Sup With the Devil aam-3

by Barbara Hamilton

  “Which our Governor,” said John grimly, “seems to wish to conveniently forget. You’re sure there’s no record of his owning land in the west?”

  “Nothing.” Sam flipped open the lantern’s door, held it steady while John lit the candle within it from his own. “Which has never stopped Hutchinson from going after something he thinks is there for the taking. Well, I wish the man joy of those books, cracking his so-called scholarly attainments against Arabic chemistry texts and alchemical discussions of how to make gold out of lead . . . Believe me, I’ve been over all seven of them with a magnifier and calipers, and haven’t found anything in them that looks like a cipher to me. Fear not,” he added, and bent over Abigail’s hand. “All will be well.”

  He turned to where Revere and Warren waited for him on the doorstep. Abigail folded her arms beneath her shawl and watched from the doorway as those three bobbing blurs of yellow light disappeared down Queen Street. Far off, the crier’s voice could be heard in the still night, Nine o’clock of a clear night, and all is well . . .

  Twenty-three

  True to his word, Sam sent the seven books, made up in a package thickly bound with string and crusted with blots of sealing wax, via Paul Revere. The silversmith arrived in Queen Street midmorning, driving his own light chaise with his quick-stepping little mare Ginny tethered and saddled behind. Johnny and Nabby had been sent off to school with instructions to go to Aunt Eliza’s in Milk Street when they were done: Pattie had taken Tommy there as soon as the house was tidied and the marketing done for Thaxter, who would remain in the house. Neither Johnny nor Nabby had been much comforted by John’s explanation that he and their mother were going across to the mainland to widen the search (“How would he have got over there, sir?” had been only the least acute of Johnny’s questions), and it cut Abigail like a knife to see the confusion and suspicion in her son’s eyes as he understood that he was being kept outside of the truth.

  She tormented herself on the drive by conjuring visions of some independent scheme of Johnny’s to discover the truth of his brother’s whereabouts for himself. Nabby, silent, had simply nodded, her blue eyes a world of wretchedness—as if she, too, understood that something was appallingly wrong beyond what was being said—and Tommy had only cried.

  They crossed the Neck to Roxbury, Katy riding pillion behind Revere, and reached Cambridge a little after noon. Weyountah and Horace were horrified at Abigail’s news and offered a) to immediately try to decode whatever might be in their books and b) to stand watch with as many of their classmen as required, all around Harvard Yard, that night at midnight, to apprehend the villains when they came to the appointed meeting-place. Abigail firmly quashed both suggestions.

  “What I will ask of you,” she said, “is that in the meantime you show us old Reverend Seckar’s house, that was Emmanuel Whitehead’s.”

  Revere went off in search of Sheriff Congreve—he seemed to know everyone in the colony—and returned with the keys to the Seckar house, which had been closed up upon the quarrelsome old professor’s death, pending disposal by the College.

  “’Tis the closest we’ll come, I presume,” added John, as they crossed the Common from the Golden Stair and made their way along the road that eventually led toward Waterford, “to this stone castle Old Beelzebub was supposed to have built.”

  “He must have had property somewhere,” said Abigail stubbornly. “Mrs. Seckar was quite clear that he did built a fortress of some kind . . .”

  “Stories get conflated, Nab,” returned John patiently. “Especially family stories. You remember Tilda Farren back in Braintree? The one who’s convinced her parents fled England because her mother was the true heir of King James—the daughter for whom the baby Prince James was substituted for political reasons in 1688.”

  Abigail privately suspected that their neighbor back in Braintree was far too partial to the medicine she took for her so-called rheumatics and back pains, but was too distracted with dread to reply. Part of her prayed that there was something at the Seckar house that would solve the entire question—some hidden map or cipher that Grimes and his cohorts were actually looking for that could be handed over to them . . .

  Another part of her was despairingly aware that if a map of the colony had been drawn on one of the bedroom walls complete with large red letters saying, HERE LIETH THE TREASURE, such was her mental state that she would be incapable of realizing what it was.

