The Ninth Daughter

by Barbara Hamilton

  “Mrs. Malvern, may I present Sergeant Patrick Muldoon of the King’s Sixty-Fourth Regiment of Foot? Sergeant Muldoon, Mrs. Malvern—the sergeant has been good enough to escort me here, and I hope at some point John and others will—”

  “Damn!” Muldoon pulled the shutters to instants after he got them open. “Here they come!”

  “Who?” gasped Rebecca shakily, as Abigail left her to dart to the window. “Abigail, where am I? I saw—Oh, God! Orion—”

  “I know all about it.” Abigail peered grimly through the crack in the shutters. Her training held good and she said, “Oh!” instead of some of the more choice expressions Muldoon was using, but rage swept her, almost drowning out fear at the sight of the thirty or so men striding down the unpaved lane toward the blockhouse, burning billets of firewood aloft in their hands. The women—perhaps two thirds of the Congregation—swarmed among them, crying and shouting and pointing. The man in the lead wasn’t Bargest, but rather the dark-browed Brother Mortify, who had guided her and Thaxter out of the village lands.

  She flung herself back to Rebecca, pulled her to her feet, and threw Muldoon’s cloak around her. “They’ll see us use the door—”

  He was already working, ripping and levering at the hasp that locked the shutters of the single window in the gable wall. It faced at an angle, away from the street. Through the shutters on the street-side windows the torchlight showed up fiercely yellow, and Abigail heard the crash of the door opening downstairs. But instead of footsteps on the floor below, there was only the light, sharp crack of torches flung in, followed at once by billows of acrid smoke. Someone shouted, “Stand ready! She may fly!”

  “I’ve my gun—”

  “There she is! There she is!” screamed a woman—Rebecca was still leaning on Abigail’s shoulder, nowhere near any of the windows. “I see her! Look, she’s flying!”

  Rebecca muttered, “I wish I might!” She took a step, staggered, and someone outside fired a gun. “Don’t tell me they think I’m a witch!”

  “Yes.”

  Someone else yelled, “There she is!” and more guns boomed. At the same moment Muldoon flung open the gable window. Smoke was now pouring up the stair, and through the open trapdoor Abigail could see the red flare of firelight.

  Wretch! Lying, hypocrite wretch! He planned this from the moment Orion told him he must keep Rebecca safe! This building is isolated—one of the few in the village that could burn without danger to its neighbors!

  “Give her here.” Muldoon jerked the knot tight on the doubled rope, wrapped around the nearest bunk-frame, crossed himself, scooped Rebecca up, and put her over one shoulder like a sack of meal. “Hang on, m’am, if ever you did. Mrs. Adams, wrap the rope around your arm like this, play it out, put your feet on the wall and lean back—”

  Abigail said, “Oh, dear God . . .”

  “Throw me down me musket to me first. And don’t drop that winker!”

  Dear God—She fought panic at the thought of descending as Muldoon descended, playing out the rope around his arm. The distance wasn’t fearful—she’d fallen from higher trees as a girl. But in the blackness, with the red wildness of firelight reflected from the front of the house and flame beginning to crawl up the dry wood of the ladder—for a moment she could think nothing but, I’ll be killed. I’ll be killed—

  Her mind flashed, blindingly, to the night a number of years ago, when one of the wild mobs of the North End, stirred up by Sam’s furious pamphlets against the Stamp Act, had mobbed, broken into, and gutted the Governor’s house—the last time Sam had let a mob get away from his control. Governor Hutchinson and his daughter had escaped out a back window, she had heard later, and fled through the winding alleyways of the North End to take refuge with friends. What horror—!

  Trembling, she dropped the musket down out the window, tied the lantern to her waist, the heat of the metal palpable even through several petticoats and a quilted skirt, wrapped the rope around her arm as she’d been shown and hoped fervently she was doing correctly—

  “There they go!” screamed someone, and as Abigail swung herself out the window—and the rope constricted like an agonizing garrote around her arm—two or three men came around the corner of the house. “She’s getting away!”

