Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

This, Abigail knew, was perfectly true.

  And it was also perfectly true that there were a thousand places within a quarter mile of Queen Street where a wellmeaning, inquisitive boy only-just-three-weeks-short-of-four could come to terrible and irrevocable grief.

  The Long Wharf. Endlessly fascinating, and extending close to a half mile out to sea: ships, boxes, coils of rope. Wet boards slippery and slanting. Mysterious ladders extending down to the cold beryl black chop of the water.

  Merchant Street, every shop and warehouse shut up and secretive-looking on the late Sabbath afternoon: cellar-doors, stacks of barrels, piles of crates that could easily fall unheard by any, pinning a little boy underneath.

  In the other direction the Common, whose grassy open spaces might tempt the boy to explore further. Yet if he’d gone to the Common, what harm could he come to—?

  In her mind she saw the men, nevertheless, traversing the dark rise of the ground toward Beacon Street, where the lamps of Mr. Hancock’s elegant house shone against the slope of the hill.

  The Mill Pond—

  Abigail closed her eyes in prayer that she couldn’t even phrase. Then she said, “Come. ’Twill do you no good, nor Charley either, to have you sitting up and making yourselves sick just because he’s been goose enough to get himself lost. The moment he’s brought back—and you know he’ll be brought back and have his hide well tanned by his father for worrying us all!—I shall wake you and fetch you down.”

  “Might Johnny sleep in with me and Tommy,” whispered Nabby, “’til Charley comes back?”

  Pattie carried the sleeping Tommy up to the small room at the end of the hall, and Johnny and Nabby snuggled in together in the girl’s narrow bed, like two doleful little ghosts in their white nightrails. Abigail held them and sang to them and reassured them, though neither felt much like hearing a story. When she left them, by the light of her single candle she still saw the glimmer of their open eyes.

  If something hasn’t happened to him, they’d have found him by now.

  She leaned her head back against the hard wood of the fireside settle, staring into the silky whispers of light as they played over the embers.

  He didn’t start his running away until I left him at Eliza’s, she thought. Because ’twas only then that he was old enough and strong enough to get far? Because ’twas only then that he realized that a world of delight existed in her garden, which our pokey little yard could not approach in wonderment?

  Because ’twas only then that his mother would leave him with Pattie and Katy while she swanned off to Cambridge in quest of mysteries and justice?

  Admit it, Portia, she told herself, knowing it for the truth of her heart and hating herself. YOU have supped with the Devil in meddling with justice that is John’s work—a man’s work. You revel in “seeing through the riddles of criminal conduct,” in being “a veritable Alexander . . .”

  She closed her eyes.

  And this is what has come of trying to take a man’s part. Her whole soul cried out in anger at this view, repeated to her throughout her childhood by her mother and aunts. She knew herself capable of more than just bearing children and washing baby-clouts . . . It CAN’T be God’s intent . . .

  Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also, the Scripture said.

  Your treasure should be here, in this house, with your children.

  She could almost hear her mother saying it. And in her heart of hearts, she knew that the house was not where her treasure lay.

  I am what I am! God made me what I am!

  A woman, her mother’s voice replied. God made you a woman, with a woman’s lesser part to play.

  “Who can find a virtuous woman?” the Psalmist asked, “for her price is far above rubies.”

  Who can find her indeed, if she’s left for Cambridge for the day to look for pirate gold?

  “The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her . . .”

  . . . and should be able to have faith that she won’t mislay his children.

  “She will do him good and not evil, all the days of her life.”

  Abigail could almost see her mother, a tall stern woman and extraordinarily beautiful, despite the tightly pinned daycap on her raven hair and the trim dark simple dress of a minister’s wife. Long hands like a queen’s, roughened and reddened by laundry diligently done each Tuesday and not pushed off until some later date, by dishes washed, by floors swept. A beautiful alto voice reading the verses of Proverbs to her three too-intelligent daughters: She worketh willingly with her hands . . . She riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household . . . She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vinyard . . .

