Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

  “Good cranberries, though . . .”

  Bad, hard land, as Abigail feared it would, translated to, few farms, much woods, impassable roads, and nobody within ten square miles to ask after the whereabouts of Shelby’s Bog. Most settlement in this part of the colony had gravitated toward the easier land of the Blackstone Valley to the south. In the course of the following morning, the two farms they encountered, at the ends of overgrown lanes from the not-very-wellkept Grafton Road, appeared to have been burned out by King Philip’s Whampanoag warriors a hundred years previously and not rebuilt. The track branched and branched again, the chaise wheels sinking in the clayey muck. Abigail watched the angle of the sunlight slanting through the woods, and with an acid sense of urgency, she calculated when they must turn back in order to make Boston by nightfall. We must find the place. Find the treasure, or prove that there is nothing there.

  Else we will know no peace . . .

  Ahead of the chaise, Weyountah rode imperturbably, drawing rein from time to time to listen to the woodlands that were growing steadily thicker around them, though Abigail heard nothing but the twittering of birds, the rustle of the wind. He was listening, she thought, as a hunter listens—or a warrior entangled in the endless, ancient woodland fights between tribe and tribe.

  He had turned his back on that world, she thought, looking up at the tall figure in his hunting-shirt and boots. And she wondered why. A world where his family clung to the old ways; a world in which visions counted for more than the theorizing of mathematicians and the spirits of the land clung tight to the hearts of its children, holding them in corn-patch and longhouse forever.

  He had made his choice and refused to be part of that past. At what cost, Abigail could only guess.

  But turn away as he might, thought Abigail, the old world of the forest was in his blood nevertheless. As they moved on again down the less travelled of those forking traces, she could see him sorting out the sounds of birds, the scent of the wind in the woods. As a child he’d hunted and learned what the land should sound like if all were safe.

  “Oh, thank Heavens!” exclaimed Katy. “The cranberry bog at last!”

  Sunlight brightened through the trees. Bees hummed over milkweed and marsh marigold, and the heavy, peaty smell of wet ground and standing muck breathed through the sweeter scents of the woods. Abigail drew rein, and Katy produced old Beelzebub’s notebook again, marked in a dozen places last night as the five of them had sat around the lamp in a corner of the ordinary of the inn at Framingham until the innkeeper had good-naturedly told them he was banking the fire and putting up the shutters for the night.

  “The village should be no more than a mile or two northwest of here . . .”

  “And it being noon,” replied Abigail mildly, unwrapping the lunch that Mr. Buckminster at the tavern had put up for them, “if you can determine which direction is northwest—”

  “Back that way.” Weyountah pointed. “At least,” he added, as he stripped the harness from Sassy and tethered her to graze, “that’s where I’d put a village: up the stream that feeds the bog, on the higher ground where the soil is better. Look, you can see where the trees were cleared and have grown back. Will you stay here or come with us?”

  “Stay here?” Katy stared at him as if he’d suggested she drown herself in the bog. “And miss finding the treasure?”

  “And miss a hard walk of a couple of miles uphill.” Horace attempted to spread the carriage-rug for her over a couple of dry tussocks, only to have her turn impatiently away.

  “I’m two months with child,” she pointed out. “I didn’t lose a leg.”

  “Don’t be a goose, Horace,” added Abigail. “Katy will be fine.”

  They shared bread and cheese and cider, and proceeded up the hill.

  Weyountah said, “Damn it!” and stopped where the trail steepened, holding up his hand.

  Abigail followed his eyes down to the trail and saw in the soft ground the tracks of a man’s boot.

  Even to her totally inexperienced eye, she could tell they were fresh.

  And that there was only one man.

  Horace gasped, “The Cornishman . . .”

  “Don’t be silly.” Abigail dropped her voice, knowing how sounds carried in the quiet of the woods. She nudged Weyountah, who put his foot next to the track. “The Cornishman’s as big as an ox. At a guess,” she said, considering the difference in length and breadth, which was barely any and that little in the Narragansett’s favor, “’tis Mr. Ryland.”

