Sup With the Devil aam-3

by Barbara Hamilton

  Friday morning was, fortunately, a mild one. While Katy and Nabby milked the cows (’twas miraculous what one more pair of hands would do for the household), starting the moment it was light enough to see, Abigail and Pattie beat and rinsed, beat and rinsed the lye-smelling oceans of laundry, and had sheets, shifts, shirts, and clouts flying like flags from the maze of clotheslines in the yard by noon. By one (Charley had disappeared again, to be rescued by Katy from almost beneath the hooves of a dray on Cornhill), Abigail and Katy were crossing the Charles Town ferry.

  “No sign of them yet.” Katy folded up the brass spyglass she had drawn from her pocket to look out past the steep promontory of Copp’s Hill toward the bay. No need to specify who they were.

  From here Abigail could see the brick walls of the British camp on Castle Island and thought with deep regret of her friend Lieutenant Jeremy Coldstone, the assistant to the Provost Marshal and a young man, she sensed, who might greatly assist her in the unraveling of this tangle of codes and books and treasure that seemed to appear and disappear. But with tensions rising every day in Boston, it would be impossible these days for Coldstone to enter the town unmolested—particularly if Sam got word of his presence.

  And in any case, reflected Abigail, the young lieutenant undoubtedly had enough to deal with these days. But she wondered what the men in the castle fort were doing to pass the time while they waited for word from the King to come.

  “Do you think there will be fighting when they come ashore, m’am?”

  Abigail sniffed. “I think there’ll be fighting the first time the Royal Commissioner’s bodyguard attempts to get a drink in a tavern. ’Tis all the prediction I feel can be made with certainty. As for Sam’s contention that we’ll face a flotilla and an invasion-force, I can scarcely see where the King is likely to find, at short notice, soldiers enough to hold a city the size of Boston. My guess is that he’ll send a Royal Commissioner, not an invading general, with orders to the colony to pay for the tea. ’Tis an understandable request but not worth battle in the streets.”

  “To Mr. Deems, ’twould be. And Bruck Travers and his father. And George, I’m afraid,” the girl added sadly. “Just the thought that patriot militia would have the temerity to form in defiance of the King’s rule had him red in the face. Joseph Ryland had to talk him out of taking the Volunteers on Saturdays to attack the militias while they drilled.”

  “That’s all we would need.” Abigail folded her shawl around her shoulders at the chill of the sea-wind.

  “’Twouldn’t have been much of a battle,” pointed out Katy practically. “They’re barely a handful, and half of them not mounted, nor armed. They’d only come to the drills to cheer the others on and wear the uniforms and drink punch. At least our men have guns.”

  “And massacring them would solve something? Besides giving Parliament a far better reason than a little saltwater tea to send in a few regiments to keep order?”

  Katy was silent for a moment, considering this, tucking the trailing streamers of her black hair back beneath her cap. In a somewhat smaller voice she said, “Well, howsoever, Ryland talked George out of it. He’s got a great deal of sense and is a fine soldier, even if he does look at me as if I’d just crawled up out of a drain.”

  “Because you’re a patriot?” Abigail had heard the slight break in her young companion’s voice.

  “I daresay it’s what he tells people—and himself. But me, I think ’tis because he’s been writing love-poems to Sally Woodleigh and sending her flowers, and she won’t so much as turn her head to say hello in the street but makes—made”—she corrected herself—“sheep’s eyes at George.” She was silent for a time; the brass tube of the spyglass forgotten in her hand, she looked out across the violet chop of the bay toward Charles Town, rising on the slopes of its hills.

  “I saw her Tuesday when I went to Cambridge,” the girl continued after a time. “I went to the King’s Chapel, to—not to see George, because of course the door’s locked, but to . . . I don’t know. He’s dead—’tis only his body in there . . . cold clay. But ’tis the body I held in my arms. The mouth I kissed; the fingers that would braid my hair. His hair was so soft, like silk . . . I know he’s not in there, but . . .”

  She shook her head, looked away across the bay again, her eyes clouded with grief. “And Sally was there. All in black, with a veil on her bonnet, as if she’d lost a husband, instead of a man she’d talked herself into thinking wanted her. I don’t think she even saw me there. She had her maid with her, and Mr. Heywood from the Volunteers. She was taken faint and leaned on his arm.”

