by Smith, Skye
"I must warn you about two things," Chris said as he prepared his metal detector and put on his headphones. "First, if this diary you're looking for wasn't buried with any metal, perhaps just rolled in oil cloth, then my detector won't find it. Second, if nails were not valuable enough to recycle in 1900, then there could be a lot of false signals in this patch of earth. The good news is that there was no cellar under the cottage, so we don't have to worry about backfill, or about it being buried deep."
He started his device and began to walk remarkably quickly across the end of the foundation. He turned and dragged one foot and repeated the line. So it went for fifteen minutes as he criss-crossed the site of the old cottage, his dragging foot showing where he had already been. Three times he stopped and dug and three times he put an ancient nail into his side pouch. And then.
And then the digging spade hit something solid and he began to clear away the packed dirt. He pulled out a short length of rotted wooden plank and turned it over and over. There were no nails in it. No metal at all. He used his detector on the shallow hole again, and then dug some more. The spade hit something else. He again cleared the dirt away carefully and pulled up a box. A metal box. A very old metal box about a foot square. He brushed it off and announced, "It's a tea tin. An old tea tin. Who wants to open it?"
"Don't you want to?" asked Maya.
"It's not mine. " Chris shrugged. "I'll keep going with the search. You two open it and tell me what you find."
The eyes of both women glittered with anticipation as Maya put the box on the bench and then looked closely at it to see how it was sealed. She took out her tiny Swiss pocket knife and slit into the wax that kept the lid tight. Slowly, carefully, trying not to scratch the metal, she worked her way around the lid. Then she carefully pried the lid off.
As soon as the lid was away, they bumped heads trying to look inside. Maya carefully pulled at some oilcloth. It was a wrapper. Inside was a stack of small unbound books of all shapes and sizes and loose papers and collections of letters. At the bottom of the box to one side, there was a smaller package. Maya unwrapped it. It contained a beautiful, long, thin quartz crystal with a silver cage at one end threaded to a silken cord. With it was a very strange-looking finger ring.
Chris could pretend disinterest no more. He peered over their shoulders, as keen as they were.
Nana's gloved hand opened the cover of the book. "These are them. Britta's diaries."
"So this must be Britta's crystal. Don't touch it. Only I must touch it," said Maya urgently.
Nana put a gloved finger into the ring and held it up to look at. "This is a very strange ring for a woman. Too big for a start."
"May I?" asked Chris. He put his handkerchief over his soiled hand and Nana dropped the ring into it. He looked at it closely. "1800, not likely," he muttered. "This is iron, yet what kind of magic iron wouldn't have rusted by now? An iron signet ring. Look it still has wax in the engraving. Older than 1800 for sure. Perhaps the diaries will tell you more about it."
Chris put the ring down. He had a crazy glint in his eye. He was now eager to search for and find more treasure. He restarted his grid and kept searching. An hour later, fifteen nails later, he took a break. The area of the old cottage had produced nothing more. He then worked until the sun was low, expanding the search outward from the foundation. Lots of trash, but nothing of interest. It was Maya who convinced him to stop.
"Sorry, Maya. I get a fever when I'm searching, and I never know when to stop. I keep telling myself, one more grid, ten more minutes, over and over, and keep going." He switched off his gizmos. "You're right. I'm finished unless you want me to check the entire island."
"Come in for supper," Maya said. "You were finished when you found the diaries."
"Well, we truly are finished then, because tomorrow I have to drive back to Vermont. You're good with that, then?"
"Chris, I am beyond joy. Nana has been reading the first diary to me. What a treasure. Written by my great, great, great, like lots of greats, grandmother." In appreciation, she had made him a huge shrimp and veggie stir-fry, which they all washed down with a couple of bottles of Prosecco. Apple crumble warm from the oven, drizzled with cream, and coffee finished off the meal that was flavored with lots of Chris's treasure-hunting stories, and lots of laughs.
