Sup with the Devil (24 page)

A
bigail’s sense of well-being—of a job well accomplished, and of new friends made—lasted her about a hundred yards down the lane toward the Boston Road.

Thaxter hitched up the chaise shortly after first light Wednesday morning, and they were sent off with much handshaking and the gift of fresh-baked bread, new butter, and several slabs of soft cheese (“The landlady at the Anchor on the road back to Boston hasn’t washed a dish in twenty years . . .”). Mr. Barlow bade her tell Mr. Adams that he and all the men hereabouts stood ready to defend the colony’s liberties (he obviously thought she was married to the
other
Mr. Adams).

But no sooner had the house disappeared among the trees behind them than the enormity of having been gone from Boston—and her children—for three days settled upon Abigail like the fall of night, and her dreams of the Massacre, of fire and peril, of Tommy left behind crying in the snow returned and tormented her like a persistent gadfly for the remainder of the day.

The reflection that Cousin Sam would have sent out riders to Medfield and every other town posthaste in the event of any real trouble gave her only momentary comfort. “If the British have not yet arrived, the whole household has come down with the smallpox,” she sighed ruefully, as the chaise turned onto the main road. “Or the house has burned to the ground.”

“I’m sure all is well, m’am,” replied Thaxter soothingly, which caused Abigail to smile despite her anxiety. In his months of association with herself and John, her young cousin had yet to pick up their sense of humor. John would have immediately set himself to cap her visions of disaster:
I think a lightning-strike, rather than the smallpox . . . If the harbor hasn’t risen in flood . . . No, wait, we’ve entirely forgotten the earthquake
. . .

Instead, for the next several miles, the clerk set himself earnestly to assuaging her fears with assurances of how secure and happy the four children would be at the home of Eliza and Isaac Smith . . . something of which Abigail was herself already aware. Yet he meant well, and she knew that to summarily silence him would hurt his feelings. So she settled herself to listen and to sort in her mind what she’d learned, like a card-player arranging clubs and spades, hearts and diamonds.

A frumenty was exactly the sort of thing a solicitous student might bring to an elderly professor about whose health he was concerned—and the old man was probably vain enough to believe assurances of concern even from a man with whom he’d quarrelled. But it pointed back yet again to the college: to someone he knew. And from Abigail’s experience with the dish, the dried fruit and assorted spices that customarily flavored the meaty porridge could easily conceal the bitter flavor of opium.

Mrs. Lake presumably had access to a kitchen, but ’twas certain Seckar wouldn’t have taken a cup of water from her hand if he were dying.

Did they make frumenty for the students in the Hall?

There are two of them in it
, she thought.
Mrs. Lake—whose name almost certainly isn’t Lake—and someone connected with the college. Someone who knows Old Beelzebub was a pirate. Someone who knew about—or learned very quickly about—the books
.

All of which would amply describe St-John Pugh . . .

Were it not for the curious fact that the Governor had not mentioned to her, Abigail, that he’d bought Mrs. Seckar’s books, and the ease with which Mrs. Lake could have gotten the key to the Chamberville house from the Governor’s hand.

Mr. Pugh had forged the note designed to keep George Fairfield from his rooms past midnight, when he could feel safe in searching for the books . . . Had he searched for them before, in the Seckar house, while its owner lay dying at the side of his sleeping wife? Would a young and dissolute man need to believe a copy of Aretino’s
I Modi—
complete with illustrations—might conceal a pirate’s treasure-map, to move Heaven and Earth to take possession of it?

And would St-John Pugh—the son of a West India merchant who was almost certainly a smuggler—enter into alliance with the Governor? And if George Fairfield had come back from his tryst to find Pugh in his room, would he not have been slain in his clothing rather than his nightshirt? Had he come in before midnight and gone to bed?

“Why would the Governor have to use subterfuge, drugs, and burglary to enter George Fairfield’s rooms in the first place?” asked Thaxter, when Abigail spoke of the matter just east of Dedham. “I realize he can’t simply detain the Vassall Professor of Theology for twenty-four hours while having the sheriff search his house, but an undergraduate? He could have simply had Horace and the servant arrested.”

