Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

  A single shot cracked out in the icy twilight—going over it, dozens of times, with John later, she never forgot that sequence: a single shot. Then a volley of gunfire, like ragged thunder.

  John had been out that evening at his club in South Boston, and her heart was in her throat that he might have been in King Street—she knew exactly what had happened. For weeks the citizens of the town—the prentice-boys, the layabouts, the Sons of Liberty, the children—had been hectoring and cursing and threatening the British troops that Governor Hutchinson had asked the King to send, to help him keep order in the town that hated both Governor and King. For weeks she’d seen the redcoats walking about the icy streets armed with their muskets, primed with the Governor’s accounts of riots and disorders, and confronted every day with handbills and broadsides decrying the troops as slave-masters who must be cast out.

  Even in those dark days, pregnant and ill and sick with grief at the loss of the tiny daughter who had died the month before, Abigail knew that it would come to shooting.

  She reached King Street while the powder-smoke still hung thick in the darkening air, the sharp smell of it overriding the characteristic stink of fresh-spilled blood. Bodies lay in the snow: a young boy in a pool of blood at the mouth of Quaker Lane, a black man and a white sailor sprawled in the rucked and muddy slush close by the little knot of British soldiers whose coats seemed dark in the twilight, like the blood spilled all over the snow.

  Her eyes opened with a snap: Where am I? Unfamiliar smells, the close air seeming to press on her . . .

  She put out her hand and instantly touched a wall, like the side of a coffin . . .

  Her other hand, flailing, met curtain.

  Rock Farm.

  The clink and scurry of tiny paws beyond the heavy cloth.

  Those dratted kittens . . .

  A bigail slept again.

  Firebells ringing in the cold March twilight, only this time she saw the kitchen of her own house in Queen Street. The house was burning, and she heard gunfire in the street; Nabby, Johnny, Charley, Tommy fled out the back door, Abigail calling after them in a voice that had no sound to it . . . Why are they alone? Why is no one else in the house?

  The cowhouse was in flame, and so was the house next door. Johnny led the way down the smoke-wreathed alleyway that led toward the street, clinging tight to Nabby’s hand on his left, to Charley’s on his right, smoke-blind, terrified, stumbling.

  Charley was holding Tommy’s hand, and when Tommy stumbled, tripping on his long leading-strings on the sides of his dress, Charley’s hand slipped from his.

  Tommy screaming, shrill voice tiny against the roar of the flame, trying to get to his feet in the snow as his sister and brothers fled down the aisle of smoke and burning. Fled away from him, unaware that they’d left him behind . . .

  Gunfire somewhere close. Men shouting as the city burned.

  Tommy screaming . . .

  Abigail jerked awake, ill with panic, heart hammering. In the kitchen beyond the bed-curtain something fell with a small clatter. More dashing little feet.

  I will catch those kittens and dunk them up and down in the water-bucket by their little tails.

  Then half-grasped fragments of a dream, of distant gunfire and distant burning, very far-off now and visible in the darkness through the window of Governor Hutchinson’s tapestried study. The Governor raised his head a little where he sat beside the cozy hearth, listened. Then touched the rim of his reading-glasses to settle them and went back to his perusal of the book in Arabic that lay upon his knee.

  Did Mrs. Lake come back to buy the books after your husband’s death?” Abigail took the breakfast plates from Tilly, Hagar, Zilpah, et al., and arranged them on a towel-draped corner of the table where the basin was brought for washing. Mrs. Barlow had already gone out to feed the chickens—at the wooden counter, two of the girls helped each other, dumping boiling water into the churn to scald it for butter, while two others gathered up straw sun-hats to start on the garden work. In the country, there was always something that needed doing. Abigail helped Narcissa and the youngest girl with the dishes, the stillness of the spring morning broken only by the crack of axes in the woods, where Thaxter obligingly lent a hand with the endless summer task of cutting winter fuel. When Seth Barlow had asked them last night, Would they remain a day? Abigail had assented, despite her uneasiness about leaving her children.

