Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  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.

  Chapter Eleven

  1723

  “REVEREND MATHER”—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.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  John Wedge always tried the soft discipline of a few compliments first. Those being over, he demanded, “So why have you chosen to keep me ignorant?”

  “Ignorant?” Abraham instinctively took a step back, not that his father had ever struck him. He simply feared disappointing him.

  “Do you know Puck?” asked John.

  “Puck? The fairy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

  “Did you know that your brother acted this fairy role?”

  Abraham’s silence made his answer.

  And John’s anger overflowed at his elder son, the dutiful one, the one who had always been conscientious, serious, religious. “Why did you not tell me of this?”

  “It would upset you, Father. I hoped he would stop, but he’s not the only one who acts characters in his room. Just the . . .”

  “The what?”

  “The leader of them.”

  “Have you heard that he is acting out a scene tonight?”

  “He is acting out a bug, I believe,” said Abraham.

  “A bug? An insect?”

  “That is what he told me. He said he was doing a play from a book about bugs.”

  A few minutes later, a door to a chamber in Massachusetts Hall burst open and Judge John Wedge stormed in, with Abraham close behind.

  Sitting on a stool in the middle of the room was a young man who might have resembled John and, more strongly, Abraham, except that neither of them would ever have been seen like this—wearing a purple cape and a cone-shaped hat.

  “Is this what fairies put on?” demanded John.

  “No,” said Benjamin, “’tis what clowns wear.”

  “And are you a clown, then?” John Wedge knocked the hat from his son’s head, grabbed him by the collar, and shook him.

  “Sir! Sir!” cried one of the other young men, who wore a hat and cloak fashioned from drapery. “Stop this.”

  John kept his eyes on his son. “Are you a clown to be laughed at by scoffers?”

  Benjamin broke away. “I’m Costard the Clown. A character.”

  “Character? Don’t speak to me of character. You have no character, to deceive me so.” John turned to Abraham. “You said he’d be a bug, not a clown.”

  Benjamin said, “I read a play in a book of bugs, Father.”

  “What is this book?”

  “A book of bugs,” said Benjamin. “If you know nothing more, I’ll say nothing more.”

  And there would be no further comment, because the noise had drawn Tutors Robie and Sever from their chambers. They needed only see the strange hats, the makeup, and the student feeding pages of script into the fireplace, and one of them shouted, “We have warned you about this, Benjamin Wedge.”

  Benjamin was ordered to appear before President Leverett the next day at two o’clock. He would be accompanied by his father, for whom he would need explanations, because his father had been entirely too furious to talk the night before.

  Benjamin knew that he would hear about the family’s reputation and the importance of observing the law. In response, he would tell his father that some boys were curious and some were careful, that some were smart and some were intelligent, that Abraham was intelligent but careful, but that Benjamin preferred curious and smart.

  Such curiosity had led Benjamin to wonder about his grandfather. What boy would not be curious about a man who had traveled Europe, ministered to the Indians, fought them, founded a school, and died right there in the Yard? Benjamin would say that he had hoped to know his grandfather by reading the books his grandfather had left to Harvard. After all, as his father had often said, “A man will be known by his books.”

  In time, Benjamin had come to Corporei Insectii and discovered the play within. He had sat in the library and read it all and felt that Isaac Wedge was speaking directly to him, telling him that it was all right to embrace an unorthodox idea, like a play preserved under the noses of those who would have cast it into the fire. And if it was all right to preserve plays and read them, Benjamin had decided, perhaps it would be all right to perform them, too, no matter the rules of the college or the customs of the colony.

  And so, late in his first year, Benjamin and a few friends had decided to act out scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  He had chosen to portray the fairy Puck, a troublesome spirit who took joy in confounding those around him. He had dressed as Puck, or undressed, stripping to the waist and tying fake goat’s horns to his head. He was beginning a scene with one of his mates, who was portraying the fairy princess Titania, when the door had burst open and the tutors had caught them.

  All through their four-week summer break, Benjamin had remembered the excitement of putting on those goat’s horns. He had become someone—something—else. And others had been excited simply by watching him. He knew he could not resist his feelings, despite threats of punishment. So at the beginning of his second year, he went to the library and copied out scenes to play from Love’s Labours Won. He had resolved that
if the tutors stopped him again, he would proclaim that a revered graduate had seen fit to preserve this play in darker days, and so it deserved attention.

  But this August morning, he could not be certain if he had fulfilled his grandfather’s wishes or violated a secret. Until he could think more on it, he should protect the book. So after morning recitations, he made his way to the library on the second floor of Harvard Hall.

  He did not intend to steal the book. The suspicious eye of Jacob Jones, keeper of the library, was too sharp for that. Benjamin had another plan.

  Tutor Jones said, “Here to read more plays, are we? We have only a few. But considering the fate you face, read fast.”

  Benjamin put on a polite demeanor and spoke polite words—“Please, sir, I would only distract myself with some reading before my punishment”—which seemed sufficient to convince Jones that Benjamin need not be watched any more closely than any other student. Moreover, Benjamin had been careful to come during library time allotted to sophomores. So Jones made a wave of the hand and turned away.

  Benjamin went to section twelve, eighth shelf. He took down a book, flipped through it, and replaced it like a casual reader. Then he slipped a volume from the sixth slot and examined it; yes, this was one he would read. As he turned to go to a chair, he acted as if something else had caught his attention on the bottom shelf, so he crouched.

  On a previous visit to this alcove, he had noticed that the bottom shelf was loose, held in place by no more than the weight of books upon it. Nails, after all, were expensive. If a shelf could be fitted without them, pennies could be saved.

  Now his penknife was in his sleeve. Now it was dropping into his hand. And while he angled his body so that the keeper could not see what he was doing, he slipped the blade into the little space between the shelf and the base of the bookcase. There were only half a dozen books on the shelf, so he was able, with a twist of the knife, to pivot the shelf a few inches and—