Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

  “They have not,” retorted Abigail, entering hard upon this line. “Mr. Blossom, did you drink the rum in the carafe in George’s room? I thought so. Mr. Waller?” A tall young man with a long, horsey face—sitting with his head between his knees in a circle of frightened acquaintances—jerked upright shakily and gazed at her with pupils narrowed to pinpricks, even in the gloom of the parlor.

  “I did, too—” gasped another young man in a green robe. “I-I feel so queer . . .”

  “I’m sure you do,” returned Abigail briskly. “There was laudanum in the rum, which would amply account for poor Diomede not waking up—”

  “And for poor George—” cried someone else.

  “The blackguard!” exclaimed another young gentleman. “To poison his master, then drink himself stupid in celebration—”

  “Nonsense!” snapped Abigail, taken aback this interpretation of her evidence. “Fairfield was stabbed, for one thing, and for another, a killer would have to be stupid to take a drug like that before even getting out of the room—”

  “It’s exactly what that nigger of mine would do,” remarked Pugh, straightening up from beside the pile of coats where Lowth lay. “Only he’d probably drink off half the rum before drugging it, to give himself a little Dutch courage—” He put his hands on his hips, regarded Abigail’s openmouthed indignation with some amusement. “They don’t think the way white people do, m’am,” he said. “You ask any man who’s grown up among ’em as I have. They don’t look ahead—not two minutes, not two feet. Like dealing with a lot of fouryear-olds.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  Pugh raised one eyebrow. “Got a lot of ’em in Boston, have you, m’am, to know ’em so well?”

  And a man with the accent of the Carolinas affirmed, “Ours sure don’t think before they act.”

  As she looked from face to face, Abigail was shocked to observe how many of these young men were nodding—some of them unwillingly, but accepting the judgment as it stood. Someone said, “Poor old George!” and someone else, “My Aunt Caro was killed by a nigger maid—”

  “And what do you expect,” demanded Dr. Langdon, rising from beside Dr. Perry where both men had knelt beside the vaguely stirring Mr. Mosson, “when you have grown up in an atmosphere envenomed by the vice of slavery? When a poor Negro is driven to desperation by the ill-treatment of a vicious master—”

  “Aunt Abigail—”

  She was opening her mouth, breathless with anger at these assumptions about Diomede and anyone else of African descent, when Horace quietly touched her elbow.

  “Aunt Abigail, I’m sorry, but . . . there is something missing from George’s room. Two books,” he said.

  Six

  I’m afraid they were not terribly edifying volumes.” Horace shyly pushed up his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “I only took note of them because—”

  “You needn’t explain,” said Abigail kindly. The poor boy was only barely seventeen, and she recalled what her brother William had been like at . . . well, considerably younger than that. “And if they were as unedifying as all that, they might very well have gone the way of the rum.” She glanced back over her shoulder as they emerged from the parlor into the open quadrangle and reentered the hallway to mount Horace’s staircase. Even in here, Dr. Langdon’s thundering peroration on why Diomede must have done murder because of his degradation under slavery could be heard with damning clarity. “What were they?”

  “Aretino’s I Modi, with the—er—illustrations by Raimondi,” stammered Horace. “And Brantôme’s Les Vies des Dames Galantes. Also illustrated.” His blush went from his hairline down under his neckcloth. Abigail thought his ears were going to catch fire. He must have looked over Fairfield’s shoulder at the illustrations, if no more. “And I don’t think they could have been sneaked out of the room by anyone in the crowd this morning. Weyountah was in the bedchamber with George the whole time.”

  “Did he keep them in there?”

  Horace nodded. “The desk has a false bottom in it,” he said simply.

