The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  “You were talking about politeness. You were saying it didn’t put butter on parsnips.”

  Esther seemed surprised. “I said that! I must be mad as a hatter.” She turned back to the Weeder. “Some folks think I am, you know. Mad as a hatter I mean. The way I see it life is a loop. You start off stark raving sane, moving yourself around like a piece on one of those racetrack board games that were the rage back in the twenties. You get to the point where folks begin to suspect you’re a bit weird, you keep on moving round, you come to the part where they think you’re off your rocker, and further along they’re whispering about whether to commit you or not, that’s how crazy you are, and you keep going on round till you reach the place where you’re certified mad as a hatter, and then whoops, you’re over the starting line and back into sanity country, ‘cause in your madness you see things more clearly than the folks who are reckoned to be sane. Which is where I’m at now, young man, and what I see”—Esther fixed the Weeder with her unblinking mischievous eyes—”is you’re running from something. Own up, young man. I saw you peeking through the blinds when you got here, you did it again when you came down to supper, but that wasn’t what tipped me off. What tipped me off was your eyes. They’re brimming with fear. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, being afraid. In my experience, which is considerable, folks who are afraid lead fuller lives. Personally I understand fear; fear runs through my body the way sap runs through a tree. I live in fear that each day will be my last on God’s earth. Well, I can’t, knock wood, complain. I’ve lived more than most. And loved more than most. And been loved more than most.” She glanced tenderly at the ancient fox terrier snoring away at her feet. The dog had lost all its hair because of a skin disease and was as pink-skinned as a newborn pig. “I like to try and imagine what visions are flashing through her head,” Esther said, watching the dog’s legs and tail twitch. “I expect she’s remembering some juicy rabbit that gave her a run for her money.” She hiccupped again but disregarded it. “I hope to God I twitch in my sleep,” she said with sudden vehemence. “I hope to God I’m remembering some of the juicy rabbits I’ve chased in my time.” She shrank tiredly back into her chair, smiling, clicking a bridge. “I hope to God I’ve got a chase or two left in me.” A faraway look came into Esther’s eyes. She let her tongue toy with the bridge for a while, then turned absently toward Snow. “Where was I, dear?”

  “You were saying that Silas here is running from something.”

  “I’m right, aren’t I?” Esther insisted.

  Snow nodded.

  “You know who he’s running from?”

  Snow nodded again. “It’s someone named Nate. The thing you have to understand about Silas”—Snow looked across the table at the Weeder, discovering a truth as she heard herself say it—”is that he’s running slowly enough to make sure he gets caught.”

  Esther hiccupped in exasperation. “That sounds like something fraught with meanings. I don’t know as I have the stamina to poke under the surface of things anymore. I’ve got another question for the both of you.” She looked slyly from one to the other. “Are you two sleeping together or apart?”

  Snow blushed and said “Apart” just as the Weeder, without thinking, said “Together.”

  Once again Esther fixed him with her unblinking eyes. “She’s got the rights of it and you’re just hoping the wish will become parent to the act. Fact is you’re not intimate enough to sleep together. The way I figure it, you can be intimate without being sexual but the vice versa is a natural disaster for everyone concerned. Course the young folks today don’t see things quite like that, but when they’ve put as many years under their belts as I’ve put under mine they will. Good Lord, I do go on, don’t I? If folks are destined to be lovers time is the one thing they have going for them—they don’t have to rush. They can afford to let nature take its course, which is one of the great luxuries of life that has been more or less discarded. Clocks have been speeded up. Everyone’s in a mad rush, though they don’t have any idea where they’re going. Folks are so busy getting nowhere fast they don’t bother to communicate anymore.”

  Esther’s tongue pried a bridge loose in her gums and snapped it back into place. “In my experience,” she said, scraping back her chair, pushing on its arms to raise herself into a standing position, “the more intimate folks are, the more they have a tendency to communicate in codes. Are you interested in codes, Mr. Sibley?”

  The Weeder stood up. “As a matter of fact I am.”

