Sup With the Devil

It was Abigail’s turn to startle. “Not to my knowledge. According to Governor Hutchinson—whom I called upon last night for a perfectly legitimate reason,” she added, as Sam’s frown returned in earnest at the name, “Barthelmy Whitehead was a slave-trader and a merchant, but a pirate I hadn’t heard. Why,” she inquired thoughtfully, “did you say pirate?”

“Oh, ’twas a great joke when I was at Harvard. That for all Seckar’s thunderings in chapel about how nine- tenths of us were going straight to Hell, not for anything we’d done or resisted, but because God in his infinite wisdom had positively determined that we should do so, before the beginning of time for His Own Ineffable Purposes—and there was some frightful argument about whether this decision was active or passive and whether it had taken place before or after the Fall of the Angels—for all his condemnation of us, the Reverend Log-In-Thine-Own-Eye Seckar’s wife was descended from a pirate. We used to think it a huge jest to chalk a skull and crossbones on the door of his study, just to hear him curse at the servants.”

“And he probably went home and took his rage out on his wife. ’Tis odd,” Abigail continued, “that you should speak of a pirate in connection with the books. Because there’s a very strange story attached to them.”

She hesitated, studying Sam’s face—already lined, the gray eyes watchful but bearing no trace of sleeplessness, for all the waiting dread that had settled on the city. If he was anything like John, she reflected wearily, he could probably sleep through the Lisbon earthquake . . .

“Are you familiar,” she asked slowly, “with a young gentleman named George Fairfield?”

“That young Tory jackanapes who’s got up a troop of mounted militia?”

“The same.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “He was killed Tuesday night, wasn’t he?”

“He was.”

She saw his expression change as he realized the direction of her question.: “Oh, for God’s sake, Nab —!”

“’Tis what they’re saying.”

“’Tis what who’s saying? We’re not the Assassins, Nab. I promise you, masked patriots don’t lie in wait for every young imbecile who takes it into his head to get himself a King’s Commission by raising a troop of horse that’ll likely schism itself into insignificance the next time the father of one of them cheats the father of another over a land-deal. The countryside is full of them.”

He made a movement to pick up the folio, then set it down, regarding her with troubled eyes. “What evidence do they have?”

“None that I know of. Yet the man they’ve arrested for the deed—the dead boy’s servant—is to my mind as innocent as my son Johnny. And there is something most curious going on.” And, a trifle hesitantly—one never knew what Sam was going to do with any piece of information one gave him—she related what Horace had told her about Mrs. Lake’s disgraceful document, about the events of Tuesday night, and the sudden indisposition of four Harvard students on Wednesday morning. “Does it not seem to you that not having found what she sought—or all of what she sought—in the account of Captain Morgan’s and Mistress Pitts’s embezzlement of Crown funds, this Mrs. Lake or her scar-faced henchmen are now in quest of other volumes from the same source? I have written Narcissa Seckar—she lives in Medfield—asking for the favor of an interview, to ascertain that Mrs. Lake’s Arabic document was indeed connected with the only other source of texts in that language that we know of in the colony: I hope to receive a reply tomorrow.”

“And you think that this Mrs. Lake—or one of her henchmen—knew only that young Fairfield had gotten books from the same source, not knowing what they might be.” Abigail could almost see the flash and flicker of thought passing through his eyes. “Who’s Mrs. Lake?”

“I’d hoped you might know someone of that name.”

He shook his head and opened the folio. “Geof. Whitehead,” he read the large, rather crooked signature that sprawled, in faded ink, across the title page of The Sceptical Chymist. “Sixteen eighty- two. The name isn’t familiar—Mrs. Lake’s, I mean—and probably isn’t her own—”

“I’d thought of that, yes.”

“But I’ll make enquiries. Embezzlement of the Crown treasury of Jamaica—”

“Horace is recopying what he can remember of the document,” said Abigail. Having paged completely through the quarto on horse-doctoring, she opened its front cover and ran her hand over the rather mildewed marbled paper of its inner binding, but she found no evidence that anything had been hidden beneath it. Nor had anything been written on it or on any of the blank pages that made up the ends of the last signature. “His memory is excellent —”

“There are notes in the back of the Paracelsus,” provided Sam, who had evidently gone over the volumes with some care. “In English, Latin, Spanish, and what I think is Algonquian, which the writer—I presume Geof. Whitehead, whoever he was—seems to use interchangeably. And that thin quarto with the red cover is all notes— mostly about chemical experiments, the position of stars as they progress through the ecliptic, where he goes to harvest witch hazel, and how long it takes cranberries to progress from first leaf to jam on his breakfast table. Nothing about pirate treasure . . .”

But there was a soft thoughtfulness in the way he said those last words, and when Abigail looked up sharply at him, she saw a distant glimmer in his eyes.

“Did you have a look about young Fairfield’s rooms?”

“I did. And found naught but a great quantity of tailors’ and bootmakers’ bills—which I shall pass along to Mr. Fairfield, Senior, when he arrives next month—and love-notes from about a dozen young ladies.” The drawer had also contained several drafts on Boston moneylenders, a huge quantity of gaming-vowels, three promissory notes that young Fairfield had signed—hair-raisingly, for other men’s debts, including one for Joseph Ryland—and two letters from his father, decrying his spendthrift ways in terms that gave Abigail little hope for liberality or pity where Diomede was concerned. But these were not Sam’s business.

Nor were the love-letters that had been in Fairfield’s pocket when he’d died—nor the note in the same dainty hand begging for an assignation behind the barn.

“You didn’t tell Hutchinson any of what you’ve told me, did you?” Sam asked at length. “The man’s a serpent; he couldn’t crawl straight if he wanted to . . . and he knows everything there is to know about who did what in this colony ninety years ago. He’ll know who Geof Whitehead was, and if he was burying pirate treasure . . .”

“I didn’t tell him that there were other books, no. I had to tell him of those in Mr. Fairfield’s room. As the slave Diomede stands in peril of his life, I didn’t think it proper to withhold evidence. I left him with the impression that they had not been included in the Harvard bequest because of their nature, which I understand to have been eyeball-scorchingly obscene.”

“The man’s a trustee of Harvard. Belike he’s already got his hands on the rest.”

“He said nothing of it . . .”

“Good Lord, woman, d’you think he’d mention it to you if he sees you poking about on the trail of the stolen books? The man’s a snake, I tell you. There’s every chance ’twas he who hired Mrs. Lake in the first place, and the man who put laudanum in young Mr. Fairfield’s rum.”

“Now, that’s ridiculous!” said Abigail. “I know you and John hate the man like poison, but even his enemies allow him to be a man of justice—”

“God save us,” retorted Sam, “from a good man with a bad idea—though I reserve my judgment about our dear Governor Hutchinson’s goodness. He’s a merchant and a pedant who convinced the King to appoint him, first to the chief justiceship of the colony, despite the fact that he has exactly as much legal training as the kitchen cat, then to the governorship—on the grounds of his loyalty to the idea that the colony exists solely for what money can be wrung out of it and handed to the King’s friends. And he’s kept there by his adherence to the principle that any means are legitimate to keep its people in bondage to the merchants of London who support the King. If he so much as suspects that money embezzled from the Jamaica treasury a hundred years ago is floating about in ‘undeserving’ hands—”

“I think you’re confusing the man with Cesare Borgia,” replied Abigail resolutely.

“And I think you’re confusing him with Solon the Good, Lawgiver of Athens . . . who had a few weaknesses of his own that they’ve kept out of the history books. Will you show me this ‘reconstructed’ treasure-key, when your nephew finishes with it?”