Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

  As Mr. Begbie had a number of deliveries in Cambridge and was likely to pursue his second vocation—that of collecting and disseminating news and rumor—when they reached the outskirts of the village, Abigail bid him good-by with thanks. “I shall finish up at the Golden Stair, on the Common,” said the carter—a neighbor of hers on Queen Street—shaking her hand in farewell. “You’ll find me there in three or four hours—time enough to locate your nephew—and we’ll still be back at the ferry long before the sun’s down. Good luck, m’am!”

  Good luck indeed, reflected Abigail good-humoredly, as she set off with her marketing basket in the direction of the College, whose cluster of brick halls she glimpsed through orchard trees, for she hadn’t the faintest idea in which of its several buildings Horace was lodged. The open-sided quadrangle of Harvard College faced the town common, across a lane and a four-foot wall. A young man in a freshman’s short gown emerged from the gate as Abigail drew near. He bore a wig box and walked swiftly, as if pursued or in fear of pursuit, and hesitated for an instant when she waved him over. “Are you acquainted with Mr. Horace Thaxter? Would you know—?”

  “I say, I say—!” Another scholar in the longer gown of a more senior student strolled over from a group of his friends. “You there, Yeovil—”

  The freshman gave Abigail a harassed look and turned.

  “What are you up to, Yeovil?”

  “I was speaking with this lady, sir,” said the boy. He looked about fifteen—Horace had been sixteen and a half when he’d entered the college the previous September, but they took boys younger even than this one—with linen spotlessly white against the blue of his academic gown and a beautifully curled pigeon-wing wig, powdered like marble.

  “Now, Yeovil,” chided the newcomer, who looked rather like a ferret in a scarlet gown, “a freshman? Address a lady?”

  “And so beautiful a lady,” added another of the group, coming over and making Abigail a handsome leg as he bowed. “Che il crin s’è un Tago e son due Soli i lume/Prodigio tal non rimirò Natura . . .” Between a crumpled neckcloth and an elaborately curled wig, his face was plump and unshaven, and his eyes, set in little cushions of fat discolored by sleeplessness, had the twinkling and rather dangerous intelligence of a pig. The effect was of a dissipated baby who had been spending far too many nights in a tavern. “How may your humble servant be of use to you, fair stranger? You, Yeovil, run along . . . Where were you off to?”

  In a taut voice that showed an unfortunate tendency to crack, the boy said, “I was taking this wig to be curled, sir.” He held up the box.

  The fat student viewed it through a quizzing-glass; his companion in the red gown, suppressing a grin, exclaimed, “Why, so you were! And whose wig is that, Yeovil?”

  “Mr. Lechmere’s, sir.”

  “Lechmere, Lechmere . . .” The older men—and the other two of their group who had joined them—all made a great show of trying to remember who Lechmere was.

  “Egad, isn’t he a sophomore?”

  “Disgraceful . . . !”

  “For shame!”

  “Tell you what,” said Red Gown, and produced from his voluminous sleeve two pewter pitchers, “why don’t you be a good chap and, while you’re in town, just hop on over to the Crowned Pig and fill these up with our good host’s best?”

  John had told Abigail about the customs of the college: Yeovil, a lowly fresher, was obliged to do the bidding of his seniors. She also guessed that Red Gown was probably a junior and thus able to preempt the boy’s services (How was he going to carry both pitchers full of ale and also Mr. Lechmere the Sophomore’s wig box . . . ? Which of course was the point, the wretched boys . . .).

  Thus she wasn’t at all surprised when Yeovil had been dispatched on his errand and the fat student—whose lush yellow gown gave him the general appearance of a gargantuan squash—made another bow, to find her request for Horace’s direction interrupted yet again . . .

  “Excuse me, my very dear madame, I beg of you—Yeovil!” the fat man yelled. “Yo, Yeovil, come back here, blister it!”

  He was the senior, then, reflected Abigail with a sigh. Or a bachelor-fellow, by the look of him. And privileged to preempt the junior’s request for ale, which had preempted the sophomore’s demand for his wig to be taken to be curled . . .

