Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

  “But if he’d got George out of his rooms. . . .” said Weyountah doubtfully.

  The Indian’s face was still soot-smudged. Abigail and Horace had found him that morning in one of the laboratory rooms in Harvard Hall, trying to focus beams of sunlight with mirrors through a choking cloud of sulfurous smoke (“This is nothing, m’am—last fall Ryland nearly suffocated everyone in the Hall with some phosphorous compound he was working on . . .”). Horace had been coughing and checking his pulse ever since.

  “He must have returned sooner than expected.”

  “Yes, but he was on his way to meet someone just at dusk when he parted from me. Would he have met—I mean . . .” Horace blushed again at the thought that his hero would have dallied with one girl from eight ’til midnight to pass the time before a second tryst.

  “Diomede said he’d no deep fondness for Miss Woodleigh,” recalled Abigail thoughtfully. “Contrary to what Miss Woodleigh was obviously telling Mr. Pugh. Obviously, the Black Dog thought that a lover so gallant as George would wait at least an hour for his lady fair before coming back to his room. George must have returned and caught him.”

  “How do we prove this?” Weyountah’s voice was grim. “’Tis all very well to guess at what the man did, but I doubt a Virginia jury will free a slave accused of killing his master on the strength of two sheets of paper. Particularly not to convict a white man in his place.”

  “Even searching his rooms might not help us,” said Abigail, “without other proofs in hand. Though we shall certainly have to try it. They are—as everyone keeps pointing out—volumes that any young man might easily wish to steal without also murdering their rightful owner; though by Horace’s own testimony, they were in his desk that morning. Where is George, by the way?” she added in a quieter voice. “I mean, where has his body been bestowed to await his father’s arrival?”

  “In the holding crypt behind Christ Church.” Weyountah’s lips settled for a moment into a hard line of grief. “Would you like to go there?”

  “When we return,” she said. “If there’s time.”

  “Sally Woodleigh has been there three times to leave flowers,” Weyountah went on drily. “In full mourning—and always with some solicitous gentleman offering her his shoulder upon which to weep. That night I heard George cry out.” He had said this to her before, but it was as if he were driven to repeat the words, to understand what they meant and what they could not mean. “I thought it was only him angry at Dio for getting drunk—”

  “Do you know what time that was?”

  The Indian shook his head. After a moment he went on, “I heard nothing further.”

  I went back to sleep . . . I let my friend die . . .

  “And George would not have thanked you,” Abigail pointed out gently, “had you gone charging across the staircase while he was dressing down Diomede for stealing his liquor.”

  “No, m’am.” The Indian’s voice was nearly inaudible.

  They had reached the quadrangle between Harvard Hall, Massachusetts, and Stoughton College. Most of the students—and a certain proportion of the younger masters—being on the Common, comparing cartridge-boxes and arguing about the merits of French over English powder, the only scholarly gown visible was Mr. Pugh, strolling in the direction of Harvard Hall with one of his “cut-faced savages” at his heels. This man—small, wiry, and black as ink—appeared so barbaric, with his head shaved, his face crisscrossed with tribal scars, and plugs of sharpened bone thrust through the septum of his nose and the lobes of his ears, that Abigail suspected his master of playing up his African customs to impress and intimidate others.

  “I’ll hitch up Sassy,” said Weyountah. “Dr. Langdon lets me take her out. If you’re to be back in Boston by sunset, we’d best start now to show you Mrs. Lake’s farmhouse—”

  “Then we shall linger only long enough to return Mr. Fairfield’s bills to his own room.” Abigail patted her satchel. “Provided my going up there won’t get you boys thrown out of the College.”

  “What, for an aunt?” Horace looked grateful—Abigail suspected that if she’d gone into the parlor and left her nephew to carry the bundle of papers up alone, he ran the risk of being sent to the other side of town on some foolish errand by Mr. Pugh.

  Pugh himself bowed as they passed him. “Not going out to march with the traitors, Mr. Wylie?”

  The Indian returned the bow. “No, I thought I should stay in today with the cowards.”

  Smiling to herself, Abigail followed Horace into Massachusetts Hall and up the middle staircase. “You said Dr. Langdon was taking charge of George’s things,” she said as they climbed. “Is the room kept closed up, or can anyone come and go?”

