Sup with the Devil (9 page)

 

 

S
heriff Congreve led Diomede away to the town jail while everyone piled and crowded after the stricken scholars as they were carried into the parlor of Massachusetts Hall. Since one of them was Mr. Lowth, Pugh and Jasmine Blossom had apparently lost any interest in guarding the staircase; even as she turned from the window, Abigail heard some of them coming up the stairs.
They’ll trample over the room like cattle . . .

She dropped behind as Langdon and Perry followed everyone out, then quickly turned down counterpane and sheet—she’d heard both John and her friend Joseph Warren speak of doing this with the victims of murder, and it made good sense to her—and caught up the paper knife, intending to compare the width of its blade with the size of the wounds. But as she turned back, she stopped, stood for a moment, and looked down into George’s face: that young man she’d met but yesterday, that
personable young gentleman
, as Diomede had called him, who had talked of men as he’d found them, who’d never been able to tell Ajax son of Telamon from Ajax son of the other fellow, who’d come running from an assignation with a willing wench to make sure she, Abigail, was housed in the best inn of the town . . .

Someone killed him
, she thought, and her throat tightened suddenly, her eyes flooded with tears. The slight changes of mortality had already taken hold, so that his face was not so disturbing as a man’s new-dead. Her uneasy horror was gone, leaving only memory and pity.

Feet in the stairway; voices in the chamber.

What was it the Romans said?
Ultio prima, secundae lacrimae.
Vengeance first, then tears . . .

No
, she corrected herself, as she laid the blade against that strangely ivory-colored flesh. ’
Tis not vengeance I seek but salvation for the man who didn’t do this crime . . .

All four of the wounds looked a good half-inch wider than the width of the blade.

Swiftly, Abigail pulled down the young man’s nightshirt, drew up the coverlet, even as she heard the doctor’s voice cry angrily in the staircase, “Here, this won’t do!” She dunked her handkerchief in the water-pitcher and was wiping the last traces of blood from her fingers when Joseph Ryland came in.

“Are you finished here, Mrs. Adams? Dr. Perry has sent for a litter to carry poor George’s body to the infirmary—”

“What happened out there?”

The bachelor-fellow shook his head. “Lowth was suddenly taken queer, he said, and slumped down as if he’d been shot. In the next second Mosson went down, too—Waller and Blossom said they were feeling queer . . .”

Abigail stared at him for a moment, then said, “Oh, those wretches!” and dashed past him and out into the study.

The cut-glass rum-bottle that had stood next to Diomede’s bloodstained pallet had been tucked unobtrusively behind a chair. It was empty.

“And it serves them right!” she exclaimed. “Only now of course there’s no way of proving it—”

“Poison?” Ryland followed her, brow drawn down half in consternation, half in disbelief. “How could—?”

“
I have drugged their possets
, Lady Macbeth says.” Abigail sniffed at the carafe, but could smell only the overwhelming reek of rum. “More likely laudanum than poison—”

“Meant for George?”

“Those idiots,” said Weyountah, going to the window—meaning, Abigail guessed, Lowth and Jasmine and Waller and Mosson who’d thought it was so clever to sneak an extra drink while everyone was milling about . . . “’Twould serve them well if it
were
poison.”

Ryland and Abigail—carafe in hand—were already hurrying down the stairs.

In the parlor where Abigail had waited last night for young Fairfield, dark little Mr. Blossom was being plied with hot coffee while half-a-dozen masters and students were trying to revive Lowth and Mosson. The smell of burnt feathers and panic filled the air. “They’ve been poisoned!” cried Mr. Yeovil again, and Pugh shouted to a little freshman named Pinkstone—presumably, thought Abigail, his own luckless “fag”—to run fetch coffee from his own room, which was on the staircase of the new hall directly across the quadrangle from that of Fairfield, Weyountah, and Horace.

“They have not,” retorted Abigail, entering hard upon this line. “Mr. Blossom, did you drink the rum in the carafe in George’s room? I thought so. Mr. Waller?” A tall young man with a long, horsey face—sitting with his head between his knees in a circle of frightened acquaintances—jerked upright shakily and gazed at her with pupils narrowed to pinpricks, even in the gloom of the parlor.