  Muldoon has time for one shot. The thought passed, very coolly, through Abigail’s mind and, bracing her feet on the house-wall, she began to lower herself as rapidly as she could. Someone fired a shot, then another, followed by a great deal of shouting and cursing and Muldoon’s voice bellowing, very unlike his usual good-natured self, “And the next one goes between the eyes of the first man steps forward!”

  He has John’s pistol.

  Then she was on the ground. She ran to the sergeant’s side, scooped up the musket that he’d dropped to the ground to draw the pistol: “Go!” he said, and she went. The yarn-clue was there, and she fled along it, the musket weighing pounds in her hand, the spreading firelight showing her up. At the thicket she waited, gasping, hearing shots behind her in the dark and seeing the black figures of men and woman silhouetted on the red glare of the fire.

  Men and women both. The words ran in a circle in her head. Men and women both . . .

  The way she herself, and Rebecca—and poor Mrs. Pentyre—had arrayed themselves at the sides of the men, in their fight for the colony’s rights?

  She shoved the thought from her as she’d have struck a mouse away that tried to climb her skirts: We’re following the principles of justice! The rights that Englishmen have fought for—

  But she knew perfectly well that many members of the Sons of Liberty were in the organization simply because they were following Sam Adams.

  It isn’t the same. She knew it in the marrow of her bones.

  His recent outburst against her notwithstanding, would Sam hesitate to order killed a man he saw as a threat to the Sons?

  It isn’t the same.

  But at that moment, kneeling, gasping, in the wet ground by the hazel thicket, it seemed frighteningly close.

  “Mrs. Adams?” “Abigail?”

  Whispered voices, hoarse with exertion and fear. “Here.” She shot the slide back for one instant, then closed it again.

  “Bide,” said Muldoon.

  Rebecca caught at her arm, her shoulder, her weight frighteningly slight. How few days ago had she wakened and been able to eat and drink? At the same moment the pistol was put into her hand, the musket taken, and she heard the oily snick of the lock, the faint noise of a cartridge being ripped. A moment later, the clink of the rod rammed home: once, twice, thrice. Every man in the militia whined like a schoolboy about drill—How many times we got to show them we know how to load our bloody guns?

  It wasn’t until she heard Muldoon loading his rifle in seconds, by touch, in the dark, with the torchlight coming toward them, that she understood why British foot soldiers had to drill for hours. So that you load your rifle—cartridge, ball, powder, patch, ram—with no more hesitation than you bring your spoon to your mouth; the way she, or her mother, could knit in the dark.

  The blockhouse was ablaze. The light covers that had blocked the rifle-slits inside had burned away; flame jetted out like the emanations of demon eyes. A single great column of fire roared from the broken roof. Rebecca’s hand clutched tighter on Abigail’s arm. Deeply as she had been asleep, thought Abigail, she would not have waked until the fire had climbed into the room. Her hand closed hard around her friend’s.

  Across the dark meadow, torches were beginning to spread out.

  Muldoon said, “We ain’t out of the woods yet, ladies.”

  The night was freezing, the darkness absolute. Though she’d put on her gloves, Abigail’s fingers were numb with the cold and it was nearly impossible sometimes to distinguish the branches and saplings Muldoon had cut and bent during the day; she stumbled repeatedly on the uneven ground, the bent roots and old stones of the wood-land edge. Thorns tore and grabbed at her skirt, her hair, her face. Through the thickets to he
r left she glimpsed the fire of the burning blockhouse, and sometimes the moving yellow flare of a torch. But no light penetrated the thin woods through which she and her companions moved. Had Muldoon not spoken softly to her she would have despaired a dozen times: She wanted to cry, Don’t leave me! like a child. But every time she reached the end of one sapling, and couldn’t find the next, she managed to keep her voice adult and level and soft—“Sergeant?” “Here, m’am. This way.” He must think I’m a complete idiot—

  They reached the fences. Knots of torchlight flitted from tree to tree in the blackness, but nothing close. Abigail leaned on the first fence-post, trembling, and very near her, heard that light Irish voice ask, “You still with us, Mrs. M?”

  “I regret—I am,” whispered Rebecca. “Hoped—I was dreaming—all those other dreams. What is this? Who are those people? Orion—Orion killed Perdita—” Her voice cracked a little, and Muldoon said, “Have a bit of this. Mrs. A?”

