Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

All of which would amply describe St-John Pugh . . .

  Were it not for the curious fact that the Governor had not mentioned to her, Abigail, that he’d bought Mrs. Seckar’s books, and the ease with which Mrs. Lake could have gotten the key to the Chamberville house from the Governor’s hand.

  Mr. Pugh had forged the note designed to keep George Fairfield from his rooms past midnight, when he could feel safe in searching for the books . . . Had he searched for them before, in the Seckar house, while its owner lay dying at the side of his sleeping wife? Would a young and dissolute man need to believe a copy of Aretino’s I Modi—complete with illustrations—might conceal a pirate’s treasure-map, to move Heaven and Earth to take possession of it?

  And would St-John Pugh—the son of a West India merchant who was almost certainly a smuggler—enter into alliance with the Governor? And if George Fairfield had come back from his tryst to find Pugh in his room, would he not have been slain in his clothing rather than his nightshirt? Had he come in before midnight and gone to bed?

  “Why would the Governor have to use subterfuge, drugs, and burglary to enter George Fairfield’s rooms in the first place?” asked Thaxter, when Abigail spoke of the matter just east of Dedham. “I realize he can’t simply detain the Vassall Professor of Theology for twenty-four hours while having the sheriff search his house, but an undergraduate? He could have simply had Horace and the servant arrested.”

  “With a King’s Commissioner due to arrive within the week, I should be careful—were I the Governor—about going on public record as having jailed the son of a Virginia planter who is moreover the captain of a troop of Loyalist light cavalry. Particularly if I had no intention of turning over to the King any treasure that I might find.”

  Thaxter said, “You think Cousin Sam is right, then? That there is treasure?”

  “I think that they think so,” replied Abigail grimly. “Whoever they are, they consider what they’re looking for worth three men’s lives . . . so far. That’s what concerns me.”

  They passed through Dedham and through the wooded farming country along the Charles. Eschewing the slandered Anchor, they had a picnic-lunch in the overgrown ruin of what had once been a farmstead. “It must have been quite a fire,” remarked Thaxter, after tethering the horse near the crumble of anciently charred timbers that marked where the barn had been. “To have jumped that distance, from barn to house—”

  “I should say rather that the two fires were started separately.” Abigail rose from spreading a blanket on the bare stones of the foundation and peeked behind a tangle of gooseberry at the old smoke-blackening of the walls. “To judge by the growth of the trees in the dooryard, I’d say ’twas King Philip’s Indians that destroyed this place, a hundred years ago.”

  “Philip—” Thaxter frowned, counting back in his mind. “Was he King of France . . . after Louis? The old King Louis, the present King’s . . . grandfather? Great-grandfather?”

  “Great-grandfather,” said Abigail. “And no, Philip wasn’t King of France. He was a chief of the Wampanoags who united the tribes against us . . . for all the good it did them,” she added sadly. “They might have chased us out of their hunting-grounds hereabouts when first we set foot in this land, but they didn’t. Like Virginia and the Carolinas and Connecticut—and Massachusetts—each tribe of Indians saw itself as a separate nation: Nipmuc and Wampanoag and Pocassett. They would not unite with their enemy tribes, and so all fell to a greater foe.”

  This led to talk, over bread and Mrs. Barlow’s excellent cider and cheese, of the excesses of Virginia’s Governor—every bit as arbitrary as Hutchinson, but at least Hutchinson had never stirred up war with the Indians on the frontier as a means of distracting the men of the colony from complaints for their rights, as Dunmore was said to be doing.

  “Were the King to send troops to occupy Boston in consequence of the dumping of the tea,” said Abigail, “I doubt the Virginians or the New Yorkers would raise a peep over it. They seem to think we should apologize for protesting against the King’s tyranny and pay for the tea that we wouldn’t pay for when we were commanded to buy it and none other—even Mr. Franklin”—she named the Pennsylvania philosopher whom many considered the intellectual head of the movement toward the colonies’ rights—“has advised we do so . . . presumably so he will not be put in the position of speaking in favor of hooligans.”

  As they gathered up their much-depleted supplies and corked the remains of the cider, the young man looked around him at the ruined farmstead again and commented—with a town boy’s ignorance—“I wonder they never rebuilt this place.”

