“You were born in Boston, weren’t you?”
Thaxter nodded. “Born and raised. And Lord, I don’t know how people live in the countryside—I mean out here, not in civilized places like Weymouth or Medford. I didn’t know places like that still existed.”
Abigail sighed. “They exist a good deal closer to Boston than Essex County. They’ve been feuding in Braintree for years over who got chosen for minister—families who used to be friends not speaking a civil word to one another—and there isn’t a county in New England, where a town hasn’t split itself off from its parent settlement, because part of the congregation doesn’t believe in precisely how the other part conceives salvation. Now with these new preachers coming through, these Evangelists, as they call them—this Awakening they speak of—it’s as if all the old arguments over who shall be saved and who damned are all being argued again.
“It wasn’t so long ago—I’ve talked to people who were children at the time—that grown men in Salem, leaders of the community, let themselves be scared like medieval peasants into killing twenty people, on the strength of accusations by a pack of spiteful girls. We think we’ve come so far toward Enlightenment and Reason, yet even in Boston, rational men who read the newspapers still think a Catholic woman is some kind of devil-worshiper, who would steal her husband’s money to give over to the Jesuits.”
The young man looked startled. “Well, with Catholics, that’s different,” he said. “I mean, they do have to do as their Pope tells them, whatever it is, don’t they?”
Abigail remembered Catherine Moore as a large, calm, good-looking woman in her late thirties whom she had met several times at the Brattle Street Meeting, walking behind Rebecca and Charles Malvern. Rebecca, Abigail recalled, had never asked her maid to carry either her cloak or her Bible, as so many wealthy ladies did. Odd, she thought, in one who had been waited on by slaves every day of her life. In the early days of the friendship Rebecca would always speak of Catherine’s unwavering loyalty in the gathering nightmare of spying and distrust that her marriage had become. Unless the friendship is extraordinary, Lisette Droux had said, it is too easy for confidence to turn into anger. And, I would rather be a good maid than a good friend. Catherine Moore, Abigail guessed, in the three years she had served Rebecca Malvern, had managed both.
The woman who came out of the dairy when Abigail and her escort rode into the yard at the Moore farm seemed to her, at first glimpse, to be the elder sister, or an aunt, of the woman she had known in those days. She stooped a little, and her face was weather-beaten; the few strands of hair visible beneath her cap were cinder gray. Only at second look did Abigail recognize her as Rebecca’s maid, by her soft little half smile. “Can I help you?” she asked, and the voice—which Abigail had only heard once or twice—was the same.
“Mistress Moore?” She let Thaxter help her from the saddle, her stout boots squishing in half-frozen muck. “I’m Mrs. Adams—”
“Of course!” Mistress Moore’s benevolence warmed to delight. “My lady’s friend. What brings you here to this”—her mouth quirked, half deprecating, half amused—“this wilderness?” And then, her dark eyes changing as she realized how great a distance her visitor had come on purpose, “My lady is all right, is she not? Tell me all is well.” As she said this another woman came out of the dairy behind her, probably just over twenty, Abigail guessed, but looking older, weather-beaten, and tired, with the rounded belly of midterm pregnancy.
“What is it—?”
“News of Rebecca,” said Catherine softly, and then glanced back at Abigail. “Isn’t it?”
Abigail said, “I’d hoped to find her here.”
Thirteen
Though it was only an hour or two past sunup, Catherine’s sister-in-law—her brother’s third wife—brought them into the big sand-floored keeping room of the log farmhouse, and cut bread and cheese, butter, and cold meat for them. “From all I’ve heard, those Gilead folk are as stingy with the Godless, as they call us, as they are with their own children. For the good of their souls, they’ll tell you,” she added with a sniff. “Sit you down, Mrs. Adams, and rest. You look like you’ve had a cold ride and no mistake.”
A crippled boy of perhaps fourteen—wizened and wasted as a little old man—who was working a spinning wheel next to the fire nodded a greeting to them, and added a few billets of wood to the blaze.
Catherine Moore’s face contracted in horror when Abigail spoke of what she’d found in Rebecca’s house Thursday morning. “Who would do such a thing? And why?”
Abigail shook her head. “ ’Tis what I’m trying to learn. ’Twasn’t a madman just wandered in from the street, we do know that,” she added. “The other woman—Mrs. Pentyre, a merchant’s young wife—was lured there, with a note forged in Rebecca’s hand . . . Rebecca didn’t know Mrs. Pentyre before Mrs. Pentyre’s marriage, did she? Her name would have been Parke in those days, Perdita Parke, of New York.”
Mistress Moore shook her head, baffled.
“I know she writes to you—she often speaks of how she treasures your letters. Was there anyone that she spoke of, any friend, any person to whom she might have gone for refuge? Or any name, any circumstance, that by any stretch of the imagination might be connected with what happened?”
Catherine sat for a moment, her head tilted to the side, thinking hard though the moment they had seated themselves her hands had taken up sewing on a child’s dress from out of her workbasket, automatically, as if no second must—or could—be left idle. “Nothing,” she said, and setting aside her work, went to the old-fashioned box-bed built into the wall near the great hearth. From the cupboard beneath it she brought out a lap desk, from which she took a packet of letters. “Mostly she wrote of her pupils, and their progress; of your kindness to her; of her labors at learning to cook and keep house, and that Tillet woman trying to turn her into a sewing-slave for her own profit. Once she wrote of her husband, and even then wouldn’t say a word against him.”
A look of wearied bitterness flickered in her eyes, swiftly put aside. What had Malvern said of her, Abigail wondered, that had made it impossible for her to find work as a maid in Boston?
Catherine went on, “She said she understood, how he would mistrust her, and blamed herself that he refused to give her any share of her father’s money. Myself,” she added grimly, “I blame that old skinflint, for along with ‘holding’ the income ‘in trust,’ he’s also lending and investing it at 2 percent, and would have been happy enough if she died, so the property would come to him outright and absolutely. Two thousand acres along the Chesapeake?” She sniffed. “He should have thanked her for keeping it in their family when he was too cheap to lay out for it, not punished her. To say nothing of saving her father from a life of beggary.”
She turned her face away, and pressed her hand to her lips, as if what Abigail had told her had only just begun to sink in. Abigail saw how her hand, once the fine deft hand of a quality lady’s maid, had grown brown, and rough with calluses, the fingers beginning to deform with arthritis.