Sup With the Devil aam-3

by Barbara Hamilton

  “You stay. He knows someone’s here—”

  The door shut. Much as she wanted to get a look at one of the men whom she strongly suspected of breaking into her house, Abigail knew how these narrow, concealed kitchen flights carried the sound of ascending footfalls. If she stayed for a look through the door-crack, she couldn’t later flee upward if the Cornishman had enough imagination to disbelieve the girls and checked the backstairs. Pushing Katy ahead of her, she ascended in almost complete darkness, thrust open the door at the top, and emerged into a hall furnished—as the parlor was downstairs—with the newest style of straightlegged chairs, a small marble-topped table, and a painting by an inferior artist of Venus putting on her makeup.

  Abigail signed Katy sharply to stay where she was, then moved with all the silent care of which she was capable—and having grown up with William for a younger brother, there was little she hadn’t learned about sneaking in silence—from one door to the other of the four rooms that opened from the hall.

  Two bore the eappearance of guest-rooms—beds with French hangings of brocaded silk—one was a parlor with a large mirror on the ceiling, and one, Abigail guessed, belonged to Mrs. Morgan—the Lady of the Lake—herself. She signed to Katy again—Wait—and slipped inside, stepping carefully on the worn oak planks. The dressing table bore silver combs and brushes—putting paid, reflected Abigail wryly, to Mr. Munn’s theory that Mrs. Morgan had run off with another man—and investigation of the highboy showed that she hadn’t taken any chemises or petticoats, either . . . or at least that she hadn’t taken so many that it showed.

  Abigail checked all the drawers of the highboy and between the mattresses of the bed—no book, no notes, no mysterious manuscripts in Arabic, and no household money. She crossed, stepping carefully, to the dressing table, examined its drawers, and found only an astonishing quantity of white lead, carmine, pomade, rice-powder, and kohl. Drat the woman . . .

  And in a corner of the dressing table, an ink-bottle.

  Half empty.

  And a used quill. Much used, in fact, its tip was whittled down nearly to the feather.

  Abigail gathered her skirts about her, knelt carefully, and reexamined the marble surface of the dressing table itself.

  Ink-stains. Granny Quincy had owned a marble-topped table, and Abigail knew exactly what happened if you didn’t wait until the ink was absolutely dry before you turned the sheet over to write on the back—you ended up having to rub and polish with solutions of oxgall and wood-sorrel and chalk, listening to Granny Quincy’s lectures on cleaning all the while.

  So what had Mrs. Morgan been writing up here that she wouldn’t write at her very pretty gilt secretaire in the parlor downstairs?

  Gently, Abigail removed every drawer from the dressing table in turn and found the papers tacked to the back side of the lower left-hand one. Four pages torn out of what looked like a housekeeping book; two bearing a laborious, crooked-lettered copy of Arabic writing; and two written over with the nowfamiliar dialog (and descriptive prose) between Lt. Governor Morgan and Mistress Pitts in a woman’s strong hand.

  Footsteps in the backstairs—Abigail knew she’d been correct, they vibrated all over the house—and a voice calling softly, “Mrs. Percy—!”

  Abigail shoved the papers into her pocket, wiggled the drawer back onto its runners, and darted to the window in time to see a huge, hulking man in a corduroy coat crossing back to the stables: the Cornishman. His head was cropped so closely it might almost have been shaved, and he carried it thrust forward, rather like an animal that has only recently learned the trick of walking on its hind legs . . .

  “He’s gone,” said Nancy, as she and Katy entered the bedroom together.

  Abigail heaved a convincing sigh—not entirely feigned—and put a hand to her chest: “What did he want? I vow, I was ready to go under the bed—”

  “And you’d have done well to,” replied the dark-haired girl. “He’s a foul one to cross, and the more so when Dubber’s not around, for he hasn’t the brains on his own to know when it would pay him to hold on to his temper. Your redskin friend’s got a ready tongue in his head,” she added, with her sidelong, triangular grin. “I was afraid he’d get himself into trouble when the Cornishman demanded what he was doing there—he’d seen there was someone at the house—but Lord! The excuses and the whining, and letting the Cornishman bully two shillings out of him before he slunk out of the house with his tail between his legs—our boy never even thought there might have been someone else here. But,” she added, “it’s best you go. He’s a nasty piece of work, and you were right to hide. He wouldn’t think twice of telling your husband you were here, and getting money to keep quiet about it . . . and maybe worse, for your girl here.”