  Esther indicated with a jerk of her head that she expected the Weeder to follow her into the living room. “Tell me about it,” she ordered. She brushed him away when he tried to take her arm and, swaying slightly, started toward the door. The Weeder turned back to help Snow clear the table but she waved him away too. “This is what you came for,” she said.

  “Where was I?” Esther asked as the Weeder settled onto the couch next to her.

  “You asked me about my interest in codes.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember that. But that’s as good a place as any to pick up a conversation. Truth is I don’t sleep when I go to sleep.” Here she cackled at a memory. “My father, may he rest in peace, used to say old age was a shipwreck but it’s only in the last twenty years that I understood what he was getting at. Since sleep is out of the question I like to keep the conversation going as long as possible. So, young man, I invite you to tell me about your interest in codes.”

  “I’m interested in one code in particular,” the Weeder said. And he told Esther how his man Nate had arranged with A. Hamilton to send back information using coded phrases taken from Addison’s play, Cato.

  “My father was something of a Revolutionary War buff,” Esther remarked. “He would have loved to hear your stories about Nate. He was mighty proud of the fact that his great-grandfather was one of the first killed by the British—he was shot dead leading his men against the North Bridge at Concord. My father’s grandfather was born during the Revolution. I remember my father boasting about how his great-grandmother once helped an agent of General Washington’s. …”

  “His great-grandmother would have been Molly Davis,” the Weeder said excitedly.

  Esther clicked a bridge into place in surprise. “Now how would you know about Molly Davis?”

  “And the agent she helped was my man Nate.”

  “Your man Nate, who you’re running away from but slow enough for him to catch up with you?”

  The Weeder smiled, nodded. “Did your father ever mention Nate’s name in connection with Molly Davis?”

  Esther thought a bit. “Don’t remember him ever talking about Nate, to tell the truth. But I remember him describing the arrival of General Washington’s agent in Flatbush. Molly, I’m embarrassed to admit it, had a slave—”

  “John Jack.”

  “That’s the one. John Jack. He happened on someone spying on her through the window. He rammed a gun into the small of the man’s back and marched him around to the front door.” Esther leered lecherously. “Your man Nate, if he and the agent were one and the same, was a voyeur, young man!”

  “How did your father know so much about Molly Davis?” the Weeder asked.

  “I suppose he learned some of it from his father and grandfather, and some of it from Molly’s penny notebook.”

  The skin on the Weeder’s face tingled. “What became of this penny notebook?”

  Esther said, “Why, I imagine it’s still tucked away in that old sailor’s chest of his in the attic. Do you want to take a look at it?”

  Speaking very quietly the Weeder said, “I’d jump at the chance.”

  12

  Here, at last, is the part where my man Nate meets Molly Davis:

  I SEE HIM AS DISTINCTLY AS IF I WERE walking alongside him as he made his way down the spine of a dirt lane that cut under the heights of The New Lots to the village of Flatbush. The night would have been as bright as a night with a sliver of a moon can get. A warm, damp breeze was probably blowing in
from the Atlantic, making the planets appear swollen and near enough to touch. A shower of meteorites blazed high overhead, leaving long fading fingers trailing across the heavens. On either side of the lane, fireflies filled the dark fields with thousands of pinpricks of light as they flashed urgent coded messages to each other. So Nate would have imagined then; so I imagine now.

  Nate, dressed in coarse breeches and an old coat with deep pockets, carrying his wooden shoemaker’s kit strapped to his back, was roughly halfway between The New Lots and Flatbush when his ears caught the drumbeat of hoofs. He scurried into the underbrush in time to avoid a lobster patrol, Grenadiers, judging from their high bearskin hats silhouetted against the stars. They passed close enough for Nate to hear the brass matchboxes fastened to their chests tapping against the brass buttons of their tunics.