  The fat student’s companions were stamping and slapping each other and smothering with laughter to such an extent that none of them saw another man—crimson-gowned and a few years older than they—until he had crossed the yard from the gate and reached Abigail’s side. “Pugh, aren’t you getting a little old for this kind of trick?” he asked in a quiet voice.

  Pugh turned, piggy eyes sparkling in their pouches of fat. “Dulce est disipere in loco, my dear Ryland . . . Have you a quarrel with educating the wealthy in the arts of humility?”

  “When it involves rudeness to a stranger,” replied his dear Ryland, “yes, I have. How may I serve you, m’am? My name is Joseph Ryland—Are you here in search of someone?” With a gesture he led her away from the group and farther into the quadrangle.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Horace Thaxter, yes, thank you. I am Mrs. Adams, his aunt.”

  “I’ve heard him speak of you, m’am. Did Mr. Fairfield write to you, then, about Thaxter’s illness?” Mended red gown billowing, Mr. Ryland led Abigail cattycorner across the yard to the old brick building that enclosed its southern end. “I’m sure it isn’t as serious as Fairfield thinks it—”

  “What happened?” asked Abigail, startled.

  Ryland made a gesture of frustration. Unlike the refulgent Mr. Pugh and his friends, the young man—she guessed his age at nearly thirty, her own age . . . A tutor, then, or a bachelor-fellow waiting for an appointment somewhere—wore his own hair, long and only lightly powdered; he spoke with the accents of Pennsylvania. “To be honest, Mrs. Adams, I think it was the food in the Hall. Do what they will, the Governors cannot keep the kitchen staff from buying the cheapest slops they can come by and pocketing the difference, and I know Horace’s constitution is a delicate one. I was going to let the matter go another day—I am the Fellow in charge of Massachusetts Hall—and then write his parents . . .”

  They entered the building by the most westerly of its several doors, and Mr. Ryland led her down a wide hall and then up one of the residential staircases. “He’ll be in Captain Fairfield’s room—he fags for Fairfield, a noxious custom . . .”

  As they reached the first landing, a young man stepped from the room on the right, his dusky face and black Indian braids startling against the white of his neckcloth and shirt, and the sober darkness of waistcoat, breeches, and stockings. Ryland said, “Weyountah, how is Thaxter? Mrs. Adams, this is Weyountah—Mr. Enoch Wylie—one of our best men in the sciences. Weyountah, Mrs. Adams of Boston, Thaxter’s aunt.”

  “Good Lord, get that woman out of here!” called a voice from the left-hand room, and the door opened to reveal a fair-haired, cheerful young man with a weather-burned complexion and a gray coat rather heavily laced with gold on the sleeves. “I knew it—Ryland’s trying to get the lot of us sent down for bringing a female in here . . . Diomede!” he called back into the room behind him. “Get on out here and bring a rope—tie up Mr. Ryland and throw him into the river—”

  “Don’t be a fool, Fairfield, this is Thaxter’s aunt come to see him.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Fairfield, in the slurry drawl of a Virginian. “The Governors will never believe a gang of towsers and tosspots like us . . .”

  Spots of color appeared on Mr. Ryland’s cheekbones, and he stepped back—with rigid reserve—as Fairfield led the way briskly into the left-hand chamber. The Indian Weyountah bowed to Abigail and gestured her to precede him, then followed her in, leaving Mr. Ryland upon the landing and the door open behind them.

  Horace got quickly to his feet from the desk where he sat by the window. The chamber was the usual one for the College : small, very tidy, furnished with a desk by the window, a couple
of chairs that young Mr. Fairfield had obviously brought with him from Virginia, a small fireplace, and a little table. On a neat sideboard were ranged a coffee-roaster, pot, and a lacquered Chinese canister, presumably for coffee beans; there was a smaller caddy for tea, spouted blue-and-white pots for tea and water, and tidily arranged cups and saucers, not all of them matching.

