Sup With the Devil aam-3

by Barbara Hamilton

  “You, sir,” she informed her errant middle son, when she finally located him in the loft above the cowshed, “are far too old to wear leading-strings, which means you are old enough to obey your mother. Where is it that you are allowed to play by yourself?”

  “The house and the yard,” replied Charley obediently.

  “And is the cowshed part of the yard?”

  “It’s by the yard.”

  Abigail led Charley firmly back across the narrow expanse of bricks as Pattie reemerged from the alleyway to the street that she’d just checked—

  And behind her, Thaxter and Katy, leading Balthazar.

  “What happened?” Abigail let go of her son’s hand, and he immediately darted to hug Katy and put himself in danger of being trodden on by the horse. “We didn’t expect you back’til near dark—”

  Thaxter shook his head, and Katy flung up her hands: “’Tis all solved,” she said, and beamed happily as she lifted Charley into her arms. “Diomede was broken out of the Cambridge jail last night—and old Sheriff Congreve is mad as fire.”

  Of course it was Sam. Even John thought so when Abigail took the news to him in his study, where he had been immured all day, sorting out depositions and writing case notes—neither the colonial courts nor the natural litigiousness of New Englanders having come to a halt just because the King might be irate over some spilled tea.

  “Drat the man.” John looked up from the drifts of papers on his desk. “He might at least have waited ’til we’d seen Fairfield—”

  “He might just as well have taken out advertisements in the Gazette in Diomede’s name saying, I AM GUILTY! Not to speak of making it impossible for him to ever see his wife and family again—”

  “Do you think that the slave stood the slightest chance of having his innocence even considered in his master’s home country? Either way, his wife and daughters would lose him, and he them. At least as things are he lives—”

  “And I’ll wager Sam did this,” went on Abigail wrathfully, “just to get my mind off saving an innocent man’s life and onto finding a treasure for him to spend on gunpowder. Beyond doubt, he didn’t even ask poor Diomede if he wished to be saved!”

  “If he didn’t wish it, he’s a fool.” John wiped his pen carefully, set it down beside the sheet he was fair-copying—a task that was generally left to Thaxter, if that young man hadn’t been halfway to Cambridge with Katy in the neighbors’ borrowed chaise. “You know as well as I how difficult it is to prove a negative—even had the true murderer not cast the blame on the nearest convincing suspect. Do you truly think the father will seek truth when vengeance is right before him? Nine men out of ten will settle for the ease of heart that vengeance gives rather than press on for the more astringent taste of facts.”

  “Robbing Diomede of his good name, his wife, his family, his home, and all his friends . . . so that Sam can hurry me into the quest for treasure—”

  “Before he himself has to flee the city?” John raised his eyebrows. “I could wish Sam would have waited to see if there were need for Diomede to flee—or be dragged—into hiding, but once Diomede’s owner is present, it might have been far less simple to free him out of hand, you know. And as I have said, tomorrow or the next day or the next might have been too late for anyone to do anything.”

  Abigail’s shoulders relaxed, and her head lowered. “You are right,” she said quietly. “’Tis just . . .”

  He reached across the desk and took her hand. As always his fingers felt very warm on hers, and strong. “Sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof,” he said. “Monday we’ll speak to Sam and have a word with Diomede if we can. Or—” He hesitated, glancing at the mountain of work before him, clearly trying to calculate when on Monday he would have ten minutes to spare . . .

  “I’ll speak to Sam,” said Abigail. “You needn’t come with me.”

  “Sam is my cousin,” returned John. “Thus it is incumbent upon me to keep him from being murdered in his own house—so I think ’tis best I come with you.”

  Abigail laughed, and returned to the kitchen and the ironing and the task of tracking down the errant Charley, who had managed to make it all the way down the alley and out onto Queen Street . . .

  On Monday she and John did indeed speak to Sam, but by Monday, Diomede and his fate had been removed, suddenly and terrifyingly, from their minds.

