Sup With the Devil aam-3

by Barbara Hamilton

  Remembered, too, the crack of guns in King Street, the black pools of blood in the blue evening snow. It was too easy to picture in her mind the college buildings in flame or occupied by troops . . .

  Though she had knelt by the bed to say her prayers before undressing, Abigail propped herself on the pillows a little and again folded her hands. Whatever paths they tread, she prayed, ten years from this night or with the coming of this night’s dawn, You have already laid out for them, for their good and Your best purposes. But as their mother, I beg of You, keep them safe, hold their hands in Yours . . .

  She must have fallen asleep in midprayer—as she almost invariably did when she prayed in bed with the featherbed up to her chin—because the next thing she knew, it was morning, and Mrs. Squills was knocking on the door of her room with the news that George Fairfield had been murdered in the night.

  Four

  They’re saying Diomede did it.” Horace’s face was white as paper, save his eyes, which were swollen and red—he had been weeping for his friend when Abigail had come into the Golden Stair’s private parlor.

  “Who’s saying?” She took the chair on the other side of the small fire. Beyond the window, mist still lay on the Common, and the birds she’d heard twittering themselves to sleep last night when George was alive were waking in every tree and shrub.

  “The Dean, and Dr. Langdon—the President of the College—and the sheriff, Mr. Congreve. He was drunk—Diomede was—but just because a man’s had a dram or two . . .” Horace broke off in some confusion, with an expression of helpless guilt, remembering no doubt the numerous family discussions in which the consumption of alcohol was roundly denounced as the root of considerably more evil than grew from the greed for money.

  “Of course not!” It said much, in Abigail’s opinion, that Horace’s tolerance for the foibles of others had widened to that extent. Two years ago the boy had been an unconscionable prig on the subject. One gift of a Harvard education . . .

  “Diomede would never have raised his hand against George.” These last words came out as a whisper, and Horace sank into the chair in which he’d been sitting when Abigail—hastily dressed and tying a fresh, clean, and borrowed cap of Mrs. Squills’s over her hair—had hastened into the room.

  With astonishing good sense, the landlady—who must have been nearly as upset over the murder as Horace was—brought in a tray of coffee things. Abigail poured a cup for herself and hot water for her nephew, to which she added a little honey. “Drink that.” When Mrs. Squills went out, through the open door of the ordinary blew the voices of men discussing the crime: murdering nigger—drunk as David’s sow—knife still in his hand . . .

  “What happened? You’ll feel better. Who’s there now?”

  “Weyountah,” whispered the boy. “He waked to the sound of George shouting at someone—not shouting, really, just raised voices . . . His room is across the landing. Mine is above Weyountah’s—Mr. Beaverbrook from New York is above George, and you couldn’t wake Beaver if you set his rooms on fire. But George often shouts at Diomede, you know . . .” He put his hand quickly to his mouth as if to catch back the present tense.

  “What time was that?”

  Horace shook his head. “When the bell rang for chapel this morning, Weyountah went across and knocked at the door—We all have to work to make sure George gets to chapel. It’s Diomede’s job, but the last two times Dio had a few drinks, George was fined, and Dr. Langdon warned him . . . So either Weyountah or I will check. When Diomede didn’t answer, Weyountah went in and found him asleep—”

  “In the study?” She remembered the small leather chest in the corner of George’s little study, which contained the slave’s pallet and, no doubt, every other item the man owned. In Virginia, she had been told, the house-slaves often slept on the floor of their masters’ rooms, like dogs.

  Horace nodded, struggling to speak in something resembling normal tones. “There was blood on his hand, and on the sheet—” His voice cracked, and he raised the cup to his lips, needing two hands to hold it steady. “Weyountah ran into the bedroom. George was lying in his bed, in his nightshirt. He’d been stabbed—there was blood all over the bed—”

  Abigail put both of her hands over the boy’s cold one. “Was there a knife?” She knew better than to believe what the men in the next room were yelling to one another.

  Horace nodded. After a moment he recovered himself enough to reply, “On the floor next to Diomede’s pallet, covered with blood.” Then, when she came around to kneel beside his chair, he threw his arms around her shoulders and held her desperately, his body trembling with the impact of the first great grief, the first blow of loss and violence in his life.

