Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

  She waited for a few moments. The unruly portion of her soul—the portion that her mother had always deplored, that wondered things like how exactly HAD Jesus managed to multiply five loaves and seven fishes (What kind of fishes?) to feed five thousand people: had each fish regenerated its head or tail when pulled in half?—that portion of her soul wondered if Sam actually would try to argue for her putting in an effort to find the treasure in the time remaining. And wondered if she would be able to keep herself from clawing his face if he did.

  But Sam clearly sensed that if Abigail didn’t kill him for such an attempt, his cousin John would, and only said, “If you need any help, please—”

  Abigail forced herself not to say, You’ve helped enough, Sam, and repeated what her mother had always told her: When there is nothing to say that will help a situation, say, Thank you. “Thank you,” she said. “But we are well.” In a slightly more natural tone she went on, “And I must thank you also, John says, for removing the man Diomede from harm’s way—”

  “Had we waited,” said Sam, “we might have lost our chance completely. John—”

  Sam rose from his chair, and John—who had stood unwontedly silent (for John) beside Abigail’s hearthside seat—stepped forward to shake his hand.

  “’Tisn’t that we have no trust in you, Sam,” he said, “as I hope I’ve no need to tell you. But not all the men you command have so complete a command of themselves as one would wish.”

  Sam looked on the point of saying something else—Abigail could read it in his eyes when they met John’s—and she knew that what he wanted to say was, We have no guarantee that the boy isn’t already dead . . .

  And John’s answered, as clearly as speech, Don’t say it, Sam. It doesn’t matter.

  There were times when Abigail felt that John was the best and wisest man on the face of the planet.

  In the hallway Sam turned to her, and said quietly, “If I’ve harmed or offended you, Nab, in any of this, I am more sorry than I can say—particularly now. I had meant to tell you earlier . . . I’ve spent the afternoon at the State House. ’Tis why I haven’t those wretched books about me, that I said I’d return to you. I’ve been looking through every record and transaction recorded by the colony, hoping to circumvent our friends’ quest for the cipher by finding Old Beelzebub’s stone castle and the remains of his Indian village . . . For where a man’s heart is, there will his treasure be also.”

  He cocked a wry eyebrow.

  “And?” said John, and Sam shook his head.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Barring the Cambridge town-lot and three lots in Boston, no Whitehead in this colony owned land before 1693—the year after Old Beelzebub died.”

  “You mean,” said Abigail slowly, “that there is no treasure?”

  “There may well have been.” Sam picked up his lantern from the bench in the hall. “Geoffrey Whitehead could have buried or concealed some kind of treasure in Massachusetts, either Spanish gold—if he really was a pirate—or whatever coin he had, if he happened to be staying in an area that was overrun by King Philip’s warriors in ’75. But ’twould have been a cache hidden away in haste and gone back for, I think, the moment the Indians were driven off.”

  “Which our Governor,” said John grimly, “seems to wish to conveniently forget. You’re sure there’s no record of his owning land in the west?”

  “Nothing.” Sam flipped open the lantern’s door, held it steady while John lit the candle within it from his own. “Which has never stopped Hutchinson from going after something he thinks is there for the taking. Well, I wish the man joy of those books, cracking his so-called scholarly attainments against Arabic chemistry texts and alchemical discussions of how to make gold out of lead . . . Believe me, I’ve been over all seven of them with a magnifier and calipers, and haven’t found anything in them that looks like a cipher to me. Fear not,” he added, and bent over Abigail’s hand. “All will be well.”

  He turned to where Revere and Warren waited for him on the doorstep. Abigail folded her arms beneath her shawl and watched from the doorway as those three bobbing blurs of yellow light disappeared down Queen Street. Far off, the crier’s voice could be heard in the still night, Nine o’clock of a clear night, and all is well . . .