  In general Abigail had little trouble keeping her mind focused on the Reverend Cooper’s sermons, for the man was a good speaker, and his arguments—if sometimes more political than theological—were well thought-out and proceeded in good order. But on Sunday, as she sat next to John for the morning sermon, she found her thoughts straying to Diomede, to the wife he had left behind him in Virginia, to the daughters he had begged to be able to write to. By breaking out of the Cambridge jail, he had virtually guaranteed that he would never be able to go home—for who would believe him when he had fled from justice?

  And yet, she thought, Sam had not been obliged to do anything at all for the man. Diomede was nothing to him, save an obstacle preoccupying Abigail’s thoughts and preventing her from concentrating on what Sam wanted her to do. And it was true, she reflected—as she listened to the long elaboration upon the adventures of King David and his men hiding out in the wilderness from the King whom the Prophet Samuel had deprived of his crown—that there was every chance that Sam had saved Diomede’s life . . .

  And how could I tell?

  How can any of us tell what lies down the road we do not take?

  Dr. Cooper’s second sermon—after eating a cold Sabbath dinner, and reading a little to the younger children, and hearing Johnny and Nabby give their summaries of the earlier sermon to make sure they understood the matter—concerned such martial prophets as Gideon and Deborah: Hear, o ye kings, give ear o ye princes; I, even I, will sing unto the Lord . . .

  One of the oldest songs in all the Holy Writ, her father had said: how the small nation had risen against those that would oppress it, and how the stars in their courses joined battle on the side that was right. So let all thine enemies perish, o Lord; but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might.

  Sisera was coming—the King’s Commissioner or whoever the King was going to send.

  With who knew how great an army in his train? With who could tell what weapon in his hand?

  And by what would that Commissioner be met?

  Abigail walked home quietly through the beautiful light of the early evening, listening to Pattie and Katy’s soft chatter behind her: the girls had remained at home in the morning to look after the smaller boys—Thaxter invariably spent Sundays with his mother, so John and Abigail took turns missing the afternoon sermon to mind the children so that the girls could attend. If I speak to Sam just after the marketing is done tomorrow, ’twill give me time to go with him out to Cambridge or to wherever they’ve hidden Diomede. And if he DARE bring up the subject of Old Beelzebub’s treasure, I really will strike him with a broom-handle . . .

  She turned from Brattle into Queen Street and saw, rather to her surprise—for Boston streets were quiet as a rule on the Sabbath—John. John hastening along with no hat on his head, looking right and left about him . . .

  She quickened her stride in the same moment that he saw her. What she saw in his face shocked and chilled her; she gathered up her skirts and ran.

  Before she could even ask him what was wrong he said, “Charley’s gone.”

  Twenty-one

  They didn’t get the note until morning.

  Before darkness fell Sunday evening, the whole of the neighborhood had been called into service: Tom Butler the cooper and his two sturdy apprentices, Ehud Hanson the shoemaker, Uzziah Begbie and his wife, Gower the blacksmith down the street . . .

  No one had seen a sturdy fair-haired little boy, not even quite four weeks from his fourth birthday . . .

  Please, dear God, Abigail prayed soundlessly as she walked along Cornhill toward Milk St
reet, please let him see his fourth birthday. Let us all see his fourth birthday . . .

  The streets were Sabbath-quiet—Thank you, God!—without the carriages and cart traffic of the weekdays, without the cattle being herded along and the barrows, drays, flocks of chickens and geese that rendered the cobbled, crisscrossing ways so confusing for a tiny child. He’ll have set off for Aunt Eliza’s, Abigail told herself as she walked, and gotten distracted by something else—the handsome lawn of the Governor’s house or horses being harnessed to take some fashionable “worthy” to church. In this part of Boston, at least, if a stray child was found wandering—even one of the ragged little urchins from the North End waterfront—someone would take him or her in, would ask, “Where do you live, dearie?” and if no answer was forthcoming would keep an eye on the street for a distrait dark-haired woman in her blue go-to-church gown looking up every alleyway, around every tree . . .

