Sup with the Devil (39 page)

On the tower, Diomede called out, “They’re coming around to your downhill side—”

Weyountah nodded sharply in that direction, where the cover consisted of trees rather than the stone walls, and Katy snatched up rifle and ammunition, and darted across the open space of the foundation. “How many?” he called out to the servant.

His head on Abigail’s lap, Ryland whispered, “Ten.”

“And they didn’t believe you,” said Abigail, “did they, when you said the treasure consisted of . . . What? Other books?”

Ryland shook his head, closed his hand on hers again in a paroxysm of agony as more shots chipped the stone behind Abigail’s head, fragments stinging her neck like bees. Weyountah called out, “Don’t fire unless you have to! They’re trying to draw our ammunition!”

“Didn’t believe.” Ryland’s voice seemed to fumble at the words. “Followed me here . . . Excellency’s papers . . . Shelby . . . records . . . Devil’s Castle . . .” His eyes opened a slit under fluctuating lids, and he seemed for a moment to come back to himself. “Tried to buy them . . . The books. Excellency spoke of him . . .”

“Did you think ’twas gold you sought at first?” whispered Abigail. “Or did you know from the start it wasn’t?”

“. . . was a scholar, Excellency said . . . rumor of what he’d made . . .”

“Did Hutchinson know what you were doing?”

“Foolish.” Ryland shook his head. “All tales. If it was real, he’d have used it. Knew it had to be here. Knew—somewhere in his books—had to be a way here. He’d write—Arabic—secrets . . .”

“And you tried to get Horace to translate,” said Abigail. “Only to find you’d got hold of the wrong secrets.”

Weyountah rammed home his load, swung the rifle to his shoulder, fired over the wall; a second shot immediately from Diomede told Abigail that someone had probably tried to rush them. How many shots had they left? How much powder?

And what would the Cornishmen and his friends be likely to do to two women in order to convince the wounded man—or the two other students—to tell them of the location of a treasure that didn’t exist? Or didn’t resemble any treasure they understood?

“And you knew George had some of Seckar’s books in his rooms . . .”

“Wretched slut.” The cold fingers picked anxiously at Abigail’s hand. “Best—most beautiful—not worthy—untie her shoes . . .” Abigail realized he was trying to talk about Sally Woodleigh. “Loved him, and all he could see . . . some hostler’s daughter . . .”

Well
, reflected Abigail,
considering the nature of the missing books, ’tis no wonder he wouldn’t admit having them to YOU
. . .

“Hush,” she whispered. “Hush . . .”

“Had to find it.” Ryland shook his head, pushing her admonition aside. “Came here—had to be here. Governor’s papers . . . They followed. Cornishman . . . men with him . . . They think it’s gold. Wouldn’t listen . . .” He moved his head weakly, flexed his massacred hands. “Destroy the rebels. Destroy . . . utterly within their camps . . .”

Katy shouted, “Weyountah!” and a salvo of gunfire came from the thicker trees on her side of the enclosure. Weyountah stood—Abigail had no idea where he got the courage to do it—for a better look through the trees, fired, dropped to his knees, and began loading with cool precise haste as a shot came from Diomede on the wall, and when Weyountah rose to his feet again, rifle at the ready, two more shots cracked out. He dropped behind cover again. Abigail could see blood on his coat.

“Followed me,” whispered Ryland again. “Followed me here. Knew if I could get it . . . all those years of waiting and work. Knew if I could defeat them . . . kill the rebels in their camps . . . Sally . . . His Excellency . . . His Majesty . . . He’d made it. I know he’d made it. All the stories say . . . Beelzebub. He’d used it. Why he left, why he came to Cambridge . . .
I will defend this city, for mine own sake, and for my servant David’s sake . . .
”

With a heart turned to ice, Abigail finished the passage from Second Kings: “
And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred four-score and five thousand; and when they arose in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses
. . .”

“
I will defend this city
,” murmured Ryland.
“I will defend this city . . .”

And as Abigail had done, Horace whispered, “
What
?!?”

