Read Online The Ninth Daughter by Barbara Hamilton - Free Book Online

Coldstone as if she expected him to arrest her as well, and ducked from the room.
    Coldstone ignored the cider. “Did Mrs. Malvern ever speak of Mrs. Pentyre? To your knowledge, were they acquainted?”
    “They may have known one another by sight,” responded Abigail, still trying to take it in, that the young and lovely wife of one of the richest merchants in Boston had known Rebecca well enough to have her throat cut in her kitchen. She stammered a little: “Mrs. Malvern had left her husband by the time Mrs. Pentyre—Miss Parke, as she was then—married Richard Pentyre. Coming as she did from Baltimore, and Mrs. Pentyre from New York, I doubt Mrs. Malvern would have known Mrs. Pentyre as a girl.”
    Perdita Pentyre!
    The silk dress. The diamond earrings. It made sense. Richard Pentyre, every inch the picture of an English gentleman, was bosom-crony to Governor Hutchinson and recipient of every favor and perquisite available to a loyal friend of the King.
    And why not? His young and lovely wife was mistress to Colonel Leslie, commander of the garrison on Castle Island.
    Her hand did not move, but she could almost feel through the fabric of her pocket and petticoats the note she had taken from the woman’s dishonored body. The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia.
    One of ours , Dr. Warren had said.
    Perdita Pentyre, an agent of the Sons of Liberty.
    Who would have thought it?
    “I beg your pardon.” She was aware that Lieutenant Coldstone had said, Mrs. Adams? with a note of interrogation in his voice. “My mind was otherwhere. Mrs. Malvern is, as I said, a close friend to our family. She lived with us, when first she was obliged to leave her husband’s house—”
    “So she is close to both your husband and yourself.”
    His eyes were on John as he spoke, and Abigail, with a warning ringing oddly in her mind, like the smell of smoke in the night, glanced swiftly at John’s face. He wore an expression of wariness, such as she’d seen on him when he played chess with an unfamiliar opponent. Only grimmer.
    She answered, “Yes.”
    John added, quietly, “As I’ve told you.”
    “And she is not an intimate friend to Mrs. Pentyre, so far as you know?”
    “Not so far as I know.”
    “Does she share your husband’s political opinions?”
    Abigail’s glance went to John again, and this time the tension in him was unmistakable. Not a chess game. A fencing-match , she thought, like the one in Hamlet : the rapiers unbuttoned, and one blade poisoned . “We met at church,” she said. “Like both of us, and many others, Mrs. Malvern believes that the colonies have the right to a voice in their own government, though what that has to do with such a crime being committed beneath her roof I am at a loss to imagine.”
    “Are you, m’am? At what time did your husband come in last night?”
    “He did not,” replied Abigail. “He has been pleading a case in Essex County since Monday. He was to have returned last night, but I presume was delayed until after the time that the gates are shut and the ferry closed down for the night. When I left for the market this morning he had not yet come in.”
    “As I told you also,” added John, whose cheeks had developed red blotches of anger. “I expect my children will say the same, if you care to interrogate them.”
    “John,” said Abigail sharply, “what does—?”
    Coldstone held up a staying hand. “What time was that?”
    Queenie saw me outside Rebecca’s door. “Nearly half past seven. Daylight.”
    “And you have only just returned from your marketing?”
    “I went first to Mrs. Malvern’s house to see if there was anything I might get for her, and found a slate by her door, saying, No School. I thought she might have been ill, and walked on to return a book I had borrowed from a friend in the North End; I returned by way of Fish Street again, to see if she was awake and in need of anything. ’Twas then I heard that a woman had been found in her house, dead,