Sup With the Devil

faintest glow of the unbanked hearth rimmed the pans on their hooks, the queens-ware dishes on their shelves, made copper mirrors of Messalina’s wide, demented eyes. She had dreamed of arguing with John—shouting at him through iron bars that separated them, You left them! You left them, and you left me! knowing he would be taken away to Halifax, tried by a military court, and hanged for treason. Knowing that it was somehow her fault.

For a time she listened in the stillness, wondering what it was that had waked her. Then she rose slowly, stiffly, to stir up the fire again. Not long after that John and Thaxter came in, their voices muffled in the yard, calling out to others, thanking them . . . arranging a meeting by the Mill Pond as soon as it grew light.

“You didn’t find him,” she whispered, when the men came in, and John gathered her in his arms. She clung to him, trembling, trying to shove away the last stains of her dream out of her mind. Feeling in the rhythm of his breath the degree of his own dread and pain.

“We will,” he said. “We will, Nab. ’Tis dark as pitch; we could have walked within a yard of him on the Common and not seen him. If he’d knocked himself senseless—falling out of a tree or off the back of a dray trying to hook a ride . . .”

He turned his head sharply at the sound of someone knocking at the front door. Thaxter, already in the hall, reached it—Abigail guessed—in two strides, for she heard the bolt clack, the hinge creak almost before the sound of the first salvo died. She and John were in the doorway of the hall an instant after that and saw by the light of the lantern the clerk still held that it was Revere and Dr. Warren in the aperture, Revere in the act of handing a piece of paper to Thaxter.

“This was on the door,” he said.

GIV US THE BUKS

WE GOT YR BOY

Twenty-two

A day passed before the second note reached them, nerveracking hours that brought Abigail close to unforgivable words with Sam, with Sam’s wife Bess, with John himself. Last night she had silently cursed her mother’s iron insistence upon the role of womanhood. Now, in her calmer moments—when, from long practice in forbearance and patience, she was able to take a deep breath and hold her always-unruly tongue at Sam’s suggestion that they bring in Horace for an all-out attempt to find the treasure-code in the seven books before they had to be surrendered—she blessed her mother for not causing her to break irretrievably with every Adams on the planet . . . not to speak of murdering Sam.

She only said, “Bring the books here, Sam. They’re going to be handed over the moment someone tells us where and when.”

He looked like the words Try to stall them were upon his lips, but to his credit he didn’t utter them. He said, “Of course. You’ll have them tonight.”

That had been during last night’s conference in the small hours when Sam was called back to see the note, and Abigail forbade them—any of them—to do a single thing, even call on the constables, until Charley had been returned safe. As the men were leaving, only an hour before dawn, she had caught Paul Revere by the sleeve: “Will you go out to Mrs. Morgan’s house in Charles Town? You, yourself, without any others and without telling Sam—Go out and see if her scar-faced coachman and the two grooms are still there? Don’t go near the place—if they have Charley there . . .”

She bit back the words, not even daring to think them.

Revere’s dark eyes narrowed, but he nodded. “I won’t be seen.”

Unable to utter a word, Abigail squeezed his hand.

Throughout Monday, it took all her self-command not to speak of the note to the other three children or to Pattie—whose self-control she did not trust as she instinctively trusted Katy’s. With the bred-in discipline of one who has spent her life taking care of animals, Katy made sure that the milking was done before the town herd-boys drove the cattle down the street to the Common in the first pink twilight of morning; Pattie saw to it that Nabby and Johnny were clean and fed and off to school. But it was Abigail who sat down with her older children before their departure, and told them that ’twas best they go to school as ever and keep their minds from Charley, whom they could not help. “The men will search the Common again today,” she said, “and the fields on the other side of Beacon Hill.” She repeated John’s argument of last night about how impossible it was to find anything as small as a three-year-old boy in the open fields on a moonless night.

While she was comforting them, a knock sounded at the front door, and Pattie came into the kitchen a moment later with the news that Mr. Ryland, the Governor’s young man, was here . . .

“You had best go,” she said, and kissed the two children, aware that her efforts at control had robbed those kisses of anything but perfunctory motion. “Pattie, will you walk with them to the school?” Both children opened their mouths in protest—being escorted by an adult was the ultimate of babyishness—but Abigail was already out of the kitchen, with barely more than a glance at the small mirror in the hall to make sure that her cap was straight and her eyes those of a Roman matron and not a wild woman.

Yet when she opened the door and saw Joseph Ryland sitting beside the parlor’s cold hearth, for that first instant it took everything she had in her not to walk straight up to him and seize him by the hair: What has the Governor to do with this . . . ?

Then he stood and faced her, white with shock and distress. “Mrs. Adams, I beg your forgiveness, for coming to you at a time like this—”

What are you doing with Beelzebub Whitehead’s books in your chamber?

She took a deep breath. “No—” She hoped her gesture would convey this forgiveness to him. “’Tis well.”

Did you hire Dubber Grimes to kidnap my son? The question shattered, dissolved against the haggard suspicion in his face, the sickened expression of someone who is trying very hard not to see something that’s under his nose. Faced with Ryland’s honest integrity, she could no more ask that than she could ask, Did you tell Dubber Grimes to murder Horace and leave his body by the side of the Concord Road?

It was absurd on the face of it.

“They have found nothing?” he asked.

She shook her head wordlessly.

“His Excellency asked me—I have been at his house yesterday and today . . . He said, he has had his quarrels with Mr. Adams, but ’tis all politics; this is another matter entirely. Have—Pray forgive me asking this, m’am . . . Have arrangements been made to drag the Mill Pond?”

“I believe so, yes.”

He made haste to add, “Of course ’tis absurd to think—”

“He is only three,” said Abigail quietly. “Boys that age have neither the judgment to keep away from places of danger, nor the strength to swim or climb or scramble to safety.”

Silence stood between them, and Abigail’s jaw ached with the effort not to shout at him: What do you know? What do you suspect? What has Hutchinson said? What has he done? In the young man’s brown eyes she saw the agony of surmises that he was trying his best to thrust away. And how not, when Hutchinson was not only the man who had gotten him into a college he could never have afforded to enter, but who was keeping him there now and upon whose continued goodwill he depended for everything?

To the marrow of her bones she knew that if she spoke of her suspicions, his honesty would drive him back to Hutchinson: Mrs. Adams says this of her son’s disappearance—is it true? Too clearly in her mind she heard Paul Revere’s voice saying, Her throat was cut, of the woman whose discreet house she had been in Friday . . .