  Eliza and Isaac Smith were horrified. Eliza and Abigail searched the garden, and Young Isaac—for all his usual talk about not profaning the Sabbath—instantly put on his hat and went out to search in the streets round about, returning only when darkness was settling over the town to offer to walk Abigail home. “Of course we’ll send and let you know . . . We’ll have Cuffee outside in the street watching for him . . .”

  “And poor Johnny thinks ’tis his fault,” said Abigail, as she and Young Isaac—still so-called though he was twenty-five years old and had his own church and congregation—made their way along Cornhill arm in arm. “Nabby was watching the younger boys and Johnny got into some kind of quarrel with her—as children do, with their rivalries over books and toys and slate-pencils. John came out of the front of the house and adjudicated the conflict, and by the time anyone looked round, Charley was gone.”

  “He can’t have got far,” opined Isaac firmly, despite the fact that his mother’s house on Milk Street was far from Queen Street by anyone’s stretch of the imagination and no one seemed to think that Charley had any other destination. And then—giving himself the lie—“Would he have found his way to the Common?”

  Abigail looked up. Dark had fallen, and above the black jumble of rooflines, stars shone clear and glittering, like diamonds. The moon was in its last dwindle toward darkness. “Why?” she asked. “Your mother’s house is nearer—”

  “Would he have known that?” reasoned the young parson. “He could simply have gotten lost. And if he grew frightened, it could easily be that he’d hesitate to speak to a stranger . . . and there are few about the streets of a Sunday between dinner and dark.”

  “True,” said Abigail, as they passed the tall brick tower of the Old Meeting-House and turned up Queen Street. “But Charley isn’t the least shy of strangers. When he gets hungry, he’ll turn to the first friendly looking stranger he meets to ask him to lead him home. And he knows he lives in—”

  She broke off, seeing the men moving about the alleyway that led to the back of the house. She quickened her steps, almost snatching up her skirts to run. When she got close, she saw that in addition to her neighbors, there were four or five of the North End roughnecks whose assistance Sam could habitually call on if so be he needed a Tory’s shopwindow broken or—for instance—a mob to storm the Governor’s house . . .

  Paul Revere was in the kitchen, talking to John. “—almost certain, ’twas the same woman,” he was saying. “I’ll tell Sam to get his men out onto the Common, though I cannot imagine Charley wouldn’t walk up to the door of the first house he came to and knock on it, asking to be taken home—or given part of their dinner on the spot, more like—”

  “You’ve heard nothing, then?” Abigail’s glance went from her husband to her friend. “Did Sam send you?”

  And saw the look that passed between the two men, that turned her blood to water in her veins. “I came on another matter,” Revere said. “Sam heard today that the corpse of a woman whom he believes might be this Mrs. Lake you spoke of—the one who kidnapped your cousin Horace—”

  “She didn’t precisely—” Abigail hesitated on the denial, realizing that, effectively, that was exactly what had happened. And then, as the silversmith’s words sank in, “Corpse?”

  “A couple of boatmen”—by which Abigail knew he meant smugglers—“found her washed up on the rocks of Bird Island, where the river’s current sets around with the tide. She was well-dressed, they said, and dark-haired. They said they’d heard from Munn in Charles Town that a woman thereabouts had disappeared.”

  “Mrs. Morgan,” said Abigail softly. “The owner of—”

  “Good Lord, not La Fata Morgana?” Revere almost laughed—he clearly knew what Mrs. Morgan was known to be—but sobered at once. “Well, I’ll be . . . She’s William Chamberville’s mistress, isn’t she? One of our dear Governor’s in-laws—”

  “Was she drowned?” Abigail recalled uneasily the glimmer of the river through the trees past the foot of Moulton’s Hill. “The house isn’t far from the river—”

  John shot her a sharp glance; Revere barely raised an eyebrow. But he only said, “No, not drowned. Her throat was cut.”

