Sup with the Devil (17 page)

“But they knew! They knew I have this weakness—”

“Pish-tush! There isn’t a servant on Earth who doesn’t drink his master’s rum when his master isn’t looking. ’Twas only chance that Mr. Fairfield woke when the intruder came in, and cried out—”

“No,” whispered Diomede, and clasped his hands together, pressing the knuckles for a moment to his lips. “I swear to you, m’am, when I woke up—when I heard what had happened . . . It was my fault, the same as if I
had
got up and used that knife myself—”

“Stop it!” ordered Abigail. “What you’re saying does no one any good and will only confuse the search for Mr. Fairfield’s real killer.” But her heart sank within her, for she guessed that was precisely what Charles Fairfield was going to say when he came north from Virginia to collect his son’s body . . . and to avenge himself on those responsible for his son’s death. “Can you write, Diomede?”

“Yes, m’am. Mr. Charles’s father—
old
Mr. George—he didn’t hold with servants being ignorant. I was made to do lessons alongside Mr. Charles and his sisters.”

“Could you write out what you’ve told me? About the fight with Mr. Pugh and his attempts to bribe you, and about Mr. George’s books that he bought from Mrs. Seckar? Write it in your own words, everything that you can remember. Mr. Congreve, do you have any objection to that? Weyountah, if you could see to it that Diomede has pen and paper—”

The Indian—who at Horace’s nervous insistence had been listening to Horace’s heartbeat—nodded, and Congreve said, “For all the good it’s like to do you, m’am. I tell you, I’ve met these Virginia planters—”

“Which is exactly why every effort should be made to get the case heard here in Massachusetts—Yes, Horace, I’m sure you’re
quite
all right; your coloring looks just as it should. With sworn statements in hand, I think my husband will have a better chance of at least getting a trial here—”

The slave closed his eyes for a moment, his face immobile; then he whispered, “Thank you, m’am,” in the voice of one who knows perfectly well that miracles do not happen. “I’ll do as you ask and have it for you if you should come here again. But if you would, m’am—could I trouble you, if I were also to write out a letter to my wife and to our daughters back in Virginia? Would you see that it’s sent to them?”

“Of course.” Then another thought occurred to her, and she dug in her pocket for the elegant love-letters. Lowering her voice to exclude the sheriff—who might not approve of a young lady’s letters being viewed by a slave—she asked, “Does this handwriting look familiar to you, Diomede?”

He responded immediately, “Yes, m’am.” And—taking the letters, with his own swift glance toward Congreve, who seemed to be preoccupied with the shouting from the Common—he whispered, “It’s Miss Woodleigh’s, m’am.”

“Let me see those—” Horace held up his hand to stay her from tucking them away, as he, Abigail, and Weyountah stepped into the sunlight of Church Street.

“Is he right?” Abigail glanced up at Weyountah, who was looking around Horace’s shoulder. “You tutored her—”

“That’s her hand, yes.”

“Yes, but this—” Horace held up the note.
As you love me, be behind the barn at midnight . . . “
This isn’t her paper. It isn’t the same as the letters, look—”

Which was quite true. The note was stiffer and thicker, and of a warmer hue than the thin, slightly crinkly sheets on which Sally Woodleigh had poured out effusions of love. From the pocket of his hand-me-down coat, Horace took an identical sheet—folded in the same fashion as the note, in quarters, rather than the longer letters, which had been folded rather elaborately and sealed.

Startled, Abigail asked, “How did you come—?”

“This one’s not from Miss Woodleigh.” Horace unfolded it. “It’s the one St-John Pugh gave me to deliver this morning to his bootmaker. You can see the paper—and the ink, too, look”—he held both notes to the sunlight—“are exactly the same.”

“Pugh,” said Weyountah. They came onto the Common again, headed for Brattle Street and the College. “Pugh sent him a note in Sally’s hand . . .”

“To get him out of his room at midnight.” Behind his thick spectacles, Horace’s gray eyes seemed to glow with somber eagerness, his fancied ailment forgotten. “Pinkstone said he was watching for something . . .”