  Dear God, keep him safe, she prayed . . . Did the sun never move? Would sunset never come, let alone midnight? And that detached and disrespectful part of herself, looking at her prayer as through a pane of glass, wondered how she had ever thought herself a woman of faith, when nothing—NOTHING—as precious to her as her son’s life had ever hung in the balance like this before.

  Mr. Scar-Eye . . . Dubber Grimes . . .

  God, keep my boy safe.

  The Seckar house turned out to be one she’d seen a hundred times in passing through Cambridge, its newer portion—facing the Waterford Road—built of brick and timber in the ’80s of the previous century, tall and old-fashioned like Sam’s house on Purchase Street, with most of the lower floor taken up by a great keeping room and a fireplace at one end that a family of four could have set up housekeeping in. The older portion of the house was hid from the road, lying perpendicular to the new, and had been built of a combination of stone and “nogging”—clay mixed with twigs and horsehair—a single story with a loft over part of it.

  “This must have been the original keeping room,” surmised John, as Congreve led them through its ancient door and into the chamber that had—for as long as anyone recalled—been the laundry. The big coopered tubs had been moved, and its northern wall knocked out and rudely patched over with boards. The eastern wall—what had been the gable end of the original house—joined to that of the newer structure but had never been pierced with a door: one entered the old wing from the yard, with no communication between the old part of the house and the new. Old Beelzebub’s idea to keep his son at a distance? About twenty inches in from the original eastern wall a second wall had been built of bricks, plastered and whitewashed to match the rest of the room. Between the two walls a couple of shelves still remained, smelling of whitewash and dust.

  Is Charley frightened? Have they hurt him?

  He is in the hands of God . . .

  Abigail stood back while John—who must, she knew, be in as great an agony as herself—methodically examined the space and the shelves. She herself looked around the old laundry-room, toward the great fireplace at its other end, where the copper and the racks of irons still stood . . .

  He looked like the Devil would have—she heard Narcissa Seckar’s thin old voice in her mind, passing along the words of Beelzebub’s daughter—if the Devil were ever to sit in a corner of the kitchen and play the fiddle . . .

  Here in this long, narrow chamber, the whole tangled knot of circumstance had begun: at the great old table, worn marble-smooth and so big it could not have fit through the doors, Old Beelzebub had undoubtedly copied out his original notes about the Governor of Jamaica into script unreadable by anyone in the colony and shoved it for safekeeping into one of his books.

  This was the room where he—or perhaps his sanctimonious son—had walled his books away.

  Where he had turned his back on his studies, thought Abigail.

  Why?

  A man who’d sailed the seas, burned Spanish towns for their gold, studied the writings of the Mahometans, practiced sorcery, chatted with Satan, been worshipped as a god?

  Deeper than ever did plummet sound I’ll drown my book, swears Prospero in The Tempest when he forgives the men who wronged him and returns to the human world again. I’ll break my staff . . .

  Why?

  He was missing two fingers of his right hand, so that he held the fiddle-bow strangely . . .

  For a moment in her fancy she saw him, with his long gray hair like a horse’s tail, and the ends of his silvered mustache brai
ded and tied with green ribbons.

  Playing the fiddle strangely with his mutilated hand. Looking straight into her eyes with a gaze black as coal and smiling mockingly. Had he, too, supped with the Devil and afterwards found that he had started chains of circumstance that he could not call back?

  The Devil carried off children, she thought.

  No. The Devil puts it into the hearts of MEN to carry them off.

  She had been taught from tiniest childhood by her father never even to think, May God curse this or that person. But she thought it now.

  May God curse Dubber Grimes and his henchmen, and may they die.

  “Aunt?”

  Shadows darkened the old door into the yard: Horace, Weyountah, Joseph Ryland.

