Cape Cod (41 page)
Prince gave her a blank stare, made all the blanker by the backs of the books that surrounded him. “Is this a name I should take to heart?”
“
Christopher
Jones, sir, of the
Mayflower.”
The demeanor of Mr. Prince seemed instantly to change. He closed the book before him and leaned across his desk. “The
Mayflower?
”
She nodded slightly, as though uncertain of what she was telling him.
“You’ve heard legends? From whom?”
She gave a nervous little laugh, revealing the brown edges of decay around her teeth. She was only twenty-three, but five years of servitude had aged her quickly. “I worked in so many places, Your Honor, ’tis hard to remember.”
Prince furrowed his brow and studied her with a hard minister’s eye. “Do you waste my time, woman?”
“Oh, no, sir. No, indeed.” She fiddled with fringe on her shawl.
“No… I don’t think you do.” He went to one of the bookcases behind him and pulled down a vellum-bound book. “Here is a journal begun near the same time as the
Mayflower
log, if there be such a thing.”
He placed it on the table in front of her. “The memories of William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony for most of its existence. Borrowed from the family.”
She ran her hand over the smooth leather. It seemed to be in perfect condition. Then she opened it. The pages were filled with a small, tight script, entirely legible.
“Have you ever seen a book of this vintage? Or felt such rough paper? A century old?”
She shook her head.
“Are you certain? Such a volume could be worth hundreds of pounds.”
This was what she wanted to know. She would spend the packet ride balancing those hundreds of pounds against the revenge that she had long plotted on the Bigelows. They had taken her family’s land for a pittance, for two pittances, and she had been unable to stop them. She had no certainty that the log would discomfit them, but they might pay to protect the memory of their
Mayflower
ancestor. Would they pay hundreds of pounds?
“Where might one sell such a book?” she asked.
“To this library,” answered Prince. “Do you have it?”
She shook her head again.
“On your honor?”
“My honor?” She laughed at that.
He leaned close to her. “You will go far toward redeeming it, should you bring the book to a place where history and scholarship are honored.”
She smiled. “If I find it.”
xiii.
The little boy did not at first recognize her. He was playing in the sand beside the shack when she came over the dune.
“Hello, Ned.”
He stood and stepped back.
“I’m your mama.”
“My mama’s in jail.”
“I… I brung you a present.” She reached into her apron and pulled out the sugar.
The little boy eyed the gift, but still he would not go to her.
Then Goody Daggett came out of the cottage. She had tried to prepare the boy for his mother’s return, but for five years, he had connected his mother with long journeys to a barn near Boston. Goody Daggett gestured for Serenity to remove her shawl.
The covering fell away, so that the low November sun struck the side of Serenity’s face.
“Mama!” The word burst joyously now, and they ran to each other’s arms.
She clung to him as though he were life itself, and from this time forward, he would be. She had refused to cry for five years, but she could contain her tears no longer. She had returned to what was left of her family. And she would never leave.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” said Little Ned.
She wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. She wiped her hand down the front of her new skirt. Then she crumbled off a piece of sugar and popped it into the little boy’s mouth.
By moonlight she went once more to Cornhill, though this time she went alone. She did not dig far before she found the rush basket. With shaking hands and cold-stung fingers, she pulled it out of its hiding place, then plunged her arm into the ancient corn. She reached to the bottom, then to the sides. She ran her arm all around. Then…
Her cry echoed from Cornhill to Tom’s Hill and lost itself in the marshes above the Little Pamet. She dropped to her knees and pounded the sand. The log was gone, and with it her future.
Had Solemnity done this? Or had the old Indian Keweenut hidden it someplace else? Keweenut was too frightened of his legacy to move it. It was Solemnity, then, for certain.
She damned him. She damned them all. Solemnity had stolen her future. The Bigelows had stolen her land. One might even have sold the log to the other, neatly closing the circle of treachery.
She damned them all again. Then she felt the tears rising again, but this time she did not permit them. She had to stay strong for her boy. She dug her fingers into the sand and squeezed as though holding on to the earth itself. She had been swindled and betrayed, but she would not be defeated… ever.