  And Weyountah explained, “There are no locks on the doors of the chambers, so people are always pilfering things. Nothing big—there’s not a man among us who would steal his neighbor’s money—but if a man has tea, or coffee beans, or has just had a package from home with something sweet in it, he’s likely to come back to his room and find less of it than there was when he went out. Of course no one is permitted spirits, so no one can report it if he comes back and finds his rum has been watered—”

  “It’s one reason, I think, that seniors let us fags study in their rooms,” put in Horace. “So someone will be there, should they have something they’d rather didn’t disappear—though in truth, Aunt Abigail, it isn’t the nest of thieves we must sound like. For one thing, most of us are in the same lectures at the same times—”

  “And for another,” added Weyountah, as they approached the staircase, “everybody gets to know everything, pretty much, and if someone goes about pocketing coffee beans, it doesn’t remain a secret for long.”

  They stopped at the foot of the staircase door to let a small procession descend. Mr. Ryland, his faded crimson gown giving him the archaic look of a priest, walked ahead; behind him, four college servants in rough tweeds carried a stretcher covered with the blankets that Abigail recognized from George Fairfield’s bed. She moved to put her arm around Horace’s waist in comfort, then restrained herself, recalling that Ryland was the Fellow in charge of the Hall. No sense having the poor boy fined four shillings on top of everything else.

  “Will Dr. Langdon write to George’s father?” she asked softly.

  Horace nodded, unable to speak, and Weyountah said, “I imagine so, yes.”

  “Do either of you know the man? Or does Mr. Ryland?”

  They looked at one another, shook their heads. “Only from hearing George speak of him,” said the Indian. “He’ll be coming, I’m sure, to—to take George home . . .”

  “And to deal with Diomede?”

  She could tell by their faces that this aspect of the situation had only begun to surface through shock and grief.

  Horace said, “Oh, dear—”

  And Weyountah, “Oh, Christ.”

  “Dear Mr. Fairfield,” said Abigail drily. “I regret to inform you that your son’s valet has murdered your son in a fit of drunken rage over his enslaved condition, which is no more than is to be expected. Shame on you for transforming him into a man so degraded as to do the deed, and it serves you right that he did. Please come and have him picked up for trial before the Virginia courts. What is the penalty for a slave who kills his master, in Virginia? Hanging? And how likely is it that he’ll receive even a hearing, let alone a trial?”

  “Negligible,” said Weyountah softly. “And no, it’s not hanging. It’s burning at the stake. When will Mr. Adams return from Maine?”

  “Friday,” said Abigail. “Possibly Saturday, though there’s talk of him going down to Providence next week. I expect they’ll hold Diomede here for Mr. Fairfield’s arrival, rather than try him under Massachusetts law, which means that no matter how many affidavits we can collect attesting his innocence, he shall still face judgment entirely at the hands of a father mourning the loss of his only son and men who have spent the whole of their lives watching for the slightest signs of defiance and murder in their slaves.”

  “Can Mr. Adams have the trial moved here?” With a swift and rather guilty glance about them, to make sure that Mr. Ryland and his party were out of the hall, Weyountah led the way up the staircase again. “How would one go about that? Petition the Governor?”

  “’Tis what I’ll try,” said Abigail grimly. “John hates the man, but the one time I’ve met him, His Excellency seemed kindly and well-disposed. I’ve heard nothing personal against him, save that he’s a self-serving blockhead who gives all colonial offices and perquisites to his family and friends, and any man might do that. Even one who has written to the King
advising that the harshest measures be taken against the colony for our disobedient persistence in wanting to have the rights accorded to the meanest ditchdigger in a British parish.

  “The problem is,” she added, as they slipped through the oak door and stood in the tiny study again, the stink of blood and rum very strong now in the close room. “The problem is,’twill be difficult to convince His Excellency or anyone that murder—sufficiently premeditated to entail the drugging of a servant—was done for a couple of pornographic books. It seems a small matter to be the worth of a man’s life.”

  “Think you so, m’am?” Weyountah, kneeling beside the rumpled and blood-smudged pallet that still lay along one wall of the study, looked up, his dark eyes somber. “My grandparents were killed, and three of my aunts, because a band of Massachusetts militiamen took the wrong path in the woods one day on their way to avenge the killing of four cows and a herdsman by the men of a Pocasset village that they couldn’t manage to locate. Such was their desire for vengeance, however, that they followed the path, knowing themselves to be lost, and burned the village that they found at the end of it, though they knew that they’d come upon Narragansetts rather than Pocassets. About twenty people were killed—men, women, and children who had no more to do with the original cow-killing than had the islanders of Oatahite. My mother only escaped because she was down at the creek catching fish that afternoon. She was ten.”