  “The land’s dreadful.” Abigail nodded toward the shaggy remains of what had been an orchard. “’Tis all rocks among the trees, and I see no well here. And it may be the land was taken over by some wealthier farmer in the district, the records having been burnt with the burning of the town. All the good land is west of here, in the valley of the Connecticut. The whites took that from the Pequots long before King Philip raised his forces—killed them all, my father told me, by selling them blankets taken from men who’d died of the smallpox.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Having met some of the merchants in Boston,” replied Abigail drily, “can you doubt it? I wonder myself if Old Beelzebub did not change his way of living—move to Cambridge and build his house there—because the Indians no longer worshipped him, but drove him out.”

  “And he left his treasure behind?” The clerk’s eyes brightened as he slipped the bit into the horse’s mouth again, hooked the harness to the traces once more. “Then it might still be there! All we’d need to do is check the county landrecords in the State House . . .”

  “And discover that Old Beelzebub lived on in Cambridge a good fifteen years past King Philip’s War and maybe more, and had plenty of time to return in perfect safety and dig his treasure up himself. Or, in the years since his death, if he indeed owned land, his clutchfisted son would have done so.”

  “But if he did not find it? If the treasure were cleverly hidden, in a cave or a pit, and the direction coded to look like a disgraceful account of an assignation by a pirate queen and a government official who should have known better—”

  “Then it might indeed,” said Abigail, as the chaise pulled out of the weed-thick dooryard and down the dim trace back to the road, “be worth three men’s lives . . . to somebody.”

  As had been the case a week ago, Abigail and her escort reached the Neck of Boston just as the sun was touching the distant hills. Coming through Roxbury, acquaintances had waved to them as they passed the Common, and no one had run out to them shouting, Turn back, turn back, the streets of Boston run red with blood! . . . Nevertheless, Abigail was conscious of deep relief not to see the smoke-plume of a burning town rising before them. Thaxter put the tired horse into a smart trot, and they jolted along the track between the shining and fishy-reeking shallows, with the red-coated soldiers standing waiting—again—for them in the half-closed portal.

  The Common lay as it always had, a great ragged pasture sloping upward toward Beacon Hill, fading into the twilight. The tinny toot of the herd-boys’ horns as they gathered up the cows mingled with the clatter of wheels on the cobbled street. The familiar mix of fish, woodsmoke, and latrines seemed to welcome her as they rattled up Orange Street, and Aunt Eliza and Uncle Isaac greeted her with embraces and laughter and offers of supper. Even her self-important cousin Young Isaac—a clergyman who seemed to regard Abigail’s marriage into the Adamses as the worst mésalliance since Persephone’s nuptials with Pluto—forebore to chide her about John’s associates. Nabby clung silently—as if she suspected that her mother preferred jauntering over the countryside hunting pirate treasure to remaining hearth-bound and cleaning lamps—while Johnny brimmed over with an account of how profoundly he had impressed his Latin master that day. Charley wanted to know why they couldn’t have a garden on Queen Street, and Tommy was missing altogether—they had to go out into the garden and hunt for
the boy among the beanpoles.

  “We’ve taken turns going over to the house to milk the girls,” said Pattie, as she and Katy herded the children to the Smith kitchen to get cleaned up for the return home. “Mrs. Butler offered to do it, but ’tis no trouble. We take Charley and Tommy with us—”

  “We’re due there now,” added Katy. “I can hear the boys bringing the herd in.”

  The Butlers, and the Hansons on the other side, had offered to look after Cleopatra and Semiramis in the absence of the Adamses and to have their prentices clean the stalls in return for a dozen small favors John had done them over the past few years.

  “We’ve put the milk in the coldest corner of the pantry, so there’ll be a fair deal of butter to be made . . .”

  “I went out to Cambridge yesterday,” added Katy, a little shyly, “to see Diomede in the jail, as you said I might—”

  “I did indeed,” said Abigail, “and I’m glad you thought to do so. Really, Eliza,” she added with a smile, “there’s no need—”

  “Nonsense, nonsense,” declared her aunt, as the maid brought to the kitchen table a tray laden with Dutch coffee, bread and butter, marmalade, and cold meats, “after a journey like that you must be famished—”

  “I’m famished,” said Charley hopefully, looking at the marmalade.