  Horace breathed, “He must have found the location of this place in the Governor’s records after all—”

  “And lied to us about it?” Abigail mimed shock. “The scoundrel!”

  Beside her, she was aware of the girl’s eyes suddenly growing hard.

  Weyountah signed Diomede to separate from them and follow through the woods some half-dozen yards to the right. Then he handed Katy his spare rifle and motioned her to do the same to the left. In this configuration—picking their every step in the brown leaf-mast—they moved up the hill to where the land flattened out a little. A century had eradicated all trace of the cornfield-patches, where beans and squash had been trained up among the stalks, and the trees seemed to Abigail no thinner or smaller than the surrounding forest. Yet she guessed that a village had been here simply from the shape of the land. There was a spring and level ground big enough for houses to be built by men and women who’d lived and died in this place, worshipping strange gods and minding their own business until the white men came.

  Horace’s hand closed tight around Abigail’s wrist. Between the trees she saw it: stones scattered among the deadfalls and tangles of witch hazel, and a little farther on, the shape of a curved stone foundation and what had been a wall. Trees had grown up close to it, roots forcing apart the stones in places. Elsewhere what looked like shallow steps had been cut in the rock bones of the hill on which the fort had been built, and the ruins of what could have been a tower.

  The Devil’s Castle.

  Her nephew tried to run forward, and both Abigail and Weyountah pulled him back. They moved forward slowly, Diomede and Katy edging inward from the sides. It was Diomede who reached the stone remains first, surmounted a sort of breastwork, then straightened up in an attitude of shock. He called out, “Mr. Ryland!” and scrambling over the wall, sprang down. Horace broke from them, ran toward the place at the same moment that Abigail saw Diomede lift the head of a man who had been lying on the broken foundationstones, half hidden by the walls.

  Ryland struggled a little, flailed one hand, then seemed to come to his senses and cried out, “Get away! Go back!”

  And around them in the woods, half-a-dozen rifles crashed.

  Twenty-six

  Weyountah grabbed Abigail by the arm and nearly dragged her up behind the low walls of the ruins, thrust her down beside him, and peered over the tumbled stones. Another rifle crashed and the ball cracked against the barrier near were they lay. Abigail gasped, “Don’t tell me the Governor has men out after us after all!”

  Diomede dropped beside her, bleeding from where a rifle-ball had grazed his arm as he dragged Ryland to shelter beside them.

  Through gritted teeth—not taking his eyes from the surrounding trees—Weyountah replied, “I’d say the Cornishman went and got some friends after Tuesday night.”

  “Drat the man! They’re as bad as the Sons of Liberty for coming out of the woodwork—I daresay some of them are Sons of Liberty in their spare time . . .” Keeping crouched behind the wall as best she could, Abigail pulled open Ryland’s coat and shirt; blood was welling from a fresh wound.

  “He was hit just now, m’am,” said Diomede. “When he sat up a little and cried for us to get back—”

  A short distance away she could see a huge pool of the man’s blood where he’d been lying when Diomede had found him.

  “Give me your handkerchief or anything you’ve got . . .”

  Close beside her, Katy got off a shot, then c
ursed vividly and added, “Horry, have you ever loaded a gun? Curse it . . . Dio, let Horry take care of Ryland, we need you to cover the other angle—”

  Obediently the servant shoved his handkerchief into Abigail’s hand and, catching up rifle, powder, and patch-box, sprang to the remains of the tower. “I can load.” Abigail had performed that service on numerous occasions when her father or William had gone duck-hunting. “Just give me a moment . . . Horace, don’t you dare faint—”

  She dug in the pasty and staring boy’s pocket, pulled out five handkerchiefs, and wadded them tight against the bleeding hole in Ryland’s chest. The bullet was lodged—at least there wasn’t a corresponding wound in his back—but it seemed to her for a time that the blood would never cease pumping out beneath the reddened linen, no matter how hard she pressed. Behind her she heard Katy swear again, and say, “I’d better go to loading. I can’t seem to hit the whoresons—”

  And another crack of gunfire from the woods.

