Sup With the Devil

could fall on them most brightly. “They’re complete fabrications, of course, but does anything about them suggest anything to either of you?”

“Good quality ink,” said the Indian at once. “And expensive paper.”

“Moreover, a writer who knew how to cut quills and keep the flow of words going,” pointed out Abigail. “The hand is a confident one, without hesitations or blots. Further, the writer is accustomed to forming complex words: intentions, probity, researches. He knows how to sound like a lawyer or a judge.”

“He certainly convinced our Horace,” said Fairfield with a grin and a gentle nudge at his friend’s shoulder. “What do they say about the pure not seeing anything but purity?”

“With your permission,” interpolated Abigail, “I shall take these two letters back to town with me. John’s away, naturally,” she added, unable to keep exasperation from her voice— When WASN’T John away when you needed him?—“but my friend Mr. Revere—the silversmith, you know—has a most acute eye for the details of handwriting and other telltale signs. He may very well see things in these that are hidden from us.”

She half expected the young Virginian to object at the mention of Paul Revere’s name, but he’d clearly never heard of the man in his life. Like most people outside of Boston, George Fairfield’s knowledge of the Sons of Liberty was limited to Sam Adams and James Otis (who hadn’t been able to be active among them for years, poor man) and some of their more spectacular exploits, like sacking the Governor’s house, destroying shops, and dumping $92,000 worth of tea into the harbor.

Instead he declared, “And I am going to do the obvious and have a look around the ladies of the surrounding countryside to see who might be Mrs. Lake.”

To which Weyountah laughed, “Why does it not surprise me that George is going to look around among the ladies?”

“Dash it, man, the woman wasn’t just made up out of mud for the occasion. She has to have come from someplace, chaise, coachman, and all.”

“For that matter,” said Weyountah thoughtfully, “where would this Mrs. Lake—or whoever she really is—have gotten a text in Arabic, or Arabic lettering, to copy from? The only scholar in Harvard who had any Arabic texts at all was old Reverend Seckar, and Horace got all of his when he died.”

“And lucky thing he did,” said Fairfield. “Poisonous old screw was going to leave them all to the College and stick his poor wife and sister without a bean. You got a few too out of that lot, didn’t you, Weyountah?”

“Are you also a scholar of Oriental languages?” inquired Abigail—though why a young man who’d been born in a two-room wigwam in the woods of Rhode Island shouldn’t have as much of an interest in the wisdom from another portion of the world as one who’d been born thirty miles away in a two-room farmhouse in the woods of Massachusetts, she didn’t know, once she thought of it.

The Narraganset shook his head. “No, natural science,” he said. “Astronomy, chiefly, but really anything I can get my hands on. The books Mrs. Seckar was selling off were ruinously old and of little use, given the advances that have been made in the studies of things like atmospheric vapors and air and water pressure. I’ve begun correspondence with Mr. Franklin,” he added, naming a little shyly the foremost scientist and philosopher in the colonies. “He’s been good enough to recommend me to the Royal Society in England, which has been of enormous assistance. There’s so little over here.”

“So little of anything,” sighed Horace wistfully.

“Which brings us back,” declared Fairfield firmly, “to where we started. Where would that Arabic text have been copied from? Who would have written a document like that in Arabic , for the Lord’s sake—”

“Obviously,” said Abigail, “someone who knew Arabic writing and was using it as a code to keep a record of a disgraceful encounter—I assume for purposes of blackmail.”

“Would Henry Morgan care if everybody on the Spanish Main knew he was having a—um—Latin lesson”—Fairfield hastily interpolated a euphemism, having clearly, for the moment, forgotten that Abigail was a respectable matron and his friend’s aunt to boot—“with someone by the name of Jezebel Pitts? I don’t imagine Mistress Pitts would mind. Besides,” he added, “they’ve both been dead for years.”

“The principal activity Governor Morgan was practicing with Mistress Pitts,” Abigail reminded him starchily, “is called, without going into Latin, conspiracy to commit embezzlement . . . and given the fact that it involved assistance from pirates, it probably would be considered treason as well by an Admiralty Court. Reason enough to justify hush-money to someone, I’m sure, even if they did not manage to lift any actual gold. But as Mr. Fairfield so justly points out, both parties have been in their dishonored graves for decades. Sam might know . . .”

“Sam—Adams?”

Abigail remembered too late—just as Fairfield had forgotten that she was an aunt and a respectable goodwife from Boston—that her listener was a Loyalist to whom the name of her husband’s notorious cousin was anathema.

“No, Sam Brooke,” she extemporized hastily. “A neighbor of mine on Queen Street. An elderly gentleman who once—I suspect—had a great deal to do with the smuggling trade and may very well have known Mistress Pitts in her old age.” She felt like kicking herself, because of course Sam Adams was precisely whom she meant. Three- quarters of the Sons of Liberty were mixed up in smuggling to one degree or another. Why put yourself in danger of an Admiralty noose, if it weren’t to avoid paying the King’s taxes on this, that, and the other, every time the King decided one of his friends needed a job as a special revenue collector?

Abigail had frequently deplored the fact that wily Cousin Sam seemed to be on a first-name basis with half the wharf-rats in Boston Harbor. But on this occasion, she thought, he might as well do some good . . .

If he wasn’t packing to get himself out of Boston, she reflected grimly, before the King’s vengeance— whatever it was going to be—for the tea came ashore.

Whatever it was going to be, it was almost certainly going to involve a warrant for Sam Adams’s arrest.

What broke her sleep every night for weeks—and had caused her to warn her fourteen-year-old servant-girl, Pattie, and John’s clerk, Thaxter (not Horace but his—and Abigail’s—esteemed cousin), to stand ready to take the children to Uncle Isaac’s house at the first sign of trouble—was not knowing how far beyond Sam the arrests would spread.

And what the Sons of Liberty would choose to do about the situation.

She picked up the two letters again and realized that the window light had faded to the point where they were difficult to read. “Good Heavens, it must be getting close to sundown,” she said in alarm. “If I’m to be back to Boston—”

“Aunt Abigail, mea culpa—”

“Dash it, where’s that lazy buck Diomede?” Fairfield sprang to his feet, strode toward the kitchen. “He’ll have the chaise harnessed for you before a fly can wash his little hands, m’am—”

In fifteen minutes Abigail was being assisted into an extremely elegant English chaise outside the Golden Stair, with bows and thanks and assurances that Horace would be permitted neither food, drink, nor sleep that night until he’d finished a verbatim copy of Mrs. Lake’s disgraceful document. In twenty, she was clinging to the brass rail of the vehicle as it bowled sharply along through the slanted evening sunlight on the road to Charles Town. Like most Virginians, young Mr. Fairfield favored spirited horseflesh, but Diomede—a big- shouldered man in his fifties—was a skilled and careful driver: Abigail was disconcerted and exhilarated by the speed, but never frightened.

When Diomede apologized for the pace—“But for a fact, m’am, we’ll be fortunate to make the ferry before it closes down”—she felt encouraged to ask him, was he himself familiar with the countryside hereabouts?

“Not like a native, m’am,” he said, in a deep velvet bass. “I came up with Mr. Fairfield in ’70, and he’s a personable young gentleman, as I’m sure you’ve observed. The year before last, when there was such a to-do about that revenue ship that went aground in Rhode Island and was burned by smugglers claiming to be against taxation, Mr. Fairfield formed up a company of gentlemen loyal to the King—the King’s Own Volunteers, they call themselves—and so he’s widely known from here to Medford and always being invited to stay at this house or that.