Sup With the Devil aam-3

by Barbara Hamilton

  “I see.” Abigail paused at the corner of Cornhill to let pass a group of men: laborers from the ropewalks that abounded in Boston, rough-looking men talking heatedly, and she heard among them the words God-damned lobsterbacks and bloody bleedin’ Parliament . . . “So our best course would be to attack the problem from the other end—which will entail a visit to the farm of the Reverend Seckar’s brother.”

  “He has a brother? It’s like hearing there was a fourth Gorgon.” Horace shook his head. “I always thought the Reverend Seckar was spontaneously generated from a vat of sour lemons.”

  “My only hope is that his family does actually live in Concord and not out in somewhere like Haverhill or Springfield. If I have to chase off for another three days to speak to the sister about who drugged the family, Heaven only knows what I’d return here to find.”

  Over a nuncheon of Arabella Butler’s griddle cakes (“Now, we must save a few for Nabby and Johnny when they get home—”), Abigail thought to ask Sam, who as a longtime rabble-rouser knew everyone in the Boston area, about Genesis Seckar. As she’d suspected, Sam knew all about him.

  “His farm lies about seven miles the other side of town.” Sam poured out coffee for Abigail, Pattie, and Katy—who had brought the younger boys back from the Smiths’—as they settled around the much-battered table in a kitchen now spotlessly clean (Abigail could have kissed Sam’s womenfolk for sparing her the appalling task). “Your husband,” he added, “likes to chide that two-thirds of the men in the colonies either enjoy being the King’s slaves or don’t care whose slaves they are so long as they’re able to cheat the poor out of their rightful money—”

  “That is not what John says!”

  Sam waved away the objection. “Well, Genesis Seckar belongs in the category of men who wouldn’t care if they were slaves of the Grand Turk, since everyone around them is going straight to Hell anyway, so how they or anyone else lives on the Earth doesn’t matter, because they’ve no proof that the world won’t evaporate in flames tomorrow, so there! He lets the militia drill on his pasture—the place is well away from prying eyes—because it doesn’t matter to him whether there’s going to be fighting or not. Bruck Travers with the Watertown militia tells me Old Man Seckar comes out and preaches during drill at the top of his lungs.”

  “Oh, him.” Katy made a face. “He’s down to two cows these days and doesn’t take care of either of ’em, poor beasts. You’re not thinking of going out there, Mrs. Adams?” She turned on the bench to regard Abigail worriedly. “He’s about a hundred and fifty years old, and proof, I always thought, that his way of life is holy—”

  “How’s that?” asked Sam, hugely amused.

  “Oh, because if it wasn’t, God would have let him die years ago, only He knows that if he did, the old wretch would be in Heaven, and God just can’t stand the idea of putting up with him.”

  “You don’t think he knows where your treasure-map is hid, do you?” Sam’s gray glance cut sharply across at Abigail. “Or the sister? Is that why you’re going?”

  “It is not,” she retorted. “I’m not entirely convinced that there is a treasure or a map to find it with. But I’m not trying to find a treasure; I’m trying to prevent an innocent man from being hanged for a murder he didn’t commit. And since it’s nearly impossible to prove a negative, we are reduced to finding who actually did kill poor Mr. Fairfield . . .”

  “Does it matter?” His voice was suddenly hard.

  Horace and Weyountah, on the other side of the table, looked at one another uneasily, and Bess said, “Now, Sam . . .”

  “I’m sure it matters to Diomede,” replied Abigail evenly.

  Sam waved as if chasing away inconvenient flies. “Let me take care of Diomede, then. What we need of you, Nab—what Massachusetts and all free men in it need of you—is that you find that treasure-map of this Mrs. Lake, and that you find it before that British ship lands . . . or before whoever the damned Governor is paying to do his dirty-work for him decodes the cipher and scoops the money that we desperately need.”

  “Which reminds me,” began Horace, reaching for his coatpocket, “I have—” And Abigail, guessing what he was about to produce, kicked him hard under the table.

