BooksBarbecue
Back The Ninth Daughter Save as PDF
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

He looked as if he were struggling against strict orders not to say a word in English, and Abigail, relenting, said more quietly, “I’m quite all right,” which was not strictly the truth. She could feel fever coming on her, from chill, exertion, and clothing damp from the wet of the woods. She realized she was very lucky to be alive at all. Rebecca, slumped behind the King’s bloody-back savage, was shivering, too. The Indian reached out a hand to her, but Abigail, mindful of the soldiers watching them, kept her grip on the reins.

In a quiet voice she asked, “I take it you didn’t get my message until the town gates were shut for the night. Was the storm too bad to get a boat across the bay?”

“Ugh.” He looked, first at Rebecca, his eyes filled with pity, then at Orion.

“The Reverend Bargest is dead,” said Abigail. “Hazlitt shot him—goodness knows what his followers are going to do.” She coughed, fighting to still it, then gave the Indian a smile. “It is very good to see you, dearest friend.”

He smiled back, and saluted her with his tomahawk. “Ugh.”

The Indian who looked like Paul Revere slipped the account book into his own saddlebag, and signed to his men. Two of them took the reins of Orion’s horse. Orion turned in the saddle, and sought Rebecca’s eyes, but did not speak. With him among them, the whole tribe disappeared into the night.

Thirty-four

Thirty-four

035

Presumably this same tribe of Indians, five nights later, boarded the three tea ships at Griffin’s Wharf—the Beaver having docked, cargo intact, the day before—and dumped some $90,000 worth of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor while six thousand armed countrymen stood around the docks. There was no attempt on Colonel Leslie’s part to interfere.

Abigail herself only heard the men go by in the street, from the bed where she lay in the weak aftermath of fever. Though her window was closed and shuttered by that time, still the tramp of their feet came to her, quiet and well-disciplined, though some of them sang. Not a mob, she thought. An army.

“And not so much as a belaying-pin on any of those three ships was stolen or damaged,” Rebecca Malvern reported the next morning, when she came after breakfast with fresh-baked scones and a hot ginger tisane. “The Indians even swept the decks clean afterwards.”

“How very tidy of them.” Abigail—dressed for the first time since being put to bed with a feverish cold—tugged her several shawls closer about her shoulders, and sipped the tisane. “Sam does nice work.”