Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

  He had made for himself, as a part of his disguise, out of wax and mud and Heaven only knew what, a V-shaped scar down his left eye and cheek . . .

  Precisely as Horace had described.

  Nine

  And of course, the first thing John wanted to know of when he returned that night—just as Abigail was sweeping the coals from the lid of the Dutch oven, and Johnny and Nabby were setting the table for dinner—was about what everyone in town was saying about the King and whether the ship from London had been sighted?

  This was understandable, Abigail knew, considering the possibility—remote but not unthinkable—that John himself might be included on a list of suspected persons as Sam’s cousin . . . and as someone who had written any number of inflammatory letters and pamphlets concerning Governor Hutchinson. “The countryside is in arms already,” he said, when Abigail had outlined what she knew on this subject, which was—as with everyone else in Boston—merely a collection of speculation and rumor. “From here to the Kennebec, every village and town has formed militia, elected officers . . . They’ve spoken of reestablishing the minutemen, as a first defense against an alarm, and are stockpiling powder and muskets in Concord and a dozen other places. What good that will do against trained troops—”

  He shook his head, his round face grave. “What frightens me more, Portia—”

  She smiled a little, at his use of the old nickname from their courting-days.

  “—is that the Tories are arming as well. If war breaks out, ’twill be civil war, with every local squabble about landboundaries and who-cheated-who-out-of-Grandpa’s-inheritance dragged into it, to confuse and embitter the quarrel. Sam has threatened the King: If you don’t give us our rights, we’ll open the gates of Hell in this country . . . But I think Sam has deeply misjudged what will emerge from those gates.”

  He who would sup with the Devil . . .

  Abigail was silent, sitting beside the spent dishes—dinner over, Nabby and Johnny quietly clearing off and (thank Heavens!) fending aside Charley and Tommy as they clamored for their parents’ attention . . . “How much danger are you in?” she asked at last.

  “Not much, I don’t think. I’m Sam’s cousin, not Sam.” John finished his cider, handed the empty cup to his daughter, who—Abigail feared—was listening more than was probably good for the little girl’s peace. “I’ve done what it’s within the rights of every Englishman to do: spoken for our rights as Englishmen. I’ve broken no windows, boiled no tar, hamstrung no man’s horse—”

  “What if they don’t care?” asked Abigail softly. “What if the Crown gives Hutchinson extraordinary powers to disregard the rights of habeus corpus, to suppress disorders here as and how he pleases, and sends him the troops to do it with? You’ve marked yourself his enemy—”

  “If the Crown has given its Governor the power to punish a man’s thoughts and words,” returned John, “it will have made me its enemy indeed . . . and every man of the colony as well. Now leave over the clearing-up for a time, and tell me of your endeavors these two weeks, dearest friend.” He gathered her onto his knee. “And tell me how it happens that you left our children with Uncle Isaac and Aunt Eliza for a night while you went gallivanting about the countryside—”

  “Gallivanting, is it, sir?” Abigail raised her brows. “Take the log from thine own eye, Lysander, before you go looking for specks in mine . . .”

  He pressed his knuckles to his breast and inclined his head in penitence, with an expression so humble that Abigail couldn’t keep herself from pushing back his wig a little to kiss the smooth skin of his forehead.

  Then she rose, and while she helped Pattie and the children clear up and do the dishes (“Sit down, John, you’ve a dispensation for today . . .”), she recounted the tale of Horace’s adventure and its increasingly disquieting chain of sequels. She did not speak of Charley’s encounter (HAD it been an actual encounter?) with Mr. Scar-Eye until she had returned to John’s side, on the settle by the fire, and the children were occupied with their studies or their play, but when she did, she saw how his face flushed with anger.

  “How would such a man have known of you? Of our house?”

  She shook her head. “As Mr. Ryland said, in some ways Cambridge is very like a village. Word gets about very swiftly, from servants at the college overhearing the conversations of their masters belike: it doesn’t seem very difficult for Weyountah to have learned from the unfortunate Mr. Pinkstone what he was sworn not to tell under threat of being eaten by cannibals.”

