Sup with the Devil (25 page)

The children crowding around her while Thaxter unharnessed Tom Butler’s horse, she handed her lantern to Katy, unlocked the kitchen door, and banged her ankle very smartly against something hard that lay almost on the threshold as she stepped in.

She began to say, “Good Heavens, Pattie, we didn’t accidentally leave Messalina indoors—?” but the smell of spilled vinegar smote her, and the faint sickliness of spoiled milk.

She held the lantern up to further throw its light.

She’d nearly tripped over a crock of butter—not broken, but lying on its side where it had . . .
Fallen? How could it?
Even had the cat been somehow trapped indoors, she could never have—

Slowly, the light penetrated through the kitchen and pantry, showing Abigail an appalling shambles. Chairs had been pushed about, every drawer of the big sideboard stood open, cupboards agape. Beside her, Johnny said, “Ma—” and Nabby’s hand, cold and frightened, gripped suddenly at hers.

And Charley, delighted as all three-year-olds are with chaos: “Was it bears did this?” He darted forward and Abigail grabbed him by the shoulder, pulled him back, and backed out of the pantry, out of the house.

“Katy,” she said, “hold on to the children—Nabby, run next door and get Mr. Butler and his boys. Pattie, go with her,” she added, seeing the little girl hesitate in fear.

“You don’t think there’s anyone—” began Pattie hesitantly, and then, as if exonerating herself, “I was inside yesterday, to make sure all was well, and it was. Pfew, that vinegar is strong! What happened?” She looked back toward the stable, from which Thaxter emerged, bearing the other lantern. “Who would do this?”

Happily, Charley opined, “I bet it was Mr. Scar-Eye!”

W
hile Katy and Pattie took the children next door to the Butlers’, Abigail, Thaxter, Tom Butler, and the cooper’s two apprentices went through the house armed with kindling-axes, barrel-mallets, and every lantern that could be borrowed up and down the street. They found no human foe on the premises, but the house had been ransacked from cellar to attic. Even Katy’s pallet bed had been shoved away from the wall and its mattress torn open, hay strewn everywhere in the room.

Abigail and the children went back to Uncle Isaac’s to sleep, leaving Thaxter to guard the premises until morning. She dreamed of being locked in the house while it was being searched, hearing the scrape of Mr. Scar-Eye’s boots as he groped toward her in the dark.

When she returned in the morning, it was to find Sam Adams in the kitchen, with his wife Bess, his daughter, Hannah, and their maid Surry all engaged in mopping up the spilled vinegar from the broken kitchen cask and scrubbing everything in sight. Abigail groaned inwardly—it was John’s unvarying contention that the scene of any crime contained at least some piece of information about the criminal. Though she had a strong suspicion that Charley had been right about the culprit being Mr. Scar-Eye, she had hoped to find something that might tell her where to look for this sinister gentleman and who might be his employer.

Yet she was far too grateful at the prospect of not having to clean up the entire house herself to quibble, only assigning to Sam and Thaxter the task of straightening the tumbled library (
John will never be able to find anything on his shelves ever again!
) while she made a careful tour of the upstairs.

It told her nothing she hadn’t known before. It had been too dark to see much by lantern-light last night, and their only object had been to make sure there was no one still lurking in the house, so the tracks of the reconnaissance party—herself, Tom Butler, et al—did not penetrate beyond the doorway of any room. Morning light showed Abigail that there had been three burglars, men in rough boots . . . something she could have guessed, she reflected wryly, from Horace’s account of the sinister coachman and his henchmen. She also knew they were sized Small, Medium, and Large from Horace’s account, information borne out by their tracks, which were just barely visible in the bedroom she shared with John. The merest modicum of guesswork would also have been sufficient for her to tell from Horace’s story that they were men used to burgling places—there wasn’t a nook in the house that they hadn’t plundered, a fact that made her very glad she’d left the household money and her pearls at Aunt Eliza’s with the children.