  Abigail was silent, looking down at that young man, in his faded blue scholar’s gown and his trim, dark, threadbare suit. The blood on the sheets nearby seemed to mutter and whisper of the violence done in the room beyond: that someone had considered something worth not only the life of George Fairfield but of his slave also . . .

  But ten years of talking over John’s cases with him had told her—if a childhood listening to the sins and enormities of an isolated New England village had not—that men walked the earth to whom the avoidance of inconvenience or embarrassment was sufficient justification for taking another man’s life.

  “Would a student caught breaking into another man’s room stand in danger of being sent down?” she asked. “Particularly at night—”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Sine dubium. The thing is,” went on Horace diffidently, as he followed Abigail and Weyountah—rather white-faced but resolute—into the bedchamber beyond. “The thing is, George had only just gotten those books . . . what was it, Weyountah? Two weeks ago?”

  “Exactly two weeks.” Weyountah removed the stacked papers from the desk, handed them to Horace, his movements swift as if the two of them worked underwater, with only limited time available in the room that stank of their friend’s lifeblood soaked into the mattress of the bed. “The twelfth of April. He kept them in here.”

  He opened the desk, revealing the shallow compartment inside empty of everything save a few sheets of paper and some broken quills.

  “Was there usually more in here?” Abigail inquired. It looked nothing like John’s neat desk at home, but then, Fairfield had not impressed her as a scholar.

  “I think so,” said Horace, his arms filled with papers, books, and Greek and Latin lexicons. “But I usually worked in the front room, not in here. The college provosts will sometimes search the rooms—I know Pugh pays the ones over in Harvard Hall and the Fellow in charge of the hall as well not to touch his—and last term Jasmine tried to blackmail George over some love-letters a girl had written to him . . . that’s when he started keeping everything hidden in this desk.”

  Weyountah hooked his finger into an almost-invisible hole at one side of the desk’s interior and lifted out the false bottom to reveal a second compartment beneath. This contained a vast rummage of disordered papers: bills—from tailors, bootmakers, the college stables for feed—mixed with letters and notes. Abigail picked one up, Deerst Geo Ill bee back of the brewhous tonight dreemin of you ellie . . . There was also a small sack of coffee beans and a flask of rum. “He kept the books in there,” said Horace. “I know, because I came in yesterday morning earlier than he’d counted on, and he had the desk open and was looking at them—” Color crept up into his face again and faded almost at once, as he remembered not the pictures in the book, but the nearness of his friend who would never ogle questionable pictures again. After a moment he swallowed hard and went on, “And the same woman who sold them to him, sold me four books in Arabic.”

  Her name, said Horace—over a breakfast of Mrs. Squills’s sausage and corn-cakes at the Golden Stair some half hour later—was Mrs. Seckar. “Her husband held the Vassall Professorship of Religion for about a hundred years,” explained the boy. “He was very much a disciple of John Calvin and would hear of no innovation in the teaching of his master—”

  “He was a pride-sick old bigot.” Weyountah poured out coffee for himself and Abigail from a yellow pottery pitcher, while Horace sipped the mild tisane of honey, mint, and water that was all his fragile digestion would tolerate. “Cruel, too. He led his poor wife a frightful life, then left the house and bulk of his estate to fund a position here at Harvard. She was selling the books—which were hers—in order to have a little money to take with her when she went to live with her cousins in Medfield.”

  “The one Mr. Fairfield spoke of,” said Abigail thoughtfully. “And she had books in Arabic? Not to mention volumes like the Vies des Dames Galantes?”

