Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

  “And Beelzebub was—?”

  “My father’s grandfather, Geoffrey Whitehead. Of course he hushed the matter up, and I think ’twas one reason my father pushed me so hard to wed Mr. Seckar, who was his favorite student and his amanuensis after Father had his stroke. He edited Father’s sermons, and acted as his secretary in all his business with the college and with the other churches in the colony. He was the son Father had always wished he’d had, the more so after Phoebe—my sister—wed a man who danced and played the fiddle and spent all his little money on fine horses . . . which he bred, to a fair profit, though Father would never hear of that. Father told me when I was seventeen that he was leaving the house to Mr. Seckar, who came of poor family and needed property. Better that a man of Godliness and worth should have it, he said, than a girl who would only marry it away to one of the Damned. I could marry Mr. Seckar, he said, and continue to live there, or leave it upon Father’s death.”

  “Was your father—” Abigail had to bite back the words right in the head? stifling her anger—the man was after all great-grandfather to Tilly and Hagar and Zilpah and at least some of the others . . .

  Narcissa only regarded her, with slightly raised white brows. “I was—a defiant girl,” she said matter-of-factly. “Rebellious of Father’s authority and scornful of the Fifth Commandment. I’m sure had I been the boy Father wanted, I would have kicked up all sorts of riot and rumpus, a fact which he ignored completely when he bemoaned the fact that God had inexplicably saddled him with the wrong sex of children. My sister was younger, and very sweet and meek, until she ran away at age fifteen with Mr. Wellman, who was Sarah’s father.” And she traded an affectionate glance with Mrs. Barlow. “Mr. Seckar was modest of bearing, right in thought and deed, saw clearly the will of the Lord—in Father’s words—”

  “Meaning saw clearly the will of your father.”

  “That, too, though perhaps he did clearly see the Will of God. I have no way of knowing. He was always ready to smite the unrighteous, Father said—meaning spiteful to those who didn’t agree with him—and upright to those who look to him for guidance, meaning cruelly harsh to his mother and sisters when he brought them in to live with us. And if he was as filled with pride as a toad is with poison, where Father could not see, and sometimes used the rod as well as the word to smite and guide . . . I’m sure Father would have allowed that some latitude is to be given for one so filled with the zeal of the Lord.”

  She returned to her knitting, and the gray kitten stood on its hinder legs and snatched at the moving needle-heads with its white-tipped paws. The farmhouse had no glass to its windows, and outside the tight-barred shutters, Abigail heard the hooting of an owl and the noise of some larger creature, moving about in the woods.

  “I’m afraid I’ve wandered rather far afield,” apologized the old lady after a moment. “But indeed, the house was the one I had grown up in, and the rear wing—the laundry and the kitchen—had once, I think, been the main part of the house.’Tis made of stone, and very long and narrow, and the floors only dirt. I believe ’twas my grandfather, the despicable Barthelmy, who had the main house built in 1683, and old Beelzebub went on living in his old stone wing until his death nearly ten years after that.”

  “I wonder what the good citizens of Cambridge made of him?” Abigail couldn’t keep the amusement from her voice, at the thought of a pirate and sorcerer—and sometime collector of naughty volumes—retiring for his declining years to that quiet town of divinity students and Tory worthies. “Or he of them, for that matter. And what of his castle in the backcountry where Indians worshipped him as a god?”

  “From what Father said—though he was quite capable of making it up—toward the end of his life, Old Beelzebub repented of his sins, gave up alchemy—”

  “He was an alchemist?”

  “Oh, good Heavens, yes. In his quest for the ancient formula for Greek Fire he is reported to have burned down half an Indian village. In addition to which he summoned the Devil, invented a flying machine, and, of course, turned common rocks into gold. His repentance, Father never hesitated to point out, would not have done him the slightest good, as he was clearly destined for Hell, and he—Father—became thoroughly incensed when I asked, Should we then not trouble to encourage thieves and slave-traders to abandon their evil ways? and told me not to be impertinent, though I thought it a perfectly reasonable question . . .”

