“Oh, good Lord,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “It could be them.”
In the flaming light Will counted, “One … two …” The riders went back into the darkness, then into the light of the next cresset. “Three … four …”
“It is them!” she cried.
Will looked at the city gates, and while he was calculating the distance to safety, Eve spurred her horse.
“Wait!” he shouted after her.
But she was already off. An instant later, the four riders were sweeping past. Will’s horse reared, leaving him dangling from its mane. And all at once, before his horse dropped back onto four hooves, he heard Eve’s horse scream.
Then Eve screamed.
Will came upon them in front of the gates. Two of the men were dismounted, a third was holding their reins.
The fourth sat his horse and gave orders. “See if she’s hurt.”
“She’s hurt,” said one of the others, “and the horse is hurt worse.” He drew his pistol.
“Don’t shoot!” Will reined up in front of them. He saw no familiar faces. Only tradesmen, mechanics of some sort, clustered around Eve. She was on the ground and bleeding at the forehead. He jumped down and ran to her.
“She hit her head,” said the man with the gun.
“Knocked cold. Bleedin’ good,” said another.
“We can bandage her head,” said the mounted man, “but we can’t help the horse.”
Will knew more about horses than women, and while he prayed that Eve’s skull was not broken, he could see, even in the dark, that the horse’s leg was.
“It’s for the best to put her down,” said the man with the gun.
“Put her down!” cried Will.
“He means the horse,” said one of the others.
There was a single shot, and the filly collapsed where she stood.
“Now then,” said the mounted man. “I’m Dr. John Warren. These are my students. We’ve just come from birthing babies in Roxbury. Twins. I wanted them to see that the process works as well with two as one.”
Will stood and looked into each face. They still reminded him of mechanics, and in a way, they were.
Dr. Warren added that it would be good for them to study head injuries, so he would be glad to take the young lady back to the small dispensary he kept in his home.
Will rode with them to Warren’s house, watched them bind her bleeding scalp and discuss further treatment, should she not awaken in the morning—”and such things have been known to happen,” said Dr. Warren.
They appeared competent and trustworthy men, so Will felt that it was safe to leave her. Then he made for the home of his only friend in Boston.
As he rode through the rain, he prayed that further treatment would not be necessary. The girl simply had to wake up. How else would he find his brother?
A SHORT TIME later, Will Pike—wet, hungry, depressed—pounded on the door of a Hanover Street clock shop and watched candlelight descend from an upper chamber.
The beefy face and curled mustache appeared in a window, the door flew open, and Herr Gefahlz cried, “Will Pike? Will Pike is it? I was in bed, but I was not sleeping. Now I am not sleeping, but I am dreaming.”
Will stepped in and was embraced by the sound of clocks, each ticking with its own timbre and rhythm. No sound save his father’s voice had ever been so soothing.
And never had he tasted ham as smoky, as salty, as spiced, or as satisfying as the ham that Frau Gefahlz—a buxom Boston woman whose real name was Mary Milton—brought out for her “special boy.”
Herr Gefahlz poured a wine that was golden and came from a crock rather than a bottle. Will had never seen such color in wine before.
“You like?” asked Gefahlz. “It comes from Germany. It is called Riesling.”
“It’s sweet,” said Will.
“Sweet like the girls of Boston,” said Frau Gefahlz. “Sweet because sweet goes with salt and spice.”
“Ja,” said Herr Gefahlz, “so take a bite of ham, then a sip of wine.”
And though the day had been long, and the week had been longer, and the shock of losing the document had yet to wear off, and the shock of seeing Eve bleeding on the road had yet to sink in, nothing had ever soothed him more than that meal with friends.
And so comforted was he in their presence that he told them the whole story, from the day that the sheriff came to arrest his father.
With each twist in the tale, Herr Gefahlz twisted his mustache and muttered, “Ja? So?” And his wife sliced a bit more ham and poured a bit more wine for everyone.