  She put a brief arm around Katy’s shoulders.

  “Is the coast clear?” asked Abigail. “Dassie said there were three of them . . .”

  Nancy smiled—very briefly—at her use of the smuggler’s slang, but only said, “Grimes and Hicks went off to town this morning. Hicks and the Cornishman are straight off the boat this year, but Grimes has friends in town. And to tell the truth,” she added, as she led Abigail down the main stair to the front parlor downstairs, “that has me worried, for I wouldn’t put it past Grimes to sell us—Belinda and me—to one of those waterfront kens your sister-in-law spoke of . . .”

  “Sell you?” Abigail stopped in the doorway.

  Nancy regarded her with a dark eye full of wry amusement. “You truly are an innocent, aren’t you, m’am? Girls with no family, no one to speak for us and—God knows—no way of making a living, save what she and I have done since we were thirteen . . .”

  She put an arm around Belinda’s shoulders, as she had Katy a few moments before, and hugged her, all the beauty leaving her face for an instant, shadow in her wry and tired eyes. “I could probably sew a straight seam for twelve inches if the salvation of humankind depended on me doing so, but Belinda would need six months’ teaching by St. Martha herself to learn to sweep a floor. Don’t you worry, m’am,” she added, seeing Abigail’s face. “I’ve saved a little and so has Dassie, and if Mrs. Morgan isn’t back by morning, we’ll be out of here. What was your niece’s name, m’am? The girl you’re looking for? Pamela, yes—Pamela what? Not that she’ll use her right name . . . If I see her, m’am, I shall tell her you’re looking for her and will help her . . .”

  “Thank you,” said Abigail, with difficulty retrieving her appearance of concern over that fictitious damsel’s plight in the face of this tall young woman’s genuine fears.

  “And confusion to your nasty old sister,” added Nancy with her tight-lipped grin. “And to my nasty old aunt as well, and Belinda’s ma, and all them others . . . Well. Now best you be gone. Last thing any of us would need is for Dubber and Newgate to come strolling up and see you here . . . Ah, there’s your chief, I see him in the trees. Good luck to you, m’am.”

  And with a smiling wave at Weyountah, Nancy closed the door, leaving Abigail with a good deal to think about as she and Katy crossed the road.

  Nineteen

  That isn’t my hand,” protested Horace at once, when Abigail showed him the paper she’d taken from Mrs. Morgan’s dressing table. “’Tis a fair copy, though, of what I wrote . . .”

  “At a guess, I’d say Mrs. Morgan copied it for herself the moment you were out the door.” Abigail handed him the other sheets, which he turned over in puzzlement. “Not the same ones you translated from? But the same text, no?”

  “Yes. Copied left to right by rote again—”

  “Precisely. Mrs. Morgan is working for someone: possibly the Governor, possibly—dare I breathe a sullying word upon a reputation so spotless?—Black Dog Pugh—”

  “Catch me,” remarked Katy, “ere I faint with shock.” They lengthened their steps as they came near to the first houses of Charles Town, and the bright sharp breeze from the harbor flapped at the women’s cloaks.

  “Do you see a rash on my neck?” ask
ed Horace of Katy, as they dropped behind a little. “I think one of those trees was a poisonous sumac . . . And I was bitten to pieces by gnats . . .”

  “Goose, the only mark there is where you’ve scratched yourself . . .”

  “I thought Miss Belinda looked like the sort of—er—young person who might attract Pugh’s attention,” said Weyountah. “If he isn’t corrupting some presumed-virtuous young matron in Cambridge instead. What have you there?”

  “Letters purporting to be from my husband,” said Abigail, “and my great-uncle, Justice Mercer from Haverhill . . . Look at the paper. And the ink.” She held them against Mrs. Morgan’s copies of both text and translation. “Not that ’tis proof—we couldn’t take it before a court and hope to impress anyone with the existence of conspiracy—but it confirms what I’ve thought.”