  Twenty-three

  True to his word, Sam sent the seven books, made up in a package thickly bound with string and crusted with blots of sealing wax, via Paul Revere. The silversmith arrived in Queen Street midmorning, driving his own light chaise with his quick-stepping little mare Ginny tethered and saddled behind. Johnny and Nabby had been sent off to school with instructions to go to Aunt Eliza’s in Milk Street when they were done: Pattie had taken Tommy there as soon as the house was tidied and the marketing done for Thaxter, who would remain in the house. Neither Johnny nor Nabby had been much comforted by John’s explanation that he and their mother were going across to the mainland to widen the search (“How would he have got over there, sir?” had been only the least acute of Johnny’s questions), and it cut Abigail like a knife to see the confusion and suspicion in her son’s eyes as he understood that he was being kept outside of the truth.

  She tormented herself on the drive by conjuring visions of some independent scheme of Johnny’s to discover the truth of his brother’s whereabouts for himself. Nabby, silent, had simply nodded, her blue eyes a world of wretchedness—as if she, too, understood that something was appallingly wrong beyond what was being said—and Tommy had only cried.

  They crossed the Neck to Roxbury, Katy riding pillion behind Revere, and reached Cambridge a little after noon. Weyountah and Horace were horrified at Abigail’s news and offered a) to immediately try to decode whatever might be in their books and b) to stand watch with as many of their classmen as required, all around Harvard Yard, that night at midnight, to apprehend the villains when they came to the appointed meeting-place. Abigail firmly quashed both suggestions.

  “What I will ask of you,” she said, “is that in the meantime you show us old Reverend Seckar’s house, that was Emmanuel Whitehead’s.”

  Revere went off in search of Sheriff Congreve—he seemed to know everyone in the colony—and returned with the keys to the Seckar house, which had been closed up upon the quarrelsome old professor’s death, pending disposal by the College.

  “’Tis the closest we’ll come, I presume,” added John, as they crossed the Common from the Golden Stair and made their way along the road that eventually led toward Waterford, “to this stone castle Old Beelzebub was supposed to have built.”

  “He must have had property somewhere,” said Abigail stubbornly. “Mrs. Seckar was quite clear that he did built a fortress of some kind . . .”

  “Stories get conflated, Nab,” returned John patiently. “Especially family stories. You remember Tilda Farren back in Braintree? The one who’s convinced her parents fled England because her mother was the true heir of King James—the daughter for whom the baby Prince James was substituted for political reasons in 1688.”

  Abigail privately suspected that their neighbor back in Braintree was far too partial to the medicine she took for her so-called rheumatics and back pains, but was too distracted with dread to reply. Part of her prayed that there was something at the Seckar house that would solve the entire question—some hidden map or cipher that Grimes and his cohorts were actually looking for that could be handed over to them . . .

  Another part of her was despairingly aware that if a map of the colony had been drawn on one of the bedroom walls complete with large red letters saying, HERE LIETH THE TREASURE, such was her mental state that she would be incapable of realizing what it was.

  Dear God, keep him safe, she prayed . . . Did the sun never move? Would sunset never come, let alone midnight? And that detached and disrespectful part of herself, looking at her prayer as through a pane of glass, wondered how she had ever thought herself a woman of faith, when nothing—NOTHING—as precious to her as her son’s life had ever hung in the balance like this b
efore.

  Mr. Scar-Eye . . . Dubber Grimes . . .

  God, keep my boy safe.

  The Seckar house turned out to be one she’d seen a hundred times in passing through Cambridge, its newer portion—facing the Waterford Road—built of brick and timber in the ’80s of the previous century, tall and old-fashioned like Sam’s house on Purchase Street, with most of the lower floor taken up by a great keeping room and a fireplace at one end that a family of four could have set up housekeeping in. The older portion of the house was hid from the road, lying perpendicular to the new, and had been built of a combination of stone and “nogging”—clay mixed with twigs and horsehair—a single story with a loft over part of it.

