the little wicker seat, smiling into the breeze that whipped back her long black hair. “So there would be no doubt about who found what, where—”
“And did you find anything?” demanded Abigail, hearing already in his voice that they had.
“We found both George’s books—the
“And they won’t tell me what the others were,” added Katy. “Well, I’m a married woman,” she added, as Abigail frowned at her.
“And in Mr. Ryland’s room,” Weyountah’s voice cut inexorably over Katy’s protests, “we found . . . all the rest of Beelzebub’s books, save only for the ones Horace and I gave to you.”
Twenty
Hidden at the bottom of his clothes-chest, in every drawer of his desk, and four-deep beneath his mattress, Weyountah says,” Abigail reported to John, who had been listening to Nabby’s history lesson when—tired and famished—Abigail and Katy came into the lamplight of the kitchen after the mile-and-a-quarter walk from the town gates in the deepening dusk. Weyountah had—yet again—barely reached the gates in time, and there had been no question but that he was obliged to leave her and Katy there, and turn back for Cambridge by the thin light of the wasting moon.
“And he was certain they were Old Beelzebub’s?”
“Well, aside from the question of what other fifty-four books the Governor’s protege would be concealing under his mattress . . . Please, no, I’m quite all right—” she added, when John forced her into the settle beside the kitchen hearth and went to the pantry.
“You’re not,” he called back over his shoulder, handing bread, butter, and slices of cold sausage and cheese back to Nabby, who had hastened after him with plates. “Did you have any dinner at all? Or you, either, Katy? I didn’t think so—”
Johnny came hurrying back to the fire with mugs of cider, followed closely by his sister and father, bearing food. Abigail had to reach up over the heads of Charley and Tommy to get her plate, both the smaller boys having flung themselves ecstatically into her lap. “Mr. Adams, really you shouldn’t—!” Katy protested, and then tucked into the sausage and cheese like a starving cannibal.
“In fact,” Abigail went on as John brought her small sewingtable close to the fire, “Weyountah recognized a number of them from Mrs. Seckar’s house. Others had Geoffrey Whitehead’s name written in them and dates ranging from 1630 to 1693, which was the year he died.” Pattie carried lamps from where she’d been sewing and hung them on the wall near Abigail’s head. “There were also exactly fifty-four of them, which was how many the Governor’s ‘man’—obviously Ryland—took away with him—”
“Only to learn that nine had been sold elsewhere.” John had shaved and washed his face, but he looked deeply weary from two days on the road. Yet the fact that he had shaved told Abigail that he was going out again to meet with the Sons of Liberty at the Green Dragon while yet it was possible to do so.
“I can’t really see Mr. Ryland stabbing his captain over them, even if they
“Can’t you?” He settled with his own cider on the settle at her side. “Friends stab friends every night in this colony, Portia, and for the stupidest possible reasons or no reason at all: drunkenness, politics, anger at someone else. Then they panic and blame someone else. You’d like to think ’twas Black Dog Pugh because he’s a slaveholder and personally obnoxious—”
“And you’d like to think ’twas the Governor because he was appointed Chief Justice of the colony in 1760 with no other qualification than that he was a good friend to the Board of Trade. And we don’t either of us seem,” she added, spreading the soft pale cheese on the crusty bread, “to be much closer to the answer. Pugh definitely—or as definitely as we can ascertain from the paper of the note—forged Sally Woodleigh’s hand to a note to get George out of his room at midnight. But whether George then lingered behind the barn in hopes of meeting the girl . . .”
“I think he did,” said John. And when Abigail frowned and Katy looked aside, he went on, “Why else would he have taken the girl’s love-letters, if not to return them? If not to honorably inform her”—he glanced at Katy—“that he had married another woman—even if he
But he beamed upon the girl as she embraced and kissed Abigail as well. John was as faithful a husband as could be found in the compass of the world, but Abigail knew he had the same soft spot in his heart for pretty girls as she had for good-looking young men.
“Therefore, he could have waited—who knows how long?—for the girl to put in an appearance, and returned, disappointed, to his chambers and gone to bed . . . to be wakened in the dead of night by an intruder whom he recognized, an intruder who had thought him drugged and had, therefore, taken no precaution to keep silent while he searched for books that were already gone.”
“It still doesn’t mean ’twas Mr. Ryland.”
“No,” said John. “But there’s a simple way to find out.”
Abigail sighed, and said, “Drat. ’Tis a day’s drive to Concord, so we’ll not leave ’til Monday—are you away tonight, dearest friend?” She put her hand on his.
“I must.” He glanced across the room to where Pattie was seating the children in a small halo of lamplight, ready for evening prayers. “In truth, Portia, none of us has the slightest idea how many nights we have left to meet freely and make plans—nor what conditions will prevail once the King’s Commissioner lands.”
“You won’t—” She kept her hold upon his hand as he rose, and went with him to the sideboard to fetch the Bible. “There is not the possibility that
“Governor Hutchinson hates me as I hate him,” said John grimly. “If friends stab friends under the impulse of momentary fears, how much more will a frightened man be tempted to stab his enemy if someone puts a knife into his hand?”
Yet he went to the table smiling and asked among his children whose turn it was to pick a portion from the Holy Writ (it was Charley, so they got Samson trouncing the Philistines—with John’s observations that ’twas only God’s love for Samson that strengthened the hero’s arm to defend the weak). Sitting at his side with the fire’s warmth shining on her back, Abigail listened to her husband’s voice and reflected that this man had far greater matters to deal with than one lonely and frightened black man sitting in the Cambridge jail.
That he would take up his cudgel and fight like that ancient Israelite hero for a slave’s life she didn’t doubt—if she pressed him to do so. He would always take on one more task, one more responsibility, one more foe, for justice’s sake or his country’s—until, facing an army of assailants, he went down before them in defeat.
Diomede’s freedom was her battle.
Enslaved, as Samson had been enslaved (and with far less foolishness, in her opinion), and helpless . . .
Across the table she saw Katy startle, and in her wide blue eyes Abigail read sudden enlightenment, something realized that she had not guessed before . . .
When the children had been kissed and herded upstairs, and John was adjusting his wig and putting on his greatcoat, Katy came up to them, and whispered, “Can you prove my marriage to George, Mr. Adams? Weyountah looked in the back of both of George’s books and found no trace of the license.”
“I took notes of the date and the circumstances and the name of the clerk,” said John. “I’ll write them out for you if you wish—”
“Belike that scoundrel Pugh took the license to blackmail George with,” sniffed Abigail, as she brought paper and pencil from the sideboard drawer. “Or to blackmail Charles Fairfield when he arrives next week. If you like, Katy, we can speak to the man—”
“Yes, later,” she said breathlessly. “But if Mr. Adams will be so good as to write out at least proof that I