  The Charles Town wharf was drawing near. Young Mr. Peasley, the ferry’s captain, shouted himself crimson while the two deck-boys swung the yard this way and that, trying to catch sea-wind against the inshore gusts that blew off the hills behind the town. Abigail clung resolutely to the edge of the bench where she sat and fixed her eyes on the tall green summit of Bunker Hill.

  “He didn’t lead her on to think it of him, did he?” she asked, and remembered the young man’s careless smile. The Sally Woodleighs of the world, at least, were not to be caught with faked marriage ceremonies . . . but even if she had not truly sent the message, asking for a meeting behind the barn, George Fairfield at least had believed that she would have.

  “No!” retorted Katy. “At least—I don’t think he did.”

  “Did she favor one above another, of the others?” Abigail asked. “The Black Dog, for instance?”

  “Oh, you heard about the fight that Saturday, did you?” Katy managed a pale and crooked grin. “’Tis funny, in spite of the things Mr. Ryland called me—he and George got into a tremendous quarrel about me—I could almost feel sorry for the poor man. Teaching her chemistry and writing love-poems—he really does write his own, you know . . . Mr. Apthorp pays Beaverbrook to write his—’tis like watching some poor mouse in a trap, running round and round against the wires, and you know he’s never going to get out. Look, there’s Weyountah!” She pointed, her face breaking into a brilliant smile. “And Horace, there on the wharf! What are you going to say to this Mrs. Lake when you find her?”

  “It depends,” replied Abigail, as the ferry at long last was drawn up alongside the wet, dark bollards, “upon how we find her and where.”

  Though it had been the original capital of the colony, Charles Town was barely more than a bustling little village these days, built on the footslopes of two tall hills at the mouth of the Mystic River and slightly less than three-quarters of a mile end to end along the shore. The house known as Avalon stood a few hundred yards from the ferry landing, east of the town proper, in a discreet grove of trees just where the gentle slope of Breed’s Hill began to steepen. Abigail wouldn’t have guessed it was a place of ill repute, save that Weyountah and Horace had inquired at two alehouses and had received the same directions from both. Avalon certainly bore no resemblance to the slatternly taverns along the Boston waterfront. It was built in the old style, partly of timber and partly of brick, with tall gables and an upper story that overhung the lower.

  The sign above its door depicted—not much to Abigail’s surprise—a woman’s arm emerging from the waters of a lake, caressing rather than brandishing the upright sword.

  “’Tis known in town as an alehouse,” said Weyountah, as the little party walked along the road that curved toward the brick kiln at the foot of Moulton’s Hill some half mile ahead. “Though the man in the taproom at the Peacock gave me a wink when I asked after the place—by which I assume that it is indeed what we’re looking for.”

  “With a nice, sheltered approach on the other side of the hill,” murmured Abigail, as they reached the place where the road curved northwest again toward Bunker Hill. “Invisible if you’re coming in from Cambridge or Medford in the dusk, I daresay.” She looked back toward the Avalon. “I don’t see anyone about, do you? Though I don’t imagine there’s much activity here ’til nightfall. Still, one would expect servants at least and some sign of s
moke in the kitchen chimney . . . and grooms about the stables. Best you stay out of sight, Horace. Shall I knock on the front door and see if I can at least get a look at this Mrs. Lake?”

  Horace looked shocked, but Weyountah only said, “Lend Horace your spyglass, Katy; the trees across the road here ought to be close enough. Can you see the door clearly, Horace? No, turn it—that way. Good. Mrs. Adams?” He offered her his arm, and Katy drew her cloak-hood up over her head and did her best to look like a respectable servant-girl as she trailed Abigail and the Indian back toward the front door. With the trees thick with spring leaf, the whole dooryard of the house called Avalon was rather gloomy, and close-up the shabbiness of the place was more evident: the dooryard muddy, the path needing gravel, the backhouses quite obviously in need of cleaning. The diamond-paned windows had not been washed recently, and the house had an air of uneasy quiet. Abigail felt herself reminded of a woman who has been struck and waits to see what will happen next.

