BooksBarbecue
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

“No,” said Abigail softly. “Of course not.” While Mrs. Gridley, Mrs. Kern, and others explained to Mr. Gridley every detail of Abigail’s story about being the mistress of Mrs. Fishwire’s niece, she walked around the little room, set up now as a tailor’s shop, with boxes to hold the fabric for various jobs and a little rack of spools of thread of various colors. The resemblance between this place and Rebecca’s house lifted the hair on her nape. And yet, she told herself, there was little variation possible in these ramshackle dwellings. It was such a place as any woman obliged to make her own living in the world would take, if she could: a small house on one of Boston’s many inner courts, that would be black as pitch once the sun was down, save for the dull gold chinks of closed shutters . . .

“Were the shutters closed?” she asked. “The night of the murder?”

“Oh, aye.” Mr. Ballagh nodded, from the doorway where he’d gone to stand talking to Mr. Gridley. “With the species of ruffians that spend their time in the Bull, you want to keep things locked up tight, once the sun goes in. The Fishwire’d keep her door open later nor most, for her trade, an’ she was always havin’ trouble with ’em.”

Another neighbor nodded. “We was all ever havin’ trouble with ’em, m’am. One or another—sailors, sometimes, sometimes just the riffraff that unloads the boats—”

“She’d get a gentleman, now an’ now, though.” The informant—swarthy as an Indian with an Irish brogue that could have been cut like cheese with a wire—explained to Abigail. “From the Bull, y’see. Gentlemen’ll come for the cards, an’ maybe so-be-it the deacons of their churches won’t see ’em takin’ a drink—”

“Maybe so-be-it they’re deacons theirselves,” added a Mrs. Bailey, and got a general laugh.

“Well, sailor or gent, they’d come down here, see the light, an’ maybe think it was a whore’s house. Or others’d come and pound on her door and curse at her, and call her witch—”

“I throwed a man out, just the week before the killing happened,” assented Ballagh. “One of the gentlemen, he was, and cursin’ like a sailor at her, because he couldn’t do his rifle-drill—beggin’ your pardon, m’am—with some drab over at the Bull.”