by Louis Bayard
This particular paper had a hairlike fringe protruding to one side and a nick in its upper left corner and, just beneath, a pinwheel stain, umber and henna. And all its original creases! No more than an inch apart, for Elizabethans folded their letters into tight little bundles, like the notes you slip to a friend in eleventh-grade American history.
Hearing Alonzo’s reproving cough, I carried the letter to the sofa and set it on the one cushion that seemed to be free of cat puke. And then we all gathered around it, kneeling like Druids before a hazel tree, and for the first time I was able to see beyond the paper itself to the words printed there.
In parlous Times, it is grete joye to thincke vppon that homelie Schoole, where wee were glad to gathere.
The School of Night, I thought. Back in session.
“So that’s it?” asked Clarissa. “This is why Styles stole all your books? And killed Lily?”
“It’s why he’ll kill us all before he’s done.”
“But it’s just a piece of paper.”
“Just a…,” stuttered Amory Swale, “piece of—”
“I mean, how high can the market value be? The only people in the world who’d pay top dollar—well, they’re practically all in this room, aren’t they?”
“She’s got a point,” I said.
Throwing himself on the couch, Alonzo drew in a gallon of air.
“For the love of all that’s holy. It’s not the front of the document, it’s the back.”
“The…” Clarissa cocked her head. “You mean Ralegh wrote a P.S. or something?”
“A pee … ess? Yes, that’s right. Love you lots, write when you get a chance, hi to the folks. Don’t be absurd, what’s on the back is not a postscript. It’s not even in Ralegh’s handwriting. It’s something infinitely more valuable.”
“Like what?”
“Thomas Harriot’s scratch paper.”
Which was perhaps the last thing that either Clarissa or I was expecting to hear.
“Hold up,” she said. “You’re telling me Thomas Harriot used a letter from Sir Walter Ralegh to scribble on? Like it was some circular he got in the mail?”
“It makes sense,” I allowed. “Paper was hard to come by in those days. Expensive, too. Any time Elizabethans found a stretch of white space—it could be the flip side of a tradesman’s bill, it could be the blank leaves of a book—they filled it with words.”
“But this isn’t just any old white space,” Clarissa protested. “This is a letter from one of the great men of the age.”
“To Harriot, Ralegh’s just another friend. Who’s probably sent him dozens of letters over the years, so what’s one more? Harriot was a practical guy, remember. If he needed paper, he’d just grab the nearest piece.”
Clarissa uncrossed her arms, squared her shoulders.
“Well, in that case,” she said, “let’s turn it over.”
Only no one would. Not at first. Even Alonzo—who had long ago claimed ownership of that piece of paper—even he remained frozen in place. It was finally my own compulsion that drove me to put my fingers to the letter once more. To raise it in the air and invert it and let it float back to earth.
And there it lay. And nothing about it made sense anymore.
“What the hell is this?” I asked.
“You might consider it a puzzle,” said Amory Swale in his perspiring voice. “Left behind by Master Harriot.”
Taking care not to touch the paper, Clarissa leaned over my arm and drew an invisible circle around that strange cross on the left.
“Not to sound dumb or anything, but it looks—”
“Yes?”
“Well, like a pirate map. You know, where they bury the chest.”
“Very much like,” Alonzo said.
I stood up. I rubbed my face hard.
“What kind of treasure are we talking about?” I asked.
And to hear Alonzo tell it, the answer had been lying in plain sight all along, just like that FedEx envelope.
“Gold,” he said. “A pope’s ransom.”
16
AND THE NEXT words out of Alonzo’s mouth were:
“Anyone up for dinner?”
So we left Amory Swale’s shack and traveled a hundred yards inland to a strip mall, home to a Thai restaurant and a Fraternal Order of Eagles and, pressed inhospitably between them, a pub-and-billiards room, a darkly perspiring sort of place that seemed to swallow us the moment we walked in. We were shown at once to a banquette, and before another minute had passed, a young woman with proud and unsubjugated hair was asking us what we’d like to drink.
“A Pimm’s Cup, if you please,” said Alonzo.
“Um, I don’t think we have those? But we’ve got more than fifty kinds of beer? And tonight? We have a special on PBR tallboys?”
His head lurched back.
“Tall … boys? Just get me a Ketel One on ice as soon as you can. And Amory, check the table; it looks viscous.”
Alonzo had chosen strategically. Being a neighborhood dive, the place was thronged with locals, sun-seared and jocular and truculent, bent over nine-foot billiard tables and ranged around dartboards and foosball tables and pinball machines. The TVs were blaring ESPN, the music was strictly Nickelback, and the hum from the electronic smoke-eaters ensured that no one could hear our conversation.
“I don’t think I mentioned,” said Alonzo, “but my good friend Amory, among his other notable talents, is quite the authority on local Algonquin legends.”
“Dear me, I don’t know about that authority business, but I do follow them quite avidly. Now I’m not sure if Mattamuskeet is a name you’re familiar with. They were the Indians who originally populated Hyde County, just south of here. I suppose we might begin our story in the year 1654, when a young English fur trader and his three companions ventured south from Virginia in a small rowboat, precious little in the way of defense.”
