The Schoolmaster's Daughter by John Smolens

Author:John Smolens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus

XIV

Hunger and Other Carnal Afflictions

AFTER ABIGAIL LEFT, BENJAMIN AND MARIAH REMAINED sitting in the dooryard.

“Thank you for arranging that,” he whispered.

“You know what this means?”

He did, but he didn’t say anything.

“You’ll be away, again. She’ll talk to your brother—they’ll get you out of Boston.”

“Perhaps,” he said.

“I will be alone here. I fear that more than anything.”

“I’ll return, Mariah.”

“This will go on and on. You get out, no knowing when you return.”

“You could leave Boston, too.”

“I could. Maybe I should. But this is my father’s house.” He could barely see her in the dark. “I cannot just leave it.” Her voice was quivering. “It is not so easy for me, what with my father just dying.”

“There’s something else,” he said. “Isn’t there?”

She turned her head away, and then said, “How’s your knee?”

“Better, much better.”

She got up and came to him, gently sitting on his lap. “How’s that?”

“It’s fine.”

She hugged him tightly, her cheek pressed against the side of his head, and he could feel the warmth coming off her skin, which always smelled faintly of salt from the harbor.

As they walked beneath a streetlamp, Abigail got a look at Molly Collins’s face. She wasn’t yet twenty, boyishly slender in the hips, but with a powdered bosom that was pushed up so that it seemed on the verge of spilling out of her bodice. Black kohl was smeared around the eyes, which made the whites seem large and protuberant, as though she were in a state of high expectation. Her mouth was painted, full, beckoning, and there was a tiny scar running at an angle down from the corner of her lower lip. She’d already lost some teeth and when she spoke there was a slight whistle about the S’s.

Boston was full of prostitutes and since her youth Abigail had been fascinated by them. She was warned, of course, to avoid them, but often she and her friends used to follow such women through the streets, dispersing only after they had been treated to a barrage of foul language, accompanied by hurled stones and dirt. Her friends liked to taunt them, but Abigail always found them as sad as they were interesting.

“There’s a soldier wants to talk to you,” Molly said. “Name’s Lumley.”

“You know him, and you knew Munroe.”

“I know me lots of men. Soldiers, sailors, and not a few that parade about in a coach-’n’-four with fine liveried footmen.”

They were heading toward the waterfront, until Molly took Abigail’s sleeve and led her down an alley. “These patrols, you know. In my profession you learn that they move like clockwork. This way we’ll avoid one that come up from Long Wharf this time of night.” She walked quickly but with a slight limp, and there was the sound of her toe dragging along the cobblestones.

“’Ere we ahh,” she said cheerfully.

She led Abigail up a narrow set of stairs that groaned under their weight, until they came to a door, which she opened with a key. Inside, the room was lit by one dim lantern and the air reeked of perfume and unwashed clothes.

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