BooksBarbecue
Back The Ninth Daughter Save as PDF
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

Coldstone looked for a moment as if he would have said something else—perhaps, she reflected uncomfortably, turned her statement back upon her. But he only nodded. “I seek the man who would do this to a woman,” he said. “I have seen cases like this in London, and such a man will go on killing, until he is stopped. Will you help me find that man, whoever he may be?”

“I will,” she said, “if I can. If you will—No.” She stopped herself. “I will help you, regardless.”

He inclined his head. “Thank you.”

“Who was this Mrs. Fishwire? What do you know about her?”

“Only that she was a hairdresser: what they call a woman of the people, meaning she was poor. She was close to fifty, a mulatto from Virginia. The office of the Provost Marshal wasn’t concerned in the matter, and only took the report of the city Watch.”

“No Mr. Fishwire?”

“None in the report. She was found by a neighbor, a Mr. Ballagh.”

Found in the same tight-packed labyrinth of alleys and byways that Rebecca Malvern had perforce made her home. Did that mean anything, or not? Did it mean anything that Richard Pentyre’s handsome house lay not half a mile distant, as so many wealthy houses did?

Whose hair had she dressed? Perdita Pentyre’s?

“It was over two years ago,” Coldstone went on. “Yet surely there will be people in the neighborhood still, who remember the circumstances. If I can track the man from that end of the trail—”

“You?” Abigail’s eyebrows shot up. “Lieutenant Coldstone, I may be a suspected traitor, but I am nevertheless a Christian woman. I would not want it on my conscience, that I had sent a British officer into the North End, with or without escort, tea ship or no tea ship.”

Stiffly, Coldstone reproved, “I would not go in uniform.”

“With that voice and that posture and hair cropped for a military wig, you would not need to. They’ll cut you to pieces and feed you to their pigs, Lieutenant. Best let me see to this.”

Sixteen

Sixteen

017