She sat on the edge of the bed and looked into his eyes, searching for some reflection of the man she had once loved.
It could be said of some men that they were God-fearing, and that would tell everything… or stern or loving or ambitious. But Hard Sam Hilyard had never been one to label. He had been a man of enormous appetite—for everything. Her own Eldredge, at fifty-six, was no less a man than he had been twenty-five years before, steady and calm through success and tribulation. But the bright-burning passion of Sam Hilyard, which had caused her to love him and then to hate him, now seemed to have guttered at last.
“What happened, Sam?”
“I lost my bearings.”
She gripped his hand in both of hers. “I’ll help you to find them again.”
He shook his head. “I hoped to give you comeuppance. For stickin’ by your father, for marryin’ Eldredge. Instead, I destroyed myself.”
“Comeuppance?” she whispered. “The book of history? The book mentioned in Serenity’s broadsides? Is it real?”
“The log of the Mayflower. The story of our ancestors. I ran slaves to get it. I killed Kwennit to keep it—”
At this, Hannah let go of his hand.
“I never meant to. We struggled, the ship lurched…” Every word was as great an agony to speak as to recall. “I ran. When I stopped runnin’, God sent for the book, but I would not give it up even with a little girl at my side. I defied God, right there on the flats.”
“Sit back, Sam. If you become agitated, you may start to bleed again.”
“Whether I do or not, you have no worry from the book.”
“You’ve destroyed it, then?”
“ ’Twill never be seen again.”
“Miz Hannah,” her servant came to the door. “British barge up Pamet way, workin’ south. We’d best leave now.”
Hannah touched his face. “You still have friends, Sam.”
“My friends are all dead.”
She did not return to Billingsgate Island for a week, as the British patrols coasted close to intimidate blockade-runners between Orleans and Sandwich. They would not detain an empty vessel for long, especially one carrying women, but the wise wife of a privateer could not endanger herself recklessly.
Though it was a bright, chilly day, she saw no smoke curling from the chimney, and the ragged curtains were pulled tight. She hiked up her skirts and ran to the house. His body lay, as it had that first day, in darkness and squalor. She gasped at the smell. She whispered his name. She cursed herself for coming too late.
Then she drew closer and saw that he was breathing. His eyes were open, still staring at the ceiling.
“Go away,” he whispered. “I’m dying.”
“And damn near killed me with fright in the bargain.” She took a pitcher of water from the bedside and threw it in his face. “Get up!”
His eyes widened with shock, and he gave her a furious glare. “Can’t you let a man die in peace?”
“You’ll not die around me, nor kill me with the stench of a shitted bed.” She pulled back the blankets. “Get up.”
“I can’t walk.”
“You won’t walk.”
A doctor had told her that if the wound had not killed him by now, he would survive, though he might spend the rest of his life in misery.
“You try me, woman. I been in bed a week… dyin’.”
She grabbed the broom and whacked his legs. “Get up!”
He rolled away and she whacked him again, across his skinny rump. “Get up. Get out of your own shit. Take your fate like a man!”
He buried his head in his hands and tried to curl into a ball. “No!”
“Yes!” Hannah was a woman who could not stand waste. And this, regardless of its history or its future, was a life wasting away. “I thank God for that day in the mill, when I saw what kind of man you are.”
And she struck him again with the broom.
“Stop! My face. My teeth. They pain like knives. Stop!”
“I thank God that I never came to love you more.” She hit him one more resounding thwack that knocked him over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. “I thank God.”
For a time, there was silence from the space between the wall and the bed.
“Sam?” she leaned over his body and wondered if she had given him his wish.
Then he looked up, but his eyes seemed to be focused on a sound. “What do I hear?”
It was the sound that had pointed him north after the sinking of the Somerset, the sound that had drawn him, almost against his will, to his brother’s house the night he returned to Cape Cod.
“What do I hear?”
“That’s… your granddaughter,” she whispered.
“Granddaughter?”
