Sup With the Devil

“Might Mr. Perry be spared for a few moments to describe to Mrs. Adams—here acting as her husband’s amanuensis—the condition of the body and the room when you were summoned?”

“Actually,” said Abigail, “what Mr. Adams would ask me to do—and on those occasions when I have acted in his name before this, he has been most emphatic in his instructions—would be to enter the chamber myself and compare my own observations with those of”—she could see President Langdon bristling up like a porcupine and the stooped, graying gentleman in black behind him who had to be Dr. Perry radiating disapproval at this display of womanish inquisitiveness—“of observers trained to analyze the smallest details. Mr. Adams has a horror”—here she could at least put the genuine ring of truth into her voice—“of information coming at third-hand, as you gentlemen”—she divided her deprecating smile among the three men—“must also abhor for its potential for mistakes. He has quite trained me to describe matters exactly as I see them, without the addition or subtraction of thoughts of my own.”

John had done nothing of the sort, of course. But she knew he had always admired that quality in her, which she had possessed long before that sturdy, brilliant, opinionated, and passionate—not to say maddening—little gentleman had come into her life when she was fifteen.

Langdon and Perry looked mollified.

Horace—with singular and, to Abigail, surprising presence of mind—produced a memorandum-book from his pocket and said with the air of one deputized to stand ready on the fringes of events, “Your notes, m’am.”

Abigail said, “Thank you, Mr. Thaxter,” with her most serene air, and preceded the doctor and the college president into the chamber where George Fairfield’s body lay.

Five

Dr. Perry stepped quickly across to the bed and drew the sheet over George Fairfield’s face. Perry would have pulled the counterpane up to cover the splotches where the blood—turning dark now as it dried—had stained through the linen, but Abigail held up her hand and asked, “How was Mr. Fairfield lying when you came in, doctor? It’s one of the things my husband will wish to know.” Her words stayed him long enough for her to note that there seemed to be three or four sources of blood—wounds that had bled. Plenty, she thought, for the killer to ‘gild the faces of the grooms’ and, like the wily and wicked Lady Macbeth, transfer the blame with the blood.

“He lay on his back,” said Perry. “His limbs were composed and the sheet drawn up to his waist, for as you recall,’twas a mild night. There was no evidence of struggle.” With a sharp twitch of his wrist he flung the counterpane into place. Despite herself, Abigail felt relieved.

“Where was he stabbed?” she asked.

The man’s upper lip seemed to lengthen at the idea of a woman wishing to know such things, even to pass the word on to her husband. “Thrice in the breast, two of the blows penetrating the heart. Once in the side, up under the ribs—”

Left side, Abigail noted. That’s where the blood had flowed out, anyway.

Abigail had seen dead men before. There were families, she knew, who didn’t believe in having their girl- children assist in the laying-out of the dead—grannies, uncles, younger children who didn’t make it through sickly winters or the endless barrage of ailments that hammered the very young before their tenth year—but hers had not been one of these. And after one has prepared for burial the body of one’s own child—poor tiny Susanna, who had barely passed her first year—no other death hits quite so hard.

She recalled going with her mother and her sister Mary to help one of her aunts lay out a cousin when she, Abigail, was barely seven: Mary was ten, and the dead child was Abigail’s own age. It was Abigail who had helped her mother braid the little girl’s hair. She remembered asking, Would Annie be angry that it was Abigail who was alive today and Annie who was dead? and getting an hour and a half on the subject of how much luckier and happier Annie was to be dead and with Jesus . . .

Probably true, she reflected, looking down at the worn linen where it lay over George Fairfield’s face: the little mount of nose and chin, the silky tousle of blonde hair just visible at the top. Certainly true, in fact, and what she had told Nabby—only with greater brevity and, she hoped, greater tenderness —a few months ago when little Jemmy Butler next door had died. But she had thought at the time, Will Annie miss her doll Penelope? Or her baby sisters? Or the way the sunlight makes crazy patterns of elongated diamonds on the plaster of the bedroom wall first thing in the morning? Or the first sweet strength of that first sweet spoonful of molasses on hot corn-pudding first thing on a cold morning?

Would George miss driving Sassy full tilt along the roads to visit his friends, when he was invited to stay at this house or that . . . widely known from here to Medford as he was? Would he miss riding with his Volunteers in preparation for a rebellion they all guessed was coming but that he would not see?

She raised her eyes to meet those of Weyountah, who sat in such stillness as to be almost invisible on the room’s single chair at the foot of the bed.

Would he miss his friends?

From the door, President Langdon commented, “Given the attitude of the body, and Mr. Wylie’s testimony”— he nodded toward Weyountah—“as to raised voices and harsh words spoken to a man already laboring under the intolerable resentment of his servile condition, and given the presence of Mr. Fairfield’s rum-bottle in the study and its contents all over the slave’s clothing, it seems clear that Diomede drank himself into a state of rage while his master slept, and entering the room, stabbed him as he lay in his bed. Deplorable, of course, but no more than can be expected when a man practices the injustices of slavery upon his fellow creature—”

“But that gives no explanation for the blood on the floor of this room,” said Abigail.

“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Langdon was clearly not used to having his diatribes against slavery interrupted by anyone, let alone a woman, for mere practicalities.

“There is blood on the floor,” said Abigail, pointing. “It’s been tracked and trampled about, but you see where the main stain of it lay, here, beside the desk by the window. Was the window open?”

President and doctor looked at each other.

“It was not.” Weyountah got to his feet. A step—the bedchamber was a tiny one—took him to the place; Abigail fetched the branch of candles from the little work-desk beneath the window, searched her pocket for flint and steel—which of course she’d left back at the inn . . . She caught up flint and striker from the bedside table. The room looked north onto the quadrangle of grass that lay between the college buildings and at this hour of the morning was gloomy. No wonder the poor boy had trouble waking up.

She knelt, holding the lights close to the floor. The main portion of the stain was clear to see. Not quite the diameter of a cider-mug, it was clearly outlined on the scuffed oak, as if it had lain there half the night. By comparison, the blots and tracks where the crowding students—and Dr. Perry himself, belike—had stepped in it were superficial. Her handkerchief, wet with a little discreetly applied spit, cleaned one of them up at once, but the original stain—which had lain hours longer—it could not touch.

There were two others, between that stain and the bed, in direct line. Round drips, and set, as if they, too, had lain there for many hours.

“He was stabbed here, by the desk,” said Weyountah softly, “and dragged or carried to the bed. The wound under the ribs—”

“Which I cannot see how it could have been made,” said Abigail, “by a man standing over him on the room side of the bed. You can see how the bed lies against the wall, with the head pointing south, the feet north toward the window. The left side, where the stab-wound is, would be away from a man standing in the room. But if he were stabbed here, standing up, of course the attacker would stab him in the left side—”

“And carry him to the bed and stab him thrice more, to make sure of him.”

Abigail turned, frowning, back toward Perry and Langdon in the doorway. “And then proceed back to his pallet in the study and go to sleep? Without even washing the blood from his hands? When all the college was sleeping, and he could easily have fled—”

“The man was drunk,” pointed out Langdon, in a tone of disgust. “I—and others—remonstrated with the boy