Sup with the Devil (30 page)

St-John Pugh was still deep in conversation with Mistress Sally Woodleigh as Abigail came around the corner of Massachusetts Hall and crossed the road toward the chapel. Like a good servant, the man Pedro stood impassive, his scarred face expressionless, looking around him with dark uninterested eyes. Abigail called out, “Mr. Pugh!” and was greeted with a deep bow and an off-swept cap, and introduced to Sally Woodleigh.

“I am terribly, terribly sorry to hear of your loss,” said Abigail, taking the two fingers offered her in the British fashion, and Mistress Woodleigh immediately began to shed tears, silently, tragically, and without any accompanying sobs that might have rendered her lovely nose red.

“Thank you,” the girl whispered—she must have been sixteen or seventeen, Katy’s age, Abigail guessed—and wiped her eye with a handkerchief, trimmed in Brussels lace a handspan deep, that her handmaiden stepped forward to offer her. “Everyone has been so good . . .”

Pugh took her other hand in his and pressed it expressively; Abigail noticed the squeeze of gratitude that Mistress Woodleigh returned.

“I was never more shocked,” said Abigail warmly, “as when I heard the news. I did not know Mr. Fairfield well, though my nephew thought the world of him.”

“All loved him,” replied the girl simply. “And I—I never understood what the poet meant, when he spoke of one’s heart being in the grave. But it is, m’am. My heart is back there in that chapel—” She turned and gestured, a trifle too much like Juliet in an amateur theatrical performance. “I only go to visit it . . . and him.”

“Say not so.” Pugh patted the small gloved hand still in his. “Leave those of us who loved him—and others yet on this earth—still with the blossom of hope.”

Sally Woodleigh, Abigail reflected, watching the dewy smile she gave him, though she had the air of one who has talked herself into believing in a grief that made her the center of attention, was clearly in actual pain; the glint in Mr. Pugh’s eye could not be described as anything but amused at the scene. It was just as well that the slave Eusebius appeared at that moment, calling out, “Michie Pugh, sir! Michie Pugh! Got a message here; he say it important for you!”

Abigail watched St-John Pugh’s face as he read the note she had written five minutes previously and was gratified to see how his eyes narrowed. “Thank you, Eusebius,” he said. “Who delivered this—?”

“Michie Thaxter, sir. He say a woman give it to him, out by the stable; say she couldn’t come into the stair.”

The Black Dog looked as if he might have cursed, had he not been still standing next to Mistress Woodleigh. Abigail guessed he had a Rabelaisian turn of phrase. He glanced toward the Chapel tower, then turned back to the girl, and bowed deeply over her hand. “Please pardon my haste,
bellissima
; a matter of great urgency.”

Certainly more urgent than Mr. Ryland’s opinions on translating Plato or your own upcoming examinations
, reflected Abigail, as the clock struck four.

In a sweetly pouting voice, Mistress Woodleigh chided, “And who is this lady you’re running off to see the instant she beckons?”

“A withered old trout who’s done business with my father,” replied Pugh at once, though Abigail had made up the name Althea Mainwaring out of thin air. “’Tis tedious, beautiful nymph, but she carries tales, and I wouldn’t have my father’s ill-will for worlds.” He bent to kiss her hand. “I know ’tis an effort for you to shake off your grief, but for the sake of those of us who—who are deeply concerned for your feelings, will you permit me to call on you tomorrow and take you walking with me on the Common? You must have a care for your health.”

“You are too kind . . .”

Abigail was afraid Pugh would prolong the scene and send Eusebius back to his room again, but evidently both men knew that Mr. Pinkstone had been left in the chamber; in any case, Pugh, after another bow and a further reverent salute on the hand of his beloved, set off at a smart pace for the far end of Cambridge, trailed by Pedro, and Abigail turned just as Eusebius was walking away.

“Eusebius,” she said, as if trying to remember something about the name—and, well-trained slave that he was, the African came back. One did not walk away from a white woman who spoke to you . . . “My nephew tells me you know something of the ailments of cats?”

