Sup with the Devil Page 3

  He must somehow get to Oxford, she thought, listening to his brief preamble. Here, we can do nothing for him, and ’twere shame to waste so mighty—if odd—a gift.

  “I have something of a reputation here in Cambridge,” he continued shyly. “I can only attribute it to that, that Mrs. Lake sent me up a message last Tuesday—the nineteenth—asking me to meet her at the Crowned Pig on the Waterford Road and enclosing these letters from Mr. Adams and Uncle Mercer.”

  “Why the clandestine meeting?” asked Abigail. “Didn’t that seem amiss to you?”

  “Not really.” The boy blushed redder. “Perhaps it should have, but one can be fined, you know, quite severely, for having anything to do with a woman—not yourself, of course, m’am, being family . . . But it’s not unusual for care to be taken even in quite innocent meetings. I didn’t think anything of it.”

  Remind me to keep you locked in your room if ever the Navy press gang comes to town.

  The Crowned Pig was a tavern about a half mile beyond the last of the handsome mansions of the town, mansions built by the wealthy merchant families who—by staying in the good graces of the Governors and obtaining the best political appointments—ruled Massachusetts. Mrs. Lake proved to be a beautiful woman a few years older than Abigail herself—Horace estimated—who asked him, was it true he could read Arabic? Horace said that he could, whereupon the lady offered him twenty pounds to come with her in her carriage and do a job of translation from that language.

  “What did she look like?” asked Abigail, adding—when her nephew merely looked confused by the question—“Other than beautiful. What color was her hair?”

  “Dark. Brown, I think, not black like a Spaniard’s.”

  “Eyes?” Of course he didn’t look her in the eyes . . . “Nose large or small? How was she dressed?”

  “Like a lady,” said the boy promptly, but that was the best he could do—not unusual, reflected Abigail. Most men she knew—with the exception of John and her friend the silversmith Paul Revere—could attest to whether a woman was naked or clothed, but were left blank by distinctions between a round gown or a jacket and skirt. Much less could they say whether the said garments were blue or green, wool or calico, English-cut or sacque like the French. At least “like a lady” could be interpreted to mean not, for instance, in the bodiceand-skirt of a tavern-wench or a farm-girl’s faded linseywoolsey hand-me-downs.

  Something a woman couldn’t get into without the assistance of her maid.

  And Mrs. Lake had a carriage, a closed post chaise driven by a groom, in which she and Horace rode for some two hours before descending to what—by Horace’s rather sketchy description—sounded like a well-to-do farmstead, a brown wooden house of two storeys set some half mile back from the road.

  “The groom took the team around to the stable in the rear of the house when we descended,” said Horace. “I noticed him particularly, because his face was scarred—” With two fingers he touched his hairline and drew them down across his left eyelid, until they converged at a point an inch or so above the right-hand corner of his mouth. “And his eyes were so light, a very pale blue under extremely dark brows. He looked like a rough man—a veritable beast—and I found myself hoping Mrs. Lake would accompany me back as far as Cambridge. Perhaps I should have been more cautious,” he added unhappily, “but twenty pounds is a great deal of money—enough to pay for my board and room here for next year.”

  “Clausum possidet arca Iovem,” sympathized Abigail. “And did she indeed have a document in Arabic, of all things, which needed translation?”

  For some reason Horace’s blush flared again, and he answered—his voice a little stifled—“Yes. And it was curious,” he added, puzzlement returning him to some of his composure, “because it had clearly been copied by someone who didn’t know Arabic—by someone who didn’t even know that Arabic is written right-to-left, not left-to-right. I could tell by the way the letters were drawn. Even at first glance I asked where she had copied this from—because I’m always looking out for Arabic texts, you understand, and she said, ‘Never you mind.’ She sat me down with the text—it was about two pages long—and pen and ink, at the table in the study of this house, where the light was good, and the whole time I worked, she sat in a corner, watching me and playing patience—”

  “Playing patience?” The solitary card game was an interesting choice, Abigail thought, for a lady—though of course there were plenty of ladies of the highest degree who hadn’t the wits to read nor the domestic virtue to sew . . . a task that Abigail herself hated.