“. . .
the angel of the Lord
. . .” Ryland’s bleeding hand loosened in hers.

“It’s what he thought was in the only handwritten Arabic document he found among Beelzebub’s books,” said Abigail softly, laying the back of her hand close to the unconscious man’s nostrils to detect the thread of his breath. “And you have to admit, ’twould have made his fame not only among the Loyalists, but with the King as well.” And as gently as she could, she began going through the pockets of his coat.

Horace turned and handed Weyountah the last of the rifle-balls, and by the way the Indian shook the lead powderbottle, Abigail knew that was the end of the powder as well.

“Go to Katy, Horace,” said Weyountah softly. “Get her rifle, cover that side of the enclosure—I should be surprised if she has shot or powder left either. Mrs. Adams, take Katy and flee up the hill into the deepest woods you can find. Go to ground as soon as you find someplace where you won’t be seen; I doubt they’re good enough trackers to follow. Stay there until dark—”

Abigail thrust the cracked and yellowed wad of papers she’d pulled from Ryland’s pocket into her own. “We can’t leave—”

“Do it. Crawl along the wall ’til you get to the woods—”

Crouching behind the ruined heaps of stone, Abigail darted and crept to where Horace and Katy knelt in the shelter of the trees, arguing in furious whispers—

“Don’t be a goose, girl.” Abigail caught Katy’s arm.

“They need every gun—”

“And how many loads have you left? I thought so. Give it to him, and follow me—”

Abigail pulled her heavy skirts up and wrapped them tight around her hips and thighs; she dropped to the ground as close to the wall as she could.
John
, she promised,
I’ll never follow my own course again in the face of your objection
. . .

And leave the possibility open
, her non-Mother self whispered in her ear,
that one of those men would find those papers in Ryland’s pocket and sell them to someone who DID know what to do with them
. . . ?

At the end of the wall the laurel grew thick. She and Katy slipped in among the glossy branches and crept uphill, trying to keep from thrashing the foliage too much. When they reached its end, Abigail heard behind them the thunderous crashing of rifles in the woods downslope, caught Katy’s wrist in her hand, and ran. Her long skirts tangled with her legs, the uneven ground catching at her feet: deadfalls, rivulets, holes hidden beneath thick leaves. As a child she’d been swift as a sprite, but it had been a long while since she’d run full out any distance—not a thing a respectable matron was supposed to do.

A rifle crashed somewhere in the woods behind them, close enough that she could smell the powder. At the same instant a man sprang from behind a thicket: he was no taller than she but hard-looking as carved hickory, with a brown face burned by weather and the tarred pigtail of a sailor and the hardest, coldest eyes Abigail had ever seen.

He held a knife in one hand.

The two women swung around to find another man—a rough laborer of the kind that Sam routinely summoned to form his tame mobs—pointing a rifle at them at a distance of a few yards.

The man with the knife said, “An’ the next shot goes right in your back, m’am.”

 

 

T
he man Abigail recognized as the Cornishman—the hulking, heavy-browed ruffian that blonde Belinda had cried warning against at the house called Avalon—stood over the crumpled body of Weyountah in the old ring of the stone tower. One of his men held a pistol on Horace and Diomede. Others were slapping and shaking Ryland and pouring rum down his throat, with oaths fit to scandalize Satan in the Pit. Katy let out a cry of anguish and tried to run to Weyountah, and the hard little sailor laughed and grabbed her by the arm, yanked her back. A couple of the men grinned and called out, “That’s the dandy, poppet!” and “Aw, ’fraid we’ve broke his courting-tackle?” and “’Tain’t all we’ll break, ‘fore we’re done—”

Horace lunged at them in blind fury, and the man guarding him reversed the pistol in his hand and gave Horace a crack in the head with it that dropped him to the broken pavement. The Cornishman grunted, “’Ere, none o’ that,” in a thick slow voice, like a semi-articulate pig’s. He turned beady eyes toward Ryland, who had given a sort of faint cry that ended in coughing. Abigail could see blood trickling from his mouth mixed with the rum.