Before them, men formed up uneven lines, officers—that is, the men they’d elected as their own officers—dashing back and forth among the would-be soldiers like distracted sheepdogs, shouting commands to load and fire. Light powder, Abigail calculated, and no bullets: Sam had not been exaggerating when he’d said how short the militia was of such supplies. Most lead had to be imported—illegally—from France.

“But if he’d got George out of his rooms. . . .” said Weyountah doubtfully.

The Indian’s face was still soot-smudged. Abigail and Horace had found him that morning in one of the laboratory rooms in Harvard Hall, trying to focus beams of sunlight with mirrors through a choking cloud of sulfurous smoke (“This is nothing, m’am—last fall Ryland nearly suffocated everyone in the Hall with some phosphorous compound he was working on . . .”). Horace had been coughing and checking his pulse ever since.

“He must have returned sooner than expected.”

“Yes, but he was on his way to meet someone just at dusk when he parted from me. Would he have met—I mean . . .” Horace blushed again at the thought that his hero would have dallied with one girl from eight ’til midnight to pass the time before a second tryst.

“Diomede said he’d no deep fondness for Miss Woodleigh,” recalled Abigail thoughtfully. “Contrary to what Miss Woodleigh was obviously telling Mr. Pugh. Obviously, the Black Dog thought that a lover so gallant as George would wait at least an hour for his lady fair before coming back to his room. George must have returned and caught him.”

“How do we prove this?” Weyountah’s voice was grim. “’Tis all very well to guess at what the man did, but I doubt a Virginia jury will free a slave accused of killing his master on the strength of two sheets of paper. Particularly not to convict a white man in his place.”

“Even searching his rooms might not help us,” said Abigail, “without other proofs in hand. Though we shall certainly have to try it. They are—as everyone keeps pointing out—volumes that any young man might easily wish to steal without also murdering their rightful owner; though by Horace’s own testimony, they were in his desk that morning. Where is George, by the way?” she added in a quieter voice. “I mean, where has his body been bestowed to await his father’s arrival?”

“In the holding crypt behind Christ Church.” Weyountah’s lips settled for a moment into a hard line of grief. “Would you like to go there?”

“When we return,” she said. “If there’s time.”

“Sally Woodleigh has been there three times to leave flowers,” Weyountah went on drily. “In full mourning—and always with some solicitous gentleman offering her his shoulder upon which to weep. That night I heard George cry out.” He had said this to her before, but it was as if he were driven to repeat the words, to understand what they meant and what they could not mean. “I thought it was only him angry at Dio for getting drunk—”

“Do you know what time that was?”

The Indian shook his head. After a moment he went on, “I heard nothing further.”

I went back to sleep . . . I let my friend die
. . .

“And George would not have thanked you,” Abigail pointed out gently, “had you gone charging across the staircase while he was dressing down Diomede for stealing his liquor.”

“No, m’am.” The Indian’s voice was nearly inaudible.

They had reached the quadrangle between Harvard Hall, Massachusetts, and Stoughton College. Most of the students—and a certain proportion of the younger masters—being on the Common, comparing cartridge-boxes and arguing about the merits of French over English powder, the only scholarly gown visible was Mr. Pugh, strolling in the direction of Harvard Hall with one of his “cut-faced savages” at his heels. This man—small, wiry, and black as ink—appeared so barbaric, with his head shaved, his face crisscrossed with tribal scars, and plugs of sharpened bone thrust through the septum of his nose and the lobes of his ears, that Abigail suspected his master of playing up his African customs to impress and intimidate others.

“I’ll hitch up Sassy,” said Weyountah. “Dr. Langdon lets me take her out. If you’re to be back in Boston by sunset, we’d best start now to show you Mrs. Lake’s farmhouse—”

“Then we shall linger only long enough to return Mr. Fairfield’s bills to his own room.” Abigail patted her satchel. “Provided my going up there won’t get you boys thrown out of the College.”

“What, for an
aunt
?” Horace looked grateful—Abigail suspected that if she’d gone into the parlor and left her nephew to carry the bundle of papers up alone, he ran the risk of being sent to the other side of town on some foolish errand by Mr. Pugh.

