Sup With the Devil

world again. I’ll break my staff . . .

Why?

He was missing two fingers of his right hand, so that he held the fiddle-bow strangely . . .

For a moment in her fancy she saw him, with his long gray hair like a horse’s tail, and the ends of his silvered mustache braided and tied with green ribbons.

Playing the fiddle strangely with his mutilated hand. Looking straight into her eyes with a gaze black as coal and smiling mockingly. Had he, too, supped with the Devil and afterwards found that he had started chains of circumstance that he could not call back?

The Devil carried off children, she thought.

No. The Devil puts it into the hearts of MEN to carry them off.

She had been taught from tiniest childhood by her father never even to think, May God curse this or that person. But she thought it now.

May God curse Dubber Grimes and his henchmen, and may they die.

“Aunt?”

Shadows darkened the old door into the yard: Horace, Weyountah, Joseph Ryland.

“Have they found aught?” Horace stepped inside, gazing around him with deep interest at the smoke-stained plaster and the high, steep rafters of the ceiling.

And Weyountah: “Dr. Langdon had men in two weeks ago to take away the books in the Reverend Seckar’s regular library in the main part of the house. About half of those had been bought originally by Emmanuel Whitehead, though a few must have belonged to Barthelmy.”

“Mrs. Adams.” Ryland bowed deeply over her hand. “Mrs. Squills at the Golden Stair said that you could be found here. His Excellency has authorized me to offer a reward toward which he will contribute. He is most distressed and most anxious to show your husband—and indeed all the citizens of Boston—that he bears no ill-will. If there is anything that he can do—if there is anything that I can do—”

“Yes,” said Abigail softly, “there is.” And taking Ryland by the shoulder, she guided the young man into the corner near the great fireplace and lowered her voice still further. “You can tell me what you were doing with fifty- four of Beelzebub Whitehead’s books in your chambers.”

Ryland looked aside, flecks of color slowly rose to mottle his colorless cheeks. “Please, Mrs. Adams—” He glanced toward Revere and John, still poking about before the hidden cache on the east wall. “I beg of you, tell no one—”

“Not His Excellency?”

He put his hands briefly to his face. “I don’t know how you can know this—”

Horace opened his mouth to make the obvious remark that they’d searched his room, but Abigail cut in ahead of him with, “Mrs. Seckar told me that you’d purchased them.”

“His Excellency—” began Ryland, and stopped. Then he let his breath out in a sigh. “His Excellency has never been poor,” he said, in a tone of weary defeat. “He heard that Old Beelzebub’s books had been found and mentioned that the old man had been a pirate. I-I thought, I hoped, that there would be some mention . . . pirates hid gold along these coasts as far north as Philadelphia, I know.” His voice faltered as he spoke, as if he could not easily find words. “He asked me to enquire and I—’twas the act of an ingrate, but I can only plead that I was poor. I purchased the books of Mrs. Seckar with the Governor’s money and told him that they had all been sold to others before I came with my offer. I thought—if there was a map or a cipher in one of them . . .”

“You didn’t try to buy them through someone else?”

He looked at her blankly. “Someone else?”

“A Mrs. Lake?”

He frowned a little, fishing through his memory for the name, then shook his head. “I mean only to hold them until I’ve had a chance to go through them—”

“You have not done so yet?”

“No, m’am. I—since the books came to my hand, I’ve been in Boston more than I’ve been here, helping His Excellency. The only times I’ve come to Cambridge have been to help my students prepare for the examinations, to drill with the Volunteers . . . and to”—he stammered just slightly on the words—“to be of service to a . . . a private pupil who has suffered a great loss . . .”

Sally Woodleigh. Who is in elaborate mourning for George Fairfield and fainting in the arms of any wealthy man who’ll stand still for it.

And if you were wealthy, she reflected, looking into those deep-set brown eyes, she would be fainting in YOUR arms . . .

“Please.” Ryland swallowed hard. “Please tell no one of what I did. I will make the money good . . . There’s treasure out there somewhere, I know there is. His Excellency’s records of the colony speak of—of old Whitehead . . . I know he must have left some . . .”

“And do they speak,” asked Abigail, “of this stone fortress of his? Or of where he might have held land?”

Ryland shook his head. “He held none, m’am. I’ve looked through all His Excellency’s records. He had a sort of stronghold on the coast up above Lynn, but that was all, and ’twas burned by the Navy in King William’s War. ’Twas thought the old man’s books were all destroyed then—he was well known as a scholar. So I was surprised to hear that they’d survived here.”

“As indeed you might be. Does anyone know you have these other books?”

“Not that I know of, m’am.”

“Then keep it that way,” she said softly. “And if any man approaches you about them, deny it, or invent a tale that you’ve passed them along to the Governor. Mrs. Seckar spoke of them as cursed,” she finished. “And ’tis true; ill things have befallen those who’ve had them in keeping. And I only hope and trust,” she murmured, as with a deep bow Mr. Ryland took his leave, “that you survive the possession of them once our friends discover nothing in those books of ours but chemical formulae and notes concerning the treatment of horses’ piles.”

They set forth quietly from the Golden Stair at half-past eleven that night: John and Abigail, Revere and Katy, crossing the Common on its northern side by the slitted glimmer of a single dark-lantern held low. The new moon had set early. By wan starlight the world was formless, trees like black thunderheads and the fine brick houses of the village’s worthies no more than dim cutouts of dark against darkness. Abigail carried the wrapped package of books in her arms. Accursed things, she thought . . .

Was it only that love of money is the root of all evil? Mr. Joseph Ryland had, from the moment she had met him, impressed her with his integrity: even his devotion to the King’s cause sprang not from place-seeking, but from dread of civil war. The fact that he would embezzle money from his benefactor, lie to him, then take advantage of his collection of the colony’s old documents to hunt for the location of the treasure, only for money . . .

For money and love?

Sally Woodleigh’s lovely face floated for a moment in Abigail’s thoughts.

Going to get your bid in with the beautiful Sally, haha?

She burned off Ryland’s eyebrows during a chemistry lesson, but he’s still tutoring her . . .

He is young. And beneath that steady exterior, she sensed in the young bachelor- fellow the capacity for passion—for Sally as for the cause of his King.

The dark bulk of the college buildings rose to their right as they moved on into the open field of the Harvard Yard, where the young men ran their footraces on bright spring days and played at ball, and where the hay was harvested in June. A single lamp glimmered, high in some uncurtained room, like a dim gold star in the blackness, and a stirring of night-breeze brought the smell of the college stables. Revere had brought a long, forked stick with its straight end sharpened; this he drove into the ground in the center of the yard, then hung one of the lanterns on it, above the level of the tops of the long grasses that in some places grew thigh-high. At the foot of this, Abigail laid the wrapped package of the books.

Please, God, let all be well . . .

She was trembling as John took her hand in his, and together they retreated back toward the college, her