“Why would Malvern’s daughter bribe servants to murder Mrs. Pentyre’s dog?” John’s face was somber as he picked up Tommy and carried him to the table, where the other children were already taking their places. “There is such a thing as vindictiveness in the world, Portia. I don’t suppose, in your conversation with the Malvern servants last night, that you asked after their master’s whereabouts on Wednesday night?”
Abigail stared at him, taken aback. “He would not—”
“And I would not,” said John. “And yet, someone did.”
Lisette Droux was a tiny, dark-haired Frenchwoman in her thirties, with buck teeth and a complexion so pitted by smallpox as to defeat the eye of any but the most willing of suitors. She rose and curtseyed as Scipio showed Abigail into the Malvern kitchen.
“Madame.”
“Mistress Droux.” A small fire burned on the hearth and warmed the big room, but the neatly stacked dishes, the absence of pans or cooking smells, told her that Charles Malvern held to the Puritan way beneath his own roof. The fire—and the kettle bubbling softly over it—were concessions to Tamar’s more fashionable cravings for tea and comforts: Abigail noticed Scipio had provided tea for the maidservant as well. “Did Miss Connelley tell you anything of what I wish to ask you about?”
“No, Madame.” At Abigail’s gestured invitation, she seated herself on the other side of the table. “Nor would I believe that Irish cocotte if she told me the sun rose in the East. But Scipio tells me you are a friend of the woman in whose house Mrs. Pentyre met her death, the woman who has now disappeared: fled, he says, and perhaps in fear for her life. And since this imbecile from the office of the Provost Marshal seems to think of nothing but that there is a political conspiracy to murder both M’sieu and Madame over this question of tea—”
Abigail said, “What?” and the woman raised her dark, straight brows.
“The imbecile,” she explained. “With the pale face and the little nose like a girl’s.” Her own was a noble organ; had her uneasy shock at this confirmation of Coldstone’s inquiries been less, Abigail would have smiled at the description of her adversary’s dainty features. “He asked, did anyone follow Madame, did anyone hide themselves about the stables while Gerald was taking out the chaise for her, did she receive letters threatening her life from such a one, or such a one—”
“Which such-ones?” asked Abigail. “Do you recall any names?”
The maidservant considered the matter, with aloof dis passion that seemed to be native to her. It was difficult to tell whether her dark bombazine dress was intended to constitute mourning for her mistress; Abigail was inclined to think not. “Son of Liberty,” Lisette said at length, pronouncing the words with care. “That was one. Mohawk was another he asked after; and Adam. And Novanglus—that is Latin for . . .”
“New Englander,” Abigail finished softly. “Yes, I know.” Adam. Or Adams? A mistake would be easy. Mohawk, Son of Liberty, and Novanglus were all names under which John had written pamphlets and articles for the Gazette and the Spy.
“It is politics.” Lisette shrugged. “It is nothing. One does not do murder over politics. You must take tea, Madame, or coffee if you will—”
Scipio brought a small pot over to the table, and a cup. Abigail in fact found coffee’s bitterness unpleasant and cursed the Crown for its tax that had pushed the colony into a boycott of her favorite comforter in the late afternoons, but knew she had to accustom herself to drink the stuff. In Malvern’s respectable house there was no hope that the tea had been smuggled in by the Dutch, tax-free.
“How long had you been in Madame Pentyre’s employment?”
“Three years, Madame. I was taken on at the time of her marriage. These pamphlets, these Sons of Liberty”—she made a very Gallic gesture with one hand—“When first she married M’sieu Pentyre, my lady read them all, these pamphlets. She would stamp her pretty foot and fling up her hands, so! and shake her hair about. She had lovely hair.” A trace of sadness came into her voice, like a woman mourning the loss of some particularly fine roses in a childhood home. “And she would call M’sieu a Tory and a dish-licking dog. M’sieu would laugh, and kiss her, and she would be wild with indignation, and storm away out of the house . . . She was very young, Madame. When M’sieu learned that she had fallen in love with Colonel Leslie, and become his mistress, how he laughed! ‘All it takes is a red coat after all,’ he says, and she colors up, and pouts, but we hear no more about the Sons of Liberty.”
So much, reflected Abigail, for The Husband’s Revenge. “And when was this?”
“Almost a year, Madame. They become lovers at the New Year, at a ball at the house of the Governor, in the pantry where the silverware is cleaned. I found some of the cleaning-sand in her petticoat-lace afterwards. But since first she is introduced to him, in the summer at a picnic in honor of the officers of the regiment, she has—what is the word? She has set her hat in his direction.”
“Did she love him?” asked Abigail. “Or he her?”
One corner of that wry little mouth turned down: Eh, bien, what will these Americans think next? “Oh. Madame. He was quite fond of her—men usually are, if a good-looking woman will consent to go to bed with them. I have heard he is genuinely grieved, and swears that he will hang every Son of Liberty in the colony for the crime. But she—” Lisette shrugged again. “He is the second son of a Scots Earl. Myself, I think my lady was jealous. It was not a month before, that M’sieu took a mistress for himself—”
Abigail tried hard not to look shocked.
“And though he was just as generous to her as he had been before, as I say, she is—she was—very young.”
Abigail closed her eyes briefly, seeing—as if with the memory of a nightmare—the blood-engorged face, the bitten shoulders and neck. So distorted had the features been by the blood pooling in the tissues it would have been hard to tell the woman’s age. But it was very much a young girl’s trick, to throw herself at the commander of the occupying troops—a man of power, moderately good-looking, and, as Mademoiselle Droux had pointed out, an Earl’s second son. To seduce him with her gay youth, with her beautiful hair: telling herself that her adventure was for her country’s sake, like the heroine of a play. Yes. She had been very young.
“How old was she?”
“Seventeen, Madame, when she married M’sieu Pentyre. She was twenty when she died.”
Abigail drew in a breath, and let it out, thinking about that very young girl. Had it been her husband taking a mistress, that had determined her on revenge? Yesterday morning, rereading Rebecca’s letters, she had found several accounts of trips to Castle Island, in quest of pamphlet-worthy gossip at the camp. Perdita Pentyre would have seen in her first a kindred spirit, then a link with the Sons of Liberty themselves, the organization whose writings she read with such eagerness. M’sieu would laugh, and kiss her, and she would be wild with indignation, and storm away out of the house . . .