Sup with the Devil (21 page)

She sank her voice, though the girls were chatting happily among themselves as they sewed and the men were totally preoccupied in slandering the King. “I was almost tempted to keep those. I’d had no
idea
. . .”

Among the deep lines of laughter and age, a dimple touched her cheek, and Abigail saw how pretty she must have been as a girl. “Such an amazing thing, is the human imagination!” Mrs. Seckar went on. “But of course, Mr. Seckar—my husband—was the first to cry out that they should be burnt, for if anything bore Beelzebub’s curse, ’twas those. And alas,” she added, raising troubled eyes, “that it seems to be so. No ill has come of the others, has it? The Arab texts—which I believe you said your nephew purchased?—and those that the Governor bought . . .”

“The Governor?” said Abigail, startled.

“Governor Hutchinson.” Mrs. Seckar regarded her in some surprise. “He purchased the bulk of them. Fifty-four books, not counting those I sold to your nephew and his friends.”

“He never spoke of them—”

“Perhaps the subject did not arise,” said Mrs. Seckar, in her comforting, grandmotherly tone. “He might have thought—”

“No, we were speaking of the books,” objected Abigail impulsively. “He’s the one who told me about your grandfather’s grasping heart, and said he was surprised your grandfather had owned books at all. The whole question of the slave Diomede’s guilt or innocence is hinged to the theft of the books. Yet he didn’t mention them at all.”

T
hat is most curious.” Mrs. Seckar’s hands stilled on her knitting; she regarded Abigail for a time in the dim flicker of the fire. Mrs. Barlow was nursing the baby for the last time that night; the younger children had already scrambled up the ladder to the loft and bed. “He paid me twenty-five pounds for the lot of them, hard currency, which was extremely generous. I am sorry to say, the transaction annoyed Mr. Seckar’s sister Reuel beyond speaking.” Her lips twitched, but she put the un-Christian smile quickly away.

“How did the books come into your hand?”

“Now that,” said Mrs. Seckar, shaking her head, “was entirely my doing. For years, I had asked my husband if ’twere possible for us to enlarge the rear wing of the house, which was used as a laundry. He argued I had done quite well there for the whole of my life, and ’twas only vanity that sought more room for ironing and primping . . . though an ill-ironed shirt was enough to justify the cancellation of supper—”

“For a
shirt
?”

The old woman looked for a moment as if she might have made some comment about her husband, but again, she mastered herself and put the thought away, this time without a smile. “He was as he was,” she said at last. “I daresay it taught me care in my work—”

“He would cancel his
wife’s
supper? ’Tis not the maid we’re talking of?”

“We had no maid,” Narcissa replied calmly. “He said, ’twas against the will of the Lord to bind another to servitude—”

“He seems to have felt no compunction about binding
you
to servitude.”

“A good wife is given unto man for his comfort.” Again that small silence, as she looked back over the years spent with Malachi Seckar, infinite tiredness in those surprisingly bright blue eyes. Then she repeated, “He was as he was. My father, while he lived, thought it no great matter, and worth an occasional missed meal himself, to school me, as he said. And I had old Mrs. Seckar, who lived into her nineties, and my husband’s sisters Reuel and Rachel to share in the work, though toward the end, in that last ten years, there was only Reuel and myself.”

Narcissa Seckar looked to be in her seventies, white-haired and rather fragile in appearance, and Abigail felt herself flush with anger at that selfish old man who had decreed that his wife could do the tasks of hauling water and wood, cooking and cleaning, with her only help a woman who was probably as old as herself.

Before Abigail could snap ungracious words about the dead, however, Narcissa forestalled her. “In any event, I did at last prevail after quite literally decades of asking. And when the workmen broke down the wall of the laundry, lo and behold, they found a sort of little chamber hidden between it and the newer portion of the house. The whole end of the room had been bricked across and plastered, and in the space behind the bricks were two shelves of books.”

