Sup with the Devil (31 page)

That he would take up his cudgel and fight like that ancient Israelite hero for a slave’s life she didn’t doubt—if she pressed him to do so. He would always take on one more task, one more responsibility, one more foe, for justice’s sake or his country’s—until, facing an army of assailants, he went down before them in defeat.

Diomede’s freedom was her battle.

Enslaved, as Samson had been enslaved (and with far less foolishness, in her opinion), and helpless . . .

Across the table she saw Katy startle, and in her wide blue eyes Abigail read sudden enlightenment, something realized that she had not guessed before . . .

When the children had been kissed and herded upstairs, and John was adjusting his wig and putting on his greatcoat, Katy came up to them, and whispered, “Can you prove my marriage to George, Mr. Adams? Weyountah looked in the back of both of George’s books and found no trace of the license.”

“I took notes of the date and the circumstances and the name of the clerk,” said John. “I’ll write them out for you if you wish—”

“Belike that scoundrel Pugh took the license to blackmail George with,” sniffed Abigail, as she brought paper and pencil from the sideboard drawer. “Or to blackmail Charles Fairfield when he arrives next week. If you like, Katy, we can speak to the man—”

“Yes, later,” she said breathlessly. “But if Mr. Adams will be so good as to write out at least proof that I
am
George’sIs legal wife—and lend me Thaxter and the chaise tomorrow—then I’ll go out to Cambridge and tell the sheriff that Diomede is to be tried here in Massachusetts after all. Don’t you see?” She looked from Abigail’s face to John’s, her eyes shining with triumph. “If Diomede was George’s property, then he’s
mine
now, and I can arrange his trial where I please!”

 

 

N
either John nor Abigail thought this would actually work, “But you might as well give it a try,” said John. Abigail had intended to send Thaxter—
who surely has enough to do just keeping up with John’s legal copying so the lot of us don’t starve!
—to the State House in the morning and look up if, in fact, Old Beelzebub Whitehead had owned land in the colony, with or without a stone castle and a tribe of worshipful Indians, and if so, where this had lain. But she agreed that the journey to Cambridge took precedence.

It would be another week, she calculated—as she went about her marketing, did the long-delayed mending, and prepared the usual Saturday double meals in anticipation of the following day’s enforced rest and meditation—before Charles Fairfield arrived in Boston: he did not sound like the kind of man to welcome even a legitimate grandson whose mother was a tavern-maid. Having her claiming to own a valuable slave would not endear her to him nor help her cause—nor that of the slave. As she and Pattie dumped snowy mountains of ironing from their baskets to the towel-draped table (a task that should have been done yesterday, she reflected guiltily)—she mentally marshalled various schemes to help either Katy or Diomede should Fairfield prove intransigent . . . in between forays into the yard and once into Queen Street when Charley’s silence indicated that he’d gone exploring again.

“At least, thanks to the Committees of Correspondence, we now know the names of Virginia lawyers to whom Katy can go,” she remarked, as she sprinkled water from the bowl at her side over the first of John’s shirts.

“But what if the King closes all the courts?” asked Pattie worriedly. “In Virginia as well as here.”

“What?” Abigail rested the heavy iron’s butt on the tableedge. “What has Virginia got to do with Sa—with
Persons Unknown
,” she corrected herself, “destroying tea in Boston?”

“They’re both colonies,” reasoned Pattie. “You know how everyone talks about ‘the Indians,’ when Weyountah speaks of the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags and the Nipmucs all being completely different peoples—some of them sided with the French during the war and some with the English, and some just tried to keep out of things as best they could. What if the King and Parliament—who are farther away from us than we are from the Narragansett villages—just think of everyone over here as ‘the colonies,’ the way my father thinks of ‘the Indians,’ and think to punish us all alike?”

“It isn’t the same,” protested Abigail. “Each colony is a separate entity with its own government and its own agents in London. You’d have to be a fool to mix up someone from Massachusetts, for instance, with a Carolinian . . . or a Carolinian from the coast with the sort of savages they have in the northern mountains. Even the—oh, drat the boy!” she added, looking quickly around the kitchen as Tommy—fastened as usual to the leg of the massive sideboard by his leadingstrings—set up a protesting wail that indicated that his interest in his toys had flagged and his elder brother was nowhere to be found.

“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.”

 

 

O
f 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 . . .

O
n 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 . . .

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.”