Sup with the Devil (10 page)

Abigail was silent, looking down at that young man, in his faded blue scholar’s gown and his trim, dark, threadbare suit. The blood on the sheets nearby seemed to mutter and whisper of the violence done in the room beyond: that someone had considered something worth not only the life of George Fairfield but of his slave also . . .

But ten years of talking over John’s cases with him had told her—if a childhood listening to the sins and enormities of an isolated New England village had not—that men walked the earth to whom the avoidance of inconvenience or embarrassment was sufficient justification for taking another man’s life.

“Would a student caught breaking into another man’s room stand in danger of being sent down?” she asked. “Particularly at night—”

“Absolutely.”

“
Sine dubium.
The thing is,” went on Horace diffidently, as he followed Abigail and Weyountah—rather white-faced but resolute—into the bedchamber beyond. “The thing is, George had only just gotten those books . . . what was it, Weyountah? Two weeks ago?”

“Exactly two weeks.” Weyountah removed the stacked papers from the desk, handed them to Horace, his movements swift as if the two of them worked underwater, with only limited time available in the room that stank of their friend’s lifeblood soaked into the mattress of the bed. “The twelfth of April. He kept them in here.”

He opened the desk, revealing the shallow compartment inside empty of everything save a few sheets of paper and some broken quills.

“Was there usually more in here?” Abigail inquired. It looked nothing like John’s neat desk at home, but then, Fairfield had not impressed her as a scholar.

“I think so,” said Horace, his arms filled with papers, books, and Greek and Latin lexicons. “But I usually worked in the front room, not in here. The college provosts will sometimes search the rooms—I know Pugh pays the ones over in Harvard Hall and the Fellow in charge of the hall as well not to touch his—and last term Jasmine tried to blackmail George over some love-letters a girl had written to him . . . that’s when he started keeping everything hidden in this desk.”

Weyountah hooked his finger into an almost-invisible hole at one side of the desk’s interior and lifted out the false bottom to reveal a second compartment beneath. This contained a vast rummage of disordered papers: bills—from tailors, bootmakers, the college stables for feed—mixed with letters and notes. Abigail picked one up,
Deerst Geo Ill bee back of the brewhous tonight dreemin of you ellie . . .
There was also a small sack of coffee beans and a flask of rum. “He kept the books in there,” said Horace. “I know, because I came in yesterday morning earlier than he’d counted on, and he had the desk open and was looking at them—” Color crept up into his face again and faded almost at once, as he remembered not the pictures in the book, but the nearness of his friend who would never ogle questionable pictures again. After a moment he swallowed hard and went on, “And the same woman who sold them to him, sold me four books in Arabic.”

H
er name, said Horace—over a breakfast of Mrs. Squills’s sausage and corn-cakes at the Golden Stair some half hour later—was Mrs. Seckar. “Her husband held the Vassall Professorship of Religion for about a hundred years,” explained the boy. “He was very much a disciple of John Calvin and would hear of no innovation in the teaching of his master—”

“He was a pride-sick old bigot.” Weyountah poured out coffee for himself and Abigail from a yellow pottery pitcher, while Horace sipped the mild tisane of honey, mint, and water that was all his fragile digestion would tolerate. “Cruel, too. He led his poor wife a frightful life, then left the house and bulk of his estate to fund a position here at Harvard. She was selling the books—which were hers—in order to have a little money to take with her when she went to live with her cousins in Medfield.”

“The one Mr. Fairfield spoke of,” said Abigail thoughtfully. “And she had books in Arabic? Not to mention volumes like the
Vies des Dames Galantes
?”

“Mrs. Seckar said they had probably been her great-grandfather’s,” explained the Indian. “I bought two texts in chemistry, though they’re fearfully out of date—the most recent was Willis’s
Pharmaceutice Rationalis
, 1674—and what I think was someone’s journal, which contained tables of astronomical observations and several pages of various methods of calculating sidereal time. One passage was translated from al-Farghani—an Arabic scholar nearly a thousand years ago—and I think in the chemical sections there were translations from al-Jildaki, who was one of the early Mohammedan scholars of the discipline.”