To her surprise the ferocious face, with its tribal scars, relaxed into a gentle smile. “Oh, pretty ones,” he said in a deep bass voice, and made a gesture as if cradling a cat in his arms.

“Could you spare just a moment?” asked Abigail. “I know it sounds fond and foolish of me, but my poor cat has begun scratching at herself, constantly, poor thing . . .”

She described at considerable length symptoms displayed by Granny Quincy’s sour old Black Witch the previous summer, and Eusebius listened gravely, asking questions now and then—What was m’aum chatte’s age, did she have rough bumps of the skin beneath her fur, was she lose fur on her backside? Since poor Black Witch had suffered with precisely these symptoms through the past three summers, Abigail took notes of what Eusebius prescribed—putting garlic in her food, braiding herbs into a collar for her if she would take it, washing her (“She no like, so you make her do anyway, m’aum”) in a solution of mild aromatics.

With luck, she reflected, handing the servant half a Spanish reale, Mr. Pinkstone would have time to return from whatever errand Weyountah had sent him on before Eusebius got back to the rooms, sparing them both anxiety about what to tell Michie Pugh . . .

She had to remind herself, as she walked round to the lane by the college stables where Weyountah and Horace waited for her with Katy—flushed and cheerful and not a penny the worse for her long walk—that Eusebius’s obvious expertise with the ailments of cats was a sword that cut both ways . . . and he would have known exactly how much to dose a frumenty to guarantee that it would transform an entire household into Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

“We both went in to look,” said Weyountah, as Horace helped Abigail and Katy up into the chaise and the vehicle set off at a smart pace—as the sun was, yet again, sinking toward the hills and threatening to catch Abigail on the wrong side of the Boston town gates. Katy turned around to wave back at Horace, then clung to the rail of the little wicker seat, smiling into the breeze that whipped back her long black hair. “So there would be no doubt about who found what, where—”

“And did you find anything?” demanded Abigail, hearing already in his voice that they had.

“We found both George’s books—the
I Modi
and the
Vies des Dames Gallantes—
in Pugh’s room . . . along with considerable other literature from other sources, but along the same lines.”

“And they won’t tell me what the others were,” added Katy. “Well, I’m a married woman,” she added, as Abigail frowned at her.

“And in Mr. Ryland’s room,” Weyountah’s voice cut inexorably over Katy’s protests, “we found . . . all the rest of Beelzebub’s books, save only for the ones Horace and I gave to you.”

H
idden at the bottom of his clothes-chest, in every drawer of his desk, and four-deep beneath his mattress, Weyountah says,” Abigail reported to John, who had been listening to Nabby’s history lesson when—tired and famished—Abigail and Katy came into the lamplight of the kitchen after the mile-and-a-quarter walk from the town gates in the deepening dusk. Weyountah had—yet again—barely reached the gates in time, and there had been no question but that he was obliged to leave her and Katy there, and turn back for Cambridge by the thin light of the wasting moon.

“And he was certain they were Old Beelzebub’s?”

“Well, aside from the question of what other fifty-four books the Governor’s protégé would be concealing under his mattress . . . Please, no, I’m quite all right—” she added, when John forced her into the settle beside the kitchen hearth and went to the pantry.

“You’re not,” he called back over his shoulder, handing bread, butter, and slices of cold sausage and cheese back to Nabby, who had hastened after him with plates. “Did you have any dinner at all? Or you, either, Katy? I didn’t think so—”

Johnny came hurrying back to the fire with mugs of cider, followed closely by his sister and father, bearing food. Abigail had to reach up over the heads of Charley and Tommy to get her plate, both the smaller boys having flung themselves ecstatically into her lap. “Mr. Adams, really you shouldn’t—!” Katy protested, and then tucked into the sausage and cheese like a starving cannibal.