July 11
“One of the Indians in the painting is supposed to be Johnny Autumn. He was hanged after the wreck of the
Whydah
. When I saw the painting, I did some digging,” explained Carolyn Hallissey.
“You didn’t find much.”
“Records from the trial. Legends from the locals. You know… Was Black Bellamy coming back for Serenity or for an Eastham girl named Maria Hallet, or was he just coming north because the heat was on in the Caribbean?”
“Plus juicy tidbits about Serenity’s brother.” Geoff flipped through the pile of sheets and found the quote from Paine’s
History of Harwich:
“ ‘After his scandal, Solemnity Hilyard spent a brief time ministering in a Praying Town. Later he and the woman disappeared on the same day. Neither was ever heard from again.’ ”
“A man of mystery,” said Carolyn.
“And the mystery of the log?”
“In the whole folder there’s not a mention of it.”
“Then maybe it
did
wrap Mrs. Jones’s fish guts, just as Samuel Eliot Morison says.”
“Maybe.” Then she leaned close, as if letting him in on a secret. “But… what… if… it… didn’t?”
He liked her. He was cynical enough to know she might be giving him an act. But he liked her, because she liked what she was doing. He would have liked her even if she hadn’t been the best-looking museum director he’d ever met. Pretty faces were a temptation, but enthusiasm…
“I’d love to bid on that log,” she said. “I’d love to
find
it even more. It’s how careers are made.”
That helped. The career-driven ones were easier to resist. Their motives were obvious.
“Why do
you
want to find it?” she asked.
“To settle my mind about it… and get the money.”
She slipped her arm through his and led him toward the door. “Two honest motives for two treasure hunters.”
They flirted right out to his car and said goodbye. Nothing wrong with any of it, as long as he went home to his wife. Of course, he and Janice hadn’t finished what they started a few mornings before, and things had been downhill ever since.
He liked what he’d read of Serenity. As the fog burned off, he took a right at the National Seashore Visitors’ Center and followed Nauset Road through the area where she had lived.
There would have been few houses in 1717, even fewer trees. All across the Cape, mature stands of hardwood had fallen in that first century to make boats, shingles, firewood, and farmland. Men had changed the face of the Narrow Land in two generations. Now scrub pine and locust were so thick that you couldn’t see half the summer houses scattered across the Eastham plain. It was comforting to know that if given a chance, nature could cover her scars.
The land of Serenity sat now in the middle of the National Seashore and so would be safe forever… but it was the Bigelows who had sold that land to the government in 1961. And they had swindled it out of the Hilyards. A harsh word, but what else could he think? Jeremiah had died, Solemnity had disappeared, and Serenity had moved to Billingsgate. Why on earth would she have moved to a sand dune, unless she’d lost everything? “Swindled” was the word. He found himself getting angry.
At the Nauset Coast Guard Station, he turned north along the cobalt blue sea.
It was pretty stupid, getting mad over something that had happened so long ago. But sometimes history had a way of surfacing right in front of you, and you had to face it. A half mile offshore, a salvage vessel was anchored over the remains of the
Whydah
. Treasure hunters had found Black Bellamy’s dream and now dreamed it themselves, hauling millions in gold and artifacts off the bottom.
Carolyn Hallissey had said she hoped to anchor an old ship in Portanimicut Pond and make it the
Whydah
museum, so that people might see pirate artifacts and find a
connection
with men driven to go “on the account.” She had used Geoff’s word, and it made him like her even more.
Find the connections. Study the flow of people through time or a place or an old house. Speculate on the things that made their lives unique and yet like yours. You didn’t do it because it was your job. You did it because it was a way to understand. Find the connections and die happy
And if there were connections to be made with pirate artifacts, imagine what might be found in the journal of the sea captain who had brought the first settlers to this place.
ii.
When he came home Janice was browning onions and garlic in a pan of olive oil. “Were you working?” she asked.
“At Old Comers Plantation.”
