Sup With the Devil

Mr. Charles Fairfield—Mr. George’s father—gave me instructions to make sure that he kept to his book.”

The valet smiled as he reined in to let an oncoming wagon pass in the narrow road where it swung around the base of Prospect Hill. “But it’s true also that so far as I can see, the reason a young gentleman goes to college is to meet men of property and consideration, and to make friendships that will be of use to him later in life. So I guess one could say, I’ve seen as much of the countryside as a man can, traipsing behind a very popular young gentleman with his baggage.”

Abigail laughed. “You have my sympathies,” she said. “Do you happen to know the name of the farmer who brought Mr. Horace back to Cambridge on Wednesday? I think Weyountah said he was from Concord.”

“From that direction,” agreed Diomede. “Mr. Rutherford has a farm just this side of Lexington, on the Concord Road. He said he found poor Mr. Thaxter by the road near Pierce’s Hill.”

Abigail mentally placed the location, a wooded country of old farmsteads and stone field-walls. A two-hour drive from Cambridge would indeed put Mrs. Lake’s “brown house of two storeys” somewhere between Menotomy and Lexington, particularly if the woman had taken the precaution of not driving straight there. John would know. And if John weren’t yet home from the Maine Assizes, Revere—when she showed him the bogus letters—would very likely be able to tell her: the Sons of Liberty made it their business to know everyone in the countryside around Boston, if for no other reason than to know were they adherents to the Crown’s policies and power, or in favor of colonial rights?

Yet for all its superficial resemblance to the little towns of the Massachusetts countryside—her family’s village of Weymouth, or Braintree where John’s mother and brothers lived—Harvard was different. In Weymouth or Braintree, everyone had known one another since childhood, and a strange face was instantly noted and commented upon. Hers certainly had been when nine years ago John had brought her to that little brown farmhouse as a bride, although everyone knew Parson Smith’s three daughters and his gadabout son . . .

People came and went from Harvard all the time. Praying Indians like Weyountah from converted villages in Rhode Island. Gaudy exotics like St-John Pugh. She reflected uneasily on the openness of the buildings of Harvard College, the ease with which anyone could ascend any of those staircases . . .

“Whoa!” Diomede drew rein. “M’am, your pardon, I beg you, but it looks like Sassy’s picked up a stone.”

And indeed, even as the little mare slowed her pace, Abigail could see she was favoring her off fore.

It crossed her mind very briefly that the delay would cost her her return, but she said at once, “No, of course—”

She took the reins as the servant sprang down and hastened to the mare’s head. She was carrying it low, Abigail observed worriedly, and holding her hoof from the ground—She must really be hurt . . .

Diomede worked gingerly, testing and probing in the woodland twilight. When he came back to the chaise, even in the gloom, she read consternation on his face.

“Is she all right?”

“She’ll be all right, m’am,” said the servant. “But she’s cut the frog of her hoof— there must have been a nail or something in the road—”

Abigail sprang down from the chaise at once. “Poor little lady,” she said. “And such a nuisance—but you know, I think I rather pushed my luck talking to those boys as late as I did, and having to walk back to Cambridge is no more than I deserve. Will she be all right to be led? I suppose we could leave the chaise here for a short time . . .”

The man relaxed—as a slave, reflected Abigail, he had probably witnessed the human limits of bad manners and petulance among those who considered a) that their convenience ranked higher than an injured animal’s pain and b) that if they missed the ferry, it must be the fault of the driver. “I don’t think there’s call for that, m’am.” He looked around him at the darkening woods. “It goes without saying that Mr. Fairfield will pay for a bed for you at the Golden Stair. I hope it’s no inconvenience—”

“The only inconvenience,” replied Abigail grandly, falling into step with Diomede as he turned the mare’s head back toward Cambridge, “will be to my aunt and uncle, who will be obliged to look after my children tonight.” In the shadowy trees, wrens and thrushes, mockingbirds and starlings all twittered and whistled as if to make sure of their territories before they settled down for the night. A breeze riffled the leaves, filled the world with the soft green scent of hay. “Of course I shall sleeplessly weep the whole night through at spending the hours apart from them,” she added with a blitheness that made the servant grin, “yet I trust that somehow I shall survive the experience of not separating Johnny and Charley from killing one another when Charley hides Johnny’s toys, and not being woken up twice and three times by Tommy wanting a story or a drink of water—”

“Oh, m’am,” said Diomede, and clasped his hands to his heart, “please don’t go on—I’m afraid I shall weep.”

