“Mrs. Adams?” Scipio reappeared in the doorway, to usher her across the hall.
“Good day to you, m’am.” Charles Malvern rose from his desk when the butler admitted her, came around himself to bring up a chair. His wide-skirted dark coat and plain Ramilles wig were not one shilling more costly than they had to be, to let others know of his consequence in the world of trade and business. Their former encounter and her championship of his estranged wife flickered like malign fire in his eyes, but he asked politely, “Will you take tea? ’Tis a raw morning.”
“Thank you, no.” Any number of Abigail’s friends observed the boycott but made it a point to call on their less political friends for a cup of Hyson or Bohea in the course of a cold afternoon. That, in Abigail’s opinion, was cheating.
He didn’t offer the acceptable Whig alternative of coffee, but signed Scipio from the room. “To what do I owe this honor, m’am?”
“A shocking thing has happened.” He was walking back around his desk as she spoke, and Abigail couldn’t keep herself from waiting until she had a good view of his face, to see how he 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.”
Scipio whispered, “What happened?” as he emerged from the book-room, to escort her to the door.
In the study, Malvern’s voice bellowed, “Scipio!” and the butler flinched.
“Mrs. Malvern has disappeared,” replied Abigail swiftly, softly—knowing the master’s wrath would descend on the slave’s head if Scipio were one moment late in answering, or if the merchant so much as suspected the butler had spoken with his dishonored guest. “Where would she go, if she sought refuge? To her maidservant? She left Boston, didn’t she? Catherine, I mean—”
“She did—”
“Scipio, get in here, damn you!”
“She might. It’s a long way, I don’t know the name of the place but I’ll—”
The study door slammed open. Impassive, Scipio opened the outer door for Abigail, held himself straight and correct as she passed through. Only when Abigail glanced back over her shoulder as the door was closing, did she see Charles Malvern seize his slave by the shoulder of his coat and thrust him back against the wall, and strike him with the back of his hand across the face.
Six
In wardly shaking from her interview with Malvern—and possessed by what she knew was a fantasy that she would reach home to find a dripping-wet Rebecca huddled beside her kitchen fire—Abigail forced herself to stop in the market on her way back to Queen Street. As surely as she knew her own name, she knew that once she reached her own house, no marketing would get done. John (surely John was home by this time—it was nearly noon by the clock on Faneuil Hall) would demand a minute account of what she had seen in Rebecca’s kitchen, and would also demand to know why she hadn’t stopped Sam, as if anything less than a nine-pound gun could stop Sam once he got going. Poor Pattie would be struggling to finish her own chores and Abigail’s neglected ones, and both Johnny and Nabby—usually at Rebecca’s dame school at this time of the morning—would be underfoot, not to mention the two little ones . . .
Life on Queen Street was one continuous domestic crisis, with brief breaks for meals and church on Sunday.
So while her mind tugged and tested at where Rebecca could have taken refuge, at who the dead woman was and how the killer could have gotten into the house, she borrowed a basket from one of the farmwives she knew at the market—her own having been set down at some point in the morning she could no longer recall—and filled it with squash and corn and beans, pears and the best of the available remaining pumpkins, two chickens, and a lobster. She also paid a farthing for molasses candy, for the children and as an offering to Pattie for running off and leaving the poor girl with the whole house to clean and the ironing.