Sup with the Devil

by Barbara Hamilton

  And leave the possibility open, her non-Mother self whispered in her ear, that one of those men would find those papers in Ryland’s pocket and sell them to someone who DID know what to do with them . . . ?

  At the end of the wall the laurel grew thick. She and Katy slipped in among the glossy branches and crept uphill, trying to keep from thrashing the foliage too much. When they reached its end, Abigail heard behind them the thunderous crashing of rifles in the woods downslope, caught Katy’s wrist in her hand, and ran. Her long skirts tangled with her legs, the uneven ground catching at her feet: deadfalls, rivulets, holes hidden beneath thick leaves. As a child she’d been swift as a sprite, but it had been a long while since she’d run full out any distance—not a thing a respectable matron was supposed to do.

  A rifle crashed somewhere in the woods behind them, close enough that she could smell the powder. At the same instant a man sprang from behind a thicket: he was no taller than she but hard-looking as carved hickory, with a brown face burned by weather and the tarred pigtail of a sailor and the hardest, coldest eyes Abigail had ever seen.

  He held a knife in one hand.

  The two women swung around to find another man—a rough laborer of the kind that Sam routinely summoned to form his tame mobs—pointing a rifle at them at a distance of a few yards.

  The man with the knife said, “An’ the next shot goes right in your back, m’am.”

  The man Abigail recognized as the Cornishman—the hulking, heavy-browed ruffian that blonde Belinda had cried warning against at the house called Avalon—stood over the crumpled body of Weyountah in the old ring of the stone tower. One of his men held a pistol on Horace and Diomede. Others were slapping and shaking Ryland and pouring rum down his throat, with oaths fit to scandalize Satan in the Pit. Katy let out a cry of anguish and tried to run to Weyountah, and the hard little sailor laughed and grabbed her by the arm, yanked her back. A couple of the men grinned and called out, “That’s the dandy, poppet!” and “Aw, ’fraid we’ve broke his courting-tackle?” and “’Tain’t all we’ll break, ‘fore we’re done—”

  Horace lunged at them in blind fury, and the man guarding him reversed the pistol in his hand and gave Horace a crack in the head with it that dropped him to the broken pavement. The Cornishman grunted, “’Ere, none o’ that,” in a thick slow voice, like a semi-articulate pig’s. He turned beady eyes toward Ryland, who had given a sort of faint cry that ended in coughing. Abigail could see blood trickling from his mouth mixed with the rum.

  The Cornishman took Katy by the hair, dragged her over to Ryland, and pulled a knife the size of a small cutlass from his belt. “You ’ear me, Ryland?” He kicked the young man’s ankle. Ryland managed to move his head. Abigail wrenched herself from the grip of the man who held her—she counted seven of them and wondered if Ryland had miscounted or if three of them were lying wounded back in the woods—and ran to Ryland’s side. She dropped to her knees as one of them reached to stop her, propped the young bachelor-fellow gently against her, his head on her shoulder, instead of on the stones.

  Three days ago she would have condemned the man who had put in motion Charley’s kidnappers—however little he had had to do with the kidnapping itself—to the bottommost circle of Dante’s Hell without a thought. But she knew what she saw, looking at the color of his face and that dribbling line of blood. Probably the Cornishman did, too. And wanted Ryland to last at least through questioning.

  The Cornishman kicked Ryland again, and when his eyes fluttered open, grunted, “Can you see, mate?” He slid the knife under Katy’s bodice and sliced the cheap cloth open to the waist, jerked down the chemise beneath, and put the knife-blade against the side of her breast. “I’m only gonna ask this once,” he said. “Then I starts cuttin’. Where’s the gold?”

  “Hutchinson has it,” said Abigail.

  Those piglike eyes narrowed. “Then why’d he say there wan’t none?”

  “Probably because Hutchinson told him there wasn’t,” she replied, with a dizzy sense of walking across a tightrope. “He sent him here to find what was in that pit—books and scientific implements . . . You know how His Excellency is about books.”

  The Cornishman blinked, thrust unexpectedly into the position—as Abigail felt she had been for weeks—of trying to prove a negative, and he was no better at it than anyone was . . .