  “You don’t really think the Governor is behind the man who killed George, do you, sir?” Weyountah sounded worried. “George was loyal to the King—”

  “You think that would matter to any red-blooded Tory merchant?” retorted Sam. “Old Hutchinson’ll be falling over himself trying to figure out what the cipher is so he can get the gold out of there before the British land as well, lest he be accountable for it. I’ll send a man out to Concord to talk to Old Seckar—”

  Abigail remembered old Mr. Creel and his spite-filled diatribes; thought about the unshaven rope-workers, with their hickory clubs and angry voices and dirty hands, she had passed on the way home. “That’s quite all right, Sam.”

  “And I’ll send someone out with you to Cambridge to find this map or cipher, and the books it’s hid in—I can probably get you someone to burgle the Governor’s house for you—”

  “That’s quite all right.”

  Sam was silent a minute—his expression reminded Abigail of Johnny’s when the boy had verbally given away something he was planning and was trying to think how to cover his tracks. But at last he said, quietly, “I don’t think you realize how important it is that we find that gold, Nab. And find it soon.”

  Around the table, Bess and Hannah, Katy and Pattie, Charley and Tommy, Weyountah and Horace had all fallen silent, as if they had ceased to exist . . .

  And they HAD ceased to exist, reflected Abigail, for Sam.

  As Diomede had ceased to exist.

  Because Seth Barlow had been right, the other evening out in the isolated darkness beyond Dedham, when he read the evening portion of scripture . . . Violent men spread violence like a contagion, and greed in a good cause was still greed. When you supped with the Devil, even the longest spoon would not keep his whispering out of your ears, long after you had thanked him for his hospitality and scurried out the door.

  Sam and his patriots, just like the rest.

  “’Tis worth more than finding who killed some Tory or who gets accused of it,” Sam said. “’Tis worth more than my life or yours—” His glance flicked across the table to the two young men. “The offices of friendship are one thing, boys, and I can see you’re shocked at my saying so. But I tell you this. Once the British land—once fat old King George lands his troops here, the first thing he’ll do is either close the courts or put his own men in charge of them, which amounts to the same thing. Then it isn’t going to matter a split grassblade who killed your friend or why, because the only thing that will matter anymore is who the King’s friends are . . . or who gains the favor of the Governor. To fight that, we need money: money for guns, money for powder, money for food for the men who’ll have the manhood to take up arms. And beside that, nothing is important.”

  He stood and went to the sideboard for his hat. “The wind’s inshore,” he said. “That ship can be only days away. We must do what we can, while we can, and let all else go by the wayside. Nab,” he added, returning to the table to kiss her cheek, “thank you for your hospitality—”

  “No,” she said, rising, “thank you—and Bess, Hannah, Surry . . .”

  The tension of the moment was lost amid handshakes, embraces, farewells.

  But it wasn’t until Sam and his family were out of the house, that Abigail asked softly, “Do you have your reconstruction of the cipher, Horace?”

  “I do. I meant to tell you, but with everyone here—and seeing Dubber put it from my mind—”

  She gripped his arm, shook her head, “’Tis well.”

  “Is it true what he said?” asked Weyountah, deeply troubled. “That the King will close the courts?”

  “The truth is that I don’t know,” said Abigail. “And neither does Sam. But the truth is also that when a man starts saying that the cause o
f defending our liberties is more important than justice or truth or saving the life of a man who has no rights before the courts of law, then I start to wonder what he would stop at. And a man who’ll stop at nothing . . .”

  “Becomes very difficult to distinguish from a robber,” concluded the Indian. “Come into the study, and let’s have a look at Horace’s paper.”

  Seventeen

  When Abigail had finished reading the two pages of Horace’s sprawling, uneven scrawl, she said, inadequately, “Goodness.” Although, quite patently, none of the recorded proceedings had anything to do with goodness.

