who look to him for guidance, meaning cruelly harsh to his mother and sisters when he brought them in to live with us. And if he was as filled with pride as a toad is with poison, where Father could not see, and sometimes used the rod as well as the word to smite and guide . . . I’m sure Father would have allowed that some latitude is to be given for one so filled with the zeal of the Lord.”
She returned to her knitting, and the gray kitten stood on its hinder legs and snatched at the moving needle- heads with its white-tipped paws. The farmhouse had no glass to its windows, and outside the tight-barred shutters, Abigail heard the hooting of an owl and the noise of some larger creature, moving about in the woods.
“I’m afraid I’ve wandered rather far afield,” apologized the old lady after a moment. “But indeed, the house was the one I had grown up in, and the rear wing—the laundry and the kitchen—had once, I think, been the main part of the house.’Tis made of stone, and very long and narrow, and the floors only dirt. I believe ’twas my grandfather, the despicable Barthelmy, who had the main house built in 1683, and old Beelzebub went on living in his old stone wing until his death nearly ten years after that.”
“I wonder what the good citizens of Cambridge made of him?” Abigail couldn’t keep the amusement from her voice, at the thought of a pirate and sorcerer—and sometime collector of naughty volumes—retiring for his declining years to that quiet town of divinity students and Tory worthies. “Or he of them, for that matter. And what of his castle in the backcountry where Indians worshipped him as a god?”
“From what Father said—though he was quite capable of making it up—toward the end of his life, Old Beelzebub repented of his sins, gave up alchemy—”
“He was an alchemist?”
“Oh, good Heavens, yes. In his quest for the ancient formula for Greek Fire he is reported to have burned down half an Indian village. In addition to which he summoned the Devil, invented a flying machine, and, of course, turned common rocks into gold. His repentance, Father never hesitated to point out, would not have done him the slightest good, as he was clearly destined for Hell, and he—Father—became thoroughly incensed when I asked,
“My son asked me that, too,” sighed Abigail. “I told him that only God knows whether a man is ultimately destined for damnation or salvation, and that we must encourage the unrighteous to abandon evil, because it might be—but we do not know—that we are God’s chosen tools in another’s path toward righteousness, like the ass that bore Saul of Tarsus toward Damascus.”
“Well, that explanation would involve my Father not knowing something.” Narcissa finished off the top of the sock, clipped the yarn, and slipped it neatly into her basket, as if all the long years she spoke of had happened to someone else. “So it could not be true. In any case, according to my aunt Serafina—Grandfather Barthelmy’s sister, who lived with us for some years while I was a child—her father, Old Beelzebub, built the stone house in Cambridge just after King Philip’s War, so it might have been he was simply driven out of the backcountry by the Indians and felt himself too old to make a new start there. The newer portion of the house lies at rightangles to the old, in such a way that it was not at all obvious that about eighteen inches of its northern end had been bricked and plastered over, to hide the two shelves of books. Only when the eastern wall was broken out—how long ago it seems! But’twas not even a month!—to make the enlargement was this secret space found and, in it, my great- grandfather’s books.”
Thoughtfully, Abigail said, “Which the Governor then bought.” She frowned. “But you said your husband ordered the work done—”
“He died,” said Narcissa, “not a week after the workmen broke down the wall.”
“Will you ladies stay up and make a night of it?” Seth Barlow grinned good-naturedly as he crossed the keeping room to their corner. Thaxter and the older boys came back in from having a final piss and disappeared up the loft-ladder; the yellow dog turned around a time or two where the benches and chairs had been. The farmer put the tin lamp he carried on the table beside his aunt-in-law’s chair and felt the side of the red teapot. Mrs. Barlow and the baby had disappeared into the bedroom some time previously. The house had grown deeply still.
Abigail said apologetically “I should—” and Narcissa waved her small, work-rough hands.
