Sup with the Devil (13 page)

Abigail was silent, knowing what he said to be true. Then after a time she replied, “But the actions of the mob in no way alter the question of whether Englishmen here deserve the same rights that Englishmen deserve of Parliament and King.”

“Perhaps they do not,” replied Ryland. “Yet ’tis said,
He who sups with the Devil needs a long spoon
. However Mr. Sam Adams, and men like Josiah Quincy and Dr. Warren, may defend the question of their rights, they’ll find themselves treated like savages if they employ savages to frighten those who oppose them. And, I think, rightly so, for there is no way of knowing when those savages may choose to take matters into their own hands.”

Behind him, the study door opened and Messrs Heywood and Apthorp emerged, joking and waving behind them to Governor Hutchinson. Mr. Oliver said, “Mr. Brattle—” and the stout merchant who had been talking with Nabby bade her a courteous farewell and went in. Abigail rose, tucked the collection of love-letters back into her satchel, and found a silver bit in her pocket to tip the footman who had taken charge of her lantern—congratulating herself on her forethought as to how long she might have to wait for an interview—and Ryland stood also, to shake her hand.

“Mrs. Adams, please forgive me if I’ve spoken too vehemently—”

“You have said nothing untrue,” she responded. Certainly the men who’d gutted and looted the Governor’s house nine years ago—destroying much of his precious collection of manuscripts—had acted far beyond Sam’s intention. “And no fault lies in vehemence of sentiment. ’Tis our actions by which we are judged.” She added, “Good luck, in the matter of the Volunteers.”

He managed a wooden grin. “Thank you for your good wishes, m’am. I expect I shall continue as company sergeant—the position I held under Captain Fairfield—and I can do a great deal there in making sure that the Volunteers are fit to fight. Because you were quite right in your observation to Mr. Heywood: the infusion of armed men into a situation that has already turned violent will beget still more violence. And it is our duty, as subjects of the King, to keep matters from degenerating to such a pass that the French or the Spanish think themselves safe to come in and take over these colonies for themselves in the chaos that will follow.”

The butler entered again and in the hallway handed Abigail her lantern, the candle lighted already and shedding a wan glow barely stronger than that of a couple of fireflies. Abigail was glad that the way home led through familiar streets and wasn’t a long one. As the servant showed mother and daughter from the room, Abigail looked back over her shoulder to see Mr. Ryland patiently waiting, while Mr. Brattle emerged from the Governor’s study and another wealthy merchant in a bottle green coat was shown in, in his stead.

W
hat did you make of the books, Sam?” inquired Abigail, when Surry—the slave-woman who was the sole remnant, along with the ramshackle old house itself, of the modest fortune old Deacon Adams had passed along to his son Sam—showed her into Sam’s book-room the following morning.

Sam Adams looked as if he might have protested that he would never have been so impertinent as to pry into volumes left in his charge by his cousin’s wife, then grinned, held Abigail’s chair for her, and went to the secret panel to get the books. Upon her arrival in Boston from Cambridge late on Wednesday afternoon, Abigail had taken the seven volumes straight to Sam’s old yellow house on Purchase Street. Though John’s clerk—Horace’s and Abigail’s cousin—Thaxter had been for some months now living under the Adams roof, Abigail still felt sufficiently uneasy about George Fairfield’s murder to want to get the volumes out of her own hands as quickly as possible.

Ryland might say what he chose about the Sons of Liberty—and might indeed, she reflected uneasily, be right—but the coincidence of there being
two
sources of Arabic documents in the colony within the past two weeks was a trifle difficult to swallow.

Besides, Sam was the only person she knew positively had secret panels in his house. Cellar to attic, there was probably enough treasonable material cached here and there—books, pamphlets, correspondence with the Crown’s opponents in other colonies, and the true names of a hundred authors of sedition—to blow the roof off the Houses of Parliament. She guessed the hidden compartment beside the mantel in his book-room was one of a dozen.