  It was well and truly dark, and Tommy and Charley were sound asleep on the seat of the chaise when the little party returned along Queen Street by lantern-light. The lamps in the houses they passed, even, were being quenched on the lower floors, leaving only the very dim squares of illumination higher on the brick walls, where bedroom candles flickered over the pages of Bibles or novels, while men took off their wigs and scratched their heads, and women brushed out their long hair. Eliza had handed Abigail a letter from John, who had been delayed in Providence—Another night bedding down with snoring strangers, poor lamb, reflected Abigail ruefully. Just as well, I can get the house in order again before he arrives.

  The children crowding around her while Thaxter unharnessed Tom Butler’s horse, she handed her lantern to Katy, unlocked the kitchen door, and banged her ankle very smartly against something hard that lay almost on the threshold as she stepped in.

  She began to say, “Good Heavens, Pattie, we didn’t accidentally leave Messalina indoors—?” but the smell of spilled vinegar smote her, and the faint sickliness of spoiled milk.

  She held the lantern up to further throw its light.

  She’d nearly tripped over a crock of butter—not broken, but lying on its side where it had . . . Fallen? How could it? Even had the cat been somehow trapped indoors, she could never have—

  Slowly, the light penetrated through the kitchen and pantry, showing Abigail an appalling shambles. Chairs had been pushed about, every drawer of the big sideboard stood open, cupboards agape. Beside her, Johnny said, “Ma—” and Nabby’s hand, cold and frightened, gripped suddenly at hers.

  And Charley, delighted as all three-year-olds are with chaos: “Was it bears did this?” He darted forward and Abigail grabbed him by the shoulder, pulled him back, and backed out of the pantry, out of the house.

  “Katy,” she said, “hold on to the children—Nabby, run next door and get Mr. Butler and his boys. Pattie, go with her,” she added, seeing the little girl hesitate in fear.

  “You don’t think there’s anyone—” began Pattie hesitantly, and then, as if exonerating herself, “I was inside yesterday, to make sure all was well, and it was. Pfew, that vinegar is strong! What happened?” She looked back toward the stable, from which Thaxter emerged, bearing the other lantern. “Who would do this?”

  Happily, Charley opined, “I bet it was Mr. Scar-Eye!”

  Sixteen

  While Katy and Pattie took the children next door to the Butlers’, Abigail, Thaxter, Tom Butler, and the cooper’s two apprentices went through the house armed with kindling-axes, barrel-mallets, and every lantern that could be borrowed up and down the street. They found no human foe on the premises, but the house had been ransacked from cellar to attic. Even Katy’s pallet bed had been shoved away from the wall and its mattress torn open, hay strewn everywhere in the room.

  Abigail and the children went back to Uncle Isaac’s to sleep, leaving Thaxter to guard the premises until morning. She dreamed of being locked in the house while it was being searched, hearing the scrape of Mr. Scar-Eye’s boots as he groped toward her in the dark.

  When she returned in the morning, it was to find Sam Adams in the kitchen, with his wife Bess, his daughter, Hannah, and their maid Surry all engaged in mopping up the spilled vinegar from the broken kitchen cask and scrubbing everything in sight. Abigail groaned inwardly—it was John’s unvarying contention that the scene of any crime contained at least some piece of information about the criminal. Though she had a strong suspicion that Charley had been right about the culprit being Mr. Scar-Eye, she had hoped to find something that might tell her where to look for this sinister gentleman and who might be his employer.

  Yet she was far too grateful at the prospect of not having to clean up the entire house herself to quibble, only assigning to Sam and Thaxter the task of straightening the tumbled library (John will never be able to find anything on his shelves ever again!) while she made a careful tour of the upstairs.

  It told her nothing she hadn’t known before. It had been too dark to see much by lantern-light last night, and their only object had been to make sure there was no one still lurking in the house, so the tracks of the reconnaissance party—herself, Tom Butler, et al—did not penetrate beyond the doorway of any room. Morning light showed Abigail that there had been three burglars, men in rough boots . . . something she could have guessed, she reflected wryly, from Horace’s account of the sinister coachman and his henchmen. She also knew they were sized Small, Medium, and Large from Horace’s account, information borne out by their tracks, which were just barely visible in the bedroom she shared with John. The merest modicum of guesswork would also have been sufficient for her to tell from Horace’s story that they were men used to burgling places—there wasn’t a nook in the house that they hadn’t plundered, a fact that made her very glad she’d left the household money and her pearls at Aunt Eliza’s with the children.

