Sup with the Devil Read online

  “Vincant divitiae,” concluded Horace with a grin, and then coughed violently in a drifting cloud of pipe-smoke from the direction of Pugh and his friends.

  When Begbie had gone—with Fairfield’s assurances that he would send Mrs. Adams home in his own chaise—Abigail and Horace told the other two young men of the true course of Horace’s adventure last week: of the assignation with Mrs. Lake, the letters of introduction, the scandalous document, and the carriage-ride that was almost certainly intended to end in Horace’s death. “Can you write out what you recall of the document?” suggested Weyountah at once.

  “I think so,” said Horace. “My memory is very good, and because I translated it, I paid particular attention to every word. It wasn’t a treasure-map or anything.”

  “Not an obvious one,” said the Indian. “But it might have contained clues—every third word, every fourth word . . .”

  “Yes, but unless he can recall every single word that’s of no use,” protested Fairfield.

  “No,” agreed Abigail. “Yet ’tis a good idea, and once Horace writes as much of the document as he can recall, some pattern may emerge that strikes one of us that was not evident to him at the time. Take a look at these.” She held out to the others the two mendacious letters, and Weyountah held them where the westering window-light could fall on them most brightly. “They’re complete fabrications, of course, but does anything about them suggest anything to either of you?”

  “Good quality ink,” said the Indian at once. “And expensive paper.”

  “Moreover, a writer who knew how to cut quills and keep the flow of words going,” pointed out Abigail. “The hand is a confident one, without hesitations or blots. Further, the writer is accustomed to forming complex words: intentions, probity, researches. He knows how to sound like a lawyer or a judge.”

  “He certainly convinced our Horace,” said Fairfield with a grin and a gentle nudge at his friend’s shoulder. “What do they say about the pure not seeing anything but purity?”

  “With your permission,” interpolated Abigail, “I shall take these two letters back to town with me. John’s away, naturally,” she added, unable to keep exasperation from her voice—When WASN’T John away when you needed him?—“but my friend Mr. Revere—the silversmith, you know—has a most acute eye for the details of handwriting and other telltale signs. He may very well see things in these that are hidden from us.”

  She half expected the young Virginian to object at the mention of Paul Revere’s name, but he’d clearly never heard of the man in his life. Like most people outside of Boston, George Fairfield’s knowledge of the Sons of Liberty was limited to Sam Adams and James Otis (who hadn’t been able to be active among them for years, poor man) and some of their more spectacular exploits, like sacking the Governor’s house, destroying shops, and dumping $92,000 worth of tea into the harbor.

  Instead he declared, “And I am going to do the obvious and have a look around the ladies of the surrounding countryside to see who might be Mrs. Lake.”

  To which Weyountah laughed, “Why does it not surprise me that George is going to look around among the ladies?”

  “Dash it, man, the woman wasn’t just made up out of mud for the occasion. She has to have come from someplace, chaise, coachman, and all.”

  “For that matter,” said Weyountah thoughtfully, “where would this Mrs. Lake—or whoever she really is—have gotten a text in Arabic, or Arabic lettering, to copy from? The only scholar in Harvard who had any Arabic texts at all was old Reverend Seckar, and Horace got all of his when he died.”

  “And lucky thing he did,” said Fairfield. “Poisonous old screw was going to leave them all to the College and stick his poor wife and sister without a bean. You got a few too out of that lot, didn’t you, Weyountah?”

  “Are you also a scholar of Oriental languages?” inquired Abigail—though why a young man who’d been born in a two-room wigwam in the woods of Rhode Island shouldn’t have as much of an interest in the wisdom from another portion of the world as one who’d been born thirty miles away in a two-room farmhouse in the woods of Massachusetts, she didn’t know, once she thought of it.

  The Narraganset shook his head. “No, natural science,” he said. “Astronomy, chiefly, but really anything I can get my hands on. The books Mrs. Seckar was selling off were ruinously old and of little use, given the advances that have been made in the studies of things like atmospheric vapors and air and water pressure. I’ve begun correspondence with Mr. Franklin,” he added, naming a little shyly the foremost scientist and philosopher in the colonies. “He’s been good enough to recommend me to the Royal Society in England, which has been of enormous assistance. There’s so little over here.”

