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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

“I have reason to think she was struck over the head,” Abigail murmured back. She shifted her cloak, where it had become entangled with the small horn lantern at her belt, and its little satchel of candles. “I don’t know how badly. Nor can I guess what the Reverend Bargest told whatever family is in charge of caring for her. They must be well and truly under his sway, for if she’s capable of speech, what she tells them will be disquieting to say the least. And they’ll see—they must see—how harmless she is . . . In the end, he knows he’s going to have to kill her.”

“Oh, aye,” said the young man again, as if it needed no saying. “Just as soon as he knows Mr. Pentyre’s been took care of, belike. They won’t have done for the poor lady already, d’ye think?”

Abigail shook her head, not shifting her gaze from the village down the hill. She’d already thought of that. “If he did bring her here, it would be because she saw him. She knew him. Whatever Bargest told him about why Perdita Pentyre must die, Orion had clearly made up his mind not to harm Rebecca. The Hand of the Lord must have had a nasty shock,” she added grimly, “when his chosen weapon came back to him with a witness, saying, You keep her safe, or I won’t kill Pentyre.”

“It’s mad. Your boy must have known the old man couldn’t let her live.”

“He knew for two years that she was another man’s wife,” said Abigail. “Yet he hoped that things would somehow turn out right in the end. But—” She broke off, and said, “Damnation!”

“What?” Muldoon grinned. “An’ don’t think it ain’t a treat, to find a good Puritan lady will swear now and then—”

“No,” whispered Abigail indignantly. “That woman there, coming out of that house . . . It’s Damnation Awaits the Trembling Sinner. The servant to the Hazlitts.”

“Damnation indeed.” He raised an eyebrow curiously at Abigail, as the tall young woman made her way along the muddy street. Abigail nodded assent, and cautiously they moved through the brown tangles of dead fern and leafless hackberry, where the edge of the woods paralleled the way. Beyond the broken stumps of the palisade, and the last cowsheds and woodpiles of the village proper, lay half a dozen houses, farther and farther apart; one of these, two stories tall, had the look of an old defensive blockhouse. Its upper floor projected over its lower, and its walls were stoutly constructed of squared logs. The sheds around it stood empty, and what had been its garden was a knotted thicket of dead weeds, ringed by straggly fence-posts whose rails had long since been taken away for other purposes.