  “This must have been the original keeping room,” surmised John, as Congreve led them through its ancient door and into the chamber that had—for as long as anyone recalled—been the laundry. The big coopered tubs had been moved, and its northern wall knocked out and rudely patched over with boards. The eastern wall—what had been the gable end of the original house—joined to that of the newer structure but had never been pierced with a door: one entered the old wing from the yard, with no communication between the old part of the house and the new. Old Beelzebub’s idea to keep his son at a distance? About twenty inches in from the original eastern wall a second wall had been built of bricks, plastered and whitewashed to match the rest of the room. Between the two walls a couple of shelves still remained, smelling of whitewash and dust.

  Is Charley frightened? Have they hurt him?

  He is in the hands of God . . .

  Abigail stood back while John—who must, she knew, be in as great an agony as herself—methodically examined the space and the shelves. She herself looked around the old laundry-room, toward the great fireplace at its other end, where the copper and the racks of irons still stood . . .

  He looked like the Devil would have—she heard Narcissa Seckar’s thin old voice in her mind, passing along the words of Beelzebub’s daughter—if the Devil were ever to sit in a corner of the kitchen and play the fiddle . . .

  Here in this long, narrow chamber, the whole tangled knot of circumstance had begun: at the great old table, worn marble-smooth and so big it could not have fit through the doors, Old Beelzebub had undoubtedly copied out his original notes about the Governor of Jamaica into script unreadable by anyone in the colony and shoved it for safekeeping into one of his books.

  This was the room where he—or perhaps his sanctimonious son—had walled his books away.

  Where he had turned his back on his studies, thought Abigail.

  Why?

  A man who’d sailed the seas, burned Spanish towns for their gold, studied the writings of the Mahometans, practiced sorcery, chatted with Satan, been worshipped as a god?

  Deeper than ever did plummet sound I’ll drown my book, swears Prospero in The Tempest when he forgives the men who wronged him and returns to the human world again. I’ll break my staff . . .

  Why?

  He was missing two fingers of his right hand, so that he held the fiddle-bow strangely . . .

  For a moment in her fancy she saw him, with his long gray hair like a horse’s tail, and the ends of his silvered mustache braided and tied with green ribbons.

  Playing the fiddle strangely with his mutilated hand. Looking straight into her eyes with a gaze black as coal and smiling mockingly. Had he, too, supped with the Devil and afterwards found that he had started chains of circumstance that he could not call back?

  The Devil carried off children, she thought.

  No. The Devil puts it into the hearts of MEN to carry them off.

  She had been taught from tiniest childhood by her father never even to think, May God curse this or that person. But she thought it now.

  May God curse Dubber Grimes and his henchmen, and may they die.

  “Aunt?”

  Shadows darkened the old door into the yard: Horace, Weyountah, Joseph Ryland.

  “Have they found aught?” Horace stepped inside, gazing around him with deep interest at the smoke-stained plaster and the high, steep rafters of the ceiling.

  And Weyountah: “Dr. Langdon had men in two weeks ago to take away the books in the Reverend Seckar’s regular library in the main part of the house. About half of those had been bought originally by Emmanuel Whitehead, though a few must have belonged to Barthelmy.”

  “Mrs. Adams.” Ryland bowed deeply over her hand. “Mrs. Squills at the Golden Stair said that you could be found here. His Excellency has authorized me to offer a reward toward which he will contribute. He is most distressed and most anxious to show your husband—and indeed all the citizens of Boston—that he bears no ill-will. If there is anything that he can do—if there is anything that I can do—”

  “Yes,” said Abigail softly, “there is.” And taking Ryland by the shoulder, she guided the young man into the corner near the great fireplace and lowered her voice still further. “You can tell me what you were doing with fifty-four of Beelzebub Whitehead’s books in your chambers.”

  Ryland looked aside, flecks of color slowly rose to mottle his colorless cheeks. “Please, Mrs. Adams—” He glanced toward Revere and John, still poking about before the hidden cache on the east wall. “I beg of you, tell no one—”

  “Not His Excellency?”

  He put his hands briefly to his face. “I don’t know how you can know this—”

  Horace opened his mouth to make the obvious remark that they’d searched his room, but Abigail cut in ahead of him with, “Mrs. Seckar told me that you’d purchased them.”

