He glanced at her, raised one heavy brow, tufted like a bobcat’s.
“May I have a word with the girl, please?”
He nodded. “As many as you like. You may cut off her hair and knit stockings out of it—”
Oonaugh clutched at her cap in alarm.
“Mistress Oonaugh,” said Abigail. “What is your surname?”
“Connelley, m’am.”
“Miss Connelley. Are you acquainted with the maid who worked for Perdita Pentyre?”
“Oh, that was a horror, m’am! I’ve heard she was—”
“I know what you’ve heard,” said Abigail grimly. “Do you know her?”
“We’ve spoke at parties. Down the rooms, you know, when the quality are all up flirtin’ an’ playin’ cards an’ carryin’ on. Thinks the sun shines out her backside, she does, the consayted Frog, but I knows her to speak to.”
“Would you be so kind as to carry a note to her for me? I should very much like to speak with her.” The handmaid of Jezebel, that was privy to all her ways . . .
Malvern brought another coin from his pocket, and held it up for Oonaugh to see. “Please tell Miss—”
“Droux, sorr. Lisette Droux.”
“Please tell Miss Droux that both Mrs. Adams and I understand how valuable her time is.” There was silence, broken only by the creak of a manservant’s feet in the hall, and the scratching of Abigail’s quill as she penned a hasty note. “Does she read English?”
“I dunno, sorr.” Oonaugh looked puzzled by the question. “I shouldn’t think so, if she’s French.”
“Then perhaps you could ask her, if she would meet Mrs. Adams here at her earliest convenience?”
“That I’ll do, sorr. You can depend on me.”
“Good.” He laid the second coin on the table. “You may go.” As the door shut behind Oonaugh, he added quietly, “Shall I call Scipio in and have him make more coffee, Mrs. Adams? You look quite exhausted.”
She could hear the half hour striking on Faneuil Hall, and tried to recall which hour had passed. She felt cold, weary to death, and a little ill. Surely it hadn’t been only that morning that she’d started reading through Rebecca’s letters of the summer before last, before sallying forth to the market to question Queenie.
“Thank you, sir, no. Thank you,” she said again, as he came around to her, to hand her up from her chair. “More than I can say.” The thick Spanish dollar he’d held up to Miss Connelley would buy, she guessed, any amount of information from Mlle Lisette Droux, and very quickly, if she knew anything of the cupidity of servants—particularly servants who might be facing unemployment in a foreign city.
He rang the bell nevertheless. Scipio appeared, having evidently disregarded his master’s orders to take himself off to bed. “Have Ulee harness the chaise, to take Mrs. Adams home. I trust,” he added, as the butler turned to obey, “that I have no need to say that I rely on your discretion, about all things concerning the events of this night, Scipio?”
The servant bowed. “You have no need, sir.”
“So Mrs. Adams tells me. If I have not said so before,” he went on quietly, “and I may not have, for you know as well as I that I do speak hastily when angry—I value very much the discretion that is natural to you, Scipio; as indeed I value all of your good qualities. Thank you for the help that you have extended to Mrs. Adams, on behalf of-of my good wife.”
Scipio inclined his head. “Thank you, sir. Mrs. Adams.” And he bowed himself from the room.
When he escorted her to the door some ten minutes later, Malvern said, “Let me know what you learn, Mrs. Adams. If you would,” he added, like a man recalling a phrase in a foreign tongue. “I’ll have the letters from Woodruff to-to my wife”—again he avoided calling her Mrs. Malvern—“sent over to you next week; I should like to read them myself again. You probably know as much as I do about—about my wife’s family—and in any case it is hard to see, after the lapse of nearly eight years, why someone from her past would choose to do violence against an innocent third party in her house.”
“I agree,” said Abigail quietly. “Yet the killer has to be someone she knows, and trusted.”
“Which doesn’t preclude Sam Adams or one of his ilk,” retorted Malvern grimly. “There!” he added. “That’s the three quarters striking! Ulee had best make a little speed, if you’re to be home when the Sabbath begins.”
Icy wind clawed them as he handed her down the step and into the chaise. Abigail had protested, while they’d waited for it, that the distance was barely five hundred yards to her own door, but in her heart she was grateful, as the glow of the vehicle’s lamps caught on flying spits of rain. “If he’s a few minutes late,” she replied, “I think we can argue, with our Lord, that it comes under the heading of pulling one’s ox from a pit. The Sabbath was made for Man, and not Man for the Sabbath.”
“Let me know what you learn,” he said. “And how I may help you find—Mrs. Malvern.”
Quietly, Abigail said, “I will.” But as the chaise rattled up King Street, Abigail reflected on how little she had learned, since she’d waked in the morning’s cold dawn. She had pulled no ox from any pit. And though a small part of her heart rejoiced at what she thought she had heard in Charles Malvern’s voice, she was well aware that she was no closer to knowing Rebecca’s whereabouts than she had been on Thursday morning, watching the Sons of Liberty mop Perdita Pentyre’s blood from Rebecca’s kitchen floor.
Eleven
Mrs. Adams
Mistress Lisette Droux will come to the kitchen of my house to meet you at four o’clock this afternoon, having no day but Sunday, to leave her master’s house. I hope and trust this meets with your approval?
I remain,
Your obedient humble etc.
Charles Malvern
“I suppose it isn’t to be hoped that Malvern could arrange an interview with Richard Pentyre,” remarked John, when Abigail handed him the note that had awaited them on the sideboard on their return from morning service.
“On the contrary, I suspect there’s a better chance of getting truth out of the maid than out of the master.” Abigail squatted to kiss Charley and Tommy, who generally had a hard time of it on Sabbath mornings while the rest of the family was at Meeting. Both John and Abigail subscribed to the belief that profane matters of the work-day week included weekday toys and games, something Tommy didn’t understand yet and Charley pretended not to. Like many children—Abigail included, at age three—he was deeply puzzled and resentful that God would require him to “sit still and be good” one day out of seven.
“Haven’t you told me, John, time and again, that eight murders out of ten turn out to be someone known to their victim?” She rose again to her feet, and spoke softly: oxen, pits, and Sabbath notwithstanding, it wasn’t a discussion she wanted small children to overhear. “In spite of the favors and business opportunities that accrued to Mr. Pentyre as a result of his wife’s affair with the commander of the British regiment, the fact remains that she was deceiving him, and doing so before the whole of the town.”
“And the fact remains that as a firm friend of the Crown, a cousin of our Governor through the Sellars and Oliver families, and a consignee for the East India Company’s tea monopoly, Pentyre had no real need of the Army’s favors,” returned John. “He had, on the other hand, numerous enemies.”
“Yet he lives.” Abigail hung her cloak on its peg, poured out water to wash her hands: The table for the cold and early Sabbath dinner had been set last night, the food prepared. At three the afternoon service would begin: Young Mr. Thaxter, John’s clerk, had agreed to come by with his mother to escort Pattie, Nabby, and Johnny back to the Meeting-House while John remained with the little ones and Abigail embarked on her un-Sabbathlike quest for information. “Why take such pains to lure his wife into a trap?”