  “Anyone can,” said Horace. “It’s just that—” His voice tailed off as they reached the landing and saw that the door to Fairfield’s room indeed stood open. Horace’s lips pursed and behind the heavy spectacle-lenses, his gray eyes hardened. Of course, thought Abigail, the one day the building is certain to be empty—

  The boy strode ahead of her into the empty study, Abigail at his heels, and through it to the bedchamber beyond. “Who’s in here?” he called out, in a hard voice completely unlike his usual mild tones. “And what are you—Oh!”

  He stopped in the doorway, blocking Abigail’s view.

  Beyond him, a young woman’s voice demanded, “And who are you, frog-eyes? I have every right to be here, I guess—”

  Abigail looked around her tall nephew’s shoulder and saw, standing beside the desk, a girl of seventeen or so—“wellset-up,” John would have described her lush figure—in a short petticoat and coarse skirt of striped linen, tucked up to show off slim brown ankles, and a brown linen jacket, much patched. Wisps of black hair, straight and heavy as an Indian’s, floated free from her cap, and so sun-browned was her face that were it not for the morning glory blue of her eyes, she might have been mistaken for one of Weyountah’s relatives.

  She nodded toward the bed, stripped of bedding and mattress. “Has his Pa come for him, then?”

  “Not yet,” Horace stammered.

  “Then where is he?”

  “Christ’s Church.”

  Her eyes narrowed beneath butterfly-wing brows: “Doing what? They’re not making him marry that Woodleigh cow, are they? Because if she—”

  Abigail said quietly, “You have not heard, mistress? George Fairfield was killed Tuesday night.” The girl pressed her hand quickly to her lips, and though her expression didn’t change, she went sheet white under her tan. It was as if she’d been struck but would not acknowledge the pain of the blow. Then she whispered, in a small despairing voice, “Oh, George.”

  “And you are—?”

  The girl said softly, “I’m his wife.”

  Eleven

  George said he’d keep the license.” Katy Pegg—as she had said her name was—sat on the edge of the naked bedframe, brown hands folded in her lap. “There’s no place at home I could put it that it’d be safe from my step-pa. We married in December, before George left for Virginia.”

  Abigail glanced at the desk beside the window. It had not been opened. Among all the tailors’ bills, all the gamblingmarkers, all the love-letters she’d taken out Wednesday morning, there had been no marriage license.

  “We rode down to Providence together. I don’t know what he told Diomede—the man his Pa wished on him, to keep him from meddling with girls, George said. Tuesday night—” Tears flooded her eyes, and she almost slapped them away with impatient fingers. “I was with him—”

  “He was killed by an intruder,” said Abigail gently, “late on Tuesday night after he came back here to his rooms. A thief.”

  The girl closed her eyes, her face like a defiant child’s, who’ll take a whipping rather than ask a parent to stop.

  “What time did you part?”

  “Midnight. He said he was meeting friends, and the—the men I’d rid out here with would be leaving soon. My step-pa would skin me if he knew—”
>
  She took a deep breath, some of the terrible tension going out of her slim shoulders, her oval face. “My step-pa hated him. He said he was a damned Tory and would break my heart for me, and leave me caught with a baby . . . which is what he was after himself, the—”

  She stopped herself, looked down at her square, boyish hands, folded tight in her lap. “George said he’d come for me on Wednesday night. That’s the night Mr. Deems—my step-pa—goes out with the Watertown militia. I wrote Thursday . . .” She raised her hands quickly to press against her lips again, then lowered them almost at once. “So I got a lift this morning from one of the farmers that was coming in for the militia. I knew George’s Pa wouldn’t stand for it, for George and me, I mean. But he said—George said—that marrying me made it all right, and they couldn’t stop us if we were wed.”

  Abigail rolled her eyes heavenward. Carmody—the worst of her brother’s ne’er-do-well friends—had boasted to William once when he didn’t realize Abigail was in earshot of having “wedded” a girl who couldn’t be persuaded and was too cagy to let herself get into a situation where she could be raped with impunity (“Well, they always cry rape afterwards,” Carmody had shrugged . . .)

