Sup With the Devil

anywhere near her. The prospect of riding back to Boston with Mr. Revere—and of boasting of his adventures to those of his siblings who had not been so fortunate as to be kidnapped by villainous ruffians—had reconciled Charley to his mother not coming back with them. He flung his arms around her neck and kissed her before his father tossed him up onto the back of Revere’s saddle: Abigail smiled a rather crooked smile.

“Take care,” whispered John, and glanced at Diomede as he handed rifles to Weyountah and Horace.

“We should be back tomorrow near sundown,” said Abigail. “With at least some idea of where this treasure lies . . . if anywhere.”

“And if the King’s vengeance comes to Boston whilst you are gone?”

“Get the children to Isaac and Eliza’s,” she said. “And I shall meet you in Concord.”

She kissed him then, and he helped her up into the chaise— and gave a good-natured boost to get Horace onto the obese and mild-mannered nag that one of the local Sons had lent to the expedition. Weyountah, with a rifle on his back and another scabbarded beside his saddle, was very different from the scholarly chemist Abigail had met only a few weeks before: quiet and grim and watchful as he prepared to return to the world on which he’d turned his back. Horace, in his ill-fitting black coat and hand-me-down boots, looked considerably less heroic—he’d coated his face with an aromatic compound designed to keep mosquitoes and gnats at bay.

But when he nudged his borrowed horse over to the other side of the chaise, to exchange words with Katy, Abigail saw suddenly in her nephew’s eyes the way he looked at the girl . . .

And there are heroes and heroes, she thought. And one doesn’t have to wear a crimson coat or join the Sons of Liberty to be one. Only have a willing heart.

And for herself, like the heroines of ancient Rome she’d read about in Livy and Tacitus, it was up to her to defend her family as well as she might while her husband dealt with the greater threat to the State. She did not, however, feel tremendously Roman as she touched Sassy’s flank with the end of the whip, and the innyard fell behind them as they set off into the morning’s brightness.

They passed over the bridge at the village of Lexington midmorning and a little over an hour later crossed the narrow wooden span over the Concord at the town that shared the river’s name. Like Cambridge, Concord had the peaceful air of well-being so often to be found in New England villages: sturdy houses of brick or clapboard surrounding a Common where cows grazed on the rather shaggy grass; wide house-lots and tidy fences of stone and hedge surrounding the fields of the nearby farms. The farmer to whom Diomede had been sent for concealment—a colonel in the local patriot militia—directed Abigail on to Genesis Seckar’s farm, deep in the woods at the end of a rutted track: “Though if you’re hungry for a little nuncheon, m’am, I’ll get my good wife to bring out some bread and milk for you, for you’ll get nothing from him, not if you was starving.”

“If a son shall ask for bread of you, shall you give him a stone?” Abigail quoted the Gospel, and Colonel Barrett made a mouth of mock dismay.

“Now, m’am, that’s doing the man injustice! He’d never part with a stone that could be put to work in a fence!”

“If it’s all the same with you, m’am, sir,” said Diomede, with a little half bow and a glance at Barrett, “and not wishing to treat your house as an inn—but I should feel a bit better to go on with Mrs. Adams here, and Mrs. Fairfield, to their destination to make sure all goes well. I’ll keep well out of sight if any tries to stay us, and won’t come next or nigh your place, if I think any would be after me—”

“Oh, Lord, man, don’t worry over that!” The colonel laughed. “Every man in the militia’s heard you’ll be staying here—on the run from the Tories, I think Mr. Adams said? Bad cess to ’em! And those who aren’t in the militia can come speak to me if they’ve a problem with it.” He grinned. “And there’s enough of us here in the town that there won’t be a problem. Come and go as you please, man.” He slapped Diomede’s arm. “And stay as long as you wish! And if you’re any hand with a musket, you’ll find you’ll be welcome in my company.”

“Er—thank you, sir.” The valet looked slightly disconcerted at the idea of joining the patriot militia so soon after riding in his master’s company with the Loyal Volunteers, but—wisely, Abigail thought—held his peace.