“In fact,” Abigail went on as John brought her small sewingtable close to the fire, “Weyountah recognized a number of them from Mrs. Seckar’s house. Others had Geoffrey Whitehead’s name written in them and dates ranging from 1630 to 1693, which was the year he died.” Pattie carried lamps from where she’d been sewing and hung them on the wall near Abigail’s head. “There were also exactly fifty-four of them, which was how many the Governor’s ‘man’—obviously Ryland—took away with him—”

“Only to learn that nine had been sold elsewhere.” John had shaved and washed his face, but he looked deeply weary from two days on the road. Yet the fact that he had shaved told Abigail that he was going out again to meet with the Sons of Liberty at the Green Dragon while yet it was possible to do so.

“I can’t really see Mr. Ryland stabbing his captain over them, even if they
had
quarrelled.”

“Can’t you?” He settled with his own cider on the settle at her side. “Friends stab friends every night in this colony, Portia, and for the stupidest possible reasons or no reason at all: drunkenness, politics, anger at someone else. Then they panic and blame someone else. You’d like to think ’twas Black Dog Pugh because he’s a slaveholder and personally obnoxious—”

“And you’d like to think ’twas the Governor because he was appointed Chief Justice of the colony in 1760 with no other qualification than that he was a good friend to the Board of Trade. And we don’t either of us seem,” she added, spreading the soft pale cheese on the crusty bread, “to be much closer to the answer. Pugh definitely—or as definitely as we can ascertain from the paper of the note—forged Sally Woodleigh’s hand to a note to get George out of his room at midnight. But whether George then lingered behind the barn in hopes of meeting the girl . . .”

“I think he did,” said John. And when Abigail frowned and Katy looked aside, he went on, “Why else would he have taken the girl’s love-letters, if not to return them? If not to honorably inform her”—he glanced at Katy—“that he had married another woman—even if he
had
bribed the quite-genuine clerk of the Providence county court to perform the ceremony in a tavern instead of the courthouse. ’Twas still a legal marriage. Easy there, girl,” he added, as Katy flung her arms around his neck and kissed him, “I’m just the messenger—”

But he beamed upon the girl as she embraced and kissed Abigail as well. John was as faithful a husband as could be found in the compass of the world, but Abigail knew he had the same soft spot in his heart for pretty girls as she had for good-looking young men.

“Therefore, he could have waited—who knows how long?—for the girl to put in an appearance, and returned, disappointed, to his chambers and gone to bed . . . to be wakened in the dead of night by an intruder whom he recognized, an intruder who had thought him drugged and had, therefore, taken no precaution to keep silent while he searched for books that were already gone.”

“It still doesn’t mean ’twas Mr. Ryland.”

“No,” said John. “But there’s a simple way to find out.”

Abigail sighed, and said, “Drat. ’Tis a day’s drive to Concord, so we’ll not leave ’til Monday—are you away tonight, dearest friend?” She put her hand on his.

“I must.” He glanced across the room to where Pattie was seating the children in a small halo of lamplight, ready for evening prayers. “In truth, Portia, none of us has the slightest idea how many nights we have left to meet freely and make plans—nor what conditions will prevail once the King’s Commissioner lands.”

“You won’t—” She kept her hold upon his hand as he rose, and went with him to the sideboard to fetch the Bible. “There is not the possibility that
you’ll
be arrested?”

“Governor Hutchinson hates me as I hate him,” said John grimly. “If friends stab friends under the impulse of momentary fears, how much more will a frightened man be tempted to stab his enemy if someone puts a knife into his hand?”

Yet he went to the table smiling and asked among his children whose turn it was to pick a portion from the Holy Writ (it was Charley, so they got Samson trouncing the Philistines—with John’s observations that ’twas only God’s love for Samson that strengthened the hero’s arm to defend the weak). Sitting at his side with the fire’s warmth shining on her back, Abigail listened to her husband’s voice and reflected that this man had far greater matters to deal with than one lonely and frightened black man sitting in the Cambridge jail.