  A swift glance back across the stone foundation—it seemed to have been a rectangle some thirty feet by fifty with a tower at either end—confirmed Abigail’s first, fleeting impression that there was a square hole in the flooring of the more intact of the two towers, where Diomede crouched on the high-point of the remaining wall. A broken paving-stone and a couple of pieces of wood lay next to it, the remains, presumably, of a trapdoor . . .

  “Good Lord, don’t tell me there really is a treasure!”

  She looked back down at Ryland’s face. It was wax white beneath horrible bruises. Shocked, she said, “He’s been beaten!” When he reached to touch her hand, she saw the mutilated fingers, sticky with blood.

  Katy dumped powder from her hand down the rifle-barrel, shoved in a patch and ball, and whacked the whole thing with the ramrod. “I thought they worked for him!”

  Ryland turned his head a little and without opening his eyes managed to whisper, “Saw me. Harvard Yard.”

  Enlightenment flooded Abigail and she said, “Were you the one who shot Dubber and Hicks after the kidnapping?”

  “Had to,” breathed Ryland. “They’d seen me—Mrs. Morgan’s—” His eyelids fluttered open and for a moment he looked toward Horace. “Sorry. Never meant . . .”

  “And I suppose you never meant that old Professor Seckar would die, either,” retorted Abigail tartly.

  “Had to,” he insisted. Pleaded. The long fingers—their ends bloodied where the nail beds had been crushed—tightened feebly on hers. “Destroy them . . . within their camps. Defend this city, for mine own sake . . . for my servant David’s sake . . .”

  “Did they take the treasure, then?” asked the girl, as Abigail sat back on her heels, shocked—and suddenly cold—at his words. “Then why the Devil are they still shooting at us?”

  “Or was it gone when you got here?” Weyountah fired again, followed instantly by another shot from Diomede on the tower. “Quick—!” The Indian stretched out his hand for Katy’s gun, and she pressed it into his grip and instantly reloaded, twice as fast, Abigail noticed, as William had ever managed to . . .

  “Not gone—”

  Softly, while Katy was reloading, Abigail said, “It wasn’t gold, was it?” She understood then what the treasure was, what it had to be. Pieces falling into place . . .

  Ryland shook his head. “Defend this city . . .”

  So THAT, she thought, is what he would have brought in triumph to Hutchinson. As vindication of whatever it had cost.

  And she had to admit, it would have brought him all the preferment, all the advancement, all the recognition he wanted and had never received.

  Maybe even the hand of the lovely Sally Woodleigh.

  She felt breathless with rage and horror.

  On the tower, Diomede called out, “They’re coming around to your downhill side—”

  Weyountah nodded sharply in that direction, where the cover consisted of trees rather than the stone walls, and Katy snatched up rifle and ammunition, and darted across the open space of the foundation. “How many?” he called out to the servant.

  His head on Abigail’s lap, Ryland whispered, “Ten.”

  “And they didn’t believe you,” said Abigail, “did they, when you said the treasure consisted of . . . What? Other books?”

  Ryland shook his head, closed his hand on hers again in a paroxysm of agony as more shots chipped the stone behind Abigail’s head, fragments stinging her neck like bees. Weyountah called out, “Don’t fire unless you have to! They’re trying to draw our ammunition!”

  “Didn’t believe.” Ryland’s voice seemed to fumble at the words. “Followed me here . . . Excellency’s papers . . . Shelby . . . records . . . Devil’s Castle . . .” His eyes opened a slit under fluctuating lids, and he seemed for a moment to come back to himself. “Tried to buy them . . . The books. Excellency spoke of him . . .”

  “Did you think ’twas gold you sought at first?” whispered Abigail. “Or did you know from the start it wasn’t?”

  “. . . was a scholar, Excellency said . . . rumor of what he’d made . . .”

  “Did Hutchinson know what you were doing?”

  “Foolish.” Ryland shook his head. “All tales. If it was real, he’d have used it. Knew it had to be here. Knew—somewhere in his books—had to be a way here. He’d write—Arabic—secrets . . .”

  “And you tried to get Horace to translate,” said Abigail. “Only to find you’d got hold of the wrong secrets.”