  And the young scoundrel with Sally Woodleigh’s love-letters in his pocket—! She felt sick with disappointment, as if she herself had been betrayed.

  “What happened?”

  “Mrs. Adams—” Weyountah’s light tread sounded in the study. “If we don’t leave now . . .”

  He halted in the doorway, startled to see Abigail not alone.

  “Mr. Wylie,” Abigail introduced, “Mistress Pegg. Or, as she claims is the truth, so far as she knows it, Mrs. Fairfield.”

  Weyountah’s jaw dropped for less than a second. He shut his mouth and bowed. “I’m very sorry, m’am,” he said. “Mrs. Adams must have—”

  “She did.” Katy stood, her shoulders straight. “And as for, so far as I know it . . . It is the truth. We brought proofs of my age and that my parents were dead, and the county clerk in Providence made us out a license and a certificate, and married us—”

  “In the courthouse?” asked Weyountah.

  Katy shook her head. “In the back room of a tavern about a mile outside of the town. George’s father has many friends in Providence, merchants who do business with him. George made this arrangement, so that we wouldn’t . . .” She broke off, looking from Abigail’s face to those of the two students, and her own cheeks reddened. Her chin came up. “And no, it wasn’t as it looks—as I can see you’re thinking. The man was genuinely the county clerk, and George gave him ten shillings to put it in his book at the courthouse that we’d been married there, though there’s nothing in the laws of Providence nor of Massachusetts, either, that says a marriage isn’t valid if it’s not performed in some certain magical place.”

  “But it is the reason, m’am,” said the Indian gently, “that they want witnesses and the presence of the families, to make sure the girl isn’t being lied to—”

  “Oh, and wouldn’t my step-pa just love to see his girl married to a Tory? George didn’t lie to me. He said he’d keep the license—”

  “It wasn’t in his desk.”

  “Look in his books,” said Katy, in a small, steady voice. “He was always putting things he wanted to keep in the backs of his books . . .”

  “That’s true,” said Horace. Abigail’s heart went out to him, at the expression of wretchedness on his face, that his hero would have played so despicable a trick on a girl.

  “But I did see it when ’twas signed, m’am,” said Katy. “And the clerk did sign it after he’d read the service over us. And he truly was the county clerk.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Weyountah firmly. “The chaise is at the door, m’am, and further delay will prevent Mrs. Adams from getting back to Boston, either by the ferry or through the town gates. Moreover, Mrs. Adams is Horace’s aunt, and you—Mrs. Fairfield—are nothing of the kind, and we could all of us be in serious trouble if some mean-spirited bachelor-fellow were to happen along and report the lot of us to Dr. Langdon.”

  “Like that wretch Ryland? He’d do it—Mrs. Adams?” The name finally seemed to register, and her blue eyes stretched wide. “Not . . . Not Samuel Adams?”

  “I am Mrs. John Adams,” said Abigail. “Are you staying in Cambridge, Mrs. Fairfield? Or can we leave you somewhere?”

  “Looks like I’ve been left somewhere as it is.” Katy turned and picked up the small bundle she had left, almost out of sight by the end of the bed. “John Adams—that wouldn’t be he who writes as Novanglus, would it? And those other letters he’s done . . . You’ll be Weyountah, won’t you?” she added, turning back toward the Indian. “You’d never get the four of us into that little chaise of George’s.”

  “It’s why I borrowed Millard’s old post chaise and Benton’s horse. If Horace has no objection to riding on the back—”

  “And if Horace does?” protested Horace.

  “Then I’ll ride on the back,” said Katy, with a sudden flicker of a grin. “I’ve always wanted to, seeing the gentlemen coming into the tavern yard—” She followed Abigail down the stair, halting obediently at Weyountah’s signal so that the Indian could step out first and make sure that the corridor was clear. They hastened to the door, where the dwarfish Mr. Beaverbrook was holding the heads of Sassy and the tallest, boniest black gelding Abigail had ever seen. As Abigail handed Mr. Beaverbrook a quarter of a silver doubloon and touched her finger to her lips for silence, Horace climbed rather gingerly onto the footman’s stand on the back of the little vehicle. “I suffer from vertigo,” he warned. “And sometimes even scotodinia . . .”