“A big problem, you have,” said Herr Gefahlz finally. “But this is America. In America, we get up in the morning and go to work and solve our problems. Tomorrow, you will solve yours.”
And Will Pike slept more soundly than he had in a week.
AUGUST IN NEW England could bring a fortnight of gloomy rain followed by a single morning so glorious that the dead would wish to live again. On such mornings, the wind backed into the northwest and began to rise, and the sea was roiled, and the sky was swept of clouds, fog, smoke, and the sins of the city, leaving nothing in the atmosphere but color—a blue so intense that every man considered himself royalty robed in golden sunshine, drinking in air so fresh that it might have been distilled from a snow-cap.
The day grew even brighter for Will Pike when word arrived that Eve was awake. He hurried to Dr. Warren’s house, where he expected to find an invalid perched on pillows. Instead, Eve was dressed and perched on a chair, a bandage wrapping her head and a spot of blood seeping through it like a badge of courage.
“I’m ready,” she proclaimed.
“But—”
“She can travel,” said the doctor. “And since we caused her accident, her care is free, but I would speak to you in private, Mr. Pike.”
Will followed the doctor into the adjoining room.
A chart showing a human’s insides hung on one wall; another of a skeleton hung opposite. A third wall was covered in books and a fourth with bottles containing liquids and powders of every color, none more intense than the scarlet that flushed Dr. Warren’s face as he turned on Will and demanded, “What do you propose to do with that virginal young woman, sir?”
“Do with her?”
“She asked me this morning to direct her to the home of Nan Dreedle.”
“Nan Dreedle?”
“By God, sir, if you’ve brought her to Boston to make a whore of her, I’ll have your testicles in a jar.” As proof, the good doctor whipped a scalpel from the leather case on his desk and held it before Will’s face.
Will stepped back. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Nan Dreedle kept a house until the syphilis drove her mad.”
“You have me wrong, sir. We seek my brother. He may have told Miss Corliss that he could be found at Nan Dreedle’s.”
The doctor lowered the scalpel. “Was he known to frequent whorehouses?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Then you have no interest in ruining this young woman’s life?”
“Were it up to me, she’d be back in Newport, ruining someone else’s. But she thinks she loves my brother.”
“Then perhaps we can find him.”
MOUNT WHOREDOM WAS what they called the back side of Beacon Hill, for reasons that became clear as they climbed from Cambridge Street, past rows of stylike storefronts and rotting row houses. Since the end of the Revolution, the whores had been moving out and families of black freedmen had been moving in, so that some now called it Mount Africa. But either way, even this poorest section of Boston looked bright and brilliant that late summer day.
And it did not take long for them to find the information they sought.
The whores trusted Dr. Warren, for he had helped many of them, providing them with ointments for their sores, setting bones broken by rambunctious customers, and counseling them on the dangers of the life they had chosen.
Some of the g
irls called him Dr. Do-Good behind his back, but it was plain from the way they greeted him that they respected him.
Nan Dreedle’s two-story house was shuttered. “Clapped up” someone had written on the door. So they went a short distance up the hill, to where a woman in a low-cut dress and tall feathered hat sat on a stoop. The sign above her door read, RABBIT ANNIE’S HOME FOR MEN.
“Hello, Annie,” said the doctor.
Annie squinted in the morning sunlight. Her hair was hennaed red, though gray roots showed. Her teeth were blackened from wine. Her lips and cheeks were reddened from rouge, so too were her breasts where the tops of her nipples showed above her bodice.
“A bit early for you, ain’t it, Doc?” she asked.
“How are you feeling, Annie?”
“Fit as a fiddle. Tight as a drum. Wet as a fish—” Annie’s eyes fell on Eve, who was listening, wide-eyed. “Hell … I feel terrible, Doc. Sore in the … in the … down there. I was hopin’ there’d be no customers today, but a girl has to eat.”
“Have you recently had a customer named Pike?” asked the doctor. “North Pike?”
