Sup With the Devil

The other woman moved heavily off.

“What is it you want?” Reuel glared at Weyountah, with his long black braids and his hunting-shirt, then transferred her scornful stare to Katy, sitting a l’Amazone behind him, her slim brown ankles visible beneath her rucked-up skirt. “Brother Genesis don’t hold with visitors, and he’s his meditations to do ’fore he sits to his dinner.”

Abigail wondered if this woman did meditations also, rather than clearing up the piles of husks, peelings, cores, and cobs heaped knee-high around the rear door of the house. “I took the liberty of coming to see you,” she went on matter-of-factly, “because my husband is attempting to trace the books that Mrs. Seckar sold: the ones found behind the wall in the laundry-room.”

“Greedy slut.” Mistress Seckar’s face darkened with suffusing blood. “The books were part of the house, as ’twas willed to my brother, God rest him, by Mr. Whitehead—and a good Christian man he was who had the strength to abide the Lord’s law. Threatened me, she did—threatened to go to law, bare-faced as Jezebel at her window—”

Horace looked as if he were going to point out that Jezebel had not been bare-faced at her window but in fact had been comprehensively painted, but Katy—Weyountah’s horse was close enough beside his for her to do so— kicked Horace in the ankle and he said, “Ow!” instead.

“For shame!” cried Abigail—of Narcissa Seckar, not of Katy—and added, “And with her husband dead beside her in her bed! I understand her poor husband had had offers for them?”

“Devil-books.” The old woman’s lip lifted to show bare brown gum adorned by a single canine. “Wrote by the Devil, and give to that Devil that hid ’em. There isn’t but one book in the whole of the world that won’t damn the soul of him that reads it, and that’s the Scripture. Gen tried to tell Malachi that, and Mother . . . As stubborn and willful as she was, in his way.” She shook her head, and added, with a distinctly medieval relish, “And he’s burning in Hell now on the unquenchable pyre of his own books. He’d never turn loose of them, though he saw right enough that those Devil-books were evil, and burn those he should have, with their filthy pictures and their heathen writing. I always thought that sweet that Mr. Ryland brought us that night was to butter him up, to get him to sell them books—”

“Mr. Ryland?” Abigail tried not to raise her brows in surprise.

“Governor’s lapdog.” Mistress Seckar nearly spit the words. “A lying weasel. Hutchinson is the son of witches, that’s never touched nothing that didn’t turn to vileness. I wouldn’t put it beyond that smooth-faced hypocrite Ryland to have poisoned that frumenty to get at the books for that heretic Hutchinson. For he had ’em in the end, all but eight or ten.”

“He did indeed,” agreed Abigail thoughtfully. “All but eight or ten.”

Twenty-five

What an archwife!” said Weyountah, when they were on the rutted lane once more, working their way back to the road. “I wonder she isn’t poisoned by her own spit.”

“Mulier ira Jovis,” added Horace sententiously, then glanced across at Katy and blushed in confusion, though Abigail guessed that if annoyed, Katy could outdo many women in the ira Jovis line.

Katy murmured, “Mr. Ryland—”

“I don’t believe it,” said Horace, baffled. “Ryland, kill George for—for money? Or just the rumor of money? Not to mention shuffling off the blame on poor old Dio! He didn’t have a bean, of course, but he would never—”

“Not for money, I don’t think,” said Abigail slowly. “For silence after George woke and saw him standing in his room—to protect his position in the college, his position with Hutchinson—”

“His Excellency would never have ordered Ryland to—”

“No,” said Abigail. “In fact I think he’d have been horrified, had he learned his protege had broken into another student’s rooms—particularly if all that could be visibly proved was that Ryland was trying to lay his hands on a couple of singularly disgraceful books. If Hutchinson knew nothing— of the treasure, of the books, of Ryland’s attempts to have translated the one handwritten document that he was able to find at Seckar’s that looked like a cipher—if Ryland was not entirely certain even that the treasure existed but hoped to present his patron with a fait accompli . . .”

“He may very well have done what he did.” Weyountah spoke without taking his eyes from the dappled depths of the woods around them. “Once he’d killed a fellow student, he had to cover his tracks, even if it meant accusing an innocent man.”

“And if George thought Ryland was looking for something else there,” said Katy softly, and tightened her grip around the Indian’s waist as the horse hopped across a little stream that had washed out the path. “They’d quarrelled over me the day before, George told me—Ryland told George he had no business meddling with tavern- wenches when Sally Woodleigh was breaking her heart over him and everybody in the Volunteers was watching. The captain must be worthy of respect in all things, he said. George told him to go soak his head. When he saw Ryland in his room—”

“He shouted,” finished Weyountah. “And sprang out of bed—especially if Ryland had the desk open—”

“And of course the books weren’t there,” said Abigail. “Because Mr. Pugh had already been in and stolen them before George even returned.”

When they reached the road where Diomede waited, Diomede listened, appalled, to what they had learned and what they surmised, but he confirmed what Katy had said. “I didn’t know it was you they spoke of, m’am,” he said, as the chaise moved off toward Medfield. “But it’s true Mr. Ryland is in love with Miss Woodleigh, and he was angry for her sake. Angry, too, that Mr. George was ‘bringing down’ the Volunteers in the eyes of folks like Miss Woodleigh’s father and Mr. Lechemere and Mr. Vassall. It was far from the first time Mr. Ryland had spoken to Mr. George about how he behaved.”

“It must have gone to his heart,” murmured Abigail, “to see the militia troop he worked for and the woman he loved, both taken so easily by someone who was behaving so unworthily—”

“That’s still no reason to have Mrs. Lake and her bullyboys attempt to murder me.”

“I’m not sure Ryland knew anything about it.” Abigail glanced up at her nephew, jogging beside the chaise on his fat and amiable mare with dust sticking to the mosquito-grease on his face. “He may not have—even as elegant gentlemen like Mr. Hancock and my uncle Isaac don’t really want to know anything about what happens to a Tory when he’s tarred and feathered. Ryland would know about Old Beelzebub from the moment word got around that the books had been found in his house. And from associating with the Governor’s household, Ryland would certainly have known about Mrs. Morgan and the Avalon. Perhaps he knew also about Mr. Chamberville’s house. He may have thought Mrs. Morgan would bring Horace to the Avalon to do his translation . . . and he may not even have known she had the kind of henchmen one would expect to find, working in the stables of a house of accommodation—”

“Well, he jolly well should have known.” Katy raised her head from puzzling out the pages of the notebook.

“I don’t expect he had ever been to the Avalon himself, or to anyplace like it. But once Dubber Grimes got wind of the treasure—and since Mrs. Morgan made herself copies of both the original Arabic document and Horace’s translation, it looks like she planned to go treasure-hunting herself almost from the start—Ryland had no more control of how the hunt was going to be conducted than Sam had when he stirred up that mob to attack Governor Hutchinson’s house back nine years ago over the stamp tax. Sam doesn’t want to admit it—and Ryland didn’t want to admit it—but these things do get away from one.”

“And all the henchmen knew,” said Weyountah, “was that it was connected with a code . . . and that the code was to be found in one of the books.”

“So is there a treasure?” Katy wanted to know. “At the end of all that?”