Sup With the Devil

Eleven

George said he’d keep the license.” Katy Pegg—as she had said her name was—sat on the edge of the naked bedframe, brown hands folded in her lap. “There’s no place at home I could put it that it’d be safe from my step-pa. We married in December, before George left for Virginia.”

Abigail glanced at the desk beside the window. It had not been opened. Among all the tailors’ bills, all the gamblingmarkers, all the love-letters she’d taken out Wednesday morning, there had been no marriage license.

“We rode down to Providence together. I don’t know what he told Diomede—the man his Pa wished on him, to keep him from meddling with girls, George said. Tuesday night—” Tears flooded her eyes, and she almost slapped them away with impatient fingers. “I was with him—”

“He was killed by an intruder,” said Abigail gently, “late on Tuesday night after he came back here to his rooms. A thief.”

The girl closed her eyes, her face like a defiant child’s, who’ll take a whipping rather than ask a parent to stop.

“What time did you part?”

“Midnight. He said he was meeting friends, and the—the men I’d rid out here with would be leaving soon. My step-pa would skin me if he knew—”

She took a deep breath, some of the terrible tension going out of her slim shoulders, her oval face. “My step-pa hated him. He said he was a damned Tory and would break my heart for me, and leave me caught with a baby . . . which is what he was after himself, the—”

She stopped herself, looked down at her square, boyish hands, folded tight in her lap. “George said he’d come for me on Wednesday night. That’s the night Mr. Deems—my step-pa—goes out with the Watertown militia. I wrote Thursday . . .” She raised her hands quickly to press against her lips again, then lowered them almost at once. “So I got a lift this morning from one of the farmers that was coming in for the militia. I knew George’s Pa wouldn’t stand for it, for George and me, I mean. But he said—George said—that marrying me made it all right, and they couldn’t stop us if we were wed.”

Abigail rolled her eyes heavenward. Carmody—the worst of her brother’s ne’er-do-well friends—had boasted to William once when he didn’t realize Abigail was in earshot of having “wedded” a girl who couldn’t be persuaded and was too cagy to let herself get into a situation where she could be raped with impunity (“Well, they always cry rape afterwards,” Carmody had shrugged . . .)

And the young scoundrel with Sally Woodleigh’s love-letters in his pocket—! She felt sick with disappointment, as if she herself had been betrayed.

“What happened?”

“Mrs. Adams—” Weyountah’s light tread sounded in the study. “If we don’t leave now . . .”

He halted in the doorway, startled to see Abigail not alone.

“Mr. Wylie,” Abigail introduced, “Mistress Pegg. Or, as she claims is the truth, so far as she knows it, Mrs. Fairfield.”

Weyountah’s jaw dropped for less than a second. He shut his mouth and bowed. “I’m very sorry, m’am,” he said. “Mrs. Adams must have—”

“She did.” Katy stood, her shoulders straight. “And as for, so far as I know it . . . It is the truth. We brought proofs of my age and that my parents were dead, and the county clerk in Providence made us out a license and a certificate, and married us—”

“In the courthouse?” asked Weyountah.

Katy shook her head. “In the back room of a tavern about a mile outside of the town. George’s father has many friends in Providence, merchants who do business with him. George made this arrangement, so that we wouldn’t . . .” She broke off, looking from Abigail’s face to those of the two students, and her own cheeks reddened. Her chin came up. “And no, it wasn’t as it looks—as I can see you’re thinking. The man was genuinely the county clerk, and George gave him ten shillings to put it in his book at the courthouse that we’d been married there, though there’s nothing in the laws of Providence nor of Massachusetts, either, that says a marriage isn’t valid if it’s not performed in some certain magical place.”

“But it is the reason, m’am,” said the Indian gently, “that they want witnesses and the presence of the families, to make sure the girl isn’t being lied to—”

“Oh, and wouldn’t my step-pa just love to see his girl married to a Tory? George didn’t lie to me. He said he’d keep the license—”

“It wasn’t in his desk.”

“Look in his books,” said Katy, in a small, steady voice. “He was always putting things he wanted to keep in the backs of his books . . .”

“That’s true,” said Horace. Abigail’s heart went out to him, at the expression of wretchedness on his face, that his hero would have played so despicable a trick on a girl.

“But I did see it when ’twas signed, m’am,” said Katy. “And the clerk did sign it after he’d read the service over us. And he truly was the county clerk.”

“Be that as it may,” said Weyountah firmly. “The chaise is at the door, m’am, and further delay will prevent Mrs. Adams from getting back to Boston, either by the ferry or through the town gates. Moreover, Mrs. Adams is Horace’s aunt, and you—Mrs. Fairfield—are nothing of the kind, and we could all of us be in serious trouble if some mean-spirited bachelor-fellow were to happen along and report the lot of us to Dr. Langdon.”

“Like that wretch Ryland? He’d do it—Mrs. Adams?” The name finally seemed to register, and her blue eyes stretched wide. “Not . . . Not Samuel Adams?”

“I am Mrs. John Adams,” said Abigail. “Are you staying in Cambridge, Mrs. Fairfield? Or can we leave you somewhere?”

“Looks like I’ve been left somewhere as it is.” Katy turned and picked up the small bundle she had left, almost out of sight by the end of the bed. “John Adams—that wouldn’t be he who writes as Novanglus, would it? And those other letters he’s done . . . You’ll be Weyountah, won’t you?” she added, turning back toward the Indian. “You’d never get the four of us into that little chaise of George’s.”

“It’s why I borrowed Millard’s old post chaise and Benton’s horse. If Horace has no objection to riding on the back—”

“And if Horace does?” protested Horace.

“Then I’ll ride on the back,” said Katy, with a sudden flicker of a grin. “I’ve always wanted to, seeing the gentlemen coming into the tavern yard—” She followed Abigail down the stair, halting obediently at Weyountah’s signal so that the Indian could step out first and make sure that the corridor was clear. They hastened to the door, where the dwarfish Mr. Beaverbrook was holding the heads of Sassy and the tallest, boniest black gelding Abigail had ever seen. As Abigail handed Mr. Beaverbrook a quarter of a silver doubloon and touched her finger to her lips for silence, Horace climbed rather gingerly onto the footman’s stand on the back of the little vehicle. “I suffer from vertigo,” he warned. “And sometimes even scotodinia . . .”

“Where do you go?” Abigail asked Katy, as Weyountah helped them into the four-wheeled post chaise and then went to mount Sassy, the harness permitting a rider.

“Home, it looks like.” Abigail heard in the girl’s voice the effort to keep it steady. “Mr. Deems is the head hostler at the Yellow Cow, if you know where that is?” She leaned from the door of the chaise to address this last to Weyountah, who was preparing to put the whole equipage into motion. “Where the road forks to go to Watertown —”

“Never tell me you walked!” protested the scholar. “That’s almost to Concord!”

“Lord, you think I couldn’t get a ride?” retorted the girl, with a quick flash of a grin. But as she settled back into the worn leather of the seat and Weyountah touched his heels to Sassy’s sides, Katy admitted wanly, “But to be honest, I’m just as glad to have the ride, if go back I must. I’d hoped . . .”

She broke off her words and sat for a time, looking out at the handsome houses as they passed along Brattle