“The four I bought weren’t anywhere near that erudite,” admitted Horace. “I had an edition of the Alexander Legend, Ibn-Battuta’s travel narratives, a commentary on the Koran, and a book about horse-doctoring.”

“So obviously, Mrs. Seckar’s ancestor was the last Arabic scholar in this colony . . . How long ago? Fifty years? Sixty years?”

“Longer,” said Weyountah. “Mrs. Seckar must be in her seventies. The Reverend Seckar was eighty-five, but up to the day he died he’d walk from their house on the Watertown Road to the chapel”—he nodded in the direction of the Common and the college—“to supervise prayers.”

“To make sure nobody strayed from the Master’s doctrines by so much as an inch, you mean,” put in Horace, devouring his fifth corn-cake. “Please don’t get me wrong, Aunt Abigail,” he added earnestly. “I understand the need for correct understanding of the Will of God, and I know that disregard of intellectual distinctions can result in some quite frightful misunderstandings of our own unworthiness to have received salvation that lies beyond our desserts . . . but I also think that no sin lies in sweetening the lesson.”

“You’re saying he was a trifle dry?” She hid her smile.

“Horace is saying the Reverend Seckar was long-winded, doctrinaire, and intrusive into matters that seemed to me no part of the Church’s business.”

“That was his point,” said Horace apologetically. “That everything in life is God’s business, in that it glorifies or affronts God. He abused poor Ryland like a pickpocket at the merest hint of Arminianism—”

“Is Mr. Ryland an Arminian?” Somehow she could believe it of that grave young man, that he could not endure the belief that a man’s good deeds would not suffice to bend the will of an angry God.

“He claims not to be. Of course, the Reverend Seckar would say—”

“I think his quarrel with Ryland,” put in the Indian, “was as much about Ryland taking a stipend from the Governor to support him here as it was about Free Will. Seckar never forgave Governor Hutchinson for being descended from a heretic. And the fact that Mrs. Seckar had four books in Arabic in her great-grandfather’s collection doesn’t mean that the other books she sold at the same time contained something that could have gotten the Governor of Jamaica hanged for treason, Arabic or not . . .”

“No,” admitted Abigail. “But the coincidence of a murder, an attempted murder, and the disappearance of antique books from the murdered man’s rooms all within a week makes me extremely curious to have a few words with Mrs. Seckar about what other books Great-Grandpa’s collection might have contained.”

 

 

F
rom Mrs. Squills, Abigail borrowed pen and paper, and wrote a note to Mrs. Seckar in Medfield (“She’s gone to live with cousins, poor lady, the Barlows, at Rock Farm out nearer Stonton than Medfield . . .” Mrs. Squills provided), asking the favor of an interview at her earliest convenience. After a moment’s thought, she composed another, to Governor Hutchinson, and a third note, more brief than the others, she sent by way of Mrs. Squills’s niece to a Mr. Metcalfe, who lived in Cambridge and whose most recent fines for infractions of the Navigation Acts John had been instrumental in having dismissed. Had she not done so, she feared that Weyountah and Horace would beggar themselves of candle-andfood money to rent her a chaise to return to Boston in.

While waiting for Mr. Metcalfe’s reply—he had assured John on the occasion of their last meeting that
any help I can be, to you or any of yours—
Abigail walked from the Golden Stair to the town jail, only to be told by Sheriff Congreve that Diomede, still half-stupefied, had slipped back into a heavy sleep. She gave the sheriff most of her slender pocket money to provide food for the prisoner and, returning to the inn, made arrangements with Mrs. Squills to send bread, cheese, and cider to him over the course of the following days.

“Last night you spoke of poor Mr. Fairfield meeting a young friend out near the college barns,” she said, when these negotiations were satisfactorily concluded. “You wouldn’t happen to know her name, would you?”