  “Yet the hand on the forged letters is a man’s.” Weyountah paused in his steps, held the two forgeries that had brought Horace into the business up to the light as he had done not quite two weeks ago at the Golden Stair.

  “Is it anything like Pugh’s? It’s disguised, I know,” Abigail added, as the Indian opened his mouth to point out that very fact. “But is there any similarity?”

  “I can see none, but that means nothing. Horace would know his writing—we’ve both seen it on enough notes we’ve been sent with—and we know he’s a fairly pretty forger from his imitation of Mistress Woodleigh’s.”

  “I wonder if she wrote him love-letters as she did to George?” Abigail frowned, thinking of those wholly conventional outpourings of passion that George had been carrying in his pocket on the night he died . . . on the night Pugh had lured him out of his room . . . Why carry Mistress Woodleigh’s love-letters when the rest were all chucked into his desk? “Are you returning to Cambridge?” she asked, as they turned along the street toward the ferry landing.

  “We were, yes,” Horace replied, still rubbing uneasily at the completely invisible spots and rashes on his neck. “Ryland is holding a sort of seminar in his rooms on translation of Plato, and with examinations coming up, nobody wants to miss it. One has to arrive early to obtain a seat.”

  “Would Mr. Pugh also attend?”

  “He has in the past,” said Weyountah. “He’s clever—always passing his examinations by just enough not to be sent down.”

  “Then I think the time has come,” said Abigail, “to make a search of Mr. Pugh’s chambers and see if there is more there than expensive coffee and brandy smuggled from France.”

  There was a certain amount of discussion in the ordinary of the Peacock Inn—where Weyountah had left Sassy and George’s chaise—about who should ride back to Cambridge and who should walk. “I’m not going to abandon Mrs. Fairfield by the side of the road for a four-mile walk back to the college,” stated Weyountah, as the hostler went off to harness up the little vehicle, which would take three people at a very crowded pinch.

  “Don’t be silly,” Katy retorted. “You need Horace to get Mrs. Adams into the Black Dog’s room to do the searching, and you to stand guard. If old Ryland sees me anywhere in the vicinity of the college I’ll be shown off the grounds and like as not everyone will start asking questions. I’ll walk—and I’ll meet you at the jail, where I’ll go to cheer up poor Diomede and let him know he’s not been abandoned and everyone is doing all they can.”

  Since Abigail had repeatedly contended that an American woman—even one as young and pretty as Katy—could go anywhere afoot in the colony without fear of the kind of insult that by all accounts lurked everywhere in crime-ridden Britain, there wasn’t much that she could say against the plan. Horace provided several moving little homilies in Latin on the subject of self-sacrifice before Weyountah heaved him up into the chaise . . . The afternoon was, in fact, getting on. The Indian whipped up Sassy, and they bowled away down the tree-lined road for Cambridge.

  “Did George speak much of his father?” asked Abigail, as they passed the old cemetery, and left the town behind. “Of what sort of a man he is and how he’s likely to react to news that Diomede killed his son?”

  “He called him ‘stern,’ ” reported Weyountah, after a little time of thought. “And I understand their relationship was stormy, though George loved his father very much.”

  “More than once he spoke of how his father and his friends were forever uneasy about the idea of a slave uprising,” said Horace, lowering Mrs. Morgan’s copy of his translation, which he was comparing with his later reconstruction. “Like the Romans, the men of Virginia have become servos servorum eorum—an attitude that outraged George, I might add. But he was forever quoting his father on the subject of this trusted mammy of some friend, who had smothered the babies under her charge, or that trusted cook who’d put Jamestown weed into the family ragout. The most their cook ever did, George said, was, when she was angry with the master, spit in the coffee before bringing it to table . . . something he never told his father, because, he said, she was a very good cook and didn’t get angry very often.”

  Abigail said, “Remind me never to breakfast with a Virginian in his home.”

  “But it doesn’t bode well,” concluded Weyountah, “for Diomede’s chances of a fair hearing.”

