Harvard Yard (24 page)
The mysterious brother, Benjamin.
Peter read ahead, skimming over the various quotations, until he came to this: “In a book of bugs, Ben finds a play and prepares to put it on. I ask the title. He will not say. But he promises to bring life to it in his room tomorrow night.”
Book of bugs?
With a few keystrokes, Peter logged on to the Harvard library catalog, HOLLIS, and found a volume that would give him the answer. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts had published the Harvard catalog of 1723. And with a little more searching, he had it before him—a facsimile of the handwritten original, three columns, title, author, section and shelf numbers, and the name of the donor.
And there it was.
A book about bugs. “
Corporei Insectii,
by Walter Shackford, Section XII, Shelf 8, Space 6, given by Isaacus Wedgius.” Peter Fallon, a man who knew his books, had never heard of this volume or the author.
Had Isaac been hiding a play in a book about bugs?
But why?
Peter kept reading. But nothing revealed itself, except that Abraham had taken to quoting Hamlet in relation to his brother’s life:
Benjamin insists on performing this play. I have told him that I should turn him in to the tutor. I should “be cruel only to be kind.”
My brother is undone. “So full of artless jealousy is guilt, / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.” He is properly served.
My brother is rusticated to Reverend Bleen’s. “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”
Reverend Bleen.
Where had he heard that name?
Too many questions. Peter decided to e-mail the whole folder to himself.
Then he clicked the “received items”: a few from himself, a few from Evangeline, and one, from Dorothy Wedge, received in the last week in September, over three weeks before Peter put in his fund-raising call:
Dear Uncle Ridley: Thanks for taking the time to read my paper and give me any other ideas you might have. It’s exciting to think there’s a lost play out there. My tutor, Mr. O’Hill, has been very interested in a commonplace book that the Massachusetts Historical Society recently obtained.
Then Peter clicked the e-mail icon and, out of curiosity, checked the e-mail “sent items” box: There were several e-mails to Peter’s address, to [email protected], which would be Dorothy. And one to [email protected], sent the day before Ridley fell off his boat:
Dear Professor O’Hill: Dorothy Wedge has discussed some of her speculations with me, and as a theatrical historian, in addition to a theatrical producer, I would have to say that they are very exciting. I am developing a theory that you might be interested in discussing with me sometime, either in Cambridge, or here in Rockport. Do you like to fish?
So Peter’s instincts in the Yard had been good. Mr. O’Hill knew more.
What did he know about Abraham and Benjamin Wedge?
Someone was using him.
Peter Fallon figured it out on the way back to Boston. People used him all the time. That didn’t bother him. But they weren’t using him because of his skills as a book man. It was that line “rusticated to Reverend Bleen’s” that told him.
Someone had figured out that Fallon Salvage and Restoration had won a bid to rehab an old house in Sudbury, someone who had read this commonplace book and thought there might be something to learn at the old Bleen House.
But who? A thug from South Boston who started following Fallon as soon as he started talking to Ridley? Or the assistant professor that Ridley had invited fishing? Or Will Wedge, who couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted Fallon to stop or go?
Since no one was waiting for him at home, Peter decided to drive out to Sudbury, just for a look at the property known as the Bleen House.
It was a big old Colonial set back from Route 126, with a big old barn out back. The lights were on, because the owners were still living there, as they would throughout the job. That was good, since it meant that no one could go poking around without being discovered. If there was an ancient book anywhere in that house, the Fallons would get the first crack at it.
Peter sat in the shadows at the side of the road and studied the slope of the slate roof and the slant of the light pouring out of the windows.
According to Sibley’s
Harvard Graduates
, this was the last place that a young man named Benjamin Wedge had ever been seen.
1723
“R
EVEREND
M
ATHER”
—Samantha Wedge curtsied before her minister—“an honor.”
“I come to see your husband, ma’am . . . about the college.”
“The college?” Samantha was known as a simple woman, not for want of intelligence but for a face that revealed emotions as though they had been set in italics. Her eyes opened wide, and she said, “A problem? With Abraham? With Benjamin?”