“Tell me truthfully,” said Abigail, once they were on the road again toward the Seckar farm. “You’re the only man, among all those who’re saying what you ought to do, who actually knows old Mr. Charles Fairfield: what are the chances that he’ll listen to testimony that says your master was murdered by someone else? When I’ve spoken with Mistress Seckar, I hope to be able to put a name on the true killer—but will Mr. Fairfield listen? Out of all of this, what would you have?”

“What I’d have, of course,” replied the slave slowly, “is for Mr. Charles to be so struck by your proofs that he’ll take me home to where I can be with my Maggie again, and our girls . . . But to tell you the truth, Mrs. Adams, even if he said he agreed, I’d be afraid to go. Because once we’d get home, sure as grass grows in the spring, there’d be some among his friends who’d start in saying how I’d actually done it—and them not knowing a thing about it, only that they’ve been afraid all their lives that they’d die at the hands of one of their own slaves. And then I couldn’t flee. Yet I know if I just run off, when he gets back to Albemarle County, Mr. Charles will sell my Maggie and our girls, and I’d never find them, not if I searched a hundred years.”

“He won’t,” said Katy firmly. “Because when he gets here, I’m going to start proceedings—that is,” she added, “if Mr. Adams is agreeable—to be recognized as George’s wife with interest in you and Maggie and your daughters . . . And he can’t very well sell them if there’s a lawsuit going on.”

Diomede grinned, a little wanly. “That’s kind of you, m’am,” he said. “And a good thought, for no man wants to buy a slave that might get him brought to law. Yet I think, to stand a chance of winning that suit, you’re going to need all the pirate treasure we can find and more.”

The Seckar farm was very much as Katy had described it: ruinous with neglect, the miles of winding lane that connected it with the Concord Road a river of potholes, while its aged owner concentrated on the salvation of his soul. Abigail and Katy both climbed down from the chaise after the first few yards, and were taken up behind Weyountah and Horace, leaving Diomede with Sassy and the vehicle. “One would think the man had little taste for company,” murmured Weyountah, glancing about him at the woods that closed in around the neglected track.

“Or company had little taste for him,” retorted Katy with a grin.

Reuel Seckar proved to be a gaunt giant of a woman, her untidy hair dirty beneath a dirty cap, her dress spotted with tallow and food. She and her cowed and delicately built sister-in-law—brother Genesis’s wife— emerged from the house when the visitors first came clear of the woods, and Mistress Reuel strode toward them like some gaunt Titaness from an earlier phase of the world, her white hair flying like some grimy sybil’s and bare feet slopping in the clayey mud. By the look of the house, Genesis either shared his brother’s feelings about household help making women lazy, or more likely, he couldn’t get anyone to stay. When Abigail brought up Narcissa Seckar’s name, Reuel sniffed with contempt.

“The whore of Babylon,” she said. “Given over to Mammon and to chasing the things of this world, and greedy as a Jew: What profit it for a man—aye, or a woman!—to gain the whole world and to lose her soul? And defiant,” she added bitterly. “Sweet-mouthed as a honeycake, and a heart rotted with Satan’s pride and defiance against the Lord.”

Abigail—whose slender experience with Jews had exposed none noticeably more greedy than some good Congregationalist slave-traders she had encountered—bit back the urge to remind this sour-faced bissom that she’d spent thirty years of her life under a roof that belonged to that Babylonian whore, and replied merely, “What a relief for you, then, to be no longer obliged to share a home with her.”

The glare that Mistress Reuel shot Abigail amply informed her that Brother Genesis—whatever his other sins—had not been pleased to take his sister in when he’d thought he’d gotten her safely palmed off on Brother Malachi. Heaven alone knew what their mutual mother had been like, God rest her soul.

“I’ve no time for idleness,” said Mistress Seckar. But instead of turning back toward the kitchen, she snapped at the woman who waited by the kitchen door—white-haired and almost toothless, with the bludgeoned air of one who barely realizes anymore that she is human—“Get back to the stew, or Gen’ll be in a passion when he gets home.”