  “My son asked me that, too,” sighed Abigail. “I told him that only God knows whether a man is ultimately destined for damnation or salvation, and that we must encourage the unrighteous to abandon evil, because it might be—but we do not know—that we are God’s chosen tools in another’s path toward righteousness, like the ass that bore Saul of Tarsus toward Damascus.”

  “Well, that explanation would involve my Father not knowing something.” Narcissa finished off the top of the sock, clipped the yarn, and slipped it neatly into her basket, as if all the long years she spoke of had happened to someone else. “So it could not be true. In any case, according to my aunt Serafina—Grandfather Barthelmy’s sister, who lived with us for some years while I was a child—her father, Old Beelzebub, built the stone house in Cambridge just after King Philip’s War, so it might have been he was simply driven out of the backcountry by the Indians and felt himself too old to make a new start there. The newer portion of the house lies at rightangles to the old, in such a way that it was not at all obvious that about eighteen inches of its northern end had been bricked and plastered over, to hide the two shelves of books. Only when the eastern wall was broken out—how long ago it seems! But’twas not even a month!—to make the enlargement was this secret space found and, in it, my great-grandfather’s books.”

  Thoughtfully, Abigail said, “Which the Governor then bought.” She frowned. “But you said your husband ordered the work done—”

  “He died,” said Narcissa, “not a week after the workmen broke down the wall.”

  “Will you ladies stay up and make a night of it?” Seth Barlow grinned good-naturedly as he crossed the keeping room to their corner. Thaxter and the older boys came back in from having a final piss and disappeared up the loft-ladder; the yellow dog turned around a time or two where the benches and chairs had been. The farmer put the tin lamp he carried on the table beside his aunt-in-law’s chair and felt the side of the red teapot. Mrs. Barlow and the baby had disappeared into the bedroom some time previously. The house had grown deeply still.

  Abigail said apologetically “I should—” and Narcissa waved her small, work-rough hands.

  “Don’t worry for me, Mrs. Adams, if you’re wanting to sit up a little longer. If you’re not too tired after your journey—”

  “Heavens, no! I only worry that you—”

  “Well,” said Barlow, kneeling beside them to bank the hearth-fire under a careful mound of ashes, “while you two ladies are arguing out which of you is being polite, I’m for bed. Are you warm enough? ’Tis a mild evening—” He got to his feet, dusted his hands, and brought shawls from the great, clumsy sideboard, one of the few pieces of furniture in the room. “The pallet’s made up for you in the bedroom, Sissy—” He bent to kiss the old lady’s wrinkled cheek. “Mrs. Adams”—he grasped her hand—“my wife promises she’ll be silent as a mouse in the morning. And don’t mind old Rex. He snores.”

  “Anyone who promises mouselike silence,” remarked Abigail ruefully, when the bedroom door shut behind him, “has never heard the ones we get in our attic. Five minutes,” she promised, “and then I shall let you go to bed.”

  “Five minutes.” Narcissa hobbled to the cupboard, took out a small pot, and from it dripped a spoon of honey into her tisane. “Will you have—No?—Where were we? Oh, yes, selling the books to the Governor.”

  ’Twas true, Abigail reflected, there had been no real NEED for Hutchinson to tell her he’d bought Mrs. Seckar’s books...

  But they had been discussing the books, and Barthelmy Whitehead, and old Emmanuel Seckar.
They had been speaking of Diomede, whose life hung in the balance depending on the events of the evening when two of those books had disappeared.

  Only a dullard would not have exclaimed, But here, I have the rest of those books right here in my study . . .

  And whatever else John and Sam liked to claim, His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson was not a dullard.

  “How did that come about? I take it your husband was not ill then—?”

  “Heavens, no. That is, Mr. Seckar’s health was fragile by then—he was in his eighties—but he never really ailed. He always walked to the college. And he would not hear of selling the books. In fact he spoke of burning them.”

