Sup With the Devil

astonished that Papa couldn’t tell at a glance that William’s notes to his friends were ciphers, they read so clumsily.”

Horace still looked a little puzzled, but Weyountah nodded. “I see what you mean, m’am. I expect one needs imagination to . . . to feel that there’s something amiss like that. Is your father an imaginative man?”

Abigail smiled at the recollection of that kind and steady old scholar back in Weymouth. “He’s an excellent man,” she said, “and a compassionate man—which requires a certain type of imagination, and one that is in short supply generally in the world. But he’s not fanciful. He can write a very fine sermon, but when he reads a text, the only thing that he sees is its meaning, not . . . not what might be implied about the writer by its form. What I’m saying is that the paper Mrs. Lake gave to Horace to translate might not have been a cipher at all.”

“Then what was it?” asked the Indian in surprise.

“And why have me translate it?”

“She didn’t know it wasn’t a cipher, goose,” said Katy, leaning forward to pluck the paper from Horace’s hand again.

“I don’t think she knew quite what it was,” said Abigail. “’Tis why she—and whoever hired her—needed it translated . . . and didn’t trust her, by the way: you said that the original had been copied by someone who didn’t know that Arabic is written right to left . . .”

“Which should let out the Governor,” put in Horace, taking the paper back. “Whatever Mr. Adams says of him, he’s an educated man and knows that much.”

“Might she have copied it, though?” Katy leaned around his arm to look at it. “Got at it at the Governor’s, I mean, and made her own copy to beat him to the treasure?”

“What I think happened,” went on Abigail, “is this: whoever broke into the Reverend Seckar’s house found some of the books, one of which had what appeared to him—or her—to be a cipher or secret writing in it. The sheets were probably either written on a flyleaf or tucked in loose, as you say Mr. Fairfield tucked papers into his books. He—or she—took it, and only after ’twas translated, realized that it was no cipher at all but merely notes for blackmail that were never used.”

“And that’s when he started looking for the other books!” said Horace excitedly. “He must have known about Old Beelzebub’s treasure from the Governor, if it’s not His Excellency himself we’re talking about—Poor George! If he hadn’t waked when he did . . .”

“Then it might have been you the following night,” said Katy softly. “Or Weyountah the night after. And one of you would have waked—I can’t imagine how anyone would poison you, Horry, you don’t eat anything but vegetables and clabbered milk—and seen someone in his room that he knew . . .” She looked over at Abigail. “’Twas why he was killed, wasn’t he? Because he recognized whoever it was he saw.”

“I think so, yes.”

“If ’twas someone working for or with the Governor,” said Weyountah, “’twould stand to reason that George would have known him from the Volunteers, wouldn’t it?”

Abigail nodded. “I don’t say it couldn’t have been someone like Bruck Travers—did Bruck and the others in the Watertown Committee of Public Safety know where George’s room was, Katy?”

“Of course. There’s dozens of the college men in the Sons or the militia, and that’s not counting the college servants. But for one thing Bruck wouldn’t know one book from another, and for another, I met Seph Nuttall from the militia in the market day before yesterday and asked him about where Bruck was that evening, and he was drilling with the militia in Watertown. Two hundred men saw him. Are you truly going to desert poor Diomede?”

“What, because Sam Adams told me to?” Abigail sniffed. “But to remain on his good side—because we may very well need his help before all’s done—I think ’twere best we go to Charles Town tomorrow, and at least have a look at this Avalon, and see what its weaknesses are and if we can catch a glimpse of its proprietress. And in the meantime—”

“She didn’t . . . She was quite modestly dressed,” protested Horace. “She didn’t have the air of a—er— meretrix . . .”

“Obviously she knew enough not to dress like a bird of paradise,” said Abigail, “for fear of frightening her own bird away. You’d never have gotten into the carriage with her,” she explained, to Horace’s inarticulate protest that he wasn’t that much of a shrinking violet, “if she’d been tricked-out and tire’d up and painted to her eyes like Jezebel at her window. I claim no knowledge of ladies of ill fame,” she went on thoughtfully, “but it sounds to me—does it not to you?—that she’s more than the answer to some sailor’s prayer. She could steal a key, but a carriage and pair is another matter, even for the madame of a house of accommodation. Would you know her again?”

“Of course.”

“If she were dressed differently, I mean, and painted up?”

He blushed. “I think so. Her hair was her own; I’m not sure I’d know her in a wig.”

“Then let us make a pilgrimage tomorrow,” said Abigail. “I can do that in the morning before John gets home—and see what we can see before Sam takes matters into his own hands. For when a man will truly stop at nothing, there is no telling who may be hurt.”

She asked the boys to stay for dinner, and prepared the lamb (only she would have gone bail that it was actually mutton) dressed with spinach, and put up a pan of potatoes beneath the hearth-coals to roast and some corn-and-milk for Horace. Johnny and Nabby came home from school, and Abigail let them thoroughly explore the cleaned and tidied house before starting them on their chores. Though the spring evenings were long, she guessed that once darkness fell, the children would be uneasy in a house that had been entered and ransacked by strangers, had they not had the chance to patrol it by daylight and see with their own eyes that all was safe. The boys departed immediately after dinner with a basket of provisions for themselves and another to be delivered to Diomede in the Cambridge jail—and Weyountah returned fifteen minutes later with Charley, whom Abigail had not even missed in the confusion of good-bys and who had managed to follow Horace and Weyountah nearly to Summer Street.

Since the handsome Indian didn’t return a second time she assumed he did, in fact, make it through the town gate by sunset, though he and Horace—unless they found a friendly farmer with a wagon—would beyond all doubt be walking the last mile back to Cambridge in the dark.

Between dinner and supper, she and the girls put up laundry to soak—Abigail’s housewifely instincts revolted at not having spare sheets clean and ready at all times—and as she at last led her little household in Bible reading and evening prayer, she reflected that few Israelites in Pharoah’s brick-pits had put in a more strenuous day than her own.

Friday morning was, fortunately, a mild one. While Katy and Nabby milked the cows (’twas miraculous what one more pair of hands would do for the household), starting the moment it was light enough to see, Abigail and Pattie beat and rinsed, beat and rinsed the lye-smelling oceans of laundry, and had sheets, shifts, shirts, and clouts flying like flags from the maze of clotheslines in the yard by noon. By one (Charley had disappeared again, to be rescued by Katy from almost beneath the hooves of a dray on Cornhill), Abigail and Katy were crossing the Charles Town ferry.

“No sign of them yet.” Katy folded up the brass spyglass she had drawn from her pocket to look out past the steep promontory of Copp’s Hill toward the bay. No need to specify who they were.

From here Abigail could see the brick walls of the British camp on Castle Island and thought with deep regret of her friend Lieutenant Jeremy Coldstone, the assistant to the Provost Marshal and a young man, she sensed, who might greatly assist her in the unraveling of this tangle of codes and books and treasure that seemed to appear and disappear. But with tensions rising every day in Boston, it would be impossible these days for Coldstone to enter the town unmolested—particularly if Sam got word of his presence.

And in any case, reflected Abigail, the young lieutenant undoubtedly had enough to deal with these days. But she wondered what the men in the castle fort were doing to pass the time while they waited for word from the King to come.