Sup With the Devil

. . Look at the paper. And the ink.” She held them against Mrs. Morgan’s copies of both text and translation. “Not that ’tis proof—we couldn’t take it before a court and hope to impress anyone with the existence of conspiracy—but it confirms what I’ve thought.”

“Yet the hand on the forged letters is a man’s.” Weyountah paused in his steps, held the two forgeries that had brought Horace into the business up to the light as he had done not quite two weeks ago at the Golden Stair.

“Is it anything like Pugh’s? It’s disguised, I know,” Abigail added, as the Indian opened his mouth to point out that very fact. “But is there any similarity?”

“I can see none, but that means nothing. Horace would know his writing—we’ve both seen it on enough notes we’ve been sent with—and we know he’s a fairly pretty forger from his imitation of Mistress Woodleigh’s.”

“I wonder if she wrote him love-letters as she did to George?” Abigail frowned, thinking of those wholly conventional outpourings of passion that George had been carrying in his pocket on the night he died . . . on the night Pugh had lured him out of his room . . . Why carry Mistress Woodleigh’s love-letters when the rest were all chucked into his desk? “Are you returning to Cambridge?” she asked, as they turned along the street toward the ferry landing.

“We were, yes,” Horace replied, still rubbing uneasily at the completely invisible spots and rashes on his neck. “Ryland is holding a sort of seminar in his rooms on translation of Plato, and with examinations coming up, nobody wants to miss it. One has to arrive early to obtain a seat.”

“Would Mr. Pugh also attend?”

“He has in the past,” said Weyountah. “He’s clever—always passing his examinations by just enough not to be sent down.”

“Then I think the time has come,” said Abigail, “to make a search of Mr. Pugh’s chambers and see if there is more there than expensive coffee and brandy smuggled from France.”

There was a certain amount of discussion in the ordinary of the Peacock Inn—where Weyountah had left Sassy and George’s chaise—about who should ride back to Cambridge and who should walk. “I’m not going to abandon Mrs. Fairfield by the side of the road for a four-mile walk back to the college,” stated Weyountah, as the hostler went off to harness up the little vehicle, which would take three people at a very crowded pinch.

“Don’t be silly,” Katy retorted. “You need Horace to get Mrs. Adams into the Black Dog’s room to do the searching, and you to stand guard. If old Ryland sees me anywhere in the vicinity of the college I’ll be shown off the grounds and like as not everyone will start asking questions. I’ll walk—and I’ll meet you at the jail, where I’ll go to cheer up poor Diomede and let him know he’s not been abandoned and everyone is doing all they can.”

Since Abigail had repeatedly contended that an American woman—even one as young and pretty as Katy— could go anywhere afoot in the colony without fear of the kind of insult that by all accounts lurked everywhere in crime-ridden Britain, there wasn’t much that she could say against the plan. Horace provided several moving little homilies in Latin on the subject of self-sacrifice before Weyountah heaved him up into the chaise . . . The afternoon was, in fact, getting on. The Indian whipped up Sassy, and they bowled away down the tree-lined road for Cambridge.

“Did George speak much of his father?” asked Abigail, as they passed the old cemetery, and left the town behind. “Of what sort of a man he is and how he’s likely to react to news that Diomede killed his son?”

“He called him ‘stern,’ ” reported Weyountah, after a little time of thought. “And I understand their relationship was stormy, though George loved his father very much.”

“More than once he spoke of how his father and his friends were forever uneasy about the idea of a slave uprising,” said Horace, lowering Mrs. Morgan’s copy of his translation, which he was comparing with his later reconstruction. “Like the Romans, the men of Virginia have become servos servorum eorum— an attitude that outraged George, I might add. But he was forever quoting his father on the subject of this trusted mammy of some friend, who had smothered the babies under her charge, or that trusted cook who’d put Jamestown weed into the family ragout. The most their cook ever did, George said, was, when she was angry with the master, spit in the coffee before bringing it to table . . . something he never told his father, because, he said, she was a very good cook and didn’t get angry very often.”

Abigail said, “Remind me never to breakfast with a Virginian in his home.”

“But it doesn’t bode well,” concluded Weyountah, “for Diomede’s chances of a fair hearing.”

Nor did it bode well, reflected Abigail, as the little vehicle passed along the Charles Town Neck toward the mainland, for the chances that Mr. Charles Fairfield would welcome a pregnant tavern-girl with open arms, prospective grandchild or no . . .

And she was acutely conscious that at this point there was little she or anyone could do, save marshal evidence for John to use when Diomede’s owner arrived . . . if Mr. Fairfield would even consent to see John or to listen to some Massachusetts lawyer explaining that George had been killed in the course of a hunt for buried pirate treasure . . . No, we cannot prove by whom . . .

Too easily she could hear the man simply shout, He’s my property, and he’s coming back with me . . .

Her fists tightened where they lay in her lap. The law is established to defend a man’s rights to his property . . .

Horace handed her the paper, and as the chaise passed along between stone walls, quiet fields, and shading elm trees, she read over her nephew’s translation, which, as he had said, was so close to his later reconstruction as to give little encouragement to any alternate reading. At no point did it mention paces, yards, directions, digging, or trees (beyond the single reference to a towering oak in a context that was clearly metaphorical), or in fact any words that could be construed as being part of a simple cipher. Nor, to Abigail’s practiced eye, did it have the style of the labored cadence of words that have been selected because their fifth letter was q.

The only cipher involved was that Old Beelzebub had written his blackmailing account in Arabic letters to protect it from prying eyes until he should have call to spring it on Lieutenant Governor Morgan and demand hush- money. She wondered if he’d ever done so. Or was it only one more scheme he’d tucked away in the back of his alchemy books and carried north with him when he’d left the Caribbean for good?

He looked like the Devil would have, if the Devil were ever to sit in a corner of the kitchen and play the fiddle . . .

She frowned in thought, eyes narrowed against the sprinkling of the sunlight through the trees.

Yet someone at least was fairly certain that there was a treasure.

Well, hundreds of thousands of people in New Spain are fairly certain that all Protestants are inevitably bound for Hell, which certainly doesn’t make them right.

Why did her mind hark back to the question of what had made old Beelzebub turn his back on his past? Walk away from the man he had been?

What man HAD he been?

As the chaise swung around toward the gates of the college, Abigail’s glance strayed toward the King’s Chapel by the Common, and a flash of black, like a crow against the green of the grass, caught her eye. A young woman in black—extremely fashionable black. Even at this distance, Abigail could tell the sable skirts gathered into the latest style of polonaise, the elbow-length sleeves festooned with sable lace and bedight with inky ribbons. Even the maidservant who followed her was in deep mourning, and the lapdog borne in the maid’s arms wore a sable bow on his neck.

Weyountah said at the same moment, “Good Lord, it’s Mistress Woodleigh! And there’s the Black Dog coming to greet her! And comfort her, I dare—”

Abigail estimated the approach of that massive yellowrobed figure—trailed likewise by a black servant . . . “Which servant is that?” she asked as the chaise rounded the corner toward the college stables. “He has two —”

“Pedro.” Horace twisted his body around in the chaise to look back. “He’ll have left Eusebius in his room —”