  “So little of anything,” sighed Horace wistfully.

  “Which brings us back,” declared Fairfield firmly, “to where we started. Where would that Arabic text have been copied from? Who would have written a document like that in Arabic , for the Lord’s sake—”

  “Obviously,” said Abigail, “someone who knew Arabic writing and was using it as a code to keep a record of a disgraceful encounter—I assume for purposes of blackmail.”

  “Would Henry Morgan care if everybody on the Spanish Main knew he was having a—um—Latin lesson”—Fairfield hastily interpolated a euphemism, having clearly, for the moment, forgotten that Abigail was a respectable matron and his friend’s aunt to boot—“with someone by the name of Jezebel Pitts? I don’t imagine Mistress Pitts would mind. Besides,” he added, “they’ve both been dead for years.”

  “The principal activity Governor Morgan was practicing with Mistress Pitts,” Abigail reminded him starchily, “is called, without going into Latin, conspiracy to commit embezzlement . . . and given the fact that it involved assistance from pirates, it probably would be considered treason as well by an Admiralty Court. Reason enough to justify hush-money to someone, I’m sure, even if they did not manage to lift any actual gold. But as Mr. Fairfield so justly points out, both parties have been in their dishonored graves for decades. Sam might know . . .”

  “Sam—Adams?”

  Abigail remembered too late—just as Fairfield had forgotten that she was an aunt and a respectable goodwife from Boston—that her listener was a Loyalist to whom the name of her husband’s notorious cousin was anathema.

  “No, Sam Brooke,” she extemporized hastily. “A neighbor of mine on Queen Street. An elderly gentleman who once—I suspect—had a great deal to do with the smuggling trade and may very well have known Mistress Pitts in her old age.” She felt like kicking herself, because of course Sam Adams was precisely whom she meant. Three-quarters of the Sons of Liberty were mixed up in smuggling to one degree or another. Why put yourself in danger of an Admiralty noose, if it weren’t to avoid paying the King’s taxes on this, that, and the other, every time the King decided one of his friends needed a job as a special revenue collector?

  Abigail had frequently deplored the fact that wily Cousin Sam seemed to be on a first-name basis with half the wharf-rats in Boston Harbor. But on this occasion, she thought, he might as well do some good . . .

  If he wasn’t packing to get himself out of Boston, she reflected grimly, before the King’s vengeance—whatever it was going to be—for the tea came ashore.

  Whatever it was going to be, it was almost certainly going to involve a warrant for Sam Adams’s arrest.

  What broke her sleep every night for weeks—and had caused her to warn her fourteen-year-old servant-girl, Pattie, and John’s clerk, Thaxter (not Horace but his—and Abigail’s—esteemed cousin), to stand ready to take the children to Uncle Isaac’s house at the first sign of trouble—was not knowing how far beyond Sam the arrests would spread.

  And what the Sons of Liberty would choose to do about the situation.

  She picked up the two letters again and realized that the window light had faded to the point where they were difficult to read. “Good Heavens, it must be getting close to sundown,” she said
in alarm. “If I’m to be back to Boston—”

  “Aunt Abigail, mea culpa—”

  “Dash it, where’s that lazy buck Diomede?” Fairfield sprang to his feet, strode toward the kitchen. “He’ll have the chaise harnessed for you before a fly can wash his little hands, m’am—”

  In fifteen minutes Abigail was being assisted into an extremely elegant English chaise outside the Golden Stair, with bows and thanks and assurances that Horace would be permitted neither food, drink, nor sleep that night until he’d finished a verbatim copy of Mrs. Lake’s disgraceful document. In twenty, she was clinging to the brass rail of the vehicle as it bowled sharply along through the slanted evening sunlight on the road to Charles Town. Like most Virginians, young Mr. Fairfield favored spirited horseflesh, but Diomede—a big-shouldered man in his fifties—was a skilled and careful driver: Abigail was disconcerted and exhilarated by the speed, but never frightened.

  When Diomede apologized for the pace—“But for a fact, m’am, we’ll be fortunate to make the ferry before it closes down”—she felt encouraged to ask him, was he himself familiar with the countryside hereabouts?