  He shoved Katy away from him, sending her sprawling to the stones. Before the other men could get to her, Horace reached her side, drew her up against him and away from the Cornishman as that hulking man stepped close to Abigail, knife extended inches from her face. “You lyin’ to me, bitch?’Cos if you are—”

  Abigail never heard what he would do to her if she was, in fact, lying. In the same second, it seemed, that she heard a gunshot in the woods, the Cornishman’s narrowed eyes popped wide, as if startled, and a rifle-ball exploded out of the front of his throat in a shower of gore. Abigail rolled aside, dragging Ryland with her, as the Cornishman dropped before them like a felled steer.

  Two other shots cracked. The man standing nearest Horace and Katy fell, clutching his side and shrieking; with great presence of mind Katy grabbed the pistol away from him as he fell and shot the next-closest man through the body. Weyountah rolled and caught up that man’s rifle, and the four remaining ruffians dropped their weapons and threw up their hands at once.

  Diomede tossed one of their rifles to Katy and went around collecting the rest even as Black Dog Pugh—trailed by his two slaves, both armed to the teeth—emerged from the trees.

  “Sink me, I thought I’d never find this place,” Pugh exclaimed. “Wouldn’t have, either, if they hadn’t started shooting. And a damn good shot,” he added, looking down at the Cornishman’s sprawled body and the bullet-hole in the back of his neck, “if I do say so myself. Pity I can’t scalp him as a trophy.” He held down his hand for Abigail. “Don’t you think, m’am?”

  Twenty-seven

  Did you follow him?” asked Abigail, as the slave Eusebius rose from beside Joseph Ryland’s body and shook his head. Abigail knelt also, to feel the young man’s wrists and throat, though she trusted the African’s judgment, and indeed, it was clear to her that Ryland was dead.

  She looked up at Pugh.

  “Lord, no. And just as well,” the bachelor-fellow added, and rubbed his fat, unshaven chins. “If we’d been following him, instead of our upstanding friend here”—he nudged the dead Cornishman with his foot—“we’d probably have fouled on him like two dogs on the same lead. No, the fair Nancy—when she came to me rather the worse for wear, for having been locked up in some sailor’s trap in Boston where Grimes had left her and the other girls—told me the Cornishman had come in and got himself a band of tavern toughs to find ‘pirate gold,’ as he put it—”

  “You knew about Old Beelzebub’s treasure, then?”

  “Lord, who in the islands didn’t? Is it here, then?” He walked to the opening in the floor and squatted to peer in. “Grimes and his bravos were boasting about looking for it down at the Pig one afternoon, so I knew there was a rumor someone had found it. I had five shillings with Jasmine that the thing didn’t exist. I should love to find out I’m wrong, though.”

  Abigail looked around her a little distractedly, and Eusebius—in the process now of tying the hands of their prisoners—wordlessly stripped off his coat and handed it to her to lay over Ryland’s face. As she did so, Abigail drew out the knife that Ryland wore at his belt, noting the slender blade was only barely wider than a paper knife. Precisely the width, in fact, of the wounds in poor George Fairfield’s side. Whether a judge would recognize this—or even look at it as evidence—she didn’t know, but she pocketed the weapon just in case before she followed the Black Dog to the trapdoor.

  “The treasure that Ryland was seeking,” she said carefully, “I don’t think was gold at all, but rather books and formulae of chemistry—or alchemy, as Beelzebub would have thought of it . . . Did Grimes tell you that?”

  �
��Grimes? He swore it was gold, so much it wouldn’t have fit into one shipload—sort of thing one talks oneself into after the second bottle of Hollands. I was buying the Hollands.” He winked one long-lashed green eye. “A small investment, considering the money I took off him as the afternoon wore on. Doesn’t look far down,” he added. “And stap me if I see any gold. But when Nancy and the other girls came knocking at my door Tuesday night, asking shelter and swearing the Cornishman was off after the treasure, that was enough to get me to follow along and see. Hold this for me, would you, m’am?”

  He put a candle in her hand. He had taken it from his pocket along with flint and steel.

