with pleasure when he saw what it contained. He moved the table closer to the hearth, which was cold, the afternoon being far too fine to need a fire. “And tell me, please,” she went on, “what troubling events befell you and why you think John had anything to do with them?”
“That’s just it, Aunt Abigail.” Horace made a move toward the door as if he would have closed it, then hesitated—no doubt recalling the extreme strictures the College set upon its students having women in their rooms—and settled himself awkwardly in the chair opposite her. “I think Uncle John had something to do with it because Mrs. Lake had a letter of introduction from him—and from Uncle Mercer in Connecticut—recommending her in the highest terms. But I suspect that she poisoned me—and I very much fear that she will try to do so again.”
“Good Heavens, why?”
The boy shook his head helplessly. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Two
“This is nothing like Mr. Adams’s hand.” Abigail set the letter down among the cocoa cups. “And I can assure you at once that there is no Mrs. Lake in the Brattle Street Congregation.”
Silently, Horace held out the other letter.
It purported to be from Justice Mercer Euston—Abigail identified him as a connection on the other side of the Thaxter family and well-known across the border in Connecticut—but even to her inexperienced eye, the smudgy, spidery handwriting looked suspiciously similar. The paper, so far as she could tell, was identical.
“And who,” asked Abigail, “is Mrs. Lake?”
“That’s just it.” Horace propped his thick-lensed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “I have no idea. We seem to be moving
“Henry Morgan the pirate?” Abigail experienced the momentary sensation that she and her nephew were not engaged in the same conversation.
An inexplicable pink flush crept up Horace’s cheekbones. “He was Governor—and later Lieutenant Governor —of Jamaica . . .”
“Yes,” said Abigail, “I know. Why would this Mrs. Lake’s relationship to him cause her to poison you—if poison you she did . . . ?”
“I think she did,” said Horace earnestly. “Though my symptoms bore a certain resemblance to my previous attacks of gastritis and the symptoms that sometimes accompany my headaches, in other respects they were such as to frighten me. Please believe me, Aunt Abigail. I have spoken of this to no one—not to Weyountah, who has been a brother to me here; not to George Fairfield, who has been so good as to take me under his wing . . . No one.” He pressed his hands together, palm to palm as if praying, and rested his lips against them, an attitude Abigail remembered from his boyhood. For a moment she was prey to the curious sensation of seeing in the young man the reflection of an infant she had held—herself a fragile and studious girl of eleven—in her arms.
“I will believe you,” she assured him. “But tell me everything, from the beginning, and leave no detail out. One cannot reconstruct the sense of a disputed text,” she added, with a glance at the contents of the desk beside the window—a mountain of books in Greek, in Hebrew, and in tongues stranger still whose very writing was alien to her—“if one is given only fragments to work with.”
“That’s true,” agreed Horace. “And it started with those texts.”
Horace Thaxter—for all his youth—was virtually the only scholar at Harvard who made a study of Oriental Languages, by which was meant (Abigail gathered) Arabic, Persian, Russian, and Biblical Aramaic, there being no one in the colony (and probably not in Britain, either) who could understand Chinese. Horace had begun his fascination with these tongues as a child, getting his merchant father (baffled but indulgent and impressed in spite of himself) to arrange for him to be tutored in the first three by sailors who had come through the port of Boston at various times, and had continued a stubborn quest for further knowledge ever since. By the age of twelve he had begun correspondence with members of the Royal Societies in both London and Paris, and had amassed a small quantity of books in each of those languages, as well as lexicons treasured as if they were chests of gold. Abigail well remembered Horace’s childhood reputation in the family: the boy had always been regarded as strange, but she now saw him, in his own element, as the man he would be, a pathfinding scholar on a road that no one she knew or knew of had traveled before.
“I have something of a reputation here in Cambridge,” he continued shyly. “I can only attribute it to that, that Mrs. Lake sent me up a message last Tuesday—the nineteenth—asking me to meet her at the Crowned Pig on the Waterford Road and enclosing these letters from Mr. Adams and Uncle Mercer.”
“Why the clandestine meeting?” asked Abigail. “Didn’t that seem amiss to you?”
“Not really.” The boy blushed redder. “Perhaps it should have, but one can be fined, you know, quite severely, for having anything to do with a woman—not yourself, of course, m’am, being family . . . But it’s not unusual for care to be taken even in quite innocent meetings. I didn’t think anything of it.”
The Crowned Pig was a tavern about a half mile beyond the last of the handsome mansions of the town, mansions built by the wealthy merchant families who—by staying in the good graces of the Governors and obtaining the best political appointments—ruled Massachusetts. Mrs. Lake proved to be a beautiful woman a few years older than Abigail herself—Horace estimated—who asked him, was it true he could read Arabic? Horace said that he could, whereupon the lady offered him twenty pounds to come with her in her carriage and do a job of translation from that language.
“What did she look like?” asked Abigail, adding—when her nephew merely looked confused by the question —“Other than
“Dark. Brown, I think, not black like a Spaniard’s.”
“Eyes?”
“Like a lady,” said the boy promptly, but that was the best he could do—not unusual, reflected Abigail. Most men she knew—with the exception of John and her friend the silversmith Paul Revere—could attest to whether a woman was naked or clothed, but were left blank by distinctions between a round gown or a jacket and skirt. Much