  “I was rather hoping it was a dream as well.” Abigail dug in her skirt pockets for the remains of the bread and cheese they’d been given by Mrs. Purley. They’d eaten most of it, watching in the woods that afternoon. “I know what Orion did, dearest. We’ve been looking for you for two weeks.” She divided the cheese—pitifully tiny morsels, when pulled into three—and handed the others chunks of the bread. In return she received Muldoon’s canteen, and a smaller flask which proved to be half full of British Army rum. “You’ve been in Gilead—”

  “That horrid place where Orion grew up?” Her voice was weak, but she sounded very much herself. “Then—it wasn’t a dream—”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “The Hand of the Lord. Bargest. He was standing by my bed. Not that I ever saw him in my life, but he looked exactly like”—her voice stuck a little on his name—“as Orion described him to me.”

  “He spoke to you of him, then?”

  “Heavens, yes. I’ve been helping him edit those nasty sermons of his for a year and a half now. Poisonous, dirty-minded, and so vain.” She leaned against the fence-rails: Abigail felt them shift in their sockets, smelled the moldy stink of the blanket she wore. “I asked him, why did he put up with that man’s interference. Constant finicking—nothing ever right. Everything we’d settle on, Orion would ride back there for approval and there was always something wrong. I knew he was getting nothing for it. He said, I owe the Reverend more than I can ever say.”

  “What he owed him,” said Abigail softly, “is that the Reverend knew that Orion had killed a girl here. Two girls.”

  She heard the hiss of Rebecca’s breath, and felt slight movement through the fence-rail. Wondered if her friend had so far forgotten her conversion, as to cross herself.

  Rebecca whispered, “He is mad.”

  “Bargest, or Orion?”

  They moved off again, following the line of fence-rails. “I think—both. Orion—it wasn’t a nightmare, was it?” Rebecca stumbled, and Abigail, immediately behind her, caught her.

  “No. I think Bargest told him that Mrs. Pentyre was one of the Nine Daughters of Eve—”

  “God, not that horrible thing! He polished that sermon like a jewel—Orion said he must have given it once or twice a year, the whole time Orion was growing up here. Simply vile! All Woman’s fault, that Man sinned—” She stumbled again, with a soft sob of pain.

  “Here, m’am, this won’t do.” Muldoon’s voice sounded very close, and by the swish of clothing and the fence-rail brambles, Abigail guessed he’d picked Rebecca up again. “Up you come. You good for another piece, then, Mrs. A?”

  Abigail sighed. “Lead on.”

  It was harder to speak softly enough for safety, and still be heard. She whispered, “Gilead’s about ten miles from Townsend, but we must stick close to the Salem road. John and others will be coming. I know they’ll be coming.”

  “Well, if we start wanderin’ about in the woods we’ve had it for sure,” remarked Muldoon matter-of-factly.

  The fence became a stone wall, and they followed the wall in the blackness. The harsh wind carried the smell of open fields and smoke. Behind them, Gilead was a cluster of coals around the dimming ruby of the blockhouse. The trees on their right muttered like live things disturbed in their sleep. Abigail said, “They can’t let us escape.”

  And Muldoon said, “Aye. That they can’t.”

  “Pentyre owns most of the land under the Gilead fields,” she explained softly, as the young sergeant helped her over the wall. “Bargest was swindled when he bought the place, it sounds like. The case has been in the courts for years—”

  “I know. Half those sermons were about how the Chosen of the Lord is being persecuted for his beliefs—”

  “For his belief that he can do whatever he likes, maybe—including bigamy and fornication, which Pentyre had him up for as well. Perdita was her husband’s heir, of course. The next heir would never come back to this country to straighten things out. Bargest sent Pentyre a letter, threatening him and Perdita with murder by the Sons of Liberty. Signed with one of John’s names, which he must have got off a pamphlet.”

  “Fly old duck,” muttered Muldoon. “You got to admit, ’tis clever.”

  “If he’s so clever,” murmured Rebecca, “will he have his men waiting for us at the road?”

