Sup With the Devil aam-3

by Barbara Hamilton

  “Er—thank you, sir.” The valet looked slightly disconcerted at the idea of joining the patriot militia so soon after riding in his master’s company with the Loyal Volunteers, but—wisely, Abigail thought—held his peace.

  “Tell me truthfully,” said Abigail, once they were on the road again toward the Seckar farm. “You’re the only man, among all those who’re saying what you ought to do, who actually knows old Mr. Charles Fairfield: what are the chances that he’ll listen to testimony that says your master was murdered by someone else? When I’ve spoken with Mistress Seckar, I hope to be able to put a name on the true killer—but will Mr. Fairfield listen? Out of all of this, what would you have?”

  “What I’d have, of course,” replied the slave slowly, “is for Mr. Charles to be so struck by your proofs that he’ll take me home to where I can be with my Maggie again, and our girls . . . But to tell you the truth, Mrs. Adams, even if he said he agreed, I’d be afraid to go. Because once we’d get home, sure as grass grows in the spring, there’d be some among his friends who’d start in saying how I’d actually done it—and them not knowing a thing about it, only that they’ve been afraid all their lives that they’d die at the hands of one of their own slaves. And then I couldn’t flee. Yet I know if I just run off, when he gets back to Albemarle County, Mr. Charles will sell my Maggie and our girls, and I’d never find them, not if I searched a hundred years.”

  “He won’t,” said Katy firmly. “Because when he gets here, I’m going to start proceedings—that is,” she added, “if Mr. Adams is agreeable—to be recognized as George’s wife with interest in you and Maggie and your daughters . . . And he can’t very well sell them if there’s a lawsuit going on.”

  Diomede grinned, a little wanly. “That’s kind of you, m’am,” he said. “And a good thought, for no man wants to buy a slave that might get him brought to law. Yet I think, to stand a chance of winning that suit, you’re going to need all the pirate treasure we can find and more.”

  The Seckar farm was very much as Katy had described it: ruinous with neglect, the miles of winding lane that connected it with the Concord Road a river of potholes, while its aged owner concentrated on the salvation of his soul. Abigail and Katy both climbed down from the chaise after the first few yards, and were taken up behind Weyountah and Horace, leaving Diomede with Sassy and the vehicle. “One would think the man had little taste for company,” murmured Weyountah, glancing about him at the woods that closed in around the neglected track.

  “Or company had little taste for him,” retorted Katy with a grin.

  Reuel Seckar proved to be a gaunt giant of a woman, her untidy hair dirty beneath a dirty cap, her dress spotted with tallow and food. She and her cowed and delicately built sister-in-law—brother Genesis’s wife—emerged from the house when the visitors first came clear of the woods, and Mistress Reuel strode toward them like some gaunt Titaness from an earlier phase of the world, her white hair flying like some grimy sybil’s and bare feet slopping in the clayey mud. By the look of the house, Genesis either shared his brother’s feelings about household help making women lazy, or more likely, he couldn’t get anyone to stay. When Abigail brought up Narcissa Seckar’s name, Reuel sniffed with contempt.

  “The whore of Babylon,” she said. “Given over to Mammon and to chasing the things of this world, and greedy as a Jew: What profit it for a man—aye, or a woman!—to gain the whole world and to lose her soul? And defiant,” she added bitterly. “Sweet-mouthed as a honeycake, and a heart rotted with Satan’s pride and defiance against the Lord.”

  Abigail—whose slender experience with Jews had exposed none noticeably more greedy than some good Congregationalist slave-traders she had encountered—bit back the urge to remind this sour-faced bissom that she’d spent thirty years of her life under a roof that belonged to that Babylonian whore, and replied merely, “What a relief for you, then, to be no longer obliged to share a home with her.”

  The glare that Mistress Reuel shot Abigail amply informed her that Brother Genesis—whatever his other sins—had not been pleased to take his sister in when he’d thought he’d gotten her safely palmed off on Brother Malachi. Heaven alone knew what their mutual mother had been like, God rest her soul.