“Not a solitary thing.” Sam set the books carefully on the desk between them: a folio edition, four quarto-sized volumes, and two octavos, their leather bindings cracked, agedark, and bearing signs of having been gnawed by mice. “Three of the Arabic volumes bear the imprint of the Medici Press in Rome. I had no idea typefaces existed in Arabic—I assume for the benefit of Christians in the Turkish Empire. We would have to have Dr. Warren”—he named a mutual friend and fellow member of the Sons of Liberty—“pass judgment on the chemistry and astronomy texts, but they must be shockingly outdated.”

He passed his big, square hand gently over the cover of the folio, and Abigail remembered that in his youth, Sam Adams had also been a student at Harvard and had acquired there—along with a taste for fiery politics and the Rights of Man—the fascination with books shared by so many questing minds.

“Where did you come by them?”

“My nephew Horace purchased the Arabic texts from a woman named Narcissa Seckar,” began Abigail.

“Good lord, not old Malachi Seckar’s wife? I can’t imagine the old boy letting his wife sell so much as the kitchen drippings without his permission—”

“He didn’t.” Abigail gingerly opened one of the quartos, studied the curious loops and squiggles that surrounded a woodcut of a horse’s backside, elaborately detailed. Presumably not the legend of Alexander. “She sold these upon his death—I understand, in order to get money to live on, her husband having bequeathed everything else he owned to the College.”

“That sounds like the old—er—gentleman. Everything?” Sam’s square, friendly face clouded. “She should have sued. John would have pried a living out of the College for her—”

“Indeed he would have. Just as well he knew nothing of it, for we’d probably have had to send Johnny to Princeton rather than Harvard as a result. In any case, these were hers—or rather, her grandfather’s—”

“Wasn’t he a pirate or something?”

It was Abigail’s turn to startle. “Not to my knowledge. According to Governor Hutchinson—whom I called upon last night for a perfectly legitimate reason,” she added, as Sam’s frown returned in earnest at the name, “Barthelmy Whitehead was a slave-trader and a merchant, but a pirate I hadn’t heard. Why,” she inquired thoughtfully, “did you say pirate?”

“Oh, ’twas a great joke when I was at Harvard. That for all Seckar’s thunderings in chapel about how nine-tenths of us were going straight to Hell, not for anything we’d done or resisted, but because God in his infinite wisdom had positively determined that we should do so, before the beginning of time for His Own Ineffable Purposes—and there was some frightful argument about whether this decision was active or passive and whether it had taken place before or after the Fall of the Angels—for all his condemnation of
us
, the Reverend Log-In-Thine-Own-Eye Seckar’s wife was descended from a pirate. We used to think it a huge jest to chalk a skull and crossbones on the door of his study, just to hear him curse at the servants.”

“And he probably went home and took his rage out on his wife. ’Tis odd,” Abigail continued, “that you should speak of a pirate in connection with the books. Because there’s a very strange story attached to them.”

She hesitated, studying Sam’s face—already lined, the gray eyes watchful but bearing no trace of sleeplessness, for all the waiting dread that had settled on the city.
If he was anything like John
, she reflected wearily,
he could probably sleep through the Lisbon earthquake
. . .

“Are you familiar,” she asked slowly, “with a young gentleman named George Fairfield?”

“That young Tory jackanapes who’s got up a troop of mounted militia?”

“The same.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “He was killed Tuesday night, wasn’t he?”

“He was.”

She saw his expression change as he realized the direction of her question.: “Oh, for God’s sake, Nab—!”

“’Tis what they’re saying.”

“’Tis what
who’s
saying? We’re not the Assassins, Nab. I promise you, masked patriots don’t lie in wait for every young imbecile who takes it into his head to get himself a King’s Commission by raising a troop of horse that’ll likely schism itself into insignificance the next time the father of one of them cheats the father of another over a land-deal. The countryside is full of them.”

He made a movement to pick up the folio, then set it down, regarding her with troubled eyes. “What evidence do they have?”

