Sup with the Devil (6 page)

Yet for all its superficial resemblance to the little towns of the Massachusetts countryside—her family’s village of Weymouth, or Braintree where John’s mother and brothers lived—Harvard was different. In Weymouth or Braintree, everyone had known one another since childhood, and a strange face was instantly noted and commented upon. Hers certainly had been when nine years ago John had brought her to that little brown farmhouse as a bride, although everyone knew Parson Smith’s three daughters and his gadabout son . . .

People came and went from Harvard all the time. Praying Indians like Weyountah from converted villages in Rhode Island. Gaudy exotics like St-John Pugh. She reflected uneasily on the openness of the buildings of Harvard College, the ease with which anyone could ascend any of those staircases . . .

“Whoa!” Diomede drew rein. “M’am, your pardon, I beg you, but it looks like Sassy’s picked up a stone.”

And indeed, even as the little mare slowed her pace, Abigail could see she was favoring her off fore.

It crossed her mind very briefly that the delay would cost her her return, but she said at once, “No, of course—”

She took the reins as the servant sprang down and hastened to the mare’s head. She was carrying it low, Abigail observed worriedly, and holding her hoof from the ground—
She must really be hurt
. . .

Diomede worked gingerly, testing and probing in the woodland twilight. When he came back to the chaise, even in the gloom, she read consternation on his face.

“Is she all right?”

“She’ll
be
all right, m’am,” said the servant. “But she’s cut the frog of her hoof—there must have been a nail or something in the road—”

Abigail sprang down from the chaise at once. “Poor little lady,” she said. “And such a nuisance—but you know, I think I rather pushed my luck talking to those boys as late as I did, and having to walk back to Cambridge is no more than I deserve. Will she be all right to be led? I suppose we could leave the chaise here for a short time . . .”

The man relaxed—as a slave, reflected Abigail, he had probably witnessed the human limits of bad manners and petulance among those who considered a) that their convenience ranked higher than an injured animal’s pain and b) that if they missed the ferry, it must be the fault of the driver. “I don’t think there’s call for that, m’am.” He looked around him at the darkening woods. “It goes without saying that Mr. Fairfield will pay for a bed for you at the Golden Stair. I hope it’s no inconvenience—”

“The only inconvenience,” replied Abigail grandly, falling into step with Diomede as he turned the mare’s head back toward Cambridge, “will be to my aunt and uncle, who will be obliged to look after my children tonight.” In the shadowy trees, wrens and thrushes, mockingbirds and starlings all twittered and whistled as if to make sure of their territories before they settled down for the night. A breeze riffled the leaves, filled the world with the soft green scent of hay. “Of course I shall sleeplessly weep the whole night through at spending the hours apart from them,” she added with a blitheness that made the servant grin, “yet I trust that somehow I shall survive the experience of not separating Johnny and Charley from killing one another when Charley hides Johnny’s toys, and not being woken up twice and three times by Tommy wanting a story or a drink of water—”

“Oh, m’am,” said Diomede, and clasped his hands to his heart, “please don’t go on—I’m afraid I shall weep.”

“I do beg your pardon,” said Abigail.

They led the limping Sassy the two miles back to Cambridge in perfect amity.

Diomede left Abigail in one of the college parlors while he took Sassy back to the stables; in a few moments George Fairfield came running in, green robe billowing and Horace at his heels. “M’am, I am covered with shame—!”

“Nonsense! I was telling Diomede, I look upon the whole business as an excellent opportunity to get a complete night’s rest, something one doesn’t, you know, if one has three sons under the age of seven.”