  She knocked at the door and assumed the expression of a righteous matron drawing aside her skirts to wade through garbage in a holy cause.

  The footsteps inside approached the door at a near run.

  The young woman who opened the door—plump, freckled, and matter-of-fact in the rather faded print dress of a servant—looked both wary and scared. And, when she saw Abigail, taken aback—

  Who is she expecting?

  “Please pardon this intrusion.” Abigail inclined her head. “My name is Mrs. Percy. I was told I might find a woman here who calls herself Mrs. Lake, though that might not be her right name. Dark-haired, about my height”—this was a guess, from the fact that Horace hadn’t noted either tallness or shortness—“a lady, I suppose you would call her . . .”

  Something altered in the young woman’s stance: shoulders slumped, mouth tightened, eyes . . . not grieved, but the eagerness died from her face and was replaced by anxiety.

  “Is she not here?” asked Abigail. “I was told—”

  “She’s gone,” said the girl. “She’s been gone two days. I hoped you had word of her, for God’s honest truth, there’s not one of us that knows what to do.”

  Eighteen

  Have you spoken to the constable?”

  Abigail’s tone of genuine concern seemed to have its effect, for the girl’s guardedness faded, and wry resentment took its place. “Oh, aye, that did us a world of good! ‘Run off with some other man,’ was all he’d say—and so he wrote to Mr . . . to Mrs. Morgan’s friend, who was good enough to buy her this house.”

  “I daresay,” remarked Abigail, “if Mrs.—Morgan, is it? It would be. If Mrs. Morgan’s friend had ever instructed some one of the Town Council to quash objections by Mr. Munn”—she named the Charles Town constable, a member in good standing of the Sons of Liberty—“concerning Mrs. Morgan’s way of life, he might well turn spiteful—”

  “Him?” The girl sniffed. “Spite’s old Munn’s middle name, right after Hypocrisy, carrying on the way he does with his wife’s own sister. And what’s it to him anyway if Mr. Chamberville wants a little comfort from time to time and a woman who’ll let him know he’s welcome in her bed? When I was a little girl,” the servant added, shaking her curly head, “and I’d cry ’cause we weren’t rich, my auntie would always say, ‘If we were Quality, you’d have to marry some old merchant whether you wanted to or not, old enough to be your da.’ I didn’t understand then, but Lord, hearing about when people marry for ships and lands and warehouses, I understand now. There,” she added. “I’ve spoke too free, m’am, but it just makes me mad as fire—”

  “You probably ought not to have,” said Abigail encouragingly, “since you’ve your position to think of. But, though I’ve always counted myself a Christian woman, I’m afraid I agree with you—” She let the end of the sentence hang with an unspoken question.

  The servant said, “Dassie. Dassie Mitchell. Please do come in, m’am; it won’t do you any good if you’re seen standing outside this house, the way folk around here talk as if they hadn’t anything better to do with their days. Belinda!” she called out, as she closed the door behind Abigail and her party. “Nancy! No word,” she said, to the two young ladies who appeared in an inner doorway, a blonde and a brunette clothed, like Dassie, as maidservants, but in dresses far newer and more stylish.

  Abigail guessed it was Dassie who did the actual work in the house.

  “This is Mrs. Percy. She came—Who was it who told you to come, m’am?”

  As they crossed through the beautifully furnished parlor and proceeded to the kitchen, Abigail spun her story—freely lifted from events that had befallen one of her father’s parishioners some fourteen years ago—of the daughter of a fictitious elder brother who had been lured into a pretend marriage with a Frenchman, who had (she said) abandoned poor Pamela in Boston. A friend of the family had recommended Abigail inquire of the proprietress of the Avalon in Charles Town, Pamela being young and very pretty—“That frightful mother of hers seems to feel that sin is sin and that the Avalon is no better than some of those . . . those kennels down along the Boston wharves—”

  “Your sister-in-law must be related to half the women in Charles Town, then,” remarked the dark-haired Nancy drily, as she poured out her mistress’s tea. “And to my stepmother and aunts as well. It’s not like this is a sailors’ knocking-shop, begging your pardon m’am for speaking so free—”

  It was in fact, Abigail gathered, what John (and several English novelists) referred to as a House of Accommodation: a venue where those who could afford it could bring their mistresses for a few hours’ congress. Mrs. Morgan provided for the rental of clean, youthful temporary mistresses along with the rooms more as a sideline than a principal business—

  “Though mind you, m’am,” said Dassie earnestly, “you’d think those sniffy mamas in this town would be glad the girls are here, when you think that if those boys over at the college didn’t have a place to come visit—as boys will—”

  Blonde Belinda winked at Weyountah, who inclined his head to her politely and passed her the plate of slightly stale cakes.

