The Oak Island Affair

by Jane Bow

  Something — a tremble of air, a ripple through the library’s silence — made Vanessa look over her shoulder. A man in a beige windbreaker, with a night’s growth of whiskers sprouting, was standing right behind her at the end of the stacks. He was absorbed in a book.

  Vanessa stared at the computer screen. “He’s Blackbeard’s man,” Brigit would declare if she were here. And then she would do something. Suddenly Vanessa became two people again: one paralyzed — shut up, put a lid on it; the other one clicked out of the site she was reading, then got up, went over to the man, and raised her voice.

  “Excuse me.” Whiskers turned his head, blinked. Vanessa smiled. “Forgive my bluntness, but what are you doing here? You’re obviously not reading.”

  The man said nothing.

  Vanessa returned to her computer. Websites the last person on a computer has visited are not difficult to trace. Vanessa clicked through a series of home pages, laying a false trail through sites on protein supplements, abdominal exercises and the origins of the expression Fuck You. Then, turning off the computer, gathering up her books, she repaired to the women’s washroom downstairs where she sat marvelling at her brashness. What if she was wrong and he was just some poor mature graduate student getting away from his wife and baby for a few early morning hours to study?

  When she doubled back to peek through the stacks, Whiskers was sitting at her computer. “Coincidence,” a word used by people who did not know any better.

  So who was the bastard? Ed’s lackey? Some unknown third party?

  No unknown third party could have known about the diary, and why would anyone take an interest in what she was doing here unless they did?

  She saw Ed kissing her, no longer hearing. Greedy.

  So? Aren’t we all greedy? Why else was she here?

  The only person in the technology section was the librarian. Vanessa turned on a computer and called up the Scottish Templars again.

  The door opened. She could see in the reflection on her screen who had come in.

  Fear, a close cousin of greed, knocks everything else out of the mind, destroys concentration and the fragile tendrils of new thought, erects crude scenarios of what could happen.

  Vanessa forced herself to stare at the screen. Clicked away from the site she had just entered.

  Whiskers took a seat at a table across the room and began to read a magazine.

  Vanessa slapped her hand against the top of the desk.

  “That’s it, I can’t do this anymore.” Her voice startled the librarian, who was sorting request forms behind the counter. “This man,” she pointed at Whiskers, “has been following me all over the library, eavesdropping on my research.”

  The librarian’s rabbit eyes darted from Vanessa to Whiskers. Behind him, through a doorway into the closed stacks, Vanessa could see a desk. There was a computer on it.

  “I’m sorry Miss,” the librarian whispered, “but I don’t see what I can do—”

  Vanessa leaned close to whisper back.

  “Look, this creep frightens me. Do you think you could give me access to a secure computer?” She nodded toward the doorway behind him. “Nobody else is in yet today, right? Could I go in there?”

  “Oh no.” The librarian’s head shook. “I’m sorry.”

  Whiskers turned a page in his magazine.

  “Please? I’ve got to get this research finished. I only need to check a few more websites. Please?” She tried to smile. “I promise I’m not a hacker or a terrorist. You could come with me. Just for a few minutes? He’s followed me all the way here from Chester and I’m scared. Please?”

  The librarian took a thousand years to look her over, weighing the relative consequences then finally stood up.

  “Ten minutes.” He led her through a doorway marked “Employees Only” to a cluttered desk set in an enclave surrounded by metal floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with books, video tapes, CDs, boxed disk sets. Vanessa sank into the chair.

  “Thank you!”

  “Yeah, well I could get fired you know.”

  “I know. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  In here, out of the public domain, amongst the shambles of his desk life, the librarian realized he had power. With it, as he turned on the machine, came magnanimity. He tilted his head toward the door.

  “Did you cover your tracks out there?”

  Vanessa grinned. “Yes.”

  A tinge of color came into his cheeks.

  “I’ll go back out. Keep watch for you.”

  Vanessa resumed her search, taking notes.