But Mather said only, “I would speak with your husband.”
“’Tis Benjamin, then? Oh, Reverend, he’s a good boy, but—”
Mather raised his hand. “Please, dear lady, take me to your husband.”
Samantha seemed to fill with questions, but she was a dutiful wife, so she asked none of them. Instead, she admitted Mather to her home, closed the door against the noise of Hanover Street, and pointed him to the front room, where John Wedge sat reading the
Boston Courier.
It was a small room in a house far smaller than that which John had once enjoyed. But his purse was smaller, too, his fleet of ships reduced to three by storms and bad business luck. Most houses were smaller because Boston had assumed the close-built look of a city, with long rows of joined dwellings and ever smaller lots for freestanding structures. And streets now crosshatched the old Shawmut Peninsula like a fishnet thrown over a three-humped whale.
But John Wedge did not mind his smaller house, for here he had enjoyed a love that was physical as well as spiritual. Here he had raised two strong sons. Here, as he was fond of saying, he and his wife had aged like French wine or English cheese. Samantha was fifty but looked ten years younger. John would have passed for Mather’s younger brother, though he was four years older.
There was, however, no denying that John Wedge and Cotton Mather were old men—both past sixty, both gone gray, both aware that it would be sooner rather than later that they would see the fulfillment of Christ’s promise.
John looked over his spectacles. “Is the reverend here because he’s heard of the arrival of the
Sparrowhawk
, with a dozen pipes of Madeira?”
Rebecca said, “Reverend Mather brings news of our boys.”
“’Tis news of the college.” Mather bustled into the room.
“But a little Madeira would ease your burdens, would it not?” said John.
“So it would.” Mather took his usual place in the chair to the left of the fireplace.
As Samantha went scurrying off, John regarded his friend. He held no awe for the great minister. It was one of the reasons that they had remained friends, despite Mather’s inclinations to bloviate and exasperate. John knew Mather the man, as flawed as any by birth, as bowed as any by experience.
Mather’s first wife and three of his children had died in the measles epidemic of 1713. His present wife was said to be as crazy as the long-forgotten Margaret Rule. His debts had brought him to ignominy, and only the help of his parishioners had saved him from the workhouse. His eldest son, Increase, had proved a wastrel and been sent to sea. And though his son Samuel had gone to the college, Mather still nurtured cold resentment toward the Harvard Corporation for passing him over fifteen years earlier, when they named John Leverett, former tutor and lawyer of liberal leanings, as president.
Nevertheless, Mather remained a man of great influence and overwhelming industry. He had published hundreds of sermons, tracts, and books on subjects ranging from infant baptism to smallpox inoculation, which he had advocated during the epidemic that had swept Boston. And the Harvard Board of Overseers had recently turned to him to produce a report on the state of the college.
“Since you are an overseer, John”—Mather produced five sheets of paper from his pocket—“you should see my findings before they be officially submitted.”
John Wedge looked at the papers. “Are you critical?”
“I see need for an investigation. From what I’ve discovered, and from what my Samuel saw in four years, there’s notorious decay at the place.”
“When I visit I see boys struggling to be men,” said John, “like us long ago.”
“Read.” Mather gestured at the sheet.
So John read while Samantha carried in two glasses and a decanter, poured, and peered over her husband’s shoulder.
Mather sipped his Madeira. “As I said fifteen years ago, to make a lawyer who never studied divinity the president of a college of divines is a preposterous thing. But I may at last have reason to remove that damned Anglican.”
“I believe Leverett is Congregationalist, like us,” said John.
“But were he removed, expectations of my ascendance to the presidency would be epidemical, John. You know that he’s an infamous drone.”
“Not by any account my sons have offered.”
“I think,” said Mather, shifting his eyes from John to Samantha, “that you should read the fourth paragraph of my report, as it pertains to your sons.”
John read aloud. “‘The students, outside of their classes, read plays, novels, and empty and vicious pieces of poetry, which have a vile tendency to corrupt good manners.’”
