Bellewether

  “Probably,” Sharon said, archly. “Not certainly.”

  “Well, no. But then we’ve got all this to add to it.” I’d spent a lot of time getting my evidence organized. Now I presented it piece upon piece like a lawyer constructing a case.

  I started with the copied pages from the “Negro registers” of Fishers’ store, with entries for a Phyllis and a Violet, of Snug Cove. I’d done some digging in the New York Public Library and found they had the personal accounts of Reuben Wilde for 1743, detailing money owed him by his brother For the hire of Phyllis and her child. And then, the coup de grace, I’d found the will of Reuben Wilde, that listed Violet in the property he passed to his son Silas when he died. “And he died in the summer of 1760,” I told them, “so that’s why our Violet stops showing up in the store registers over at Cross Harbor.”

  She’d been “reclaimed” by the cousin of Benjamin Wilde—Silas. I hadn’t found much on him, yet, but Violet, if we could believe all the documents, would have been eighteen years old at the time. And Benjamin, who wouldn’t captain his first ship till later that year, would have been twenty-five.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind,” I said, “Benjamin Wilde grew up in a household with slaves. What we need to decide now is, what are we going to do with that knowledge?”

  Eve wasn’t sure we should do anything. “Like Sharon said before, I think this takes us too far off our mandate.”

  Sharon nodded firm agreement. “That’s right. First you want the legend of the French ghost, which not only is a legend but has no connection whatsoever with our Captain Wilde. And now you try to sneak this whole slave angle in. I just don’t think you even understand what you were hired to do.”

  I let the insult pass. “I think that I was hired to oversee the start of a museum in the home of Captain Wilde that shows the story of his life and legacy.”

  She argued, “But what you’re discussing now, with this”—her gesture took in all my papers and the box of artifacts—“you’re talking sixteen years before the date that we’ve decided we’re depicting in this house, the date of Captain Wilde’s inventory.”

  “Well,” I said, because I had been giving this some thought, “I think the inventory’s useful when it comes to our refurnishing the house, I do agree, but if you’re saying that one day’s our only point of reference, then it really can’t be Captain Wilde’s museum.”

  “What?”

  “He wasn’t even here,” I said, “the day they did the inventory. He was off at sea. We’d have to make this the museum of his wife and children, and just tell their stories. Or, to tell the truer version, it should really just be a museum of the British occupation, because on the day they took that inventory there were British officers in charge here, so we really ought to tell their story—have their maps and charts and things spread out around the rooms, right?”

  Sharon’s tone turned icy. “I do not appreciate your sarcasm.”

  “It isn’t really sarcasm. It’s logic. If our mandate is to tell the story of the captain’s life, we should tell all of it. We shouldn’t just redecorate the past to make it look the way we want it to.”

  She was starting to say something else, but Frank had reached the limit of his patience and he cut her off. “Enough. We all know, don’t we, what the right thing is to do? A show of hands, who thinks we ought to use that upstairs room to honour those two women that my family tried pretending never lived? Don, get your damn hand up. There now. We good? Then let’s move on.”

  Across the table, Tracy tried to hide her smile. She always liked it when Frank lost his temper and shut someone down. She coughed, and brought the others up to speed with what our acquisitions committee had been dealing with.

  “This painting Isaac Fisher has,” said Harvey, “are we sure we’re going to get it?”

  Frank replied that I was working on it.

  Sharon sniffed and got her own back, just a little. “Well, I hope she does better with that than she did with the Sisters of Liberty.”

  I let that one slide by harmlessly, knowing I’d won the real battle this evening. Besides, I was already forming ideas of how we could come up with alternate funding to pay for the furnishings that we still needed.

  “Security,” Don put in, “for this year’s Halloween ghost watch. Who’s going to give up their evening?”

  There were various excuses and vague murmurings around the table.

  I asked, “What’s the ghost watch?”

  “Oh,” Rosina said, “that’s only what Don calls it. It’s not anything official.”

