Sup With the Devil

George was still away from his room when you went in—”

“Oh, Lord, yes. Bed all made up and turned down waiting for him—Dio’s a born chambermaid. Glad to see the old fellow here, by the way—did you arrange a jail deliverance? Good on you. I tiptoed in just after the clock struck twelve. I was pretty sure, with George gone, Dio’d be laid out stiff as a board on the rum, though ’fore God, m’am, if I’d known how stiff I’d have gone out to the barn and warned poor George something was afoot.” He stood frowning, gazing at the dulled and dirty equipment crowded on the little bench. Then, more quietly, “Ryland really killed George for this?”

“When one chases the Devil’s treasure,” said Abigail, “one pursues the illusion that Satan conjures in the mind, not the handful of sticks and dirt that are often the reality. It’s not only that the heart lies close to the treasure . . . sometimes one finds that the treasure exists only in the heart.”

“Silly bastard.” Pugh shook his head, placed the candle on the table’s edge, and held out his hands to her. “George was worth a thousand of him. Well, I always said old George didn’t care about Sally one way or t’other— not that I’d say so to the fair Sally herself. That young lady upstairs—” He jerked his head toward the hole above them, “would be the girl he married, would she? Katy Pegg? Thought I recognized her.”

“Was the license in one of the books?”

“Wasn’t sure what to do with it.” Pugh shrugged. “No need to go waving it in front of Sally, of course. D’you think the girl would go halves with me for whatever we could screw out of old man Fairfield on the strength of it? You know he’ll never let it stand up in a Virginia court.”

“That,” said Abigail sternly, “is something you would have to discuss with Mrs. Fairfield. I believe she would settle for ownership of Diomede, and Dio’s wife and children—and some sort of maintenance for her child. If you’re going up,” she added, as Pugh whistled sharply beneath the trap-hole for Pedro, “would you be so good as to ask Weyountah to come down? I want to see if he can salvage any of this for himself.”

Pedro held down his hands for his master, and when he’d been hauled (Pedro must be stronger than he looks!) up through, Abigail made a swift search around the cellar for any further papers or notes that might have been left. There were none. Joseph Ryland had had sufficient time, before his erstwhile henchmen had put in their appearance, to gather them all, into the thick block of folded pages that poked Abigail in the thigh beneath her petticoats every time she moved.

“Do these things spoil with keeping?” she asked Weyountah, when the Indian had dropped lithely down beside her.

“The phosphorous certainly has.” He hastily re-stoppered a flask in which the waxy crusts of something white clung to the sides; Abigail stepped back, repelled by the smell of it. “I’m not sure what some of this is, even. But he was doing something with sulfur, and the sulfur is still good—”

“Let’s take that, then,” she said, “and pass it along to Sam or Mr. Revere . . . One makes gunpowder with sulfur, no?”

“Among other things, yes. It doesn’t seem like that’s what Old Beelzebub was doing down here . . .”

“No,” said Abigail, a little quickly. “Can I ask you something, Weyountah? We can take the sulfur, but when we depart, would you stay behind and destroy the rest of this? Destroy it so that none of it can be used again? I shall explain later,” she added, as the Indian looked quickly sidelong at her. “Beelzebub’s treasure is . . . not something I want anyone else to happen upon by accident. It has brought too much grief and trouble to the world already. ’Tis a secret best forgotten.”

The Indian looked puzzled for a moment, then turned his head to study the chemical apparatus—the retorts and alembics, the filtering coils and small furnace, the piston air-pump and oily crusts in the vessels—and she saw something change in his dark eyes, as he guessed, perhaps not what the treasure of Beelzebub had been, but the sort of thing it was. Softly, he said, “You can rely on me, m’am. I shall join you in Boston tomorrow.”