“I do beg your pardon,” said Abigail.

They led the limping Sassy the two miles back to Cambridge in perfect amity.

Diomede left Abigail in one of the college parlors while he took Sassy back to the stables; in a few moments George Fairfield came running in, green robe billowing and Horace at his heels. “M’am, I am covered with shame —!”

“Nonsense! I was telling Diomede, I look upon the whole business as an excellent opportunity to get a complete night’s rest, something one doesn’t, you know, if one has three sons under the age of seven.”

“Well, you’ll have rest at the Golden Stair on my account—or rather my Pa’s, since he’s the one who settles them all,” added the young man with a grin. “Poor old Sassy! Thank the Lord, Diomede saw her falter as quick as he did. She’s taken no hurt—the man’s a wonder with horses. With just about everything, come to that . . . I could have taken a whip to that brute Pugh for telling me only yesterday that I’d best sell him off cheap because he pilfers my liquor now and then. Lord, I’d trust Diomede with a bottle a lot sooner than I’d trust Pugh or either of those so- called grooms of his—wild savages straight off the boat from Africa! Diomede was born in Williamsburg and raised a gentleman, and his father before him!” He tucked Abigail’s cloak around her shoulders and sprang to open the parlor door for her, seeming blithely unaware of any incongruity in the fact that he could describe a man old enough to be his father as a gentleman and yet possess the legal right to sell him off like a mule. “His manners are a sight better than Pugh’s, anyway—though I suppose the same could be said about Sassy.”

Mrs. Squills at the Golden Stair didn’t appear a bit surprised at Abigail’s reappearance with the two scholars: “The way those boys were talking to you, I knew you’d never get to the ferry in time,” she said, her smile as she curtseyed making her look much older—she was missing several of her teeth. “Mr. Horace’s aunt, I think Diomede said? Now, go along with you,” she added briskly, flapping her apron at Abigail’s escort. “Before you’re fined for being out of your rooms after dark, and in a tavern—”

“They wouldn’t fine me for being with my aunt,” protested Horace, and the tiny innwife’s face flexed into an exaggerated expression of astonishment.

“There’s another college here in Cambridge that you’ve been going to all this time without telling me?” she demanded. “Because the Dean of Harvard would fine you for being out with your own mother, let alone an aunt . . . And I know fullwell about the little minx you’ve got waiting for you out behind the stables,” she added, with a glare at Fairfield.

“I—?” Fairfield pressed his hand to his heart and raised his eyebrows in innocent bafflement.

“Run along with you!” She shook her head as Fairfield made a dancing-master’s leg to Abigail and saluted her hand before he strode off, laughing, across the dark of the Common, Horace trotting loyally at his heels. “They’re good boys,” she added, leading Abigail toward the stair. “For all they drive an honest woman mad with their, ‘I’ll pay you next quarter for a batter-cake today.’ I don’t know which is worse, George with his lady friends or Horace with his nose forever in a book!” She collected a couple of abandoned beer mugs from the table, as she passed it, to add to her tray. “Well, ’tis the peskiest kitten that grows to the best mouser, you know. I wouldn’t give tuppence for a lad that didn’t run about the town seeing what he can get himself into, would you?”

Abigail smiled, thinking of her own too-serious Johnny’s hair-raising experiments with building mousetraps and measuring the current of the tides in the Mill Pond. “Nobody’s ever shown me a lad that didn’t,” she responded, “so I wouldn’t know.”

Her mind returned to Johnny as she made ready for bed (“Now I’ve a clean hairbrush that I keep for those who’re taken by circumstance unexpectedly . . . And let me lend you a shift for tomorrow, Mrs. Adams—I’ve one