Swale had added a violet foulard to his ensemble, and something violet had crept into his delivery, too. He lingered with such relish on the Tuscarora War and the decline of the Cacores that I was hunkering down for something Iliadic in length when he abruptly hurried to his point.
“You see, with the collapse of the Indian chiefdom, the Mattamuskeet people were gradually dispersed. Which is not to say extinguished, for many of them lingered on, intermarrying or self-segregating as needed. Thus, the oldest tribal legends were carried forward, often in undiluted form, across multiple generations. Maker’s Mark? Thank you so much.
“Now, being orally transmitted, these legends often vary in their details. But one of them struck me with especial force. It concerned a white man, one of the first cohort of English settlers. This fellow apparently made quite an impression, for several reasons. First, he spoke the Algonquin language. Most unusual. Second, he came in peace and almost always came alone. And third … he was awash in gold.”
Gasping, Swale took a swallow of whiskey.
“So much so,” he continued, “that the white man was known as Weroance Wassador. Which translates roughly to King of the Bright Shining Metal. Many a chieftain’s earrings came from this fellow. Gold ingots the size of rounceval peas, they say. Oh, and there’s another curious aspect to the legend. This man asked for nothing in exchange but”—he began to rub the sides of his glass—“I suppose you’d call it information.”
“What kind?” asked Clarissa.
“He wanted to know the names of things. What words they had for birds and trees. Where they hunted and fished. He wanted to hear about their gods, he wanted to know their stories. The Indians had never met a white man like this. Nor would they again for a very long time.”
“This white man,” said Alonzo. “His name has been passed down, too, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, my, yes. Ha-yot.”
* * *
Those two bare syllables seemed actually to reverberate before subsiding into silence. Swale grasped an onion ring, gave it a jeweler’s squint.
“Well, now,” h
e said, chewing around its periphery. “I’d been hearing this tale in one form or another for—oh, forever, I think, never imagining it to be based in actual history. And then one afternoon, I was attending an estate sale down in Ocracoke. Rather impoverished old gentleman, hard on his luck, but with deep roots in the area. Well, in the usual course of things, I bid a rather token sum on a box of—”
“Junk,” suggested Alonzo.
Not entirely, Swale protested. For at the bottom of the box lay something completely unexpected. Not a set of chipped teacups or Look magazines, but a single pectoral cross. Four inches by two. Time-tarnished, closer now to amber than gold, but unmistakable in its provenance. The moment it touched Swale’s hands, he knew what he had.
“And that’s when I called Alonzo.”
“Amory and I had it appraised, of course. Easily four hundred years old, as I suspected. Oh, but don’t take my word for it.”
From his jacket pocket came a small bundle in a white handkerchief. He placed it at the center of the table and peeled away each frond of silk.
“Please,” he said, taking out a pocket magnifier and handing it to us. “Look.”
My head lightly touched Clarissa’s as we peered through the lens. I saw first three crudely carved letters at the cross’s tip.
TEH
And, on the crossbar, another string of letters, half eroded but still legible:
MDLXXXVI
“Fifteen eighty-six,” I murmured.
“The very year Thomas Harriot was on these shores,” said Swale.
Clarissa sat back in the booth and stretched her pale arms behind her head.
“Okay, boys. Tell us how much this cross would fetch today.”
“Given its provenance,” Alonzo said, “up to ten thousand dollars at auction. Now please imagine that sum multiplied by a hundred. Five hundred, a thousand. This is the magnitude with which we’re reckoning.”
“Says who?” I said. “Come on now, it’s a big leap from a gold cross to a stinkin’ treasure chest. The etchings—I mean, who’s to say when they were done? And the local legends—pardon me, they’re so much noise. I hate to piss on your parade, Alonzo, but it’s all kind of thin.”
“That’s all right,” he answered equably. “We can fatten it up.”
“Except you’ve forgotten one little thing. There’s not a word about gold in Harriot’s Report. Or any of the other accounts of that expedition. I mean, if gold had come back to England from the New World? There’d have been another expedition on the next tide. The Lost Colony would never have been lost, you’d have had ten more colonies bringing up the rear.”
“The gold didn’t get back to England,” said Alonzo. “It stayed right here.”
17
“AMORY,” HE DECLARED. “Move the onion rings, would you?”
Reaching under the table, Alonzo pulled up a roll of newsprint, which he unfurled to reveal an enlarged second-generation copy of Harriot’s map, daubed with yellow highlighter.
“Now if you all would oblige me by looking here,” he said. “Where somebody—Harriot, we presume—has drawn charming little curlicue waves. On what we may presume to be the easternmost edge of the map, since we lack a compass heading to tell us otherwise. We also find a drawing of a whale. Now wheeeere would Thomas Harriot have seen such a creature?”
With a wry smile, Clarissa raised her hand. “The Atlantic.”