  Abigail’s heart protested furiously, A man’s life is at stake . . . A dozen mens’, or a hundred, depending on that wretched Commissioner or whoever the King is sending that keeps John up all the night planning and organizing what can be done . . .

  But that is not your business, Abigail. She could almost hear her mother saying it.

  The Scripture might proclaim, She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy—

  But her mother would say—and she was right, Abigail reflected in agony—that the first duty of a woman was to her children, and her second to her husband, whose children she must guard while he went and had all the peril . . .

  And the excitement and the intellectual sharpening that went with it.

  She felt the guilt like a physical pain, an ache in her side where Charley would curl himself up against her when, worn out with the mischiefs of a three-year-old, he would come back to her, cling to her, knowing she would keep him safe.

  And she hadn’t.

  She woke up cold, her neck aching where her head had tipped sideways, the kitchen dark around her. The faintest glow of the unbanked hearth rimmed the pans on their hooks, the queens-ware dishes on their shelves, made copper mirrors of Messalina’s wide, demented eyes. She had dreamed of arguing with John—shouting at him through iron bars that separated them, You left them! You left them, and you left me! knowing he would be taken away to Halifax, tried by a military court, and hanged for treason. Knowing that it was somehow her fault.

  For a time she listened in the stillness, wondering what it was that had waked her. Then she rose slowly, stiffly, to stir up the fire again. Not long after that John and Thaxter came in, their voices muffled in the yard, calling out to others, thanking them . . . arranging a meeting by the Mill Pond as soon as it grew light.

  “You didn’t find him,” she whispered, when the men came in, and John gathered her in his arms. She clung to him, trembling, trying to shove away the last stains of her dream out of her mind. Feeling in the rhythm of his breath the degree of his own dread and pain.

  “We will,” he said. “We will, Nab. ’Tis dark as pitch; we could have walked within a yard of him on the Common and not seen him. If he’d knocked himself senseless—falling out of a tree or off the back of a dray trying to hook a ride . . .”

  He turned his head sharply at the sound of someone knocking at the front door. Thaxter, already in the hall, reached it—Abigail guessed—in two strides, for she heard the bolt clack, the hinge creak almost before the sound of the first salvo died. She and John were in the doorway of the hall an instant after that and saw by the light of the lantern the clerk still held that it was Revere and Dr. Warren in the aperture, Revere in the act of handing a piece of paper to Thaxter.

  “This was on the door,” he said.

  GIV US THE BUKS

  WE GOT YR BOY

  Twenty-two

  A day passed before the second note reached them, nerveracking hours that brought Abigail close to unforgivable words with Sam, with Sam’s wife Bess, with John himself. Last night she had silently cursed her mother’s iron insistence upon the role of womanhood. Now, in her calmer moments—when, from long practice in forbearance and patience, she was able to take a deep breath and hold her always-unruly
tongue at Sam’s suggestion that they bring in Horace for an all-out attempt to find the treasure-code in the seven books before they had to be surrendered—she blessed her mother for not causing her to break irretrievably with every Adams on the planet . . . not to speak of murdering Sam.

  She only said, “Bring the books here, Sam. They’re going to be handed over the moment someone tells us where and when.”

  He looked like the words Try to stall them were upon his lips, but to his credit he didn’t utter them. He said, “Of course. You’ll have them tonight.”

  That had been during last night’s conference in the small hours when Sam was called back to see the note, and Abigail forbade them—any of them—to do a single thing, even call on the constables, until Charley had been returned safe. As the men were leaving, only an hour before dawn, she had caught Paul Revere by the sleeve: “Will you go out to Mrs. Morgan’s house in Charles Town? You, yourself, without any others and without telling Sam—Go out and see if her scar-faced coachman and the two grooms are still there? Don’t go near the place—if they have Charley there . . .”

  She bit back the words, not even daring to think them.

  Revere’s dark eyes narrowed, but he nodded. “I won’t be seen.”

