A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  “He left things in a muddle,” Sasha agreed vehemently. “It seems to get worse the more we work on it, and I’m beginning to wonder if he didn’t liberate a few things on his way out.”

  “Sasha—”

  “I know, but I can’t see any reason in not asking—”

  Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I broke in as gracefully as I could. “If I could just get set up someplace—?”

  The two librarians looked at me and burst out laughing. They managed to convey their mirth almost noiselessly.

  “Of course, you want to get started!” Sasha said.

  “I’ll see you later, Emma.” Harry left.

  Sasha led me to a carrel. “Why don’t you settle in here, and I’ll get you Madam Chandler.” A loud, metallic, grating noise from outside overrode her words. “Oh, drat, we’re still at the mercy of the workmen out there,” she informed me. “Repairing the grout or something, in the walls.”

  “Mortar?”

  “That’s it, it’s a mess and a racket and there’s been problems with the fire alarms with all their digging around. Poor Harry’s been dragged out of bed several times this month when the alarm’s gone off in the middle of the night—but you don’t need to be worried about all that.” She put the annoyance aside and got back to business. “Now there may be a few other folks in and about. We have scholars who visit for a day and a couple of interns to help with the cataloguing and such. And usually Dr. Faith Morgan is up here too, but she’s in Boston for a few days. She’s been studying some rare examples of Antebellum fiction, doing wonderful stuff on the nature of expressed emotion. With such an interesting topic, you’d think she’d be a little more…a little less…you know, more of a people person. I mean, she and Harry get on famously, there’s no denying that—”

  Something in Sasha’s voice changed and her face went red. I was certain that there was at least a little possessive jealousy at play here.

  “—and I know the interns are fascinated, she strikes them all as rather mysterious, but she doesn’t make much effort with the rest of us. When she does, it’s almost like she’s trying to push buttons, trying to manipulate you.” Suddenly, Sasha realized that she was speaking out of turn again, and a moment hung awkwardly between us so that when her phone rang, she was eager to excuse herself. “I’ll bring the journal when I get done. I’ll be real quick, I promise.”

  Her description of Dr. Morgan’s project rang a bell with me, but I couldn’t remember why. I was too distracted by the length of time that it took Sasha to come back out with the diary—she was taking forever! Eventually she emerged with my book and a slip of paper. “Sorry about that, my phone. It was the director, Evert Whitlow. He likes to have the new Fellows for lunch the first day, but he won’t be able to see you until Wednesday.”

  “Okay, thanks.” I paused, not quite certain how to bring up the question I had on my mind. “Dr. Morgan’s work sounds familiar to me. Where does she teach?”

  “Out in California somewhere, I think.” She flushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…before…you know, some people are just easier to get…and she…just…” Sasha paused, still holding the diary and apparently reconsidering what she was going to say. Finally, she put the Chandler volume down in front of me. “Well, here’s the journal. Good luck. I’ll be in my office if you need anything.”

  All other thoughts fled as I was left alone with my treasure. I moved the journal so that it was perfectly square on the desk before me and examined it as an object for a moment. What would it tell me about its former owner? Already it was more than I expected: So many diaries were simply sheets of paper sewn together with a little cardboard cover pasted on the end pages, simple recordings of the quotidian facts of a life, sometimes only a list of visitors or chores. This one already struck me as different. It was about eight inches long and six wide, with a faded blue leather cover, leafy vines outlining its edge, tooled in gold leaf that still shone. Although the corners of the book were dog-eared and browned with age, the cover and endpapers were clean of mildew and other decay. The only problem was that the pages were a little loose within the binding: there was no way that I could photocopy the journal without damaging it further, if in fact Shrewsbury allowed photocopying of bound volumes. That didn’t matter so much, as I would have to transcribe it into my notebook computer anyway.

  Taking a deep breath, as if I were about to plunge from the high board, I opened to the first page.