Beyond those obvious indicators, the visitors had been annoyingly fastidious. No one had dropped so much as a button, let alone a dagger that might match the wound in George Fairfield’s side or a letter from Mrs. Lake bearing instructions to murder Horace. No bloody handprints (
thank goodness!
); no mysterious documents in Arabic or any other language.

But, Abigail reflected as she came downstairs, she’d had to look. If they’d left any of these things in the kitchen, well, Bess, Hannah, and Surry had taken care of them and there was nothing that she, Abigail, could do about it now. The best she could accomplish at the moment was to assign various tasks to clean up, and herself go to the market—which, though it was now late in the morning and nothing would be available but picked-over leavings, was a matter of critical importance, particularly if John was due back tomorrow or Saturday . . .

“And we need to get up laundry tonight,” she added to Thaxter, as she passed the study door. “I will
not
have anyone in this house spend a moment on sheets those villains have pawed—”

A familiar voice called from the kitchen, “Is she in? Aunt Abigail—!”

Then Weyountah’s, deeper and steadier, “Is there something we can help with—?”

“Yes.” Abigail entered the big room, dusting her hands. “Horace, get my marketing basket from behind the pantry door, please. Weyountah, would you be able to stay and assist Mr. Adams in straightening up the study? Oh, thank goodness, Arabella,” she added, as her next-door neighbor knocked at the back door with a plate of smoking-hot griddle cakes and a jug of molasses, “you are a choir of angels and all the saints in Heaven rolled into one! Speedy help is double help . . .”

“
Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur
,” quoted Horace automatically, and then, thin face flushing with excitement, “Aunt Abigail, I’ve seen him! I know who he is! Mrs. Lake’s coachman! Dubber Grimes!”

Abigail set her marketing basket on the corner of the table, cast a glance at the angle of sunlight in the yard—
There will be NOTHING left in the market
. . . !—and said, “Bess, would you and Bella do the honors? I
beg
you will excuse me, but if I don’t get to the market now—”

“We’ll save you griddle cakes,” promised Arabella Butler with a smile, and playfully shoved Abigail toward the door.

“And coffee,” added Bess, “if we can keep Sam from drinking it all . . .”

Abigail seized Horace by the elbow and thrust the market basket into his hands as she was pushed out the door.

“Tell me,” she commanded, as she and the young man hurried their steps down Queen Street toward the big market square.

“’Twas entirely by accident,” said Horace, and shoved his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his nose.
“Res hominum fragiles alit et regit—”

“Yes, yes, I know the fragile affairs of men are guided by chance,” said Abigail impatiently. “Where did you see him?”

“At the Crowned Pig. The seniors were ragging poor Yeovil again and I followed him to give him a hand, and when I walked into the tap-room, there was Grimes—the scar-eyed coachman—dicing in the corner with Black Dog Pugh! I ducked back out at once and asked one of the—er—young ladies who work there, who was that man with Mr. Pugh? And she said his name was Dubber Grimes, and he is from Charles Town, and the men with him—there were two others at the table besides Pugh—were Newgate Hicks and the Cornishman, and they all worked as bullyboys at a . . . a house of ill-fame in Charles Town called Avalon. While the girl was getting the ale for Yeovil, I watched them; they weren’t only dicing, but talking with Pugh. He gave them money!”

“Only to be expected if they were dicing. Still . . . Avalon,” said Abigail thoughtfully. “Well, well—someone has a sense of humor. In the tales of King Arthur,” she explained, seeing her nephew look blank, “Avalon is the location of the lake, which has in it the Lady who gives Arthur his sword, if I remember aright . . . Your aunt Elizabeth”—she named her mother—“never considered fanciful tales proper for us children, but Aunt Eliza has a book of them and would read to us when we’d visit. Though I never thought to find the reference useful—”

“Mrs.
Lake
?”

“When you think of it,” said Abigail, as they turned from Cornhill into the square before the great market-hall, “what other sort of woman might a man know that he could hire as a cat’s-paw, to look respectable enough that a young man like yourself would get into a carriage with her? Would you have gone with Dubber Grimes on his own? Or with gentlemen named Newgate or—er—the Cornishman? Or even Pugh himself, for that matter?”