  “Are they all right? Nancy and Belinda and Dassie—”

  “You’ve met ’em, have you, m’am? Good girls, and corky as squirrels—” He cracked flint to steel briskly, then blew on the spark where it had taken on the loop of tinder through his fingers. “Grimes took ’em off to some crimp named Manchet down by the harbor who runs a nunnery out of his back-room. Kidnap, too, by the sound of it. Nan laid old Manchet out with a pintle Tuesday night after Grimes and his bravos had left, and the three of ’em came to me. Just bring that winker over here—”

  He fastidiously removed his coat, then lowered himself down the trap, holding his hand up afterwards for the light. Abigail saw the small glow bob and shift beneath her in a hole that resembled a cold cellar, perhaps six feet by eight, beneath the stone foundation of the old fortress: “Coming down, m’am? That’s the dandy!” He set the candle on a shelf and held up his hands for her as Abigail wrapped her skirts tightly around her legs and slid down into his grip. “What a mess, eh? And not a gold-piece in the lot.”

  He held up the candle, as Abigail looked around. The few books that the old pirate had left in this little strong room had mildewed into black blocks, but the glass vessels had survived the passage of years. Abigail recognized them from Weyountah’s workroom in Harvard Hall, what she’d seen of it through his poisonous smoke: crook-necked distillingbottles, thin measuring-flasks. Two carboys showed signs of having contained fluids of some sort, now dried away to glossy dark scum on the bottom and sides. In clay pots, a number of salts and something that smelled like sulfur remained.

  “Weyountah would know what all this is,” she said, trying to keep her voice casual.

  “Wonder if it spoils with keeping?” Pugh held the light close to the largest vessel, where the liquid had dried and crusted with time. “Does Jasmine owe me five, or do I owe him? Would have been a jolly good sport if there had been something here . . .” He picked up a telescope from the shelf, pointed it at the sky and peered through it for a moment, set it down again. “Would have guaranteed me the fair Sally’s hand, anyway. So this is what poor Ryland was after?”

  “I think so, yes. He told me—in the course of the affray—that he’d hoped to gain some recognition from the Governor for it.”

  “I expect he would. The old boy’s never given up the hope of putting together a history of the colony, and a find like this—proof that old Beelzebub did really do alchemy to get the Nipmucs to worship him—would turn him pink down to the ends of his prehensile toes.”

  Pugh chuckled, like the great black bulldog he was called. “Ryland was just wild that old Seckar wouldn’t sell him the old man’s books when they were found back in April. I’m afraid I muddied the waters there a bit . . .”

  “And George got the two you wanted in the end,” said Abigail drily, “didn’t he?”

  Pugh met her eyes in the dim glow.

  She raised her eyebrows, and his heavy mouth quirked sidelong. “You know about that?”

  “I have a good guess. Your note to George—sorry, Sally’s note to George—was in his pocket when he came back to his rooms that night . . . on your notepaper. I take it George was still away from his room when you went in—”

  “Oh, Lord, yes. Bed all made up and turned down waiting for him—Dio’s a born chambermaid. Glad to see the old fellow here, by the way—did you arrange a jail deliverance? Good on you. I tiptoed in just after the clock struck twelve. I was pretty sure, with George gone, Dio’d be laid out stiff as a board on the rum, though ’fore God, m’am, if I’d known how stiff I’d have gone out to the barn and warned poor George something was afoot.” He stood frowning, gazing at the dulled and dirty equipment crowded on the little bench. Then, more quietly, “Ryland really killed George for this?”

  “When one chases the Devil’s treasure,” said Abigail, “one pursues the illusion that Satan conjures in the mind, not the handful of sticks and dirt that are often the reality. It’s not only that the heart lies close to the treasure . . . sometimes one finds that the treasure exists only in the heart.”

  “Silly bastard.” Pugh shook his head, placed the candle on the table’s edge, and held out his hands to her. “George was worth a thousand of him. Well, I always said old George didn’t care about Sally one way or t’other—not that I’d say so to the fair Sally herself. That young lady upstairs—” He jerked his head toward the hole above them, “would be the girl he married, would she? Katy Pegg? Thought I recognized her.”

  “Was the license in one of the books?”

  “Wasn’t sure what to do with it.” Pugh shrugged. “No need to go waving it in front of Sally, of course. D’you think the girl would go halves with me for whatever we could screw out of old man Fairfield on the strength of it? You know he’ll never let it stand up in a Virginia court.”