  “I’ve no time for idleness,” said Mistress Seckar. But instead of turning back toward the kitchen, she snapped at the woman who waited by the kitchen door—white-haired and almost toothless, with the bludgeoned air of one who barely realizes anymore that she is human—“Get back to the stew, or Gen’ll be in a passion when he gets home.”

  The other woman moved heavily off.

  “What is it you want?” Reuel glared at Weyountah, with his long black braids and his hunting-shirt, then transferred her scornful stare to Katy, sitting à l’Amazone behind him, her slim brown ankles visible beneath her rucked-up skirt. “Brother Genesis don’t hold with visitors, and he’s his meditations to do ’fore he sits to his dinner.”

  Abigail wondered if this woman did meditations also, rather than clearing up the piles of husks, peelings, cores, and cobs heaped knee-high around the rear door of the house. “I took the liberty of coming to see you,” she went on matter-of-factly, “because my husband is attempting to trace the books that Mrs. Seckar sold: the ones found behind the wall in the laundry-room.”

  “Greedy slut.” Mistress Seckar’s face darkened with suffusing blood. “The books were part of the house, as ’twas willed to my brother, God rest him, by Mr. Whitehead—and a good Christian man he was who had the strength to abide the Lord’s law. Threatened me, she did—threatened to go to law, bare-faced as Jezebel at her window—”

  Horace looked as if he were going to point out that Jezebel had not been bare-faced at her window but in fact had been comprehensively painted, but Katy—Weyountah’s horse was close enough beside his for her to do so—kicked Horace in the ankle and he said, “Ow!” instead.

  “For shame!” cried Abigail—of Narcissa Seckar, not of Katy—and added, “And with her husband dead beside her in her bed! I understand her poor husband had had offers for them?”

  “Devil-books.” The old woman’s lip lifted to show bare brown gum adorned by a single canine. “Wrote by the Devil, and give to that Devil that hid ’em. There isn’t but one book in the whole of the world that won’t damn the soul of him that reads it, and that’s the Scripture. Gen tried to tell Malachi that, and Mother . . . As stubborn and willful as she was, in his way.” She shook her head, and added, with a distinctly medieval relish, “And he’s burning in Hell now on the unquenchable pyre of his own books. He’d never turn loose of them, though he saw right enough that those Devil-books were evil, and burn those he should have, with their filthy pictures and their heathen writing. I always thought that sweet that Mr. Ryland brought us that night was to butter him up, to get him to sell them books—”

  “Mr. Ryland?” Abigail tried not to raise her brows in surprise.

  “Governor’s lapdog.” Mistress Seckar nearly spit the words. “A lying weasel. Hutchinson is the son of witches, that’s never touched nothing that didn’t turn to vileness. I wouldn’t put it beyond that smooth-faced hypocrite Ryland to have poisoned that frumenty to get at the books for that heretic Hutchinson. For he had ’em in the end, all but eight or ten.”

  “He did indeed,” agreed Abigail thoughtfully. “All but eight or ten.”

  Twenty-five

  What an archwife!” said Weyountah, when they were on the rutted lane once more, working their way back to the road. “I wonder she isn’t poisoned by her own spit.”

  “Mulier ira Jovis,” added Horace sententiously, then glanced across at Katy and blushed in confusion, though Abigail guessed that if annoyed, Katy could outdo many women in the ira Jovis line.

  Katy murmured, “Mr. Ryland—”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Horace, baffled. “Ryland, kill George for—for money? Or just the rumor of money? Not to mention shuffling off the blame on poor old Dio! He didn’t have a bean, of course
, but he would never—”

  “Not for money, I don’t think,” said Abigail slowly. “For silence after George woke and saw him standing in his room—to protect his position in the college, his position with Hutchinson—”

  “His Excellency would never have ordered Ryland to—”

  “No,” said Abigail. “In fact I think he’d have been horrified, had he learned his protégé had broken into another student’s rooms—particularly if all that could be visibly proved was that Ryland was trying to lay his hands on a couple of singularly disgraceful books. If Hutchinson knew nothing—of the treasure, of the books, of Ryland’s attempts to have translated the one handwritten document that he was able to find at Seckar’s that looked like a cipher—if Ryland was not entirely certain even that the treasure existed but hoped to present his patron with a fait accompli . . .”

