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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

“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.”

“When was this? What month?”

“June,” said Philomela. “The middle of June, 1772. About two days after I heard there’d been an offer for me, I heard about there’d been a murder near the docks, a woman—Mrs. Barry—killed and slashed up; I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, I was shocked, of course, but I didn’t think it was the same man. Then not long after that I got a long poem, an awful poem, talking about how sometimes a man has to strike down the thing he loves, to save his soul. Two of the verses talked about killing a red-haired demon with a woman’s face.”

“Do you still have the poem?”

“Not with me,” said Philomela. “I hid it. I didn’t want to look at it, didn’t want to think about it.”

“He also talked about killing her,” said Lucy Fluckner somberly. “In the same poem, about killing her as they made love. But it was all so flowery, if you didn’t know what was going on, you wouldn’t know what was going on . . . if you know what I mean. Not just in the poem, I mean, but the whole situation. And this Mr. Merryweather who was trying to buy Philomela from Papa, they couldn’t come to an agreement about price. Papa’s incredibly stingy. He paid four hundred dollars for Philomela, and he wasn’t going to take a penny less. Mr. Merryweather—and I guess his client—was very persistent for about two months. Then he stopped sending notes.” Lucy shrugged.

“Two months.”

September, 1772. Apple-picking time, when Tommy was born.