Abigail slowed her steps as she passed the Malvern countinghouse, at the head of his wharf. Not a grand wharf, like Hancock’s, or the marvel of the Long Wharf that stretched half a mile out to sea, but big enough to serve either of Malvern’s oceangoing brigs. The Fair Althea stood in port, named for the woman Abigail suspected its owner had never forgiven Rebecca for replacing. Malvern had rebuilt the countinghouse at the wharf’s head, on the site of his grandfather’s original modest structure: two and a half stories of solid Maine timber, with a warehouse behind it for muslins and calicoes, tool-steel and paint.
The tide was out. The sloping shingle below street level was dotted with heaped boxes, rough drays, coils of rope, and wet-dark cargo nets spread to dry. At the nearby Woodman’s Wharf a vessel was loading with kegs of what smelled like potash, stevedores shouting to one another as they worked. Beyond lay the leafless forest of bobbing masts, and the cold air muttered with the creak of ropes, the endless soft knocking of pulley blocks against the mast-wood. The world smelled of seaweed and wet rope. Wind smote her, but it was not colder than Charles Malvern’s wrinkled angry countenance and pale eyes, when last she, and Rebecca, and John had stood before him.
“By the terms of James Woodruff’s will, I am executor of that property.” Malvern had spoken to John, not to Rebecca, his square brown hands folded ungivingly on his desk. The merchant was even shorter than John, and though now in his midfifties, and wiry in build, gave an impression of tremendous, almost threatening, physical strength. His merchant father had sent him to sea in his youth, and he retained the hardness of a man who has had to impose his will by force on other men in order to survive. “It was made over to me as Rebecca’s husband—”
She heard the pause before her friend’s name, heard in that harsh cracked voice the refusal to call her Mrs. Malvern . Mrs. Malvern was and forever would be the woman he had lost.
“—and she has but to give over her present mode of life, to regain its use. To hand property to a woman who has forsaken her husband to live upon the town would do neither her nor the community any service, and would provide the worst sort of example.”
“To whom, sir?” demanded Abigail hotly. “To other wives who find it not to their taste to have communications with their families forbidden? Who don’t care to be imprisoned like felons for weeks at a time or to have their books burned and rooms searched?”
“Precisely, Madame,” Malvern had replied. “If my wife cannot tolerate my attempts to better her, but would flee the lesson like a fractious child, then shame upon her as well as upon myself. If I keep watch upon her it is because she has lied to me, both about her faith and about the conduct of my first wife’s children, to whom she has shown nothing but dissembled hatred since first she entered my house. I defy the law, or any man of business, to fault me in separating her from her family, after she has robbed me and given the money to them—to purchase the property whose income she now claims as her own.”
“That is not true!” Rebecca rose, stepped to the desk before which John already stood. It had been early December, as bleak as it was today, and with the smell of snow in the air. Abigail recalled, as much as the interview itself, how cramped and stuffy the little office had felt, and how intrusive had been the noise of the wharves and the street outside, after a year and a half of the farm’s slow-paced peace. “That land was my father’s,” Rebecca said. “And his father’s, before that—”
“Which would have been sold to pay your father’s debts,” responded Malvern, “had you not helped yourself to the household money entrusted to you, and pledged my good name in a loan, to salvage it. And if your client”—here he had turned his bitter pale eyes back to John—“wishes those facts to be aired at large before the General Court of the colony, along with her father’s will, which clearly places the property in my hands in trust for her as my wife, I will certainly oblige her and you, Mr. Adams, by so doing. In the meantime she has but to return to my roof, to fulfill her own portion of a contract of which she is now in violation.”
Tears glittering sharply in her brown eyes, Rebecca had said, “I would sooner take up my abode in Hell.”
The following week, Abigail recalled, two clients—both merchants connected with Malvern—had withdrawn their business from John, even as John had lost half a dozen during the months that Rebecca had lived beneath their roof.
The Malvern house, like the countinghouse, was solid. Modest in its way, it had clearly been built to proclaim the extent to which God had favored the endeavors of the family. Three stories high, it was fashioned of both timber and bricks, and kept the old diamond-glass windows of an earlier day. As Abigail approached it a carriage was brought to its door, and the two surviving Malvern children emerged, followed by a black manservant and Miss Malvern’s plump, giggling maid. They lie about me to their father, Rebecca had whispered desperately. They carry tales—terrible things!—and he believes them . . .
And what parent would take the word of a new young wife, before that of his own daughter and son?
Jeffrey must be twenty now. From the opposite side of King Street Abigail watched them. Rebecca had written to her that the young man had begun at Harvard. Taller than his father, he favored the first Mrs. Malvern’s pale beauty, especially when he threw back his head and laughed at one of the maid’s flirtatious sallies. Mistress Tamar Malvern tapped her brother sharply on the sleeve with her fan, but laughed as well. From a sharp-faced little vixen of eleven when her father had married Rebecca, she had grown into a lovely peaches-and-cream brunette, with the air of a girl who is quite aware that men swoon at her feet. Neither gave the manservant so much as a glance as he opened the carriage door for them. The servant stepped back sharply to avoid being splashed as the carriage pulled away.
“Mrs. Adams.” He saw her across the street and smiled, teeth very white in a fine-boned ebony face. His name, Abigail recalled, was Scipio; he’d greet her with his sunny smile at the Brattle Street Meeting, if he was sure his master wasn’t looking. Sure enough, he glanced back at the house as if to make sure he was unobserved before crossing to her. “Are you well, m’am? And Mrs. Malvern: Is all well with her?”
“No,” said Abigail softly. “I am sorry to say a shocking thing has happened, and I was coming now, to let your master know of it. As far as I know she’s all right,” she added, seeing how the man’s eyes widened with alarm. “It wouldn’t be right to tell you details before I’ve spoken to him—”
“No, of course not.” He collected himself quickly, hastened ahead of her, to open the house door. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”
No fire burned in the grate of the book-room where he left her, though there were Turkey carpets on the brick floor. Charles Malvern was not a man to heat rooms when they were not in use. A portrait of the Fair Althea hung on the wall, very like Jeffrey but with kindliness rather than wit in her smile. Beside it hung a painting of Tamar, done recently, where once Rebecca’s pen-sketch of little Nathan had been displayed: the child whose birth had cost his mother her life. Abigail remembered that Nathan had been fascinated with it, had sat, too, looking up at the likeness of the mother he had never seen. The sketch was gone. Abigail wondered whether Malvern had disposed of it when Rebecca had left, or after the boy had died.