“I did, too—” gasped another young man in a green robe. “I-I feel so queer . . .”

“I’m sure you do,” returned Abigail briskly. “There was laudanum in the rum, which would amply account for poor Diomede not waking up—”

“And for poor George—” cried someone else.

“The blackguard!” exclaimed another young gentleman. “To poison his master, then drink himself stupid in celebration—”

“Nonsense!” snapped Abigail, taken aback this interpretation of her evidence. “Fairfield was stabbed, for one thing, and for another, a killer would have to be stupid to take a drug like that before even getting out of the room—”

“It’s exactly what that nigger of mine would do,” remarked Pugh, straightening up from beside the pile of coats where Lowth lay. “Only he’d probably drink off half the rum before drugging it, to give himself a little Dutch courage—” He put his hands on his hips, regarded Abigail’s openmouthed indignation with some amusement. “They don’t think the way white people do, m’am,” he said. “You ask any man who’s grown up among ’em as I have. They don’t look ahead—not two minutes, not two feet. Like dealing with a lot of fouryear-olds.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

Pugh raised one eyebrow. “Got a lot of ’em in Boston, have you, m’am, to know ’em so well?”

And a man with the accent of the Carolinas affirmed, “Ours sure don’t think before they act.”

As she looked from face to face, Abigail was shocked to observe how many of these young men were nodding—some of them unwillingly, but accepting the judgment as it stood. Someone said, “Poor old George!” and someone else, “My Aunt Caro was killed by a nigger maid—”

“And what do you expect,” demanded Dr. Langdon, rising from beside Dr. Perry where both men had knelt beside the vaguely stirring Mr. Mosson, “when you have grown up in an atmosphere envenomed by the vice of slavery? When a poor Negro is driven to desperation by the ill-treatment of a vicious master—”

“Aunt Abigail—”

She was opening her mouth, breathless with anger at these assumptions about Diomede and anyone else of African descent, when Horace quietly touched her elbow.

“Aunt Abigail, I’m sorry, but . . . there is something missing from George’s room. Two books,” he said.

I
’m afraid they were not terribly edifying volumes.” Horace shyly pushed up his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “I only took note of them because—”

“You needn’t explain,” said Abigail kindly. The poor boy was only barely seventeen, and she recalled what her brother William had been like at . . . well, considerably younger than that. “And if they were as unedifying as all that, they might very well have gone the way of the rum.” She glanced back over her shoulder as they emerged from the parlor into the open quadrangle and reentered the hallway to mount Horace’s staircase. Even in here, Dr. Langdon’s thundering peroration on why Diomede must have done murder because of his degradation under slavery could be heard with damning clarity. “What were they?”

“Aretino’s
I Modi
, with the—er—illustrations by Raimondi,” stammered Horace. “And Brantôme’s
Les Vies des Dames Galantes
. Also illustrated.” His blush went from his hairline down under his neckcloth. Abigail thought his ears were going to catch fire. He must have looked over Fairfield’s shoulder at the illustrations, if no more. “And I don’t think they could have been sneaked out of the room by anyone in the crowd this morning. Weyountah was in the bedchamber with George the whole time.”

“Did he keep them in there?”

Horace nodded. “The desk has a false bottom in it,” he said simply.

And Weyountah explained, “There are no locks on the doors of the chambers, so people are always pilfering things. Nothing big—there’s not a man among us who would steal his neighbor’s money—but if a man has tea, or coffee beans, or has just had a package from home with something sweet in it, he’s likely to come back to his room and find less of it than there was when he went out. Of course no one is permitted spirits, so no one can report it if he comes back and finds his rum has been watered—”

“It’s one reason, I think, that seniors let us fags study in their rooms,” put in Horace. “So someone will be there, should they have something they’d rather didn’t disappear—though in truth, Aunt Abigail, it isn’t the nest of thieves we must sound like. For one thing, most of us are in the same lectures at the same times—”

“And for another,” added Weyountah, as they approached the staircase, “everybody gets to know everything, pretty much, and if someone goes about pocketing coffee beans, it doesn’t remain a secret for long.”