  The language was stilted and old-fashioned and used a great number of plain English words not generally encountered in polite conversation. At least her nephew hadn’t translated these passages into Latin, as any number of Abigail’s male acquaintances would have, under the impression that a mere woman wouldn’t understand what futuo meant. Between the farmers around her childhood village discussing their stock, and her younger brother’s raids on the higher shelf of their father’s classical library, there was very little that Abigail had not at least heard about.

  Horace, who had gone to gaze out the study window while she was reading, turned around and tried to pretend he wasn’t breaking out in hives with embarrassment.

  Weyountah said matter-of-factly—since his friend was quite clearly incapable of speech—“It’s as close as Horace could make it to the original wording, but of course it isn’t word-for-word. I don’t see how we could decipher it, if it is a cipher, without knowing that.”

  “No, we couldn’t.” Abigail turned the sheets over in her hands, trying not to remember that these were what the two young men had been working on the night George had been killed. “And yet—Horace, you said that it was English written in Arabic characters, as if the Arabic was itself a cipher. Did the prose itself seem labored or . . . or odd? Given the subject matter,” she added drily. “And the fact that ’twas written a hundred years ago.

  “What I mean is,” she went on, when her nephew merely looked uncomprehending, “did you ever write one of those every-other-letter or every-third-word codes to your friends when you were a child? Your uncle William was forever getting me to do so when he was trying to slip information to those good-for-nothing friends of his that he didn’t want Papa to see. He was terrible at it,” she explained. “They always sounded hideously labored, and words like gamblingdebts and liquor are nearly impossible to conceal, if you’re supposed to be writing about the new shirt your mother is making for you. And writing the operative words in Latin didn’t do any good because Papa reads Latin as if it were English . . . considerably better than William or his friends.”

  “So if ’twere every third word or something like that,” said Katy, perusing the disgraceful account with interest from her perch on the corner of John’s desk, “you’d expect there would be words like tree and dig and paces somewhere in it, wouldn’t you? And there aren’t. Except where Mrs. Pitts refers to a ‘mighty oak . . .’ ”

  “And letter-ciphers were even more of a nuisance,” agreed Abigail. “I always had to go fishing about for words that had a q or a y in just the right place, until I was astonished that Papa couldn’t tell at a glance that William’s notes to his friends were ciphers, they read so clumsily.”

  Horace still looked a little puzzled, but Weyountah nodded. “I see what you mean, m’am. I expect one needs imagination to . . . to feel that there’s something amiss like that. Is your father an imaginative man?”

  Abigail smiled at the recollection of that kind and steady old scholar back in Weymouth. “He’s an excellent man,” she said, “and a compassionate man—which requires a certain type of imagination, and one that is in short supply generally in the world. But he’s not fanciful. He can write a very fine sermon, but when he reads a text, the only thing that he sees is its meaning, not . . . not what might be implied about the writer by its form. What I’m saying is that the paper Mrs. Lake gave to Horace to translate might not have been a cipher at all.”

  “Then what was it?” asked the Indian in surprise.

  “And why have me translate it?”

  “She didn’t know it wasn’t a cipher, goose,” said Katy, leaning forward to pluck the paper from Horace’s hand again.

  “I don’t think she knew quite what it was,” said Abigail. “’Tis why she—and whoever hired her—needed it translated . . . and didn’t trust her, by the way: you said that the original had been copied by someone who didn’t know that Arabic is written right to left . . .”

  “Which should let out the Governor,” put in Horace, taking the paper back. “Whatever Mr. Adams says of him, he’s an educated man and knows that much.”

  “Might she have copied it, though?” Katy leaned around his arm to look at it. “Got at it at the Governor’s, I mean, and made her own copy to beat him to the treasure?”

  “What I think happened,” went on Abigail, “is this: whoever broke into the Reverend Seckar’s house found some of the books, one of which had what appeared to him—or her—to be a cipher or secret writing in it. The sheets were probably either written on a flyleaf or tucked in loose, as you say Mr. Fairfield tucked papers into his books. He—or she—took it, and only after ’twas translated, realized that it was no cipher at all but merely notes for blackmail that were never used.”