That night Chris took the guest bed, and at first light Maya ran him over to the village in the skiff, back to his parked rented Ford so he could be through Boston before the morning rush hour began.
* * * * *
* * * * *
MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith
Chapter 11 - The Mystic Crystal
"I've found it!" called Nana excitedly, "a mention of the ring. It was given to her by her mother in England. It's a family heirloom, passed down for hundreds of years. It belonged to a Captain Raynar who lived in the time of the great Harrowing." Nana went to her laptop and typed in the word Harrowing and pressed 'Enter'. "It can't be."
"What?" said Maya coming over to read over her shoulder.
"The great Harrowing was in 1069 thru 1070 in the Danelaw of Northeastern England. It was William the Conqueror's genocide of the Anglo-Danes who controlled England before he invaded. The ring can't be that old. It would be nothing more than a rusted hulk by now. Chris must be wrong. It can't be iron. It must be made of something else."
"Here, leave me with Google for a while, Nana. You go back to reading the diary. That old English makes my head swim."
Twenty minutes later it was Maya's turn to call out in excitement. "Bog iron! The crystal iron gleaned from bogs that the Vikings used for nails and fittings for their longships. It's rust resistant. That's why their ships didn't fall apart." There was no response from Nana. She looked over at her. She was asleep over the diary and her notes.
Maya softly pulled the notes towards her and read them. It was the beginning of a timeline for the diary. She quickly saw why the fear of John Brown. Britta's little brother, Jon, had witnessed John Brown and his smugglers scuttle and burn the Customs schooner 'Gaspee', but he wasn't one of Brown's sworn men. Britta had feared that Brown would have Jon silenced, permanently. That was why they fled from Providence to Boston.
Nana hadn't gotten very far. Maya reminded herself that the woman was 88. The tin tea box was on the table in front of her. With two fingers she carefully lifted the silk cord and with it the crystal, Britta's crystal, and put the cord over her head and hung the pendant between her breasts. Then she meditated.
* * * * *
Nana was woken from her doze by Maya's murmuring. This time she went and got her voice recorder and switched it on and put it down right in front of Maya. Then she watched and waited in case there was another nightmare. Interestingly, the crystal around Maya's neck seemed to be glowing ever so slightly.
She tried to listen closely, but much of what the girl said made no sense. She would make notes from the voice recording, later. Occasionally, however, entire sentences were spoken clearly. Maya had not yet read the diary and yet what she was saying somewhat matched what was in the diary, at least as much of it as Nana had read. How could this be?
Nana brought Maya back to the present to eat a late supper of toasted BLT's washed down with a very round-tasting Shiraz. "Where did you go?"
"Boston in the time of the great boycott, just before the Boston Tea Party," replied Maya.
Nana dropped her sandwich and coughed out a chunk of bacon. She had been just kidding. She didn't expect such a response. Actually, when she gave it more thought, she decided that what Maya had said was very fishy. Perhaps she was joking. "There was no such word as boycott at that time, and it wasn't called the Boston Tea Party until fifty years later. It was called the Destruction of the Tea. Were you just yanking my chain?"
"Boycott and Tea Party were my words, not Britta's. Tell me about the Otis family. Especially all the James's."
Nana looked at the girl curiously, and then wracked her memory. "They were a wealthy Purit
an family, well-educated, and well-placed socially and politically. They were closely associated with the Adams family. I would have to look up the James's. From her letters I know that Britta eloped with Jimmy, that was James the third, but he died soon after. His family, or at least his mother, never accepted the marriage as legal.
I also know that the main political focus of the Otis and the Adams families was to make parliament in London agree that Englishmen in the provinces were protected by the same English Bill of Rights that protected the people in England. That is why they started the general boycott of English imports, especially goods imported by the big multinational corporations. That is why the families set up the committees of correspondence. They passed messages around to keep everyone informed of what was happening and to keep the boycott going."
"Provinces?" Maya wrinkled her nose. "You mean colonies don't you?"
