Sup With the Devil

run his errands. But he lets me study here in his rooms—Pugh used to come looking for me in my own, to send me on made-up errands to the farthest end of town . . .”

“Does he not have a fag of his own?” John had always been philosophical about the fagging system in effect at Harvard—the freshmen attaching themselves to seniors as partial protection against hazing; it was something one simply had to endure in order to get an education. Abigail, aware that it was almost certain that her sons would one day be freshmen here, regarded it in a less sanguine light.

“He does, m’am. And slaves as well, two of them. But he likes to bully and is a positive diabolos for spiteful vengeances. As I was saying, Pugh caught me on Friday and sent me on an errand into the far end of the town, to the Pig; and when I came out of the inn, I saw Mrs. Lake’s coachman across the road.”

“Did you so?”

“I knew him, m’am. The scar on his face is like the mark of Cain. There were two men with him, one tall and powerful with a shaven head that poked forward like a turtle’s, the other a man of medium size with an ear missing and his nose most horribly scarred. All three were swarthy, and the mutilated man wore his hair in a long queue, smeared with tar as sailors do. They were looking about them, and as I knew no one at the Pig, I asked no questions but simply made haste to leave by the kitchen door. It was then—Friday evening—that I sent to you.”

“As well you did,” murmured Abigail. “We seem to have stumbled into a broadside ballad here—all we need is an endangered maiden who is true heiress to the treasure, though I reckon Mistress Pitts was very well able to take care of herself. How much do your friends know, or guess?”

Horace shook his head. “What they know is only that I went to visit friends and was found unconscious in a ditch the following morn. What they guess . . .”

His brow furrowed, and for a moment the boyish face with its pasty adolescent spots and its too-large nose seemed, suddenly, that of the man he would be. “Weyountah has taxed me, two or three times, with questions. He guesses I wasn’t telling the truth, and he’s seen that I’m afraid. George . . .” He grinned affectionately. “I’m sure George took him aside and told him that if I’d had the red blood in me to go off—er—drabbing, and ended up drunk in a ditch, I’d be the better not to have some praying Indian chasing after me for the details. They put it about that I was sick—”

“’Tis what Mr. Ryland seems to have thought.”

“Well, he’s the Fellow in charge of this hall, so if word of any of this reached his ears, he’d have to report it, you see. And he’d really rather not know.”

Abigail raised her brows. “He seems to me a most honest man—”

“Oh, he is! Amicus humani generis. He does most of the work in George’s troop— the King’s Own Volunteers—if the truth be known. But by the same token, he knows that if George gets sent down, that’s the end of the Volunteers. Quod verum est and all that, of course . . . but what Dr. Langdon doesn’t know won’t harm him.”

Three

When George Fairfield returned after his Greek lecture (“Lord, how am I supposed to know the difference between Ajax son of Telamon and Ajax son of that other fellow?”), Abigail could easily understand the glow of hero worship in her nephew’s eyes when he spoke his friend’s name. Long-limbed and handsome, the young Virginian had the instinctive air of command that came—Abigail guessed—from ordering black slaves around for most of his life, and the exquisite manners acquired in a society where impressing landowners more wealthy than oneself (or their relatives) was the only way to advance one’s family’s fortunes.

Yet he had great kindness and an instinctive sense of justice. Over dinner at the Golden Stair Tavern on the Common (“Madame, God would send me to Hell if I obliged you to eat the food they serve in the Hall!”) during a lively argument about how far democracy ought to be permitted in the government of each colony, he argued not from Locke or Rousseau (“Good Lord, m’am, I couldn’t tell the one from t’other if they were both to offer me a hundred pounds!”) but from the men he’d met in the backcountry beyond his father’s plantation. “You can’t put men like that in charge of making the laws of the colony, m’am! First thing they’d rule is that it’s perfectly fine for them to close off the lands the Indians hunt on and chop them up into farms to sell to new immigrants, and then to shoot any Indian who tries to stop them.”

Since Abigail had met hundreds of such men in Boston—particularly since the beginning of John’s involvement with the Sons of Liberty—she was hard put to find an argument against this. “Just because a man owns no property doesn’t mean he’s a self-seeking savage . . .”

“No, m’am. But in my experience, it means he’s likelier to be than a man who’s had an education—”

Yet when Uzziah Begbie—as democratic a soul as one was likely to meet in all of Massachusetts Colony— came in seeking her, Fairfield beckoned him to the table and bade the innkeeper’s wife bring beer and another plate, and asked him all about his carrier business and were the roads as terrible when one went west as they were in Virginia?

“He acted as protector to me when first I came to Harvard,” said Weyountah to Abigail, under cover of this dialogue, “though he was only a year before me. No one wanted an Indian to fag for him, as you might expect, so I was very much on my own. He made sure I knew all the rules, like not wearing a hat in the Yard and not swapping gowns with anyone, so I wouldn’t be boxed—”

“And telling us which seniors to watch out for,” added Horace, with a glance across the tavern at Black Dog Pugh and his minions, who had gathered near the windows to drink and flirt with the innkeeper’s spritely niece. “Pugh or his boys—the thin one is Jasmine Blossom, I think his real name is Jessamy, and the one in the blue coat is Lowth—will send freshmen into town for punch, knowing it’s against the rules, and when they’re caught by the provosts, will deny having done so. Then the fresher gets fined four shillings, which is a great deal, especially in winter with candles to buy.”

“The rumor runs,” contributed Weyountah, “that the neighbors of Pugh’s father back on Barbados all take up a collection, once a year, to keep the Black Dog in Harvard and in the interest of maintaining good order on the island.”

“And the—er—virtue of their daughters. Heaven only knows how he’s remained here long enough to become a junior bachelor—”

“Well, he’s not stupid,” said the Indian, “and I understand he’s made better use of his time here visiting merchants in town and learning of their business than he ever has studying his Latin. Perhaps he only courts their daughters.”

“Vincant divitiae,” concluded Horace with a grin, and then coughed violently in a drifting cloud of pipe-smoke from the direction of Pugh and his friends.

When Begbie had gone—with Fairfield’s assurances that he would send Mrs. Adams home in his own chaise —Abigail and Horace told the other two young men of the true course of Horace’s adventure last week: of the assignation with Mrs. Lake, the letters of introduction, the scandalous document, and the carriage-ride that was almost certainly intended to end in Horace’s death. “Can you write out what you recall of the document?” suggested Weyountah at once.

“I think so,” said Horace. “My memory is very good, and because I translated it, I paid particular attention to every word. It wasn’t a treasure-map or anything.”

“Not an obvious one,” said the Indian. “But it might have contained clues—every third word, every fourth word . . .”

“Yes, but unless he can recall every single word that’s of no use,” protested Fairfield.

“No,” agreed Abigail. “Yet ’tis a good idea, and once Horace writes as much of the document as he can recall, some pattern may emerge that strikes one of us that was not evident to him at the time. Take a look at these.” She held out to the others the two mendacious letters, and Weyountah held them where the westering window-light