to see this ‘Novanglus’ note of Coldstone’s without displaying in turn the one that was on Mrs. Pentyre’s body. ’Twouldn’t take a clever man long to guess the code, if he knew already that she met her end on a Wednesday night at close to midnight. Nor do we know how close they are to unraveling whatever other papers Mrs. Pentyre may have left—including, you say, all Rebecca’s previous notes.” He shook his head, forestalling her unspoken question. “It can’t be risked.” He led the way across the street.
But the knocker had been taken from the Fluckners’ door. When they walked around the side of the house to the carriageway, they found the gate into the back quarters shut and locked. John glared at the shuttered windows, and returning to the front, pounded on the door with his fist.
“The droppings I saw through the gate of the carriageway were fresh,” provided Abigail. “And there’s smoke in the kitchen chimney.”
“Fluckner’s probably given orders to open to no one they don’t recognize.” John gave the portal an impatient and un-Sabbathlike kick. “And it’s too much to hope, that he’d permit his daughter to come back to town to get his servants to open up the house—even to someone who wasn’t under suspicion of treason and murder. Always supposing,” he added, as he came down the single brick step, “that telling Fluckner of the poem in the first place wouldn’t cause him to sell the poor girl out of hand, to spare himself trouble.”
“For something she couldn’t help?” Abigail stopped in her tracks, half inclined to go back and have another try at the door. “For receiving poems that she didn’t want, from a man who is clearly insane? Knock again, John, they might—”
“And pigs might fly.” He put his hand at her back, started to lead her down the street. “I’ve argued in the Commonwealth courts for thirteen years, my girl, and if I had a shilling for every man who would sell a slave rather than deal with more than an hour’s ‘nonsense,’ as men like to call it, from people that slave might attract to the household . . . Well, I’d have bought you a house as big as that one, and a new lace cap to wear in it.”
They turned the corner onto Cornhill. It was barely four, yet lamplight shone in many windows, where children in their Sabbath best sat politely in parlor chairs while mothers read the Scripture to them, or told them Bible stories as Abigail’s father had told them to her. The taverns and ordinaries were of course closed, yet in every one they passed, Abigail saw lights behind the shutters, where the men lodged there gathered, muttering with talk.
It is a dangerous game they’re playing, Sam and Mr. Hancock and Dr. Warren and the others, she thought. All those meetings, at Old South and Faneuil Hall, were not just to keep spirits roused and angry—and to keep that potential mob of farmers and countrymen in town—until the date passed on which the tea must be confiscated.
The Sons of Liberty had to keep that anger just below the boiling point. To keep it from erupting into uncontrolled violence, from giving the Governor an excuse to call in extra troops, an excuse to say, These men are criminals, not defenders of Englishmen’s rights as they claim.
Her hand sought John’s. “Should I try if I can get Lieutenant Coldstone to help us open Fluckner’s door?”
“If you think we can guarantee he won’t make that poem disappear, since it proves I’m not the killer.”
“In other words, we need a witness to its discovery.”
“We need a witness who won’t be intimidated by a British threat,” said John. “That is, always supposing the poem has any bearing on the Pentyre matter at all. It may not.”
“Do you doubt that it does?” asked Abigail, surprised.
“Not the slightest.”
Abigail looked for Queenie the next day at the market, turning in her mind possibilities that seemed, when viewed from one angle, to be the fantasies of a schoolgirl dream. Yet her mind kept returning to the lakes of blood on Rebecca’s kitchen floor, to the stains of mud and dampness on the green and white counterpane, the glint of scissor-blades in the shadows of the hall, and she knew that the lunacy which she suspected possessed Hester Tillet was as nothing compared with the madness whose existence could not be denied.
Even a man who would deliberately mimic such crimes, for whatever goal of politics or vengeance, is no more sane than the devil who originally perpetrated them.
As if that brief glimpse of madness had opened some terrible inner door, she seemed now to be conscious of lunacy everywhere. What had Lucy Fluckner said? You know how easy it is to think, ‘Were we really making that up . . . ?’
She didn’t know.
All she knew was that she wanted, by hook or by crook, to get into the Tillet house and have a look at the south attic.
Queenie was nowhere to be found at the market. Abigail spotted Mrs. Tillet’s tall, starched cap almost at once among the stalls, and kept well clear of her. The cook could be ill—according to Rebecca, Queenie was a determined malingerer. Yet, Mrs. Tillet was an even more determined taskmistress, and ferociously disinclined to let any member of her household abdicate their duty.
Curious.
I’m going to feel very silly indeed, Abigail reflected as she moved swiftly, lightly away from the market square—her basket still empty—in the direction of Fish Street, if I find that there is some perfectly simple explanation to the yard being kept locked up, the rear house going unrented, and the Tillets’ obvious desire to keep people away.
The gate into Tillet’s Yard was still locked when Abigail reached the alley. Stepping back until her shoulders touched the opposite wall, she craned her neck to look up, and saw the south attic’s shutters had been opened again. The inner sides, folded back against the rain-wetted dark of the gable, were dry, the glass beneath them unbeaded with any trace of last night’s showers.
Surely it isn’t possible. Mrs. Tillet isn’t that mad.
She pulled her hood up to conceal her face, and moved inconspicuously to the end of the alley, in time to see a porter with a laden handcart engaged in an argument with Nehemiah Tillet outside the door of his shop. The handcart blocked traffic, but Tillet was gesturing impatiently to have it unloaded into the shop, as before, instead of into the yard.
Of course, she reflected as she retraced her steps down the alley, to circle around through somebody’s garden and pig-yard into Broad Alley and thence to Fish Street on the other side of the Tillet shop . . . Of course a violent murder in his rental house could have changed his mind about leaving the gate open. But surely not in b
road daylight?
It didn’t seem to have affected the landlords of Zulieka Fishwire’s house—or that residence’s ultimate rentability.
As she approached the shop from the other direction, Tillet, his apprentice, and the porter were struggling with a large box. Abigail slipped casually into the shop, and passed through it to its rear door and into the yard. Though she was tempted to investigate Rebecca’s house—closed-up and forlorn near the locked alley gate—she made her way instead to the kitchen, where Queenie was as usual sitting at her ease at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea.
“Mrs. Adams!” She sprang to her feet and looked immediately—her face contracted with guilt—at the tray that rested on the other end of the table. Wicker—like everything else in the kitchen rather battered and grimed and clearly picked up secondhand from someplace else—and bearing a pottery pitcher of water, and a pottery plate on which lay one slice of bread, rimed with the barest film of butter. Beside it sat an enormous basket, stacked with cut and folded packets of muslin and calico: the component parts of shirts.
“My dear, I’ve been sick with worry over you!” cried Abigail. “I was afraid you were ill, knowing how sensitive your system is to horrors and strain!”
“If only you knew the whole!” groaned Queenie, and passed her wrist over her sweatless brow, with the air of an enslaved Child of Israel stealing momentary respite from the task of building the Great Pyramid single-handedly. “I know not where ’twill end! And Mrs. Tillet is like a woman possessed!”
The Ninth Daughter Page 24