Sup with the Devil Read Online Free PDF

idea where you were?”
    Horace shook his head. “Weyountah says that a farmer from Concord brought me here in his wagon, having deduced—in quite your style, m’am,” he added with a faint grin, “that I was from the College by the circumstance of me clutching my Arabic lexicon to my breast when I was found in a ditch at the side of the Concord Road, raving of pirates and gold. I did not come to my right senses ’til nearly evening and then was vilely sick all the next day. I begged Weyountah and George not to breathe a word of my absence—George is the dearest of good fellows but a complete, er, rattlepate—for fear that I might be sent down for having to do with a woman and for getting drunk, though George has told me that had I been drunk my symptoms would have been quite different.”
    “Do Weyountah and Mr. Fairfield know—” She paused as a discreet tap sounded at the door, and Diomede put his head in to ask after the state of the cocoa pot. “Do Weyountah and Mr.—or is it Captain?—Fairfield—”
    “Mr. Ryland calls him Captain because that’s his rank in the militia troop he formed.”
    “Did he, indeed? Do they know about Mrs. Lake?”
    “No, m’am. Weyountah says he thinks that I was poisoned—he has made a study of plants and says there’s something called mad apple or Jamestown-weed that produces such effects—and I said I had gone to visit friends and had eaten of sallet at an inn. Such accidents do happen, he says, and naturally an innkeeper would have sent me on my way when I began to rave. In the light of Mr. Adams’s letter, and Uncle Mercer’s, I had almost convinced myself that something of the sort had indeed taken place—that it was an accident on the part of Mrs. Lake, and there was an innocent explanation. Then, four days ago it must have been, St-John Pugh—a most arrogant bullyboy . . .”
    “Black hair, green eyes, and a nose like a suffused potato? Wears a yellow gown?”
    “Even so, m’am—the Black Dog, he’s called. I condole you to have made his acquaintance,” added the boy, with his donnish smile. “He has been a senior here at least three years, they say, and has made my stay at this college a calvary. ’Tis only because George took me in as his fag that I’ve had some protection, though George doesn’t truly need a fag the way other seniors have them: I mean, he has Diomede to keep his rooms for him and run his errands. But he lets me study here in his rooms—Pugh used to come looking for me in my own, to send me on made-up errands to the farthest end of town . . .”
    “Does he not have a fag of his own?” John had always been philosophical about the fagging system in effect at Harvard—the freshmen attaching themselves to seniors as partial protection against hazing; it was something one simply had to endure in order to get an education. Abigail, aware that it was almost certain that her sons would one day be freshmen here, regarded it in a less sanguine light.
    “He does, m’am. And slaves as well, two of them. But he likes to bully and is a positive diabolos for spiteful vengeances. As I was saying, Pugh caught me on Friday and sent me on an errand into the far end of the town, to the Pig; and when I came out of the inn, I saw Mrs. Lake’s coachman across the road.”
    “Did you so?”
    “I knew him, m’am. The scar on his face is like the mark of Cain. There were two men with him, one tall and powerful with a shaven head that poked forward like a turtle’s, the other a man of medium size with an ear missing and his nose most horribly scarred. All three were swarthy, and the mutilated man wore his hair in a long queue, smeared with tar as sailors do. They were looking about them, and as I knew no one at the Pig, I asked no questions but simply made haste to leave by the kitchen door. It was then—Friday evening—that I sent to you.”
    “As well you did,” murmured Abigail. “We seem to have stumbled into a broadside ballad here—all