“How horrible for you,” sympathized Abigail warmly, “after the shocking day you had Thursday! I had meant to come yesterday, to see how you did—and I confess I’m astonished you were not felled by it all!—but that vain,
arrogant
officer dared to come and order
John
to go out to the camp, only because he was Mrs. Malvern’s lawyer—”
“Oh, my dear, you don’t know,” gasped Queenie. “You
can’t
know how things have been since then! That horrible Lieutenant Coldstone, and those dreadful soldiers, asking me if I’d heard anything in the middle of the night—What would I have heard, sleeping as I do in the west attic and the whole house locked up, and at midnight, too?—and Mrs. Tillet coming home in the midst of it all, and such a row there was, with all the luggage brought in, I swear my head was pounding fit to split! You know the headaches I get—”
“Oh,
dear
, yes!” agreed Abigail, having been treated to minute descriptions of every single headache whenever she came to call on Rebecca over the course of the past year. If Nehemiah Tillet had a habit of dropping in on his tenant to advise her on how best to arrange the wood in her fireplace, and Mrs. Tillet was constantly in and out of Rebecca’s little house to bring shirts for Rebecca to sew and errands for her husband that could not be put off, Queenie was just as intrusive, crossing the yard a dozen times in the course of preparing dinner, with items of gossip, complaints about her health and the ill treatment she was obliged to endure, or simply queries:
Who was that who was just here? Is he a gentleman friend of yours? Don’t think I didn’t see Mrs. Wallace coming to call on you—is it true she’s a spendthrift who has nearly bankrupted her husband . . . ?
But when Abigail interrupted the catalog of further symptoms to ask, was there anyone Rebecca had spoken of, to whom she might have fled, the cook only bristled, and snapped, “Belike she’s run off with her man—after all her talk of how she’s pure as driven snow—”
“Her man?” asked Abigail, startled. “Not Mr. Hazlitt—”
“As if her sort stops at one.” Queenie sniffed. “The one she let in through her parlor window from the alley.”
“Did you see him? Was this at midnight? It could have been—”
The protuberant brown eyes shifted suddenly, and Queenie said, “No, of course not! That is, it wasn’t at midnight—What would I have been doing in the alley at midnight? It wasn’t Wednesday night at all. I mean to say, I’ve seen her do so at other times, many other times, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it, too!” she added defensively. “What I mean to say is, this Mrs. Pentyre, if
she
was carrying on with the Colonel of the British Regiment, and had someone else she wanted to meet, a woman like the Malvern is just the one who’d have let her use her house. And I’m sorry to say it,” she went on doggedly, as Abigail opened her mouth to protest, “being as I know you were taken in by her cozening ways, but taken in you were, Mrs. Adams.”
“No!” Abigail stopped still in the midst of the market crowd. “How dare—That is,” she collected herself, seeing Queenie’s face redden dangerously, “how could I have been so deceived? Are you sure of this man you saw?”
“Other nights,” said the cook. “Dozens of other—”
“Mrs. Queensboro!”
So engrossed had Abigail been in Queenie’s rather confused tale, that she had completely neglected to keep an eye out for Hester Tillet. The draper’s wife swept up to them now like a Navy Man of War in her dark gown and tall, starched cap, her voice like a bucket of coals falling down a flight of stairs. “I don’t come to market to have you stand prattling of our affairs to all the world—your servant, Mrs. Adams.” She accompanied her bobbed curtsey with a poisonous glare.
“M’am, I would never—”
“Don’t you tell me what you would do and what you wouldn’t,” snapped Mrs. Tillet. “I won’t have it. Come away at once.”
Though Queenie was a good decade older than her employer she bowed her head at once and retreated.
“ ’Twas my fault, m’am,” said Abigail quickly, hoping to win herself enough of Queenie’s goodwill to elicit further confidences later. “I but asked after Mrs. Malvern—”
“Then shame on you for gossiping with servants,” retorted Mrs. Tillet. “The lazy trollop has come to her just and fitting end, and I make no doubt they will find her body, too, in time, at the bottom of the harbor, with her throat cut like her friend’s.” She closed her hand around Queenie’s arm—a mighty handful of flesh, but the linendraper’s wife had a grip to accommodate nearly anything—and thrust her away ahead of her into the crowd toward the oyster seller’s stall.