  “And that’s when he started looking for the other books!” said Horace excitedly. “He must have known about Old Beelzebub’s treasure from the Governor, if it’s not His Excellency himself we’re talking about—Poor George! If he hadn’t waked when he did . . .”

  “Then it might have been you the following night,” said Katy softly. “Or Weyountah the night after. And one of you would have waked—I can’t imagine how anyone would poison you, Horry, you don’t eat anything but vegetables and clabbered milk—and seen someone in his room that he knew . . .” She looked over at Abigail. “’Twas why he was killed, wasn’t he? Because he recognized whoever it was he saw.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “If ’twas someone working for or with the Governor,” said Weyountah, “’twould stand to reason that George would have known him from the Volunteers, wouldn’t it?”

  Abigail nodded. “I don’t say it couldn’t have been someone like Bruck Travers—did Bruck and the others in the Watertown Committee of Public Safety know where George’s room was, Katy?”

  “Of course. There’s dozens of the college men in the Sons or the militia, and that’s not counting the college servants. But for one thing Bruck wouldn’t know one book from another, and for another, I met Seph Nuttall from the militia in the market day before yesterday and asked him about where Bruck was that evening, and he was drilling with the militia in Watertown. Two hundred men saw him. Are you truly going to desert poor Diomede?”

  “What, because Sam Adams told me to?” Abigail sniffed. “But to remain on his good side—because we may very well need his help before all’s done—I think ’twere best we go to Charles Town tomorrow, and at least have a look at this Avalon, and see what its weaknesses are and if we can catch a glimpse of its proprietress. And in the meantime—”

  “She didn’t . . . She was quite modestly dressed,” protested Horace. “She didn’t have the air of a—er—meretrix . . .”

  “Obviously she knew enough not to dress like a bird of paradise,” said Abigail, “for fear of frightening her own bird away. You’d never have gotten into the carriage with her,” she explained, to Horace’s inarticulate protest that he wasn’t that much of a shrinking violet, “if she’d been tricked-out and tire’d up and painted to her eyes like Jezebel at her window. I claim no knowledge of ladies of ill fame,” she went on thoughtfully, “but it sounds to me—does it not to you?—that she’s more than the answer to some sailor’s prayer. She could steal a key, but a carriage and pair is another matter, even for the madame of a house of accommodation. Would you know her again?”

  “Of course.”

  “If
she were dressed differently, I mean, and painted up?”

  He blushed. “I think so. Her hair was her own; I’m not sure I’d know her in a wig.”

  “Then let us make a pilgrimage tomorrow,” said Abigail. “I can do that in the morning before John gets home—and see what we can see before Sam takes matters into his own hands. For when a man will truly stop at nothing, there is no telling who may be hurt.”

  She asked the boys to stay for dinner, and prepared the lamb (only she would have gone bail that it was actually mutton) dressed with spinach, and put up a pan of potatoes beneath the hearth-coals to roast and some corn-and-milk for Horace. Johnny and Nabby came home from school, and Abigail let them thoroughly explore the cleaned and tidied house before starting them on their chores. Though the spring evenings were long, she guessed that once darkness fell, the children would be uneasy in a house that had been entered and ransacked by strangers, had they not had the chance to patrol it by daylight and see with their own eyes that all was safe. The boys departed immediately after dinner with a basket of provisions for themselves and another to be delivered to Diomede in the Cambridge jail—and Weyountah returned fifteen minutes later with Charley, whom Abigail had not even missed in the confusion of good-bys and who had managed to follow Horace and Weyountah nearly to Summer Street.

  Since the handsome Indian didn’t return a second time she assumed he did, in fact, make it through the town gate by sunset, though he and Horace—unless they found a friendly farmer with a wagon—would beyond all doubt be walking the last mile back to Cambridge in the dark.

  Between dinner and supper, she and the girls put up laundry to soak—Abigail’s housewifely instincts revolted at not having spare sheets clean and ready at all times—and as she at last led her little household in Bible reading and evening prayer, she reflected that few Israelites in Pharoah’s brick-pits had put in a more strenuous day than her own.