  1. The Templar who had sailed to Nova Scotia was a Scot called Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney. By 1398 trade was taking place across the Atlantic. North American buffalo furs had been appearing in Florence long before Columbus sailed, and Greenland ladies were wearing the latest fashions from Burgundy.

  2. Henry Sinclair had crossed the Atlantic with a fleet of twelve ships. He had taken with him two hundred men-at-arms, Knights Templar, soldiers, carpenters, shipwrights, sail-makers, armourers, and Cistercian monks, who were farmers. Apparently he was planning to found a new Templar empire.

  3. Henry Sinclair was exploring the wilderness coast to the south of Nova Scotia when his best friend and fellow knight, James Gunn, died. Henry had his men carve a huge outline of a Knight Templar in a rock face on what is now the Massachusetts coast.

  4. Henry returned to Scotland in 1400 and was killed by English marauders the same year.

  Vanessa stared at the page. If Henry had come to Nova Scotia to found a new Templar Empire, why had he gone home again?

  Mlle Durocher’s voice came to her. ‘With history you must think it through, Vanessa. Put yourself inside the skin of the one you are researching.’

  Brother Bart’s St. Clere was looking for something. And the Templars had fled France with a huge treasure. Was that what Henry had brought here? Or was it the books of Templar wisdom? But if Henry Sinclair had felt the need to bury something ninety years after the Templars were dissolved, why wouldn’t he have done it back home, on one of his own remote Orkney Islands off the northern coast of Scotland, where he could keep an eye on it?

  Because the treasure and the books of knowledge would have been priceless and the Orkney Island waters were swarming with Vikings. Also, someone might have talked.

  Someone had talked. How else had Brother Bart’s Captain St. Clere known to come looking here? And what had he found? What had happened to Brother Bart? If only she could have finished the translation.

  Vanessa scrolled through the St. Clere site. Maybe there would be a picture. There was. An ancient Templar ring, flat topped with an insignia: two knights mounted on one horse.

  Outside a brisk west wind had come up. The sun was shining but a tower of grey cloud was building out over the sea to the east as Vanessa slid into the traffic flowing south.

  “Gold stands for love.”

  The Templar Henry Sinclair, who had come to Mahone Bay in 1398, was connected to Brother Bart’s pirates. However, carbon dating of the Oak Island finds put the treasure much later, in Brother Bart’s day.

  So, had Brother Bart’s pirates liberated the Templar treasure from Oak Island? Surely not, they were already carrying Brother Bart’s treasure.

  Mlle Durocher’s voice: If they found what they were looking for, they would have had to leave something behind.

  Vanessa checked her rear view mirror. No sign of Whiskers. Good. Could she have been wrong about everything that had happened in the library? Because if Whiskers was Sanger’s flunky, it meant that Brigit was right. Edward Sanger was Blackbeard: Seth. What else, therefore, might he do?

  Ahead of her, the traffic slowed. Vanessa took her foot off the accelerator, glanced into the mirror again and there, moving in from the other lane, two cars behind her, its grill glinting in the sunlight, was a blue car with Whiskers at the wheel.

  Vanessa slowed so that the car behind her would pass. Then, braking hard, she dared Whiskers to hit he
r, to give her an excuse to get out, to call the police and have him charged. He came very close. She watched his jaw tighten, his body jolt, but his car did not touch Gran’s old Ford. She wished she had time to slow to a crawl, to keep him here all morning, to see where he would turn off, but she needed to get home and review her notes. When they reached Chester, she gave him the finger. Whiskers stayed on the highway.

  Vanessa slammed on the brakes, did a U-turn, re-entered the stream of highway traffic just in time to see Whiskers’ blue car pull off at the turning into Stewart Hall.

  She spread her notes on the dining room table.

  Now focus. Forget Whiskers, Sanger, the loss of the diary. Maybe Brigit was right about energy. She had been driving peacefully, mulling over her research, thinking with love about Grampa. But on the sight of Whiskers, po-faced in the car behind, rage had consumed her, malevolence a contagion as silently destructive as any bacterium.

