Sup With the Devil

both early risers; they were halfway through Mrs. Squills’s porridge, eggs, and coffee before Revere joined them.

While she and John were still alone, Abigail inquired, “Does Sam have the true books here with him? Or was he so sure he could get away with his trick that he didn’t even bring them?”

“He has them,” said John. “He’s staying at the Indian’s Head—”

“For fear I may have glimpsed him yester’even and guessed what he was about?” She poured a dollop of cream from the pitcher into her coffee, a drink of which she was not truly fond, but Mrs. Squills would serve no tea.

“For fear you’d stab him in his sleep afterwards, I think.” John spoke lightly, but Abigail could see him watching her sidelong. He knew she was still very angry indeed.

Stab him as George was stabbed . . .

Revere felt it, too, she could tell, when he descended the stair and greeted her, and—though happily married to his lovely Rachel—flirted a little with Mrs. Squills as she brought out hot bread and more coffee. “Is the boy well?” he asked, and John nodded.

“He slept soundly—sleeps still. Katy’s up there now with him.”

“I want to thank you,” said Abigail, holding out her hand to her friend. “More than I can say.”

The silversmith shook his head. “All’s well that ends well. I could have murdered Sam—”

“Yes,” said Abigail. “Sam. All’s well that ends well, as you say . . . But if you would, Mr. Revere, when you’re done with breakfast, would you be good enough to go to the Indian’s Head and tell Sam I want the thinnest of the quarto volumes—the handwritten one with the red cover that contains the astronomy tables and the chemical experiments and the accounts of what flowers bloomed when. Katy and I will be going on to Concord—”

“Nab, I can’t leave Boston now!” cried John. “The King’s ship—”

“I didn’t ask you to come with me. I know what you need to do in Boston—and you, too, Mr. Revere. All’s well that ends well—but the matter isn’t ended. Horace and Weyountah will come with us to have a few words with Reuel Seckar about who it was who handed her vile brother that poisoned frumenty. Is Diomede still in the vicinity, by the way? Or has he been smuggled clear out of Massachusetts?”

“He’s at a place called Phips’s Farm,” said John, his brow furrowed with uneasiness at her words. “Travers— the man who actually carried out the jail deliverance—tried to talk him into flight to New York or Philadelphia, but Diomede says, he will not leave this area until one or another of us has spoken with his master, when he arrives, that Diomede may learn in how much peril he actually stands. He is loathe to utterly separate himself from all chance of seeing his wife and children again—”

“Oh, the foolish, foolish man,” said Abigail sarcastically, and dabbed butter on her bread. “Loathe to brand himself utterly a murderer by breaking jail and fleeing? Now who ever would have supposed a man could be so silly?”

“A man would consider the course a good deal less silly when he has a noose about his neck,” returned John. “There are men in Concord who have said they will take him in and claim him as a servant of theirs—”

“Can he be sent for here?” Abigail glanced at the slowgraying darkness of the window. “To be honest, I could do with another outrider—”

“You could do with half a dozen,” said John bluntly. “Sam has half a score of men at call who can bear you escort—”

“The men Sam would give me as escort,” retorted Abigail, “if the local Sons of Liberty bear any resemblance to those of Boston, would be as dangerous to Katy and myself as Messrs Grimes, Hicks, and the Cornishman. At least they would who haven’t any business in their lives more pressing than hunting pirate treasure, rather than starting to cut their hay or make silver teapots or organize the defense of our liberties or pursue their livings like honest men. Do you think,” she added, when John opened his mouth to protest, “that ruffians like Bruck Travers and smugglers like Ezra Logan whom Sam gets to fetch and carry for him would stick at carrying off treasure if they could? Do you think Sam would stick at it if I spoke of doing a thing with the gold—if there is gold—besides handing it over at once to the Sons of Liberty?

