The Ninth Daughter - By Barbara Hamilton Page 0,101
through it to its rear door and into the yard. Though she was tempted to investigate Rebecca’s house—closed-up and forlorn near the locked alley gate—she made her way instead to the kitchen, where Queenie was as usual sitting at her ease at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea.
“Mrs. Adams!” She sprang to her feet and looked immediately—her face contracted with guilt—at the tray that rested on the other end of the table. Wicker—like everything else in the kitchen rather battered and grimed and clearly picked up secondhand from someplace else—and bearing a pottery pitcher of water, and a pottery plate on which lay one slice of bread, rimed with the barest film of butter. Beside it sat an enormous basket, stacked with cut and folded packets of muslin and calico: the component parts of shirts.
“My dear, I’ve been sick with worry over you!” cried Abigail. “I was afraid you were ill, knowing how sensitive your system is to horrors and strain!”
“If only you knew the whole!” groaned Queenie, and passed her wrist over her sweatless brow, with the air of an enslaved Child of Israel stealing momentary respite from the task of building the Great Pyramid single-handedly. “I know not where ’twill end! And Mrs. Tillet is like a woman possessed!”
“How is this?” Abigail dropped, unasked, into the other rush-bottomed chair and puckered her brow in earnest readiness to listen to whatever Queenie had to say—noting, as she did so, that the teacup Queenie was drinking out of was one that she, Abigail, had given Rebecca. Though Nehemiah Tillet had on Monday dropped a small box containing “Mrs. Malvern’s things,” a glance at the sideboard told her that the Tillets had in fact appropriated plates, glasses, and silverware—anything expensive or of good quality—for their own.
“I have warned her,” cried Queenie, shaking her head and pouring Abigail some tea. “She will not listen! Not to me nor to anyone! No good will come of it—”
“Of what, for Heaven’s sake?” She took care to make herself sound profoundly concerned and not ready to grab Queenie by the shoulders and shake the information out of her.
“And the whole thing is simply shredding my nerves, Mrs. Adams! From the moment Mr. Revere shouted to me to come—”
So that’s how they did it—
“There has not been a moment, when I have been free of migraine, or palpitations of the heart, or the sweats . . . Feel my forehead, if you don’t believe me, Mrs. Adams! Last night I could not get a wink of sleep, not one single wink, and what it’s done to my digestion I daren’t think! My husband was the same way, all nerves, poor soul . . . Of course I was stronger then—”
“You have always inspired me with your strength, Mrs. Queensboro,” affirmed Abigail desperately, knowing Mrs. Tillet was not a woman to linger in the marketplace.
“No more.” Queenie shook her head, and raised a sigh so piteous and profound that—as Shakespeare had said—it seemed to shatter all her considerable bulk. “No more. Not since his death, taken as he was in the flower of his prime . . . I have never been the same, you know . . .”
“What is it that she’s done?” asked Abigail, throwing caution to the winds. “Surely she isn’t making you, on top of all else that you have to do to run this household, sew those wretched shirts that she charges the customers seven shillings for?”
And she cast a meaningful eye toward the basket.
“Alas, if it were only that!” Queenie pressed a hand to her eyes. “Even with my migraines, that I get from doing close work—and even the smallest effort at it will set me off for days—”
Heavy footfalls shook the parlor floorboards. Had she not known the yard gate was locked, Abigail would have made a smiling excuse and taken her leave at that point, but she knew she was cornered. She turned toward the parlor door with an expression of pleasure. “Why, Mrs. Tillet—”
“Mrs. Adams.” The linendraper’s wife filled the doorway like the Minotaur emerging from its cave. “To what do we owe this visit?”
“I’m terribly sorry to intrude, m’am, but I was in the neighborhood and Mr. Adams had asked me, about a volume of Tacitus he had lent to Mrs. Malvern some weeks ago. It was not among the things you so kindly sent; I had wondered if by chance it had been mistakenly set aside?”