  “Not like a native, m’am,” he said, in a deep velvet bass. “I came up with Mr. Fairfield in ’70, and he’s a personable young gentleman, as I’m sure you’ve observed. The year before last, when there was such a to-do about that revenue ship that went aground in Rhode Island and was burned by smugglers claiming to be against taxation, Mr. Fairfield formed up a company of gentlemen loyal to the King—the King’s Own Volunteers, they call themselves—and so he’s widely known from here to Medford and always being invited to stay at this house or that. Mr. Charles Fairfield—Mr. George’s father—gave me instructions to make sure that he kept to his book.”

  The valet smiled as he reined in to let an oncoming wagon pass in the narrow road where it swung around the base of Prospect Hill. “But it’s true also that so far as I can see, the reason a young gentleman goes to college is to meet men of property and consideration, and to make friendships that will be of use to him later in life. So I guess one could say, I’ve seen as much of the countryside as a man can, traipsing behind a very popular young gentleman with his baggage.”

  Abigail laughed. “You have my sympathies,” she said. “Do you happen to know the name of the farmer who brought Mr. Horace back to Cambridge on Wednesday? I think Weyountah said he was from Concord.”

  “From that direction,” agreed Diomede. “Mr. Rutherford has a farm just this side of Lexington, on the Concord Road. He said he found poor Mr. Thaxter by the road near Pierce’s Hill.”

  Abigail mentally placed the location, a wooded country of old farmsteads and stone field-walls. A two-hour drive from Cambridge would indeed put Mrs. Lake’s “brown house of two storeys” somewhere between Menotomy and Lexington, particularly if the woman had taken the precaution of not driving straight there. John would know. And if John weren’t yet home from the Maine Assizes, Revere—when she showed him the bogus letters—would very likely be able to tell her: the Sons of Liberty made it their business to know everyone in the countryside around Boston, if for no other reason than to know were they adherents to the Crown’s policies and power, or in favor of colonial rights?

  Yet for all its superficial resemblance to the little towns of the Massachusetts countryside—her family’s village of Weymouth, or Braintree where John’s mother and brothers lived—Harvard was different. In Weymouth or Braintree, everyone had known one another since childhood, and a strange face was instantly noted and commented upon. Hers certainly had been when nine years ago John had brought her to that little brown farmhouse as a bride, although everyone knew Parson Smith’s three daughters and his gadabout son . . .

  People came and went from Harvard all the time. Praying Indians like Weyountah from converted villages in Rhode Island. Gaudy exotics like St-John Pugh. She reflected uneasily on the openness of the buildings of Harvard College, the ease with which anyone could ascend any of those staircases . . .

  “Whoa!” Diomede drew rein. “M’am, your pardon, I beg you, but it looks like Sassy’s picked up a stone.”

  And indeed, even as the little mare slowed her pace, Abigail could see she was favoring her off fore.

  It crossed her mind very briefly that the delay would cost her her return, but she said at once, “No, of course—”

  She took the reins as the servant sprang down and hastened to the mare’s head. She was carrying it low, Abigail observed worriedly, and holding her hoof from the ground—She must really be hurt . . .

  Diomede worked gingerly, testing and probing in the woodland twilight. When he came back to the chaise, even in the gloom, she read consternation on his face.

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’ll be all right, m’am,” said the servant. “But she’s cut the frog of her hoof—there must have been a nail or something in the road—”

  Abigail sprang down from the chaise at once. “Poor little lady,” she said. “And such a nuisance—but you know, I think I rather pushed my luck talking to those boys as late as I did, and having to walk back to Cambridge is no more than I deserve. Will she be all right to be led? I suppose we could leave the chaise here for a short time . . .”