  To expunge it from her mind was the only way to reach the place where the treasure was. Somewhere between the Scottish Templars, Brother Bart and the Oak Island discoveries lay the key to this puzzle, every nerve ending was telling her so. She took Gran’s exercise book off the shelf, found the place where Brother Bart described being buried.

  A grave had been dug, lined with sailcloth, roofed with logs too heavy for me to shift. Resting on the top of it was a human skull, below it two crossed bones … I lay very still, listening to my breathing. Pictures came, Mia in the meadow. I felt her body, her love, and how I cried … My breathing slowed. I listened to it, completely empty now of thought or prayer or plans or hope. Peaceful at last in my grave.

  Then:

  Hauled up out of the earth after I know not how long, naked and pale as a grub … I was inducted through an elaborate ceremony involving swords and incantations into the pirates’ secret society.

  “Goodness and love lie beyond religions,” the advisor told me. “You find them in your own heart. That was the real teaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  And:

  I then spent several weeks cooking for an endless stream of silent men on the island. They were working in shifts … Some were soaked to the skin when they came to eat, others covered in dirt.

  Looking for something and leaving something that required a lot of burying. There was just enough time to make another list:

  Vanessa’s pen paused. The seeing eye, five thousand-year old symbol of love’s creativity, printed on every American dollar bill, sewn into great-Uncle Seamus’ Freemason’s apron. The pirates were Freemasons, and the Templars, their forerunners, had known architecture and engineering. The seeing eye must be important. She scanned her list, sketched a quick map of Oak Island, and put in all the spots where clues had been found.

  The doorbell rang. Vanessa stared from list to map. What if the Oak Island cross was the four directions, and the place where the lines intersected, the headstone, was where the creative power saw into the roots of life, the skull with the cross bones lying beneath it? What if she extended the lines of the cross? The doorbell went on ringing, twice, three times. Whoever was there had no intention of giving up.

  “God damn it!” Doorbells, phones, faxes, television, the Altamira fishermen’s widows had not had to contend with any of that. “Silencio!” Mother Superior’s roar had threatened to quash life itself in her Altamira classroom. And in the ensuing dusty minutes, disturbed only by the ticking clock, a cry from the marketplace, squealing brakes down the block, ideas could take shape and ripen, dreams, knowledge, passions could blossom—

  “What?” Vanessa flung open the door.

  Sanger’s bodyguard/driver held a bouquet of roses, carnations, iris, lilies, hyacinth, baby’s breath in one hand, in the other a gold-coloured gift bag. Vanessa took them and closed the door.

  In the bag was a flat lingerie box done up with a burgundy bow. There was a card attached: “To replace the sea-soaked set. I’ll pick you up at seven tonight. We’ll celebrate my new island purchase then maybe play some chess. Teach.”

  “Fuck you, Ed.” She was about to fling the bag aside but something else was weighing it down. Vanessa tossed the lingerie box onto the coffee table, reached in again. And knew before she laid eyes on it, from the weight and feel of the ancient leather, that she was holding Brother Bartolomeo’s diary.

  “Oh!” Forgetting all the prohibitions about the contact of skin with ancient materials, she held the diary against her as if it were a kidnapped child returned then opened it, riffling the pages to make sure it was all there, unharmed. “Oh thank You God or Sophia or whoever You are, thank You thank You thank You!” She sank onto the couch.

  So Sanger had taken the diary. Had detailed someone to watch Brigit while he entertained Vanessa, waiting for the chance to come into her home, to steal from her. And was returning it now. To gain the trust she had asked for? Trying, by admitting the theft, to negate it, reduce it to the status of “borrowing” because she had jumped overboard, risked her life rather than be with him? He had not had time to have it translated. So what was he telling her?

  There was no time to think or to sit with the dictionaries, do a proper translation of the rest of Brother Bart’s story, but she knew the rhythms of his voice and the cadences he favoured. For now she could puzzle her way through what had happened to him.

  In spite of the danger, Brother Bart’s curiosity about the pirates’ work on the island was not to be denied.