Pugh himself bowed as they passed him. “Not going out to march with the traitors, Mr. Wylie?”

The Indian returned the bow. “No, I thought I should stay in today with the cowards.”

Smiling to herself, Abigail followed Horace into Massachusetts Hall and up the middle staircase. “You said Dr. Langdon was taking charge of George’s things,” she said as they climbed. “Is the room kept closed up, or can anyone come and go?”

“Anyone can,” said Horace. “It’s just that—” His voice tailed off as they reached the landing and saw that the door to Fairfield’s room indeed stood open. Horace’s lips pursed and behind the heavy spectacle-lenses, his gray eyes hardened.
Of course
, thought Abigail,
the one day the building is certain to be empty—

The boy strode ahead of her into the empty study, Abigail at his heels, and through it to the bedchamber beyond. “Who’s in here?” he called out, in a hard voice completely unlike his usual mild tones. “And what are you—Oh!”

He stopped in the doorway, blocking Abigail’s view.

Beyond him, a young woman’s voice demanded, “And who are
you
, frog-eyes? I have every right to be here, I guess—”

Abigail looked around her tall nephew’s shoulder and saw, standing beside the desk, a girl of seventeen or so—“wellset-up,” John would have described her lush figure—in a short petticoat and coarse skirt of striped linen, tucked up to show off slim brown ankles, and a brown linen jacket, much patched. Wisps of black hair, straight and heavy as an Indian’s, floated free from her cap, and so sun-browned was her face that were it not for the morning glory blue of her eyes, she might have been mistaken for one of Weyountah’s relatives.

She nodded toward the bed, stripped of bedding and mattress. “Has his Pa come for him, then?”

“Not yet,” Horace stammered.

“Then where is he?”

“Christ’s Church.”

Her eyes narrowed beneath butterfly-wing brows: “Doing what? They’re not making him marry that Woodleigh cow, are they? Because if she—”

Abigail said quietly, “You have not heard, mistress? George Fairfield was killed Tuesday night.” The girl pressed her hand quickly to her lips, and though her expression didn’t change, she went sheet white under her tan. It was as if she’d been struck but would not acknowledge the pain of the blow. Then she whispered, in a small despairing voice, “Oh, George.”

“And you are—?”

The girl said softly, “I’m his wife.”

G
eorge said he’d keep the license.” Katy Pegg—as she had said her name was—sat on the edge of the naked bedframe, brown hands folded in her lap. “There’s no place at home I could put it that it’d be safe from my step-pa. We married in December, before George left for Virginia.”

Abigail glanced at the desk beside the window. It had not been opened. Among all the tailors’ bills, all the gamblingmarkers, all the love-letters she’d taken out Wednesday morning, there had been no marriage license.

“We rode down to Providence together. I don’t know what he told Diomede—the man his Pa wished on him, to keep him from meddling with girls, George said. Tuesday night—” Tears flooded her eyes, and she almost slapped them away with impatient fingers. “I was with him—”

“He was killed by an intruder,” said Abigail gently, “late on Tuesday night after he came back here to his rooms. A thief.”

The girl closed her eyes, her face like a defiant child’s, who’ll take a whipping rather than ask a parent to stop.

“What time did you part?”

“Midnight. He said he was meeting friends, and the—the men I’d rid out here with would be leaving soon. My step-pa would skin me if he knew—”

She took a deep breath, some of the terrible tension going out of her slim shoulders, her oval face. “My step-pa hated him. He said he was a damned Tory and would break my heart for me,
and
leave me caught with a baby . . . which is what
he
was after himself, the—”

She stopped herself, looked down at her square, boyish hands, folded tight in her lap. “George said he’d come for me on Wednesday night. That’s the night Mr. Deems—my step-pa—goes out with the Watertown militia. I wrote Thursday . . .” She raised her hands quickly to press against her lips again, then lowered them almost at once. “So I got a lift this morning from one of the farmers that was coming in for the militia. I knew George’s Pa wouldn’t stand for it, for George and me, I mean. But he said—George said—that marrying me made it all right, and they couldn’t stop us if we were wed.”