  Beyond those obvious indicators, the visitors had been annoyingly fastidious. No one had dropped so much as a button, let alone a dagger that might match the wound in George Fairfield’s side or a letter from Mrs. Lake bearing instructions to murder Horace. No bloody handprints (thank goodness!); no mysterious documents in Arabic or any other language.

  But, Abigail reflected as she came downstairs, she’d had to look. If they’d left any of these things in the kitchen, well, Bess, Hannah, and Surry had taken care of them and there was nothing that she, Abigail, could do about it now. The best she could accomplish at the moment was to assign various tasks to clean up, and herself go to the market—which, though it was now late in the morning and nothing would be available but picked-over leavings, was a matter of critical importance, particularly if John was due back tomorrow or Saturday . . .

  “And we need to get up laundry tonight,” she added to Thaxter, as she passed the study door. “I will not have anyone in this house spend a moment on sheets those villains have pawed—”

  A familiar voice called from the kitchen, “Is she in? Aunt Abigail—!”

  Then Weyountah’s, deeper and steadier, “Is there something we can help with—?”

  “Yes.” Abigail entered the big room, dusting her hands. “Horace, get my marketing basket from behind the pantry door, please. Weyountah, would you be able to stay and assist Mr. Adams in straightening up the study? Oh, thank goodness, Arabella,” she added, as her next-door neighbor knocked at the back door with a plate of smoking-hot griddle cakes and a jug of molasses, “you are a choir of angels and all the saints in Heaven rolled into one! Speedy help is double help . . .”

  “Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur,” quoted Horace automatically, and then, thin face
flushing with excitement, “Aunt Abigail, I’ve seen him! I know who he is! Mrs. Lake’s coachman! Dubber Grimes!”

  Abigail set her marketing basket on the corner of the table, cast a glance at the angle of sunlight in the yard—There will be NOTHING left in the market . . . !—and said, “Bess, would you and Bella do the honors? I beg you will excuse me, but if I don’t get to the market now—”

  “We’ll save you griddle cakes,” promised Arabella Butler with a smile, and playfully shoved Abigail toward the door.

  “And coffee,” added Bess, “if we can keep Sam from drinking it all . . .”

  Abigail seized Horace by the elbow and thrust the market basket into his hands as she was pushed out the door.

  “Tell me,” she commanded, as she and the young man hurried their steps down Queen Street toward the big market square.

  “’Twas entirely by accident,” said Horace, and shoved his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “Res hominum fragiles alit et regit—”

  “Yes, yes, I know the fragile affairs of men are guided by chance,” said Abigail impatiently. “Where did you see him?”

  “At the Crowned Pig. The seniors were ragging poor Yeovil again and I followed him to give him a hand, and when I walked into the tap-room, there was Grimes—the scar-eyed coachman—dicing in the corner with Black Dog Pugh! I ducked back out at once and asked one of the—er—young ladies who work there, who was that man with Mr. Pugh? And she said his name was Dubber Grimes, and he is from Charles Town, and the men with him—there were two others at the table besides Pugh—were Newgate Hicks and the Cornishman, and they all worked as bullyboys at a . . . a house of ill-fame in Charles Town called Avalon. While the girl was getting the ale for Yeovil, I watched them; they weren’t only dicing, but talking with Pugh. He gave them money!”

  “Only to be expected if they were dicing. Still . . . Avalon,” said Abigail thoughtfully. “Well, well—someone has a sense of humor. In the tales of King Arthur,” she explained, seeing her nephew look blank, “Avalon is the location of the lake, which has in it the Lady who gives Arthur his sword, if I remember aright . . . Your aunt Elizabeth”—she named her mother—“never considered fanciful tales proper for us children, but Aunt Eliza has a book of them and would read to us when we’d visit. Though I never thought to find the reference useful—”