Abigail slewed around on her heels, aghast. Scipio got hastily to his feet, the dark beyond the single candle’s light cloaking, Abigail suspected, the ashen hue of his face.
Charles Malvern said, “You may go, Scipio.”
“Sir, I—”
“You may go.”
Scipio stayed long enough to help Abigail to her feet. “Mr. Malvern,” she said, as the servant’s footsteps retreated down the stair, “I beg you not to blame Scipio in this.”
“And in what way is a trusted servant not to be blamed, who admits robbers to his master’s house while the family is away?” He put his head a little to one side, and the pale eyes that regarded her shrieked rage in a face as calm as stone. “Don’t tell me Scipio, too, has been corrupted by this talk of colonial liberties that your husband and his friends vomit forth. Or does he merely seek a share of my daughter’s jewelry?” He reached for the bellpull, and Abigail impulsively extended her hand to stop his.
“This isn’t jewelry, sir—”
“If it was garden dirt,” said Malvern, yanking the bell, “it would still not excuse burglary.”
“Mr. Malvern,” said Abigail desperately, “I have reason to believe this box contains clandestine correspondence of your daughter’s.” She felt sick at the thought of Scipio being taken to one of the taverns by the Long Wharf, where dealers bid for slaves to carry south to Virginia. Even if the little merchant went so far as to actually have her locked up in the gaol house by the law-counts for part of the night—with every thief and prostitute in Boston—John would get her out, with no worse effects than perhaps lice in her hair and bugs in her skirts from the bedding.
Scipio was not in the law’s hands, but the hands of his master.
Malvern’s eyes narrowed: “A girl’s love notes.” For a moment she thought he was going to snap at her, My daughter does not receive any such thing . . .
Of course any father would seek to protect his daughter by knowing who was courting her—particularly a man of wealth like Malvern. Yet it crossed her mind to wonder if he sought to control his daughter’s thoughts and movements as totally as he had sought to control Rebecca’s.
Footsteps sounded on the back stairs. Dim yellow light mottled the creamy plaster visible through the hall door, making the vines stenciled there seem to stir in soundless wind.
“I pray so, sir,” she said, keeping her voice steady with an effort. “Because I fear this box contains evidence of a conspiracy against both yourself, and your wife.”
For one instant, familiar with the uncontrollable first rush of his rages, she would not have been surprised had he struck her. Malvern only stood, staring, mouth half open and eyes glittering with fury. Then his lips closed hard, and he stepped to her, and yanked the box from her hands.
A manservant appeared in the doorway, hastily adjusting a badly tied neckcloth. “Sir?”
Malvern was silent for a moment, studying Abigail’s face. “Bring me a chisel to my study,” he said at last. And he added, as if the words were forced from him at gunpoint, “And bring coffee for myself and Mrs. Adams.”
In November of 1770, a few months after starting at Harvard, Jeffrey Malvern had written to Tamar, Father spoke today of the Papist. It sounded like he begins to have regard for her for making her own way. This does not sound promising. Can you not find him a mistress? There is a woman here named Mrs. Bell, who would be willing but has the appearance of great respectability.
John’s clerk, young Mr. Thaxter, had told Abigail things about Mrs. Bell of Cambridge, and Abigail thought young Mr. Jeffrey grossly underestimated his father’s gullibility, if he supposed the merchant hadn’t heard them, too.
March of 1771: What earthly reason did you give, for not complaining to him at the time, if she indeed threatened you with a hot coal in your face? Surely even for the Whore of Babylon, that is extreme?
July of 1772—a few weeks after the death of their young brother: . . . but since he is gone, could you not come up with some way that it was the Papist’s doing?
January of 1773, shortly after Rebecca’s effort to retrieve her property: I don’t like this talk of divorcement. He’s but four-and-fifty, and there’s juice in him yet. No sense prying one step-mama away from him only to have him wed another, and then it will be all to do again. The next one may not be so Jesuitical or so obliging about leaving her correspondence where they may be found. What about Clara Wheelock, or one of her fair “nieces”? That carroty one (Jenny?) should keep any man alive busy.
Abigail looked up from Piers Woodruff’s dozenth letter begging and bullying his sister Rebecca to send him money as the clock struck ten. Walking home from their meeting with Malvern last November, with Rebecca silent and shaking at her side, she had wished for worms to consume Malvern from the inside out, as they had consumed Herod Agrippa in the Book of Acts. Now seeing his face, she thought, I must never wish such ill again, even in my heart. His was indeed the face of a man whose heart and entrails were being devoured from within.
For the first time in her life, she pitied him. She said, “I’m sorry.”
He laid down his son’s latest missive—containing only lamentations about debts and hangovers, and a request for Tamar to get the old man to see reason about my allowance—and passed a hand over his face. Two hours ago, Malvern had sent his disheveled serving man to Queen Street, with a note to the effect that Mrs. Adams was detained at his house but would return with a suitable escort, and had summoned Scipio from the kitchen to tell him that he need not worry for his position, but should go to bed. “I will see to Miss Malvern, when she comes home,” the father had said.
“Has this accomplished all that you had in mind, Mrs. Adams?” the merchant now asked, visibly struggling to control the anger that seemed to be the only emotion he was capable of feeling. He reached for the coffeepot, but lifting it found it empty (as Abigail had, half an hour previously). For a moment he seemed about to hurl it to the floor, but it was an expensive piece, so he set it down again. His pale eyes burned with exhausted resentment as he looked back at her. “Does the knife go deep enough for you, to avenge the hurt I gave your friend?”
“I did not come seeking vengeance.” Abigail lifted the yellowing sheets, the looping scribbles of the handwriting of that young wastrel and gambler who had made his sister’s life such a misery. “Only information, about who Rebecca might have known, who would have done such a thing to an innocent woman in her house.”
“The woman wasn’t innocent,” grated Malvern. “She was a whore, as her husband is a lying pimp.”
“If she was a whore, her deserving would have been an A sewed to her garment, in the old way, not to have her throat cut and her body mutilated.”
Malvern opened his mouth to shout something about whores and what they deserved, and Abigail steadily met his eyes. After a moment he closed his lips again, settled back into his chair. “You are right, Mrs. Adams,” he said, in a voice like the grind of the sea on pebbles after a storm. “If it was reasonable men we spoke of. Yet the woman did her whoring with the commander of the British troops. And her husband is the Governor’s friend and one of the commissioners who’s been given the Royal Monopoly to sell East India Company tea. I should think it would be obvious, where to seek for her murderers, and why they would do their deed in—in the house that they chose.”