“Don’t worry for me, Mrs. Adams, if you’re wanting to sit up a little longer. If you’re not too tired after your journey—”
“Heavens, no! I only worry that you—”
“Well,” said Barlow, kneeling beside them to bank the hearth-fire under a careful mound of ashes, “while you two ladies are arguing out which of you is being polite, I’m for bed. Are you warm enough? ’Tis a mild evening—” He got to his feet, dusted his hands, and brought shawls from the great, clumsy sideboard, one of the few pieces of furniture in the room. “The pallet’s made up for you in the bedroom, Sissy—” He bent to kiss the old lady’s wrinkled cheek. “Mrs. Adams”—he grasped her hand—“my wife promises she’ll be silent as a mouse in the morning. And don’t mind old Rex. He snores.”
“Anyone who promises mouselike silence,” remarked Abigail ruefully, when the bedroom door shut behind him, “has never heard the ones we get in our attic. Five minutes,” she promised, “and then I shall let you go to bed.”
“Five minutes.” Narcissa hobbled to the cupboard, took out a small pot, and from it dripped a spoon of honey into her tisane. “Will you have—No?—Where were we? Oh, yes, selling the books to the Governor.”
’Twas true, Abigail reflected, there had been no real NEED for Hutchinson to tell her he’d bought Mrs. Seckar’s books...
But they had been discussing the books, and Barthelmy Whitehead, and old Emmanuel Seckar. They had been speaking of Diomede, whose life hung in the balance depending on the events of the evening when two of those books had disappeared.
Only a dullard would not have exclaimed,
And whatever else John and Sam liked to claim, His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson was not a dullard.
“How did that come about? I take it your husband was not ill then—?”
“Heavens, no. That is, Mr. Seckar’s health was fragile by then—he was in his eighties—but he never really ailed. He always walked to the college. And he would not hear of selling the books. In fact he spoke of burning them.”
“Did he have offers?” Abigail wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, though in fact, as her host had said, the night was a pleasant one. Outside the tiny glow of the betty lamp, the big keeping room was like a friendly cave. The gleam picked up for a moment the round gold reflection of Rex’s eyes before that faithful retainer dropped his nose back to his paws, sighed, and returned to his well-earned sleep. He did indeed snore.
“Three,” said Mrs. Seckar. “The first was from a West Indian bachelor-fellow named Pugh—who naturally enough offered for the disgraceful books, of which there were about five, as I recall—I think he offered for three or four other volumes as well. Mr. Seckar refused and swore he’d burn them before he’d sell them to the likes of Mr. Pugh.”
“I have met Mr. Pugh,” said Abigail. “I should like to think myself spiritually fit enough that I would sell him a map were he lost in a desert without water, but I am not sure of it—”
“Well, he’s the one who thought it a hilarious jest,” said Mrs. Seckar, “to stand up and ask at Mr. Seckar’s lectures, was it true that a member of his family had once kept a harem of Berber dancing-girls, and how was the state of their salvation affected by being tupped by a Christian man? Father had managed to completely scotch the rumor about his grandfather,” she added. “But Mr. Pugh’s great-grandfather had done business with Old Beelzebub in Jamaica. Threats to have him sent down served to keep him from spreading these tales—yet he made the mistake of offering to blackmail Mr. Seckar on the subject when Mr. Seckar would not sell. Of course this only rendered Mr. Seckar quarrelsome. Not,” she added drily, “that it took much to render Mr. Seckar quarrelsome.”
“And of course the one he quarrelled with was you.”
“One did one’s best.” Narcissa sighed, and her arthritiscrippled fingers stilled on the looped yarn of a new- started sock. “And one did one’s best not to be pulled down by his ways. At any rate I did. Poor Reuel was forever trying to please her brother—and her mother, while she lived, who was in many ways worse.” She shook her head and went back to setting stitches onto the needles. “I think one of the other offers was from a relative of yours— you said your Mr. Thaxter was your cousin? This young man’s name was Thaxter as well, a nice boy with
