slid the knife under Katy’s bodice and sliced the cheap cloth open to the waist, jerked down the chemise beneath, and put the knife-blade against the side of her breast. “I’m only gonna ask this once,” he said. “Then I starts cuttin’. Where’s the gold?”
“Hutchinson has it,” said Abigail.
Those piglike eyes narrowed. “Then why’d he say there wan’t none?”
“Probably because Hutchinson told him there wasn’t,” she replied, with a dizzy sense of walking across a tightrope. “He sent him here to find what was in that pit—books and scientific implements . . . You know how His Excellency is about books.”
The Cornishman blinked, thrust unexpectedly into the position—as Abigail felt she had been for weeks—of trying to prove a negative, and he was no better at it than anyone was . . .
He shoved Katy away from him, sending her sprawling to the stones. Before the other men could get to her, Horace reached her side, drew her up against him and away from the Cornishman as that hulking man stepped close to Abigail, knife extended inches from her face. “You lyin’ to me, bitch?’Cos if you are—”
Abigail never heard what he would do to her if she was, in fact, lying. In the same second, it seemed, that she heard a gunshot in the woods, the Cornishman’s narrowed eyes popped wide, as if startled, and a rifle-ball exploded out of the front of his throat in a shower of gore. Abigail rolled aside, dragging Ryland with her, as the Cornishman dropped before them like a felled steer.
Two other shots cracked. The man standing nearest Horace and Katy fell, clutching his side and shrieking; with great presence of mind Katy grabbed the pistol away from him as he fell and shot the next-closest man through the body. Weyountah rolled and caught up that man’s rifle, and the four remaining ruffians dropped their weapons and threw up their hands at once.
Diomede tossed one of their rifles to Katy and went around collecting the rest even as Black Dog Pugh— trailed by his two slaves, both armed to the teeth—emerged from the trees.
“Sink me, I thought I’d never find this place,” Pugh exclaimed. “Wouldn’t have, either, if they hadn’t started shooting. And a damn good shot,” he added, looking down at the Cornishman’s sprawled body and the bullet-hole in the back of his neck, “if I do say so myself. Pity I can’t scalp him as a trophy.” He held down his hand for Abigail. “Don’t you think, m’am?”
Twenty-seven
Did you follow him?” asked Abigail, as the slave Eusebius rose from beside Joseph Ryland’s body and shook his head. Abigail knelt also, to feel the young man’s wrists and throat, though she trusted the African’s judgment, and indeed, it was clear to her that Ryland was dead.
She looked up at Pugh.
“Lord, no. And just as well,” the bachelor-fellow added, and rubbed his fat, unshaven chins. “If we’d been following him, instead of our upstanding friend here”—he nudged the dead Cornishman with his foot—“we’d probably have fouled on him like two dogs on the same lead. No, the fair Nancy—when she came to me rather the worse for wear, for having been locked up in some sailor’s trap in Boston where Grimes had left her and the other girls—told me the Cornishman had come in and got himself a band of tavern toughs to find ‘pirate gold,’ as he put it—”
“You knew about Old Beelzebub’s treasure, then?”
“Lord, who in the islands didn’t? Is it here, then?” He walked to the opening in the floor and squatted to peer in. “Grimes and his bravos were boasting about looking for it down at the Pig one afternoon, so I knew there was a rumor
Abigail looked around her a little distractedly, and Eusebius—in the process now of tying the hands of their prisoners—wordlessly stripped off his coat and handed it to her to lay over Ryland’s face. As she did so, Abigail drew out the knife that Ryland wore at his belt, noting the slender blade was only barely wider than a paper knife. Precisely the width, in fact, of the wounds in poor George Fairfield’s side. Whether a judge would recognize this—or even look at it as evidence—she didn’t know, but she pocketed the weapon just in case before she followed the Black Dog to the trapdoor.
“The treasure that Ryland was seeking,” she said carefully, “I don’t think was gold at all, but rather books and formulae of chemistry—or alchemy, as Beelzebub would have thought of it . . . Did Grimes tell you that?”
“Grimes? He swore it was gold, so much it wouldn’t have fit into one shipload—sort of thing one talks oneself into after the second bottle of Hollands. I was buying the Hollands.” He winked one long-lashed green eye. “A small investment, considering the money I took off him as the afternoon wore on. Doesn’t look far down,” he added. “And stap me if I see any gold. But when Nancy and the other girls came knocking at my door Tuesday night, asking shelter and swearing the Cornishman was off after the treasure, that was enough to get me to follow along and see. Hold this for me, would you, m’am?”
He put a candle in her hand. He had taken it from his pocket along with flint and steel.
“Are they all right? Nancy and Belinda and Dassie—”
“You’ve met ’em, have you, m’am? Good girls, and corky as squirrels—” He cracked flint to steel briskly, then blew on the spark where it had taken on the loop of tinder through his fingers. “Grimes took ’em off to some crimp named Manchet down by the harbor who runs a nunnery out of his back-room. Kidnap, too, by the sound of it. Nan laid old Manchet out with a pintle Tuesday night after Grimes and his bravos had left, and the three of ’em came to me. Just bring that winker over here—”
He fastidiously removed his coat, then lowered himself down the trap, holding his hand up afterwards for the light. Abigail saw the small glow bob and shift beneath her in a hole that resembled a cold cellar, perhaps six feet by eight, beneath the stone foundation of the old fortress: “Coming down, m’am? That’s the dandy!” He set the candle on a shelf and held up his hands for her as Abigail wrapped her skirts tightly around her legs and slid down into his grip. “What a mess, eh? And not a gold-piece in the lot.”
He held up the candle, as Abigail looked around. The few books that the old pirate had left in this little strong room had mildewed into black blocks, but the glass vessels had survived the passage of years. Abigail recognized them from Weyountah’s workroom in Harvard Hall, what she’d seen of it through his poisonous smoke: crook- necked distillingbottles, thin measuring-flasks. Two carboys showed signs of having contained fluids of some sort, now dried away to glossy dark scum on the bottom and sides. In clay pots, a number of salts and something that smelled like sulfur remained.
“Weyountah would know what all this is,” she said, trying to keep her voice casual.
“Wonder if it spoils with keeping?” Pugh held the light close to the largest vessel, where the liquid had dried and crusted with time. “Does Jasmine owe me five, or do I owe him? Would have been a jolly good sport if there had been something here . . .” He picked up a telescope from the shelf, pointed it at the sky and peered through it for a moment, set it down again. “Would have guaranteed me the fair Sally’s hand, anyway. So this is what poor Ryland was after?”
“I think so, yes. He told me—in the course of the affray—that he’d hoped to gain some recognition from the Governor for it.”
“I expect he would. The old boy’s never given up the hope of putting together a history of the colony, and a find like this—proof that old Beelzebub did really do alchemy to get the Nipmucs to worship him—would turn him pink down to the ends of his prehensile toes.”
Pugh chuckled, like the great black bulldog he was called. “Ryland was just wild that old Seckar wouldn’t sell him the old man’s books when they were found back in April. I’m afraid I muddied the waters there a bit . . .”
“And George got the two you wanted in the end,” said Abigail drily, “didn’t he?”
Pugh met her eyes in the dim glow.
She raised her eyebrows, and his heavy mouth quirked sidelong. “You know about that?”
“I have a good guess. Your note to George—sorry,
