Sup With the Devil

Street, and Tommy was missing altogether—they had to go out into the garden and hunt for the boy among the beanpoles.

“We’ve taken turns going over to the house to milk the girls,” said Pattie, as she and Katy herded the children to the Smith kitchen to get cleaned up for the return home. “Mrs. Butler offered to do it, but ’tis no trouble. We take Charley and Tommy with us—”

“We’re due there now,” added Katy. “I can hear the boys bringing the herd in.”

The Butlers, and the Hansons on the other side, had offered to look after Cleopatra and Semiramis in the absence of the Adamses and to have their prentices clean the stalls in return for a dozen small favors John had done them over the past few years.

“We’ve put the milk in the coldest corner of the pantry, so there’ll be a fair deal of butter to be made . . .”

“I went out to Cambridge yesterday,” added Katy, a little shyly, “to see Diomede in the jail, as you said I might—”

“I did indeed,” said Abigail, “and I’m glad you thought to do so. Really, Eliza,” she added with a smile, “there’s no need—”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” declared her aunt, as the maid brought to the kitchen table a tray laden with Dutch coffee, bread and butter, marmalade, and cold meats, “after a journey like that you must be famished—”

“I’m famished,” said Charley hopefully, looking at the marmalade.

It was well and truly dark, and Tommy and Charley were sound asleep on the seat of the chaise when the little party returned along Queen Street by lantern-light. The lamps in the houses they passed, even, were being quenched on the lower floors, leaving only the very dim squares of illumination higher on the brick walls, where bedroom candles flickered over the pages of Bibles or novels, while men took off their wigs and scratched their heads, and women brushed out their long hair. Eliza had handed Abigail a letter from John, who had been delayed in Providence—Another night bedding down with snoring strangers, poor lamb, reflected Abigail ruefully. Just as well, I can get the house in order again before he arrives.

The children crowding around her while Thaxter unharnessed Tom Butler’s horse, she handed her lantern to Katy, unlocked the kitchen door, and banged her ankle very smartly against something hard that lay almost on the threshold as she stepped in.

She began to say, “Good Heavens, Pattie, we didn’t accidentally leave Messalina indoors—?” but the smell of spilled vinegar smote her, and the faint sickliness of spoiled milk.

She held the lantern up to further throw its light.

She’d nearly tripped over a crock of butter—not broken, but lying on its side where it had . . . Fallen? How could it? Even had the cat been somehow trapped indoors, she could never have—

Slowly, the light penetrated through the kitchen and pantry, showing Abigail an appalling shambles. Chairs had been pushed about, every drawer of the big sideboard stood open, cupboards agape. Beside her, Johnny said, “Ma—” and Nabby’s hand, cold and frightened, gripped suddenly at hers.

And Charley, delighted as all three-year-olds are with chaos: “Was it bears did this?” He darted forward and Abigail grabbed him by the shoulder, pulled him back, and backed out of the pantry, out of the house.

“Katy,” she said, “hold on to the children—Nabby, run next door and get Mr. Butler and his boys. Pattie, go with her,” she added, seeing the little girl hesitate in fear.

“You don’t think there’s anyone—” began Pattie hesitantly, and then, as if exonerating herself, “I was inside yesterday, to make sure all was well, and it was. Pfew, that vinegar is strong! What happened?” She looked back toward the stable, from which Thaxter emerged, bearing the other lantern. “Who would do this?”

Happily, Charley opined, “I bet it was Mr. Scar-Eye!”

Sixteen

While Katy and Pattie took the children next door to the Butlers’, Abigail, Thaxter, Tom Butler, and the cooper’s two apprentices went through the house armed with kindling-axes, barrel-mallets, and every lantern that could be borrowed up and down the street. They found no human foe on the premises, but the house had been ransacked from cellar to attic. Even Katy’s pallet bed had been shoved away from the wall and its mattress torn open, hay strewn everywhere in the room.

Abigail and the children went back to Uncle Isaac’s to sleep, leaving Thaxter to guard the premises until morning. She dreamed of being locked in the house while it was being searched, hearing the scrape of Mr. Scar- Eye’s boots as he groped toward her in the dark.

When she returned in the morning, it was to find Sam Adams in the kitchen, with his wife Bess, his daughter, Hannah, and their maid Surry all engaged in mopping up the spilled vinegar from the broken kitchen cask and scrubbing everything in sight. Abigail groaned inwardly—it was John’s unvarying contention that the scene of any crime contained at least some piece of information about the criminal. Though she had a strong suspicion that Charley had been right about the culprit being Mr. Scar-Eye, she had hoped to find something that might tell her where to look for this sinister gentleman and who might be his employer.

Yet she was far too grateful at the prospect of not having to clean up the entire house herself to quibble, only assigning to Sam and Thaxter the task of straightening the tumbled library (John will never be able to find anything on his shelves ever again!) while she made a careful tour of the upstairs.

It told her nothing she hadn’t known before. It had been too dark to see much by lantern-light last night, and their only object had been to make sure there was no one still lurking in the house, so the tracks of the reconnaissance party—herself, Tom Butler, et al—did not penetrate beyond the doorway of any room. Morning light showed Abigail that there had been three burglars, men in rough boots . . . something she could have guessed, she reflected wryly, from Horace’s account of the sinister coachman and his henchmen. She also knew they were sized Small, Medium, and Large from Horace’s account, information borne out by their tracks, which were just barely visible in the bedroom she shared with John. The merest modicum of guesswork would also have been sufficient for her to tell from Horace’s story that they were men used to burgling places—there wasn’t a nook in the house that they hadn’t plundered, a fact that made her very glad she’d left the household money and her pearls at Aunt Eliza’s with the children.

Beyond those obvious indicators, the visitors had been annoyingly fastidious. No one had dropped so much as a button, let alone a dagger that might match the wound in George Fairfield’s side or a letter from Mrs. Lake bearing instructions to murder Horace. No bloody handprints (thank goodness!); no mysterious documents in Arabic or any other language.

But, Abigail reflected as she came downstairs, she’d had to look. If they’d left any of these things in the kitchen, well, Bess, Hannah, and Surry had taken care of them and there was nothing that she, Abigail, could do about it now. The best she could accomplish at the moment was to assign various tasks to clean up, and herself go to the market—which, though it was now late in the morning and nothing would be available but picked-over leavings, was a matter of critical importance, particularly if John was due back tomorrow or Saturday . . .

“And we need to get up laundry tonight,” she added to Thaxter, as she passed the study door. “I will not have anyone in this house spend a moment on sheets those villains have pawed —”

A familiar voice called from the kitchen, “Is she in? Aunt Abigail—!”

Then Weyountah’s, deeper and steadier, “Is there something we can help with—?”

“Yes.” Abigail entered the big room, dusting her hands. “Horace, get my marketing basket from behind the pantry door, please. Weyountah, would you be able to stay and assist Mr. Adams in straightening up the study? Oh, thank goodness, Arabella,” she added, as her next-door neighbor knocked at the back door with a plate of smoking-hot griddle cakes and a jug of molasses, “you are a choir of angels and all the saints in Heaven rolled into one! Speedy help is double help . . .”