“Yours… and mine.”
He raised himself to the window and peered out. Hannah’s daughter was crossing the dunes with a six-month-old child in her arms.
“Your daughter brings her daughter to visit an old friend of her mother’s. Reveal this truth to anyone, especially to them, I’ll give you reason to wish you had died this week.”
“My daughter and granddaughter,” he whispered, staring into the bright September afternoon.
Hannah watched his shock turn to joy, then consternation. He jumped up, straightened his clothes, pulled the covers up, and wrinkled his nostrils at the stench.
“I cannot meet them like this,” he said.
“No. You’re right.” Though she remained outwardly calm, her inner turmoil overwhelmed her. To save Sam from drowning, Hannah had sailed into the sea of her own past. She had endangered not only herself but her family as well. She decided that throwing him a rope was enough. He would have to climb it himself.
“Clean yourself and perhaps I will bring them next time.” Then she hiked up her skirt and hurried out.
When she returned the following week, Sam was bathed and his beard neatly trimmed. The cottage was straightened. Tea brewed upon the hearth. But Hannah brought only a doctor from Barnstable. He gave Sam a dose of laudanum, then extracted four teeth, the roots of which had been shattered by the pistol ball.
She left him in misery, though she promised that when she returned, she would bring his daughter and grandchild at last.
By the following week, the swelling had gone down. Sam was mending net when she approached, and she felt a rush of pity at the sight of him, his face filling with anticipation, then collapsing with disappointment because she was alone once more. And this time, she did not promise that they would come. Instead, she made him promise never to try to see them.
“Let them be the ideal of your life. Remember that they exist because of you. But don’t endanger their happiness to find your own.”
iv.
The knowledge that he had fathered a daughter did not save Sam Hilyard from his demons. They still danced on the Billingsgate dunes and whistled in the corners of his brain. But the vision of the child, the purity of her cry echoing across the sand, had saved him from death.
There was a reason to endure, after all, if only to make amends.
He spent the autumn gaining strength. He rebuilt an old fishing boat, which he named the Nancy, after his granddaughter. When the British were not about, he dug quahaugs, cut them into pieces, and baited them onto a long line of hooks. Sometimes he caught cod, sometimes bass, and often nothing. But in this, he joked to himself, he was like one of the Apostles.
The fishermen no longer deserted Billingsgate as winter approached. Near the southern tip of the island there were now a dozen year-round families. A schoolhouse was planned, and there was even talk of building a lighthouse when the war ended.
But farther north, where Sam lived, the population grew sparse and the wind shaped the world. And Sam came to study all that he had taken for granted as a boy. He remembered his father making a lesson of the ospreys that nested in the old whale tower. The tower was gone, and there were no tall trees left on the Cape, so the ospreys were gone as well. But Sam found truth in the tides
and the migration of the shorebirds and the browning of the dune grass that would green again in spring.
Neither wars fought with British frigates nor petty hatreds fired by ancient feuds could interrupt the orderly pattern of the natural world. Birth, death, survival, family—these were what mattered.
Each night Sam stood near the spot where his grandmother had died and gazed west toward Barnstable, home of his daughter and granddaughter and the woman he still loved. And the wind rattled the dune grass. So fragile, he thought, and yet without it, the island would blow away like a man without friends, a man without a family.
He yearned to see them. More than once he planned to go to Barnstable as a fisherman selling his catch, simply to gaze upon them again. But the time never seemed right.
Instead, he stayed on Billingsgate and watched the war play out. The British attacked Rock Harbor and burned whatever lay at anchor. Cape Cod sailors ran the blockade in whaleboats. But Cape Cod selectmen dined on British ships, and British officers paid gold guineas for goods in friendly towns. Principles, Sam decided, were a thing of the past.
Then he found his grandmother’s principles rolled into the barrel of the blunderbuss he had once hidden in the wall. And he remembered his father facing Captain Ourry on the deck of the Somerset. And he decided there was a principle to hold him as well.