“Doing what? Taking tickets?”
“Are we arguing tonight?” He stood in the kitchen doorway so that she couldn’t escape. The original house had had three good-sized rooms back to back—parlor, dining room, and great room with beehive ovens and hand-pump plumbing. But in some misbegotten modernization, the beehives had been torn out, the plumbing redirected, and a galley kitchen squeezed into a pantry at the back, a cramped little piece of New York on the shores of Cape Cod Bay.
She dropped a fistful of linguini into a pot of boiling water.
He took out two Molson’s Goldens, wiped the lips of each can clean, popped them, and put one beside the range. “I don’t hear ‘Sesame Street.’ Where are the kids?”
“At my grandmother’s.” She eyeballed a cup of white wine into the pan.
A collander of mussels was draining in the sink, a can of tomatoes stood open beside the stove.
“No kids, mussels marinara… We can’t be arguing tonight.”
“We’re looking for answers.”
“How’s the toilet flushing?”
“That’s a question. Everything’s going down fine. For now.”
The wine reduced. In went the tomatoes, followed by a dash of oregano, a bit of basil. All done as though he were not standing two feet away. She could ignore him the way Larry Bird could make passes—no eye contact at all.
“I have an answer for you,” he said. “I was at Old Comers doing research.”
“You’ve made up your mind?”
“About one thing. This
thing
between our families has had a lot of chapters since the
Mayflower.”
She dropped the mussels into the sauce and threw in another shot of wine.
They ate on the deck, in the quiet of the July evening. The mussels marinara tasted of sun and sea. The Washington State Chardonnay calmed her temper and cleared his head. They talked rationally. They disagreed like adults. They drank more wine.
“The future’s been dropped in your lap, Geoff. You can’t throw it away because of the past. Think of me. Think of the kids.”
“If Clara had lived, she might have signed the sailing camp over to the town and taken this out of my hands.”
Janice looked into her glass. “She didn’t. Be thankful the decision is still yours to make.”
Twilight faded. Except for the sound of an occasional car gliding by the foot of the hill, the calm of the summer night embraced them.
“You know the difference between you and me?” he said.
“Aside from the obvious ones?”
“You grew up here. You know how depressing it can be in the winter, when the hillsides are brown and half the people from Bourne to Provincetown are collecting unemployment while they wait for the tourists.”
“Winter can be nice, but it’s damn lonely,” she said.
“Even lonelier on a narrow bed in a gloomy New Hampshire prep school, staring at the picture of John Lennon curling off the wall, humming ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and thinking of those boyhood summers, fishing with your father on salt-fog mornings when you were so into the fish you wouldn’t notice the fog burning off. But just before it disappeared, you’d look up and see wisps of it in the air, like spun silver… Memories like that get a lot of people through the winter.” “I have memories, too. We have them together.” She refilled their glasses. “But spun silver feeds the November rain.”
“I know. I’ve thought a lot about it.” Then he took her hand and led her down the hill, through the locust grove, to the barn. In his office, he flipped on the track lights above his drafting table.
“Geoffrey… elevations?”
“Just sketches.”
“They’re beautiful.”
There were a dozen views of seventeenth-century reproductions. All had the steep-pitched roof and narrow clapboards of the Aptucxet trading post. Some had the traditional diamond-pane windows; others had Palladian windows at the gable ends. And he had begun to toy with floor plans as well, all roughly rendered in 2b on yellow trace.
She looked at them as though he’d just given her Picasso’s sketchbook.
“This
is what you were made to do, Geoff.”
“I’m no fool, Jan. That’s a lot of damn money your family’s offering.”
“It’s the future. Let me go get some more wine.”
But she never made it to the house.
After a few moments, Geoff heard the sound of running water. At first, it puzzled him, so he went down the stairs.
Her sandals were on the threshold, her T-shirt and shorts just beyond. His eyes followed the path that led to the outdoor shower stall at the end of the barn. Bra… panties… steam. As she turned beneath the spray, the places that the sun never touched glistened in the starlight.