  Weyountah rammed home his load, swung the rifle to his shoulder, fired over the wall; a second shot immediately from Diomede told Abigail that someone had probably tried to rush them. How many shots had they left? How much powder?

  And what would the Cornishmen and his friends be likely to do to two women in order to convince the wounded man—or the two other students—to tell them of the location of a treasure that didn’t exist? Or didn’t resemble any treasure they understood?

  “And you knew George had some of Seckar’s books in his rooms . . .”

  “Wretched slut.” The cold fingers picked anxiously at Abigail’s hand. “Best—most beautiful—not worthy—untie her shoes . . .” Abigail realized he was trying to talk about Sally Woodleigh. “Loved him, and all he could see . . . some hostler’s daughter . . .”

  Well, reflected Abigail, considering the nature of the missing books, ’tis no wonder he wouldn’t admit having them to YOU . . .

  “Hush,” she whispered. “Hush . . .”

  “Had to find it.” Ryland shook his head, pushing her admonition aside. “Came here—had to be here. Governor’s papers . . . They followed. Cornishman . . . men with him . . . They think it’s gold. Wouldn’t listen . . .” He moved his head weakly, flexed his massacred hands. “Destroy the rebels. Destroy . . . utterly within their camps . . .”

  Katy shouted, “Weyountah!” and a salvo of gunfire came from the thicker trees on her side of the enclosure. Weyountah stood—Abigail had no idea where he got the courage to do it—for a better look through the trees, fired, dropped to his knees, and began loading with cool precise haste as a shot came from Diomede on the wall, and when Weyountah rose to his feet again, rifle at the ready, two more shots cracked out. He dropped behind cover again. Abigail could see blood on his coat.

  “Followed me,” whispered Ryland again. “Followed me here. Knew if I could get it . . . all those years of waiting and work. Knew if I could defeat them . . . kill the rebels in their camps . . . Sally . . . His Excellency . . . His Majesty . . . He’d made it. I know he’d made it. All the stories say . . . Beelzebub. He’d used it. Why he left, why he came to Cambridge . . . I will defend this city, for mine own sake, and for my servant David’s sake . . .”

  With a heart turned to ice, Abigail finished the passage from Second Kings: “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred four-score and five thousand; and when they arose in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses . . .”

&nb
sp; “I will defend this city,” murmured Ryland. “I will defend this city . . .”

  And as Abigail had done, Horace whispered, “What?!?”

  “. . . the angel of the Lord . . .” Ryland’s bleeding hand loosened in hers.

  “It’s what he thought was in the only handwritten Arabic document he found among Beelzebub’s books,” said Abigail softly, laying the back of her hand close to the unconscious man’s nostrils to detect the thread of his breath. “And you have to admit, ’twould have made his fame not only among the Loyalists, but with the King as well.” And as gently as she could, she began going through the pockets of his coat.

  Horace turned and handed Weyountah the last of the rifle-balls, and by the way the Indian shook the lead powderbottle, Abigail knew that was the end of the powder as well.

  “Go to Katy, Horace,” said Weyountah softly. “Get her rifle, cover that side of the enclosure—I should be surprised if she has shot or powder left either. Mrs. Adams, take Katy and flee up the hill into the deepest woods you can find. Go to ground as soon as you find someplace where you won’t be seen; I doubt they’re good enough trackers to follow. Stay there until dark—”

  Abigail thrust the cracked and yellowed wad of papers she’d pulled from Ryland’s pocket into her own. “We can’t leave—”

  “Do it. Crawl along the wall ’til you get to the woods—”

  Crouching behind the ruined heaps of stone, Abigail darted and crept to where Horace and Katy knelt in the shelter of the trees, arguing in furious whispers—

  “Don’t be a goose, girl.” Abigail caught Katy’s arm.

  “They need every gun—”

  “And how many loads have you left? I thought so. Give it to him, and follow me—”

  Abigail pulled her heavy skirts up and wrapped them tight around her hips and thighs; she dropped to the ground as close to the wall as she could. John, she promised, I’ll never follow my own course again in the face of your objection . . .