“Well, you’ll have rest at the Golden Stair on my account—or rather my Pa’s, since he’s the one who settles them all,” added the young man with a grin. “Poor old Sassy! Thank the Lord, Diomede saw her falter as quick as he did. She’s taken no hurt—the man’s a wonder with horses. With just about everything, come to that . . . I could have taken a whip to that brute Pugh for telling me only yesterday that I’d best sell him off cheap because he pilfers my liquor now and then. Lord, I’d trust Diomede with a bottle a lot sooner than I’d trust Pugh or either of those so-called grooms of his—wild savages straight off the boat from Africa! Diomede was born in Williamsburg and raised a gentleman,
and
his father before him!” He tucked Abigail’s cloak around her shoulders and sprang to open the parlor door for her, seeming blithely unaware of any incongruity in the fact that he could describe a man old enough to be his father as a
gentleman
and yet possess the legal right to sell him off like a mule. “His manners are a sight better than Pugh’s, anyway—though I suppose the same could be said about Sassy.”

Mrs. Squills at the Golden Stair didn’t appear a bit surprised at Abigail’s reappearance with the two scholars: “The way those boys were talking to you, I knew you’d never get to the ferry in time,” she said, her smile as she curtseyed making her look much older—she was missing several of her teeth. “Mr. Horace’s aunt, I think Diomede said? Now, go along with you,” she added briskly, flapping her apron at Abigail’s escort. “Before you’re fined for being out of your rooms after dark,
and
in a tavern—”

“They wouldn’t fine me for being with my
aunt
,” protested Horace, and the tiny innwife’s face flexed into an exaggerated expression of astonishment.

“There’s another college here in Cambridge that you’ve been going to all this time without telling me?” she demanded. “Because the Dean of
Harvard
would fine you for being out with your own
mother
, let alone an aunt . . .
And
I know fullwell about the little minx
you’ve
got waiting for you out behind the stables,” she added, with a glare at Fairfield.

“I—?” Fairfield pressed his hand to his heart and raised his eyebrows in innocent bafflement.

“Run along with you!” She shook her head as Fairfield made a dancing-master’s leg to Abigail and saluted her hand before he strode off, laughing, across the dark of the Common, Horace trotting loyally at his heels. “They’re good boys,” she added, leading Abigail toward the stair. “For all they drive an honest woman mad with their, ‘I’ll pay you next quarter for a batter-cake today.’ I don’t know which is worse, George with his lady friends or Horace with his nose forever in a book!” She collected a couple of abandoned beer mugs from the table, as she passed it, to add to her tray. “Well, ’tis the peskiest kitten that grows to the best mouser, you know. I wouldn’t give tuppence for a lad that didn’t run about the town seeing what he can get himself into, would you?”

Abigail smiled, thinking of her own too-serious Johnny’s hair-raising experiments with building mousetraps and measuring the current of the tides in the Mill Pond. “Nobody’s ever shown me a lad that didn’t,” she responded, “so I wouldn’t know.”

Her mind returned to Johnny as she made ready for bed (“Now I’ve a clean hairbrush that I keep for those who’re taken by circumstance unexpectedly . . . And let me lend you a shift for tomorrow, Mrs. Adams—I’ve one just laundered, and I know you’ll want a clean one in the morning . . . No, no, just send it back when you’re home . . .”). Unfair, of course, to abandon her children to Pattie and Aunt Eliza—to whom Pattie would unfailingly take them, once it was clear that their mother had missed the ferry. Six-year-old Johnny had an instinctive dislike of change, and little Tommy—at eighteen months—was of an age to want things to remain the same . . . and Nabby would worry. Abigail wished, as she brushed out the raven cloak of hair that fell to her hips and braided it for the night, that there was a way that she could have sent them a note, at least, reassuring them, though it would be obvious what had happened . . .

In time, she hoped, Johnny would be coming to Harvard, as his father had. Abigail hopped quickly between the spotless sheets, blew out the candle . . .

But in ten years, she could not keep herself from asking, would the college still be in existence? A year ago, or two, the question would have been unthinkable. Harvard College was the best and oldest school in the colonies. Yet in throwing the King’s tea into the harbor, the Sons of Liberty had effectively declared their rebellion against the King’s authority. Only a fool or a child would talk himself into believing that the retribution for this behavior wouldn’t be severe . . .

