“Curious,” said Abigail softly. “Curious.”
Through the long spring day, Abigail helped the girls and Narcissa in the garden, took her turn minding Baby Mary, listened to Tilly, Methuseleh, and Josiah recite their lessons, and in general gave herself over to the peaceful rhythms of the deep countryside. In such a place, it was impossible to know what was happening in Boston and thus necessary to trust entirely in the mercy of God. The family kept insisting that she was here as Aunt Sissy’s guest, and they were glad of it for they feared Aunt would miss the town life, and it wasn’t necessary for her or Thaxter to do a thing . . .
And yet, Abigail missed the vegetable-rows back in Braintree almost as much as her children delighted in the open spaces of Aunt Eliza’s garden, and she revelled in the smell of the earth as she pulled weeds in a borrowed sun-hat. In the forenoon she helped Sarah Barlow prepare dinner for when the men came in from the woods and the field, and looked over the stitches of the younger girls, and now and then sat with Narcissa and came back to the subject of alchemical books and pirate treasure . . .
“How did you know your great-grandfather was a pirate?” she asked at one point. “If your father worked to keep the matter hushed, and his father as well . . .”
“Aunt Serafina told us.” Narcissa deftly untied the strings of Baby Mary’s clout, took the washrag Abigail handed her. “She was, as I said, Grandpa Barthelmy’s younger sister and lived with us when I was a very little girl. She remembered Old Beelzebub—her father—very well. She said he looked like the Devil would have, if the Devil were ever to sit in a corner of the kitchen and play the fiddle. This was after he had changed his way of life, of course, so she never saw him in his glory, with a cutlass in his teeth and burning cannon-fuses braided in his beard. But she said he was very tall, with long gray hair thick as a horse’s mane, and had a long mustache whose ends he braided, and that he was missing two fingers of his right hand so that he held the fiddle-bow strangely. She swore us to secrecy, Phoebe and I, and at night when Father had put out the lights, Aunt whispered to us about the Indians worshipping him and how he burned down half their village and summoned the Devil and all the rest of it —”
“Did she ever speak of him hiding a treasure?” Abigail handed her a clean baby-clout and made finger- waggles at Baby Mary, laid on the keeping room table, who caught at Abigail’s fingers and threshed her tiny legs.
Narcissa frowned as she tied the clout in place. “In a general sort of way,” she said after a time. “Though that may have been only something Phoebe and I made up later, because pirates are supposed to have buried treasures. Certainly I recall nothing being said of one buried in Massachusetts. And even if there had been, I can’t see that it would have gotten past Grandpa.”
“Did your grandfather ever search for one?”
“If he had, ’twould have been an admission that his father was a pirate.” Narcissa picked up the infant and carried her toward the door, Abigail following with a blanket. “Not that it would have stopped the old scoundrel. I’m a little surprised he hadn’t had all the walls of Beelzebub’s original stone house sounded the minute the old man died. Perhaps he thought that in repairing his way of life, his father had given the money to charity . . . something it never sounded like the old sinner would have done, either after his reformation or before it, according to Aunt Sera.”
Abigail spread out the blanket in the sun, shaded her eyes to catch a glimpse of those three little straw- bonnets bent dutifully over the garden rows. “Why did he reform?” she asked. “Did your aunt tell you that?”
“No.” Narcissa’s forehead puckered as she considered the matter, putting together old tales half recalled, which might—Abigail reflected—have been hearsay anyway . . . “Yet it must have taken some great event, don’t you think? For a man given heart and body to the ways of sin—not only sins of the flesh, as all pirates do, but the sort of intellectual dabbling in alchemy and demonology that can be twice as fascinating to an intelligent man. For such a man to reverse his steps and try to walk back uphill to the Light. Particularly,” she added, “when everyone around him is telling him, as they must have if he was living in Massachusetts, that ’twould not have done him any good anyway.”
“Exactly.” Abigail adjusted a portion of worn sheet over a long billet of firewood to make a sort of lean-to above the baby’s head. “So why would he have done that?”
“Does it make a difference?”
“I don’t know. But ’tis odd—one of many odd things about this whole adventure. Is his castle still standing? The treasure would be there if anywhere.”
“I’ve never heard of a castle anywhere in the backcountry.” Narcissa fished last night’s sock from her workbasket. “It might only have been a sort of
“’Twould serve Grandpa Barthelmy right, and your father, too,” retorted Abigail, “had there been land with treasure buried on it, and they sold it . . .
“Oh, I should think so.” Narcissa grinned cheerily. “Nearly every pirate on the Spanish Main passed through Port Royal at one time or another, did they not? If he’d wanted to blackmail Morgan for his congress with Jezebel Pitts, he’d have had plenty of opportunity to do so.”
Fifteen
A bigail’s sense of well-being—of a job well accomplished, and of new friends made— lasted her about a hundred yards down the lane toward the Boston Road.
Thaxter hitched up the chaise shortly after first light Wednesday morning, and they were sent off with much handshaking and the gift of fresh-baked bread, new butter, and several slabs of soft cheese (“The landlady at the Anchor on the road back to Boston hasn’t washed a dish in twenty years . . .”). Mr. Barlow bade her tell Mr. Adams that he and all the men hereabouts stood ready to defend the colony’s liberties (he obviously thought she was married to the
But no sooner had the house disappeared among the trees behind them than the enormity of having been gone from Boston—and her children—for three days settled upon Abigail like the fall of night, and her dreams of the Massacre, of fire and peril, of Tommy left behind crying in the snow returned and tormented her like a persistent gadfly for the remainder of the day.
The reflection that Cousin Sam would have sent out riders to Medfield and every other town posthaste in the event of any real trouble gave her only momentary comfort. “If the British have not yet arrived, the whole household has come down with the smallpox,” she sighed ruefully, as the chaise turned onto the main road. “Or the house has burned to the ground.”
“I’m sure all is well, m’am,” replied Thaxter soothingly, which caused Abigail to smile despite her anxiety. In his months of association with herself and John, her young cousin had yet to pick up their sense of humor. John would have immediately set himself to cap her visions of disaster:
Instead, for the next several miles, the clerk set himself earnestly to assuaging her fears with assurances of how secure and happy the four children would be at the home of Eliza and Isaac Smith . . . something of which Abigail was herself already aware. Yet he meant well, and she knew that to summarily silence him would hurt his feelings. So she settled herself to listen and to sort in her mind what she’d learned, like a card-player arranging clubs and spades, hearts and diamonds.
A frumenty was exactly the sort of thing a solicitous student might bring to an elderly professor about whose health he was concerned—and the old man was probably vain enough to believe assurances of concern even from a