“Someone had to look after the girl,” protested Tillet. “My wife was unsatisfied with the woman then helping her with sewing for the shop—”
Like the crippled boy turning the spinning wheel at Moore’s Farm out in Essex County, reflected Abigail sadly. Handed off, to provide labor to whoever would support him. At least Kemiah Moore and his wife appeared to be willing to feed that boy the same rations they gave their own family, and let him sit among the kitchen’s distractions. But maybe, her darker soul whispered, that was only because he was incapable of wandering away.
“An unfortunate story,” said Coldstone, as they walked back along Fish Street in the gathering dusk. “But not a new one.”
“A letter to Medford will yield more information on the subject,” said Abigail. Her head ached—she prayed Pattie had made some kind of dinner for John and the children, and had thought to save some for her—and she felt infinitely tired. Though she knew Mrs. Tillet’s spew of invective had been simply that—the vomiting forth of a poisoned mind—she felt as if she were physically smeared with filth every time the young Lieutenant turned his eyes upon her. “I do beg your pardon, Lieutenant.”
“For using the King’s authority as it should be used?” he asked. “As a tool to protect those incapable of protecting themselves?” He glanced back at Gomer, walking between Sergeant Muldoon and Trooper Yarrow, seemingly oblivious that her ankles were exposed by the hem of Queenie’s borrowed dress. “What will you do with her? She’s obviously incapable of looking after herself.”
“I’ll write to my father,” said Abigail. “He’s the pastor at Weymouth, across the bay to the south. He’ll know a good family who can take her in and will treat her decently. She seems willing enough to work.”
“Oh, I’ll work, m’am,” provided Gomer, hurrying her steps to close the distance between them. “Just please don’t lock me up with the rats. I got so hungry up there in the attic, and cold. I’ll even sew for you, but I’m no good at it.”
Abigail thought about the single slice of thinly buttered bread, the jug of water. Even the harsh laws of Leviticus enjoined the Hebrews to look after their beasts, and to treat the lowest of their households with common humanity. Which obviously—since the frugal Tillets had smuggled her into their attic while the rest of the household was in turmoil on the day of the murder—they had had no intention of doing, even from the first. Free labor, and the cheapest possible food . . .
At least the slave Philomela, thought Abigail, was worth four hundred dollars to somebody.
She stopped, and laid a hand on Lieutenant Coldstone’s arm. “Lieutenant,” she said, “might I impose upon you for one more favor? And this one,” she added, “
will
advance us on our way, to finding the murderer of Mrs. Pentyre.”
S
he had the notes from both Philomela and Lucy Fluckner still in her pocket, but the Fluckner butler Mr. Barnaby barely glanced at them. “A shocking thing it was, m’am,” he said. “Well, there’s always young men who’ll try to get up an
affaire
with a maidservant, especially one as beautiful as Miss Philomela, and some of them do send poems. Terrible lot of tosh, most of them.” He glanced back at Coldstone, who followed them up the stair—a broad and handsome flight, open in the fashion of wealthy English houses where presumably there was more money to be spent on heating. “But this, sir—m’am—there was something about these, after the first two or three, that made my blood run cold. I didn’t know Miss Philomela had kept that last one. Terrible frightened she was over it—and no wonder! The first few weeks after she got it, I thought she was like to faint, going outside the house.”
He opened the door to the maid’s room, which was a narrow chamber on the main bedroom floor, between the overdecorated demipalaces allotted to Mrs. Fluckner and her daughter. Philomela’s room was very like the girl herself, Abigail thought. No frills, no fuss, though she probably could have gleaned any number of gaudy castoffs from either of her mistresses. On a little table beside the bed lay a book of Sir Philip Sidney’s poems.
The more sinister poem in question was, as Philomela had said, under the loose floorboard beside the head of the bed.
Abigail saw immediately that it was written on the same expensive English paper as had been the note that summoned Perdita Pentyre to her death. Her heart beating hard, she unfolded it, carried it to the window where the last of the daylight still lingered over Boston’s peaked roofs. She remembered what the girls had said of its contents, and braced herself for horrors.
But the words of those first lines were blanked from her mind by the handwriting itself.
No. Oh, no.
She felt sick, almost dizzy with the rush of surmise and horror, pieces of some monstrous mosaic falling into place . . .