"No, dear. They were provinces of England. The American provinces. This was the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I don't know why school history texts call them colonies. They haven't been colonies since the 1600's. It was because they were actual provinces of England, that the Bill of Rights should have applied to them. That was the basis of the entire legal case to parliament."
"So this organized boycott was like, you know, the Occupy Movement that the students are now running against the bankers?" asked Maya.
"Hmm, I would say, yes. Yes, they were. Yes, a very good analogy. The committees of correspondence had a function very much like the way that students are using cell phones and social media to keep things organized.
The multinationals of the day, especially the East India Company were very much like Wal-Mart today, with an almost monopoly hold on imported goods. The Adams family even set up co-op banks to help small businesses and farmers. They were called land banks, but of course they were soon crushed by the multinational banks."
Maya reached for Nana's hand and squeezed it. "This is so exciting. Britta was helping them, you know. I dreamed it while I was meditating. She was helping Jemmy Otis and Samuel Adams, and that is how she met, and fell in love with Jim Otis."
"You dreamed this. But you still haven't read the diaries. How could you know?"
"The crystal perhaps," replied Maya. "Perhaps my aura is like, watching it in Britta's crystal. So, uh, so did the Otis and Adams families run the Boston Tea Party?"
"Heavens no, girl. Their boycott was a completely different thing, a legal and peaceful thing, and it worked. The boycott spread all over the American provinces and even into some of the counties of England. Parliament and the East India Company eventually were so frightened by the power of the boycott that they gave up and eliminated the import taxes and duties and lowered the prices of imports."
"But I thought the Boston Tea Party was because of the taxes," Maya grumbled, confused. It would have been better if she had skipped out on history class at school and gone surfing. What they had taught her seemed to be wrong.
"No, that is a complete misconception. Smuggling was highly profitable business because of the high import taxes and monopoly pricing. Like with illegal drugs today. When the taxes were dropped, and the prices dropped, well, then a bunch of very rich smugglers were suddenly facing huge losses. Instead of losing all that money, they organized the destruction of the tea, so that they could still sell their smuggled tea at a profit."
"Ahh." Something clicked in Maya's head. "Smugglers like John Brown."
"Yes, smuggler bosses like John Brown and John Hancock. They were sort of the drug lords of their time. They had their fingers in everything nefarious, and backed it up with violence. The smugglers had been slavers before the French and Indian war and privateers during it. Privateer is just a fancy name for pirate. They were dangerous men. Rogue males. And they all belonged to the same club, the Scottish Mason's club.
Unfortunately for Boston, the local economy went from boom to bust because of their tea party. Destroying the tea was an act of piracy, and vandalism, and theft. It was the wanton destruction of private property. That's why nobody admitted to it until twenty years later and why it was hidden from history for fifty years."
"Hmm, interesting." Maya went quiet to think. "So like, it was as if the current Tea Party invaded all the Wal-Mart stores and destroyed anything not made in the USA."
"Exactly," said Nana.
"Bummer, I mean bummer that the current Tea Party doesn't do that to Wal-Mart instead of just bitching about having to pay taxes like everyone else. Hmmm. Let me see if I've got this right." Maya took a moment to put her thoughts in order.
"Britta was helping the good guys who were running the import boycott and trying to get a bill of rights, and she was scared of these smuggler psychos because they were burning ships and destroying the cargos of their competitors. That explains a lot. Thanks."
"It's all in Wikipedia." Nana pushed her laptop closer to the girl.
"That's okay. I think I've got it for now. I will sleep with her crystal tonight and try to remember what I dream about. The dreams come on in like, full widescreen Technicolor with stereophonic sound. Really exciting stuff. Britta was like, right there in the middle of everything."
Nana lowered her voice. "Some of her later letters are quite shocking. I think she was working as a spy, a Mata Hari, infiltrating the British officers during the War of Independence."
