Sup with the Devil (22 page)

’Twas true, Abigail reflected, there had been no real NEED for Hutchinson to tell her he’d bought Mrs. Seckar’s books...

But they had been discussing the books, and Barthelmy Whitehead, and old Emmanuel Seckar. They had been speaking of Diomede, whose life hung in the balance depending on the events of the evening when two of those books had disappeared.

Only a dullard would not have exclaimed,
But here, I have the rest of those books right here in my study
. . .

And whatever else John and Sam liked to claim, His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson was not a dullard.

“How did that come about? I take it your husband was not ill then—?”

“Heavens, no. That is, Mr. Seckar’s health was fragile by then—he was in his eighties—but he never really ailed. He always walked to the college. And he would not hear of selling the books. In fact he spoke of burning them.”

“Did he have offers?” Abigail wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, though in fact, as her host had said, the night was a pleasant one. Outside the tiny glow of the betty lamp, the big keeping room was like a friendly cave. The gleam picked up for a moment the round gold reflection of Rex’s eyes before that faithful retainer dropped his nose back to his paws, sighed, and returned to his well-earned sleep. He did indeed snore.

“Three,” said Mrs. Seckar. “The first was from a West Indian bachelor-fellow named Pugh—who naturally enough offered for the disgraceful books, of which there were about five, as I recall—I think he offered for three or four other volumes as well. Mr. Seckar refused and swore he’d burn them before he’d sell them to the likes of Mr. Pugh.”

“I have met Mr. Pugh,” said Abigail. “I should like to think myself spiritually fit enough that I would sell him a map were he lost in a desert without water, but I am not sure of it—”

“Well, he’s the one who thought it a hilarious jest,” said Mrs. Seckar, “to stand up and ask at Mr. Seckar’s lectures, was it true that a member of his family had once kept a harem of Berber dancing-girls, and how was the state of their salvation affected by being tupped by a Christian man? Father had managed to completely scotch the rumor about his grandfather,” she added. “But Mr. Pugh’s great-grandfather had done business with Old Beelzebub in Jamaica. Threats to have him sent down served to keep him from spreading these tales—yet he made the mistake of offering to blackmail Mr. Seckar on the subject when Mr. Seckar would not sell. Of course this only rendered Mr. Seckar quarrelsome. Not,” she added drily, “that it took much to render Mr. Seckar quarrelsome.”

“And of course the one he quarrelled with was you.”

“One did one’s best.” Narcissa sighed, and her arthritiscrippled fingers stilled on the looped yarn of a new-started sock. “And one did one’s best not to be pulled down by his ways. At any rate I did. Poor Reuel was forever trying to please her brother—and her mother, while she lived, who was in many ways worse.” She shook her head and went back to setting stitches onto the needles. “I think one of the other offers was from a relative of yours—you said your Mr. Thaxter was your cousin? This young man’s name was Thaxter as well, a nice boy with spectacles. He said he had heard that Mr. Seckar might have some books in Arabic to sell, only by that time Mr. Seckar had made up his mind that he would burn the books. That was because of Mrs. Lake.”

“Mrs. Lake?”

“If that was her name.” Narcissa’s tone made Abigail’s eyebrows—elevated already—ascend further. “A well-dressed woman who came in her own carriage and offered twenty pounds for the lot. Only Mr. Seckar took one look at the cut of her dress and the cost of her lace—for a man who claimed that God had no use for furbelows he was a sharp judge of them—and the quantity of white lead and cochineal she had plastered from bosom to hairline, and declared her to be the blood-sister of the Whore that Sitteth upon the Waters . . . A remark he made to her face, unfortunately. This provoked a response from her, and the conversation rapidly lost whatever dignity it had begun with. He called her a Babylonian harlot, and I do not even know the meaning of the terms she applied to him, but the interview ended with Mr. Seckar screaming at her to get out of his house and Mrs. Lake threatening to call in her footmen—her
boys
, I believe she termed them—and have him thrashed.”

“Footmen?” said Abigail thoughtfully.

“Two of them, as well as a coachman who would not have looked out of place on the gun deck of great-grandfather’s flagship—”

“Had he a scar on his face?”

The old woman nodded at once and held up her two fingers in a
V
before her left eye. “A frightful one, just here . . . He and one of the footmen came up as far as the front door as she opened it to go out. I was in the hall at the time and could smell them—rum and dirty linen. After that of course, your poor nephew—who arrived only hours later with his offer—received short shrift, accompanied by an accusation that he was in That Harlot’s pay. Mr. Seckar worked himself into a terrible passion.” Her lovely brows tugged down into a frown. “Such things left him exhausted as mere walking did not, and he still felt a heaviness in his limbs, he said, on the following day. And on the following night he died.”

She fell silent, gazing past the tiny gleam of the betty lamp into the silent gloom. The cat woke in her basket and padded out through the hinged flap in the door to hunt; the kittens tussled a little among themselves, then returned to sleep. Rex turned upon his side with a profound sigh. Though it was nearly too dark to see anything, Abigail could hear in the other woman’s voice, despite the outrageous conduct of the man who had been her master for nearly three-quarters of her life, a break of regret, of grief.

