Sup With the Devil

“Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur,” quoted Horace automatically, and then, thin face flushing with excitement, “Aunt Abigail, I’ve seen him! I know who he is! Mrs. Lake’s coachman! Dubber Grimes!”

Abigail set her marketing basket on the corner of the table, cast a glance at the angle of sunlight in the yard—There will be NOTHING left in the market . . . !—and said, “Bess, would you and Bella do the honors? I beg you will excuse me, but if I don’t get to the market now —”

“We’ll save you griddle cakes,” promised Arabella Butler with a smile, and playfully shoved Abigail toward the door.

“And coffee,” added Bess, “if we can keep Sam from drinking it all . . .”

Abigail seized Horace by the elbow and thrust the market basket into his hands as she was pushed out the door.

“Tell me,” she commanded, as she and the young man hurried their steps down Queen Street toward the big market square.

“’Twas entirely by accident,” said Horace, and shoved his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “Res hominum fragiles alit et regit—”

“Yes, yes, I know the fragile affairs of men are guided by chance,” said Abigail impatiently. “Where did you see him?”

“At the Crowned Pig. The seniors were ragging poor Yeovil again and I followed him to give him a hand, and when I walked into the tap-room, there was Grimes—the scar-eyed coachman—dicing in the corner with Black Dog Pugh! I ducked back out at once and asked one of the—er—young ladies who work there, who was that man with Mr. Pugh? And she said his name was Dubber Grimes, and he is from Charles Town, and the men with him—there were two others at the table besides Pugh—were Newgate Hicks and the Cornishman, and they all worked as bullyboys at a . . . a house of ill-fame in Charles Town called Avalon. While the girl was getting the ale for Yeovil, I watched them; they weren’t only dicing, but talking with Pugh. He gave them money!”

“Only to be expected if they were dicing. Still . . . Avalon,” said Abigail thoughtfully. “Well, well—someone has a sense of humor. In the tales of King Arthur,” she explained, seeing her nephew look blank, “Avalon is the location of the lake, which has in it the Lady who gives Arthur his sword, if I remember aright . . . Your aunt Elizabeth”—she named her mother—“never considered fanciful tales proper for us children, but Aunt Eliza has a book of them and would read to us when we’d visit. Though I never thought to find the reference useful—”

“Mrs. Lake?”

“When you think of it,” said Abigail, as they turned from Cornhill into the square before the great market-hall, “what other sort of woman might a man know that he could hire as a cat’s-paw, to look respectable enough that a young man like yourself would get into a carriage with her? Would you have gone with Dubber Grimes on his own? Or with gentlemen named Newgate or—er—the Cornishman? Or even Pugh himself, for that matter?”

Horace seemed to be digesting the information that he’d ridden in a carriage with a bona fide Scarlet Woman while Abigail made her way to the stalls of the farmers whose chickens, rabbits, and lambs she knew to be freshest and most plump, and who picked their vegetables in the dark of early morning and not the afternoon before. And since everyone else in Boston knew who those farmers were also, she found, as she had feared, no lettuces left, no peas (DRAT “Dubber” and his henchmen!), and the only asparagus remaining was thick and tough as tree-trunks.

With a basket full of beets and carrots, some elderly lamb, an assortment of very small fish wrapped in rushes, some strawberries, and a huge quantity of rather raggedy spinach, she turned her steps back toward home. John would just have to make the best of it. “When was this?” she asked.

“Yesterday afternoon. ’Twas too late to come to you then— we’d never have made it to the ferry before sunset—and Weyountah was at a demonstration of vacuum-pumps, which he would not forgo . . . But what is a vacuum? Nothing! What can we do?”

“I think the time has come,” said Abigail, “for a search of Mr. Pugh’s rooms. Those grooms of his are generally there, aren’t they?”

“Either the grooms or Pinky.”

“Not surprising, if he’s in the habit of keeping indecent books about—not to speak of treasure-maps. John won’t be home until tomorrow evening or Saturday morning, and thank Heavens there’s not a great deal of laundry to be done, bar the sheets and assuming the weather stays fine. Our Black Dog had mortally offended the Reverend, but ’twould have been easy enough to send him a frumenty by the hand of one of his minions. Do the cooks at the Hall make frumenties?”

“Sometimes,” said Horace, a trifle startled at this conversational detour—frumenties were utter poison to him, and it clearly wasn’t something he’d ever considered. “I know he gets custards and syllabubs from them—and pays them extremely well not to speak of making him things, since he could be sent down for it, and they could be sacked for selling the College provisions that way.”

“I see.” Abigail paused at the corner of Cornhill to let pass a group of men: laborers from the ropewalks that abounded in Boston, rough-looking men talking heatedly, and she heard among them the words God- damned lobsterbacks and bloody bleedin’ Parliament . . . “So our best course would be to attack the problem from the other end—which will entail a visit to the farm of the Reverend Seckar’s brother.”

“He has a brother? It’s like hearing there was a fourth Gorgon.” Horace shook his head. “I always thought the Reverend Seckar was spontaneously generated from a vat of sour lemons.”

“My only hope is that his family does actually live in Concord and not out in somewhere like Haverhill or Springfield. If I have to chase off for another three days to speak to the sister about who drugged the family, Heaven only knows what I’d return here to find.”

Over a nuncheon of Arabella Butler’s griddle cakes (“Now, we must save a few for Nabby and Johnny when they get home—”), Abigail thought to ask Sam, who as a longtime rabble-rouser knew everyone in the Boston area, about Genesis Seckar. As she’d suspected, Sam knew all about him.

“His farm lies about seven miles the other side of town.” Sam poured out coffee for Abigail, Pattie, and Katy —who had brought the younger boys back from the Smiths’—as they settled around the much-battered table in a kitchen now spotlessly clean (Abigail could have kissed Sam’s womenfolk for sparing her the appalling task). “Your husband,” he added, “likes to chide that two-thirds of the men in the colonies either enjoy being the King’s slaves or don’t care whose slaves they are so long as they’re able to cheat the poor out of their rightful money—”

“That is not what John says!”

Sam waved away the objection. “Well, Genesis Seckar belongs in the category of men who wouldn’t care if they were slaves of the Grand Turk, since everyone around them is going straight to Hell anyway, so how they or anyone else lives on the Earth doesn’t matter, because they’ve no proof that the world won’t evaporate in flames tomorrow, so there! He lets the militia drill on his pasture—the place is well away from prying eyes—because it doesn’t matter to him whether there’s going to be fighting or not. Bruck Travers with the Watertown militia tells me Old Man Seckar comes out and preaches during drill at the top of his lungs.”

“Oh, him.” Katy made a face. “He’s down to two cows these days and doesn’t take care of either of ’em, poor beasts. You’re not thinking of going out there, Mrs. Adams?” She turned on the bench to regard Abigail worriedly. “He’s about a hundred and fifty years old, and proof, I always thought, that his way of life is holy—”

“How’s that?” asked Sam, hugely amused.

“Oh, because if it wasn’t, God would have let him die years ago, only He knows that if he did, the old wretch would be in Heaven, and God just can’t stand the idea of putting up with him.”

“You don’t think he knows where your treasure-map is hid, do you?” Sam’s gray glance cut sharply across at Abigail. “Or the sister? Is that why you’re going?”

“It is not,” she retorted. “I’m not entirely convinced that there is a treasure or a map to find it with. But I’m not trying to find a treasure; I’m trying to prevent an innocent man from being hanged for a murder he didn’t commit. And since it’s nearly impossible to prove a negative, we are reduced to finding who actually did kill poor Mr. Fairfield . . .”