  Whyever Revere had come to the house, he wasted no time in sending one of his men to fetch Sam, and by midnight—when Abigail finally went to bed—every smuggler, rope-beater, and out-of-work apprentice in the Sons of Liberty was moving about the streets of Boston, lantern in hand, searching for Charley. Katy went out with them. Pattie remained with Abigail to comfort Nabby’s guilty tears and Johnny’s even more excruciating stoic wretchedness: “’Twas only his way, my Hercules,” whispered Abigail, gathering her eldest son against her side as they sat together on the settle and stroking his baby-fine fair hair. “You know how he is. If it hadn’t been you and your sister, he’d have gone for the door next time one or the other of you buckled your shoe or went to the backhouse—” She said it to make them giggle, which they did. “’Tis just how Charley is right now, always wanting to be off exploring. You remember how you were, Johnny. How you had to follow Ben Clayford and his brother when they went fishing, and you climbed out the window of your room to do it—”

  “I was a baby then,” protested the six-year-old. “All the more, I should have been watching Charley, and not giving in to my ill-temper and sinfulness.”

  Nabby, on her other side, clung to Abigail’s arm and began to cry softly again. “If something hasn’t happened to him,” she whispered, “they’d have found him by now.”

  This, Abigail knew, was perfectly true.

  And it was also perfectly true that there were a thousand places within a quarter mile of Queen Street where a wellmeaning, inquisitive boy only-just-three-weeks-short-of-four could come to terrible and irrevocable grief.

  The Long Wharf. Endlessly fascinating, and extending close to a half mile out to sea: ships, boxes, coils of rope. Wet boards slippery and slanting. Mysterious ladders extending down to the cold beryl black chop of the water.

  Merchant Street, every shop and warehouse shut up and secretive-looking on the late Sabbath afternoon: cellar-doors, stacks of barrels, piles of crates that could easily fall unheard by any, pinning a little boy underneath.

  In the other direction the Common, whose grassy open spaces might tempt the boy to explore further. Yet if he’d gone to the Common, what harm could he come to—?

  In her mind she saw the men, nevertheless, traversing the dark rise of the ground toward Beacon Street, where the lamps of Mr. Hancock’s elegant house shone against the slope of the hill.

  The Mill Pond—

  Abigail closed her eyes in prayer that she couldn’t even phrase. Then she said, “Come. ’Twill do you no good, nor Charley either, to have you sitting up and making yourselves sick just because he’s been goose enough to get himself lost. The moment he’s brought back—and you know he’ll be brought back and have his hide well tanned by his father for worrying us all!—I shall wake you and fetch you down.”

  “Might Johnny sleep in with me and Tommy,” whispered Nabby, “’til Charl
ey comes back?”

  Pattie carried the sleeping Tommy up to the small room at the end of the hall, and Johnny and Nabby snuggled in together in the girl’s narrow bed, like two doleful little ghosts in their white nightrails. Abigail held them and sang to them and reassured them, though neither felt much like hearing a story. When she left them, by the light of her single candle she still saw the glimmer of their open eyes.

  If something hasn’t happened to him, they’d have found him by now.

  She leaned her head back against the hard wood of the fireside settle, staring into the silky whispers of light as they played over the embers.

  He didn’t start his running away until I left him at Eliza’s, she thought. Because ’twas only then that he was old enough and strong enough to get far? Because ’twas only then that he realized that a world of delight existed in her garden, which our pokey little yard could not approach in wonderment?

  Because ’twas only then that his mother would leave him with Pattie and Katy while she swanned off to Cambridge in quest of mysteries and justice?

  Admit it, Portia, she told herself, knowing it for the truth of her heart and hating herself. YOU have supped with the Devil in meddling with justice that is John’s work—a man’s work. You revel in “seeing through the riddles of criminal conduct,” in being “a veritable Alexander . . .”