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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

“There she is! There she is!” screamed a woman—Rebecca was still leaning on Abigail’s shoulder, nowhere near any of the windows. “I see her! Look, she’s flying!”

Rebecca muttered, “I wish I might!” She took a step, staggered, and someone outside fired a gun. “Don’t tell me they think I’m a witch!”

“Yes.”

Someone else yelled, “There she is!” and more guns boomed. At the same moment Muldoon flung open the gable window. Smoke was now pouring up the stair, and through the open trapdoor Abigail could see the red flare of firelight.

Wretch! Lying, hypocrite wretch! He planned this from the moment Orion told him he must keep Rebecca safe! This building is isolated—one of the few in the village that could burn without danger to its neighbors!

“Give her here.” Muldoon jerked the knot tight on the doubled rope, wrapped around the nearest bunk-frame, crossed himself, scooped Rebecca up, and put her over one shoulder like a sack of meal. “Hang on, m’am, if ever you did. Mrs. Adams, wrap the rope around your arm like this, play it out, put your feet on the wall and lean back—”

Abigail said, “Oh, dear God . . .”

“Throw me down me musket to me first. And don’t drop that winker!”

Dear God—She fought panic at the thought of descending as Muldoon descended, playing out the rope around his arm. The distance wasn’t fearful—she’d fallen from higher trees as a girl. But in the blackness, with the red wildness of firelight reflected from the front of the house and flame beginning to crawl up the dry wood of the ladder—for a moment she could think nothing but, I’ll be killed. I’ll be killed—

Her mind flashed, blindingly, to the night a number of years ago, when one of the wild mobs of the North End, stirred up by Sam’s furious pamphlets against the Stamp Act, had mobbed, broken into, and gutted the Governor’s house—the last time Sam had let a mob get away from his control. Governor Hutchinson and his daughter had escaped out a back window, she had heard later, and fled through the winding alleyways of the North End to take refuge with friends. What horror—!

Trembling, she dropped the musket down out the window, tied the lantern to her waist, the heat of the metal palpable even through several petticoats and a quilted skirt, wrapped the rope around her arm as she’d been shown and hoped fervently she was doing correctly—

“There they go!” screamed someone, and as Abigail swung herself out the window—and the rope constricted like an agonizing garrote around her arm—two or three men came around the corner of the house. “She’s getting away!”