Horace seemed to be digesting the information that he’d ridden in a carriage with a bona fide Scarlet Woman while Abigail made her way to the stalls of the farmers whose chickens, rabbits, and lambs she knew to be freshest and most plump, and who picked their vegetables in the dark of early morning and not the afternoon before. And since everyone else in Boston knew who those farmers were also, she found, as she had feared, no lettuces left, no peas (
DRAT “Dubber” and his henchmen!
), and the only asparagus remaining was thick and tough as tree-trunks.

With a basket full of beets and carrots, some elderly lamb, an assortment of very small fish wrapped in rushes, some strawberries, and a huge quantity of rather raggedy spinach, she turned her steps back toward home. John would just have to make the best of it. “When was this?” she asked.

“Yesterday afternoon. ’Twas too late to come to you then— we’d never have made it to the ferry before sunset—and Weyountah was at a demonstration of vacuum-pumps, which he would not forgo . . . But what is a vacuum? Nothing! What can we do?”

“I think the time has come,” said Abigail, “for a search of Mr. Pugh’s rooms. Those grooms of his are generally there, aren’t they?”

“Either the grooms or Pinky.”

“Not surprising, if he’s in the habit of keeping indecent books about—not to speak of treasure-maps. John won’t be home until tomorrow evening or Saturday morning, and thank Heavens there’s not a great deal of laundry to be done, bar the sheets and assuming the weather stays fine. Our Black Dog had mortally offended the Reverend, but ’twould have been easy enough to send him a frumenty by the hand of one of his minions. Do the cooks at the Hall make frumenties?”

“Sometimes,” said Horace, a trifle startled at this conversational detour—frumenties were utter poison to him, and it clearly wasn’t something he’d ever considered. “I know he gets custards and syllabubs from them—and pays them extremely well not to speak of making him things, since he could be sent down for it, and
they
could be sacked for selling the College provisions that way.”

“I see.” Abigail paused at the corner of Cornhill to let pass a group of men: laborers from the ropewalks that abounded in Boston, rough-looking men talking heatedly, and she heard among them the words
God-damned lobsterbacks
and
bloody bleedin’ Parliament
. . . “So our best course would be to attack the problem from the other end—which will entail a visit to the farm of the Reverend Seckar’s brother.”

“He has a brother? It’s like hearing there was a fourth Gorgon.” Horace shook his head. “I always thought the Reverend Seckar was spontaneously generated from a vat of sour lemons.”

“My only hope is that his family does actually live in Concord and not out in somewhere like Haverhill or Springfield. If I have to chase off for another three days to speak to the sister about who drugged the family, Heaven only knows what I’d return here to find.”

 

 

O
ver a nuncheon of Arabella Butler’s griddle cakes (“Now, we must save a few for Nabby and Johnny when they get home—”), Abigail thought to ask Sam, who as a longtime rabble-rouser knew everyone in the Boston area, about Genesis Seckar. As she’d suspected, Sam knew all about him.

“His farm lies about seven miles the other side of town.” Sam poured out coffee for Abigail, Pattie, and Katy—who had brought the younger boys back from the Smiths’—as they settled around the much-battered table in a kitchen now spotlessly clean (Abigail could have kissed Sam’s womenfolk for sparing her the appalling task). “Your husband,” he added, “likes to chide that two-thirds of the men in the colonies either enjoy being the King’s slaves or don’t care whose slaves they are so long as they’re able to cheat the poor out of their rightful money—”

“That is
not
what John says!”

Sam waved away the objection. “Well, Genesis Seckar belongs in the category of men who wouldn’t care if they were slaves of the Grand Turk, since everyone around them is going straight to Hell anyway, so how they or anyone else lives on the Earth doesn’t matter, because they’ve no proof that the world won’t evaporate in flames tomorrow, so there! He lets the militia drill on his pasture—the place is well away from prying eyes—because it doesn’t matter to him whether there’s going to be fighting or not. Bruck Travers with the Watertown militia tells me Old Man Seckar comes out and preaches during drill at the top of his lungs.”