  “Mrs. Seckar said they had probably been her great-grandfather’s,” explained the Indian. “I bought two texts in chemistry, though they’re fearfully out of date—the most recent was Willis’s Pharmaceutice Rationalis, 1674—and what I think was someone’s journal, which contained tables of astronomical observations and several pages of various methods of calculating sidereal time. One passage was translated from al-Farghani—an Arabic scholar nearly a thousand years ago—and I think in the chemical sections there were translations from al-Jildaki, who was one of the early Mohammedan scholars of the discipline.”

  “The four I bought weren’t anywhere near that erudite,” admitted Horace. “I had an edition of the Alexander Legend, Ibn-Battuta’s travel narratives, a commentary on the Koran, and a book about horse-doctoring.”

  “So obviously, Mrs. Seckar’s ancestor was the last Arabic scholar in this colony . . . How long ago? Fifty years? Sixty years?”

  “Longer,” said Weyountah. “Mrs. Seckar must be in her seventies. The Reverend Seckar was eighty-five, but up to the day he died he’d walk from their house on the Watertown Road to the chapel”—he nodded in the direction of the Common and the college—“to supervise prayers.”

  “To make sure nobody strayed from the Master’s doctrines by so much as an inch, you mean,” put in Horace, devouring his fifth corn-cake. “Please don’t get me wrong, Aunt Abigail,” he added earnestly. “I understand the need for correct understanding of the Will of God, and I know that disregard of intellectual distinctions can result in some quite frightful misunderstandings of our own unworthiness to have received salvation that lies beyond our desserts . . . but I also think that no sin lies in sweetening the lesson.”

  “You’re saying he was a trifle dry?” She hid her smile.

  “Horace is saying the Reverend Seckar was long-winded, doctrinaire, and intrusive into matters that seemed to me no part of the Church’s business.”

  “That was his point,” said Horace apologetically. “That everything in life is God’s business, in that it glorifies or affronts God. He abused poor Ryland like a pickpocket at the merest hint of Arminianism—”

  “Is Mr. Ryland an Arminian?” Somehow she could believe it of that grave young man, that he could not endure the belief that a man’s good deeds would not suffice to bend the will of an angry God.

  “He claims not to be. Of course, the Reverend Seckar would say—”

  “I think his quarrel with Ryland,” put in the Indian, “was as much about Ryland taking a stipend from the Governor to support him here as it was about Free Will. Seckar never forgave Governor Hutchinson for being descended
from a heretic. And the fact that Mrs. Seckar had four books in Arabic in her great-grandfather’s collection doesn’t mean that the other books she sold at the same time contained something that could have gotten the Governor of Jamaica hanged for treason, Arabic or not . . .”

  “No,” admitted Abigail. “But the coincidence of a murder, an attempted murder, and the disappearance of antique books from the murdered man’s rooms all within a week makes me extremely curious to have a few words with Mrs. Seckar about what other books Great-Grandpa’s collection might have contained.”

  From Mrs. Squills, Abigail borrowed pen and paper, and wrote a note to Mrs. Seckar in Medfield (“She’s gone to live with cousins, poor lady, the Barlows, at Rock Farm out nearer Stonton than Medfield . . .” Mrs. Squills provided), asking the favor of an interview at her earliest convenience. After a moment’s thought, she composed another, to Governor Hutchinson, and a third note, more brief than the others, she sent by way of Mrs. Squills’s niece to a Mr. Metcalfe, who lived in Cambridge and whose most recent fines for infractions of the Navigation Acts John had been instrumental in having dismissed. Had she not done so, she feared that Weyountah and Horace would beggar themselves of candle-andfood money to rent her a chaise to return to Boston in.

  While waiting for Mr. Metcalfe’s reply—he had assured John on the occasion of their last meeting that any help I can be, to you or any of yours—Abigail walked from the Golden Stair to the town jail, only to be told by Sheriff Congreve that Diomede, still half-stupefied, had slipped back into a heavy sleep. She gave the sheriff most of her slender pocket money to provide food for the prisoner and, returning to the inn, made arrangements with Mrs. Squills to send bread, cheese, and cider to him over the course of the following days.