Sup With the Devil

little knot of British soldiers whose coats seemed dark in the twilight, like the blood spilled all over the snow.

Her eyes opened with a snap: Where am I? Unfamiliar smells, the close air seeming to press on her . . .

She put out her hand and instantly touched a wall, like the side of a coffin . . .

Her other hand, flailing, met curtain.

Rock Farm.

The clink and scurry of tiny paws beyond the heavy cloth.

Those dratted kittens . . .

A bigail slept again.

Firebells ringing in the cold March twilight, only this time she saw the kitchen of her own house in Queen Street. The house was burning, and she heard gunfire in the street; Nabby, Johnny, Charley, Tommy fled out the back door, Abigail calling after them in a voice that had no sound to it . . . Why are they alone? Why is no one else in the house?

The cowhouse was in flame, and so was the house next door. Johnny led the way down the smoke-wreathed alleyway that led toward the street, clinging tight to Nabby’s hand on his left, to Charley’s on his right, smoke-blind, terrified, stumbling.

Charley was holding Tommy’s hand, and when Tommy stumbled, tripping on his long leading-strings on the sides of his dress, Charley’s hand slipped from his.

Tommy screaming, shrill voice tiny against the roar of the flame, trying to get to his feet in the snow as his sister and brothers fled down the aisle of smoke and burning. Fled away from him, unaware that they’d left him behind . . .

Gunfire somewhere close. Men shouting as the city burned.

Tommy screaming . . .

Abigail jerked awake, ill with panic, heart hammering. In the kitchen beyond the bed- curtain something fell with a small clatter. More dashing little feet.

I will catch those kittens and dunk them up and down in the water-bucket by their little tails.

Then half-grasped fragments of a dream, of distant gunfire and distant burning, very far-off now and visible in the darkness through the window of Governor Hutchinson’s tapestried study. The Governor raised his head a little where he sat beside the cozy hearth, listened. Then touched the rim of his reading-glasses to settle them and went back to his perusal of the book in Arabic that lay upon his knee.

Did Mrs. Lake come back to buy the books after your husband’s death?” Abigail took the breakfast plates from Tilly, Hagar, Zilpah, et al., and arranged them on a towel-draped corner of the table where the basin was brought for washing. Mrs. Barlow had already gone out to feed the chickens—at the wooden counter, two of the girls helped each other, dumping boiling water into the churn to scald it for butter, while two others gathered up straw sun-hats to start on the garden work. In the country, there was always something that needed doing. Abigail helped Narcissa and the youngest girl with the dishes, the stillness of the spring morning broken only by the crack of axes in the woods, where Thaxter obligingly lent a hand with the endless summer task of cutting winter fuel. When Seth Barlow had asked them last night, Would they remain a day? Abigail had assented, despite her uneasiness about leaving her children.

To return to Boston would entail a drive of all the daylight hours. She knew there were things that she had forgotten to ask last night.

“She did not.” Narcissa paused, frowning, a rag daubed with soap in her hand. “Drat it, there goes my theory that the murder was done without robbery. I wish I could remember how many of those books there were, hidden behind the wall and what they were about.”

“You said, fifty-four.”

“’Twas only what I sold to the Governor.” The older woman rubbed briskly at the pewter, went to the counter to cadge the last of the boiling water to add to the basin. “And the list of them that Mr. Seckar made went with them. Once I had said that they were mine to sell or to keep—this was after your nephew’s first attempt to purchase and Mrs. Lake’s visit—Mr. Seckar took them away and hid them in his study.”

“Hid them literally? Not just shut the door and turned the key?”

“Hid them,” said Narcissa firmly. “He said he would not put it past me to try to steal one or two, to sell them, and to blame his sister for the theft . . .”

“Why would you do that?”

“To make up household money that I had overspent. ’Twas ever his fear,” she explained, “that I would spend too much at market and that I would sell something of his to make up the difference. His mother and sister were both fearful pinchpennies, and I could not throw out so much as a torn napkin without accounting of it to them.”

No wonder this primitive farmstead where she was obliged to sleep in the kitchen seemed to fill the old woman with such happiness. It did not include any of the Seckar family.

“So a thief who came in when the family was drugged might not have got them all,” said Abigail. “He—or she—would not have known where to find them. Was there any who knew the house well, besides yourself and your sister-in-law?” Abigail settled the dripping plates on the towel—only six of them, which had probably come across from England with the original settlers: the children ate off trenchers made of the dried heels of bread-loaves and shared a cup among them.

“Nary a soul,” the old lady replied promptly. “You must understand, Mrs. Adams,” she added with a rueful smile, “there was not a man of the faculty—and I think every single one of the Fellows—that my husband wasn’t in a quarrel with, over everything from the Nature of Time as it existed before God created the Heavens and the Earth, to whether women should be permitted to learn to read and write . . . which my husband said were not necessary to a woman’s salvation and were in fact a detriment, for with our limited understanding we would only come to hurt in using such things.”

She stepped aside to let one of the little girls—Hagar or Susanna—sweep the sanded floor around her feet. “And then, there were a number of men in the college who felt that my father had been completely wrong in leaving the house to Mr. Seckar, and this, too, was a fruitful cause of backbiting. As a farmer’s son, Mr. Seckar was considered by some to be undeserving of the Vassall Chair—though he was a great scholar and well deserved the honors accorded him. He felt everyone was in league against him.”

“Did anyone come to try to purchase the books the day after your husband died?”

“That evening young Mr. Fairfield came with food from the College Hall—Heaven only knows who he bribed to get it!—and to make sure we had all we needed. We were both, Reuel and I, still very weak from being bled—and poisoned into the bargain! ’Twas then I asked him, was he interested in purchasing any of the books? Perhaps I’m as wicked as Mr. Seckar and his mother were always saying,” she added, and though she kept her tone light, Abigail heard in her voice that it was something she had indeed believed from time to time. “And it may come from being the great-granddaughter of a pirate, but ’twas already in my mind that Mr. Seckar’s brother would be taking us in —Reuel and I. I thought that I had rather have a little money of my own . . . and the books were my own, as Old Beelzebub’s heiress, even if the house had been left to the college. In any case, I suspected Mr. Fairfield would be interested in those volumes that Mr. Pugh had found so congenial, and I was right. I think he at once told your nephew that I would sell, for young Mr. Thaxter and his Indian friend appeared the next morning to buy what they could afford, and later in the day the Governor sent a man to purchase the rest from under the noses of the College Board of Governors. Mrs. Lake herself never came back.”