  To return to Boston would entail a drive of all the daylight hours. She knew there were things that she had forgotten to ask last night.

  “She did not.” Narcissa paused, frowning, a rag daubed with soap in her hand. “Drat it, there goes my theory that the murder was done without robbery. I wish I could remember how many of those books there were, hidden behind the wall and what they were about.”

  “You said, fifty-four.”

  “’Twas only what I sold to the Governor.” The older woman rubbed briskly at the pewter, went to the counter to cadge the last of the boiling water to add to the basin. “And the list of them that Mr. Seckar made went with them. Once I had said that they were mine to sell or to keep—this was after your nephew’s first attempt to purchase and Mrs. Lake’s visit—Mr. Seckar took them away and hid them in his study.”

  “Hid them literally? Not just shut the door and turned the key?”

  “Hid them,” said Narcissa firmly. “He said he would not put it past me to try to steal one or two, to sell them, and to blame his sister for the theft . . .”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “To make up household money that I had overspent. ’Twas ever his fear,” she explained, “that I would spend too much at market and that I would sell something of his to make up the difference. His mother and sister were both fearful pinchpennies, and I could not throw out so much as a torn napkin without accounting of it to them.”

  No wonder this primitive farmstead where she was obliged to sleep in the kitchen seemed to fill the old woman with such happiness. It did not include any of the Seckar family.

  “So a thief who came in when the family was drugged might not have got them all,” said Abigail. “He—or she—would not have known where to find them. Was there any who knew the house well, besides yourself and your sister-in-law?” Abigail settled the dripping plates on the towel—only six of them, which had probably come across from England with the original settlers: the children ate off trenchers made of the dried heels of bread-loaves and shared a cup among them.

  “Nary a soul,” the old lady replied promptly. “You must understand, Mrs. Adams,” she added with a rueful smile, “there was not a man of the faculty—and I think every single one of the Fellows—that my husband wasn’t in a quarrel with, over everything from the Nature of Time as it existed before God created the Heavens and the Earth, to whether women should be permitted to learn to read and write . . . which my husband said were not necessary to a woman’s salvation and were in fact a detriment, for with our limited understanding we would only come to hurt in using such things.”

  She stepped aside to let one of the little girls—Hagar or Susanna—sweep the sanded floor around her feet. “And then, there were a number of men in the college who felt that my father had been completely wrong in leaving the house to Mr. Seckar, and this, too, was a fruitful cause of backbiting. As a farmer’s son, Mr. Seckar was considered by some to be undeserving of the Vassall Chair—though he was a great scholar and well deserved the honors accorded him. He felt everyone was in league against him.”

  “Did anyone come to try to purchase the books the day after your husband died?”

  “That evening young Mr. Fairfield came with food from the College Hall—Heaven only knows who he bribed to get it!—and to make sure we had all we needed. We were both, Reuel and I, still very weak from being bled—and poisoned into the bargain! ’Twas then I asked him, was he interested in purchasing any of the books? Perhaps I’m as wicked as Mr. Seckar and his mother were always saying,” she added, and though she kept her tone li
ght, Abigail heard in her voice that it was something she had indeed believed from time to time. “And it may come from being the great-granddaughter of a pirate, but ’twas already in my mind that Mr. Seckar’s brother would be taking us in—Reuel and I. I thought that I had rather have a little money of my own . . . and the books were my own, as Old Beelzebub’s heiress, even if the house had been left to the college. In any case, I suspected Mr. Fairfield would be interested in those volumes that Mr. Pugh had found so congenial, and I was right. I think he at once told your nephew that I would sell, for young Mr. Thaxter and his Indian friend appeared the next morning to buy what they could afford, and later in the day the Governor sent a man to purchase the rest from under the noses of the College Board of Governors. Mrs. Lake herself never came back.”

  “Curious,” said Abigail softly. “Curious.”

