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Back The Ninth Daughter
Chapters (37)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. Twenty-six
  30. Twenty-seven
  31. Twenty-eight
  32. Twenty-nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty-one
  35. Thirty-two
  36. Thirty-three
  37. Thirty-four

“You underrate their skill, m’am. He moreover is good friends with the woman in whose house the body was found: a woman separated from her husband, who has lived under Mr. Adams’s protection and whose legal affairs Mr. Adams has looked after, pro bono. Had he wished to harm Mrs. Pentyre, what safer way to do so, than to mimic the methods of a lunatic who has killed two other women and has gone untaken? He chooses a night on which the Tillets are known to be absent. The renter of the house then flees, and you—Mr. Adams being bonded to remain in Boston and being moreover under suspicion—undertake a two-day journey into the backcountry, where an officer of the Crown would take his life in his hands to go—to warn or inform her—”

“Do you honestly think that’s what happened?” demanded Abigail, appalled.

Coldstone was silent, studying her face, she realized, as she had studied Charles Malvern’s, when she had broken the news to him of Rebecca’s disappearance. She didn’t flee, she wanted to shout at him. She was imprisoned in her room, her blood was on the pillow of her bed, and on the floor beside the door—

And Paul Revere and Dr. Warren had neatly mopped it away. She found herself trembling all over.

“No,” he said after a time. “No, I don’t. All these things—these possibilities—are like objects in a room, like furnishings well arranged. But there is another room, and in that room is the possibility that the same man who killed Mrs. Fishwire and Jenny Barry has started killing again. As all such men invariably will.”

“And that matters to you.”

“Yes. It does.”

Silence again. Abigail handed him the cup of coffee, and looked around for the bell with which Pattie could be summoned to the parlor. Of course it was missing—Charley and Johnny were forever taking it to sound the alarm against imaginary Indian attacks—so she murmured, “Excuse me,” went to the door, and called, “Pattie, dearest? Could you bring us some of my marmalade? Do you like marmalade, Lieutenant? And some of your gingerbread, if it’s ready—” She returned to her chair beside the fire.

“These other women who were killed. When did it happen? I think I would have heard—”

“Jenny Barry was killed in June of 1772. Zulieka Fishwire in September of the same year.”