“Thank you, m’am, for coming.” The young woman’s voice was as lovely as her face, and her golden brown eyes were not those of a girl who indulges in “romantical fancies.” “And thank you for believing me, and Miss Fluckner. For a swear to you as I’m born, I’m telling the truth, so far as I know it.”
“And what is the truth?” At Miss Fluckner’s gesture Abigail took a seat in one of the room’s two cane-bottomed chairs; Miss Fluckner herself sat on the bed. Rods had been rigged from the ceiling, and calico curtains, in an approximation of a half-tester—cryingly necessary, thought Abigail, given the chill of the room and the doll-like pe titeness of the fireplace. “That the man who murdered Jenny Barry, Zulieka Fishwire, and Perdita Pentyre seeks also to kill you? What makes you think this? Please speak freely,” she added, seeing the automatic look of reserve—so common to even the best-treated of slaves—that flickered across the back of Philomela’s eyes. Abigail glanced at Miss Fluckner for confirmation, then said, “Nothing that you say will be repeated, or will be held against you.”
A ridiculous assertion, she railed at herself the instant the words were out of her mouth. Even the most trusting bonds-woman wasn’t about to state some of her real opinions in the presence of members of a race who could get her whipped if they didn’t like what they heard. But it seemed to reassure Philomela.
“I don’t know about Mrs. Pentyre, m’am,” said the servant after a moment. “And I don’t know why this is happening to me. I swear, I have never spoken to this man in my life. Even as I say it, it sounds—” She shook her head, peeped apologetically at her young mistress. “It sounds like something out of the novels Miss Lucy is always reading.”
And Miss Lucy—to Abigail’s relief and doubtless Philomela’s as well—only grinned in good-natured acknowledgment.
Philomela took a deep breath, let it out. “This is what happened. It doesn’t sound like much.”
And it didn’t. And yet—thought Abigail, the hair prickling on her nape. And yet . . .
Philomela’s master in Virginia had sold her to Thomas Fluckner in April of 1772, because Mrs. Fluckner’s maid had had a child, and could no longer (Mrs. Fluckner said) devote herself to the interests of her mistress as she properly should. When Philomela had been in the household about six weeks, someone started sending her poems.
“They’d be slipped in under the kitchen door at night, or poked through the cracks in the shutters. Mr. Barnaby—Mr. Fluckner’s butler—would bring them to me, and joke me about having an admirer, and that’s all I thought they were.”
“You do read, then?”
“Oh, yes, m’am. Back home, my mistress liked to be read to. And one of my mistress’s sons would write me poems—one of his friends, too. That’s all I thought these were: young gentlemen’s foolishness.” She looked aside slightly, and down, her bronze lips tightening in a way that told Abigail that these offerings were probably not the only young gentlemen’s foolishness that Philomela had had to put up with in her old mistress’s home. She wondered how much those first poems had had to do with the decision to sell Philomela . . . far away from Virginia.
“I did show Miss Lucy,” Philomela added quickly. “And I asked her, Should I show Mrs. Fluckner? I didn’t want to do wrong, yet I did fear Miss Lucy’s mother might blame me, for having an admirer, though I didn’t know who this man was.”
Lucy Fluckner put in, “Mama would have said, Philomela was encouraging him, and would have asked Papa to sell her. I thought as long as I knew, it was all right.”
Abigail pinched her lips on the words, And what possible business could it have been of yours or your mother’s? If Pattie had acquired an “admirer” in Boston, she herself would certainly want to know if the man was a thief who only wanted access to the household. She settled for, “Of course. You both acted very properly. Did you keep the poems?”
“At first I did,” said Philomela. “Though they weren’t very good, I didn’t think. The first two were just about how beautiful he thought I was—” Her voice stammered a little over the words. “Then he started writing how I came to him in his dreams at night, and the things I said . . . and things we did.” The room was too dim, and her complexion too dark, to show her blush. “Not the way some gentlemen write, that they dreamed of me lying in their arms and how beautiful I was in the moonlight and all how it would be a good idea if I’d make their dream come true. You know that kind of poem—”
She caught herself a little guiltily, but Abigail smiled, and said, “I have received such, yes. And very tiresome I found them.”
A dimple flicked into place beside the girl’s perfect mouth: vanished in a flexure of uneasy disgust. “This man wrote as if I’d truly come to him, while he was asleep and dreaming. As if that was truly me who’d said I loved him, who’d given herself to him, and not . . . not just a phantom out of his own head. And as if I—the real me—was held accountable for what his dream-me had said and done. But since I didn’t know even who he was I couldn’t tell him, Grow up. It’s just your dream. I thought then he might have been a young boy, you know how they get, when they’ve never had a woman . . .”
She caught herself again and glanced at Abigail’s face, as if worried she’d gone too far, but again Abigail nodded. “I know.” She remembered her brother William at fifteen, in poetical ecstasies over one of the local Weymouth belles. Like Romeo on the subject of Rosalind—a state that had ended abruptly when William’s good-for-nothing friends had taken him to one of the Boston brothels.
“And he’d write how he watched me, going about my business in the town. Not like Mr. Petrarch writing about his Laura, I saw you crossing the bridge today and my heart stood still . . . Specific things. The way Mrs. Fluckner handed you that basket of apples at the market . . . How, you look so beautiful in that yellow dress with the blue flowers. He was watching me, Mrs. Adams. I can’t tell you how that made me feel. And then he wrote that in his room the night before, I’d turned away from his mirror so that he guessed that I was a demon; that I was feeding on his love, and his love would damn him. But, he said, he loved me anyway, though I was the devil’s minion and his soul was in peril because—”
She stammered a little, and turned her eyes aside. Then she finished, “Because he enjoyed it when I raped him.”
Abigail said softly, “Oh.” And felt it to be true, in that instant, that whoever he was, he had indeed killed the others. And the awareness turned her sick with fear.
“After that I watched for him,” Philomela said softly. “I burned that poem, and all the others. You know how it is, when you’re scared? Everything seems . . . distorted. You almost can’t tell what’s real and what you only imagine. Every man on the street could have been him. There was a man I’m pretty certain was him—handsome, dark-haired—he’d sometimes be on Milk Street when we’d come out and get into the carriage, and he didn’t seem to have much business there. But of course I only glimpsed him. And I was afraid to turn and look harder, in case it was him and that made him think I was in love with him, or whatever it was he thought. About a week after that Mr. Fluckner got an offer to buy me, from a Mr. Merryweather, who’s a dealer in slaves and bloodstock horses and such things. Acting for someone else, our butler said. And I knew it had to be him.”