  Abigail held him, stroked his back as she did Tommy’s when the little boy had a nightmare, saying nothing. But her mind raced. Her grief at the young man’s death seemed to run in tandem with her shock at the manner of it, and totally separated from the thousand questions that formed themselves up, sharp and clear as if she saw them written down on a paper before her. What kind of knife? Was it one of George’s, or strange to the establishment? Diomede would know that—probably Weyountah also, he seems an observant young man . . . Was there anything missing from the room? When did George come in last night? Was Diomede dressed?

  Was there anything in the bedroom that seemed out of place?

  But Horace was barely seventeen years old and had just taken a wound as agonizing as the one that had killed his friend, and for a time she did nothing but hold him, letting him know that there was someone to hold.

  He took a deep breath, let it go. Let go of George, as if he had been clinging to his friend’s hand. He began to say, “I’m sorry—”

  “Shush. Can you take me back there now? Are you able for it?”

  Horace nodded, pushed his steamed and tear-blotted spectacles back into place, then removed them, and fumbled to clean them on the end of his neckcloth. “Diomede would never have done it,” he said.

  “Was he drunk? George said he drank . . .”

  “Never to the point that he didn’t know what he was doing!”

  “But to the point that he wouldn’t wake up if someone else put a bloodied knife into his hand? What is it Lady Macbeth says? I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal . . .”

  “But no one would!” protested Horace. “George hadn’t an enemy in the world!” He got awkwardly to his feet and gallantly helped Abigail to rise.

  Not even the man George kept at his beck and call for four years, away from family and friends, only for his convenience in a foreign town? An American born and bred, gentlemanly and intelligent and kind, who had to sleep on the floor and live out of a chest the size of a breadbox, so that he was there to ‘make him mind his book,’ keep him away from unsuitable ladies, and wake him up in time for chapel?

  It was the first thing the Middlesex County sheriff was going to say.

  “It doesn’t take a plot, or a lifelong foe, to do murder,” she said quietly. “Only a moment’s rage. Let us go and see what we can learn.”

  The entire student body of Harvard—some two hundred young men and boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five—were either milling around the westernmost hallway of Massachusetts Hall or pushing their way up and down Horace’s staircase. Horace bleated, “Here, let me through—I have rooms up here—Please let me through . . .” to absolutely no effect.

  Abigail caught the first brightly colored sleeve that came her way, yanked it purposefully, and said in a voice honed by six years of dealing with young Johnny at home, “Excuse me, sir, I am Mr. Fairfield’s aunt—I beg your pardon, sir, but I am a member of the family—Please let us pass—” in so firm a tone that the young men so addressed either backed down out of the staircase or, farther up, squashed themselves flat against the wall. Abigail’s normal conversational tones were brisk but soft, yet at need she could call up a particular timbre of voice that could cut flint. “I beg your pardon, we must get through—Please excu
se us, sir, but we’re members of the family—”

  In Fairfield’s study, men were packed tight, all of them shouting at the slumped form of Diomede, who huddled in a chair in the corner with a harassed-looking man in a blue coat before him, whom Abigail recognized—from years of association with John’s legal practice—as Seth Congreve, sheriff of Middlesex County. Diomede was shaking his head, saying, “I don’t remember, sir! I don’t know—” He raised his hands, sticky now with drying blood that blotched and boltered the white sleeves of his shirt. “I swear I didn’t—drunk or sober, I’d never have touched a hair of his head!”

  His clothing stank of blood and rum, and tears of shock ran down his face.

  “So you’re saying you’re so drunk you didn’t even hear—Can you gentlemen please be silent!—So you didn’t hear your master arguing with some other man—someone whom you weren’t even aware was in the room?”

  “He could have been,” barked St-John Pugh. “I warned George about that nigger’s drinking . . .”

  And the weasel-like sophomore Jasmine Blossom demanded sarcastically, “You were so drunk you didn’t even wake for a man walking in bold as paint and stabbing your master after a quarrel loud enough to wake the Injun? Oh, let me have another story, Papa, it’s not nearly bedtime yet!”