They stopped at the foot of the staircase door to let a small procession descend. Mr. Ryland, his faded crimson gown giving him the archaic look of a priest, walked ahead; behind him, four college servants in rough tweeds carried a stretcher covered with the blankets that Abigail recognized from George Fairfield’s bed. She moved to put her arm around Horace’s waist in comfort, then restrained herself, recalling that Ryland was the Fellow in charge of the Hall. No sense having the poor boy fined four shillings on top of everything else.

“Will Dr. Langdon write to George’s father?” she asked softly.

Horace nodded, unable to speak, and Weyountah said, “I imagine so, yes.”

“Do either of you know the man? Or does Mr. Ryland?”

They looked at one another, shook their heads. “Only from hearing George speak of him,” said the Indian. “He’ll be coming, I’m sure, to—to take George home . . .”

“And to deal with Diomede?”

She could tell by their faces that this aspect of the situation had only begun to surface through shock and grief.

Horace said, “Oh, dear—”

And Weyountah, “Oh, Christ.”

“
Dear Mr. Fairfield
,” said Abigail drily. “
I regret to inform you that your son’s valet has murdered your son in a fit of drunken rage over his enslaved condition, which is no more than is to be expected. Shame on you for transforming him into a man so degraded as to do the deed, and it serves you right that he did. Please come and have him picked up for trial before the Virginia courts.
What is the penalty for a slave who kills his master, in Virginia? Hanging? And how likely is it that he’ll receive even a hearing, let alone a trial?”

“Negligible,” said Weyountah softly. “And no, it’s not hanging. It’s burning at the stake. When will Mr. Adams return from Maine?”

“Friday,” said Abigail. “Possibly Saturday, though there’s talk of him going down to Providence next week. I expect they’ll hold Diomede here for Mr. Fairfield’s arrival, rather than try him under Massachusetts law, which means that no matter how many affidavits we can collect attesting his innocence, he shall still face judgment entirely at the hands of a father mourning the loss of his only son and men who have spent the whole of their lives watching for the slightest signs of defiance and murder in their slaves.”

“Can Mr. Adams have the trial moved here?” With a swift and rather guilty glance about them, to make sure that Mr. Ryland and his party were out of the hall, Weyountah led the way up the staircase again. “How would one go about that? Petition the Governor?”

“’Tis what I’ll try,” said Abigail grimly. “John hates the man, but the one time I’ve met him, His Excellency seemed kindly and well-disposed. I’ve heard nothing personal against him, save that he’s a self-serving blockhead who gives all colonial offices and perquisites to his family and friends, and any man might do that. Even one who has written to the King advising that the harshest measures be taken against the colony for our disobedient persistence in wanting to have the rights accorded to the meanest ditchdigger in a British parish.

“The problem is,” she added, as they slipped through the oak door and stood in the tiny study again, the stink of blood and rum very strong now in the close room. “The problem is,’twill be difficult to convince His Excellency or anyone that murder—sufficiently premeditated to entail the drugging of a servant—was done for a couple of pornographic books. It seems a small matter to be the worth of a man’s life.”

“Think you so, m’am?” Weyountah, kneeling beside the rumpled and blood-smudged pallet that still lay along one wall of the study, looked up, his dark eyes somber. “My grandparents were killed, and three of my aunts, because a band of Massachusetts militiamen took the wrong path in the woods one day on their way to avenge the killing of four cows and a herdsman by the men of a Pocasset village that they couldn’t manage to locate. Such was their desire for vengeance, however, that they followed the path,
knowing themselves to be lost
, and burned the village that they found at the end of it, though they
knew
that they’d come upon Narragansetts rather than Pocassets. About twenty people were killed—men, women, and children who had no more to do with the original cow-killing than had the islanders of Oatahite. My mother only escaped because she was down at the creek catching fish that afternoon. She was ten.”