  Through the long spring day, Abigail helped the girls and Narcissa in the garden, took her turn minding Baby Mary, listened to Tilly, Methuseleh, and Josiah recite their lessons, and in general gave herself over to the peaceful rhythms of the deep countryside. In such a place, it was impossible to know what was happening in Boston and thus necessary to trust entirely in the mercy of God. The family kept insisting that she was here as Aunt Sissy’s guest, and they were glad of it for they feared Aunt would miss the town life, and it wasn’t necessary for her or Thaxter to do a thing . . .

  And yet, Abigail missed the vegetable-rows back in Braintree almost as much as her children delighted in the open spaces of Aunt Eliza’s garden, and she revelled in the smell of the earth as she pulled weeds in a borrowed sun-hat. In the forenoon she helped Sarah Barlow prepare dinner for when the men came in from the woods and the field, and looked over the stitches of the younger girls, and now and then sat with Narcissa and came back to the subject of alchemical books and pirate treasure . . .

  “How did you know your great-grandfather was a pirate?” she asked at one point. “If your father worked to keep the matter hushed, and his father as well . . .”

  “Aunt Serafina told us.” Narcissa deftly untied the strings of Baby Mary’s clout, took the washrag Abigail handed her. “She was, as I said, Grandpa Barthelmy’s younger sister and lived with us when I was a very little girl. She remembered Old Beelzebub—her father—very well. She said he looked like the Devil would have, if the Devil were ever to sit in a corner of the kitchen and play the fiddle. This was after he had changed his way of life, of course, so she never saw him in his glory, with a cutlass in his teeth and burning cannon-fuses braided in his beard. But she said he was very tall, with long gray hair thick as a horse’s mane, and had a long mustache whose ends he braided, and that he was missing two fingers of his right hand so that he held the fiddle-bow strangely. She swore us to secrecy, Phoebe and I, and at night when Father had put out the lights, Aunt whispered to us about the Indians worshipping him and how he burned down half their village and summoned the Devil and all the rest of it—”

  “Did she ever speak of him hiding a treasure?” Abigail handed her a clean baby-clout and made finger-waggles at Baby Mary, laid on the keeping room table, who caught at Abigail’s fingers and threshed her tiny legs.

  Narcissa frowned as she tied the clout in place. “In a general sort of way,” she said after a time. “Though that may have been only something Phoebe and I made up later, because pirates are supposed to have buried treasures. Certainly I recall nothing being said of one buried in Massachusetts. And even if there had been, I can’t see that it would have gotten past Grandpa.”

  “Did your grandfather ever search for one?”

  “If he had, ’twould have been an admission that his father was a pirate.” Narcissa picked up the infant and carried her toward the door, Abigail following with a blanket. “Not that it would have stopped the old scoundrel. I’m a little surprised he hadn’t had all the walls of Beelzebub’s original stone house sounded the minute the old man died. Perhaps he thought that in repairing his way of life, his father had given the money to charity . . . something it never sounded like the old sinner would have done, either after his reformation or before it, according to Aunt Sera.”

  Abigail spread out the blanket in the sun, shaded her eyes to catch a glimpse of those three little straw-bonnets bent dutifully over the garden rows. “Why did he reform?” she asked. “Did your aunt tell you that?”

  “No.” Narcissa’s forehead puckered as she considered the matter, putting together old tales half recalled, which might—Abigail reflected—have been hearsay anyway . . . “Yet it must have taken some great event, don’t you think? For a man given heart and body to the ways of sin—not only sins of the flesh, as all pirates do, but the sort of intellectual dabbling in alchemy and demonology that can be twice as fascinating to an intelligent man. For such a man to reverse his steps and try to walk back uphill to the Light. Particularly,” she added, “when everyone around him is telling him, as they must have if he was living in Massachusetts, that ’twould not have done him any good anyway.”

  “Exactly.” Abigail adjusted a portion of worn sheet over a long billet of firewood to make a sort of lean-to above the baby’s head. “So why would he have done that?”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “I don’t know. But ’tis odd—one of many odd things about this whole adventure. Is his castle still standing? The treasure would be there if anywhere.”