And her acquaintance with the Sons of Liberty convinced her that whatever the King did, their reaction would be equally violent.

As she drifted toward sleep, she heard again, on the edges of her dreams, the angry shouting of mobs that had at various times attacked the shops and businesses of men who’d denounced the Sons. Remembered the sparkle in Sam’s eyes when he’d related to her how he’d egged on a mob to even sack the house of the Governor: the building had been gutted, and the collected records of the first years of the colony, painstakingly collected by that scholarly gentleman in order to write the first comprehensive history of Massachusetts, had been torn and trampled in the gutters . . .

Remembered, too, the crack of guns in King Street, the black pools of blood in the blue evening snow. It was too easy to picture in her mind the college buildings in flame or occupied by troops . . .

Though she had knelt by the bed to say her prayers before undressing, Abigail propped herself on the pillows a little and again folded her hands.
Whatever paths they tread
, she prayed,
ten years from this night or with the coming of this night’s dawn, You have already laid out for them, for their good and Your best purposes
.
But as their mother, I beg of You, keep them safe, hold their hands in Yours . . .

She must have fallen asleep in midprayer—as she almost invariably did when she prayed in bed with the featherbed up to her chin—because the next thing she knew, it was morning, and Mrs. Squills was knocking on the door of her room with the news that George Fairfield had been murdered in the night.

T
hey’re saying Diomede did it.” Horace’s face was white as paper, save his eyes, which were swollen and red—he had been weeping for his friend when Abigail had come into the Golden Stair’s private parlor.

“Who’s saying?” She took the chair on the other side of the small fire. Beyond the window, mist still lay on the Common, and the birds she’d heard twittering themselves to sleep last night when George was alive were waking in every tree and shrub.

“The Dean, and Dr. Langdon—the President of the College—and the sheriff, Mr. Congreve. He was drunk—Diomede was—but just because a man’s had a dram or two . . .” Horace broke off in some confusion, with an expression of helpless guilt, remembering no doubt the numerous family discussions in which the consumption of alcohol was roundly denounced as the root of considerably more evil than grew from the greed for money.

“Of course not!” It said much, in Abigail’s opinion, that Horace’s tolerance for the foibles of others had widened to that extent. Two years ago the boy had been an unconscionable prig on the subject.
One gift of a Harvard education . . .

“Diomede would never have raised his hand against George.” These last words came out as a whisper, and Horace sank into the chair in which he’d been sitting when Abigail—hastily dressed and tying a fresh, clean, and borrowed cap of Mrs. Squills’s over her hair—had hastened into the room.

With astonishing good sense, the landlady—who must have been nearly as upset over the murder as Horace was—brought in a tray of coffee things. Abigail poured a cup for herself and hot water for her nephew, to which she added a little honey. “Drink that.” When Mrs. Squills went out, through the open door of the ordinary blew the voices of men discussing the crime:
murdering nigger—drunk as David’s sow—knife still in his hand
. . .

“What happened? You’ll feel better. Who’s there now?”

“Weyountah,” whispered the boy. “He waked to the sound of George shouting at someone—not shouting, really, just raised voices . . . His room is across the landing. Mine is above Weyountah’s—Mr. Beaverbrook from New York is above George, and you couldn’t wake Beaver if you set his rooms on fire. But George often shouts at Diomede, you know . . .” He put his hand quickly to his mouth as if to catch back the present tense.

“What time was that?”

Horace shook his head. “When the bell rang for chapel this morning, Weyountah went across and knocked at the door—We all have to work to make sure George gets to chapel. It’s Diomede’s job, but the last two times Dio had a few drinks, George was fined, and Dr. Langdon warned him . . . So either Weyountah or I will check. When Diomede didn’t answer, Weyountah went in and found him asleep—”