Sup With the Devil

been a wall. Trees had grown up close to it, roots forcing apart the stones in places. Elsewhere what looked like shallow steps had been cut in the rock bones of the hill on which the fort had been built, and the ruins of what could have been a tower.

The Devil’s Castle.

Her nephew tried to run forward, and both Abigail and Weyountah pulled him back. They moved forward slowly, Diomede and Katy edging inward from the sides. It was Diomede who reached the stone remains first, surmounted a sort of breastwork, then straightened up in an attitude of shock. He called out, “Mr. Ryland!” and scrambling over the wall, sprang down. Horace broke from them, ran toward the place at the same moment that Abigail saw Diomede lift the head of a man who had been lying on the broken foundationstones, half hidden by the walls.

Ryland struggled a little, flailed one hand, then seemed to come to his senses and cried out, “Get away! Go back!”

And around them in the woods, half-a-dozen rifles crashed.

Twenty-six

Weyountah grabbed Abigail by the arm and nearly dragged her up behind the low walls of the ruins, thrust her down beside him, and peered over the tumbled stones. Another rifle crashed and the ball cracked against the barrier near were they lay. Abigail gasped, “Don’t tell me the Governor has men out after us after all!”

Diomede dropped beside her, bleeding from where a rifle-ball had grazed his arm as he dragged Ryland to shelter beside them.

Through gritted teeth—not taking his eyes from the surrounding trees—Weyountah replied, “I’d say the Cornishman went and got some friends after Tuesday night.”

“Drat the man! They’re as bad as the Sons of Liberty for coming out of the woodwork—I daresay some of them are Sons of Liberty in their spare time . . .” Keeping crouched behind the wall as best she could, Abigail pulled open Ryland’s coat and shirt; blood was welling from a fresh wound.

“He was hit just now, m’am,” said Diomede. “When he sat up a little and cried for us to get back—”

A short distance away she could see a huge pool of the man’s blood where he’d been lying when Diomede had found him.

“Give me your handkerchief or anything you’ve got . . .”

Close beside her, Katy got off a shot, then cursed vividly and added, “Horry, have you ever loaded a gun? Curse it . . . Dio, let Horry take care of Ryland, we need you to cover the other angle—”

Obediently the servant shoved his handkerchief into Abigail’s hand and, catching up rifle, powder, and patch- box, sprang to the remains of the tower. “I can load.” Abigail had performed that service on numerous occasions when her father or William had gone duck-hunting. “Just give me a moment . . . Horace, don’t you dare faint—”

She dug in the pasty and staring boy’s pocket, pulled out five handkerchiefs, and wadded them tight against the bleeding hole in Ryland’s chest. The bullet was lodged—at least there wasn’t a corresponding wound in his back—but it seemed to her for a time that the blood would never cease pumping out beneath the reddened linen, no matter how hard she pressed. Behind her she heard Katy swear again, and say, “I’d better go to loading. I can’t seem to hit the whoresons—”

And another crack of gunfire from the woods.

A swift glance back across the stone foundation—it seemed to have been a rectangle some thirty feet by fifty with a tower at either end—confirmed Abigail’s first, fleeting impression that there was a square hole in the flooring of the more intact of the two towers, where Diomede crouched on the high-point of the remaining wall. A broken paving-stone and a couple of pieces of wood lay next to it, the remains, presumably, of a trapdoor . . .

“Good Lord, don’t tell me there really is a treasure!”

She looked back down at Ryland’s face. It was wax white beneath horrible bruises. Shocked, she said, “He’s been beaten!” When he reached to touch her hand, she saw the mutilated fingers, sticky with blood.

Katy dumped powder from her hand down the rifle-barrel, shoved in a patch and ball, and whacked the whole thing with the ramrod. “I thought they worked for him!”

Ryland turned his head a little and without opening his eyes managed to whisper, “Saw me. Harvard Yard.”

Enlightenment flooded Abigail and she said, “Were you the one who shot Dubber and Hicks after the kidnapping?”

“Had to,” breathed Ryland. “They’d seen me—Mrs. Morgan’s—” His eyelids fluttered open and for a moment he looked toward Horace. “Sorry. Never meant . . .”

“And I suppose you never meant that old Professor Seckar would die, either,” retorted Abigail tartly.

“Had to,” he insisted. Pleaded. The long fingers—their ends bloodied where the nail beds had been crushed—tightened feebly on hers. “Destroy them . . . within their camps. Defend this city, for mine own sake . . . for my servant David’s sake . . .”

“Did they take the treasure, then?” asked the girl, as Abigail sat back on her heels, shocked—and suddenly cold—at his words. “Then why the Devil are they still shooting at us?”

“Or was it gone when you got here?” Weyountah fired again, followed instantly by another shot from Diomede on the tower. “Quick—!” The Indian stretched out his hand for Katy’s gun, and she pressed it into his grip and instantly reloaded, twice as fast, Abigail noticed, as William had ever managed to . . .

“Not gone—”

Softly, while Katy was reloading, Abigail said, “It wasn’t gold, was it?” She understood then what the treasure was, what it had to be. Pieces falling into place . . .

Ryland shook his head. “Defend this city . . .”

So THAT, she thought, is what he would have brought in triumph to Hutchinson. As vindication of whatever it had cost.

And she had to admit, it would have brought him all the preferment, all the advancement, all the recognition he wanted and had never received.

Maybe even the hand of the lovely Sally Woodleigh.

She felt breathless with rage and horror.

On the tower, Diomede called out, “They’re coming around to your downhill side—”

Weyountah nodded sharply in that direction, where the cover consisted of trees rather than the stone walls, and Katy snatched up rifle and ammunition, and darted across the open space of the foundation. “How many?” he called out to the servant.

His head on Abigail’s lap, Ryland whispered, “Ten.”

“And they didn’t believe you,” said Abigail, “did they, when you said the treasure consisted of . . . What? Other books?”

Ryland shook his head, closed his hand on hers again in a paroxysm of agony as more shots chipped the stone behind Abigail’s head, fragments stinging her neck like bees. Weyountah called out, “Don’t fire unless you have to! They’re trying to draw our ammunition!”

“Didn’t believe.” Ryland’s voice seemed to fumble at the words. “Followed me here . . . Excellency’s papers . . . Shelby . . . records . . . Devil’s Castle . . .” His eyes opened a slit under fluctuating lids, and he seemed for a moment to come back to himself. “Tried to buy them . . . The books. Excellency spoke of him . . .”

“Did you think ’twas gold you sought at first?” whispered Abigail. “Or did you know from the start it wasn’t?”

“. . . was a scholar, Excellency said . . . rumor of what he’d made . . .”

“Did Hutchinson know what you were doing?”

“Foolish.” Ryland shook his head. “All tales. If it was real, he’d have used it. Knew it had to be here. Knew—