“Good gracious!” Abigail—a bit reluctantly—put aside the subject of this woman’s father, who hadn’t even protected his daughter against a domestic tyrant, in contemplation of a treasure trove more valuable, to her mind, than gold. “I take it the house had been in your family? Was it your father’s house? I know the Reverend Seckar willed it to the college when he died—”

“The house was built by old Beelzebub.” Again there was that trace of pride in Narcissa’s voice as she spoke her ancestor’s name. “By
Captain Whitehead
, as my father insisted upon calling him. Father pretended to the end of his days that his grandfather had been no more than a sea-captain in the West Indies and had not even sold slaves, much less stolen them from the Spanish and sacked towns in passing. One cannot really blame him, considering the position he held, in the college and in the Church.”

“And Beelzebub was—?”

“My father’s grandfather, Geoffrey Whitehead. Of course he hushed the matter up, and I think ’twas one reason my father pushed me so hard to wed Mr. Seckar, who was his favorite student and his amanuensis after Father had his stroke. He edited Father’s sermons, and acted as his secretary in all his business with the college and with the other churches in the colony. He was the son Father had always wished he’d had, the more so after Phoebe—my sister—wed a man who danced and played the fiddle and spent all his little money on fine horses . . . which he bred, to a fair profit, though Father would never hear of that. Father told me when I was seventeen that he was leaving the house to Mr. Seckar, who came of poor family and needed property. Better that a man of Godliness and worth should have it, he said, than a girl who would only marry it away to one of the Damned. I could marry Mr. Seckar, he said, and continue to live there, or leave it upon Father’s death.”

“Was your father—” Abigail had to bite back the words
right in the head
? stifling her anger—the man was after all great-grandfather to Tilly and Hagar and Zilpah and at least some of the others . . .

Narcissa only regarded her, with slightly raised white brows. “I was—a defiant girl,” she said matter-of-factly. “Rebellious of Father’s authority and scornful of the Fifth Commandment. I’m sure had I been the boy Father wanted, I would have kicked up all sorts of riot and rumpus, a fact which he ignored completely when he bemoaned the fact that God had inexplicably saddled him with the wrong sex of children. My sister was younger, and very sweet and meek, until she ran away at age fifteen with Mr. Wellman, who was Sarah’s father.” And she traded an affectionate glance with Mrs. Barlow. “Mr. Seckar was modest of bearing, right in thought and deed, saw clearly the will of the Lord—in Father’s words—”

“Meaning saw clearly the will of your father.”

“That, too, though perhaps he did clearly see the Will of God. I have no way of knowing. He was always ready to smite the unrighteous, Father said—meaning spiteful to those who didn’t agree with him—and upright to those who look to him for guidance, meaning cruelly harsh to his mother and sisters when he brought them in to live with us. And if he was as filled with pride as a toad is with poison, where Father could not see, and sometimes used the rod as well as the word to smite and guide . . . I’m sure Father would have allowed that some latitude is to be given for one so filled with the zeal of the Lord.”

She returned to her knitting, and the gray kitten stood on its hinder legs and snatched at the moving needle-heads with its white-tipped paws. The farmhouse had no glass to its windows, and outside the tight-barred shutters, Abigail heard the hooting of an owl and the noise of some larger creature, moving about in the woods.

“I’m afraid I’ve wandered rather far afield,” apologized the old lady after a moment. “But indeed, the house was the one I had grown up in, and the rear wing—the laundry and the kitchen—had once, I think, been the main part of the house.’Tis made of stone, and very long and narrow, and the floors only dirt. I believe ’twas my grandfather, the despicable Barthelmy, who had the main house built in 1683, and old Beelzebub went on living in his old stone wing until his death nearly ten years after that.”

“I wonder what the good citizens of Cambridge made of him?” Abigail couldn’t keep the amusement from her voice, at the thought of a pirate and sorcerer—and sometime collector of naughty volumes—retiring for his declining years to that quiet town of divinity students and Tory worthies. “Or he of them, for that matter. And what of his castle in the backcountry where Indians worshipped him as a god?”