And worse than that, the vertiginous shock of how close she’d stood to the man.
Dear God in Heaven—!
“Mrs. Adams?” Coldstone was watching her face narrowly. Quickly she turned to the second page, aware that her fingers were shaking. “Do you know the hand?”
“No. It’s—” She shook her head, stammered—groped for some other reason to account for her distress. “It’s just that it’s a little like my father’s, at first glance—that rounding of the letters . . . It shocked me for an instant, that’s all.”
Had I babbled, ‘Good Heavens, it looks exactly like the Emperor of China’s,’ it would not be so obvious a lie . . .
“Mrs. Adams.” The officer took the sheets from her hand, and his dark eyes traveled swiftly over the lines. Then he returned his gaze to her, and she looked aside, fighting to keep her thoughts from her face and aware she must be white-lipped and distracted as one who has seen a ghost.
“What is it?”
“Naught.” She could barely get the word out.
“Naught,” he repeated, and it was the first time she saw emotion—rage—blaze in his eyes, cold as the northern lights. “Even with what you know.
Naught
.”
Abigail looked away. “My secrets are not mine to tell.”
“Nor are mine,” said Coldstone quietly. “Yet I have spoken with those who have been magistrates in London for many years, and on one fact they all agree: that these men do not stop their crimes. How many more women are you willing to have die, Mrs. Adams, before you conclude that protection of the innocent is more important to you than shielding politically suspect friends? May I take these?”
“Let me keep two pages.” Her voice sounded stifled in her own ears. “In case one of my politically suspect friends recognizes it.”
Without a word he pocketed the other three sheets, and preceded her down the handsome stairs. Mr. Barnaby glanced at them inquiringly, but neither spoke. At the outer door Coldstone looked up and down the darkening length of Milk Street. At least two dozen of Revere’s North End boys loitered still, hands in pockets, studiously paying not the slightest attention to the two soldiers stationed beside the Fluckner door. “Go on to the wharf,” said Abigail. “You won’t be molested, and there’s enough light left, for you to return to Castle Island. I will circulate these”—she touched her pocket—“and see if the hand is familiar—”
“And if it belongs to one of the Sons of Liberty, will that be the last I hear of it?”
He was so angry she could almost see it, coming off him like frozen smoke. In a voice held steady with an effort, Abigail said, “We aren’t savages, Lieutenant. Even as we are not traitors.”
He faced her in the thin twilight. “
You
are not a savage, Mrs. Adams,” he replied. “Yet you are devoted to a cause—which you feel to be right—which is being led by men who feel themselves justified in breaking the King’s law. Whether that law is just or unjust is immaterial in the face of the fact that you—and they—believe your cause to be above law. Even as those killers of witches in Salem a generation ago believed theirs to be. Such an attitude, m’am, makes you as dangerous as they.”
He bowed, and left her on the steps. The circle of patriots followed him and his men, like sharks around a ship’s boat, out of sight in the gloom. When they had gone, young Dr. Warren emerged from the shadows of a nearby alley, raffish-looking in a mechanic’s corduroy jacket and rough boots. “May I escort you home, Mrs. Adams?”
Later, Abigail recalled that she’d talked with him of something, but didn’t know what, and she was hard-put not to simply answer his remarks at random. Her mind seemed to return, again and again, to two things:
These men do not stop their crimes.
And the poem about the slaughter of a red-haired whore, written in Orion Hazlitt’s hand.
“
W
ill you come with me to Sam’s?” John picked up his boots, which he’d already pulled off by the fire by the time Abigail handed him the two sheets of fe vered verse. “It’s gone beyond choice, now. You didn’t do anything foolish like try to see Hazlitt, did you?”
“I walked down Hanover Street.” Abigail took off her apron, closed the sewing box that she’d been working on when John had returned home. Upstairs, the children and Pattie slumbered in their beds. “The shop was shuttered, and there was no light in the upstairs windows. I had not the courage to do more.”
“You had more sense, you mean.” John fetched their coats and cloaks from the pegs beside the door—his own still cold to the touch—while Abigail climbed to the little room Pattie shared with the younger boys and now with Gomer Faulk. She gently woke Pattie, and bid her watch until they returned. Only then, wreathed in scarves and cloaks and hoods and hats, with a lantern bobbing ineffectually from John’s hand, did they step out into the windy night.