Though her own market basket was still nearly empty, thanks to her companion’s determination not to let her purchase from any farmer to whom she herself had taken a personal dislike, Abigail—with a backwards glance to make sure the towering Tillet bonnet was still moving among the stalls—hastened her steps around the corner of the market hall and out of sight. A small bridge crossed the opening of the town dock, leading to the tangle of lanes that eventually gave onto Ann Street, then Fish Street, along the brisk and crowded waterfront of the North End. It was a walk of only minutes to the alley that led to Tillet’s Yard, shadowed still with the wet light of the chilly morning.
The gate was still closed—and still barred, though Tillet and the younger of his two prentice-boys were obliged to help a carter unload several quires of paper, a roll of buckram, and a box of what appeared to be shoes in the street beside the shop’s front door, to the great inconvenience of traffic. But Abigail didn’t need to enter the yard to refresh her memory. Rebecca’s parlor window—shuttered again now—looked out onto the alley, and there was no way that it could be seen from either the main Tillet house, or from the yard.
Had
Queenie seen a man entering Rebecca’s window, either Wednesday night or on some other occasion? Despite the vindictiveness in her voice, the cook’s words had had a ring of truth, before she’d begun to go back on her story and obfuscate . . . What, indeed,
would
she have been doing in the alley, on a night of threatening rain? On a night, moreover, when her master and mistress were away? Selling a pound or two of the Tillet cornmeal, or a loaf of sugar, to put the money in her own pocket?
Abigail couldn’t imagine the self-pitying little woman possessed a clandestine lover of her own. Either way, reason enough to come up with any kind of slander to undermine Rebecca’s credibility, had Rebecca, for instance, seen her from that parlor window when she opened it to pull the shutters to. Still—
The only window of the L-shaped Tillet house that overlooked the alley was the small gable window of the south attic, a room which Abigail knew had for years been given over to storage, after the overhasty marriage (in her opinion) of the youngest daughter of the house. According to Rebecca, the cramped and stuffy little chamber had been shuttered and out of use for years.
But as she looked up now, she saw—a little to her surprise—that the window’s shutters stood open. And just for a moment—though admittedly the angle of her vision was a narrow one, looking up from the straitened confine of the alley—Abigail thought she saw pale movement behind the dingy glass.
Mrs. Tillet’s unmistakable voice boomed from the street, shouting to her husband. Abigail moved off further up the alley, to cut through a neighbor’s drying yard and garden, and so out onto Cross Street unobserved.
There was no message from anyone, by the time she came belatedly home.
A
s she swept and cleaned the upstairs rooms, scoured lamps, listened to Nabby and Johnny’s lessons, mixed a batch of bread and prepared dinner—with extra provision for tomorrow’s cold Sabbath meals—Abigail’s mind chased memories.
Rebecca Malvern at eighteen, coming for the first time into the Brattle Street Meeting-House as a bride. She recalled how the dark, self-consciously sober fabric of her dress had been cut and trimmed with a stylish flare that no Boston woman would ever display. In her own family pew, Abigail had overheard the whispers from the pews on all sides:
Maryland . . . dowry . . . Papist . . . Poor little Tamar Malvern told me only yesterday she said, “I’ll teach you to pray to the Virgin and the Pope.”
Tamar, mincing with downcast eyes behind her new stepmother, had looked smug; Malvern icy; Rebecca wretched, but head still high.
October of 1768. Abigail herself, she recalled, had been great with the child who had become Susanna—her precious, fragile girl. That was the week the redcoat troops had first come ashore in Boston, setting up their tents on the Commons, and jostling everywhere in the streets. A group of them had passed the meetinghouse after the service, and while Malvern had paused to ask John some question about the vestry—on which they were both serving that year—Rebecca had commented to Abigail,
Are we expecting French invasion, or does the King just think that eight hundred of his armed servants in the town will cause us to sleep better of nights?
