The Ninth Daughter (44 page)

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.”

 

 

 

 

T
he 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 her 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 this 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.

“Not according to the Book of Leviticus,” agreed Abigail. “How awkward that the Bible doesn’t give similar instructions for identifying them.”

“By their deeds shall ye know them,” replied Dog-Mouth darkly. “All these days, that the hag’s been lyin’ in the Devil’s sleep,
we’ve
known. We seen our Reverend growin’ sicker an’ sicker; seen the fires that have broke out, here and there about the town in dead of night; and the very beasts in their stalls struck by plague, since she’s been here.”

Abigail wondered whether the Hand of the Lord had used an accomplice to set the fires and mix nightshade with the fodder, but knew better than to do so aloud.

“Reverend, he wouldn’t hear word against the witch,” said another man, as they ringed Abigail and made their way toward the broken-down shanty. “Not at first, so great is his heart with love.” Torchlight flared in the cracks of the walls, the broken-out holes of what had been windows. “Yet those vexations began, the first night of her bein’ in the blockhouse, and him cryin’ out in his sleep for terror.
We
knew. All the village could see him weakenin’ day by day—when he’d writhe in pain, or clutch at his heart when he stood up before the Congregation at evenin’ services. When he’d cry out at the shape of the devil, flyin’ like a glowing bird, he said, about his head.
We
knew who that glowin’ bird was!”

Abigail raised her eyebrows. The Hand of the Lord was a more astute mountebank than she’d thought. “And is this the first time your Reverend has been set upon by demons?” she inquired. “Or have others he’s disagreed with all turned out to be witches, too?”