  “Have they found aught?” Horace stepped inside, gazing around him with deep interest at the smoke-stained plaster and the high, steep rafters of the ceiling.

  And Weyountah: “Dr. Langdon had men in two weeks ago to take away the books in the Reverend Seckar’s regular library in the main part of the house. About half of those had been bought originally by Emmanuel Whitehead, though a few must have belonged to Barthelmy.”

  “Mrs. Adams.” Ryland bowed deeply over her hand. “Mrs. Squills at the Golden Stair said that you could be found here. His Excellency has authorized me to offer a reward toward which he will contribute. He is most distressed and most anxious to show your husband—and indeed all the citizens of Boston—that he bears no ill-will. If there is anything that he can do—if there is anything that I can do—”

  “Yes,” said Abigail softly, “there is.” And taking Ryland by the shoulder, she guided the young man into the corner near the great fireplace and lowered her voice still further. “You can tell me what you were doing with fifty-four of Beelzebub Whitehead’s books in your chambers.”

  Ryland looked aside, flecks of color slowly rose to mottle his colorless cheeks. “Please, Mrs. Adams—” He glanced toward Revere and John, still poking about before the hidden cache on the east wall. “I beg of you, tell no one—”

  “Not His Excellency?”

  He put his hands briefly to his face. “I don’t know how you can know this—”

  Horace opened his mouth to make the obvious remark that they’d searched his room, but Abigail cut in ahead of him with, “Mrs. Seckar told me that you’d purchased them.”

  “His Excellency—” began Ryland, and stopped. Then he let his breath out in a sigh. “His Excellency has never been poor,” he said, in a tone of weary defeat. “He heard that Old Beelzebub’s books had been found and mentioned that the old man had been a pirate. I-I thought, I hoped, that there would be some mention . . . pirates hid gold along these coasts as far north as Philadelphia, I know.” His voice faltered as he spoke, as if he could not easily find words. “He asked me to enquire and I—’twas the act of an ingrate, but I can only plead that I was poor. I purchased the books of Mrs. Seckar with the Governor’s money and told him that they had all been sold to others before I came with my offer. I thought—if there was a map or a cipher in one of them . . .”

  “You didn’t try to buy them through someone else?”

  He looked at her blankly. “Someone else?”

  “A Mrs. Lake?”

  He frowned a little, fishing through his memory for the name, then shook his head. “I mean only to hold them until I’ve had a chance to go through them—”

  “You have not done so yet?”

  “No, m’am. I—since the books came to my hand, I’ve been in Boston more than I’ve been here, helping His Excellency. The only times I’ve come to Cambridge have been to help my students prepare for the examinations, to drill with the Volunteers . . . and to”—he stammered just slightly on the words—“to be of service to a . . . a private pupil who has suffered a great loss . . .”

  Sally Woodleigh. Who is in elaborate mourning for George Fairfield and fainting in the arms of any wealthy man who’ll stand still for it.

  And if you were wealthy, she reflected, looking into those deep-set brown eyes, she would be fainting in YOUR arms . . .

  “Please.” Ryland swallowed hard. “Please tell no one of what I did. I will make the money good . . . There’s treasure out there somewhere, I know there is. His Excellency’s records of the colony speak of—of old Whitehead . . . I know he must have left some . . .”

  “And do they speak,” asked Abigail, “of this stone fortress of his? Or of where he might have held land?”

  Ryland shook his head. “He held none, m’am. I’ve looked through all His Excellency’s records. He had a sort of stronghold on the coast up above Lynn, but that was all, and ’twas burned by the Navy in King William’s War. ’Twas thought the old man’s books were all destroyed then—he was well known as a scholar. So I was surprised to hear that they’d survived here.”

  “As indeed you might be. Does anyone know you have these other books?”

  “Not that I know of, m’am.”