  Unable to utter a word, Abigail squeezed his hand.

  Throughout Monday, it took all her self-command not to speak of the note to the other three children or to Pattie—whose self-control she did not trust as she instinctively trusted Katy’s. With the bred-in discipline of one who has spent her life taking care of animals, Katy made sure that the milking was done before the town herd-boys drove the cattle down the street to the Common in the first pink twilight of morning; Pattie saw to it that Nabby and Johnny were clean and fed and off to school. But it was Abigail who sat down with her older children before their departure, and told them that ’twas best they go to school as ever and keep their minds from Charley, whom they could not help. “The men will search the Common again today,” she said, “and the fields on the other side of Beacon Hill.” She repeated John’s argument of last night about how impossible it was to find anything as small as a three-year-old boy in the open fields on a moonless night.

  While she was comforting them, a knock sounded at the front door, and Pattie came into the kitchen a moment later with the news that Mr. Ryland, the Governor’s young man, was here . . .

  “You had best go,” she said, and kissed the two children, aware that her efforts at control had robbed those kisses of anything but perfunctory motion. “Pattie, will you walk with them to the school?” Both children opened their mouths in protest—being escorted by an adult was the ultimate of babyishness—but Abigail was already out of the kitchen, with barely more than a glance at the small mirror in the hall to make sure that her cap was straight and her eyes those of a Roman matron and not a wild woman.

  Yet when she opened the door and saw Joseph Ryland sitting beside the parlor’s cold hearth, for that first instant it took everything she had in her not to walk straight up to him and seize him by the hair: What has the Governor to do with this . . . ?

  Then he stood and faced her, white with shock and distress. “Mrs. Adams, I beg your forgiveness, for coming to you at a time like this—”

  What are you doing with Beelzebub Whitehead’s books in your chamber?

  She took a deep breath. “No—” She hoped her gesture would convey this forgiveness to him. “’Tis well.”

  Did you hire Dubber Grimes to kidnap my son? The question shattered, dissolved against the haggard suspicion in his face, the sickened expression of someone who is trying very hard not to see something that’s under his nose. Faced with Ryland’s honest integrity, she could no more ask that than she could ask, Did you tell Dubber Grimes to murder Horace and leave his body by the side of the Concord Road?

  It was absurd on the face of it.

  “They have found nothing?” he asked.

  She shook her head wordlessly.

  “His Excellency asked me—I have been at his house yesterday and today . . . He said, he has had his quarrels with Mr. Adams, but ’tis all politics; this is another matter entirely. Have—Pray forgive me asking this, m’am . . . Have arrangements been made to drag the Mill Pond?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  He made haste to add, “Of course ’tis absurd to think—”

  “He is only three,” said Abigail quietly. “Boys that age have neither the judgment to keep away from places of danger, nor the strength to swim or climb or scramble to safety.”

  Silence stood between them, and Abigail’s jaw ached with the effort not to shout at him: What do you know? What do you suspect? What has Hutchinson said? What has he done? In the young man’s brown eyes she saw the agony of surmises that he was trying his best to thrust away. And how not, when Hutchinson was not only the man who had gotten him into a college he could never have afforded to enter, but who was keeping him there now and upon whose continued goodwill he depended for everything?

  To the marrow of her bones she knew that if she spoke of her suspicions, his honesty would drive him back to Hutchinson: Mrs. Adams says this of her son’s disappearance—is it true? Too clearly in her mind she heard Paul Revere’s voice saying, Her throat was cut, of the woman whose discreet house she had been in Friday . . .

  Rage and tears and dread fought within her; the Lord only knew, she thought, what he was seeing of this in her face. And he would, thank goodness, attribute it simply to anxiety for her son . . .

  At length the young man said, “His Excellency—Please do not hesitate, or let political enmities prevent either you or Mr. Adams, from calling upon His Excellency for any assistance whatsoever: men, authority, vessels, Writs of Assistance, whatever you require. As a father, an uncle, and a grandfather, he is utterly at your disposal, and that of your husband. As am I.”