  “And anything you happened to speak of to Ryland,” remarked John, leaning to the fire to tong up a coal for his long-stemmed Dutch pipe, “has now gone straight to His Excellency—if he didn’t know it already.”

  Mrs. Lake’s note he turned over in his fingers and held to the strengthening light of the kitchen hearth: “It’s a man’s hand, anyway, so we can assume Mrs. Lake is a cat’s-paw—”

  “Or had the wits to guess that her intended victim might wonder why a Boston lawyer’s handwriting was so girlish?”

  John made the gesture with his pipe, of a fencer acknowledging a hit. He’d taken off his wig, and without its neat frame of snuff brown waves his round face seemed more relaxed: the at-home John, the evening-John who seemed to her like lover and brother and best friend in one.

  “Is the hand anything like Hutchinson’s? Do you have a letter of his?”

  “In his own hand and not a clerk’s? I doubt it. As I recall it, Narcissa Seckar’s father was Emmanuel Whitehead, who held the Vassall Chair of Theology before Seckar did. I never heard anything about a pirate in the family—”

  “I should imagine ’twas the sort of thing they’d hush up. Particularly after Sam making a jest of it.”

  “Well, ’tis nothing you’d think of, looking at Old Whitehead. The man was dry and cold as the Original Snake in the Garden. You’d never have caught him giving his books to a college. He left everything he owned to Seckar, who was his student—house, property, the very dishes in the kitchen—rather than turn any of it over to a member of the sex that was responsible for human perdition, he said—”

  “Wretch. I take it Mrs. Seckar was his only child.”

  “I think there was another daughter who ran off with a horse coper or something. ’Twas all a very long time ago. I believe his father was a merchant—”

  “And a slave-dealer, His Excellency said. Myself, I had rather have a good, honest pirate than the pack of hypocrites I’ve heard about—”

  “That’s only,” said John quietly, “because you’ve never found yourself in the hands of one.”

  “And in any case,” went on Abigail, “there must have been a genuine pirate somewhere in the family, because from what I gather of the two books that are missing, they’re nothing that would have been purchased by a man who held the Vassall Chair of Theology . . . unless he was a thoroughgoing hypocrite indeed. I’ve found nothing out of the ordinary about the papers in Mr. Fairfield’s desk and will return them there tomorrow for old Mr. Fairfield to deal with; the love-letters I shall burn. Weyountah writes me that they think they’ve found the farmhouse where Mrs. Lake lured Horace, so we shall see what the place can tell us—”

  “Not much, I daresay. Ten to one you’ll find ’tis the house of a Tory family that lives in town these days and rents out the land—and if Hutchinson’s behind it, they’ll not even have asked why he wanted to borrow the key to the place. And don’t burn the love-letters just yet.” He took from the settle beside them the packet of letters that had been in Fairfield’s pocket, unfolded one of them in the flickering hearth-light. “French paper, expensive scent, a hand that shouts ‘governess’—would there be any chance that these were sent by the Woodleigh girl?

  “Montgomery Woodleigh’s fortune is sufficient temptation, given the right circumstances, for a man to want to kill a rival, and given the nature of the missing books, they may in fact have nothing to do with the murder. Ask Diomede about whose hopes these letters”—he gestu
red with the scented packet—“might have crushed. And be careful, Nab.”

  He took her hand. Abigail was about to disavow any danger in dealing with possible minions of the scholarly gentleman to whom she’d spoken the evening before . . .

  And then glanced across the hearth at Charley progressing through the alphabet at Pattie’s side. She had, of course, scrubbed off the V-shaped “scar” that afternoon the moment the boy had come into the house, and Charley denied that Mr. Scar-Eye had spoken to him or even attempted to do so . . . and later, that he’d even existed.

  And yet, for a moment, it seemed to her that she saw the mark on her son’s face still.

  When Abigail returned from her marketing on the following morning, she found Sam’s promised minion waiting for her, a grim old codger in his sixties who was reassuring John—as Abigail came down the passway into the yard—that he would treat and treasure Mrs. Adams as if she were the Queen of England, and the more so because it stood to reason the bastard King wouldn’t marry any but a whore . . .

