Sup With the Devil

“Does it matter?” His voice was suddenly hard.

Horace and Weyountah, on the other side of the table, looked at one another uneasily, and Bess said, “Now, Sam . . .”

“I’m sure it matters to Diomede,” replied Abigail evenly.

Sam waved as if chasing away inconvenient flies. “Let me take care of Diomede, then. What we need of you, Nab—what Massachusetts and all free men in it need of you—is that you find that treasure-map of this Mrs. Lake, and that you find it before that British ship lands . . . or before whoever the damned Governor is paying to do his dirty-work for him decodes the cipher and scoops the money that we desperately need.”

“Which reminds me,” began Horace, reaching for his coatpocket, “I have—” And Abigail, guessing what he was about to produce, kicked him hard under the table.

“You don’t really think the Governor is behind the man who killed George, do you, sir?” Weyountah sounded worried. “George was loyal to the King—”

“You think that would matter to any red-blooded Tory merchant?” retorted Sam. “Old Hutchinson’ll be falling over himself trying to figure out what the cipher is so he can get the gold out of there before the British land as well, lest he be accountable for it. I’ll send a man out to Concord to talk to Old Seckar—”

Abigail remembered old Mr. Creel and his spite-filled diatribes; thought about the unshaven rope-workers, with their hickory clubs and angry voices and dirty hands, she had passed on the way home. “That’s quite all right, Sam.”

“And I’ll send someone out with you to Cambridge to find this map or cipher, and the books it’s hid in—I can probably get you someone to burgle the Governor’s house for you—”

“That’s quite all right.”

Sam was silent a minute—his expression reminded Abigail of Johnny’s when the boy had verbally given away something he was planning and was trying to think how to cover his tracks. But at last he said, quietly, “I don’t think you realize how important it is that we find that gold, Nab. And find it soon.”

Around the table, Bess and Hannah, Katy and Pattie, Charley and Tommy, Weyountah and Horace had all fallen silent, as if they had ceased to exist . . .

And they HAD ceased to exist, reflected Abigail, for Sam.

As Diomede had ceased to exist.

Because Seth Barlow had been right, the other evening out in the isolated darkness beyond Dedham, when he read the evening portion of scripture . . . Violent men spread violence like a contagion, and greed in a good cause was still greed. When you supped with the Devil, even the longest spoon would not keep his whispering out of your ears, long after you had thanked him for his hospitality and scurried out the door.

Sam and his patriots, just like the rest.

“’Tis worth more than finding who killed some Tory or who gets accused of it,” Sam said. “’Tis worth more than my life or yours—” His glance flicked across the table to the two young men. “The offices of friendship are one thing, boys, and I can see you’re shocked at my saying so. But I tell you this. Once the British land—once fat old King George lands his troops here, the first thing he’ll do is either close the courts or put his own men in charge of them, which amounts to the same thing. Then it isn’t going to matter a split grassblade who killed your friend or why, because the only thing that will matter anymore is who the King’s friends are . . . or who gains the favor of the Governor. To fight that, we need money: money for guns, money for powder, money for food for the men who’ll have the manhood to take up arms. And beside that, nothing is important.”

He stood and went to the sideboard for his hat. “The wind’s inshore,” he said. “That ship can be only days away. We must do what we can, while we can, and let all else go by the wayside. Nab,” he added, returning to the table to kiss her cheek, “thank you for your hospitality—”

“No,” she said, rising, “thank you—and Bess, Hannah, Surry . . .”

The tension of the moment was lost amid handshakes, embraces, farewells.

But it wasn’t until Sam and his family were out of the house, that Abigail asked softly, “Do you have your reconstruction of the cipher, Horace?”

“I do. I meant to tell you, but with everyone here—and seeing Dubber put it from my mind—”

She gripped his arm, shook her head, “’Tis well.”

“Is it true what he said?” asked Weyountah, deeply troubled. “That the King will close the courts?”

“The truth is that I don’t know,” said Abigail. “And neither does Sam. But the truth is also that when a man starts saying that the cause of defending our liberties is more important than justice or truth or saving the life of a man who has no rights before the courts of law, then I start to wonder what he would stop at. And a man who’ll stop at nothing . . .”

“Becomes very difficult to distinguish from a robber,” concluded the Indian. “Come into the study, and let’s have a look at Horace’s paper.”

Seventeen

When Abigail had finished reading the two pages of Horace’s sprawling, uneven scrawl, she said, inadequately, “Goodness.” Although, quite patently, none of the recorded proceedings had anything to do with goodness.

The language was stilted and old-fashioned and used a great number of plain English words not generally encountered in polite conversation. At least her nephew hadn’t translated these passages into Latin, as any number of Abigail’s male acquaintances would have, under the impression that a mere woman wouldn’t understand what futuo meant. Between the farmers around her childhood village discussing their stock, and her younger brother’s raids on the higher shelf of their father’s classical library, there was very little that Abigail had not at least heard about.

Horace, who had gone to gaze out the study window while she was reading, turned around and tried to pretend he wasn’t breaking out in hives with embarrassment.

Weyountah said matter-of-factly—since his friend was quite clearly incapable of speech—“It’s as close as Horace could make it to the original wording, but of course it isn’t word-for-word. I don’t see how we could decipher it, if it is a cipher, without knowing that.”

“No, we couldn’t.” Abigail turned the sheets over in her hands, trying not to remember that these were what the two young men had been working on the night George had been killed. “And yet—Horace, you said that it was English written in Arabic characters, as if the Arabic was itself a cipher. Did the prose itself seem labored or . . . or odd? Given the subject matter,” she added drily. “And the fact that ’twas written a hundred years ago.

“What I mean is,” she went on, when her nephew merely looked uncomprehending, “did you ever write one of those every-other-letter or every-third-word codes to your friends when you were a child? Your uncle William was forever getting me to do so when he was trying to slip information to those good-for-nothing friends of his that he didn’t want Papa to see. He was terrible at it,” she explained. “They always sounded hideously labored, and words like gamblingdebts and liquor are nearly impossible to conceal, if you’re supposed to be writing about the new shirt your mother is making for you. And writing the operative words in Latin didn’t do any good because Papa reads Latin as if it were English . . . considerably better than William or his friends.”

“So if ’twere every third word or something like that,” said Katy, perusing the disgraceful account with interest from her perch on the corner of John’s desk, “you’d expect there would be words like tree and dig and paces somewhere in it, wouldn’t you? And there aren’t. Except where Mrs. Pitts refers to a ‘mighty oak . . .’ ”

“And letter-ciphers were even more of a nuisance,” agreed Abigail. “I always had to go fishing about for words that had a q or a y in just the right place, until I was