  “Where do you go?” Abigail asked Katy, as Weyountah helped them into the four-wheeled post chaise and then went to mount Sassy, the harness permitting a rider.

  “Home, it looks like.” Abigail heard in the girl’s voice the effort to keep it steady. “Mr. Deems is the head hostler at the Yellow Cow, if you know where that is?” She leaned from the door of the chaise to address this last to Weyountah, who was preparing to put the whole equipage into motion. “Where the road forks to go to Watertown—”

  “Never tell me you walked!” protested the scholar. “That’s almost to Concord!”

  “Lord, you think I couldn’t get a ride?” retorted the girl, with a quick flash of a grin. But as she settled back into the worn leather of the seat and Weyountah touched his heels to Sassy’s sides, Katy admitted wanly, “But to be honest, I’m just as glad to have the ride, if go back I must. I’d hoped . . .”

  She broke off her words and sat for a time, looking out at the handsome houses as they passed along Brattle Street and out toward the countryside beyond the town. The drumming of the militia faded behind them, the ragged crackling of rifle-fire like very distant lightning. Katy began to say, “George—” She stopped herself. Whatever George was or could have been, it was over now.

  “What about Diomede?” she asked after a time, returning her attention to Abigail. “I only ever saw him at a distance, but George told me about him, and I feel like I know him—just as I feel like I know Weyountah and . . . It is Horace, isn’t it? Was Dio drunk when this thief came in? I know he drank,” she added. “But according to George—I’m sorry, I can’t seem to stop bringing up his name, like a grandmother . . . George said Diomede seldom got so fogbound he couldn’t pull himself together and wake up at need. Diomede’s a terrible mother hen, George said. Well, he had to be; it was his job, like those old Roman he-nannies they used to have—”

  “Pedagogues,” said Abigail, smiling.

  “Yes . . . and about time the men found out what it was like, having to chase around after a child all day long. Not that they aren’t sweet,” she added, with a secret smile of her own and a small movement, to lay her hand on her belly, that made Abigail moan inwardly—And the young blackguard made her pregnant as well! “I know all this is bad for me, but the poor man must be devastated! To look after someone all th
ose years . . . Is Diomede all right?”

  “I fear not,” Abigail said. “Diomede is being accused of the murder.”

  The girl’s eyes flared with horror, and when Abigail sketched the circumstances—saying nothing of what was stolen, only that the rum had been drugged—Katy cried again, “Oh, NO! How awful—”

  “Is there anyone you know of,” Abigail asked curiously, “who might hate George enough to harm him?”

  “Bruck Travers,” replied the girl at once. “He’s captain of the Watertown militia. He’s also on the Committee of Correspondence. Mr. Deems—my step-pa—says Bruck is the greatest patriot in the county, and so he is. Twice he had the boys out to ambush George and Diomede when they were coming back from drilling with the Volunteers.”

  The heartfelt approval in her voice made Abigail raise her brows. “I thought you were a Tory?”

  “What on earth gave you that idea?” Katy looked genuinely surprised. “I listened very carefully to the clerk when he read the marriage service, and I didn’t hear a single thing about a woman having to cleave to her husband’s politics if her husband’s idiot enough to believe the Governor’s Tory lies. George can take care of himself and whip a dozen of Bruck Travers. That is—”

  Her voice stammered a little, and she looked aside again, fixing her attention on the open cornfields that lay beyond the tree-shaded road, the grazing cattle and the black circling shapes of crows. After a moment she went on, “Just because George let a bunch of lying Tory merchants talk him into believing a King who wants to put us all in chains, doesn’t mean I don’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

  She took a few breaths, her body swaying a little with the motion of the chaise. “If your husband were a raving Tory, m’am, would you cease to love him?”

  “No,” said Abigail, smiling. “No, I suppose not.”

  About ten miles along the Concord Road, Weyountah reined the team up a side-trace that ran through a woodlot, across a very rickety bridge, and past what looked like, in previous years, had been corn fields, now given over to pasturage of a herd of black-and-white cows. Twisting in her seat to lean out the window and holding perilously to her sunbonnet, Katy said, “It’s the Chamberville place, isn’t it?”