Some in the congregation didn’t hesitate to ascribe her objection to the King’s troops to a secret Papist’s natural sympathy for the Irish, or perhaps the French. But despite the difference in their ages, in Rebecca, Abigail had found a kindred soul. Before long she was inviting the girl to take potluck tea in the kitchen while she herself did the household mending, rather than sit formally in the parlor, and Rebecca had watched in wide-eyed consternation as Abigail performed whatever household tasks needed doing: churning butter or scraping out candlesticks or kneading bread, things that had been done by slaves in the home of Rebecca’s father. Later, when Rebecca was living with them—sharing the bed with Nabby and Johnny in the other small upstairs chamber—they’d laughed together about her dismay. “I wish I’d paid closer attention!” Rebecca had moaned during her first lesson with the butter churn. Abigail had replied in her primmest schoolmistress voice: “At least you’ve seen one before and aren’t frightened.” Rebecca had flicked droplets of the skimmed milk at her from her fingertips, like a schoolgirl, and they’d both laughed.
How good it had felt to laugh, Abigail remembered, after all those weeks of grieving Susanna’s death.
J
ohn had promised to return from consulting a client in good time to walk Abigail to the Malvern house, a distance of barely a quarter mile. With the Sabbath on the morrow, and John confined by his bond to the town limits of Boston, Abigail didn’t really expect him to conclude his business that quickly, and when the dinner dishes were washed and the pots scoured, the kitchen swept and all the lamps filled and set out ready, she’d gone two doors down Queen Street and made arrangements with young Shim Walton the cooper’s apprentice. “I wouldn’t
dream
of trespassing on your master’s beliefs, Shim, by asking you to do paid work once the Sabbath Eve has begun! But I’ve had a premonition that I may accidentally drop a halfpenny in the street first thing Monday morning as I go past your master’s shop . . .”
A carriage was drawn up before Malvern’s front door, as it had been on Thursday afternoon. From across the street, Abigail watched the merchant climb inside, stiff and self-conscious-looking in a satin coat and hair powder. Cloaked shapes that had to be his two surviving children followed him, tall Jeffrey and slender Tamar, trailed by the more robust shape of the giggling maid. Scipio, in his evening livery, bowed them away from the house’s single, shallow step, then turned back inside. As he did so, another servant on the ground floor leaned from a window, and closed the shutters against the night.
“I’ll be all right now, Shim,” said Abigail softly, but the boy insisted on escorting her across the street and down the carriageway to the yard. Scipio must have come straight from the front step to the kitchen’s door to meet her, his candle glinting on the brass of his livery buttons.
The fire had already been banked in the kitchen, but the room still pulsed with warmth, exquisite after the night’s brutal cold. The glow of the oil-lamp on its chain dimly outlined cauldrons and skimmers, trammels and oil-jars in the shadows, and the brick floor still smelt of the after-dinner wash up. The butler had kept coffee from dinner for her in the pot on the hob, and served her in one of the family cups: blue English porcelain rather than servants’ pottery.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t come up with the direction of Miss Catherine’s brother any sooner than this, m’am,” Scipio explained, when Abigail had gestured him to sit. Since it was the house he lived in, she felt strange and awkward inviting him to do so, slave or not, even as she stopped herself from inviting him to share with her the coffee he’d made.
What is the proper behavior between slave and free in this situation?
she asked herself irritably, and concluded that there wasn’t any. A truly proper servant wouldn’t have admitted a stranger to his master’s house in the first place, nor discussed the family’s affairs with an outsider. “She wrote to me, and to Ulee in the stables, once or twice over the last year. But we had to look through the letters to find mention of the nearest town to her brother’s farm. It’s Townsend, but where that might be I don’t know. Wenham is another place she speaks of, but she writes as if it’s some ways off from her, it sounds like.”
“Wenham is some ways off from any spot on the civilized earth,” muttered Abigail. “Always supposing Mrs. Malvern could get across the river or through the town gate.”
“I understand—” Scipio cleared his throat delicately. “I understand that Miss Rebecca had friends who might have skiffs or whaleboats that could get her across the harbor, even on a falling tide and a rainy night—”
“If she had such,” replied Abigail, with equal tact—since no one in Boston, not even the slaves, admitted to knowing anyone either engaged in smuggling or involved with the Sons of Liberty, “and of course I don’t for a moment imagine she would know such people—I think they would undertake inquiries amongst themselves, and quickly learn if that had in fact been the case. It does not seem to have been.”