* * * * *
At 88, Nana had found a new lease on life, a new reason to be interested in life. She was going to type up all of Britta's diaries and notes and letters. She was going to type up all the recordings of Maya's dreams. She was going to compile it all, and perhaps publish a book. It would be her last book, she knew, but it would keep her mind active for at least five more years. She felt truly blessed to have a new quest at her age.
For now, for the immediate, her priority was to encourage Maya to have Britta dreams, and then to record all her thoughts and reactions and questions. She didn't know how much longer Maya would be visiting but it wouldn't be long, and she had to make the best of it.
Maya watched her great-grandmother shed years by the hour. Uncle Rob would not be pleased. She had told him just two days ago that Nana had shipped her books away for selling, and was ready to move off the island. In one day that had all changed. The way Nana was now, how excited she was about life, Rob would have to put her in a straight jacket to move her off this island.
Oh well, that's life. She bet that Rob didn't know much about Nana's past. Her wild side. Her travels in Europe after the war. Her sexual affairs with famous artists and authors.
"So your new book, Nana, will it be one of those dry history texts that take up space on library shelves and collect dust? I mean, the stuff that comes in my dreams may not be true. It may be just my imagination."
"I've thought about that, dear. I will have no choice but to call it historical fiction. I mean, how could I name your aura as a reference? I will write it as a novel, but I will include as much of Britta's history as I can. I have to. It is part of our family history. I don't want it to get lost."
"Her diaries are not nearly as exciting as my dreams," Maya pointed out. "Maybe we shouldn't just let me wander around in the dreams. Maybe you should find an interesting incident in the diary, and then when I am inside the dreams, ask me about the incident."
"Do you think that will work?"
"It's worth a try." Maya shrugged. She enjoyed the Britta dreams, but she couldn't spend all her life dreaming. She had her own life to live. Besides, she had received a disturbing Email from England and she might not be able to hide out on this island for much longer.
* * * * *
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MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith
Chapter 12 - Wendy Comes
Easter was barely a week over, when Maya's fears came true, and Wendy phoned. She was at the marina on the peninsula, and had come to take Maya to England.
"So, who is this woman?" Nana asked, concerned by the immediate change that had come over her
great-granddaughter's mood.
"She is the personal assistant to the executive headmaster of a bunch of exclusive boys' schools in England," Maya said while she walked around the cottage grabbing anything that was hers and throwing it on the bed for future packing.
"And what does she want with you?"
"She's here to take me to England. Nana, I have a retainer contract with the schools. I earn big money by helping them to whittle down the list of boys that want to attend their schools. I use my aura to identify the psycho kids for them." Maya explained it all to Nana and even told her the names of the schools.
"Well, at least they are the most prestigious boys schools in England," Nana said. "I suppose it does make a great deal of sense to exclude psycho kids from getting in."
"You still don't get it, Nana. They use my divvy powers to make sure that only the psycho kids get in. Actually, they prefer to call them 'gifted'." Maya's statement was met with an icy silence matched to an icy stare.
"But they are some of the oldest schools in Europe. They date back to Norman times. They have been, are, the training grounds for the ruling elite of many countries." Nana was in a state of disbelief. She wondered if this was some kind of bad dream. She and Maya had shared a lot of dreams lately, Britta dreams.
"And that whole time the schools have specialized in training the 'gifted' sons of the elite," Maya shot back. "With my help they can do it even better. One of the schools will be reserved for only the 'truly gifted' sons. The other will be for the 'almost gifted' sons. The graduates of the gifted school will become the power barons of the world, while the graduates of the other school will go into politics or become real estate agents or something."
"I cannot believe such a thing. Well, yes, I can believe it of an elite psycho society, but I cannot believe that you, you of all people, would help them." Nana's face was turning red with anger. "I am shocked that you ... you ... you.."
"Originally I stalled them for my own safety. Then I stalled them hoping they would realize the dangers of their plan and they would pay me money for doing nothing. Now I actually want to go to England."