  “Yes, m’am.”

  “And you translated this document?”

  “Yes, m’am.” His cheekbones had now gone a fiery pink. “Her message asked me to bring my Arabic lexicon, which I had.”

  “And what on earth was it, to put you so to the blush?”

  Horace avoided meeting her eyes. “It was an account—quite—er—Petronian—of an . . . an encounter between Governor Morgan and a female pirate named Jezebel Pitts, which was supposed to have taken place in May of 1688 in Port Royal. It was written not in Arabic, but in English using Arabic characters, as a sort of code-writing, and contained passages that would have been better suited to have been translated into Latin . . .”

  “Good grief!”

  “The tenor of the account would lead one to believe that the writer had been present, for it included a mix of veritable pornography and quite treasonous and conspiratorial assertions on the part of Governor Morgan—a plot to raid the colony’s treasury with the assistance of—er—Mistress Pitts and her men, though there was no mention of where the bullion so acquired was to have been bestowed, nor of course any indication of whether the plan proceeded to—er—consummation.”

  “Consummation indeed,” murmured Abigail, her eyebrows raised nearly to her hairline. “When was Port Royal destroyed?”

  “Sixteen ninety-two, m’am.”

  “And lies full-fathom five, with nobody to miss the pilfered gold. How long did it take you to translate this remarkable document?”

  “About three hours, Aunt Abigail. Mrs. Lake read it through without so much as a blush, and by her expression seemed most vexed that it had nothing to say about the whereabouts of the treasure . . . She asked me, two or three times, if I had translated it all, and I swore to her that I had. In the end she brought me a cup of coffee and some bread and meat, and went to summon her coachman, it being quite dark by then. I will say I was extremely hungry and rather vexed that all I might eat was a little bit of the meat, which is poisonous to my digestion but which would not bring on a migraine like the bread would. And coffee, I believe, is a pernicious drink, not suited to human consumption, so I poured it out after a few sips. To this abstention—for being of dyspeptic habit I depend upon regular meals—and to the exhaustion of concentration, I attributed the sleepiness that overwhelmed me. Mrs. Lake and her coachman had to assist me into the chaise, and I so misliked the man’s appearance that I struggled to remain awake and to observe if I could the countryside we traversed.”

  Abigail did a moment’s mental calculation. “With no moon that night you’re fortunate he didn’t have you in the ditch.”

  “Yes, m’am. Yet I found the countryside wholly unfamiliar, as one does by starlight, and despite the fact that I was shivering violently, I kept nodding off. At last I woke to find the chaise standing still in what appeared to be a stand of woods. I called out to the coachman and had no reply. I tried to open the door of the chaise and for some reason could not—it was very dark within, since we were in the woods, and in my befuddled state I couldn’t find the door handle. At last, convinced that something terrible was about to happen, I used my Arabic lexicon to break the window-glass and put my hand through to open the door from the outside—”

  “Reasoning that Mrs. Lake could scarcely have you up for vandalism if her coachman had abandoned you in the wilderness ?”

  The young man’s black eyebrows pulled together behind those thick
lenses. “Aunt Abigail, at that point I know not what I was thinking. I staggered when I came down from the chaise, and it seemed to me that I could hear someone or something approaching me through the woods. It came to me, I know not why, that the whole of the events of the evening might have been orchestrated by one of the senior classmen—’tis precisely the sort of thing Black Dog Pugh likes to do—for my discomfiture . . . An’ ’twere not that, I had not liked the coachman’s face nor his mien. It may seem cowardly of me,” he added in a stifled voice, “and foolish, too, but I fled into the woods.”

  His long, slender fingers toyed with the corn-bread on the plate; he was caught between the shame of being teased the whole of his short life and the memory of very genuine terror.

  “Have you any idea where you were?”