  It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the eighteenth-century handwriting, but the first of my several fears was allayed: Madam Chandler wrote with a beautifully clear hand. It would be a pleasure to read this elegant script, and I knew that my work would go so much faster than if I had to contend with poor penmanship. I read the superscript at the top of the page, the once-black ink faded to blurred brown, but still legible:

  Margaret Amalie Chase Chandler, her IIId Booke,

  Begun this Year of Grace 1723

  Stone Harbour, Massachusetts

  Since it is possible that thou mayst

  depart from Life this very Moment,

  regulate every Act and Thought accordingly.

  A flood of ideas cascaded through my head even before I finished reading that heading. Her middle name suggested the possibility that Margaret might be part French; the date, I remembered, correlated with the first year of her husband’s tenure as justice in the courts in Stone Harbor and Boston; and she herself must have been in her early twenties at the time. Even as I was digesting this morsel, gooseflesh ran down my spine and arms as I realized that this was the third volume of her journal—was it possible that the others still existed? A whole series? Hold on a second, Emma, don’t go looking for more, when you haven’t even read one page of this one!

  But the epigram dragged me back to the miracle of this book. I had no idea who had written the quote, but it sounded classical to me. The thing that kept my heart racing was that it was the sort of thing you’d see in a man’s journal—it was extremely rare for women to know the classics, even in translation. She was very well read indeed, if she was familiar with the Greek and Latin writers. Margaret Chase’s family was rich, but not aristocratic—I had learned from her husband Matthew’s documents that her father was a merchant. And it wasn’t yet fashionable in Europe for even wellborn women to be so educated. And the tone of the epigram was so strongly religious, that told me a lot about her as well. This was going to be a trip. I could tell it would be an adventure to learn about this woman’s life.

  I closed my eyes and said a little prayer to Saint Helena, the patron saint of archaeologists, before I looked at the first entry:

  May 29/This morning took into service Nora, a little blacke Wenche…

  That slowed me down a second. The name Nora suggested Irish, while black…of course. It was taking me a minute to acclimate to the idiom of the time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, black or white generally referred to hair rather than skin color. And her spelling, rather than being condemned for its irregularity, would have been praised for its creativity. I continued to read:

  …a little blacke Wench cursed with as terrible a Mouthe as I have ever had the Misfortune to heer. Tis little Surprize to discover that she is Irish, and as rabblesome as any who hie beyond the Pale, so I fear Correction will come only at great length of Time and much exercise of Discipline. Insofr as Matthew bade me take her up I will do so, but I would too his sense of Mercy and Justice extended as far as his poore Wife! V. gd—I will keep her, but I will also watch the Plate. V. hot still, set Katie to whip’g the Sleeves of the green Linnen; Jenny to Jellie makg. Tomorrow to visit Rev. Blnchd who has been much troubled with his Wind—I will carry my parsley Tonic to him as he says it is the only Thing that brings ease.

  I could barely keep from shrieking with glee! I had hoped that the journal would not be just a chronicle of the weather and the Sunday sermon’s text, but this sort of detail was an unbelievable wealth of informati
on. Servant troubles, household tasks, opinions—and oh, what opinions!—feelings, gassy preachers and their cure! Oooh, what a book this was! What a book mine would be!

  Slow down, Emma! I chided myself. This is only the first paragraph; what will you do if the rest isn’t as detailed as this? I flipped carefully through the pages, and every entry seemed to be at least a paragraph long. Although most people tended to use the words diary and journal interchangeably these days, this was a true journal, filled not only with facts but the thoughts of the writer. In other words, the mother lode.

  I needed to formulate a plan. Do I read the whole thing first, get a feel for what’s in store? Or take each entry apart as I get to it, analyze it without being influenced by what I knew was to come? This was like finding Tut’s tomb as far as I was concerned, a window on another world, and I wanted to make sure that I would get every bit out of it that I could. Perhaps it would be wiser to transcribe it as I went…I set the book down carefully to consider.

