Sup with the Devil (8 page)

D
r. Perry stepped quickly across to the bed and drew the sheet over George Fairfield’s face. Perry would have pulled the counterpane up to cover the splotches where the blood—turning dark now as it dried—had stained through the linen, but Abigail held up her hand and asked, “How was Mr. Fairfield lying when you came in, doctor? It’s one of the things my husband will wish to know.” Her words stayed him long enough for her to note that there seemed to be three or four sources of blood—wounds that had bled.
Plenty
, she thought,
for the killer to ‘gild the faces of the grooms’ and, like the wily and wicked Lady Macbeth, transfer the blame with the blood.

“He lay on his back,” said Perry. “His limbs were composed and the sheet drawn up to his waist, for as you recall,’twas a mild night. There was no evidence of struggle.” With a sharp twitch of his wrist he flung the counterpane into place. Despite herself, Abigail felt relieved.

“Where was he stabbed?” she asked.

The man’s upper lip seemed to lengthen at the idea of a woman wishing to know such things, even to pass the word on to her husband. “Thrice in the breast, two of the blows penetrating the heart. Once in the side, up under the ribs—”

Left side
, Abigail noted. That’s where the blood had flowed out, anyway.

Abigail had seen dead men before. There were families, she knew, who didn’t believe in having their girl-children assist in the laying-out of the dead—grannies, uncles, younger children who didn’t make it through sickly winters or the endless barrage of ailments that hammered the very young before their tenth year—but hers had not been one of these. And after one has prepared for burial the body of one’s own child—poor tiny Susanna, who had barely passed her first year—no other death hits quite so hard.

She recalled going with her mother and her sister Mary to help one of her aunts lay out a cousin when she, Abigail, was barely seven: Mary was ten, and the dead child was Abigail’s own age. It was Abigail who had helped her mother braid the little girl’s hair. She remembered asking, Would Annie be angry that it was Abigail who was alive today and Annie who was dead? and getting an hour and a half on the subject of how much luckier and happier Annie was to be dead and with Jesus . . .

Probably true
, she reflected, looking down at the worn linen where it lay over George Fairfield’s face: the little mount of nose and chin, the silky tousle of blonde hair just visible at the top. Certainly true, in fact, and what she had told Nabby—only with greater brevity and, she hoped, greater tenderness—a few months ago when little Jemmy Butler next door had died. But she had thought at the time,
Will Annie miss her doll Penelope? Or her baby sisters? Or the way the sunlight makes crazy patterns of elongated diamonds on the plaster of the bedroom wall first thing in the morning? Or the first sweet strength of that first sweet spoonful of molasses on hot corn-pudding first thing on a cold morning?

Would George miss driving Sassy full tilt along the roads to visit his friends, when he was
invited to stay at this house or that . . . widely known from here to Medford
as he was? Would he miss riding with his Volunteers in preparation for a rebellion they all guessed was coming but that he would not see?

She raised her eyes to meet those of Weyountah, who sat in such stillness as to be almost invisible on the room’s single chair at the foot of the bed.

Would he miss his friends?

From the door, President Langdon commented, “Given the attitude of the body, and Mr. Wylie’s testimony”—he nodded toward Weyountah—“as to raised voices and harsh words spoken to a man already laboring under the intolerable resentment of his servile condition, and given the presence of Mr. Fairfield’s rum-bottle in the study and its contents all over the slave’s clothing, it seems clear that Diomede drank himself into a state of rage while his master slept, and entering the room, stabbed him as he lay in his bed. Deplorable, of course, but no more than can be expected when a man practices the injustices of slavery upon his fellow creature—”

“But that gives no explanation for the blood on the floor of this room,” said Abigail.

“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Langdon was clearly not used to having his diatribes against slavery interrupted by anyone, let alone a woman, for mere practicalities.

“There is blood on the floor,” said Abigail, pointing. “It’s been tracked and trampled about, but you see where the main stain of it lay, here, beside the desk by the window. Was the window open?”

President and doctor looked at each other.

“It was not.” Weyountah got to his feet. A step—the bedchamber was a tiny one—took him to the place; Abigail fetched the branch of candles from the little work-desk beneath the window, searched her pocket for flint and steel—which of course she’d left back at the inn . . . She caught up flint and striker from the bedside table. The room looked north onto the quadrangle of grass that lay between the college buildings and at this hour of the morning was gloomy. No wonder the poor boy had trouble waking up.

She knelt, holding the lights close to the floor. The main portion of the stain was clear to see. Not quite the diameter of a cider-mug, it was clearly outlined on the scuffed oak, as if it had lain there half the night. By comparison, the blots and tracks where the crowding students—and Dr. Perry himself, belike—had stepped in it were superficial. Her handkerchief, wet with a little discreetly applied spit, cleaned one of them up at once, but the original stain—which had lain hours longer—it could not touch.

There were two others, between that stain and the bed, in direct line. Round drips, and set, as if they, too, had lain there for many hours.

“He was stabbed here, by the desk,” said Weyountah softly, “and dragged or carried to the bed. The wound under the ribs—”

“Which I cannot see how it could have been made,” said Abigail, “by a man standing over him on the room side of the bed. You can see how the bed lies against the wall, with the head pointing south, the feet north toward the window. The left side, where the stab-wound is, would be away from a man standing in the room. But if he were stabbed here, standing up, of course the attacker would stab him in the left side—”

“And carry him to the bed and stab him thrice more, to make sure of him.”