  “Why, think what trouble they’d get into with the respectable girls in the town! Like your poor niece!”

  Abigail’s mind—always ill-regulated concerning points of doctrine and morality—momentarily scouted the question of whether this was more or less sinful than an out-and-out house of prostitution: it actively encouraged double adultery rather than simple fornication. Then she glanced sidelong at Katy, who was looking around the kitchen with great curiosity and obviously didn’t connect any of this tale of falsified marriage-vows and wheedling seducers with herself. Did she really believe that the young heir to five thousand acres of Virginia tobacco would genuinely marry the daughter of the head hostler at the Yellow Cow?

  And if she did, what then? That he’d take her home to the master and mistress of a plantation and present her to them as their daughter-in-law?

  And a dyed-in-the-wool patriot to boot?

  Gradually—by dint of interest, sympathy, and letting the three confused and worried servant-girls simply talk—the story emerged. Wednesday afternoon—May fourth—Mrs. Morgan had gone for a walk, as she generally did before dinner . . . dinner being served at the fashionable hour of five, rather than at three or four as working-folk did. The girls didn’t think much of it when she didn’t return for dinner. It happened—not frequently—that Mrs. Morgan’s particular friend would cross over from Boston where he lived, and they would meet to go driving. Only when night fell—the moon being on the wane—did they begin to worry, but there was a gentleman scheduled to come calling Wednesday night with a lady friend, and with one thing and another, none of the three of them—Nancy, Dassie, nor Belinda—quite knew what steps to take.

  “And did not Mr. Grimes or Mr. Hicks have anything to suggest?” inquired Weyountah, which caused the girls to look at one another worriedly. “It is Mr. Grimes who has charge of Mrs. Morgan’s stables, is it not?” he asked, as if
the matter were common knowledge, and Nancy nodded.

  “They said not to worry, that she’d most likely met Mr.—met her friend—and would be back late.” With her long face and wide, rather mannish shoulders, Nancy was nowhere near as pretty as Katy or Pattie, Abigail judged, but she had a smooth briskness to her and a lovely velvet voice. She probably has half the boys in the college in love with her. And is certainly more obtainable than Sally Woodleigh.

  “Might she have gone to Mr. Chamberville’s house near Concord with him?” asked Abigail smoothly. “I believe you said she had a key—”

  Again the girls traded frowns, not remembering whether one or the other of them had mentioned Mr. Chamberville’s name and, if they had, whether they’d also mentioned the Concord house or whether or not Mrs. Morgan had the key to it. It was Dassie who said, “I don’t think she’d have gone there, m’am. Not with rebels all over those parts, as they are, and every sort of rumor flying about. Mr. Chamberville hasn’t been next or nigh Concord in months.”

  “And did you write to Mr. Chamberville about this? Or is Mr. Munn the only one he’s heard from?”

  “M’am, to tell you the truth we haven’t the least idea what it’s best we do,” replied Nancy. “’Twould be different if any of the three of us had family, or a friend who’d so much as acknowledge us in the street—not that a one of’em would recognize our faces! Begging your pardon, m’am,” she added. “The household money’s gone—that’s the first thing we checked, unless she moved where it’s hid again—and ’tis only a matter of time before Mr. C takes his house back. And Mr. Grimes—”

  “Here he comes!” Belinda, who’d been sitting near the window, sprang to her feet.

  “Grimes—?”

  “Cornishman.”

  “Hide us,” commanded Abigail sharply, and Nancy flung open the door of the backstairs, then caught Weyountah’s arm as Abigail and Katy darted up the narrow, boxed-in flight.