Sup With the Devil

She could tell by their faces that this aspect of the situation had only begun to surface through shock and grief.

Horace said, “Oh, dear—”

And Weyountah, “Oh, Christ.”

“Dear Mr. Fairfield,” said Abigail drily. “I regret to inform you that your son’s valet has murdered your son in a fit of drunken rage over his enslaved condition, which is no more than is to be expected. Shame on you for transforming him into a man so degraded as to do the deed, and it serves you right that he did. Please come and have him picked up for trial before the Virginia courts. What is the penalty for a slave who kills his master, in Virginia? Hanging? And how likely is it that he’ll receive even a hearing, let alone a trial?”

“Negligible,” said Weyountah softly. “And no, it’s not hanging. It’s burning at the stake. When will Mr. Adams return from Maine?”

“Friday,” said Abigail. “Possibly Saturday, though there’s talk of him going down to Providence next week. I expect they’ll hold Diomede here for Mr. Fairfield’s arrival, rather than try him under Massachusetts law, which means that no matter how many affidavits we can collect attesting his innocence, he shall still face judgment entirely at the hands of a father mourning the loss of his only son and men who have spent the whole of their lives watching for the slightest signs of defiance and murder in their slaves.”

“Can Mr. Adams have the trial moved here?” With a swift and rather guilty glance about them, to make sure that Mr. Ryland and his party were out of the hall, Weyountah led the way up the staircase again. “How would one go about that? Petition the Governor?”

“’Tis what I’ll try,” said Abigail grimly. “John hates the man, but the one time I’ve met him, His Excellency seemed kindly and well-disposed. I’ve heard nothing personal against him, save that he’s a self-serving blockhead who gives all colonial offices and perquisites to his family and friends, and any man might do that. Even one who has written to the King advising that the harshest measures be taken against the colony for our disobedient persistence in wanting to have the rights accorded to the meanest ditchdigger in a British parish.

“The problem is,” she added, as they slipped through the oak door and stood in the tiny study again, the stink of blood and rum very strong now in the close room. “The problem is,’twill be difficult to convince His Excellency or anyone that murder—sufficiently premeditated to entail the drugging of a servant—was done for a couple of pornographic books. It seems a small matter to be the worth of a man’s life.”

“Think you so, m’am?” Weyountah, kneeling beside the rumpled and blood-smudged pallet that still lay along one wall of the study, looked up, his dark eyes somber. “My grandparents were killed, and three of my aunts, because a band of Massachusetts militiamen took the wrong path in the woods one day on their way to avenge the killing of four cows and a herdsman by the men of a Pocasset village that they couldn’t manage to locate. Such was their desire for vengeance, however, that they followed the path, knowing themselves to be lost, and burned the village that they found at the end of it, though they knew that they’d come upon Narragansetts rather than Pocassets. About twenty people were killed—men, women, and children who had no more to do with the original cow-killing than had the islanders of Oatahite. My mother only escaped because she was down at the creek catching fish that afternoon. She was ten.”

Abigail was silent, looking down at that young man, in his faded blue scholar’s gown and his trim, dark, threadbare suit. The blood on the sheets nearby seemed to mutter and whisper of the violence done in the room beyond: that someone had considered something worth not only the life of George Fairfield but of his slave also . . .

But ten years of talking over John’s cases with him had told her—if a childhood listening to the sins and enormities of an isolated New England village had not—that men walked the earth to whom the avoidance of inconvenience or embarrassment was sufficient justification for taking another man’s life.

“Would a student caught breaking into another man’s room stand in danger of being sent down?” she asked. “Particularly at night—”

“Absolutely.”

“Sine dubium. The thing is,” went on Horace diffidently, as he followed Abigail and Weyountah—rather white-faced but resolute—into the bedchamber beyond. “The thing is, George had only just gotten those books . . . what was it, Weyountah? Two weeks ago?”

“Exactly two weeks.” Weyountah removed the stacked papers from the desk, handed them to Horace, his movements swift as if the two of them worked underwater, with only limited time available in the room that stank of their friend’s lifeblood soaked into the mattress of the bed. “The twelfth of April. He kept them in here.”

He opened the desk, revealing the shallow compartment inside empty of everything save a few sheets of paper and some broken quills.

“Was there usually more in here?” Abigail inquired. It looked nothing like John’s neat desk at home, but then, Fairfield had not impressed her as a scholar.

“I think so,” said Horace, his arms filled with papers, books, and Greek and Latin lexicons. “But I usually worked in the front room, not in here. The college provosts will sometimes search the rooms—I know Pugh pays the ones over in Harvard Hall and the Fellow in charge of the hall as well not to touch his—and last term Jasmine tried to blackmail George over some love-letters a girl had written to him . . . that’s when he started keeping everything hidden in this desk.”

Weyountah hooked his finger into an almost-invisible hole at one side of the desk’s interior and lifted out the false bottom to reveal a second compartment beneath. This contained a vast rummage of disordered papers: bills —from tailors, bootmakers, the college stables for feed—mixed with letters and notes. Abigail picked one up, Deerst Geo Ill bee back of the brewhous tonight dreemin of you ellie . . . There was also a small sack of coffee beans and a flask of rum. “He kept the books in there,” said Horace. “I know, because I came in yesterday morning earlier than he’d counted on, and he had the desk open and was looking at them—” Color crept up into his face again and faded almost at once, as he remembered not the pictures in the book, but the nearness of his friend who would never ogle questionable pictures again. After a moment he swallowed hard and went on, “And the same woman who sold them to him, sold me four books in Arabic.”

Her name, said Horace—over a breakfast of Mrs. Squills’s sausage and corn-cakes at the Golden Stair some half hour later—was Mrs. Seckar. “Her husband held the Vassall Professorship of Religion for about a hundred years,” explained the boy. “He was very much a disciple of John Calvin and would hear of no innovation in the teaching of his master—”

“He was a pride-sick old bigot.” Weyountah poured out coffee for himself and Abigail from a yellow pottery pitcher, while Horace sipped the mild tisane of honey, mint, and water that was all his fragile digestion would tolerate. “Cruel, too. He led his poor wife a frightful life, then left the house and bulk of his estate to fund a position here at Harvard. She was selling the books—which were hers—in order to have a little money to take with her when she went to live with her cousins in Medfield.”

“The one Mr. Fairfield spoke of,” said Abigail thoughtfully. “And she had books in Arabic? Not to mention volumes like the Vies des Dames Galantes?”

“Mrs. Seckar said they had probably been her great-grandfather’s,” explained the Indian. “I bought two texts in chemistry, though they’re fearfully out of date—the most recent was Willis’s Pharmaceutice Rationalis, 1674—and what I think was someone’s journal, which contained tables of astronomical observations and several pages of various methods of calculating sidereal time. One passage was translated from al-Farghani—an Arabic scholar nearly a thousand years ago—and I think in the chemical sections there were translations from al-Jildaki, who was one of the early Mohammedan scholars of the discipline.”

“The four I bought weren’t anywhere near that erudite,” admitted Horace. “I had an edition of the Alexander Legend, Ibn-Battuta’s travel narratives, a commentary on the Koran, and a book about horse-doctoring.”

“So obviously, Mrs. Seckar’s ancestor was the last Arabic scholar in this colony . . . How long ago? Fifty years? Sixty years?”

“Longer,” said Weyountah. “Mrs. Seckar must be in her seventies. The Reverend Seckar was eighty-five, but up to the day he died he’d walk from their house on the Watertown Road to the chapel”—he nodded in the direction