  Horace Thaxter hadn’t changed much in two years, Abigail reflected; she didn’t think his weight had increased by so much as an ounce, though he’d grown a good five inches, and he had not been short when last she’d seen him at fifteen. All elbows, knees, and spectacles, he wore an extremely shabby suit of faded black coat and breeches, clearly handed down from someone both shorter and more robust. He said, “Aunt Abigail—!” and held out a bony, ink-stained hand.

  From the doorway, Ryland said, “I’m glad to see you on your feet, Thaxter,” a small crease of worry between his brows. “Captain Fairfield, if I may remind you—”

  “I know, I know, dash it! That hell-begotten Greek class, may they all descend unto Avernus together—”

  “Hades, actually,” put in Horace, stepping aside as an elderly black man—who’d been arranging wood and kindling in the hearth—gathered his hearth-brush and ashes and slipped from the rather overcrowded room . . . Presumably Diomede, Abigail guessed. And presumably the one responsible for the room’s spotless order. There was a chest in the corner that, by what John had told her of the Virginia and Carolina men when he had studied here, would contain the slave’s blanket, upon which he would sleep on the floor . . .

  “Avernus being the Latin . . . Aunt Abigail, you truly shouldn’t have—”

  “Horry, I shall smite you with the poker if you tell me once more the difference between Latin and Greek . . . Yes, yes, Ryland, take your duty to the Muses as given, and I’ll be along as soon as I’ve done my duty to decent manners.”

  “I shouldn’t want you to be—”

  “It’s my business if I’m sent down or not,” Fairfield snapped. “You’re not my dry nurse. Dash it,” he added, as Ryland disappeared into the shadows of the rather gloomy staircase, “now I’ve offended him again. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Diomede”—he thrust open the door to the inner chamber—“go fetch some water for Mrs. Adams for tea—or would you be of the Rebel persuasion, m’am, like all the rest of the Adamses I’ve heard of, not to speak of every other scholar in this curst school? Or is the issue of tea now considered settled once and for all?” And he raised his brows in a quirky jest.

  “Coffee,” said Weyountah, “is I believe the proper alternative. Or cocoa.” And he guided Abigail to one of the chairs beside the cold hearth.

  “You sounded as if a visit would do you good.” Abigail took Horace’s hand with a smile and set her basket on the corner of the table. “You know your mother would never forgive me, were you left to languish without someone at least making sure you were still alive.”

  “Cocoa, then,” said Fairfield, snapping his fingers as Diomede appeared in the doorway. “And sink me if that dashed Beaverbrook hasn’t stolen my cocoa . . . Go upstairs and get it, would you? And thrash the little maggot if he’s there. Shall we take ourselves off, Horace, while you visit with your aunt? I daresay Ryland only showed her up to make sure I came along to his Greek class and didn’t get sent down, which old Hogden promised he would, if I’m late again. When class is done, m’am,” he added with a bow, “I trust you’ll join us for dinner at the Golden Stair? Diomede”—he leaned through the staircase door to call after the ascending slave—“after you’ve provided cocoa for Mrs. Adams, run along to the Golden Stair and bespeak a dinner for five. Oh, and fetch me my—”

  Patiently, the servant reappeared, took from the seat of the other chair the red gown and four-square cap of scholarship—Abigail could see Horace’s hanging on a peg on the wall—and held them out to his master.

  “You’re a wonder, Diomede . . .” Fairfield called back over his shoulder as he dove through the door. “And if you don’t save me some of whatever’s in that basket, Thaxter”—his voice trailed back up the stairs—“I shall tell Mr. Pugh you’ve been tupping his mistress—”

  Weyountah said, “I’ll be in the laboratory should you need me, Thaxter,” and with a bow to Abigail, departed.

  The room seemed suddenly, echoingly quiet.

  Horace’s breath blew out in a sigh. “Aunt Abigail, I beg a thousand pardons for having written. No consideration in the world would have induced me to do so, had I thought you would put yourself to the inconvenience—”

  “Don’t be silly.” Abigail fetched her basket from the table and held it out to him; his pale face flushed slightly with pleasure when he saw what it contained. He moved the table closer to the hearth, which was cold, the afternoon being far too fine to need a fire. “And tell me, please,” she went on, “what troubling events befell you and why you think John had anything to do with them?”