“I remember a name. But my memory is—” Annie rubbed thumb and forefinger, and Will placed a coin in her hand. “He didn’t want me. Too old, I guess.”
Eve spoke up. “Is he here?”
Rabbit Annie laughed. “He was all over the hill the last two days. Said he’d have every girl in every house, ’fore he headed up Falmouth way, up to Maine.”
“Maine?” said Eve. “Why Maine?”
“Well, dearie,” Rabbit Annie grinned, “I hate to say bad to such a sweet-lookin’ biscuit as you, but he said he was headin’ north to settle down with a jealous woman, so he was spendin’ big for the last time.”
“Jealous woman?” Eve’s face lost all color. “I’m his jealous woman.”
“Be quiet,” snapped Will. Then he turned back to Annie. “Did he say where he got the money to spend so free?”
“Said he’d sold ‘a fine piece of parchment.’ Said he felt richer than a rooster in a fresh-painted henhouse.”
Now Will’s face lost its color. “Did he say what the parchment was?”
“Dearie, he was more interested in pussy than parchment.”
Without another word to Rabbit Annie, Will thanked the doctor, turned, and headed down the hill.
“Where are you going?” demanded Eve.
“Falmouth, Maine,” he said.
“They’ve renamed it.” Dr. Warren followed. “They call it Portland, now.”
“Why don’t you all stay?” shouted Rabbit Annie. “For another five shillings, I’ll tell you how I got my name … every detail.”
A FEW HOURS later, Will Pike and Eve Corliss stood at the rail of a Portland-bound packet leaving Boston Harbor.
Will’s task had grown infinitely more complicated. If he found his brother, he would then have to find the man to whom his brother had sold the document, then convince the man to sell it back.
And a greater complication was Eve Corliss herself, who had threatened that if Will left her in Boston, she would tell Dr. Warren that he had raped her.
“My brother no longer loves you,” Will had said as they stood on the wharf. “He never loved you. That should be obvious.”
“And so will my belly be obvious in another month.”
“My brother?”
She had looked out to sea. “A man should not ask a lady such questions.”
Now, the northwesterlies were pushing the packet over the wave tops, and Eve was already seasick.
Will stood behind her on the pitching deck, steadied her, and said, “Keep your eyes on the horizon. That’s how my brother told me to outsmart seasickness.”
So she retched over the side, then fixed her eyes on Nantasket Roads, the channel to the south, and after a few moments cried out, “Good God! They’re here!”
She pointed to a black-hulled schooner tacking up from the south. The gunwales were painted red and there was a red diamond on each sail, trademarks of the Corliss line.
“That’s the Pretty Eve,” said Eve.
Will borrowed a glass from a passenger and looked, and there on the quarterdeck were Robert Danton and Curly Bill Barton.
“They’ve found us,” cried Eve.
“They’ve found Boston. They may never find us,” said Will, “unless they put their glass on us right now and see you puking over the side. So get below.”
And the two vessels passed in the wind.
EIGHT
PETER AND EVANGELINE WERE jogging his favorite route: from the Back Bay over the Fiedler footbridge to the Esplanade, then along the Charles River and onto Atlantic Avenue, where they could glimpse the harbor glittering in the morning sunlight.
“This is exercise,” he said. “Not like that silly power walking.”
“I don’t power walk,” she said. “I stride aggressively.” And she sped up.
He hung back for a moment to look at her. It was a good angle. She had long legs and—there was no better way to say it—a nice ass, nicely covered in running shorts over spandex. It was all right to think that way about the woman you loved … or had once loved and had fallen in love with again. Especially after that business with the flat tires.
“I know what you’re looking at,” she said. “Stop it and pick up the pace. I want to talk.”