  Horace shook his head. “Weyountah says that a farmer from Concord brought me here in his wagon, having deduced—in quite your style, m’am,” he added with a faint grin, “that I was from the College by the circumstance of me clutching my Arabic lexicon to my breast when I was found in a ditch at the side of the Concord Road, raving of pirates and gold. I did not come to my right senses ’til nearly evening and then was vilely sick all the next day. I begged Weyountah and George not to breathe a word of my absence—George is the dearest of good fellows but a complete, er, rattlepate—for fear that I might be sent down for having to do with a woman and for getting drunk, though George has told me that had I been drunk my symptoms would have been quite different.”

  “Do Weyountah and Mr. Fairfield know—” She paused as a discreet tap sounded at the door, and Diomede put his head in to ask after the state of the cocoa pot. “Do Weyountah and Mr.—or is it Captain?—Fairfield—”

  “Mr. Ryland calls him Captain because that’s his rank in the militia troop he formed.”

  “Did he, indeed? Do they know about Mrs. Lake?”

  “No, m’am. Weyountah says he thinks that I was poisoned—he has made a study of plants and says there’s something called mad apple or Jamestown-weed that produces such effects—and I said I had gone to visit friends and had eaten of sallet at an inn. Such accidents do happen, he says, and naturally an innkeeper would have sent me on my way when I began to rave. In the light of Mr. Adams’s letter, and Uncle Mercer’s, I had almost convinced myself that something of the sort had indeed taken place—that it was an accident on the part of Mrs. Lake, and there was an innocent explanation. Then, four days ago it must have been, St-John Pugh—a most arrogant bullyboy . . .”

  “Black hair, green eyes, and a nose like a suffused potato? Wears a yellow gown?”

  “Even so, m’am—the Black Dog, he’s called. I condole you to have made his acquaintance,” added the boy, with his donnish smile. “He has been a senior here at least three years, they say, and has made my stay at this college a calvary. ’Tis only because George took me in as his fag that I’ve had some protection, though George doesn’t truly need a fag the way other seniors have them: I mean, he has Diomede to keep his rooms for him and run his errands. But he lets me study here in his rooms—Pugh used to come looking for me in my own, to send me on made-up errands to the farthest end of town . . .”

  “Does he not have a fag of his own?” John had always been philosophical about the fagging system in effect at Harvard—the freshmen attaching themselves to seniors as partial protection against hazing; it was something one simply had to endure in order to get an education. Abigail, aware that it was almost certain that her sons would one day be freshmen here, regarded it in a less sanguine light.

  “He does, m’am. And slaves as well, two of them. But he likes to bully and is a positive diabolos for spiteful vengeances. As I was saying, Pugh caught me on Friday and sent me on an errand into the far end of the town, to the Pig; and when I came out of the inn, I saw Mrs. Lake’s coachman across the road.”

  “Did you so?”

  “I knew him, m’am. The scar on his face is like the mark of Cain. There were two men with him, one tall and powerful with a shaven head that poked forward like a turtle’s, the other a man of medium size with an ear missing and his nose most horribly scarred. All three were swarthy, and the mutilated man wore his hair in a long queue, smeared with tar as sailors do. They were looking about them, and as I knew no one at the Pig, I asked no questions but simply made haste to leave by the kitchen door. It was then—Friday evening—that I sent to you.”

  “As well you did,” murmured Abigail. “We seem to have stumbled into a broadside ballad here—all we need is an endangered maiden who is true heiress to the treasure, though I reckon Mistress Pitts was very well able to take care of herself. How much do your friends know, or guess?”

  Horace shook his head. “What they know is only that I went to visit friends and was found unconscious in a ditch the following morn. What they guess . . .”

  His brow furrowed, and for a moment the boyish face with its pasty adolescent spots and its too-large nose seemed, suddenly, that of the man he would be. “Weyountah has taxed me, two or three times, with questions. He guesses I wasn’t telling the truth, and he’s seen that I’m afraid. George . . .” He grinned affectionately. “I’m sure George took him aside and told him that if I’d had the red blood in me to go off—er—drabbing, and ended up drunk in a ditch, I’d be the better not to have some praying Indian chasing after me for the details. They put it about that I was sick—”

  “’Tis what Mr. Ryland seems to have thought.”

