He lifted his head and his green eyes flashed sudden fire. “Other than that brute of a husband, you mean? The swine had the temerity to write to Tillet, threatening to bring him to law for ‘harboring a harlot,’ as he called her, and ‘operating a house of ill fame.’ If ever there was a case of God’s hand being needed in mortal affairs—” He broke off, and turned his face away, his breath coming fast and a stain of angry crimson flushing his cheekbone.
“Without the hand of the Lord, no mortal affair can prosper.” Mrs. Hazlitt raised her head, her fingers tightening around those of her son. “All our deeds are in vain, unless God guide us by his strong hand, and only through the hand of the Lord lies our salvation.”
“Harlot or no harlot,” said Revere, “I’d give much to be there when the Watch tells old Malvern his wife’s gone missing. And under such circumstances as these.”
“Good God, man,” cried Warren, “you’re not thinking Malvern had aught to do with—”
“I’m not thinking anything,” retorted the silversmith lazily. “But after all the spite and venom he’s poured forth to anyone who’ll listen these past three years, I’d be curious to see how he takes it.”
How indeed? Abigail followed the men back into the shop. Sam was still fretting about the missing “Household Expenses” book, demanding of Orion where Rebecca would have gone, if not to the Tillets or Revere, to the Adams house or the printshop—? Little enough chance I’ll have to even speak to him, once the Watch has given him the news . . .
Great Heavens, surely they wouldn’t detain him?
What is it John said, that of all murders done, the culprit is usually known to the victim? Would the Watch be such fools as to think that—as the missing woman’s estranged husband—Charles Malvern had had anything to do with such a crime? She recalled the little merchant’s anger-crimsoned face, when last she’d seen him, those cold eyes like gray buckshot . . .
“Are you coming, Mrs. Adams?” Sam opened the shop door for her. “We need you to discover the body, and summon the Watch.”
Something in Sam’s briskness—or perhaps only his preoccupation with his precious book of contacts—raised the hackles on her neck as it had in Rebecca’s kitchen earlier. She stepped back from him, pulled her scarf more tightly around her throat. “Discover it yourself, Sam,” she said briefly. “I think I need to pay a visit to Rebecca’s husband, and tell him that his wife has vanished—and see if he has aught to say, about where she might have gone.”
Five
He hounds me. Rebecca had wiped her eyes as she’d said it, on an evening in summer—the summer before last, one afternoon when Rebecca had crossed the bay to Braintree with some of Abigail’s Smith cousins, and they’d spent the day in the summer tasks of threading leather britches beans to dry, and bottling blackberries from the woods behind the orchard. Abigail had been heavy yet again with child—baby Tommy, old enough now to stagger sturdily about the kitchen. Walking swiftly through the market, thrusting guilt from her heart as she would have brushed falling rain from her face, Abigail earnestly hoped that Pattie—the fourteen-year-old farm-girl who’d lived with the family since their return to Boston a year ago—was keeping an eye on him . . . on Charley, too. There were simply too many things a pair of enterprising little boys could get into, in a kitchen on a freezing day.
He hounds me. He has always considered me his property, like his horses or the corn in his ships. He questions the servants about everything I do, he opens and reads my letters, he demands accounting of every penny I spend and he has imprisoned me under lock and key as if I were a disobedient child. Yet he has said, he will not let me go.
And Orion Hazlitt had cried: If ever there was a case of God’s hand being needed in mortal affairs—
Abigail shook her head, her heart aching at the desperation in the young man’s voice.
The clock in the brick turret of Faneuil Hall chimed ten thirty. Abigail drew her skirts aside from barrows of country apples, wet from the rain. Pens of sheep blocked her way; crates of fish, drying now and several hours out of the sea: By the time I can do my marketing they’ll be stale, and the best will be gone . . .
But her steps did not pause. If I am to see him at all, I must see him first. Before the Watch.
Her mind chased Rebecca’s voice back along a corridor of memory.
They’re spying on me. I know they’re spying on me. All except Catherine—my maid—and he has the other servants spy on her. I dread he’ll send her away, and get some creature of his own, like that horrid Mrs. Jewkes in Pamela. That had been earlier, before she’d left Charles Malvern’s house: only weeks after she and Abigail had first met. When she’d wept then, the lace border of her handkerchief had been wider than the linen it surrounded.
I used to laugh at Pamela, but I swear I feel like that wretched ninny these days. Rebecca had never had much use for Abigail’s favorite novel, or its saintly heroine. He actually did lock me up, for nearly a week. He’s said he will again, if he hears I’ve come here to see you. “I will not be defied in my own house,” he says. The servants seemed to think nothing of it. And no one will help, because like Pamela’s Mr. B, he can hurt them in their pocketbooks—
And it was true, Abigail knew, that the innkeeper from whom Rebecca had first rented chambers in October of ’70 had been nearly driven out of business by the prices Malvern and his network of merchant cronies had demanded of him for victuals and wood. The same thing had happened to the second room she had rented, early in the summer of ’72. The Adamses had returned to Braintree by then and Abigail had asked her to move into the crowded little farmhouse, but again Rebecca had refused. I can’t live with you and John forever, she’d said, but Abigail had been aware at the time that Charles Malvern’s youngest child, four-year-old Nathan, had been ill. Though Rebecca was estranged from her little stepson’s father, still she would not leave Boston. She had found the little house behind the Tillets’—who loathed Malvern over the politics of their respective congregations—but by what Orion had just told her, Malvern had not ceased his efforts to make his estranged wife’s life as difficult as possible.
And then, thought Abigail, as she turned into the waterfront bustle of Merchants’ Row, there was the matter of Rebecca’s father’s will.
It was the last occasion upon which she—or as far as she knew, Rebecca—had seen Charles Malvern, except to catch a glimpse of him across the sanctuary of the Brattle Street Meeting-House.