It had, Abigail reminded herself, only been a few weeks—after how many years? One might hate the husband who crushed and oppressed and bound one’s life, but he had been, when all was said, Narcissa’s nearest company for almost fifty years.

“How did he die?”

Narcissa shook her head. “I think in his rage, he had strained his heart,” she said. “Then we all three came down ill that evening—Mr. Seckar, Reuel, and I. One of his students had given him a frumenty, a dish of which he was very fond, and I suspect that under all the spices it might have been a little unwholesome. The doctor, when he was called, bled us and said ’twas likely an influenza, but neither I nor Reuel had a fever, though all the next day I had a headache, and felt stupid and not myself, though that,” she added, “might have been the bleeding. In a way I am grateful, for I don’t even recall feeling shock when I woke—halfway through the morning and the sun high in the sky—and found him lying dead at my side. I staggered to the door wrapped in a quilt, and managed to get it unlatched and to call out to some boys in the lane to fetch a doctor. Beyond that I recall little of the day. They tell me they found me curled up asleep in the quilt on the floor of the hall when the doctor arrived.”

She fell silent again, a little like Weyountah, Abigail thought, repeating his memory of last Tuesday night as if to fix it in his mind. To make it something which had once happened to him, rather than a gnawing and present pain.

After long silence, Abigail asked, “And were any of the books gone the next day?”

The older woman looked up from her contemplation of the dark pit of the hearth, startled. “Why, I have no idea,” she said. And then, “Good Heavens, Mrs. Adams, you do not mean to suggest that my husband and I were
poisoned
? So that someone could get at the books?”

“I don’t know what I mean to suggest,” said Abigail. “You say your husband was frail?”

“He was active,” she said. “And alert. But his heart was not good, and after preaching or lecturing, he would often come home and sleep for hours.”

“Then a drug administered to put the household to sleep might easily have been too strong for him.”

“Good Heavens,” she murmured again, her hands still upon her knitting, her bright blue eyes gazing for a moment into the darkness, as if through it she could see the face of the horrid old man who had forbidden her supper if his shirt was not ironed as he liked it, and who would not have in a servant to help two old women whose strength was nearly gone.

Then her gaze returned to Abigail. “On the other hand,” she said, “if someone knew of his infirmities, ’twould be just as easy to poison him—you must inquire as to the source of that frumenty, Mrs. Adams, the moment you return to Cambridge! —knowing that I would sell the books afterwards . . . would it not?”

“You, Mrs. Seckar,” said Abigail, “are too clever by half. No wonder your husband wanted to keep you a slave.”

F
irebells ringing. In the kitchen Abigail heard them, and panic seized her: four-fifths of the houses in Boston were timber, and of those, most were crowded in these dense neighborhoods around Brattle Street and Brattle Square, where flames could leap from roof to roof. Though the cold March evening was still (
March
? she thought cloudily, ’tis
the second of May
. . .), if the fire was close, it wouldn’t save their house . . .

She ran down the corridor from the kitchen of the house on Brattle Street, tiny Nabby and tinier Johnny clinging to her skirts. Her movements clumsy (
Because of the baby? Or because I’m dreaming . . .
), pregnant with the child who became Charley, she flung open the front door, the cold smiting her, snow on the ground.

Voices shouting all around her in the twilight as her neighbors came rushing to their doors. Men raced to pump water from frozen pumps, to form up the lines that every neighborhood knew by instinct to form, buckets passed hand-to-hand . . .

Only there was no smoke in the air. Just shouting from the direction of King Street, men’s voices with a savage note in them that raised the hair on her nape. In her dream she knew what was going to happen and turned, shouted over her shoulder at her children, “Stay inside—”

A single shot cracked out in the icy twilight—going over it, dozens of times, with John later, she never forgot that sequence: a single shot. Then a volley of gunfire, like ragged thunder.

John had been out that evening at his club in South Boston, and her heart was in her throat that he might have been in King Street—she knew exactly what had happened. For weeks the citizens of the town—the prentice-boys, the layabouts, the Sons of Liberty, the children—had been hectoring and cursing and threatening the British troops that Governor Hutchinson had asked the King to send, to help him keep order in the town that hated both Governor and King. For weeks she’d seen the redcoats walking about the icy streets armed with their muskets, primed with the Governor’s accounts of riots and disorders, and confronted every day with handbills and broadsides decrying the troops as slave-masters who must be cast out.

Even in those dark days, pregnant and ill and sick with grief at the loss of the tiny daughter who had died the month before, Abigail knew that it would come to shooting.

She reached King Street while the powder-smoke still hung thick in the darkening air, the sharp smell of it overriding the characteristic stink of fresh-spilled blood. Bodies lay in the snow: a young boy in a pool of blood at the mouth of Quaker Lane, a black man and a white sailor sprawled in the rucked and muddy slush close by the little knot of British soldiers whose coats seemed dark in the twilight, like the blood spilled all over the snow.

H
er eyes opened with a snap:
Where am I
? Unfamiliar smells, the close air seeming to press on her . . .

She put out her hand and instantly touched a wall, like the side of a coffin . . .

Her other hand, flailing, met curtain.

Rock Farm
.

The clink and scurry of tiny paws beyond the heavy cloth.

Those dratted kittens
. . .