The Ninth Daughter - By Barbara Hamilton Page 0,32
door on a rainy night. Names Abigail recalled only vaguely, and sought now, in the letters, grimly fighting the temptation to linger on the memories they stirred.
Her anger came back to her, reading of how Charles Malvern had harried her from first one set of chambers and then another; the sadness and pity, at that letter when Rebecca spoke of Orion Hazlitt’s growing love for her; grief at the account of little Nathan Malvern’s death. And like a mirror in her friend’s words, the recollection of her own days on the farm, with John’s two brothers and their wives and children, John’s indomitable little mother and her easygoing second husband . . . No lying jealousies about stepparents there.
It was well and truly eight o’clock before she set out for the market. Coincidentally, just about the time the Tillet cook Queenie—in Abigail’s mind one of the laziest women in New England—generally made her appearance there.
“Wait your turn, you pushy slattern!” the stout little woman shrilled at a young housemaid who was trying to get past her to a golden heap of pears. “The nerve of some people!” she added, loudly, as Abigail came up beside her. “Think they own the market—not that these nasty things have any more juice to them than ninepins, or flavor either. And a penny the slut wants for two of them! Why would anyone want two of the things, or one either—don’t you pay her prices, Mrs. Adams, I refuse to stand by and let a good woman be cheated.” She dragged Abigail away. “What Mrs. T will say sweetening the fruit, with sugar at three shillings for a loaf, and blaming me that there’s nothing fit for the family to eat—”
“How horrible for you,” sympathized Abigail warmly, “after the shocking day you had Thursday! I had meant to come yesterday, to see how you did—and I confess I’m astonished you were not felled by it all!—but that vain, arrogant officer dared to come and order John to go out to the camp, only because he was Mrs. Malvern’s lawyer—”
“Oh, my dear, you don’t know,” gasped Queenie. “You can’t know how things have been since then! That horrible Lieutenant Coldstone, and those dreadful soldiers, asking me if I’d heard anything in the middle of the night—What would I have heard, sleeping as I do in the west attic and the whole house locked up, and at midnight, too?—and Mrs. Tillet coming home in the midst of it all, and such a row there was, with all the luggage brought in, I swear my head was pounding fit to split! You know the headaches I get—”
“Oh, dear, yes!” agreed Abigail, having been treated to minute descriptions of every single headache whenever she came to call on Rebecca over the course of the past year. If Nehemiah Tillet had a habit of dropping in on his tenant to advise her on how best to arrange the wood in her fireplace, and Mrs. Tillet was constantly in and out of Rebecca’s little house to bring shirts for Rebecca to sew and errands for her husband that could not be put off, Queenie was just as intrusive, crossing the yard a dozen times in the course of preparing dinner, with items of gossip, complaints about her health and the ill treatment she was obliged to endure, or simply queries: Who was that who was just here? Is he a gentleman friend of yours? Don’t think I didn’t see Mrs. Wallace coming to call on you—is it true she’s a spendthrift who has nearly bankrupted her husband . . . ?
But when Abigail interrupted the catalog of further symptoms to ask, was there anyone Rebecca had spoken of, to whom she might have fled, the cook only bristled, and snapped, “Belike she’s run off with her man—after all her talk of how she’s pure as driven snow—”
“Her man?” asked Abigail, startled. “Not Mr. Hazlitt—”
“As if her sort stops at one.” Queenie sniffed. “The one she let in through her parlor window from the alley.”
“Did you see him? Was this at midnight? It could have been—”
The protuberant brown eyes shifted suddenly, and Queenie said, “No, of course not! That is, it wasn’t at midnight—What would I have been doing in the alley at midnight? It wasn’t Wednesday night at all. I mean to say, I’ve seen her do so at other times, many other times, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it, too!” she added defensively. “What I mean to say