  Abigail felt as if she were eight years old again, and that her brother had struck her in the wind with a chunk of firewood. Sick, and cold, and suddenly too tired to move another foot. “They’ll have found the horses—”

  “That shanty’s a bit off the track,” said the sergeant, as they moved on. “Watch it here, m’am—” A hand groped for her elbow in the dark, supported her where the ground turned to a morass whose surface ice crunched sharply underfoot. “As I said, we can’t leave the road. And if we don’t get ’em, sure they’ll catch us by daylight come mornin’. I been watchin’ for torches coming this way from the village, and seen none, but that doesn’t mean they’re not usin’ a dark-lantern. We’ll just have to take a sharp listen, ’fore we go in for the beasts.”

  They trudged in silence. Though Abigail fought to keep her concentration sharp, cold, hunger, daylong fatigue, and bone-deep exhaustion dragged at her thoughts, which kept returning to a gnawing anxiety about where John and the others might be. She found herself a dozen times obsessively calculating how many hours had passed since she’d sent off her notes—good heavens, did any of those notes actually arrive? Had ill befallen Shim, or Jed Paley, or the others in carrying them? Had Orion accomplished Pentyre’s murder after all? Had John and the others all been arrested?

  For that matter, had their arrest (if it had taken place) triggered rioting? Was there fighting in Boston? Her mind fretted at the memory of cries and gunfire barely a street away in winter twilight, of running to King Street in the icy night four years ago, to see the bodies lying in the churned-up snow, of the stink of gunfire hanging in the raw air.

  Abigail, stop it! she told herself firmly. They’ve just got lost.

  A more prosaic and likely reason, and one which just as surely condemned her and her companions to wandering in darkness until the witch-hunters found them. But at least it didn’t involve British cannon opening fire on Boston.

  “Bide here.” She heard the rustle of Muldoon’s cloak, and the blanket as he lowered Rebecca to the ground. He took the musket from Abigail’s hand. “The beasts should be hereabouts, t’other side of the road. If I call, Mrs. Adams, you cross the road, follow my voice. If I call, Mrs. Malvern, you know they’re there and they’ve got me.”

  “You’re very good at this,” Abigail whispered admiringly.

  “Saints, m’am, I spent the whole of me boyhood poachin’ Lord Semphill’s rabbits. Me an’ the other lads, we had it worked to fare-thee-well, how to keep from gettin’ a thrashin’.” With barely a rustle he moved off through the trees. Rebecca’s hand closed over hers, cold as ice, and Abigail groped around them in the darkness until she found what felt like the remains of a deadfall tree. To t
his she guided her friend, and sat beside her, unbuckling her belt to bring the shuttered lantern between them. She hadn’t dared crack the slide so much as a half inch for light, for most of their flight, but the hot metal was a comfort to fingers nearly frozen.

  Above the wind in the trees it was nearly impossible to distinguish smaller sounds.

  Then a gun fired like the breaking of Doom, and Muldoon yelled, “Mrs. Malvern, run for it!”

  And at half a dozen points around them, dark-lanterns shone out suddenly among the trees.

  Thirty-three

  Knowing exactly how far the light of her own lantern illuminated the darkness around her—which was not at all—Abigail immediately shoved Rebecca backwards off the log where they sat, snapped open the slide of her lantern, and got to her feet, holding the lantern before her to illuminate her own face and plunge everything around her into still blacker night. At the same time she faced into the woods and shouted, “Rebecca, don’t come any closer!” Rather to her astonishment, five of the dozen or so men coming toward them out of the woods immediately whirled and raced off in that direction, lanterns aloft, shouting, “I see her! I see the witch! Hark how her eyes glow!”

  Rebecca, under Muldoon’s dark army cloak, had the good sense to lie perfectly still as Abigail strode away from her to intercept her captors.

  “I suppose the Chosen of the Lord is waiting courageously back in the safety of the village?” Abigail demanded briskly. “While you blunder about in the woods to face an armed man? Get your hand off me, sir,” she added, as one of the men moved to seize her arm. “Now that my friend has fled to safety I have no reason to flee from you. You can’t murder every outsider who passes through your village, you know.”

  “ ’Tis no crime, to exterminate a witch.” The very tall, very young farmer who faced her seemed to be the leader of this portion of the mob. He had narrow-set eyes, thin mousy hair, and a mouth like an ill-natured dog’s.