  And for the hour and a half that it took for old Mr. Creel’s wagon and team to reach Cambridge, Abigail was obliged to listen to that gentleman’s opinions as to what ought to be done to those who were conspiring with the King to enslave the men of Massachusetts—as well as to the New Hampshire sons of whores who were trying to cheat the colony of the best of its lands, the heretic bastards in Rhode Island who were siding with the Indians in a conspiracy to massacre women and children because they (the heretic bastards) were in the pay of the French, and all Pennsylvania merchants who were all born cowards and thieves. Abigail made several attempts at rebuttal to his more outrageous statements (“Them praying-Indians they talk about got no more prayer in ’em than cats: they worship the Devil ’cause they’re Devils themselves . . .”), but the old man was almost stone-deaf and violently obstinate, and by the time they’d crossed the narrow neck of land that joined Boston to the mainland, she gave up and sat fuming. The man was, after all, giving her a ride in his wagon for seven rather weary miles, and she realized she had the choice of shouting her objections to him at the top of her lungs—objections to which he wouldn’t listen even if he could hear them accurately—or walking.

  Even attempts to turn the subject availed little: his neighbors were all Tory traitors also, apparently. And heretics. “Served’em right that their horses was blinded and hamstrung by the Committee—that’ll show ’em not to go speaking against Mr. Sam Adams and Mr. Hancock—We took an’ strung up Cal Lechmere’s dog, hung it right in front of his door with a sign on its neck, This’ll be You . . .”

  “And what did the dog ever do to harm you?” demanded Abigail. “Or the poor horses, either?”

  Which was a mistake, resulting in a long catalog of the late dog’s transgressions—which seemed to consist merely in doing its loyal duty to drive off intruders—and the observation that a) Tory beasts deserved what they got and b) women didn’t understand these things and should keep their noses out of men’s doings.

  Abigail was frothing with wrath by the time she was set down outside the gates of Harvard College, and the first thing she did was to take from her pocket Sam’s letter of introduction to one Lazarus Dowdall—of Perking Hill Farm—asking him to oblige Mrs. Adams by returning her to Boston that afternoon, and tear it up. The man was probably the local sheep-thief anyway.

  A man in shirtsleeves pulling weeds around the single great tree in the court informed Abigail that Mr. Thaxter was carrying a note from Mr. Pugh to Mr. Beecham in town and would be back any time; Abigail watched through the window of the parlor of Massachusetts Hall where she was seated until she saw Horace come through the gate carrying a package. When she intercepted him, he greeted her with obvious relief—“I’ve been carrying notes back and forth between Pugh and Jasmine half the morning, just to be bloody-minded . . .” She walked with him up the end staircase of Harvard Hall, when he went to knock on Mr. Pugh’s door.

  The door was opened by a very young-looking fair-haired boy in a short freshman’s gown, over whose shoulder Pugh’s voice called out, “Oh, is that you, Thaxter? Did you get the coffee? Good lad! Now I’ve one more errand, if you would be so kind—”

  “I beg you’ll excuse my nephew,” said Abigail, and the baby-faced freshman stepped quickly aside out of the doorway as Pugh set aside the enormous white Persian cat from his knee and rose from the chair beside the window: the study reeked of beer fumes and stale smoke, and Abigail had the impression, looking in, of rather old-fashioned furniture—opulent and tapestried—and not a book in sight. “I’ve come from town this morning to visit him.”

  “Madame, I abase myself in shame.” Pugh made a surprisingly graceful leg for a man that corpulent, sweeping aside the skirts of the brocaded banyan he wore over his shirtsleeves as if it had been a court-coat at the Palace of St. James. From the mantle of the fireplace a black cat blinked down, like Satan surveying the world beneath his feet; a long-furred gray tortoiseshell was washing itself in the windowsill. “Had I known our Horace was expecting company, I would never have taken him from his morning tasks. Don’t just stand there, Pinky, put the coffee away—”

  The freshman hastened to relieve Horace of his package.

  “Will you have some tea, Mrs. Adams? No? My heart shall never recover. Yes, yes, Horace, it is well, run along—Pinky, dearest, I fancy you’d better take this note on to Jasmine’s room—” He scooped up the tortoiseshell cat as it moved to wind itself around Abigail’s skirts.

