“By all means send for him, m’am.” Coldstone stepped aside from the doorway. “Yet this warrant has the King’s authority, and save for your messenger boy, none of the household shall stir from my presence until I have seen that attic.”
Nevertheless, Mrs. Tillet refused to budge until the magistrate—a man of Mr. Tillet’s age, bluff and red-faced from his profession as a ship’s carpenter—appeared, grumbling and snorting at being called from his work and glaring at his red-faced sister-in-law. In the interim, Mr. Tillet repeatedly began his long train of explanations: “—my niece, sir, and subject to violent fits; ’tis only out of the goodness of my wife’s heart that we took her in at all—” which invariably ended in his wife telling him to hold his tongue. For her part, Mrs. Tillet spent the half hour or so that the wait occupied in railing against Abigail’s morals, personal habits, marriage, family, housekeeping, and sanity, despite Lieutenant Coldstone’s reiterated warnings that her words were being taken note of, and would lay her open to action for slander.
“Let her sue me!” shouted Mrs. Tillet, pounding her chest with one massive fist. “I’ll repeat every word I’ve said to the whole of the General Court, and then they will all know her for the slut and unbeliever she is!”
Abigail listened in stony silence, only praying that Sam wouldn’t get word of all this and show up to further complicate matters.
And that, once in Coldstone’s hands, Rebecca would not reveal that the killer was, in fact, Abednego Sellars or some other member of the Sons.
Sam didn’t come. With the magistrate’s appearance, the whole of the party filed upstairs, to find that the door of the attic stair was indeed locked. This ultimately debouched into the wide, freezingly cold space at the top of the house—not even Queenie’s chamber at the west end, above that of her master and mistress, gleaned any warmth, for obviously no fires were kept up on the second floor at all.
The door of the small room called the south attic was also locked. The bolts on the outside of its door looked new. Beside the door stood a water pitcher, a plate innocent even of crumbs, a basket filled with newly sewed shirts, and beside them, a short, braided-leather whip, of the kind hunters used for beating dogs away from a kill.
“The woman’s got to earn her keep,” stated Mrs. Tillet fiercely. “She’d eat us out of house and home if left to herself, a glutton and a wittol. ’Tis only Christian charity that we took her in, and she refuses to turn a hand to help us or support herself. She should be put out into the road—”
“Why then do you lock the door on her instead?” Coldstone took the key, and opened the door. “Strange charity, m’am.”
The woman seated on the bed had already staggered to her feet—probably at the sound of footsteps and strange voices—and dropped the chemise she was sewing, flung herself on her knees in front of Coldstone, and threw her arms around his legs. “Please, sir, please, tell her it wasn’t my fault I didn’t get them done!” she babbled. Her long blonde hair, pale as flax, hid her face, and the marks the dog-whip had left stood out purple on her cold-reddened arms. “I couldn’t help! ’Tis I couldn’t hold a needle right with the cold, and I did try! Please tell her!”
The room was like an icehouse. Coldstone reached down and grasped the woman’s arm—she wore only a chemise, with the bed’s single blanket wrapped over it—and brought her to her feet. Tears poured down from her eyes, and snot from her nose, and her fingers left little traces of blood on the officer’s white gloves as she clutched at his hands.
“Make her let me go, sir! I promise I’ll do whatever she asks, but tell her to let me out!”
Coldstone turned to Abigail. “Is this Mrs. Malvern?” With a gentle hand he brushed back the greasy strings of graying blonde hair from a face square, broad, and slightly animal-looking, with its level bar of dark brow and its sloping forehead.
Abigail had already come forward with her handkerchief, gently wiping at the tears, stroking the woman’s shoulder in a way that she hoped was reassuring. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
Twenty-eight
It was well past dinnertime by the time it was agreed that Gomer Faulk—that was the woman’s name—would be taken to Abigail’s house for the next few days, until it could be decided what to do with her. Hester Tillet had a great deal to say, at the top of her lungs, about her “niece’s” inborn inability to tell the truth on any subject whatsoever, and bawled that Abigail would hear from her lawyers for taking from her household one of its members, though as Gomer was a good thirty-five years of age and, according to the disgusted Magistrate Goss, no relation whatsoever to the Tillets, it was hard to discover on what grounds Hester thought she had jurisdiction over her.
“Faulk? Nobody named Faulk in the family. There was a Faulk out in Medford—a drunk good-for-nothing who abandoned his family, as I recall it—but they were no connection of ours, thank God . . .”
Gomer herself clung alternately to Abigail and Lieutenant Coldstone, shivering and wiping her nose with her fingers. “Just don’t let her lock me up again. There’s rats at night, sir, m’am, big ’uns, and they talks to me. I’ll sew for you all you want m’am, sir, just don’t let her whip me again.” She was clearly, as Orion Hazlitt had said of his servant girl Damnation, “lacking.” She couldn’t recall the names of her parents other than Ma and Pa, but said that she’d lived with one family and another in the farms around Medford, the most recent being that of Nehemiah Tillet’s sister and brother-in-law. “They hit me now and now, but they didn’t lock me up. Let me sleep in the cowshed. I like cows, m’am. I takes good care of ’em . . .
“She and that man”—she pointed to Tillet—“come to my uncle Reb’s wedding, and Uncle Reb and Miss Eliza, they said they had to go away, and I couldn’t come with ’em—”
“Someone had to look after the girl,” protested Tillet. “My wife was unsatisfied with the woman then helping her with sewing for the shop—”
Like the crippled boy turning the spinning wheel at Moore’s Farm out in Essex County, reflected Abigail sadly. Handed off, to provide labor to whoever would support him. At least Kemiah Moore and his wife appeared to be willing to feed that boy the same rations they gave their own family, and let him sit among the kitchen’s distractions. But maybe, her darker soul whispered, that was only because he was incapable of wandering away.
“An unfortunate story,” said Coldstone, as they walked back along Fish Street in the gathering dusk. “But not a new one.”
“A letter to Medford will yield more information on the subject,” said Abigail. Her head ached—she prayed Pattie had made some kind of dinner for John and the children, and had thought to save some for her—and she felt infinitely tired. Though she knew Mrs. Tillet’s spew of invective had been simply that—the vomiting forth of a poisoned mind—she felt as if she were physically smeared with filth every time the young Lieutenant turned his eyes upon her. “I do beg your pardon, Lieutenant.”
“For using the King’s authority as it should be used?” he asked. “As a tool to protect those incapable of protecting themselves?” He glanced back at Gomer, walking between Sergeant Muldoon and Trooper Yarrow, seemingly oblivious that her ankles were exposed by the hem of Queenie’s borrowed dress. “What will you do with her? She’s obviously incapable of looking after herself.”
“I’ll write to my father,” said Abigail. “He’s the pastor at Weymouth, across the bay to the south. He’ll know a good family who can take her in and will treat her decently. She seems willing enough to work.”