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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

“Rebecca has been missing for three days now,” Abigail went on. “For three days the Sons of Liberty have been seeking her—so I am told—about the city, and have found no trace of her. For all I know this man, this killer, whoever he is, seeks her, too. I’d hoped to find something in her correspondence with her family that might help me. She had made few friends here in Boston—”

“She had that printer!” Malvern’s hand smote the table with a violence that made Abigail jump. “For all her talk of my misdeeds, and my mistrust, while she—”

“In the years you have been apart,” Abigail said slowly, “your wife and I have been as near as sisters. And I will swear an oath on the Testament that she has never regarded herself as anything other than your wife. She has spoken of you in anger—sometimes in very great anger—but never in disrespect . . . Which is more, I’m afraid, than can be said of me.”

“It isn’t what I’ve heard.”

“From whom did you hear it?”

He was silent again, and in the silence hooves could be heard in the street outside, and the clatter of harness as a carriage came to a halt before the house’s outer door. Malvern’s eyes moved toward the hall, then returned to Abigail, weary and angry, yet to her the anger seemed to smolder deeper—an inner pain, not a wall against opposition. “You’re not telling me all of the truth, Mrs. Adams. You’re mired to the neck in the bog of Sam Adams’s making—as you mired my wife.”

“What I believe—and what she believes—about the rights of the colonies doesn’t mean that she isn’t in danger now. It doesn’t mean that the man who perpetrated a monstrous crime isn’t looking for her. Or that I would not move Heaven and Earth, if I could, to find her before he gets to her.”

A serving man’s shoe-heels clacked in the hall, lamp flame juddering across the papered walls. Abigail’s eye slid to Malvern’s face, then away as a bright jumble of hushed giggles sounded, a girl’s voice crying, “He is not my sweet-heart!” and a young man’s, “Oh, so you go kiss in alcoves just any officer you happen to meet?” “Faith, how’d ye know that, Master Jeff? Ye weren’t out of the card-room but only long enough to piss in Mrs. Fluckner’s rose-bed!”

“Good heavens, hand me that sponge, girl! This is what comes of trying to take rouge off in the carriage—” “Don’t be silly, Jeff, the old man’s asleep by this time . . .”