Abigail turned, frowning, back toward Perry and Langdon in the doorway. “And then proceed back to his pallet in the study and go to sleep? Without even washing the blood from his hands? When all the college was sleeping, and he could easily have fled—”

“The man was drunk,” pointed out Langdon, in a tone of disgust. “I—and others—remonstrated with the boy about retaining a drunkard in his service, but he would not listen. Preferring, I suppose, the prestige—if one can call it that—of owning a Negro to the drudgery of making up his own bed.”

“If your honor will pardon me for speaking,” said Weyountah, “in my experience of the man, Diomede was not a habitual drunkard. He would go on an occasional spree for an evening if he thought Mr. Fairfield was not going to return to his rooms until late, as was the case, I believe, last night. But this is not the same thing as a man who punishes the bottle night after night.”

“’Tis but a step, and a short one,” replied the president coldly, “from the ‘occasional spree,’ as you call it, to greater and greater frequency as the demon takes hold. Surely
you
of all people do not deny the pattern?”

“No, sir.” Weyountah’s voice held level, despite the reference—which Abigail considered tactless in the extreme—to the notorious effect that white man’s liquor had on many of the Indians who used it. “I speak only of my observation as to where Diomede stood in regard to that pattern.”

“With what was he stabbed?” Abigail wondered if Perry would let her get a look at the wounds themselves and decided that a request to do so would only exacerbate a futile situation.

“The paper knife from Mr. Fairfield’s desk was in Diomede’s hand, m’am,” said Weyountah.

“Would a paper knife be sharp enough to kill a man?”
And do I need to worry about Johnny getting his hands on John’s from the study desk and murdering Charley while I’m away?

The Indian edged between doctor and president—neither of whom looked as if they would have made way for him, had either been able to find a good reason for standing on his dignity to that extent—and returned from the outer study a moment later with the bloodied weapon in his hand. “The edge is no sharper than it has to be to cut paper,” he said. “But the point would surely be a deadly weapon in a strong man’s hand.”

A bit gingerly, Abigail took the hilt and touched the point with her fingertip. Aside from the smallness of the guard and the narrow blade, it would have almost served as an actual weapon: English-made, steel, with ivory plates on the hilt and a blade about seven inches long. Long enough and strong enough to reach the heart.

“And is there anything missing from the room? Where did Mr. Fairfield keep his money, for instance?”

“In his pockets, if he had any,” replied Weyountah with a sigh. “Or in a desk-drawer or lying on the corner of the desk. Every excursion involved George searching for money—” A slight break flawed his voice as he remembered a hundred or a thousand tiny, trivial scenes. “And he never had a penny.”

“I thought his father was rich!”

“He is, m’am. And George had credit all over town. But actual money in his pockets—”

“The boy was a gamester.” Langdon’s voice reeked with disgust. “And worse,” he added darkly, meaning, Abigail guessed from Mrs. Squills’s remarks at the Stair, given to wenching. Weyountah laid the paper knife on the corner of the desk and looked over the untidy papers there.

More than untidy, thought Abigail. Shuffled up together into loose bundles, the way Sam’s were when he had been looking for something in his overcrowded study.

It could just mean that George Fairfield had mislaid his money and had searched his own desk. Still . . .

Two Spanish doubloons and a couple of Pennsylvania pound notes lay on the floor, as if they’d fallen when the desk was opened. A dozen or so books—the
Iliad
and the
Aeneid
, lexicons of Greek and Latin, Hoole’s
Catonis Disticha de Moribus
and Ezekiel Cheever’s
A Short Introduction, to the Latin Tongue, for the use of the lower forms in the Latin School, Being the Accidence abridged and compiled in that most easy and accurate method wherein the famous Mr. Ezekiel Cheever taught
, were piled on a chair higgledy-piggledy.

She remembered the tidiness of the front chamber. Looking around her, every portion of the bedroom save the vicinity of the desk attested to Diomede’s housekeeping skills.

The stain on the floor was exactly between the desk—which stood beneath the window—and the bed.

She asked, “Does it look to you as if George had done any work at this desk? As if he’d been
able
to do work at it as it is?”

The Indian frowned and reconsidered the papers—the fact that no single paper lay in the center, that the inkstand and standish had been moved to the windowsill . . . the fact that, in effect, the desk looked as if someone had taken everything off it, then piled it back on . . .

“He did keep up with his work,” said Abigail, standing at Weyountah’s side. “He spoke of it last night . . . See, there’s been wax dripped on the surface of the desk, fresh, it looks like, and
under
these papers . . . When did George come in last night, do you know?”

“The curfew is nine o’clock,” pointed out Dr. Perry, rather severely, from the door.

Weyountah said nothing, but the glance he gave Abigail spoke clearly enough.

“Mrs. Squills spoke yesterevening of George meeting
a friend
out by the stables,” she went on, turning toward Horace, who now stood a little behind the physician and the college president in the doorway. “Horace, you walked with George from the inn after he so very kindly saw to my lodging . . .”

In a stifled voice, Horace said, “We—George and I—parted between Massachusetts Hall and the brewhouse. I-I did warn him ’twas nearly nine, and he said he’d not be late.”

And quietly, Weyountah added, with a warning glance toward Perry and President Langdon, “George had many
friends
. If he . . .”

Voices raised in the staircase outside, followed immediately by a thumping on the outer door. “Dr. Perry, sir—!”

At the same moment, Abigail became aware of voices in the quadrangle below.

Going to the window, she saw Pugh’s tall, skinny follower Lowth slumped unconscious beside the door of the staircase, with two of his companions bending over him. Another young man lay on the ground, surrounded by his friends, a short distance away. She turned back as the excited young Mr. Yeovil burst into the study, crying, “Dr. Perry, Dr. Perry, they’ve been poisoned!”

Mr. Ryland, hard on his heels, added, “Dr. Perry, there’s something very strange going on . . .”