  Nor did it bode well, reflected Abigail, as the little vehicle passed along the Charles Town Neck toward the mainland, for the chances that Mr. Charles Fairfield would welcome a pregnant tavern-girl with open arms, prospective grandchild or no . . .

  And she was acutely conscious that at this point there was little she or anyone could do, save marshal evidence for John to use when Diomede’s owner arrived . . . if Mr. Fairfield would even consent to see John or to listen to some Massachusetts lawyer explaining that George had been killed in the course of a hunt for buried pirate treasure . . . No, we cannot prove by whom . . .

  Too easily she could hear the man simply shout, He’s my property, and he’s coming back with me . . .

  Her fists tightened where they lay in her lap. The law is established to defend a man’s rights to his property . . .

  Horace handed her the paper, and as the chaise passed along between stone walls, quiet fields, and shading elm trees, she read over her nephew’s translation, which, as he had said, was so close to his later reconstruction as to give little encouragement to any alternate reading. At no point did it mention paces, yards, directions, digging, or trees (beyond the single reference to a towering oak in a context that was clearly metaphorical), or in fact any words that could be construed as being part of a simple cipher. Nor, to Abigail’s practiced eye, did it have the style of the labored cadence of words that have been selected because their fifth letter was q.

  The only cipher involved was that Old Beelzebub had written his blackmailing account in Arabic letters to protect it from prying eyes until he should have call to spring it on Lieutenant Governor Morgan and demand hush-money. She wondered if he’d ever done so. Or was it only one more scheme he’d tucked away in the back of his alchemy books and carried north with him when he’d left the Caribbean for good?

  He looked like the Devil would have, if the Devil were ever to sit in a corner of the kitchen and play the fiddle . . .

  She frowned in thought, eyes narrowed against the sprinkling of the sunlight through the trees.

  Yet someone at least was fairly certain that there was a treasure.

  Well, hundreds of thousands of people in New Spain are fairly certain that all Protestants are inevitably bound for Hell, which certainly doesn’t make them right.

  Why did her mind hark back to the question of what had made old Beelzebub turn his back on his past? Walk away from the man he had been?

  What man HAD he been?

  As the chaise swung around toward the gates of the college, Abigail’s glance strayed toward the King’s Chapel by the Common, and a flash of black, like a crow against the green of the grass, caught her eye. A young woman in black—extremely fashionable black. Even at this distance, Abigail could tell the sable skirts gathered into the latest
style of polonaise, the elbow-length sleeves festooned with sable lace and bedight with inky ribbons. Even the maidservant who followed her was in deep mourning, and the lapdog borne in the maid’s arms wore a sable bow on his neck.

  Weyountah said at the same moment, “Good Lord, it’s Mistress Woodleigh! And there’s the Black Dog coming to greet her! And comfort her, I dare—”

  Abigail estimated the approach of that massive yellowrobed figure—trailed likewise by a black servant . . . “Which servant is that?” she asked as the chaise rounded the corner toward the college stables. “He has two—”

  “Pedro.” Horace twisted his body around in the chaise to look back. “He’ll have left Eusebius in his room—”

  “Let me out here,” said Abigail, and dug in her pocket for pencil and her commonplace-book. Quickly she wrote:

  Mr. Pugh,

  ’Twould be to your GREAT ADVANTAGE to meet me at four o’clock

  —a glance at the clock above the King’s Chapel showed that it wanted but ten minutes of the hour—

  at the Crowned Pig. Wait for me there, as I cannot linger long; this matter concerns certain BOOKS that I understand you seek.

  Althea Mainwaring

  “Who’s Althea—?” began Horace, and Weyountah chuckled.

  “Very good, m’am! And if Mr. Pinkstone is there studying, I’m to send him on an errand to fetch a hair from the Great Cham’s beard?”

  “Something like that.” She sprang down from the chaise and handed Weyountah the note. “Do you know anything about this Eusebius? Anything at all that I can use to keep him talking when he gets here?”

  “He has a wife in the West Indies named Violetta and is courting one of the maidservants at Mr. Vassall’s house,” provided Weyountah. “He was brought from Africa as a youth and was trained there by the local witch doctor—”