Free Sup with the Devil by Barbara Hamilton Page B

corrected herself, as she laid the blade against that strangely ivory-colored flesh. ’ Tis not vengeance I seek but salvation for the man who didn’t do this crime . . .
    All four of the wounds looked a good half-inch wider than the width of the blade.
    Swiftly, Abigail pulled down the young man’s nightshirt, drew up the coverlet, even as she heard the doctor’s voice cry angrily in the staircase, “Here, this won’t do!” She dunked her handkerchief in the water-pitcher and was wiping the last traces of blood from her fingers when Joseph Ryland came in.
    “Are you finished here, Mrs. Adams? Dr. Perry has sent for a litter to carry poor George’s body to the infirmary—”
    “What happened out there?”
    The bachelor-fellow shook his head. “Lowth was suddenly taken queer, he said, and slumped down as if he’d been shot. In the next second Mosson went down, too—Waller and Blossom said they were feeling queer . . .”
    Abigail stared at him for a moment, then said, “Oh, those wretches!” and dashed past him and out into the study.
    The cut-glass rum-bottle that had stood next to Diomede’s bloodstained pallet had been tucked unobtrusively behind a chair. It was empty.
    “And it serves them right!” she exclaimed. “Only now of course there’s no way of proving it—”
    “Poison?” Ryland followed her, brow drawn down half in consternation, half in disbelief. “How could—?”
    “ I have drugged their possets , Lady Macbeth says.” Abigail sniffed at the carafe, but could smell only the overwhelming reek of rum. “More likely laudanum than poison—”
    “Meant for George?”
    “Those idiots,” said Weyountah, going to the window—meaning, Abigail guessed, Lowth and Jasmine and Waller and Mosson who’d thought it was so clever to sneak an extra drink while everyone was milling about . . . “’Twould serve them well if it were poison.”
    Ryland and Abigail—carafe in hand—were already hurrying down the stairs.
    In the parlor where Abigail had waited last night for young Fairfield, dark little Mr. Blossom was being plied with hot coffee while half-a-dozen masters and students were trying to revive Lowth and Mosson. The smell of burnt feathers and panic filled the air. “They’ve been poisoned!” cried Mr. Yeovil again, and Pugh shouted to a little freshman named Pinkstone—presumably, thought Abigail, his own luckless “fag”—to run fetch coffee from his own room, which was on the staircase of the new hall directly across the quadrangle from that of Fairfield, Weyountah, and Horace.
    “They have not,” retorted Abigail, entering hard upon this line. “Mr. Blossom, did you drink the rum in the carafe in George’s room? I thought so. Mr. Waller?” A tall young man with a long, horsey face—sitting with his head between his knees in a circle of frightened acquaintances—jerked upright shakily and gazed at her with pupils narrowed to pinpricks, even in the gloom of the parlor.
    “I did, too—” gasped another young man in a green robe. “I-I feel so queer . . .”
    “I’m sure you do,” returned Abigail briskly. “There was laudanum in the rum, which would amply account for poor Diomede not waking up—”
    “And for poor George—” cried someone else.
    “The blackguard!” exclaimed another young gentleman. “To poison his master, then drink himself stupid in celebration—”
    “Nonsense!” snapped Abigail, taken aback this interpretation of her evidence. “Fairfield was stabbed, for one thing, and for another, a killer would have to be stupid to take a drug like that before even getting out of the room—”
    “It’s exactly what that nigger of mine would do,” remarked Pugh, straightening up from beside the pile of coats where Lowth lay. “Only he’d probably drink off half the rum before drugging it, to give himself a little Dutch courage—” He put his hands on his hips, regarded Abigail’s openmouthed indignation with some amusement. “They