It was in fact late the following afternoon—Friday, the thirteenth of May—before Weyountah and Horace appeared on the Adams doorstep. Abigail—after a brief consultation with John—bade the two young men stay on for dinner with the family and to spend the night. Upon Abigail’s return Thursday evening in company with St-John Pugh and his party—Katy, their various prisoners, and Joseph Ryland’s body—John had listened to her account of the young Loyalist’s death and her own theory about what Beelzebub’s treasure had consisted of, and had agreed that it was a matter that must go no further.

From regard for their children—Charley seemed far more taken up with the equitable distribution of the wooden soldiers in the toybox than with the fact that he’d been kidnapped and held in the back-room of Mr. Manchet’s tavern on Fish Street for forty-eight hours earlier in the week—the conference after dinner was held in John’s study rather than the kitchen. But throughout the meal, Abigail kept glancing at Weyountah’s face, reading her suspicions in the grimness of his eyes.

When John closed the door behind him and poked up the little hearth-fire—for the spring afternoon was chill —she asked, “What was it that Old Beelzebub had figured out how to make in the Devil’s Castle back in 1675?”

Weyountah had spread out the notes on John’s desk, a dozen folio-sized sheets, yellow with age and stained with time and mold. Notations of chemical formulae covered them, and writing both in Arabic and what Weyountah told her was Algonquian, the language spoken by many of the Massachusetts tribes. “All of this is written in Algonquian, but sometimes he’ll use Roman letters for it and sometimes Arabic. No wonder people thought he was the Devil.”

“But what is it?” Katy leaned from her chair at Abigail’s side, tried to read past his shoulder. On the trip back to Boston, the girl had had a long, quiet conversation with Black Dog Pugh, presumably about whether half a loaf would be better than no bread once Charles Fairfield came to Cambridge. The West Indian had called again that morning, and conferred with both Katy and John. Diomede had wisely remained at Mr. Barrett’s farm near Concord, under another name. “Why would anyone want a lot of chemical formulas so badly they’d kill for them?”

“Formulae,” corrected Horace automatically.

“Killing is what they’re about,” said Abigail softly. “Isn’t it?”

“I think so, yes,” said the Indian. “I recognized a number of the experiments he’s done. Beelzebub was working with combinations of poisonous vapors—mixtures of sulfurs and phosphorous a hundred times more deadly than the poisoned smokes the Romans used. Vapors that stuck to the skin and remained in the air for hours rather than dispersing.”

“The Chinese used poison smokes, of course,” said Horace. “The Persians, also—everything from balls of burning mustard to clouds of powdered antimony and chalk designed to asphyxiate the enemy . . . beastly. It sounds as if Old Beelzebub took a more scientific approach to produce clouds that would hang for hours in the air after they were shot by means of hollowed cannon-shells into enemy villages.”

“Enemy?” said Thaxter, puzzled. “Who—?”

Weyountah held up the smallest of the sheets of paper, which contained not formulae, but simply writing in a firm, faded hand.

“Evil Heart,” he read slowly, translating as he went. “We the fathers of the Abooksiqun village have smoked over the offer you have made to us to deal with the white men who come against us, who have tried to take our land. We have talked and we have prayed to the spirits that guide us. You say that you can kill the white soldiers who will come to our villages before they can reach us; that you can rub them out before they can see a single warrior of the Nipmuc tribe; that you can stretch them dead upon the ground miles from us and destroy their villages without a single warrior of the Nipmuck ever having to enter there. This you will do, you say, out of thanks to us, for taking you in when your own people had turned their faces from you.”

Weyountah turned the paper over, his strong-boned young face grave and sad in the lamplight.

“This we do not want and will not have. We the fathers of the Abooksiqun village understand the greatness of this gift of death that you offer to us, and thank you that we are in your heart and your thought. Yet we find this gift that you offer us an abomination. This is not what we wish to do or what we wish to become or how we wish our sons to speak of us after we are gone. When we are gone, we want our sons to say, Our Fathers were warriors, not, Our Fathers were cowards who poisoned their enemies from afar.”

“He couldn’t have done it,” said Thaxter after a time. “Could he?”