The Ninth Daughter by Barbara Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

would take the news. “There was a murder done last night, at the house where Mrs. Malvern is now living—”
    He turned back, eyes flaring, as Scipio’s had, and she saw in them for one second not just surprise, but apprehension and even fear. She went on swiftly, “A woman: We don’t know who.”
    “Not Mrs. Malvern?” That first instant’s horror—like the echo of her own cry, Not Rebecca! —disappeared and was replaced by suspicion: the wary anger of a man who has been cheated by a mountebank, and looks out lest he be cheated again.
    “No. But Mrs. Malvern has disappeared—”
    “Has she?” He settled back in his chair, and his voice was dry again. “I daresay she’s run to that heretic printer my daughter tells me she’s dallying with.”
    “If it is Mr. Hazlitt you mean,” said Abigail, feeling the blood rising in her cheeks, “I have come from there just now.” Heretic , in Charles Malvern’s mental lexicon, meant, Abigail knew, anyone of less than stringently double predestinarian Calvinist belief. Even a convert, like Orion Hazlitt, from a less doctrinaire sect was forever suspect, much less a former Catholic like Rebecca. “Inasmuch as she has assisted him with the text of the sermons he is printing—”
    “Sermons forsooth!” He almost spit the words at her. “By whom? One of those lying unbelievers at the New Brick Meeting-House? What woman was killed? How did she come into the house, if not for ill purposes? And at night, you say? Was she another like my wife, who’d go about the town alone—?”
    “We don’t know,” repeated Abigail, seeing the seamed little face opposite her darkening a dangerous crimson with rage. “She was found in Rebecca’s”—she bit back the word kitchen , remembering that she was only supposed to have this from hearsay, and finished—“house this morning, slashed to death, and used most horribly.”
    “Then she had her deserving.” Malvern almost shouted the words at her. “If she was one of Sam Adams’s gang of traitors. A trollop, as they’d have Rebecca be, for their dirty sakes. Belike it was one of them that did the murder—”
    “I don’t think so.” Abigail fought to keep her own temper under control. “I’m trying to find who she was—”
    “Why ask me, then? That lying Papist turned her back on any decent females she knew when she left this house, and the truly decent ones turned their backs on her. Surely you would know, her dear good friend, her almost-sister , her only true friend in the world . . .”
    He is jealous of you , Rebecca had said, on another of those occasions when she had sneaked from her husband’s house, to take refuge in Abigail’s kitchen. Of my father, of the secrets I tell my maid. Even of little Nathan. He wants me to be his completely . . .
    “But, I do not,” said Abigail, keeping her voice level with an effort. “And I doubt you would say this woman had her deserving, if you—” She bit off her words once more. You weren’t there . . .
    “If I what?” shouted Malvern. “If I were willing to wink at treason, at sedition, at the creatures your husband and his cousin play upon to get their way? Don’t tell me she wasn’t hand in glove with these Sons of Liberty—Sons of Belial, more like! You ask your husband, if you want to know who this bitch was that was murdered, or where my wife might have run off to. And so I’ll tell the Watch, when they come—if they come, and this isn’t all another of Sam Adams’s lies. And as for you, Mrs. Adams, shame on you, a mother of children, and shame on your husband for permitting you to walk about the town like the harlot of the Scripture: Now is she without, and now in the streets . . . her feet go down to hell . To Hell is where you have led my wife, Mrs. Adams, in dragging her into the affairs of your so-called friends. And for that I will never forgive you, or them. Now get out of my house.”
     
     
     
     
    S cipio whispered, “What