  “Did he have offers?” Abigail wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, though in fact, as her host had said, the night was a pleasant one. Outside the tiny glow of the betty lamp, the big keeping room was like a friendly cave. The gleam picked up for a moment the round gold reflection of Rex’s eyes before that faithful retainer dropped his nose back to his paws, sighed, and returned to his well-earned sleep. He did indeed snore.

  “Three,” said Mrs. Seckar. “The first was from a West Indian bachelor-fellow named Pugh—who naturally enough offered for the disgraceful books, of which there were about five, as I recall—I think he offered for three or four other volumes as well. Mr. Seckar refused and swore he’d burn them before he’d sell them to the likes of Mr. Pugh.”

  “I have met Mr. Pugh,” said Abigail. “I should like to think myself spiritually fit enough that I would sell him a map were he lost in a desert without water, but I am not sure of it—”

  “Well, he’s the one who thought it a hilarious jest,” said Mrs. Seckar, “to stand up and ask at Mr. Seckar’s lectures, was it true that a member of his family had once kept a harem of Berber dancing-girls, and how was the state of their salvation affected by being tupped by a Christian man? Father had managed to completely scotch the rumor about his grandfather,” she added. “But Mr. Pugh’s great-grandfather had done business with Old Beelzebub in Jamaica. Threats to have him sent down served to keep him from spreading these tales—yet he made the mistake of offering to blackmail Mr. Seckar on the subject when Mr. Seckar would not sell. Of course this only rendered Mr. Seckar quarrelsome. Not,” she added drily, “that it took much to render Mr. Seckar quarrelsome.”

  “And of course the one he quarrelled with was you.”

  “One did one’s best.” Narcissa sighed, and her arthritiscrippled fingers stilled on the looped yarn of a new-started sock. “And one did one’s best not to be pulled down by his ways. At any rate I did. Poor Reuel was forever trying to please her brother—and her mother, while she lived, who was in many ways worse.” She shook her head and went back to setting stitches onto the needles. “I think one of the other offers was from a relative of yours—you said your Mr. Thaxter was your cousin? This young man’s name was Thaxter as well, a nice boy with spectacles. He said he had heard that Mr. Seckar might have some books in Arabic to sell, only by that time Mr. Seckar had made up his mind that he would burn the books. That was because of Mrs. Lake.”

  “Mrs. Lake?”

  “If that was her name.” Narcissa’s tone made Abigail’s eyebrows—elevated already—ascend further. “A well-dressed woman who came in her own carriage and offered twenty pounds for the lot. Only Mr. Seckar took one look at the cut of her dress and the cost of her lace—for a man who claimed that God had no use for furbelows he was a sharp judge of them—and the quantity of white lead and cochineal she had plastered from bosom to hairline, and declared her to be the blood-sister of the Whore that Sitteth upon the Waters . . . A remark he made to her face, unfortunately. This provoked a response from her, and the conversation rapidly lost whatever dignity it had begun with. He called her a Babylonian harlot, and I do not even know the meaning of the terms she applied to him, but the interview ended with Mr. Seckar screaming at her to get out of his house and Mrs. Lake threatening to call in her footmen—her boys, I believe she termed them—and have him thrashed.”

  “Footmen?” said Abigail thoughtfully.

  “Two of them, as well as a coachman who would not have looked out of place on the gun deck of great-grandfather’s flagship—”

  “Had he a scar on his face?”

  The old woman nodded at once and held up her two fingers in a V before her left eye. “A frightful one, just here . . . He and one of the footmen came up as far as the front door as she opened it to go out. I was in the hall at the time and could smell them—rum and dirty linen. After that of course, your poor nephew—who arrived only hours later with his offer—received short shrift, accompanied by an accusation that he was in That Harlot’s pay. Mr. Seckar worked himself into a terrible passion.” Her lovely brows tugged down into a frown. “Such things left him exhausted as mere walking did not, and he still felt a heaviness in his limbs, he said, on the following day. And on the following night he died.”

  She fell silent, gazing past the tiny gleam of the betty lamp into the silent gloom. The cat woke in her basket and padded out through the hinged flap in the door to hunt; the kittens tussled a little among themselves, then returned to sleep. Rex turned upon his side with a profound sigh. Though it was nearly too dark to see anything, Abigail could hear in the other woman’s voice, despite the outrageous conduct of the man who had been her master for nearly three-quarters of her life, a break of regret, of grief.