“I trust Horace, John,” she went on more gently. “I trust Weyountah. And I must do this now, soon—ere the King’s ship lands and the Governor acquires more strength, as you know he’ll do, whatever else the King’s Commission decides. And if it isn’t the Governor, but only Black Dog Pugh, do you think his strength will be less if the Crown’s is greater?”

“You sound as if, having found the true culprit in Fairfield’s murder, you intend to go on from Concord to seek this mythical treasure.”

“I do, John,” said Abigail. “I must. Whoever is behind the attempt to kidnap Charley—whether ’tis the Governor or Pugh or someone else we’ve no notion of—do you think his failure will make him shrug his shoulders and give the matter up? If this treasure is not accounted for and seen to be accounted for, one way or the other, these men will try again, to force me or Horace or someone else close to us to aid in its discovery. We might not be so lucky next time. Next time you or Sam or any of our friends may be in jail or in hiding, and unable to lend a hand. It must be done now.”

And she knew that—whatever her mother might say of it—this was true.

“Where do you mean to look? Sam has been through the court records, and this Mr. Ryland of yours”—she had told him of her conversation with the young Loyalist—“has seen everything the Governor has in his private collection, and both agree Whitehead had no property in the backcountry.”

“If he was living in an Indian village, he wouldn’t have,” replied Abigail. “And if land were registered in his name, after King Philip’s War I’m very certain some good Protestant congregation made sure that the records were changed, and serve him right for living with the Infidel. I shall see what Katy and Weyountah—and old Beelzebub himself—can tell us of the matter. Charley!” she added, springing to her feet as Katy came down the stair with the boy’s hand in hers.

“You’ve had an adventure, son,” said John, moving over on the bench to make room for the child. “Will you have coffee with us?” Which meant a great deal of milk and the tiniest bit of the bitter black fluid to darken it. “So tell me, lad, did they starve you and keep you in chains?”

Thus encouraged by the lightness in his father’s attitude, Charley poured forth his account of his captivity from the moment that Mr. Scar-Eye had scooped him up in the alley that led from the yard to Queen Street (only Abigail suspected that her son had actually gone out to the street). Other than being tied up and locked in an attic somewhere near the waterfront, it didn’t sound as if Charley had been mistreated, and Abigail marveled a little at John’s handling of what was, essentially, an interrogation: Where were you taken? What did they do? Could you recognize the place again? By treating it as an adventure—when Abigail knew, from the redness of John’s ears, that his rage was no less than her own at the men who had kidnapped his son—he drew the fear from the event and disabled nightmares to come. “I knew you’d save me,” Charley said again, hugging his father’s arm and pressing his face to his coat-sleeve.

All’s well that ends well. Yet aside from the fact that the deaths of the scar-faced Dubber Grimes and his associate prevented learning who had paid them, Abigail felt no pity for them and tried not to be glad that they were dead. She was burningly conscious that “all” had come very close to not “ending well.”

“Do you think you—and Weyountah—will be able to figure out at least where Old Beelzebub’s fortress might have lain from the notes in his commonplace-book?” she asked Katy quietly, when Revere returned to the inn with the volume.

“If someone can read it to me.” The girl turned the pages as—at the other end of the table—Charley negotiated for a ride back to Boston on the crupper of Revere’s mare instead of at his father’s side in Mr. Revere’s dull old chaise. “Lord if I ever saw handwriting to beat this! It seems like the old man took careful note of where he found things and what the woods looked like and whether the dirt was clay or—is that word supposed to be gravel? That bog he speaks of where he’d gather his cranberries—that sounds like the one over beyond Medway—I don’t know another where you’d get twelve gallons of berries in a day in mid- September. But over here he speaks of walking out to gather witch hazel, which grows on higher ground, and it doesn’t sound as if it’s far. And I do know there’s high ground just north of there.”

Horace and Weyountah arrived shortly after that, driving Sassy in George’s chaise and accompanied by Diomede, who had been mounted—and armed—by the local militia. Two other saddle horses were tethered behind the chaise, from the same source, Abigail assumed, though Sam had had the good sense not to show his face