  “Well, he’s the Fellow in charge of this hall, so if word of any of this reached his ears, he’d have to report it, you see. And he’d really rather not know.”

  Abigail raised her brows. “He seems to me a most honest man—”

  “Oh, he is! Amicus humani generis. He does most of the work in George’s troop—the King’s Own Volunteers—if the truth be known. But by the same token, he knows that if George gets sent down, that’s the end of the Volunteers. Quod verum est and all that, of course . . . but what Dr. Langdon doesn’t know won’t harm him.”

  Three

  When George Fairfield returned after his Greek lecture (“Lord, how am I supposed to know the difference between Ajax son of Telamon and Ajax son of that other fellow?”), Abigail could easily understand the glow of hero worship in her nephew’s eyes when he spoke his friend’s name. Long-limbed and handsome, the young Virginian had the instinctive air of command that came—Abigail guessed—from ordering black slaves around for most of his life, and the exquisite manners acquired in a society where impressing landowners more wealthy than oneself (or their relatives) was the only way to advance one’s family’s fortunes.

  Yet he had great kindness and an instinctive sense of justice. Over dinner at the Golden Stair Tavern on the Common (“Madame, God would send me to Hell if I obliged you to eat the food they serve in the Hall!”) during a lively argument about how far democracy ought to be permitted in the government of each colony, he argued not from Locke or Rousseau (“Good Lord, m’am, I couldn’t tell the one from t’other if they were both to offer me a hundred pounds!”) but from the men he’d met in the backcountry beyond his father’s plantation. “You can’t put men like that in charge of making the laws of the colony, m’am! First thing they’d rule is that it’s perfectly fine for them to close off the lands the Indians hunt on and chop them up into farms to sell to new immigrants, and then to shoot any Indian who tries to stop them.”

  Since Abigail had met hundreds of such men in Boston—particularly since the beginning of John’s involvement with the Sons of Liberty—she was hard put to find an argument against this. “Just because a man owns no property doesn’t mean he’s a self-seeking savage . . .”

  “No, m’am. But in my experience, it means he’s likelier to be than a man who’s had an education—”

  Yet when Uzziah Begbie—as democratic a soul as one was likely to meet in all of Massachusetts Colony—came in seeking her, Fairfield beckoned him to the table and bade the innkeeper’s wife bring beer and another plate
, and asked him all about his carrier business and were the roads as terrible when one went west as they were in Virginia?

  “He acted as protector to me when first I came to Harvard,” said Weyountah to Abigail, under cover of this dialogue, “though he was only a year before me. No one wanted an Indian to fag for him, as you might expect, so I was very much on my own. He made sure I knew all the rules, like not wearing a hat in the Yard and not swapping gowns with anyone, so I wouldn’t be boxed—”

  “And telling us which seniors to watch out for,” added Horace, with a glance across the tavern at Black Dog Pugh and his minions, who had gathered near the windows to drink and flirt with the innkeeper’s spritely niece. “Pugh or his boys—the thin one is Jasmine Blossom, I think his real name is Jessamy, and the one in the blue coat is Lowth—will send freshmen into town for punch, knowing it’s against the rules, and when they’re caught by the provosts, will deny having done so. Then the fresher gets fined four shillings, which is a great deal, especially in winter with candles to buy.”

  “The rumor runs,” contributed Weyountah, “that the neighbors of Pugh’s father back on Barbados all take up a collection, once a year, to keep the Black Dog in Harvard and in the interest of maintaining good order on the island.”

  “And the—er—virtue of their daughters. Heaven only knows how he’s remained here long enough to become a junior bachelor—”

  “Well, he’s not stupid,” said the Indian, “and I understand he’s made better use of his time here visiting merchants in town and learning of their business than he ever has studying his Latin. Perhaps he only courts their daughters.”