The Cornishman took Katy by the hair, dragged her over to Ryland, and pulled a knife the size of a small cutlass from his belt. “You ’ear me, Ryland?” He kicked the young man’s ankle. Ryland managed to move his head. Abigail wrenched herself from the grip of the man who held her—she counted seven of them and wondered if Ryland had miscounted or if three of them were lying wounded back in the woods—and ran to Ryland’s side. She dropped to her knees as one of them reached to stop her, propped the young bachelor-fellow gently against her, his head on her shoulder, instead of on the stones.

Three days ago she would have condemned the man who had put in motion Charley’s kidnappers—however little he had had to do with the kidnapping itself—to the bottommost circle of Dante’s Hell without a thought. But she knew what she saw, looking at the color of his face and that dribbling line of blood. Probably the Cornishman did, too. And wanted Ryland to last at least through questioning.

The Cornishman kicked Ryland again, and when his eyes fluttered open, grunted, “Can you see, mate?” He slid the knife under Katy’s bodice and sliced the cheap cloth open to the waist, jerked down the chemise beneath, and put the knife-blade against the side of her breast. “I’m only gonna ask this once,” he said. “Then I starts cuttin’. Where’s the gold?”

“Hutchinson has it,” said Abigail.

Those piglike eyes narrowed. “Then why’d he say there wan’t none?”

“Probably because Hutchinson told him there wasn’t,” she replied, with a dizzy sense of walking across a tightrope. “He sent him here to find what was in that pit—books and scientific implements . . . You know how His Excellency is about books.”

The Cornishman blinked, thrust unexpectedly into the position—as Abigail felt she had been for weeks—of trying to prove a negative, and he was no better at it than anyone was . . .

He shoved Katy away from him, sending her sprawling to the stones. Before the other men could get to her, Horace reached her side, drew her up against him and away from the Cornishman as that hulking man stepped close to Abigail, knife extended inches from her face. “You lyin’ to me, bitch?’Cos if you are—”

Abigail never heard what he would do to her if she was, in fact, lying. In the same second, it seemed, that she heard a gunshot in the woods, the Cornishman’s narrowed eyes popped wide, as if startled, and a rifle-ball exploded out of the front of his throat in a shower of gore. Abigail rolled aside, dragging Ryland with her, as the Cornishman dropped before them like a felled steer.

Two other shots cracked. The man standing nearest Horace and Katy fell, clutching his side and shrieking; with great presence of mind Katy grabbed the pistol away from him as he fell and shot the next-closest man through the body. Weyountah rolled and caught up that man’s rifle, and the four remaining ruffians dropped their weapons and threw up their hands at once.

Diomede tossed one of their rifles to Katy and went around collecting the rest even as Black Dog Pugh—trailed by his two slaves, both armed to the teeth—emerged from the trees.

“Sink me, I thought I’d never find this place,” Pugh exclaimed. “Wouldn’t have, either, if they hadn’t started shooting. And a damn good shot,” he added, looking down at the Cornishman’s sprawled body and the bullet-hole in the back of his neck, “if I do say so myself. Pity I can’t scalp him as a trophy.” He held down his hand for Abigail. “Don’t you think, m’am?”

D
id you follow him?” asked Abigail, as the slave Eusebius rose from beside Joseph Ryland’s body and shook his head. Abigail knelt also, to feel the young man’s wrists and throat, though she trusted the African’s judgment, and indeed, it was clear to her that Ryland was dead.

She looked up at Pugh.

“Lord, no. And just as well,” the bachelor-fellow added, and rubbed his fat, unshaven chins. “If we’d been following him, instead of our upstanding friend here”—he nudged the dead Cornishman with his foot—“we’d probably have fouled on him like two dogs on the same lead. No, the fair Nancy—when she came to me rather the worse for wear, for having been locked up in some sailor’s trap in Boston where Grimes had left her and the other girls—told me the Cornishman had come in and got himself a band of tavern toughs to find ‘pirate gold,’ as he put it—”