“With a King’s Commissioner due to arrive within the week, I should be careful—were I the Governor—about going on public record as having jailed the son of a Virginia planter who is moreover the captain of a troop of Loyalist light cavalry. Particularly if I had no intention of turning over to the King any treasure that I might find.”

Thaxter said, “You think Cousin Sam is right, then? That there is treasure?”

“I think that
they
think so,” replied Abigail grimly. “Whoever
they
are, they consider what they’re looking for worth three men’s lives . . . so far. That’s what concerns me.”

They passed through Dedham and through the wooded farming country along the Charles. Eschewing the slandered Anchor, they had a picnic-lunch in the overgrown ruin of what had once been a farmstead. “It must have been quite a fire,” remarked Thaxter, after tethering the horse near the crumble of anciently charred timbers that marked where the barn had been. “To have jumped that distance, from barn to house—”

“I should say rather that the two fires were started separately.” Abigail rose from spreading a blanket on the bare stones of the foundation and peeked behind a tangle of gooseberry at the old smoke-blackening of the walls. “To judge by the growth of the trees in the dooryard, I’d say ’twas King Philip’s Indians that destroyed this place, a hundred years ago.”

“Philip—” Thaxter frowned, counting back in his mind. “Was he King of France . . . after Louis? The old King Louis, the present King’s . . . grandfather? Great-grandfather?”

“Great-grandfather,” said Abigail. “And no, Philip wasn’t King of France. He was a chief of the Wampanoags who united the tribes against us . . . for all the good it did them,” she added sadly. “They might have chased us out of their hunting-grounds hereabouts when first we set foot in this land, but they didn’t. Like Virginia and the Carolinas and Connecticut—and Massachusetts—each tribe of Indians saw itself as a separate nation: Nipmuc and Wampanoag and Pocassett. They would not unite with their enemy tribes, and so all fell to a greater foe.”

This led to talk, over bread and Mrs. Barlow’s excellent cider and cheese, of the excesses of Virginia’s Governor—every bit as arbitrary as Hutchinson, but at least Hutchinson had never stirred up war with the Indians on the frontier as a means of distracting the men of the colony from complaints for their rights, as Dunmore was said to be doing.

“Were the King to send troops to occupy Boston in consequence of the dumping of the tea,” said Abigail, “I doubt the Virginians or the New Yorkers would raise a peep over it. They seem to think we should apologize for protesting against the King’s tyranny
and
pay for the tea that we wouldn’t pay for when we were commanded to buy it and none other—even Mr. Franklin”—she named the Pennsylvania philosopher whom many considered the intellectual head of the movement toward the colonies’ rights—“has advised we do so . . . presumably so he will not be put in the position of speaking in favor of hooligans.”

As they gathered up their much-depleted supplies and corked the remains of the cider, the young man looked around him at the ruined farmstead again and commented—with a town boy’s ignorance—“I wonder they never rebuilt this place.”

“The land’s dreadful.” Abigail nodded toward the shaggy remains of what had been an orchard. “’Tis all rocks among the trees, and I see no well here. And it may be the land was taken over by some wealthier farmer in the district, the records having been burnt with the burning of the town. All the good land is west of here, in the valley of the Connecticut. The whites took that from the Pequots long before King Philip raised his forces—killed them all, my father told me, by selling them blankets taken from men who’d died of the smallpox.”

“Is that true?”

“Having met some of the merchants in Boston,” replied Abigail drily, “can you doubt it? I wonder myself if Old Beelzebub did not change his way of living—move to Cambridge and build his house there—because the Indians no longer worshipped him, but drove him out.”

“And he left his treasure behind?” The clerk’s eyes brightened as he slipped the bit into the horse’s mouth again, hooked the harness to the traces once more. “Then it might still be there! All we’d need to do is check the county landrecords in the State House . . .”