  “Then keep it that way,” she said softly. “And if any man approaches you about them, deny it, or invent a tale that you’ve passed them along to the Governor. Mrs. Seckar spoke of them as cursed,” she finished. “And ’tis true; ill things have befallen those who’ve had them in keeping. And I only hope and trust,” she murmured, as with a deep bow Mr. Ryland took his leave, “that you survive the possession of them once our friends discover nothing in those books of ours but chemical formulae and notes concerning the treatment of horses’ piles.”

  They set forth quietly from the Golden Stair at half-past eleven that night: John and Abigail, Revere and Katy, crossing the Common on its northern side by the slitted glimmer of a single dark-lantern held low. The new moon had set early. By wan starlight the world was formless, trees like black thunderheads and the fine brick houses of the village’s worthies no more than dim cutouts of dark against darkness. Abigail carried the wrapped package of books in her arms. Accursed things, she thought . . .

  Was it only that love of money is the root of all evil? Mr. Joseph Ryland had, from the moment she had met him, impressed her with his integrity: even his devotion to the King’s cause sprang not from place-seeking, but from dread of civil war. The fact that he would embezzle money from his benefactor, lie to him, then take advantage of his collection of the colony’s old documents to hunt for the location of the treasure, only for money . . .

  For money and love?

  Sally Woodleigh’s lovely face floated for a moment in Abigail’s thoughts.

  Going to get your bid in with the beautiful Sally, haha?

  She burned off Ryland’s eyebrows during a chemistry lesson, but he’s still tutoring her . . .

  He is young. And beneath that steady exterior, she sensed in the young bachelor-fellow the capacity for passion—for Sally as for the cause of his King.

  The dark bulk of the college buildings rose to their right as they moved on into the open field of the Harvard Yard, where the young men ran their footraces on bright spring days and played at ball, and where the hay was harvested in June. A single lamp glimmered, high in some uncurtained room, like a dim gold star in the blackness, and a stirring of night-breeze brought the smell of the college stables. Revere had brought a long, forked stick with its straight end sharpened; this he drove into the ground in the center of the yard, then hung one of the lanterns on it, above the level of the tops of the long grasses that in some places grew thigh-high. At the foot of this, Abigail laid the wrapped package of the books.

  Please, God, let all be well . . .

  She was trembling as John took her hand in his, and together they retreated back toward the college, her cloak and skirts flapping around her ankles, the yellow smudge of the closed-down lantern-beam bobbing on the ground before them in the dark. Her thoughts seemed to have narrowed, running in a blind circle of fear and hope and agony.

  Charley. Dear God, keep him safe.

  Stillness and the watching sparkle of the distant stars. John shut the lantern-slide and they stood i
n the darkness among the trees along the wall of the college barn, where Fairfield had met with goodness only knew how many young ladies in his short career. Nothing below the level of the sky was visible, save that single light out in the midst of the Yard. John’s breath was a steady whisper beside her, and his arm circled her waist, his strength surprising. Katy’s hand stole into Abigail’s free one, chilled in the night. A bird cried somewhere in the trees.

  Then silence.

  The distant light went out.

  Abigail’s breath caught. She started forward; John’s arm tightened around her: “Give them a moment to get away from him.”

  But she knew if Charley had the freedom of his own limbs he’d immediately start looking for them, would get lost in the long grass . . .

  Then a rifle-shot cracked, like thunder in the darkness. Then another and another. Abigail gasped as if cold water had doused her—somewhere a man cried out . . .

  Sam. Dear God. Dear God—

  She tore the lantern out of John’s hand and the two of them were running, running toward where the light had been. John shouted, “Nab—!” and his hand caught hers in the darkness, and then, “Charley!”

  Don’t be an idiot, John, he’ll try to run toward us and get lost—

  “Charley!” she screamed. “Charley, we’re here—!”

  Shouting ahead of them, in the direction of the Sever orchards, and another gun fired, and then, thready in the blackness, a child’s wail, “Ma!”

  “Stay where you are!” shouted John. “Stay where you are and GET DOWN!”

  I’m going to kill Sam. I’m going to kill him—