Sup With the Devil

Street and out toward the countryside beyond the town. The drumming of the militia faded behind them, the ragged crackling of rifle-fire like very distant lightning. Katy began to say, “George—” She stopped herself. Whatever George was or could have been, it was over now.

“What about Diomede?” she asked after a time, returning her attention to Abigail. “I only ever saw him at a distance, but George told me about him, and I feel like I know him—just as I feel like I know Weyountah and . . . It is Horace, isn’t it? Was Dio drunk when this thief came in? I know he drank,” she added. “But according to George —I’m sorry, I can’t seem to stop bringing up his name, like a grandmother . . . George said Diomede seldom got so fogbound he couldn’t pull himself together and wake up at need. Diomede’s a terrible mother hen, George said. Well, he had to be; it was his job, like those old Roman he-nannies they used to have—”

“Pedagogues,” said Abigail, smiling.

“Yes . . . and about time the men found out what it was like, having to chase around after a child all day long. Not that they aren’t sweet,” she added, with a secret smile of her own and a small movement, to lay her hand on her belly, that made Abigail moan inwardly—And the young blackguard made her pregnant as well! “I know all this is bad for me, but the poor man must be devastated! To look after someone all those years . . . Is Diomede all right?”

“I fear not,” Abigail said. “Diomede is being accused of the murder.”

The girl’s eyes flared with horror, and when Abigail sketched the circumstances—saying nothing of what was stolen, only that the rum had been drugged—Katy cried again, “Oh, NO! How awful—”

“Is there anyone you know of,” Abigail asked curiously, “who might hate George enough to harm him?”

“Bruck Travers,” replied the girl at once. “He’s captain of the Watertown militia. He’s also on the Committee of Correspondence. Mr. Deems—my step-pa—says Bruck is the greatest patriot in the county, and so he is. Twice he had the boys out to ambush George and Diomede when they were coming back from drilling with the Volunteers.”

The heartfelt approval in her voice made Abigail raise her brows. “I thought you were a Tory?”

“What on earth gave you that idea?” Katy looked genuinely surprised. “I listened very carefully to the clerk when he read the marriage service, and I didn’t hear a single thing about a woman having to cleave to her husband’s politics if her husband’s idiot enough to believe the Governor’s Tory lies. George can take care of himself and whip a dozen of Bruck Travers. That is—”

Her voice stammered a little, and she looked aside again, fixing her attention on the open cornfields that lay beyond the tree-shaded road, the grazing cattle and the black circling shapes of crows. After a moment she went on, “Just because George let a bunch of lying Tory merchants talk him into believing a King who wants to put us all in chains, doesn’t mean I don’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

She took a few breaths, her body swaying a little with the motion of the chaise. “If your husband were a raving Tory, m’am, would you cease to love him?”

“No,” said Abigail, smiling. “No, I suppose not.”

About ten miles along the Concord Road, Weyountah reined the team up a side-trace that ran through a woodlot, across a very rickety bridge, and past what looked like, in previous years, had been corn fields, now given over to pasturage of a herd of black-and-white cows. Twisting in her seat to lean out the window and holding perilously to her sunbonnet, Katy said, “It’s the Chamberville place, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Of course.” She returned to a normal posture and looked at Abigail as if surprised she hadn’t heard the whole tale. “Lemuel Chamberville was the magistrate at Waterford when the King tried to force the Stamp Act down our throats, and Boam Travers—Bruck’s father—and his boys hamstrung Chamberville’s cattle and horses, and burned his barn, and half killed his coachman, and eventually Chamberville went to live in Boston and rents out his land to the Harters, who’re Tories, too, but have about five sons and hold the debts on nearly everyone in the township. The house has been empty for years.”

And through the window, Abigail heard Horace cry excitedly, “That’s the house! I know it!”

Score one for John.

Weyountah tied up the horses as Horace—pale with mal de mer—sprang down from his tall perch and ran across the drive (which could have stood a few wagonloads of gravel, in Abigail’s opinion) to the shuttered windows. “These were open,” he said at once. “When we drove up, there were lamps burning inside.”

“They show no sign of having been forced,” remarked Abigail, bracing her feet on the foundation bricks and raising herself up a little to examine the wood. “Either that, or whoever did it was very skilled—I myself have no practical experience in the forcing-open of window-shutters.” She led the way to the front door, and knelt on the single shallow step to examine the wood around the doorknob. “No fresh scratches here—”

“And we’re far enough back from the road that there’s no reason they’d have chosen the back door over the front,” added Weyountah. But they went round to the back in any case, checking every shutter en route, and found the kitchen door likewise innocent of fresh evidence of a break-in. The stable was also closed up, but horses had certainly stood in the yard, and the droppings left there looked no more than a week old—

“And look here,” called out Katy, emerging from around the corner of the stable with her short skirts tucked up even shorter under her belt. “Someone’s eaten an apple and smoked a couple of pipes of tobacco here by the corner—”

“That would be Oculus Cicatricosus.” Horace turned back to look at the house. “I don’t think the parlor I was in overlooked the stable-yard . . .”

“No, but Mrs. Lake left you, as you recall, to fetch you poisoned bread and coffee,” pointed out Abigail. “And this corner lies in clear sight of the kitchen door.”

“Were you here?” Katy hunkered like a child to prod at the nasty little wads of tobacco with a twig, where they lay all but hidden in the unscythed grass. “Did someone try to break into the house?”

“We think Horace—Mr. Thaxter—was lured to this house,” explained Abigail, “by people who almost certainly were not the Chambervilles . . . On the other hand,” she added thoughtfully, “they might well have been.”

“Chamberville is a Tory of the deepest dye.” Katy straightened up and tucked back into her cap—under the shading brim of her straw sunbonnet—the long wisps of Indian-black hair that seemed to have a tendency to stray everywhere. “A close friend of the Governor’s and ripe to turn his hand to any villainy in the King’s name. What happened?” She looked sharply from Abigail to Horace, then back toward the house . . . which certainly could have been easily opened, Abigail reflected, by someone who had simply been able to get the key from its owner, as John had said.

“And is there anyone that you know of,” she asked, “whose face is scarred in a V over his left eye—” She demonstrated again the mark that Charley had so carefully duplicated in mud on his own pink countenance.

“Blue eyes,” said Horace eagerly. “Very light blue, under black brows—the one brow whitened where the scar goes through.”

Katy frowned thoughtfully and shook her head. She trailed Abigail and the two young men as they circled the stable, all four studying the ground without any clear idea of what they sought or might find. “He doesn’t sound like the sort of person Mr. Chamberville would employ,” she guessed, which, Abigail reflected, was probably true.

“I daresay not. And I daresay he and his spiritual brethren could be hired for a penny a day on the wharves, by whoever knows Chamberville well enough to beg his key off him for a night, with the throat-cutting thrown in gratis.”

“Were they going to cut your throat?” The girl regarded Horace’s tall, bespectacled form with renewed interest.

“I don’t know,” said Horace uncomfortably. “It seemed so to me last Friday night, stopped in the darkness of the woods with these people . . . Now, I’m not so sure.”

“You must be sure,” pointed out the girl. “’Tis when you have doubts and hesitate that you become their victim—whether highway robbers or the Governor’s men spreading lies to keep the people from acting for their rights. Only in certainty lies the attack, and only in the attack lies salvation and freedom.”

“Some craven scruple,” quoted Weyountah, shaking his head, “of thinking too precisely on the event.”