“And discover that Old Beelzebub lived on in Cambridge a good fifteen years past King Philip’s War and maybe more, and had plenty of time to return in perfect safety and dig his treasure up himself. Or, in the years since his death, if he indeed owned land, his clutchfisted son would have done so.”

“But if he did not find it? If the treasure were cleverly hidden, in a cave or a pit, and the direction coded to look like a disgraceful account of an assignation by a pirate queen and a government official who should have known better—”

“Then it might indeed,” said Abigail, as the chaise pulled out of the weed-thick dooryard and down the dim trace back to the road, “be worth three men’s lives . . . to somebody.”

 

 

A
s had been the case a week ago, Abigail and her escort reached the Neck of Boston just as the sun was touching the distant hills. Coming through Roxbury, acquaintances had waved to them as they passed the Common, and no one had run out to them shouting,
Turn back, turn back, the streets of Boston run red with blood!
. . . Nevertheless, Abigail was conscious of deep relief not to see the smoke-plume of a burning town rising before them. Thaxter put the tired horse into a smart trot, and they jolted along the track between the shining and fishy-reeking shallows, with the red-coated soldiers standing waiting—again—for them in the half-closed portal.

The Common lay as it always had, a great ragged pasture sloping upward toward Beacon Hill, fading into the twilight. The tinny toot of the herd-boys’ horns as they gathered up the cows mingled with the clatter of wheels on the cobbled street. The familiar mix of fish, woodsmoke, and latrines seemed to welcome her as they rattled up Orange Street, and Aunt Eliza and Uncle Isaac greeted her with embraces and laughter and offers of supper. Even her self-important cousin Young Isaac—a clergyman who seemed to regard Abigail’s marriage into the Adamses as the worst mésalliance since Persephone’s nuptials with Pluto—forebore to chide her about John’s associates. Nabby clung silently—as if she suspected that her mother preferred jauntering over the countryside hunting pirate treasure to remaining hearth-bound and cleaning lamps—while Johnny brimmed over with an account of how profoundly he had impressed his Latin master that day. Charley wanted to know why they couldn’t have a garden on Queen Street, and Tommy was missing altogether—they had to go out into the garden and hunt for the boy among the beanpoles.

“We’ve taken turns going over to the house to milk the girls,” said Pattie, as she and Katy herded the children to the Smith kitchen to get cleaned up for the return home. “Mrs. Butler offered to do it, but ’tis no trouble. We take Charley and Tommy with us—”

“We’re due there now,” added Katy. “I can hear the boys bringing the herd in.”

The Butlers, and the Hansons on the other side, had offered to look after Cleopatra and Semiramis in the absence of the Adamses and to have their prentices clean the stalls in return for a dozen small favors John had done them over the past few years.

“We’ve put the milk in the coldest corner of the pantry, so there’ll be a fair deal of butter to be made . . .”

“I went out to Cambridge yesterday,” added Katy, a little shyly, “to see Diomede in the jail, as you said I might—”

“I did indeed,” said Abigail, “and I’m glad you thought to do so. Really, Eliza,” she added with a smile, “there’s no need—”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” declared her aunt, as the maid brought to the kitchen table a tray laden with Dutch coffee, bread and butter, marmalade, and cold meats, “after a journey like that you must be famished—”

“
I’m
famished,” said Charley hopefully, looking at the marmalade.

It was well and truly dark, and Tommy and Charley were sound asleep on the seat of the chaise when the little party returned along Queen Street by lantern-light. The lamps in the houses they passed, even, were being quenched on the lower floors, leaving only the very dim squares of illumination higher on the brick walls, where bedroom candles flickered over the pages of Bibles or novels, while men took off their wigs and scratched their heads, and women brushed out their long hair. Eliza had handed Abigail a letter from John, who had been delayed in Providence—
Another night bedding down with snoring strangers, poor lamb
, reflected Abigail ruefully.
Just as well
,
I can get the house in order again before he arrives.