  “That’s just it, Aunt Abigail.” Horace made a move toward the door as if he would have closed it, then hesitated—no doubt recalling the extreme strictures the College set upon its students having women in their rooms—and settled himself awkwardly in the chair opposite her. “I think Uncle John had something to do with it because Mrs. Lake had a letter of introduction from him—and from Uncle Mercer in Connecticut—recommending her in the highest terms. But I suspect that she poisoned me—and I very much fear that she will try to do so again.”

  “Good Heavens, why?”

  The boy shook his head helplessly. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  Two

  John Adams

  Boston

  16 April 1774

  My dear Horace,

  Let this serve as an introduction to Mrs. Lake, a woman of the highest probity, and as urging that you oblige her in her researches. She is a member in good standing in the Brattle Street Congregation, and in that capacity, I have known her for many years, and can vouch for both her character and her intentions.

  Yrs obt’ly,

  John Adams

  “This is nothing like Mr. Adams’s hand.” Abigail set the letter down among the cocoa cups. “And I can assure you at once that there is no Mrs. Lake in the Brattle Street Congregation.”

  Silently, Horace held out the other letter.

  It purported to be from Justice Mercer Euston—Abigail identified him as a connection on the other side of the Thaxter family and well-known across the border in Connecticut—but even to her inexperienced eye, the smudgy, spidery handwriting looked suspiciously similar. The paper, so far as she could tell, was identical.

  “And who,” asked Abigail, “is Mrs. Lake?”

  “That’s just it.” Horace propped his thick-lensed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “I have no idea. We seem to be moving per nocte ad tenebris, unless she is some relation to Henry Morgan . . .”

  “Henry Morgan the pirate?” Abigail experienced the momentary sensation that she and her nephew were not engaged in the same conversation.

  An inexplicable pink flush crept up Horace’s cheekbones. “He was Governor—and later Lieutenant Governor—of Jamaica . . .”

  “Yes,” said Abigail, “I know. Why would this Mrs. Lake’s relationship to him cause her to poison you—if poison you she did . . . ?”

  “I think she did,” said Horace earnestly. “Though my symptoms bore a certain resemblance to my previous attacks of gastritis and the symptoms that sometimes accompany my headaches, in other respects they were such as to frighten me. Please believe me, Aunt Abigail. I have spoken of this to no one—not to Weyountah, who has been a brother to me here; not to George Fairfield, who has been so good as to take me under his wing . . . No one.” He pressed his hands together, palm to palm as if praying, and rested his lips against them, an attitude Abigail remembered from his boyhood. For a moment she was prey to the curious sensation of seeing in the young man the reflection of an infant she had held—herself a fragile and studious girl of eleven—in he
r arms.

  “I will believe you,” she assured him. “But tell me everything, from the beginning, and leave no detail out. One cannot reconstruct the sense of a disputed text,” she added, with a glance at the contents of the desk beside the window—a mountain of books in Greek, in Hebrew, and in tongues stranger still whose very writing was alien to her—“if one is given only fragments to work with.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Horace. “And it started with those texts.”

  Horace Thaxter—for all his youth—was virtually the only scholar at Harvard who made a study of Oriental Languages, by which was meant (Abigail gathered) Arabic, Persian, Russian, and Biblical Aramaic, there being no one in the colony (and probably not in Britain, either) who could understand Chinese. Horace had begun his fascination with these tongues as a child, getting his merchant father (baffled but indulgent and impressed in spite of himself) to arrange for him to be tutored in the first three by sailors who had come through the port of Boston at various times, and had continued a stubborn quest for further knowledge ever since. By the age of twelve he had begun correspondence with members of the Royal Societies in both London and Paris, and had amassed a small quantity of books in each of those languages, as well as lexicons treasured as if they were chests of gold. Abigail well remembered Horace’s childhood reputation in the family: the boy had always been regarded as strange, but she now saw him, in his own element, as the man he would be, a pathfinding scholar on a road that no one she knew or knew of had traveled before.