  “His Excellency—” began Ryland, and stopped. Then he let his breath out in a sigh. “His Excellency has never been poor,” he said, in a tone of weary defeat. “He heard that Old Beelzebub’s books had been found and mentioned that the old man had been a pirate. I-I thought, I hoped, that there would be some mention . . . pirates hid gold along these coasts as far north as Philadelphia, I know.” His voice faltered as he spoke, as if he could not easily find words. “He asked me to enquire and I—’twas the act of an ingrate, but I can only plead that I was poor. I purchased the books of Mrs. Seckar with the Governor’s money and told him that they had all been sold to others before I came with my offer. I thought—if there was a map or a cipher in one of them . . .”

  “You didn’t try to buy them through someone else?”

  He looked at her blankly. “Someone else?”

  “A Mrs. Lake?”

  He frowned a little, fishing through his memory for the name, then shook his head. “I mean only to hold them until I’ve had a chance to go through them—”

  “You have not done so yet?”

  “No, m’am. I—since the books came to my hand, I’ve been in Boston more than I’ve been here, helping His Excellency. The only times I’ve come to Cambridge have been to help my students prepare for the examinations, to drill with the Volunteers . . . and to”—he stammered just slightly on the words—“to be of service to a . . . a private pupil who has suffered a great loss . . .”

  Sally Woodleigh. Who is in elaborate mourning for George Fairfield and fainting in the arms of any wealthy man who’ll stand still for it.

  And if you were wealthy, she reflected, looking into those deep-set brown eyes, she would be fainting in YOUR arms . . .

  “Please.” Ryland swallowed hard. “Please tell no one of what I did. I will make the money good . . . There’s treasure out there somewhere, I know there is. His Excellency’s records of the colony speak of—of old Whitehead . . . I know he must have left some . . .”

  “And do they speak,” asked Abigail, “of this stone fortress of his? Or of where he might have held land?”

  Ryland shook his head. “He held none, m’am. I’ve looked through all His Excellency’s records. He had a sort of stronghold on the coast up above Lynn, but that was all, and ’twas burned by the Navy in King William’s War. ’Twas thought the old man’s books were all destroyed then—he was well known as a scholar. So I wa
s surprised to hear that they’d survived here.”

  “As indeed you might be. Does anyone know you have these other books?”

  “Not that I know of, m’am.”

  “Then keep it that way,” she said softly. “And if any man approaches you about them, deny it, or invent a tale that you’ve passed them along to the Governor. Mrs. Seckar spoke of them as cursed,” she finished. “And ’tis true; ill things have befallen those who’ve had them in keeping. And I only hope and trust,” she murmured, as with a deep bow Mr. Ryland took his leave, “that you survive the possession of them once our friends discover nothing in those books of ours but chemical formulae and notes concerning the treatment of horses’ piles.”

  They set forth quietly from the Golden Stair at half-past eleven that night: John and Abigail, Revere and Katy, crossing the Common on its northern side by the slitted glimmer of a single dark-lantern held low. The new moon had set early. By wan starlight the world was formless, trees like black thunderheads and the fine brick houses of the village’s worthies no more than dim cutouts of dark against darkness. Abigail carried the wrapped package of books in her arms. Accursed things, she thought . . .

  Was it only that love of money is the root of all evil? Mr. Joseph Ryland had, from the moment she had met him, impressed her with his integrity: even his devotion to the King’s cause sprang not from place-seeking, but from dread of civil war. The fact that he would embezzle money from his benefactor, lie to him, then take advantage of his collection of the colony’s old documents to hunt for the location of the treasure, only for money . . .

  For money and love?

  Sally Woodleigh’s lovely face floated for a moment in Abigail’s thoughts.

  Going to get your bid in with the beautiful Sally, haha?

  She burned off Ryland’s eyebrows during a chemistry lesson, but he’s still tutoring her . . .

  He is young. And beneath that steady exterior, she sensed in the young bachelor-fellow the capacity for passion—for Sally as for the cause of his King.