  It had, Abigail reminded herself, only been a few weeks—after how many years? One might hate the husband who crushed and oppressed and bound one’s life, but he had been, when all was said, Narcissa’s nearest company for almost fifty years.

  “How did he die?”

  Narcissa shook her head. “I think in his rage, he had strained his heart,” she said. “Then we all three came down ill that evening—Mr. Seckar, Reuel, and I. One of his students had given him a frumenty, a dish of which he was very fond, and I suspect that under all the spices it might have been a little unwholesome. The doctor, when he was called, bled us and said ’twas likely an influenza, but neither I nor Reuel had a fever, though all the next day I had a headache, and felt stupid and not myself, though that,” she added, “might have been the bleeding. In a way I am grateful, for I don’t even recall feeling shock when I woke—halfway through the morning and the sun high in the sky—and found him lying dead at my side. I staggered to the door wrapped in a quilt, and managed to get it unlatched and to call out to some boys in the lane to fetch a doctor. Beyond that I recall little of the day. They tell me they found me curled up asleep in the quilt on the floor of the hall when the doctor arrived.”

  She fell silent again, a little like Weyountah, Abigail thought, repeating his memory of last Tuesday night as if to fix it in his mind. To make it something which had once happened to him, rather than a gnawing and present pain.

  After long silence, Abigail asked, “And were any of the books gone the next day?”

  The older woman looked up from her contemplation of the dark pit of the hearth, startled. “Why, I have no idea,” she said. And then, “Good Heavens, Mrs. Adams, you do not mean to suggest that my husband and I were poisoned? So that someone could get at the books?”

  “I don’t know what I mean to suggest,” said Abigail. “You say your husband was frail?”

  “He was active,” she said. “And alert. But his heart was not good, and after preaching or lecturing, he would often come home and sleep for hours.”

  “Then a drug administered to put the household to sleep might easily have been too strong for him.”

  “Good Heavens,” she murmured again, her hands still upon her knitting, her bright blue eyes gazing for a moment into the darkness, as if through it she could see the face of the horrid old man who had forbidden her supper if his shirt was not ironed as he liked it, and who would not have in a servant to help two old women whose strength was nearly gone.

  Then her gaze returned to Abigail. “On the other hand,” she said, “if someone knew of his infirmities, ’
twould be just as easy to poison him—you must inquire as to the source of that frumenty, Mrs. Adams, the moment you return to Cambridge! —knowing that I would sell the books afterwards . . . would it not?”

  “You, Mrs. Seckar,” said Abigail, “are too clever by half. No wonder your husband wanted to keep you a slave.”

  Fourteen

  Firebells ringing. In the kitchen Abigail heard them, and panic seized her: four-fifths of the houses in Boston were timber, and of those, most were crowded in these dense neighborhoods around Brattle Street and Brattle Square, where flames could leap from roof to roof. Though the cold March evening was still (March? she thought cloudily, ’tis the second of May . . .), if the fire was close, it wouldn’t save their house . . .

  (We left that house, didn’t we? We went back to Braintree because of John’s chest-pains . . . Tommy was born in Braintree . . .)

  She ran down the corridor from the kitchen of the house on Brattle Street, tiny Nabby and tinier Johnny clinging to her skirts. Her movements clumsy (Because of the baby? Or because I’m dreaming . . .), pregnant with the child who became Charley, she flung open the front door, the cold smiting her, snow on the ground.

  Voices shouting all around her in the twilight as her neighbors came rushing to their doors. Men raced to pump water from frozen pumps, to form up the lines that every neighborhood knew by instinct to form, buckets passed hand-to-hand . . .

  Only there was no smoke in the air. Just shouting from the direction of King Street, men’s voices with a savage note in them that raised the hair on her nape. In her dream she knew what was going to happen and turned, shouted over her shoulder at her children, “Stay inside—”