Sup With the Devil

wiping the last traces of blood from her fingers when Joseph Ryland came in.

“Are you finished here, Mrs. Adams? Dr. Perry has sent for a litter to carry poor George’s body to the infirmary—”

“What happened out there?”

The bachelor-fellow shook his head. “Lowth was suddenly taken queer, he said, and slumped down as if he’d been shot. In the next second Mosson went down, too—Waller and Blossom said they were feeling queer . . .”

Abigail stared at him for a moment, then said, “Oh, those wretches!” and dashed past him and out into the study.

The cut-glass rum-bottle that had stood next to Diomede’s bloodstained pallet had been tucked unobtrusively behind a chair. It was empty.

“And it serves them right!” she exclaimed. “Only now of course there’s no way of proving it—”

“Poison?” Ryland followed her, brow drawn down half in consternation, half in disbelief. “How could—?”

“I have drugged their possets, Lady Macbeth says.” Abigail sniffed at the carafe, but could smell only the overwhelming reek of rum. “More likely laudanum than poison—”

“Meant for George?”

“Those idiots,” said Weyountah, going to the window—meaning, Abigail guessed, Lowth and Jasmine and Waller and Mosson who’d thought it was so clever to sneak an extra drink while everyone was milling about . . . “’Twould serve them well if it were poison.”

Ryland and Abigail—carafe in hand—were already hurrying down the stairs.

In the parlor where Abigail had waited last night for young Fairfield, dark little Mr. Blossom was being plied with hot coffee while half-a-dozen masters and students were trying to revive Lowth and Mosson. The smell of burnt feathers and panic filled the air. “They’ve been poisoned!” cried Mr. Yeovil again, and Pugh shouted to a little freshman named Pinkstone—presumably, thought Abigail, his own luckless “fag”—to run fetch coffee from his own room, which was on the staircase of the new hall directly across the quadrangle from that of Fairfield, Weyountah, and Horace.

“They have not,” retorted Abigail, entering hard upon this line. “Mr. Blossom, did you drink the rum in the carafe in George’s room? I thought so. Mr. Waller?” A tall young man with a long, horsey face—sitting with his head between his knees in a circle of frightened acquaintances—jerked upright shakily and gazed at her with pupils narrowed to pinpricks, even in the gloom of the parlor.

“I did, too—” gasped another young man in a green robe. “I-I feel so queer . . .”

“I’m sure you do,” returned Abigail briskly. “There was laudanum in the rum, which would amply account for poor Diomede not waking up—”

“And for poor George—” cried someone else.

“The blackguard!” exclaimed another young gentleman. “To poison his master, then drink himself stupid in celebration—”

“Nonsense!” snapped Abigail, taken aback this interpretation of her evidence. “Fairfield was stabbed, for one thing, and for another, a killer would have to be stupid to take a drug like that before even getting out of the room —”

“It’s exactly what that nigger of mine would do,” remarked Pugh, straightening up from beside the pile of coats where Lowth lay. “Only he’d probably drink off half the rum before drugging it, to give himself a little Dutch courage—” He put his hands on his hips, regarded Abigail’s openmouthed indignation with some amusement. “They don’t think the way white people do, m’am,” he said. “You ask any man who’s grown up among ’em as I have. They don’t look ahead—not two minutes, not two feet. Like dealing with a lot of fouryear-olds.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

Pugh raised one eyebrow. “Got a lot of ’em in Boston, have you, m’am, to know ’em so well?”

And a man with the accent of the Carolinas affirmed, “Ours sure don’t think before they act.”

As she looked from face to face, Abigail was shocked to observe how many of these young men were nodding—some of them unwillingly, but accepting the judgment as it stood. Someone said, “Poor old George!” and someone else, “My Aunt Caro was killed by a nigger maid—”

“And what do you expect,” demanded Dr. Langdon, rising from beside Dr. Perry where both men had knelt beside the vaguely stirring Mr. Mosson, “when you have grown up in an atmosphere envenomed by the vice of slavery? When a poor Negro is driven to desperation by the ill-treatment of a vicious master—”

“Aunt Abigail—”

She was opening her mouth, breathless with anger at these assumptions about Diomede and anyone else of African descent, when Horace quietly touched her elbow.

“Aunt Abigail, I’m sorry, but . . . there is something missing from George’s room. Two books,” he said.

Six

I’m afraid they were not terribly edifying volumes.” Horace shyly pushed up his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “I only took note of them because—”

“You needn’t explain,” said Abigail kindly. The poor boy was only barely seventeen, and she recalled what her brother William had been like at . . . well, considerably younger than that. “And if they were as unedifying as all that, they might very well have gone the way of the rum.” She glanced back over her shoulder as they emerged from the parlor into the open quadrangle and reentered the hallway to mount Horace’s staircase. Even in here, Dr. Langdon’s thundering peroration on why Diomede must have done murder because of his degradation under slavery could be heard with damning clarity. “What were they?”

“Aretino’s I Modi, with the—er—illustrations by Raimondi,” stammered Horace. “And Brantome’s Les Vies des Dames Galantes. Also illustrated.” His blush went from his hairline down under his neckcloth. Abigail thought his ears were going to catch fire. He must have looked over Fairfield’s shoulder at the illustrations, if no more. “And I don’t think they could have been sneaked out of the room by anyone in the crowd this morning. Weyountah was in the bedchamber with George the whole time.”

“Did he keep them in there?”

Horace nodded. “The desk has a false bottom in it,” he said simply.

And Weyountah explained, “There are no locks on the doors of the chambers, so people are always pilfering things. Nothing big—there’s not a man among us who would steal his neighbor’s money—but if a man has tea, or coffee beans, or has just had a package from home with something sweet in it, he’s likely to come back to his room and find less of it than there was when he went out. Of course no one is permitted spirits, so no one can report it if he comes back and finds his rum has been watered—”

“It’s one reason, I think, that seniors let us fags study in their rooms,” put in Horace. “So someone will be there, should they have something they’d rather didn’t disappear—though in truth, Aunt Abigail, it isn’t the nest of thieves we must sound like. For one thing, most of us are in the same lectures at the same times—”

“And for another,” added Weyountah, as they approached the staircase, “everybody gets to know everything, pretty much, and if someone goes about pocketing coffee beans, it doesn’t remain a secret for long.”

They stopped at the foot of the staircase door to let a small procession descend. Mr. Ryland, his faded crimson gown giving him the archaic look of a priest, walked ahead; behind him, four college servants in rough tweeds carried a stretcher covered with the blankets that Abigail recognized from George Fairfield’s bed. She moved to put her arm around Horace’s waist in comfort, then restrained herself, recalling that Ryland was the Fellow in charge of the Hall. No sense having the poor boy fined four shillings on top of everything else.

“Will Dr. Langdon write to George’s father?” she asked softly.

Horace nodded, unable to speak, and Weyountah said, “I imagine so, yes.”

“Do either of you know the man? Or does Mr. Ryland?”

They looked at one another, shook their heads. “Only from hearing George speak of him,” said the Indian. “He’ll be coming, I’m sure, to—to take George home . . .”

“And to deal with Diomede?”