Hannah had revealed her deepest secret to save him. It would be the noble thing to honor her wishes, to keep no more dreams of his children. They were his only in their conception, after all. He would hold to a principle and deprive himself of the greatest joy he might know. There could be no worse punishment, yet nothing more cleansing.
When word arrived that the Treaty of Ghent had been signed and the foolish war was over, Sam sent a letter to England. He did not know if he could ever exorcise his demons, but he had begun.
Squire Bellamy,
The log of the Mayflower is gone, as are the black children who fed sharks to pay for it and the white men you sent to find it. If you send more men to the island spoken of in the book, they will not find me. If they do find me, they will meet the strange-lettered axe spoken of in the book, as did their predecessors. You have no recourse. You are as guilty as I. My mind may brew a storm, but I will keep my world tranquil.
Yr. Obedient Srvt.
Sam Hilyard
CHAPTER 27
July 15
Board Meetings and Floorboards
Sam’s letter to Bellamy won Carolyn Hallissey her job.
Now, with the snap of a manicured finger, she could convene the board of trustees—three real estate developers, two bankers, a selectman, a lawyer, a minister, and a retired teacher—for a breakfast meeting to discuss the purchase of a topsail schooner.
Once, the trustees had all been related, tweedy old Bostonians who summered on the Cape and kept their fists tightly clenched. But as times and endowments changed, so did the board. More than one seat was now held by a major contributor, like John M. Nance, who sprawled in a wing chair in Carolyn’s office after the meeting.
“Hilyard and his faggot Hollywood friend went metal-detecting on Billingsgate the other day.”
She laughed. “It’s not there. And don’t be so critical of our gay friends, John.”
Her secretary David brought coffee, served it, and left.
“You mean, like him?”
“David is very efficient. He’s doing a lot of good work for us. At night he goes home to Provincetown.”
“Another faggot.” Nance stirred his coffee. “Too bad that old Rake bastard got killed. He was the best hope to know the truth.”
“Sam Hilyard said the log was gone in 1815. Maybe we should believe him.”
“William Bradford’s diary was gone, but somebody found that. Dumb luck led you to Sam Hilyard’s letter. Rake thought the log was gone until you got him thinking about it.” Nance took a rose from the vase on her desk and slipped it into the lapel of his white suit. The rose matched his tie. “I don’t think Rake knew what was in that log. We can only speculate. But finding it could make or break the most satisfying deal of my life. I want it found.”
It had not been dumb luck that drew Carolyn Hallissey to Hertfordshire a year earlier, but intelligence, planning, ambition, then dumb luck.
As curator of Cape Cod paintings for Old Comers Plantation, she had tapped the deep pockets of contributor Nance to bid against the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for works by Sandwich Impressionist Dodge McKnight, against the Heritage Plantation for the seascapes of Frank Vining Smith and C. D. Cahoon, against anybody for the work of Provincetown modernists like Robert Motherwell and Ross Moffett. And she had thrilled the art world when she found, in the attic of an old Truro house, a study of shadow and light called Tom’s Hill, Winter, an undiscovered Edward Hopper.
But Old Comers needed a signature collection, and for that, she had chosen the eclectic and relatively inexpensive work of Tom Hilyard.
She had followed the movement of his paintings via mailing lists, call lists, and trade publications. When a British newsletter reported that the contents of the Bellamy estate in Hertfordshire were being auctioned, she recalled a Cape Cod legend that Black Bellamy was an ancestor of the Hilyards. And one of the missing Hilyard paintings was called Voyage from Hertfordshire. Coincidence or… connection?
She went to her board connection, which had been forged during job interviews, over drinks and dinner, on business trips to New York and Boston, and in a dozen hotel rooms. She had no guilt over her relationship with John M. Nance. She had been dealt enough bad luck that she took whatever good came her way, including a free trip to England.
