Free The Ninth Daughter by Barbara Hamilton

John as he unfolded the slip of paper. “Mrs. Pentyre is indeed missing from her home. According to Lieutenant Coldstone, the stableman there says that Mrs. Pentyre took a light chaise out, fairly late in the evening, and its horse was found wandering loose on the Commons this morning. They’re dragging the Mill-Pond for the chaise.” He added drily, “I understand that if Richard Pentyre is unable to identify his wife’s body, Colonel Leslie knows it well enough to do so.”
    “It isn’t a matter for jest.” In a low voice Abigail recounted what she had found in Rebecca Malvern’s house that morning, and what she had done about it. “I could have beaten Sam with a broom handle for going through the place as he did,” she finished, as she tucked the chicken into its place in the pot. “The more so now, that any trace of evidence that it wasn’t you has been destroyed. I went to Malvern’s after we left Hazlitt’s printshop.”
    “You don’t think she’d have taken refuge with him?”
    Abigail shook her head. “No. I think she’d have taken refuge with Revere, or with us, or with Orion Hazlitt. But she didn’t.”
    John said, “ Hmmn .”
    “If she had,” Abigail went on slowly, drying her hands, “I wouldn’t put it past Malvern—I don’t think I’d put it past Malvern—to take her in, and then lock her up again, as he did before—”
    He glanced back at her from the note, which he was studying by the stronger light of the kitchen window. “You truly think he would do something like that?”
    Abigail hesitated. “I truly don’t know,” she said at last. “One hears of it—and not just in novels,” she added, seeing the corner of his mouth turn down. “He is—a man who will have his own way, no matter what he has to do to get it. Mostly, I wanted to speak with him before the Watch told him of the crime and Rebecca’s disappearance. I knew he’d see no one, afterwards.”
    “You’re probably right about that. And much as I hate to admit it, if Sam and the others hadn’t cleared up the scene I suppose Coldstone would have had grounds to arrest me for sedition this morning, instead of being put off with a thirty-pound bond.” At that point in Abigail’s narrative, he’d snatched off his wig and thrown it at the wall; it lay like a dead animal now on the sideboard near his hand. Without it, his face looked even rounder, his blue eyes more protuberant. His mouse brown hair, short-cropped, was graying, and Abigail had to suppress the urge to kiss the thin spots above his forehead. “You say Sam didn’t recognize Mrs. Pentyre? Or know about her?” He turned the note over in his fingers. “Did you take a close look at this?”
    She shook her head, set aside the dumplings she was making, and crossed to his side. “When he saw her body, he certainly didn’t have any candidates in mind. There can’t be that many wealthy women who were friends with Rebecca, who would have been using the code of the Sons.” Over his shoulder she studied the paper:
    The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia.
    And frowned. She dried her hands again, took from a drawer in the sideboard a much-scribbled sheet on which Nabby—with many blots and scratches—had been practicing the fiddling art of writing with a goose-quill. This she held up to John, her thumb at the topmost line, where Rebecca had written:
    All Things Work Together for the Good of Them that Love the Lord.
    “Is that the same handwriting?” she asked.
    John fished in his pocket for a magnifying lens, laid the two papers side by side.
    “The capitals are the same,” he said, after a long few minutes. “But look how the small o ’s and e ’s want to pinch, while Mrs. Malvern’s are naturally round. Not just one or two, but all of them. See there, where the in in Linnet blots and widens, where he’s tried to imitate that little swoop you see in the in in Things . The same on the downstrokes of the capital T ’s and L ’s: that forced