“From what Father said—though he was quite capable of making it up—toward the end of his life, Old Beelzebub repented of his sins, gave up alchemy—”

“He was an alchemist?”

“Oh, good Heavens, yes. In his quest for the ancient formula for Greek Fire he is reported to have burned down half an Indian village. In addition to which he summoned the Devil, invented a flying machine, and, of course, turned common rocks into gold. His repentance, Father never hesitated to point out, would not have done him the slightest good, as he was clearly destined for Hell, and he—Father—became thoroughly incensed when I asked,
Should we then not trouble to encourage thieves and slave-traders to abandon their evil ways
? and told me not to be impertinent, though I thought it a perfectly reasonable question . . .”

“My son asked me that, too,” sighed Abigail. “I told him that only God knows whether a man is ultimately destined for damnation or salvation, and that we must encourage the unrighteous to abandon evil, because it might be—but we do not know—that we are God’s chosen tools in another’s path toward righteousness, like the ass that bore Saul of Tarsus toward Damascus.”

“Well, that explanation would involve my Father not knowing something.” Narcissa finished off the top of the sock, clipped the yarn, and slipped it neatly into her basket, as if all the long years she spoke of had happened to someone else. “So it could not be true. In any case, according to my aunt Serafina—Grandfather Barthelmy’s sister, who lived with us for some years while I was a child—her father, Old Beelzebub, built the stone house in Cambridge just after King Philip’s War, so it might have been he was simply driven out of the backcountry by the Indians and felt himself too old to make a new start there. The newer portion of the house lies at rightangles to the old, in such a way that it was not at all obvious that about eighteen inches of its northern end had been bricked and plastered over, to hide the two shelves of books. Only when the eastern wall was broken out—how long ago it seems! But’twas not even a month!—to make the enlargement was this secret space found and, in it, my great-grandfather’s books.”

Thoughtfully, Abigail said, “Which the Governor then bought.” She frowned. “But you said your husband ordered the work done—”

“He died,” said Narcissa, “not a week after the workmen broke down the wall.”

“Will you ladies stay up and make a night of it?” Seth Barlow grinned good-naturedly as he crossed the keeping room to their corner. Thaxter and the older boys came back in from having a final piss and disappeared up the loft-ladder; the yellow dog turned around a time or two where the benches and chairs had been. The farmer put the tin lamp he carried on the table beside his aunt-in-law’s chair and felt the side of the red teapot. Mrs. Barlow and the baby had disappeared into the bedroom some time previously. The house had grown deeply still.

Abigail said apologetically “I should—” and Narcissa waved her small, work-rough hands.

“Don’t worry for me, Mrs. Adams, if you’re wanting to sit up a little longer. If you’re not too tired after your journey—”

“Heavens, no! I only worry that you—”

“Well,” said Barlow, kneeling beside them to bank the hearth-fire under a careful mound of ashes, “while you two ladies are arguing out which of you is being polite, I’m for bed. Are you warm enough? ’Tis a mild evening—” He got to his feet, dusted his hands, and brought shawls from the great, clumsy sideboard, one of the few pieces of furniture in the room. “The pallet’s made up for you in the bedroom, Sissy—” He bent to kiss the old lady’s wrinkled cheek. “Mrs. Adams”—he grasped her hand—“my wife promises she’ll be silent as a mouse in the morning. And don’t mind old Rex. He snores.”

“Anyone who promises mouselike silence,” remarked Abigail ruefully, when the bedroom door shut behind him, “has never heard the ones we get in our attic. Five minutes,” she promised, “and then I shall let you go to bed.”

“Five minutes.” Narcissa hobbled to the cupboard, took out a small pot, and from it dripped a spoon of honey into her tisane. “Will you have—No?—Where were we? Oh, yes, selling the books to the Governor.”