  She managed to say, “Thank you,” and made herself repeat for the third time John’s argument about the moonless night and the possibility that Charley had been lying stunned somewhere, and she saw relief flood into Ryland’s sensitive face. “You’re quite right,” he exclaimed, with an eagerness to believe that told its own tale. “And a sturdy and well-grown boy—especially of that age—could well have missed his direction to your aunt’s garden, if that’s what he was seeking, and finding himself in open country . . .”

  Some of the awful tension left his shoulders, and his face relaxed a little and grew sad. “My mother lived in Germantown but a little distance from Philadelphia,” he said. “When I was apprenticed in the city, I ran away—three or four times—only wanting to be back where the streets weren’t brick, and the houses weren’t tall, and there was space to walk alone among the trees and smell the earth and the river. ’Twould have been easy, I think, for your son to let himself run too far.”

  She met his eyes then, and asked—with a softness that surprised herself—“And is that what you think happened to him?”

  And his glance ducked away, but not before she saw the pain at the back of his eyes. “I don’t—”

  The rear door opened and Katy came in, a pail of milk in either hand. She stopped on the threshold and regarded Ryland warily; his brow clouded as he recognized her, and his glance went sharply to Abigail’s face. Abigail said, “Mr. Ryland? I believe you know Mrs. Fairfield.”

  His lips tightened and a dusky flush crept up over his skin, that she would give the name of his captain to the daughter of a stableman. “Servant, m’am.” His bow was a vocabulary of obligation, scorn, and restraint.

  Katy set down one pail and offered him two fingers, as the Tory ladies did. They were stained, where Semiramis (as she so often did) had dunged her tail.

  “M’am.” His bow deepened by a degree and a half from the upright over her hand. Then he was gone.

  Only an hour after that, Paul Revere arrived with the news that the house called Avalon was closed up tight: shuttered, locked, the barns closed and the horses and carriage gone.

  When the
cows came home that night, the head herd-boy beat with his fist on the back door and handed Abigail a paper. “’Twere tied ’round Cleo’s horn, m’am,” he explained, “when we gathered ’em up, like.”

  LEAV EM DED CENNER OF Y YARD WTH LANNRN

  BURNINNG MIDNIT TOMORO WEN LANRN GOES

  OUT YR BOYLL BEE THER TRY AN STOP US AN

  HEL BEE THER DED

  Should Dr. Langdon or Sheriff Congreve be informed?” Joseph Warren handed the note back to Revere and looked inquiringly toward Sam, John, and Abigail in the lamplight.

  “I don’t know Congreve well enough to know whether he can be trusted to keep his hands out of the matter.” Paul Revere turned the paper over in his hands, letting the gleam of the parlor fire fall upon it. Examining the writing, the ink, the quality of the paper itself, as it was, Abigail knew, his habit to study everything that came his way. “Langdon would try to interfere,” he added.

  “Langdon would try to interfere if he got news of a war between the Chinese and the Hottentots,” remarked Sam bitterly. “He cannot be kept from interfering . . .”

  “And can you be trusted?” With a queer, cold sense of being someone other than herself, Abigail turned her glance to Sam. Darkness had fallen by the time the men had reassembled in the parlor; by the low gleam of the lamps on the table his face had a slightly sinister look. He made a gesture of surrender.

  “John and I will go,” Abigail said, without even a glance at her husband. “Mr. Revere, would you be so good as to accompany us? For the rest of you, Sam, Dr. Warren . . . I forbid you to be part of this. Any of you. My son’s life is at stake, and I will not have interference in doing exactly as these men demand.”

  Revere began gently, “Mrs. Adams—”

  “No. We will do as the note asks and nothing else. I defy any one of you to explain to me why the filthy gold collected by some pirate, no matter what noble purpose you intend to put it to, is more important to me than my child’s life.”