  “He may very well have done what he did.” Weyountah spoke without taking his eyes from the dappled depths of the woods around them. “Once he’d killed a fellow student, he had to cover his tracks, even if it meant accusing an innocent man.”

  “And if George thought Ryland was looking for something else there,” said Katy softly, and tightened her grip around the Indian’s waist as the horse hopped across a little stream that had washed out the path. “They’d quarrelled over me the day before, George told me—Ryland told George he had no business meddling with tavern-wenches when Sally Woodleigh was breaking her heart over him and everybody in the Volunteers was watching. The captain must be worthy of respect in all things, he said. George told him to go soak his head. When he saw Ryland in his room—”

  “He shouted,” finished Weyountah. “And sprang out of bed—especially if Ryland had the desk open—”

  “And of course the books weren’t there,” said Abigail. “Because Mr. Pugh had already been in and stolen them before George even returned.”

  When they reached the road where Diomede waited, Diomede listened, appalled, to what they had learned and what they surmised, but he confirmed what Katy had said. “I didn’t know it was you they spoke of, m’am,” he said, as the chaise moved off toward Medfield. “But it’s true Mr. Ryland is in love with Miss Woodleigh, and he was angry for her sake. Angry, too, that Mr. George was ‘bringing down’ the Volunteers in the eyes of folks like Miss Woodleigh’s father and Mr. Lechemere and Mr. Vassall. It was far from the first time Mr. Ryland had spoken to Mr. George about how he behaved.”

  “It must have gone to his heart,” murmured Abigail, “to see the militia troop he worked for and the woman he loved, both taken so easily by someone who was behaving so unworthily—”

  “That’s still no reason to have Mrs. Lake and her bullyboys attempt to murder me.”

  “I’m not sure Ryland knew anything about it.” Abigail glanced up at her nephew, jogging beside the chaise on his fat and amiable mare with dust sticking to the mosquito-grease on his face. “He may not have—even as elegant gentlemen like Mr. Hancock and my uncle Isaac don’t really want to know anything about what happens to a Tory when he’s tarred and feathered. Ryland would know about Old Beelzebub from the moment word got around that the books had been found in his house. And from associating with the Governor’s household, Ryland would certainly have known about Mrs. Morgan and the Avalon. Perhaps he knew also about Mr. Chamberville’s house. He may have thought Mrs. Morgan would bring Horace to the Avalon to do his translation . . . and he may not even have known she had the kind of henchmen one would expect to find, working in the stables of a house of accommodation—”

  “Well, he jolly well should have known.” Katy raised her head from puzzling out the pages of the notebook.

  “I don’t expect he had ever been to the Avalon himself, or to anyplace like it. But once Dubber Grimes got wind of the treasure—and since Mrs. Morgan made herself copies of both the original Arabic document and Horace’s translation, it looks like she planned to go treasure-hunting herself almost from the start—Ryland had no more control of how the hunt was going to be conducted than Sam had when he stirred up that mob to attack Governor Hutchinson’s house back nine years ago over the stamp tax. Sam doesn’t want to admit it—and Ryland didn’t want to admit it—but these things do get away from one.”

  “And all the henchmen knew,” said Weyountah, “was that it was connected with a code . . . and that the code was to be found in one of the books.”

  “So is there a treasure?” Katy wanted to know. “At the end of all that?”

  Abigail was silent for a time, watching the sun dapple through the trees on Sassy’s dark flanks. “I think so,” she said at length. “Though perhaps not the sort of treasure that Mr. Grimes and his companions thought they’d find.”

  It was growing dark when they reached Framingham, famished and exhausted. At the single tavern there, Abigail asked, first, after word from Boston—had any message come concerning the King’s reply? When the answer came in the negative, she asked after the countryside west of Medfield, and did my good host or his good wife—or the half-dozen members of the local militia who’d come in at the end of their chores to make the same enquiry about affairs in Boston—know the whereabouts of Deckle’s Farm? Her sister—“That’s Mrs. Deckle,” she explained earnestly—had writ her that it lay about a day’s journey on from the village and that ’twas near a stone Indian ruin, or maybe ’twas the Spanish that had built it . . .