  “That,” said Abigail sternly, “is something you would have to discuss with Mrs. Fairfield. I believe she would settle for ownership of Diomede, and Dio’s wife and children—and some sort of maintenance for her child. If you’re going up,” she added, as Pugh whistled sharply beneath the trap-hole for Pedro, “would you be so good as to ask Weyountah to come down? I want to see if he can salvage any of this for himself.”

  Pedro held down his hands for his master, and when he’d been hauled (Pedro must be stronger than he looks!) up through, Abigail made a swift search around the cellar for any further papers or notes that might have been left. There were none. Joseph Ryland had had sufficient time, before his erstwhile henchmen had put in their appearance, to gather them all, into the thick block of folded pages that poked Abigail in the thigh beneath her petticoats every time she moved.

  “Do these things spoil with keeping?” she asked Weyountah, when the Indian had dropped lithely down beside her.

  “The phosphorous certainly has.” He hastily re-stoppered a flask in which the waxy crusts of something white clung to the sides; Abigail stepped back, repelled by the smell of it. “I’m not sure what some of this is, even. But he was doing something with sulfur, and the sulfur is still good—”

  “Let’s take that, then,” she said, “and pass it along to Sam or Mr. Revere . . . One makes gunpowder with sulfur, no?”

  “Among other things, yes. It doesn’t seem like that’s what Old Beelzebub was doing down here . . .”

  “No,” said Abigail, a little quickly. “Can I ask you something, Weyountah? We can take the sulfur, but when we depart, would you stay behind and destroy the rest of this? Destroy it so that none of it can be used again? I shall explain later,” she added, as the Indian looked quickly sidelong at her. “Beelzebub’s treasure is . . . not something I want anyone else to happen upon by accident. It has brought too much grief and trouble to the world already. ’Tis a secret best forgotten.”

  The Indian looked puzzled for a moment, then turned his head to study the chemical apparatus—the retorts and alembics, the filtering coils and small furnace, the piston air-pump and oily crusts in the vessels—and she saw something change in his dark eyes, as he guessed, perhaps not what the treasure of Beelzebub had been, but the sort of thing it was. Softly, he said, “You can rely on me, m’am. I shall join you in Boston tomorrow.”

  It was in fact late the following afternoon—Friday, the thirteenth of May—before Weyountah and Horace appeared on the Adams doorstep. Abigail—after a brief consul
tation with John—bade the two young men stay on for dinner with the family and to spend the night. Upon Abigail’s return Thursday evening in company with St-John Pugh and his party—Katy, their various prisoners, and Joseph Ryland’s body—John had listened to her account of the young Loyalist’s death and her own theory about what Beelzebub’s treasure had consisted of, and had agreed that it was a matter that must go no further.

  From regard for their children—Charley seemed far more taken up with the equitable distribution of the wooden soldiers in the toybox than with the fact that he’d been kidnapped and held in the back-room of Mr. Manchet’s tavern on Fish Street for forty-eight hours earlier in the week—the conference after dinner was held in John’s study rather than the kitchen. But throughout the meal, Abigail kept glancing at Weyountah’s face, reading her suspicions in the grimness of his eyes.

  When John closed the door behind him and poked up the little hearth-fire—for the spring afternoon was chill—she asked, “What was it that Old Beelzebub had figured out how to make in the Devil’s Castle back in 1675?”

  Weyountah had spread out the notes on John’s desk, a dozen folio-sized sheets, yellow with age and stained with time and mold. Notations of chemical formulae covered them, and writing both in Arabic and what Weyountah told her was Algonquian, the language spoken by many of the Massachusetts tribes. “All of this is written in Algonquian, but sometimes he’ll use Roman letters for it and sometimes Arabic. No wonder people thought he was the Devil.”

  “But what is it?” Katy leaned from her chair at Abigail’s side, tried to read past his shoulder. On the trip back to Boston, the girl had had a long, quiet conversation with Black Dog Pugh, presumably about whether half a loaf would be better than no bread once Charles Fairfield came to Cambridge. The West Indian had called again that morning, and conferred with both Katy and John. Diomede had wisely remained at Mr. Barrett’s farm near Concord, under another name. “Why would anyone want a lot of chemical formulas so badly they’d kill for them?”