  “That’s Mr. Pinkstone?” asked Abigail softly, as they descended to the courtyard again.

  Horace nodded as he took Abigail’s basket. “Is that gingerbread?” he asked, sniffing the air rather wistfully—since gingerbread was one of the many things that brought on his hives.

  “I brought it for Weyountah,” she explained, “and some honey for yourself—”

  The gratitude and delight in his face were almost painful to see. Honey was one of the few treats that her nephew could consume with impunity.

  “—and a little extra gingerbread, for purposes of corruption. I take it Mr. Blossom lives in Massachusetts Hall?” Though Horace would have turned right toward the main door of Harvard as they emerged from Pugh’s staircase, Abigail set out briskly across the courtyard for the hall opposite.

  “How did you know?”

  “I assume Mr. Pugh would not have been sending you back and forth with notes to someone who didn’t live in the building farthest from Harvard Hall . . . I think the walk will do us good, both to unload the honey, which is rather heavy, and to lie in wait for Mr. Pinkstone, who—threats of cannibalism aside—seems ripe to do his master a disservice. Upon which staircase does Mr. Blossom reside?”

  After lying in wait for a very few minutes within the entry of the hall that led to the various staircases, Abigail and Horace were rewarded by the sight of young Mr. Pinkstone emerging from Harvard Hall and scurrying across the open court as if pursued. The clock on the chapel chimed noon as he came, and from the doors of the hall a great number of students began to pour forth, gowns bright against the Indian red of the brickwork and the green of the new grass. Abigail rather feared that Mr. Pinkstone would turn back or engage himself in conversation with one of them, but in fact he quickened his steps—probably fearing to be intercepted by some student more senior to Mr. Pugh and sent on some yet more tiresome errand.

  He checked his steps as he approached the door, but Horace called out, “I wanted quick word with you, Pinky, where the Black Dog couldn’t see—and I’m sorry you got caught up in all his bloody-minded note-carrying. Here,” he said, and took Abigail’s basket from her. “My aunt brought Weyountah some gingerbread, but I think he doesn’t need all of it.”

  The young man took what Horace handed him and began immediately to devour it, like a small dog who expects his bone to be seized by a larger dog. “That’s decent of you,” he said, and after the first bite, “Lord, that’s good, m’am! Did you make it?”

  “Catc
h me palming off someone else’s gingerbread on my nephew’s friends,” said Abigail. And then, to Horace, as if they’d arranged the matter beforehand, “Ask him about the marzipan tea I’d sent you that was in poor Mr. Fairfield’s rooms.”

  “What? Oh, yes.” Horace looked momentarily startled, then nodded. “I’ve been thinking what you said about the Black Dog breaking up the card game early Tuesday night—You don’t think he came across to poor George’s room then, by any chance, do you? It’s just that my aunt had sent me some marzipan tea, and I had it in the room with me when I was studying there—”

  “’Twas in a Japan-ware caddy,” corroborated Abigail, “that belongs to my grandmother. I’m afraid it sounds like a terrible thing to be concerned with, but she’ll be very upset if it’s lost. And while I wouldn’t wish to accuse anyone of thievery, the tea is the sort of thing that someone might help themselves to, and you can’t carry it off in your pockets, you know. And I only wonder—”

  “Well, m’am, I wouldn’t put it past Pugh.” The boy rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I haven’t seen anything like a tea caddy in his room—What color was it?”

  Abigail described her Grandma Quincy’s Japan-ware tea caddy, which was in fact safely on a shelf in Aunt Eliza’s kitchen. “It just occurred to me when Horace mentioned the matter, that midnight is a tremendously early hour for a man like Mr. Pugh to be breaking up a promising game.”

  “He was winning, too,” said Pinkstone. “Not that that’s anything new—the fellow cheats like Iscariot. He’d heard Shallop from over in Hollis Hall had just got money in from his family, and was physicking him of it when he said, of a sudden, that he had a headache, and we were all to get out. I knew that was all stuff—Pugh wouldn’t have a headache if you gave him a hundred pounds to do it and wouldn’t stop a game if there was an ax sticking out of his skull . . . Myself, I thought he’d got a signal.”