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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

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

Twenty-eight

029

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 . . .”