  Several miles down the lane he found the farmhouse that A. Hamilton had described—it was on the outreaches of Flatbush, the second house down from the communal barn with the date “1747” carved over the double doors. As a matter of prudence, Nate decided to scout the house before announcing his presence. He could hear the notes of a pianoforte coming from a front room, but he couldn’t make out who was playing because the shutters had been fastened for the night. Weaving between the fireflies, Nate circled around to the back of the house. Nearby a dog howled and several other dogs farther down the lane took up the cry. The barking ceased as suddenly as it had started. Nate spotted a faint light where a back shutter had been left ajar. He climbed over a fence and crossed the yard to the shutter. All the panes of the mullioned window behind the shutter but one had been replaced with animal skins stretched and oiled. Nate pressed closer to the single pane that remained. He found himself looking into a small bedroom. Against one wall was a narrow truckle bed covered with an indigo blue quilt. In the middle of the room was a naked woman. She was standing in a low tin tub filled with water, her profile toward Nate, her nose and mouth covered with a bandanna soaked in camphor, the pungent odor of which reached Nate outside the window. A whale oil lamp with a floating wick was set on the floor next to the tub and its flame projected flickering shadows of the woman as she sponged herself in the tin tub.

  Staring at her shadow dancing on the wall and ceiling, Nate surely caught his breath and leaned forward. The skin on his face must have tingled. He would have followed each movement she made, oblivious to everything else in the world. I can see her in my mind’s eye reaching for a towel folded over the back of a settle chair. I imagine her about thirty years old, with incredibly pale skin and (over the bandanna) eyes that conveyed shyness or sadness. Or all of the above. Her dark hair would have been cut short and parted in the middle, with wisps curling off negligently from her sideburns. Her shoulders would have been bony and narrow, her breasts small and jutting, her stomach flat, her pubic hair a tangle of damp curls. Throwing the towel over a shoulder, she stepped from the tub and walked with a slight limp (her leg had been broken in a fall from a horse and badly set) to a mirror hanging on the inside of a door.

  Watching the woman as she studied her reflection in the mirror, taking in the lean line of her back, her buttocks, her muscular thighs and calves (it turned out that she covered the equivalent of twenty miles a day spinning on her “walking wheel”), taking in her bare ankles and her bare feet, Nate surely lusted after her as he had never lusted after anyone or anything in his life.

  Contrary to published reports, my man Nate was no archangel. The fact of the matter is he had never set eyes on a naked woman before. He had imagined one often enough; had peeked with his classmates at sketches of the female body in medical texts at Yale; had once sweet-talked a girl into taking off her stockings and slippers and wading in the Connecticut River with him; had been mesmerized by the memory of her bare ankles and her bare feet for months afterward. But the vision that confronted him now transported him to a different level of existence. He felt lightheaded. He heard his heart pounding. He sensed an erection forming and instinctively thrust it into the side of the house. (I know you are out there, Nate, lurking in the crevices of your myth, squirming as I approach. I’m getting uncomfortably close, aren’t I, Nate?)

  He would have been content to stand with his nose pressed to the pane of glass and his erection pressed against the wall, watching the naked woman for the rest of his natural life if he hadn’t felt the business end of a blunderbuss stabbing into the small of his back under his shoemaker’s kit. In the darkness behind Nate someone chuckled quietly. “Figured as how them dogs wasn’t howlin’ for nothin’. Ol’ equalizer’s loaded with buck ‘n’ ball,” a Negro voice announced. “Jus’ move a muscle, ol’ John Jack, he gonna cut you into two peepers ‘stead-a one. Now go’n lift them hands a yours straight up.”

  Nate raised his hands over his head and froze.

  “Now you gonna start yerself walkin’ real slowlike ‘round to the front door, which is where a gentleman, which is what you sure as hell ain’t, would-a come to in the first place.”

  Nate risked a glance over his shoulder, made out the tall Negro holding the blunderbuss and did as he was bid. He reached the front door of the farmhouse, pushed it open with the toe of his shoe and stepped into the room. A woman bent with age, wearing a thick knitted shawl draped over her fragile shoulders, sat on a stool in front of the pianoforte, nodding and singing as she played what Nate recognized as an old English nursery rhyme. An old dog twitched in his sleep at her feet.