  My decision took less than a heartbeat. I would definitely read it through first. Although I would take notes as ideas came to me, I needed to begin my engagement with Margaret Chandler, learn who she was, react to her as a person, before I began to dissect and analyze her world. Wonderful woman, tell me how you lived! Surrender all your secrets! Prejudices, prayers, the cost of cloth, neighborly disputes, dinner menus—!

  A small cough from Sasha alerted me that my enthusiasm had animated me: unwittingly, I had left my seat and was doing a little victory dance in front of the desk.

  Ah, but it can’t be the first time she’s seen such behavior, not in a place like this! I nodded an unfelt apology, resumed my seat, and got down to the engrossing task of reading someone else’s diary.

  The only reason I stopped two hours later was because I was in desperate need of a biology break. I found that Sasha also was in the ladies’ room.

  “Any luck with the missing manuscripts?” I asked, as I finished drying my hands.

  “No, but Harry’s on it,” she said. “He’ll get it sorted out, I’m sure, I’m just jumpy right now, about everything, it seems. There’s so much going on—what with the way that Mr. Whitlow is reorganizing the structure of the library this year—adding more administrators all the time—and keeping up with the collections management, and all. I can’t afford to even think about losing this job; you know how it goes: last hired, first fired. And it always seems that there’s money for administrators, but never any for librarians. It’s tough.”

  “Especially with the economy the way it is,” I agreed.

  “Tell me about it.” Sasha dug out an orange stick and cleaned under her nails, quickly and efficiently. “And what with the alarm systems and all, well, you can see why I’d be worried about the state of the collections, especially the things we can’t locate—”

  And perhaps that is the reason the security staff is acting like a bunch of angry apes, I thought.

  “—but we’ll sort it out. Harry and me.” Sasha smiled without explaining anything more, gave me a little wave, and went back to work.

  Although I would have bet heavily against it, I was hungrier than I imagined possible when dinnertime came later on that evening. I would have stayed in the library all night if Sasha hadn’t come by to chase me out at the five o’clock closing time, and it was only then that I realized I hadn’t bothered to eat lunch. The Chandler journal was so engrossing that the hours flew by, but my questions also mounted. As with the first entry in the journal, others that came after it were detailed, and they also sometimes contained a series of numbers. In some cases, the numbers appeared in the middle of the text. I finally decided that the numbers did not represent dates or verses from the Bible—none of the numbers went higher than the mid-twenties—but were possibly part of some sort of code, perhaps alphabetical. I made a few halfhearted attempts to play around with the numbers, but got nowhere with them. So I simply resolved to keep my eyes open for more clues and continued to read.

  Although I enjoy eating, I am by all accounts, and especially Brian’s, a miserable cook, preferring to dump my dinner out of one or more cans rather than going to a lot of trouble to create something really tasty. So it was with some surprise that I found, while making my dinner, that I was in fact the gourmet of the house. I figured beans and rice would at least get some vegetables and low-fat carbos into me and wouldn’t take more than a few minutes away from work. My housemates, however, had even more efficient solutions to the evening meal than me. Although I saw him eat an orange during the early news, Jack’s dinner consisted solely of three or four trips to his Cutty cabinet throughout the early evening. Each time he nearly filled his lowball glass. He had dessert in the form of an individual serving of banana pudding in a plastic container after trip number three and Wheel of Fortune.

  Michael, on the other hand, took a more traditional route and dumped a frozen burrito into the microwave. He was still wearing his overcoat, which I’d noticed he’d never bothered to remove during his day’s tenure at the library, and which seemed to remain with him as a form of security blanket. Bored with watching his burrito spin surreally around on the carousel, Michael hopped up onto the counter to watch me mince some garlic with the wide-eyed curiosity and excitement that children have for fireworks or parades.

  “Hey, Julia Child. I think there’s some spices or something over there,” he said, jerking his head to a cabinet near the sink. “I saw some little cans or jars.”

  After I determined that the little jars were full of roach powder and sink cleanser, I got some cumin and chili powder from my little store of groceries I’d brought with me, at Brian’s suggestion, and dumped it into the cooking beans.

