The Ninth Daughter - By Barbara Hamilton Page 0,25
to follow her. He did not, and as the door closed behind her she heard his voice, quick and low, “You must excuse her . . . overwrought . . . closest of friends . . .” She was within an ace of turning back and asking how dared he take their side against her, but was too angry even for that. She strode as far as the corner of Cross Street, then stopped, her temper ebbing and leaving her feeling cold and rather drained.
A few moments later she heard John’s step on the cobbles. In a marveling voice, he murmured, “You’ve never withheld the benefit of the doubt?”
“Only from those who don’t deserve it,” she retorted. Then, blushed. “Thank you for covering my retreat. The woman never fails to enrage me, and I won’t say my words were uncalled-for because they were called-for . . . but I would shake poor Nabby to pieces if she’d said them. I don’t know what got into me. I must go back and apologize . . .”
“If you make the attempt I shall put you over my shoulder and carry you bodily home.” John took her elbow, guided her firmly in the direction of Queen Street. “I stayed only to keep Mrs. Tillet from following you into the street and pulling your hair out. Send her a note tomorrow, when she’ll have cooled down—except that I don’t think she ever cools down. As to what got into you,” he added grimly, “after this morning’s events, I’m astonished you’re not in bed with the vapors. I asked if I could come next week and collect Rebecca’s things—”
“You can’t let her—” Furious, she tried to turn back, and John’s hand tightened on her arm.
“I can’t very well stop her from doing what she is determined to do. What I can do is keep her from selling them at a slopshop. She said she’d have them ready for me.”
“After taking out what she considers she’s entitled to in payment of rent,” Abigail grumbled. “Secure in the knowledge that with so many strangers tramping through, the absence of this little thing or that, can be blamed on others and not herself. Who will miss a trifle?”
“If Rebecca returns safe to miss them,” replied John, “I shall be on my knees, giving thanks to God. Now come home and rest.”
A bigail wasn’t certain she would be able to close her eyes, after what she had seen that morning, and the anxiety about Rebecca’s possible whereabouts that gnawed her; nor was she entirely willing to make the experiment. Finding Pattie still (at three in the afternoon!) cleaning grates and emptying ashes—with the enthusiastic help of Nabby and Johnny, who were seldom permitted to get themselves that dirty—Abigail would have changed her dress to help her: “If you don’t lie down on your bed and be quiet I shall dose you with laudanum and oblige you to be quiet,” John threatened. Then, seeing her uncertain face, he added so softly that only she could hear, “I shall stay there with you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I have briefs to read. What I should have done this morning—and, God help me, what I should be doing tomorrow morning when I’ll be out at the British camp.”
So Abigail rested, and found herself, as she had feared, back in Rebecca’s house, climbing the dark stairs with the stink of blood all around her; hearing Rebecca sobbing in her bedroom, with the door tied shut, and horrible sounds drifting up from the floor below. But when she unraveled the knotted clothes-rope, and got the door open, Rebecca’s bed was empty, and instead of that tiny blood-spot on the pillow, the whole of the counterpane was soaked with gore.
Dinner over—dishes washed, pots scoured, scouring-sand swept up from the floor, floor washed, Tommy prevented from falling into the fire—Abigail wrapped up a few pieces of chicken and the extra potatoes she had cooked, added half a loaf of bread and a small crock of butter, and carried this meal to Hanover Street in her marketing basket for Orion Hazlitt. As she’d suspected she would, she found the shop shuttered and the young printer, haggard and distracted, in the keeping room, trying to get his mother to drink another glass of laudanum and water.
“You remember how we used to play in the marshes?” Mrs. Hazlitt murmured sleepily. “You’d pick daisies and mallows, and we’d make long strings of them, you and I . . . We’d both come