  Here is her song:

  If buttercups buzz [she sang, off-key] after the bee;

  If boats were on land, churches on sea;

  If ponies rode men, and grass ate the cow;

  If cats should be chased into holes by the mouse;

  If mommas sold their babies to gypsies for half a crown;

  If summer were spring and the other way round

  Then all the world would be upside down.

  And thumping on the keys with her arthritic fingers, the old woman started to repeat the refrain:

  Then all the world would—

  Suddenly she caught a glimpse of the Negro pointing his blunderbuss at a stranger. Her eyes widened. Her mouth worked, but no sound emerged. Then she found her vocal cords and screeched, “Molly! Come quick! John Jack’s gone and caught himself a rebel!”

  A door flew open. The woman who had been sponging herself in the tub stood under the lintel, one hand raised and touching it. She was wearing a man’s flannel dressing gown buttoned up to her neck. Her feet, visible beneath the hem, were still bare. The bandanna that had been over her mouth and nose was gone, but she still reeked of camphor.

  “Found ‘im peepin’ thru the winda,” John Jack reported. He prodded Nate in the back. “Who went, an’ said anythin’ ‘bout you lowerin’ them hands’a yours down?”

  Nate’s hands shot up again. He addressed the young woman. “You must be Molly Davis.”

  “What do you want from me?” she asked from the door.

  “What I want,” Nate told her, “is polite intercourse.”

  The woman measured Nate with her sad eyes for a long moment. Presently she asked, “What is your name?”

  Nate told her. She hesitated, then indicated with a jerk of her head that she expected him to follow her into the bedroom. John Jack and the ancient woman exchanged looks. John Jack shrugged and lowered his blunderbuss. Nate let his hands sink of their own weight to his sides, thrust them into the deep pockets of his waistcoat and plunged past Molly into the bedroom, into the odor of camphor. She followed him and closed the door. He turned to face her. The tin tub half-filled with water stood like a lake between them.

  Once again he saw her standing naked in the tub, saw the curve of her breast as she reached for the towel, and he had trouble collecting his thoughts. “I have a letter,” he finally managed. “For you. From A. Hamilton.”

  Slipping the wooden shoemaker’s kit from his shoulders, Nate sat down on the settle chair, took off his right shoe and removed a folded letter from its hiding place betwe
en the inner and outer soles. Stepping around the lake Molly accepted the letter, scooped up the whale oil lamp from the floor and walked with an almost imperceptible limp to the bed. She placed the lamp on a night stool, sat down on the edge of the mattress and slit open the seal with the edge of a fingernail. Moving her lips, sounding out each word, she read the letter. “We must burn this,” she said, looking up at Nate. “I will help you in every way I can.” Her eyes avoided his. “Is it true you were spying on me through the window?”

  Nate reddened. “I wanted to be sure I had the right house.” He nodded toward the bandanna soaked with camphor, neatly folded on a side table and, hoping to change the subject, asked, “Why do you breathe in camphor?”

  Molly said, “A woman in the village told me that a handkerchief soaked in camphor and held to the nose five minutes each day will prevent the yellow fever, beside purging the nasal passages and the lungs. You smile at things you don’t understand. It does you no credit. Back in Ireland they have a saying—what butter and whiskey won’t cure there’s no cure for. But I don’t hold with that. I believe in herb plasters and quince juice and lily roots and a salve made of opium and honey. It is well known that arsenic taken in small doses cures indigestion. The resin of a dragon tree calms the swelling that comes from gout.” Molly became aware of Nate’s eyes riveted on her. “Why do you stare at me? Because you saw me without clothing? You must be very innocent. Are you tongue-tied? Say something.” Molly’s eyebrows glided toward each other, her mouth stretched into a suggestion of a smile, though it seemed to Nate to be the kind of smile that was an alternative to tears. “To start with, tell me where you are from.”