“As if her sort stops at one.” Queenie sniffed. “The one she let in through her parlor window from the alley.”
“Did you see him? Was this at midnight? It could have been—”
The protuberant brown eyes shifted suddenly, and Queenie said, “No, of course not! That is, it wasn’t at midnight—What would I have been doing in the alley at midnight? It wasn’t Wednesday night at all. I mean to say, I’ve seen her do so at other times, many other times, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it, too!” she added defensively. “What I mean to say is, this Mrs. Pentyre, if she was carrying on with the Colonel of the British Regiment, and had someone else she wanted to meet, a woman like the Malvern is just the one who’d have let her use her house. And I’m sorry to say it,” she went on doggedly, as Abigail opened her mouth to protest, “being as I know you were taken in by her cozening ways, but taken in you were, Mrs. Adams.”
“No!” Abigail stopped still in the midst of the market crowd. “How dare—That is,” she collected herself, seeing Queenie’s face redden dangerously, “how could I have been so deceived? Are you sure of this man you saw?”
“Other nights,” said the cook. “Dozens of other—”
“Mrs. Queensboro!”
So engrossed had Abigail been in Queenie’s rather confused tale, that she had completely neglected to keep an eye out for Hester Tillet. The draper’s wife swept up to them now like a Navy Man of War in her dark gown and tall, starched cap, her voice like a bucket of coals falling down a flight of stairs. “I don’t come to market to have you stand prattling of our affairs to all the world—your servant, Mrs. Adams.” She accompanied her bobbed curtsey with a poisonous glare.
“M’am, I would never—”
“Don’t you tell me what you would do and what you wouldn’t,” snapped Mrs. Tillet. “I won’t have it. Come away at once.”
Though Queenie was a good decade older than her employer she bowed her head at once and retreated.
“ ’Twas my fault, m’am,” said Abigail quickly, hoping to win herself enough of Queenie’s goodwill to elicit further confidences later. “I but asked after Mrs. Malvern—”
“Then shame on you for gossiping with servants,” retorted Mrs. Tillet. “The lazy trollop has come to her just and fitting end, and I make no doubt they will find her body, too, in time, at the bottom of the harbor, with her throat cut like her friend’s.” She closed her hand around Queenie’s arm—a mighty handful of flesh, but the linendraper’s wife had a grip to accommodate nearly anything—and thrust her away ahead of her into the crowd toward the oyster seller’s stall.
Though her own market basket was still nearly empty, thanks to her companion’s determination not to let her purchase from any farmer to whom she herself had taken a personal dislike, Abigail—with a backwards glance to make sure the towering Tillet bonnet was still moving among the stalls—hastened her steps around the corner of the market hall and out of sight. A small bridge crossed the opening of the town dock, leading to the tangle of lanes that eventually gave onto Ann Street, then Fish Street, along the brisk and crowded waterfront of the North End. It was a walk of only minutes to the alley that led to Tillet’s Yard, shadowed still with the wet light of the chilly morning.
The gate was still closed—and still barred, though Tillet and the younger of his two prentice-boys were obliged to help a carter unload several quires of paper, a roll of buckram, and a box of what appeared to be shoes in the street beside the shop’s front door, to the great inconvenience of traffic. But Abigail didn’t need to enter the yard to refresh her memory. Rebecca’s parlor window—shuttered again now—looked out onto the alley, and there was no way that it could be seen from either the main Tillet house, or from the yard.
Had Queenie seen a man entering Rebecca’s window, either Wednesday night or on some other occasion? Despite the vindictiveness in her voice, the cook’s words had had a ring of truth, before she’d begun to go back on her story and obfuscate . . . What, indeed, would she have been doing in the alley, on a night of threatening rain? On a night, moreover, when her master and mistress were away? Selling a pound or two of the Tillet cornmeal, or a loaf of sugar, to put the money in her own pocket?
Abigail couldn’t imagine the self-pitying little woman possessed a clandestine lover of her own. Either way, reason enough to come up with any kind of slander to undermine Rebecca’s credibility, had Rebecca, for instance, seen her from that parlor window when she opened it to pull the shutters to. Still—
The only window of the L-shaped Tillet house that overlooked the alley was the small gable window of the south attic, a room which Abigail knew had for years been given over to storage, after the overhasty marriage (in her opinion) of the youngest daughter of the house. According to Rebecca, the cramped and stuffy little chamber had been shuttered and out of use for years.
But as she looked up now, she saw—a little to her surprise—that the window’s shutters stood open. And just for a moment—though admittedly the angle of her vision was a narrow one, looking up from the straitened confine of the alley—Abigail thought she saw pale movement behind the dingy glass.
Mrs. Tillet’s unmistakable voice boomed from the street, shouting to her husband. Abigail moved off further up the alley, to cut through a neighbor’s drying yard and garden, and so out onto Cross Street unobserved.
There was no message from anyone, by the time she came belatedly home.
As she swept and cleaned the upstairs rooms, scoured lamps, listened to Nabby and Johnny’s lessons, mixed a batch of bread and prepared dinner—with extra provision for tomorrow’s cold Sabbath meals—Abigail’s mind chased memories.
Rebecca Malvern at eighteen, coming for the first time into the Brattle Street Meeting-House as a bride. She recalled how the dark, self-consciously sober fabric of her dress had been cut and trimmed with a stylish flare that no Boston woman would ever display. In her own family pew, Abigail had overheard the whispers from the pews on all sides: Maryland . . . dowry . . . Papist . . . Poor little Tamar Malvern told me only yesterday she said, “I’ll teach you to pray to the Virgin and the Pope.” Tamar, mincing with downcast eyes behind her new stepmother, had looked smug; Malvern icy; Rebecca wretched, but head still high.
October of 1768. Abigail herself, she recalled, had been great with the child who had become Susanna—her precious, fragile girl. That was the week the redcoat troops had first come ashore in Boston, setting up their tents on the Commons, and jostling everywhere in the streets. A group of them had passed the meetinghouse after the service, and while Malvern had paused to ask John some question about the vestry—on which they were both serving that year—Rebecca had commented to Abigail, Are we expecting French invasion, or does the King just think that eight hundred of his armed servants in the town will cause us to sleep better of nights?
Some in the congregation didn’t hesitate to ascribe her objection to the King’s troops to a secret Papist’s natural sympathy for the Irish, or perhaps the French. But despite the difference in their ages, in Rebecca, Abigail had found a kindred soul. Before long she was inviting the girl to take potluck tea in the kitchen while she herself did the household mending, rather than sit formally in the parlor, and Rebecca had watched in wide-eyed consternation as Abigail performed whatever household tasks needed doing: churning butter or scraping out candlesticks or kneading bread, things that had been done by slaves in the home of Rebecca’s father. Later, when Rebecca was living with them—sharing the bed with Nabby and Johnny in the other small upstairs chamber—they’d laughed together about her dismay. “I wish I’d paid closer attention!” Rebecca had moaned during her first lesson with the butter churn. Abigail had replied in her primmest schoolmistress voice: “At least you’ve seen one before and aren’t frightened.” Rebecca had flicked droplets of the skimmed milk at her from her fingertips, like a schoolgirl, and they’d both laughed.