Sup With the Devil

“Half a mo’, Mrs. Adams.” Begbie sprang down from his seat, darted down the split-log steps to the shipyard. From where she sat Abigail could see the broad, flat shape of the ferry scow and no sign of its captain or crew. A carter, a country minister in a black coat, and two stout farm-women in widebrimmed straw hats clustered by the ferry landing, talking eagerly with a couple of men in sailors’ slops.

Even the gulls that wheeled above the dumped remains of some fisherman’s unsold catch seemed to be yammering rumors to one another.

Men came and unloaded an immense coil of ship’s cable from the goods-wagon; Begbie took the horse’s bridle, led the animal down to the ferry just as Obed Pusey and his crew reappeared and began collecting sixpences for the voyage. Abigail climbed down before they crossed the wet black wood of the wharf, and sought out the bench farthest aft and as close to the mast as she could get without interfering with the crew’s work. Crossing through the confluence of the Charles River and the bay itself, the ferry would roll like a home-going drunkard and —a disgrace to her merchant heritage—Abigail knew she invariably became seasick in even the half-mile voyage from Boston to Charles Town across the harbor.

The sharp spring wind filled the sails as the men poled the scow off the wharf: Abigail resolutely fixed her eyes on the tidy cluster of brown houses, of orchards and farmlands, on the feet of the mainland hills. Like Boston, Charles Town stood on a peninsula, connected to the mainland by a neck of land, but from Charles Town you didn’t have to wind around rivers and over bridges to get to the town of Cambridge, where young Horace Thaxter was presently in college.

A letter from Mr. Adams . . . which induced me to believe myself safe in entering a situation at best equivocal . . .

Of course, Horace always believed himself in danger of his life. Abigail recalled more than one conversation with the weedy boy devoted entirely to his recital of his latest symptoms, which ranged from tremor cordis to sanguineous congestion of the lungs. At the time of their last meeting he had been, she estimated, fifteen and “grinding” with a tutor to prepare himself for Harvard College. Horace was tall, thin, and filled to the hairline with Aristotle and medical quackery. That had been on a visit to Salem where his parents (as well as Abigail’s sister) lived, shortly after Abigail’s son Charley’s first birthday.

Now Charley was three.

This is a matter which frightens me.

After long and complex circumlocutions in Latin, it came down to that. This is a matter which frightens me . . . Simple words in English.

And it was true—Abigail admitted it to herself—that she took a deal of pleasure in chopping through the Gordian knot of puzzling circumstance and the deliberate obstructions of evildoers.

It was also true that it was May, after a winter remarkable for the bitterness of its cold, and that once Mr. Begbie’s goods-wagon was off the rocking waters of the bay and onto the road that ran along the feet of Breeds and Bunker Hills, the sweetsmelling quiet of the countryside made a blessed change from Boston’s fishy reek and the stinks of sewage and backyard cows, the twitter of birds a delight after the rattle of carts and the shouting of boys playing in Queen Street and the clatter of hammers in Mr. Butler’s cooperage next door . . .

The peaceful air a relief from that dread that seemed to have settled over the town like a pillow pressed to an uneasy sleeper’s face.

What will we do if . . . ?

It should be any day we’ll hear . . .

Massachusetts in the spring.

The countryside that lay between Charles Town and Cambridge was prosperously settled, orchard trees parting now and then to show Abigail tidy farmhouses, and fields of corn already shoulder-high. Cows chewed mildly in their pastures; gray stone walls lined the road. In patches of woodland, finches and robins sang. Abigail dearly enjoyed the noise and excitement and conveniences of Boston—the ability to simply go down to the wharves for Spanish lemons or to a mercer’s on the next street if she happened to decide her daughter Nabby needed a new dress. The ability to go to a bookstore and purchase the newest works of Goldsmith or Smollett, or the fact that John could bring in newspapers printed that day. The fact that in winter, snow did not mean utter isolation. Yet she had been raised in the parsonage of a very small village, and in her heart, she sorely missed the scents of deep grass and woodland in May.

As Mr. Begbie had a number of deliveries in Cambridge and was likely to pursue his second vocation—that of collecting and disseminating news and rumor—when they reached the outskirts of the village, Abigail bid him good-by with thanks. “I shall finish up at the Golden Stair, on the Common,” said the carter—a neighbor of hers on Queen Street—shaking her hand in farewell. “You’ll find me there in three or four hours—time enough to locate your nephew—and we’ll still be back at the ferry long before the sun’s down. Good luck, m’am!”

Good luck indeed, reflected Abigail good-humoredly, as she set off with her marketing basket in the direction of the College, whose cluster of brick halls she glimpsed through orchard trees, for she hadn’t the faintest idea in which of its several buildings Horace was lodged. The open-sided quadrangle of Harvard College faced the town common, across a lane and a four-foot wall. A young man in a freshman’s short gown emerged from the gate as Abigail drew near. He bore a wig box and walked swiftly, as if pursued or in fear of pursuit, and hesitated for an instant when she waved him over. “Are you acquainted with Mr. Horace Thaxter? Would you know—?”

“I say, I say—!” Another scholar in the longer gown of a more senior student strolled over from a group of his friends. “You there, Yeovil—”

The freshman gave Abigail a harassed look and turned.

“What are you up to, Yeovil?”

“I was speaking with this lady, sir,” said the boy. He looked about fifteen—Horace had been sixteen and a half when he’d entered the college the previous September, but they took boys younger even than this one—with linen spotlessly white against the blue of his academic gown and a beautifully curled pigeon-wing wig, powdered like marble.

“Now, Yeovil,” chided the newcomer, who looked rather like a ferret in a scarlet gown, “a freshman? Address a lady?”

“And so beautiful a lady,” added another of the group, coming over and making Abigail a handsome leg as he bowed. “Che il crin s’e un Tago e son due Soli i lume/Prodigio tal non rimiro Natura . . .” Between a crumpled neckcloth and an elaborately curled wig, his face was plump and unshaven, and his eyes, set in little cushions of fat discolored by sleeplessness, had the twinkling and rather dangerous intelligence of a pig. The effect was of a dissipated baby who had been spending far too many nights in a tavern. “How may your humble servant be of use to you, fair stranger? You, Yeovil, run along . . . Where were you off to?”

In a taut voice that showed an unfortunate tendency to crack, the boy said, “I was taking this wig to be curled, sir.” He held up the box.

The fat student viewed it through a quizzing-glass; his companion in the red gown, suppressing a grin, exclaimed, “Why, so you were! And whose wig is that, Yeovil?”

“Mr. Lechmere’s, sir.”

“Lechmere, Lechmere . . .” The older men—and the other two of their group who had joined them—all made a great show of trying to remember who Lechmere was.

“Egad, isn’t he a sophomore?”

“Disgraceful . . . !”

“For shame!”

“Tell you what,” said Red Gown, and produced from his voluminous sleeve two pewter pitchers, “why don’t you be a good chap and, while you’re in town, just hop on over to the Crowned Pig and fill these up with our good host’s best?”

John had told Abigail about the customs of the college: Yeovil, a lowly fresher, was obliged to do the bidding of his seniors. She also guessed that Red Gown was probably a junior and thus able to preempt the boy’s services (How was he going to carry both pitchers full of ale and also Mr. Lechmere the Sophomore’s wig box . . . ? Which of course was the point, the wretched boys . . .).

Thus she wasn’t at all surprised when Yeovil had been dispatched on his errand and the fat student—whose lush yellow gown gave him the general appearance of a gargantuan squash—made another bow, to find her request