And Mrs. Squills laughed. “Lord love you, Mrs. Adams, that’s like putting a name on one of those butterflies out there.” She gestured toward the kitchen door, beyond which lay her vegetable garden and a rather weedy border of penstemon, buttercups, and wild roses just coming into bloom. “Poor Mr. George had a dozen of them, for all he was practically engaged to Miss Sally Woodleigh. I think my Ginny broke her heart for him,” she added, in a quieter voice, “not that I’d ever let her go meeting him or any man living out behind the college hay-barn . . . But it goes to show.”

The tiny landlady shook her head sadly. “He hadn’t an ounce of vice in him, you know, Mrs. Adams. Please don’t think so. And he’d never have harmed a soul. But he was like a walking sprig of catnip, and that’s the truth.”

“Had he enemies?” In addition to the marketing basket she’d arrived with, Abigail now carried a small satchel belonging to Horace, into which they had crammed the papers, bills, and letters that had cluttered the hidden compartment of George Fairfield’s desk. “Barring the sweethearts of his lady friends, that is.” Dozens of the letters in the satchel were love-notes in a score of different hands, and in the pocket of George’s gold-laced gray coat—which had lain, tossed down with his ruffled shirt and his breeches, on the floor where he’d dropped them—she had found a small packet of them, along with a note in a delicate hand saying,
As you love me, be behind the barn at midnight
. . .

“Well—” Mrs. Squills frowned, as if speaking against her will. “He was a Tory, when all’s said—though I like to think it was just a boy’s fancy, because he was raised that way, you know. He’d have gotten over it.” She sighed, and Abigail guessed that the local beauties weren’t the only ones who’d fallen for George Fairfield’s easy charm. “But most of the men at the college, they’re all for our liberties and will be slaves to no man, nor no King either. And yes, sometimes there was bad feeling over that, and once or twice I understand it came to blows, though never here. I stand for nothing like that in my place.” (There was a Mr. Squills, stout and ox-eyed, fussing about in the kitchen, but Abigail was under no illusions about whose
place
the Golden Stair was.)

“But that sort of thing, ’tisn’t the sort of thing one kills over.”

Isn’t it?
Mr. Metcalfe’s chaise drew up before the door, and Horace and Weyountah—appearing in their college gowns with a bulky parcel for her—helped Mr. Metcalfe’s young groom fasten satchel and parcel onto the back. Promises were exchanged to lose no time in searching the countryside round for the house to which Horace had been taken, for a dark-haired woman of respectable appearance, for anyone who might have been called George’s enemy . . . Promises to visit Diomede and make sure he had food and a blanket, to write to Mr. Fairfield protesting his innocence . . .

’Tisn’t the sort of thing one kills over
, reflected Abigail, as the chaise pulled away.

Only wasn’t the formation of the King’s Own Volunteers—a fighting-force of the young men of the district loyal to the King—preparation to do exactly that?

Kill all men who would take up arms against the King in defense of their own liberties?

Was there not every chance that the King’s ship, when it made landfall in Boston, would be carrying troops with precisely that mandate? To arrest—and kill if necessary—those whose politics differed from those of the King?
Including Cousin Sam
, she thought, her heartbeat quickening unpleasantly.
And maybe John . . .

No.
She thrust the thought aside. John had never involved himself with the Sons of Liberty—not much, anyway. She leaned back in the seat, and thought about the paper-wrapped parcel the boys had given her, and Horace’s worn satchel with it smuddl e of love-notes and who-knows-what tha t George hadn’t wanted prying eyes to see.
A personable young gentleman . . . widely known from here to Medford . . . always invited to this house or that . . .

Politics, passion, and mysterious ciphers written in Arabic . . .

And none of them, reflected Abigail—gazing out between the horse’s ears at the bright dapple of sunshine on the shaded road, the peaceful countryside of stone walls, prosperous farmhouses, hay, and corn—none of them sufficient reason to save a man’s life from those who had decided beforehand that he must be guilty.