  “So where’s, ah, Faith, tonight?” I asked. I wanted to ask Michael, with his seeming inclination to share more of his thoughts and opinions than anyone really wanted, about whatever it was that Sasha was alluding to this morning. It occurred to me that Sasha had made a lot of allusions to things I was curious about. But my gambit to get Michael to speak up worked even better than I thought.

  “Ice Queen’s still off freezing someone’s soul in Boston. She’ll be away for a couple more nights, then she’s all ours again. Just don’t leave the bathroom a mess when you’re in there before her, or you’ll wish your parents had never met.”

  I frowned and dumped my cooked rice into a bowl and then scraped the beans out on top of that. “Oh?”

  Michael was the epitome of archness. “How discreet you are, Dr. Fielding. Why don’t you just come out and ask?”

  “Okay.” I took my bowl over to the kitchen table and began to eat. Around bites I said, “So. Why do you call her the Ice Queen? How do you freeze a soul? Is it just that she’s crabby in the morning, or that she’s a highly functioning but dangerous psychotic? What makes you think I couldn’t take her with one hand tied behind my back? Why would you think that anyone appreciates seeing a messy bathroom in a communal living situation? And how come—”

  Even though it was abundantly clear that I was kidding, Michael sternly held up one hand: Elvis wasn’t coming onstage until the audience was properly hushed, Maestro wasn’t about to begin the symphony until all attention was focused on him. “It’s just my pet name for Faith. I suppose she’s no worse than your common or garden variety touch-me-not, sanguivorous neurotic that the ivory tower seems to incubate by the thousands, but on the minus side, she’s got more armor than a cockroach hiding in a safe deposit box, a tongue like sulfuric acid, and the same benevolent tolerance for ordinary humanity as a pissed-off Gila monster. Unless you have something that she wants, and then, watch out. She changes like a chameleon.”

  I swallowed.

  Michael finished off his assessment of Faith. “Apart from that, she’s sort of cute. Hasn’t published much lately, though.”

  The microwave bell dinged, and Michael hopped down and scooped out the burrito onto a paper towel. He went off to watch the news with Jack before I could ask him any more.

&nbs
p; After dinner I was on my way to my room when the phone rang. I picked up the extension in the second-floor sitting area.

  “Hello?”

  “May I speak with Emma Fielding please?” An oily, faintly familiar voice oozed over the line.

  “Speaking.”

  “Professor Fielding. This is Ron Belcher,” the caller announced, pleased with himself.

  “Dean Belcher, what a surprise.” I was very careful not to say what a pleasure it was; his manner had the same effect on me as biting into sandy butter.

  It should have been nothing at all. I don’t recall much of the specific conversation, only that he was calling to let me know that the last of my letters of support had been received and that I would still be responsible for the classes that my colleagues and graduate students were covering during my brief leave. Again, these were reminders that no one working for tenure needed to be given, especially not someone as type-A as I am.

  It was the last two things he said, after twenty minutes of listening to himself talk, that put me into shock.

  The first was that he’d been having a look at my tenure portfolio, and—confidentially speaking, of course—he was almost convinced that it might just be enough. Almost.

  The other thing was his mentioning that he’d been good friends with the Shrewsbury Foundation’s director, Evert Whitlow, when they’d been at prep school together. He asked me to give Ev his best regards.

  I didn’t even get a chance to ask what he’d meant about my portfolio before he hung up. I think I’d remembered to tell him, in the slender openings he’d left for my part of the conversation, that I was having lunch with Mr. Whitlow later in the week. I think that I’d been able to form complete sentences, even while I was on autopilot, the bulk of my brain trying to come to grips with the fact that he’d called me up to cast doubts on my tenure hopes. I hung up automatically, hoping that I’d made inoffensive and polite noises in all the right places. But at some point during the conversation, my eyes had closed so tightly that I was seeing stars and my fists were clenched so hard that the nails bit into the meat of my palms.