The Bellamys, like the empire, had long passed their peak when the buyers descended on Moseby Hall. But there was little for Carolyn Hallissey to bid on. The magnificent Joshua Reynolds portrait of Lemuel Bellamy was going to the Royal Gallery, and there were no Tom Hilyards hidden in the corners. Her voyage to Hertfordshire did not uncover the Voyage from Hertfordshire.
But here was where dumb luck played its role. On the day before the auction she was perusing the collection from the Bellamy library. The most valuable volumes had been sold already. All that remained was a set of common editions of Swift, Smollett, Defoe, Dickens, and Sterne.
She found Sam Hilyard’s letter in a copy of Robinson Crusoe. Neither the letter nor the book, it seemed, had been read since 1815. She bought the set for $1,000. She knew the story of the axe, Nance’s ancestors, and Jack’s Island. Now a letter linked them all to a volume that any museum in the world would kill for. John M. Nance was very much interested.
A month later, she was appointed director of Old Comers Plantation, and the oral history project began. She talked first with Rake Hilyard, who told her that Voyage to Hertfordshire had been in his house for years.
ii.
Geoff had not slept well. In the middle of the night he had felt the ghosts ambling through the old house, Sam Hilyard and Hannah, Rake, and all the rest. Once, the wind banged the barn door open and he was certain he saw the ghost of Jack Hilyard skitter through the moonlight.
It had been the kind of night to bring out the black dogs, as he called them, thoughts of mortality that could make you question whatever you were doing at the time and that usually fetched a little religion right behind them. His had been Catholicism, learned from a mother who kept her faith though she married a lackadaisical Protestant and brought this lackadaisical half-Catholic into the world.
If he started asking hard questions, he knew he’d be up all night and useless when he went after the answers in the morning. So he contemplated the effortless majesty of whales gliding through the bay and finally slipped back to sleep.
Around eight o’clock he decided to walk down to his brother-in-law’s house. Maybe Janice was there.
The bobwhites whistled in the woods along the road. The shade was cool and dense. The underbrush grew so thick around pitch pine and oak that you couldn’t see more than a few feet into the woods. It was dark and prime
val, seemingly indestructible, though not much more than a generation old and as fragile as… well, his marriage.
The road came into a meadow about a hundred yards from the L-shaped Greek Revival house the Bigelows had built in 1850. Geoff was wearing jeans so that he could slip into the brush and case the place, like some rip-off artist with a screwdriver in his pocket. But he didn’t see the Now Voyager or hear his kids.
He picked a few blueberries from a bush by the road. They were fat and juicy and tasted of pine. Pick some for your cereal, grab a few blackberries. Enjoy life. But first, find your family and straighten out this mess.
Then, a stretch Cadillac about the size of a coal barge came down the west side road and pulled into Doug Bigelow’s driveway. Was he so confident that he now had a chauffeur?
But it wasn’t a chauffeur. It was much worse—John M. Nance, Strip-the-Plants Nance, Public Enemy Number One on the environmentalists’ hit list, also on the lists of the several conservation commissions, the EPA, a few horned husbands… and Rake Hilyard.
Doug seemed to treat Nance like the long-lost uncle who also happened to hold the mortgage on the house. They shook hands, and Doug invited him in. But Nance wanted to go for a walk, so they went for a walk—right down the road toward Rake’s house.
Geoff didn’t think he’d look too good if they saw him spying from the brambles. He’d look even worse if he popped out of the woods like some tourist hunting for the beach. So he hunkered down and hoped he hadn’t grown allergic to poison ivy in his old age.
“… doesn’t know what’s good for him,” Nance was saying.
“He seems very interested in this Mayflower log.”
“You’d better hope he doesn’t find it. If he does, he won’t be a struggling architect with two mortgages, two car payments—”
“And a few pretensions.”
Pretensions? Geoff almost jumped up right then. He had principles, not pretensions, but they were right about the rest.
“He’ll have a lot of dough,” Nance was saying, “and very little incentive to make the sale.”
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