“Oh, my,” said Samantha.
“Would you not agree, John,” asked Mather, “that we should be recommending proper books of theology to our sons, rather than plays?”
“My sons know nothing of plays,” said Samantha.
“Oh, but they do, dear lady,” said Mather. “Abraham Wedge has been seen reading from the volume of Shakespeare that Leverett allows in the library.”
“Shakespeare?” said Samantha, her eyes widening.
“And Benjamin—I dread to say—has acted out scenes in chambers.”
“Acted out?” John closed his hands around the paper. “Who tells you this?”
“My son saw it one night. He saw your son act out the person of Puck.”
“Puck?” said John.
“A pagan spirit,” said Mather, “stripped to the waist, wearing a headdress with goat’s horns . . . a thing from the region of Sodom, I suspect.”
John looked at Samantha, whose expression spoke for her.
“Were it up to me”—Mather stood—“there would be no Shakespeare in that library to foul the minds of our sons.” He finished his drink. “Were it up to me.”
“Cotton,” said John, “why have you brought this to us now?”
“You should know, that you might save your son from himself before we save him for you.” Mather stopped in the doorway. “There is word that Benjamin intends to act out another play from Shakespeare. He should be stopped, John, for his own good.”
ii
A father could not wait when his sons were threatened, either by their own depravity or by one who believed himself ordained to sweep all depravity from the “college of divines.”
So John took the ferry to Charlestown and hired a calash to take him to Cambridge. The whole way he kept his eyes on the clouds reflecting above the red horizon, and this kept his mind from his worries until he reached the college.
There were more than a hundred students, most living in the buildings that formed the open quadrangle overlooking the village. Harvard Hall and Massachusetts Hall, newest and largest, stood opposite each other. Stoughton Hall closed the quadrangle so completely that there was no more than five feet of space between it and the other two. It was an arrangement of stately formality that left the old Yard quite literally behind and completely out of sight.
But boys would be boys, no matter the environment, and Isaac could hear a rowdy song coming from one of the upstairs chambers in Massachusetts Hall, while loud conversation echoed from rooms all around.
There was no doubt that the college was livelier than in John’s day. Across the colony, old ideas of Calvinist predestination were clashing with the belief that redemption was a matter of free will. And students applied free will wherever they could. Their studies remained strictly prescribed, but outside of class, they were in constant pursuit of new ways to vex the previous generation. They started periodicals, convened secret societies, and formed debating clubs, where the topics ranged from the sacred—“Is God knowable through physical evidence?”—to the profane—“Be it fornication to lie with one’s sweetheart after contraction but before marriage?”
Abraham Wedge and several friends had started a society with this charter:
Whereas Vice and Folly are in their zenith and gild the hemisphere with meteors whose false glare is mistaken for stars of wisdom and virtue, and whereas Bad language and Drunkenness are viewed as the height of good breeding amongst those around us, we hereby form the Philomusarian Club, to meet thrice weekly for gentlemanly conversation, tobacco, and beer.
That night, the Philomusarians were meeting in Abraham’s chamber. As pipe smoke floated above them, seven young men discussed the meaning of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. No conversation could have made Abraham feel closer to his friends or to the God they sought to honor by their decorous talk, until there came a pounding on his door.
Abraham—tall, long-legged, almost ascetic in his thinness—leapt to the door and yanked it open, prepared to harangue some interloper. Instead, he was greeted by his father’s angry glare. “Sir! What brings you here?”
“Shakespeare,” said John Wedge. “You’ve been reading Shakespeare.”
“He’s in the library, Father. He helps me broaden my mind, but”—Abraham glanced at his friends, then closed the door and stepped into the hall—“so does the apostle Paul.”
“Good,” said John. “You should read both.”
“Both? Then”—Abraham’s eyes widened like his mother’s—“you approve?”
“I do not approve of ignorance, and not to know Shakespeare, in the modern world, is plain ignorance. So you show good sense.”