Peter’s suspicions about the guy on the Cliff Walk had turned out to be just that—bad thoughts about a helpful stranger … but modern thoughts, the kind that were planted in the minds of people who watched cable news or read the papers. The message, whether they were talking about terrorists or sex killers, was simple: It’s a scary world out there, and bad things can happen. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Peter liked to believe that neighbors looked out for each other, a man’s word was his bond, and, as his mother used to tell him, a stranger was just a friend you hadn’t been introduced to. That was the world he remembered from his boyhood, a better world than most Americans lived in now, and probably a better world than they’d lived in back then.
Still, the chances of meeting the serial killer instead of the Good Samaritan were small, no matter what they told you on television. So Peter was glad he had trusted that guy on the Cliff Walk. It meant they had the flat tire fixed quickly and were back on the road to Boston before eight.
And even though Evangeline had promised to cook dinner, Peter had two rib-eyes in his refrigerator. They’d go nicely with the 2005 St. Emilion he wanted to taste before deciding to buy a case. So he cooked the steaks, the wine showed promise, and she stayed the night.
Now he caught up to her. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Pick a topic. If you can talk while doing aerobic exercise, you haven’t reached your maximum heart rate. So talk.”
“All right,” he said over the thump of Reeboks on sidewalk. “That guy last night … what made you trust him enough to get into his car?”
“Instinct,” she said. “People who do photography books aren’t dangerous.”
Thump-thump-thump.
“And he liked that I was a travel writer,” she added.
“Did he want a job with your magazine?”
“Don’t know,” she said as they turned off Atlantic Avenue and started up Hanover Street. “But he let me see some of the pictures that were still on his”—She took a couple of breaths—”on his memory card.”
They ran past the cafés and Italian bakeries just opening for business.
“How about an espresso and a cannoli?” said Peter.
“No. This was your idea. A run through the city, you said. Good for the circulation, you said. The couple that jogs together scrogs together, you said.”
So they kept going through the North End, the oldest neighborhood in Boston, once Puritan, later Irish, now Italian and changing again.
“He had a good eye,” she told Peter as they passed Paul Revere Park. His pictures … the Cliff Walk, Queechee Gorge—”
&nb
sp; “What?” Peter stopped on the sidewalk.
Paul Revere looked down from his bronze horse.
Evangeline kept jogging in place. “Queechee Gorge.”
“Queechee Gorge? Taken recently?”
“Taken in foliage season.”
“Recently, then. What else did he talk about?”
“The beauty of the Cliff Walk … current events.”
“Like the repeal of the Second Amendment?”
“If you’re photographing New England, you go to Queechee Gorge in October. He didn’t have anything to do with that professor.” And she set off again.
Maybe she was right, thought Peter. Maybe he was too suspicious. Maybe they needed something sweet for breakfast. So he jogged across the street and ducked into Modern Pastry.
When he caught up to her on State Street, he was carrying a box. “Two almond turnovers, for after we shower.”
“The prince of willpower.”
They didn’t talk much more as they ran toward the Old State House. They went up Tremont, by the Old Granary Burying Ground, over Boston Common.
“I’ll race you to your stoop,” she said as they came through the Public Garden.
“All right. Let’s start from—”
“Go!” And she took off.
“Hey!” He sprinted after her.
She darted across Arlington Street, which was jammed with morning traffic. Horns blared, somebody shouted at them, then she sprinted up Marlborough Street and into a different world, a tree-lined low-traffic tunnel of brownstones and restricted parking, quiet enough that Peter could hear Evangeline’s thump-thump-thump half a block ahead of him.
He dodged an old woman walking her bichon frise, then he dodged the dog’s droppings, then he shouted over his shoulder, “Pick up after your dog!”
“Fuck you!” came the answer, along with a few barks.
Evangeline laughed and crossed Berkeley Street and sprinted to the finish—the steps of his condo.
Peter burst across Berkeley right after her, dodging cars and talking trash. “You can’t beat me, baby. I’m right on your ass.”
“Don’t drop the pastries! And leave my ass out of this!” With a final kick, she grabbed for the newel post in front of his house. “I win.”
The Lost Constitution Page 11