“None that I know of. Yet the man they’ve arrested for the deed—the dead boy’s servant—is to my mind as innocent as my son Johnny. And there is something most curious going on.” And, a trifle hesitantly—one never knew what Sam was going to do with any piece of information one gave him—she related what Horace had told her about Mrs. Lake’s disgraceful document, about the events of Tuesday night, and the sudden indisposition of four Harvard students on Wednesday morning. “Does it not seem to you that
not
having found what she sought—or all of what she sought—in the account of Captain Morgan’s and Mistress Pitts’s embezzlement of Crown funds, this Mrs. Lake or her scar-faced henchmen are now in quest of other volumes from the same source? I have written Narcissa Seckar—she lives in Medfield—asking for the favor of an interview, to ascertain that Mrs. Lake’s Arabic document was indeed connected with the only other source of texts in that language that we know of in the colony: I hope to receive a reply tomorrow.”

“And you think that this Mrs. Lake—or one of her henchmen—knew only that young Fairfield had gotten books from the same source, not knowing what they might be.” Abigail could almost see the flash and flicker of thought passing through his eyes. “Who’s Mrs. Lake?”

“I’d hoped you might know someone of that name.”

He shook his head and opened the folio. “Geof. Whitehead,” he read the large, rather crooked signature that sprawled, in faded ink, across the title page of
The Sceptical Chymist
. “Sixteen eighty-two. The name isn’t familiar—Mrs. Lake’s, I mean—and probably isn’t her own—”

“I’d thought of that, yes.”

“But I’ll make enquiries. Embezzlement of the Crown treasury of Jamaica—”

“Horace is recopying what he can remember of the document,” said Abigail. Having paged completely through the quarto on horse-doctoring, she opened its front cover and ran her hand over the rather mildewed marbled paper of its inner binding, but she found no evidence that anything had been hidden beneath it. Nor had anything been written on it or on any of the blank pages that made up the ends of the last signature. “His memory is excellent—”

“There are notes in the back of the Paracelsus,” provided Sam, who had evidently gone over the volumes with some care. “In English, Latin, Spanish, and what I think is Algonquian, which the writer—I presume Geof. Whitehead, whoever he was—seems to use interchangeably. And that thin quarto with the red cover is all notes—mostly about chemical experiments, the position of stars as they progress through the ecliptic, where he goes to harvest witch hazel, and how long it takes cranberries to progress from first leaf to jam on his breakfast table. Nothing about pirate treasure . . .”

But there was a soft thoughtfulness in the way he said those last words, and when Abigail looked up sharply at him, she saw a distant glimmer in his eyes.

“Did you have a look about young Fairfield’s rooms?”

“I did. And found naught but a great quantity of tailors’ and bootmakers’ bills—which I shall pass along to Mr. Fairfield, Senior, when he arrives next month—and love-notes from about a dozen young ladies.” The drawer had also contained several drafts on Boston moneylenders, a huge quantity of gaming-vowels, three promissory notes that young Fairfield had signed—hair-raisingly, for other men’s debts, including one for Joseph Ryland—and two letters from his father, decrying his spendthrift ways in terms that gave Abigail little hope for liberality or pity where Diomede was concerned. But these were not Sam’s business.

Nor were the love-letters that had been in Fairfield’s pocket when he’d died—nor the note in the same dainty hand begging for an assignation behind the barn.

“You didn’t tell Hutchinson any of what you’ve told me, did you?” Sam asked at length. “The man’s a serpent; he couldn’t crawl straight if he wanted to . . .
and
he knows everything there is to know about who did what in this colony ninety years ago. He’ll know who Geof Whitehead was, and if he was burying pirate treasure . . .”

“I didn’t tell him that there were other books, no. I had to tell him of those in Mr. Fairfield’s room. As the slave Diomede stands in peril of his life, I didn’t think it proper to withhold evidence. I left him with the impression that they had not been included in the Harvard bequest because of their nature, which I understand to have been eyeball-scorchingly obscene.”