“An interesting idea. Now let’s travel westward—landward—to see if it can be borne out. We find these bizarre coordinates. Places like…” His finger waltzed from point to point. “Manteo’s Lodge … Bridgett’s Stone … Kewasowok’s Bier … These names simply didn’t exist in England or anywhere else in Europe. Believe me, I’ve checked. Harriot can only have been talking about one particular corner of the world.” He looked up and smiled. “The place he called Virginia.”
“For all we know,” I said, “the body of water could be the Irish Sea. Harriot did spend three years in Ireland, you know. The bier, the lodge—they could be anything, they could be nothing at all. It could all be some semielaborate joke.”
“Your nearly metronomic predictability, Henry, is something I have missed. As you can see,” he added, flipping the newsprint over, “I’ve taken the liberty of reprinting Harriot’s own jottings. This is what he wrote just beneath the map.”
CIIOWVTKSIYFHIYYKPQGXQNOHPSNOFCO
PCRBPFOJYKSNHPHLLHPQBOOXO
ANOHQPQKNOPKTAKFYGHQRBFOPPCIVKNQBO
QBONOQKEOOTNOOYOTNKGSCNACHPOHNQBO
“What is it?” asked Clarissa. “Some kind of code?”
“I admit I was expecting something rather more sophisticated. What we have on our hands is a basic substitution cipher. Of a nearly embarrassing simplicity.”
“Okay,” she said. “Could you please embarrass me by explaining it?”
“Very well.” He pulled out a sketch pad and a steel-tipped pen. “It boils down to this. Working from our regular alphabet, we create a substitution alphabet—simply by inserting a special key word. By way of example, let’s choose Henry. Observe.”
Regular alphabet
A
B
C
D
E
Substitution alphabet
H
E
N
R
Y
“As you can see, A becomes H, B becomes E, and so on. The rest of the alphabet changes accordingly.”
Regular alphabet
F
G
H
I/J
K …
Substitution alphabet
A
B
C
D
F …
“How come you’ve doubled up I and J?” asked Clarissa.
“Because in the Elizabethan alphabet they were the same letter. Same with U and V. Very well, now, we’ve done our job, each letter in the original message now has a substitute letter, and the code flows very easily from there. Wherever you would normally write A, you write H. Wherever you’d write F, you write A. And so on. The task for the decoder is to figure out what that initial key word is.
“Now, the simplest thing to do is to use your own name. The trouble with Harriot’s name—at least the way we spell it—is that it has a pair of repeated letters. Two r’s won’t work as well because you have to assign each r a different letter, which sows confusion. So I started looking at the other ways Harriot’s name was spelled. And after some trial and error, I came up with this.
Regular alphabet
A
B
C
D
E
F
Substitution alphabet
H
E
R
Y
O
T
“From there, I just had to switch out the rest of the letters—making allowances, of course, for the fact that the Elizabethan alphabet had two fewer letters. By the way, Henry, you’re welcome to try it, if you—”
“Go on.”
“Well, once I’d done all that, the code was cracked. I had only to divide the letters into syntactical units and voilà!”
He turned the page over and pushed the pad toward us.
In New Found Land dost my treasure lie
Sich splendour as appalls the eye
Great stores of gold, matchlesse in worthe,
There to bee freede from Virginia’s Earthe.
“New Found Land,” said Alonzo. “That’s straight from the title of Harriot’s book. Virginia’s Earth. We know where we are now, don’t we? But what’s in this blessed earth? My treasure. Great stores of gold, matchlesse in worthe.”
“Metaphor,” I suggested.
“Don’t be absurd. What was Harriot’s whole purpose in coming here? To find natural wealth, minerals, tangible things that would give England a reason to take over the neighborhood, yes? So I ask you: What’s more tangible than gold? I grant you, if you lo
ok at the map or the cross or the old tales individually, they’re thin gruel. But throw them all in the same pot and then toss in the caramelizing ingredient of Harriot’s own words—well, I call that a meal. For kings.”
I reached for my beer mug. Only to realize I’d drunk the whole thing.
“So Harriot the incorruptible,” I said, “the guy Ralegh trusted with all his money. Stumbles on some massive trove of treasure and decides to keep it all for himself?”
“Let’s just say he was laying in a store. For the future.”
“Well, that’s all very well,” said Clarissa, taking a sip of her Heineken. “But it doesn’t explain why he leaves the gold behind. What good would it do him buried here?”
“None at all,” answered Alonzo. “Unless he intends to come back.”
“And why would he?”
“Why would he not? Think about it. No one was a more valuable asset to the Crown than Harriot. He knew the local language, he knew the lay of the land, he’d charmed every chieftain in the region. They’d have been mad not to send him back.”
“They didn’t,” I interjected.
“Oh, that’s true,” said Amory Swale, smiling fearfully. “But for reasons beyond anyone’s control. England went to war with Spain, and the queen needed Ralegh, and Ralegh needed Harriot. The window of opportunity slammed shut.”
“But where would Harriot have found gold in the first place?” Clarissa asked. “Carolina’s very nice and all, but it ain’t California.”
“The gold didn’t come by land,” Alonzo explained. “It came by sea.”