  “Mr. Pugh,” said Abigail briskly, “would you and your friends be so good as to assist Mr. Congreve in clearing the room a little? One can scarcely do justice if one isn’t able to hear oneself think. Mr. Ryland, just the man I wished to see—Might you detail some of the King’s Own Volunteers to eject anyone not immediately connected with the investigation? Thank you—Mr. Pugh is also assisting me . . . Deputize whom you will—”

  “Yes!” Congreve swung around with a gesture of a man with a sack of corn beset by pigeons. “All of you, out of here—Mrs. Adams!” he added in surprise. “What on earth—?”

  “I was working with Mr. Fairfield,” she said, “on a strange little puzzle that involved him and his friends; I am horrified to hear of this. And of course Mr. Adams will undertake to defend poor Diomede, who quite obviously had no more to do with the killing than Mr. Ryland or Mr. Pugh—You there, Mr. Yeovil, are you associated with the sheriff? No? Then please take yourself out—”

  “What puzzle?” asked the sheriff, as Ryland pushed past him into the bedroom—even more crowded—beyond. “And why ‘obviously’?”

  “A man who’s drunk so much that he doesn’t know what he’s doing is unlikely to win a hand-to-hand fight with a sober one,” she retorted briskly, though she was not, in fact, at all certain that this was true. “Certainly not as swiftly as this battle proceeded, in any case. Mr. Ryland, could you ask Mr. Beaverbrook to remain, and of course Mr. Wylie—” It took her a moment to remember Weyountah’s baptismal name. “Is there a physician here?”

  “Mr. Perry.” Congreve nodded toward the bedroom door, then turned toward the task of ejecting the last of the stragglers. “Mr. Perry teaches medicine here at the college.”

  “Mr. Pugh,” called Abigail, “might I prevail upon you to keep guard at the bottom of the staircase with your men? Thank you,” she added, not giving the bachelor-fellow a chance to say yes or no. “You have been of inestimable assistance—” She caught him by the sleeve and thrust him through the door and into the faces of Lowth and Jasmine, just reascending after pushing the last of their fellow classmates out at the bottom of the stair. She closed the door on him, reopened it long enough for Ryland and another young man whom she vaguely recognized as one of the younger members of the Oliver family—relatives of the Governor—to push out the last few observers, then closed it behind them all.

  Harvard men—and raised in the best traditions of good manners—they clearly had been taught that one doesn’t push back against a lady, and weren’t quite sure how to deal with one who summarily ordered them out the door.

  “There,” she said, and walked back to the corner where Sheriff Congreve still stood—looking rather amused—beside Diomede. “It wants but a little firmness—and getting the right people to think they’re going to receive more than their due. Might I speak with the prisoner, Mr. Congreve? I truly cannot imagine the man would turn against his master—and Mr. Adams will want to know every detail I can glean.”

  “And Mr. Adams sent you out here?” He sounded doubtful about that, as well he might. Being a lawyer’s clerk required an education, something Abigail was sharply conscious that neither she nor any other woman was allowed to obtain. Nor would she or any other woman have been permitted to exercise the skills of a lawyer if she somehow acquired them. And a lawyer who sent out a woman—much less his wife!—to do a man’s work would have been, quite simply, committing professional suicide.

  Abigail lowered her voice, though the little study was now empty except for themselves, Diomede, Horace, and a pale and rather wizened-looking young man who was probably Mr. Beaverbrook, who lived immediately above this room. “The matter upon which Mr. Fairfield asked to see me,” she explained—And it isn’t QUITE a lie, she reasoned, as the poor young man really did consult me for my opinion once he knew what was taking place—“was, we had thought, a family matter concerning my nephew Mr. Thaxter, and for this reason I hesitate to speak of it without consulting Mr. Adams. Whether it has any bearing upon this shocking turn of events or not, I have no idea, but Mr. Adams will certainly undertake to defend Diomede, whom we both know would never have done such a thing.”

  On the other side of the table, the servant raised his head, the first flash of life returning to his eyes that Abigail had seen since she had come into the room. The first flash of hope.