  “I’ve never heard of a castle anywhere in the backcountry.” Narcissa fished last night’s sock from her workbasket. “It might only have been a sort of palisado, such as soldiers build of logs in enemy country, in which case, ’twould have been occupied by the Indians when he left it and certainly destroyed during the fighting with France, if not before. And it may not even have existed at all. If he’d ever had any claim to land in the backcountry, it’s been long sold. For again, Grandpa Barthelmy would have got hold of it, had it still been in the family, and I can’t imagine he’d have sold a square foot of his father’s land without searching it for buried treasure.”

  “’Twould serve Grandpa Barthelmy right, and your father, too,” retorted Abigail, “had there been land with treasure buried on it, and they sold it . . . Was Old Beelzebub in Jamaica when Henry Morgan was Lieutenant Governor there?”

  “Oh, I should think so.” Narcissa grinned cheerily. “Nearly every pirate on the Spanish Main passed through Port Royal at one time or another, did they not? If he’d wanted to blackmail Morgan for his congress with Jezebel Pitts, he’d have had plenty of opportunity to do so.”

  Fifteen

  A bigail’s sense of well-being—of a job well accomplished, and of new friends made—lasted her about a hundred yards down the lane toward the Boston Road.

  Thaxter hitched up the chaise shortly after first light Wednesday morning, and they were sent off with much handshaking and the gift of fresh-baked bread, new butter, and several slabs of soft cheese (“The landlady at the Anchor on the road back to Boston hasn’t washed a dish in twenty years . . .”). Mr. Barlow bade her tell Mr. Adams that he and all the men hereabouts stood ready to defend the colony’s liberties (he obviously thought she was married to the other Mr. Adams).

  But no sooner had the house disappeared among the trees behind them than the enormity of having been gone from Boston—and her children—for three days settled upon Abigail like the fall of night, and her dreams of the Massacre, of fire and peril, of Tommy left behind crying in the snow returned and tormented her like a persistent gadfly for the remainder of the day.

  The reflection that Cousin Sam would have sent out riders to Medfield and every other town posthaste in the event of any real trouble gave her only momentary comfort. “If the British have not yet arrived, the whole household has come down with the smallpox,” she sighed ruefully, as the chaise turned onto the main road. “Or the house has burned to the ground.”

  “I’m sure all is well, m’am,” replied Thaxter soothingly, which caused Abigail to smile despite her anxiety. In his months of associatio
n with herself and John, her young cousin had yet to pick up their sense of humor. John would have immediately set himself to cap her visions of disaster: I think a lightning-strike, rather than the smallpox . . . If the harbor hasn’t risen in flood . . . No, wait, we’ve entirely forgotten the earthquake . . .

  Instead, for the next several miles, the clerk set himself earnestly to assuaging her fears with assurances of how secure and happy the four children would be at the home of Eliza and Isaac Smith . . . something of which Abigail was herself already aware. Yet he meant well, and she knew that to summarily silence him would hurt his feelings. So she settled herself to listen and to sort in her mind what she’d learned, like a card-player arranging clubs and spades, hearts and diamonds.

  A frumenty was exactly the sort of thing a solicitous student might bring to an elderly professor about whose health he was concerned—and the old man was probably vain enough to believe assurances of concern even from a man with whom he’d quarrelled. But it pointed back yet again to the college: to someone he knew. And from Abigail’s experience with the dish, the dried fruit and assorted spices that customarily flavored the meaty porridge could easily conceal the bitter flavor of opium.

  Mrs. Lake presumably had access to a kitchen, but ’twas certain Seckar wouldn’t have taken a cup of water from her hand if he were dying.

  Did they make frumenty for the students in the Hall?

  There are two of them in it, she thought. Mrs. Lake—whose name almost certainly isn’t Lake—and someone connected with the college. Someone who knows Old Beelzebub was a pirate. Someone who knew about—or learned very quickly about—the books.