  The man relaxed—as a slave, reflected Abigail, he had probably witnessed the human limits of bad manners and petulance among those who considered a) that their convenience ranked higher than an injured animal’s pain and b) that if they missed the ferry, it must be the fault of the driver. “I don’t think there’s call for that, m’am.” He looked around him at the darkening woods. “It goes without saying that Mr. Fairfield will pay for a bed for you at the Golden Stair. I hope it’s no inconvenience—”

  “The only inconvenience,” replied Abigail grandly, falling into step with Diomede as he turned the mare’s head back toward Cambridge, “will be to my aunt and uncle, who will be obliged to look after my children tonight.” In the shadowy trees, wrens and thrushes, mockingbirds and starlings all twittered and whistled as if to make sure of their territories before they settled down for the night. A breeze riffled the leaves, filled the world with the soft green scent of hay. “Of course I shall sleeplessly weep the whole night through at spending the hours apart from them,” she added with a blitheness that made the servant grin, “yet I trust that somehow I shall survive the experience of not separating Johnny and Charley from killing one another when Charley hides Johnny’s toys, and not being woken up twice and three times by Tommy wanting a story or a drink of water—”

  “Oh, m’am,” said Diomede, and clasped his hands to his heart, “please don’t go on—I’m afraid I shall weep.”

  “I do beg your pardon,” said Abigail.

  They led the limping Sassy the two miles back to Cambridge in perfect amity.

  Diomede left Abigail in one of the college parlors while he took Sassy back to the stables; in a few moments George Fairfield came running in, green robe billowing and Horace at his heels. “M’am, I am covered with shame—!”

  “Nonsense! I was telling Diomede, I look upon the whole business as an excellent opportunity to get a complete night’s rest, something one doesn’t, you know, if one has three sons under the age of seven.”

  “Well, you’ll have rest at the Golden Stair on my account—or rather my Pa’s, since he’s the one who settles them all,” added the young man with a grin. “Poor old Sassy! Thank the Lord, Diomede saw her falter as quick as he did. She’s taken no hurt—the man’s a wonder with horses. With just about everything, come to that . . . I could have taken a whip to that brute Pugh for telling me only yesterday that I’d best sell him off cheap because he pilfers my liquor now and then. Lord, I’d trust Diomede with a bottle a lot sooner than I’d trust Pugh or either of those so-called grooms of his—wild savages straight off the boat from Africa! Diomede was born in Williamsburg and raised a gentleman, and his father before him!” He tucked Abigail’s cloak around her shoulders and sprang to open the parlor door for her, se
eming blithely unaware of any incongruity in the fact that he could describe a man old enough to be his father as a gentleman and yet possess the legal right to sell him off like a mule. “His manners are a sight better than Pugh’s, anyway—though I suppose the same could be said about Sassy.”

  Mrs. Squills at the Golden Stair didn’t appear a bit surprised at Abigail’s reappearance with the two scholars: “The way those boys were talking to you, I knew you’d never get to the ferry in time,” she said, her smile as she curtseyed making her look much older—she was missing several of her teeth. “Mr. Horace’s aunt, I think Diomede said? Now, go along with you,” she added briskly, flapping her apron at Abigail’s escort. “Before you’re fined for being out of your rooms after dark, and in a tavern—”

  “They wouldn’t fine me for being with my aunt,” protested Horace, and the tiny innwife’s face flexed into an exaggerated expression of astonishment.

  “There’s another college here in Cambridge that you’ve been going to all this time without telling me?” she demanded. “Because the Dean of Harvard would fine you for being out with your own mother, let alone an aunt . . . And I know fullwell about the little minx you’ve got waiting for you out behind the stables,” she added, with a glare at Fairfield.

  “I—?” Fairfield pressed his hand to his heart and raised his eyebrows in innocent bafflement.

  “Run along with you!” She shook her head as Fairfield made a dancing-master’s leg to Abigail and saluted her hand before he strode off, laughing, across the dark of the Common, Horace trotting loyally at his heels. “They’re good boys,” she added, leading Abigail toward the stair. “For all they drive an honest woman mad with their, ‘I’ll pay you next quarter for a batter-cake today.’ I don’t know which is worse, George with his lady friends or Horace with his nose forever in a book!” She collected a couple of abandoned beer mugs from the table, as she passed it, to add to her tray. “Well, ’tis the peskiest kitten that grows to the best mouser, you know. I wouldn’t give tuppence for a lad that didn’t run about the town seeing what he can get himself into, would you?”