“Is Coldstone right?” asked Abigail softly after a time. “Have we become like the hanging judges years ago? Like medieval Inquisitors, who would kill a man to save his soul? Abrogating to ourselves the right to do so, because we
felt
it was right?”
“The only ones who do that,” replied John after thought, “are those who see the world as they did, with only a single answer, not only to
that
problem, but to
all
problems. And the single-minded certainly do not number Sam among their ranks, you know. Nor will he condone murder, just because a man has served the liberties of his country.”
“No,” said Abigail. “No, I know that. Orion—no wonder he didn’t harm Rebecca! And no wonder she went into hiding—”
“
If
it was Hazlitt who killed Mrs. Pentyre.” John held aloft the lantern as they entered the square before the State House and the Customs house, where the Massacre had taken place. Every shutter in town was barred, and at this hour, most of the windows behind them were dark. The night watchman’s cries drifted to them from another street, barely to be heard beneath the steady tolling of the bells. The wind made the feeble light sway even in John’s hand, and the waning moon, breaking through the clouds, showed Abigail movement stirring in the alleyways. A chip of light flared, where someone closed a slide over a lantern. “ ’Tis all right,” he said softly, when she caught at his sleeve. “Sam’s boys, most like.”
“And was it Sam’s
boys
,” she asked, vexed, “who’ve followed
me
, when I’ve been abroad at night?”
“Damn his impertinence,” growled John. “But likely, yes. I’ll have a word to say to him.” They walked on in silence.
“When you say,” said Abigail after a moment, “
if
it was Orion who killed Perdita Pentyre—You still think there were two criminals, and two crimes?”
“I don’t doubt he committed the others, and that it’s he who has been following that poor slave-girl and sending her poems. But killing Mrs. Pentyre—” He shook his head. “To say nothing of throwing the blame off onto me. There are men whose loyalty I’ve doubted, Abigail, men I think Sam needs to be more careful in his dealings with . . . but not Hazlitt. For God’s sake, why commit the crime in the house of the woman he loves? And why steal her list of contacts?”
“What else would he have done with it?” countered Abigail. “Left it for the Watch? Handed it back to Sam?”
“But in Rebecca’s house—”
“Where else,” asked Abigail softly, “could he be sure of getting Mrs. Pentyre alone? These other women whom he—he fixed upon, to whom he was drawn in some unholy fashion—these women he convinced himself were the Daughters of Eve. They were, as Lieutenant Coldstone said,
common women
. Women whom any man could come to and find unprotected . . . or in poor Philomela’s case, a woman whose access he could purchase, though thankfully it was beyond his price. Perdita Pentyre wasn’t. Yet to him she was Jezebel the Queen.”
“Jezebel—?”
“Remember Bargest’s sermons that I told you of? About the Nine Daughters of Eve, that lie in wait to destroy a man’s soul?
The serpent, the witch
—we know Mrs. Fishwire had any number of serpents in her shop, besides her poor cats—
the harlot
.
The succubus
—the demon female who torments a righteous man’s dreams. Or would he consider Philomela a nightmare? Poor Mrs. Pentyre, riding at the Colonel’s side to review the troops, with her face painted and her head tir’d like Jezebel—”
They walked on, Abigail’s pattens clinking on the cobbles of Kilby Street and her heavy skirts flapping against her legs. Fort Hill loomed before them, pricked with spots of yellow where the few soldiers left on the mainland manned the guns. At the wharves below, ships stirred and creaked, restless wooden animals in the dark.
“Saying it is Orion,” said John quietly. “And saying that he wouldn’t have killed Rebecca . . . How can you be sure that she’s in hiding?”
“I looked in his attic.”
The lantern-light flashed as John turned his head. “You thought then—?”
“No. It was nowhere in my mind. But I’d just realized she might be being held prisoner
somewhere
, when I went into his house and he sent me upstairs for laudanum for his mother. I had to look up into the nearest attic, to see how possible it would be. I think at that moment I would have run down the street looking into the attics of every house in turn. It’s only a tiny space up there, you know. One can’t stand up in it, even right under the ridgepole, and there’s no other space in the house, where a woman could be kept.”