  I need to know what is being done with Mia’s people’s treasures. Are they melting down those stunning golden panels, turning them into gold bars, easier to bury? Men will die before I will allow this. What other path is open to me? The loss of love leaves a man a shell, empty, hollow. I could, I suppose, turn back to You, Father, devote every waking hour to prayer, but You made both the beauty of the connection between Mia and me and the destruction that killed her. You are beyond this simple monk’s ability to know, and are not to be reasoned with, reckoned with, pleaded to, trusted. I think now that Captain St. Clere’s advisor is right, there is so much more to worship than the dogma out of which my paltry life has been chiselled.

  So I spend my free time walking and watching, sauntering along the shorelines in the evenings after the last dish is dried, and up any number of paths as if to gather herbs and blossoms for my salads, twigs for our soups. It is not difficult to circumvent the sentries and why, I wonder, do some of the men return from their shifts wet and others do not?

  I watch from the undergrowth as the men measure and dig and move stones under the watchful eyes of Captains St. Clere and DuMoulin. If anyone ever does catch me I will look Captain St. Clere in the eye.

  “Rings of love must not become the stuff of barter or a pirate’s conceit,” I will tell him. “If there is a God whom you love, you will return my rings to me.” That I may be buried with them. What else have I to care about now?

  Though I must confess sometimes I do fear a little. That is why late at night in the supply tent on the island, where I sleep beside the stove, or in the early dawn hours I write to You in this diary. I may not know You after these forty years, God, but I have grown fond of this conversation even though any form of communication is strictly forbidden here. If anyone finds this diary I will be hanged the way two men were just this morning, all of us forced to watch, because they had been caught with—

  Vanessa struggled with the next words, skipped ahead:

  —In the meantime however, having watched and thought and made a few calculations of my own, at least I can console myself that the light of Your sun will always reach my Mia’s people’s treasure once a day, just as it always used to.

  The light of Your sun? Vanessa squeezed her eyes shut, then rechecked the words: “sol,” sun; “tesoro,” treasure; “una vez al dia,” once a day: “… the light of Your sun will always reach my Mia’s people’s treasure once a day.”

  The same sun that was sending a shaft of light down through the clouds above Mahone Bay now could show them where the treas
ure was? She put down the diary, rubbed her eyes. How could that be? Was it in a limestone cavern like the underwater cave the treasure hunter had found under Borehole 10X, where they had taken the video picture of the human hand?

  A limestone cavern above the water line.

  Why not? They had been found in this area, where the tides had swirled up over millions of years. Sometimes the ground above them was thin as an eggshell. Like Sophie’s Cave-In Pit.

  But if the treasure was close enough to the surface for the sun to shine on it every day, why hadn’t one of the dozens of treasure hunters who had been tearing Oak Island to shreds during the last two hundred years found it?

  Mademoiselle should see this. Vanessa jumped up, knocking the lingerie box from the coffee table onto the floor. Absently she pulled off the ribbon. Inside, a cream silk underwire brassiere, the kind that sculpts the breasts, with lace across the top of the cups, and matching panties lay on a bed of baby blue tissue. Vanessa closed the box, embarrassed. Opened it again — who was watching? — passed the silk between her fingers, and looked at his card again: “… my new island?”

  Had he bought Mlle Durocher’s property? How could he have? And if he had bought the rest of the island, how could he not know about her lot? Vanessa looked at the telephone.

  No, it was past noon, too late for that. She would see Mlle Durocher at the causeway.

  Nerve endings signal each other much faster than thought. Vanessa could not have told you why, after she pulled off her jeans to change, she also shed her underpants and bra, then ran back into the living room, pulled on the silk panties, hooked on the new brassiere. The gold doubloon was lying on the coffee table. She hung it around her neck, then found a tank top. Her khaki cargo shorts had pockets deep enough for her list, the map she had made of the Oak Island discoveries, and a pencil.

  XVI

  TRAFFIC ON THE COASTAL ROAD was blocked. Vanessa’s thumb beat the steering wheel as cars and trucks came to a halt ahead and behind her. A little way down the highway a column of black smoke billowed into the sunshine. Windows of the stores, bungalows, businesses were gaping wounds, the glass blown out by an explosion.