  “Spanish?” The innkeeper shook his head. “Not never heard of Spanish in this district, m’am—”

  “That wouldn’t be the Devil’s Castle, would it?” A very young militiaman looked up from his ale.

  “Is it a castle, then?” exclaimed Abigail in assumed surprise. “I’d heard, ’twas built by the Indians—”

  “Narh, Indians never built in stone, m’am.” (Abigail already knew this.) “Never heard about the Spanish, neither. But there’s supposed to be a stone ruin over near Hassanamisco Pond where there was a Nipmuc village onc’t upon a time. Never seen it myself—”

  Enquiries for Hassanamisco Pond elicited several sets of mutually conflicting directions, most of which began, “You take the Grafton Road . . .” and ended anywhere in the countryside. Descriptions of the countryside between Framingham and Grafton were not encouraging.

  “Is there a cranberry bog nearabouts there?” asked Katy, and that brought better results. Three of the militiamen testified to the location of Shelby’s Bog, but two-three miles from the Grafton Road.

  “And Shelby is the name of the man who owns the land?” inquired Abigail.

  “Not now it’s not. ’Twas the feller who took it over after King Philip’s War, after the Nipmucs was wiped out there, so I’ve heard—”

  “Friend of the Governor in them days,” put in somebody’s white-haired grandfather.

  And another, derisively, “Ain’t it always?”

  “Had the records changed, I heard, to prove ’twas always his,” confided the oldster. “Didn’t get no good of it. ’Tis bad, hard land.”

  “Good cranberries, though . . .”

  Bad, hard land, as Abigail feared it would, translated to, few farms, much woods, impassable roads, and nobody within ten square miles to ask after the whereabouts of Shelby’s Bog. Most settlement in this part of the colony had gravitated toward the easier land of the Blackstone Valley to the south. In the course of the following morning, the two farms they encountered, at the ends of overgrown lanes from the not-very-wellkept Grafton Road, appeared to have been burned out by King Philip’s Whampanoag warriors a hundred years previously and not rebuilt. The track branched and branched again, the chaise wheels sinking in the clayey muck. Abigail watched the angle of the sunlight slanting through the woods, and with an acid sense of urgency, she calculated when they must turn back in order to make Boston by nightfall. We must find the place. Find the treasure, or prove that there is nothing there.

  Else we will know no peace . . .

  Ahead of the chaise, Weyountah rode imperturbably, drawing rein from time to time t
o listen to the woodlands that were growing steadily thicker around them, though Abigail heard nothing but the twittering of birds, the rustle of the wind. He was listening, she thought, as a hunter listens—or a warrior entangled in the endless, ancient woodland fights between tribe and tribe.

  He had turned his back on that world, she thought, looking up at the tall figure in his hunting-shirt and boots. And she wondered why. A world where his family clung to the old ways; a world in which visions counted for more than the theorizing of mathematicians and the spirits of the land clung tight to the hearts of its children, holding them in corn-patch and longhouse forever.

  He had made his choice and refused to be part of that past. At what cost, Abigail could only guess.

  But turn away as he might, thought Abigail, the old world of the forest was in his blood nevertheless. As they moved on again down the less travelled of those forking traces, she could see him sorting out the sounds of birds, the scent of the wind in the woods. As a child he’d hunted and learned what the land should sound like if all were safe.

  “Oh, thank Heavens!” exclaimed Katy. “The cranberry bog at last!”

  Sunlight brightened through the trees. Bees hummed over milkweed and marsh marigold, and the heavy, peaty smell of wet ground and standing muck breathed through the sweeter scents of the woods. Abigail drew rein, and Katy produced old Beelzebub’s notebook again, marked in a dozen places last night as the five of them had sat around the lamp in a corner of the ordinary of the inn at Framingham until the innkeeper had good-naturedly told them he was banking the fire and putting up the shutters for the night.

  “The village should be no more than a mile or two northwest of here . . .”

  “And it being noon,” replied Abigail mildly, unwrapping the lunch that Mr. Buckminster at the tavern had put up for them, “if you can determine which direction is northwest—”