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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

“All young ladies have their mortal foes, Madame. Oh, such a one has stolen my hairdresser away from me, I shall claw out her eyes with my fingernails, so! Ah, such another has got herself sat next to that most divine preacher at tea, I will strangle her in her own hair-ribbons! Does one pay heed to such trivialities?”

“One must, in the circumstances.”

“One must, if my lady were found with her eyes scratched out, or strangled in her hair-ribbons,” said the older woman somberly. “I saw her body, Madame. I took the clothes off her, and washed her, and dressed her in her prettiest night-dress, that her husband gave her when they were wed, and Madame, I would not admit M’sieu Pentyre into the room until I was done. Even then I kept a cloth over my young lady’s face. What was done to her was done by the Devil himself.”

Abigail whispered, “Amen,” and Mademoiselle Droux crossed herself. “And was she ever afraid of what she could not define? Afraid without reason, of a shadow, or a pas serby?”

“En effet, Madame, my lady was twenty years old, and the young do not frighten easily. If she had such fears, she did not speak of them to me. I did not make of myself a confidante, as so many maids do, except at the very beginning, when she was lonely and her empty-headed mother and sisters in New York did not write to her, if they could write, which I doubt. But I would sooner be a good maid than a good friend. Unless the friendship is extraordinary, it is too easy for confidence to turn into anger, and then one is on the street again, with nowhere to go.”

Abigail thought about Catherine Moore, turned out of her job and obliged to return to the farm of her brother, near Townsend (wherever that was) somewhere in the wooded wilds of Essex County.

In the high kitchen windows the light was fading. This woman would have her duties, back at the great brick Pentyre mansion on Prince’s Street. “These notes that Mrs. Pentyre received from the woman in the street. Did she keep them?”

“She locked them away, yes, Madame. Indeed, she took greater care of them, than commonplaces about trees and birds and flowers warranted.” She shrugged. “I copied them for M’sieu Pentyre, and the originals, our pretty Provost took away with him. What he shall make of them, I do not know.”

“Mademoiselle Droux,” she said, “you have been very kind, and your observations extremely helpful.”