Sup with the Devil Read Free

works of Goldsmith or Smollett, or the fact that John could bring in newspapers printed that day. The fact that in winter, snow did not mean utter isolation. Yet she had been raised in the parsonage of a very small village, and in her heart, she sorely missed the scents of deep grass and woodland in May.
    As Mr. Begbie had a number of deliveries in Cambridge and was likely to pursue his second vocation—that of collecting and disseminating news and rumor—when they reached the outskirts of the village, Abigail bid him good-by with thanks. “I shall finish up at the Golden Stair, on the Common,” said the carter—a neighbor of hers on Queen Street—shaking her hand in farewell. “You’ll find me there in three or four hours—time enough to locate your nephew—and we’ll still be back at the ferry long before the sun’s down. Good luck, m’am!”
    Good luck indeed , reflected Abigail good-humoredly, as she set off with her marketing basket in the direction of the College, whose cluster of brick halls she glimpsed through orchard trees, for she hadn’t the faintest idea in which of its several buildings Horace was lodged. The open-sided quadrangle of Harvard College faced the town common, across a lane and a four-foot wall. A young man in a freshman’s short gown emerged from the gate as Abigail drew near. He bore a wig box and walked swiftly, as if pursued or in fear of pursuit, and hesitated for an instant when she waved him over. “Are you acquainted with Mr. Horace Thaxter? Would you know—?”
    “I say, I say—!” Another scholar in the longer gown of a more senior student strolled over from a group of his friends. “You there, Yeovil—”
    The freshman gave Abigail a harassed look and turned.
    “What are you up to, Yeovil?”
    “I was speaking with this lady, sir,” said the boy. He looked about fifteen—Horace had been sixteen and a half when he’d entered the college the previous September, but they took boys younger even than this one—with linen spotlessly white against the blue of his academic gown and a beautifully curled pigeon-wing wig, powdered like marble.
    “Now, Yeovil,” chided the newcomer, who looked rather like a ferret in a scarlet gown, “a freshman ? Address a lady ?”
    “And so beautiful a lady,” added another of the group, coming over and making Abigail a handsome leg as he bowed. “Che il crin s’è un Tago e son due Soli i lume/Prodigio tal non rimirò Natura . . . ” Between a crumpled neckcloth and an elaborately curled wig, his face was plump and unshaven, and his eyes, set in little cushions of fat discolored by sleeplessness, had the twinkling and rather dangerous intelligence of a pig. The effect was of a dissipated baby who had been spending far too many nights in a tavern. “How may your humble servant be of use to you, fair stranger? You, Yeovil, run along . . . Where were you off to?”
    In a taut voice that showed an unfortunate tendency to crack, the boy said, “I was taking this wig to be curled, sir.” He held up the box.
    The fat student viewed it through a quizzing-glass; his companion in the red gown, suppressing a grin, exclaimed, “Why, so you were! And whose wig is that, Yeovil?”
    “Mr. Lechmere’s, sir.”
    “Lechmere, Lechmere . . .” The older men—and the other two of their group who had joined them—all made a great show of trying to remember who Lechmere was.
    “Egad, isn’t he a sophomore?”
    “Disgraceful . . . !”
    “For shame!”
    “Tell you what,” said Red Gown, and produced from his voluminous sleeve two pewter pitchers, “why don’t you be a good chap and, while you’re in town, just hop on over to the Crowned Pig and fill these up with our good host’s best?”
    John had told Abigail about the customs of the college: Yeovil, a lowly fresher, was obliged to do the bidding of his seniors. She also guessed that Red Gown was probably a junior and thus able to preempt the boy’s services ( How was he going to