  She went on as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “The family side of the business not being completed, Mr. Fairfield paid to have me stay in Cambridge last night, at the Golden Stair. I will of course write at once to Mr. Adams, who is at the Maine Assizes this week, and to his clerk in Boston, Mr. John Thaxter, who graduated from here last year. But I know Mr. Adams will want to know the precise details of the scene, as they were before the rooms were disturbed, and will also want to know everything that can be recollected by both the witnesses and the accused—which as you know yourself can become very quickly distorted with the passage of time.”

  Congreve nodded and scratched at the edge of his wig—horsehair, Abigail guessed, and probably vastly uncomfortable: she could see the little rim of reddened flesh all around its edge where it irritated the skin. He said, “I see. And that’s perfectly all right, Mrs. Adams—a very respectable gentleman, your husband is, and a fine lawyer. Mr. Langdon—”

  He turned to the waspish, red-faced gentleman—resplendent in a red doctor’s gown barred with black velvet and a startling full-bottomed wig—who appeared in the door of the bedchamber.

  “Might Mr. Perry be spared for a few moments to describe to Mrs. Adams—here acting as her husband’s amanuensis—the condition of the body and the room when you were summoned?”

  “Actually,” said Abigail, “what Mr. Adams would ask me to do—and on those occasions when I have acted in his name before this, he has been most emphatic in his instructions—would be to enter the chamber myself and compare my own observations with those of”—she could see President Langdon bristling up like a porcupine and the stooped, graying gentleman in black behind him who had to be Dr. Perry radiating disapproval at this display of womanish inquisitiveness—“of observers trained to analyze the smallest details. Mr. Adams has a horror”—here she could at least put the genuine ring of truth into her voice—“of information coming at third-hand, as you gentlemen”—she divided her deprecating smile among the three men—“must also abhor for its potential for mistakes. He has quite trained me to describe matters exactly as I see them, without the addition or subtraction of thoughts of my own.”

  John had done nothing of the sort, of course. But she knew he had always admired that quality in her, which she had possessed long before that sturdy, brilliant, opinionated, and passionate—not to say mad
dening—little gentleman had come into her life when she was fifteen.

  Langdon and Perry looked mollified.

  Horace—with singular and, to Abigail, surprising presence of mind—produced a memorandum-book from his pocket and said with the air of one deputized to stand ready on the fringes of events, “Your notes, m’am.”

  Abigail said, “Thank you, Mr. Thaxter,” with her most serene air, and preceded the doctor and the college president into the chamber where George Fairfield’s body lay.

  Five

  Dr. Perry stepped quickly across to the bed and drew the sheet over George Fairfield’s face. Perry would have pulled the counterpane up to cover the splotches where the blood—turning dark now as it dried—had stained through the linen, but Abigail held up her hand and asked, “How was Mr. Fairfield lying when you came in, doctor? It’s one of the things my husband will wish to know.” Her words stayed him long enough for her to note that there seemed to be three or four sources of blood—wounds that had bled. Plenty, she thought, for the killer to ‘gild the faces of the grooms’ and, like the wily and wicked Lady Macbeth, transfer the blame with the blood.

  “He lay on his back,” said Perry. “His limbs were composed and the sheet drawn up to his waist, for as you recall,’twas a mild night. There was no evidence of struggle.” With a sharp twitch of his wrist he flung the counterpane into place. Despite herself, Abigail felt relieved.

  “Where was he stabbed?” she asked.

  The man’s upper lip seemed to lengthen at the idea of a woman wishing to know such things, even to pass the word on to her husband. “Thrice in the breast, two of the blows penetrating the heart. Once in the side, up under the ribs—”

  Left side, Abigail noted. That’s where the blood had flowed out, anyway.

  Abigail had seen dead men before. There were families, she knew, who didn’t believe in having their girl-children assist in the laying-out of the dead—grannies, uncles, younger children who didn’t make it through sickly winters or the endless barrage of ailments that hammered the very young before their tenth year—but hers had not been one of these. And after one has prepared for burial the body of one’s own child—poor tiny Susanna, who had barely passed her first year—no other death hits quite so hard.