  “Every Halloween,” Malaika told me, “people drive up here to park and party in the woods, so they can try to see the ghost light.”

  “It’s a nuisance,” Eve agreed. “And now that our board’s officially in charge of the museum, it’s our problem, not the town’s.”

  And Sharon said, “My husband said he’d try to get a few off-duty boys to come and help us out, but it’s a busy night.”

  I looked around at all of them. “So . . . wait. We’re going to have a lot of people coming up here Halloween night, on their own, and we don’t even have to advertise?”

  Malaika smiled, catching on. “What did you have in mind?”

  • • •

  Gianni met the cars as they were entering the parking lot. “I’ll bring my pumpkin,” he had promised, and he did—a plastic orange pumpkin bucket like the one I’d carried as a kid at Halloween around the neighbourhood.

  “Hey, welcome to the ghost hunt!” he was greeting every new arrival. “Parking by donation, give whatever you feel comfortable with.” Parking by extortion, I thought, watching him in action. To one driver he said, “Really, Tony? Really? You feel comfortable with that? You want your girl to see how cheap you are? Yeah, there you go. That’s better.”

  As the couples—they were mostly couples—left their cars, a little bit uncertain still what they’d just wandered into, they were met by Don, resplendent in his vampire teeth, who handed them a paper bag for garbage and a photocopied map of all the pathways and then started them along their way. “Be careful!” he called after them, each time. “You never know what might jump out at you.”

  I knew what would jump out at them. First Lara, dressed as Lydia, would pass them in a pale and tattered nightgown with her hair all tangled up in imitation seaweed as though she had returned from being drowned.

  Then one of Gianni’s friends, another waiter from the deli, in the role of Joseph Wilde, would stumble from the bushes and accost them with a toy rifle in hand and ask them, “Have you seen my sister?”

  Harvey, who had rented the same re-enactment uniform he’d worn for our Fall Harvest, would be skulking around through the trees pretending to be the lost Revolutionary soldier who’d been guided by the ghost to safety, urging anyone he saw to watch out for the British.

  And if anybody made it to the graveyard, they’d find Frank up there to tell them, in his practical but chilling way, the story of the fatal love affair between young Lydia and her French soldier, leaving those who’d heard the tale to find their own way back again along the dark and lonely path between the trees where every leaf that scuttled in the wind became a footstep just behind you.

  By the time the moon was high and it was nearly midnight, we must have had eighty people, maybe more, assembled near the picnic tables in our clearing, enjoying the ghost-shaped cookies and hot chocolate that Tracy’s partner Veronica had set up there. We’d been lucky—since her family owned the deli she’d been able to persuade the town to waive the licence fee so we could serve the food and drink without a problem, and the deli had provided the refreshments free of charge.

  One of the women standing closest to the house let out a shriek.

  “It’s him!” She pointed to the woods. “Look, there he is!”

  And everybody turned—including Lara, Gianni’s friend, and Harvey, who had finished with their acting parts and come back, still in costume, to join in the general fun. They
turned and saw a small light, swinging slowly like a lantern in a hand, move through the trees along the far edge of the clearing.

  Frank, who’d also left his post by now and stood among us, to the side, surprised me with his flair for the theatrical. “Now, everyone stay quiet,” he advised. “Don’t want to spook him. He’s just looking for his Lydia, to lead her to the cove.”

  Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The light swung silently along, then turned away along the path that led down to the water.

  Well done, Tracy, I thought, looking at Veronica, who winked.

  A collective breath of satisfaction rippled through the onlookers, as conversation started up again. Within a half hour we were wrapping up, the tables wiped, refreshments packed away, the people leaving as they’d come, in couples.

  One big middle-aged man with a leather jacket and a neck tattoo reached for my hand and shook it heartily. “I tell ya, I’ve been coming up here thirty years to see the soldier’s ghost, and I ain’t never had a better time than this.”

  When Gianni came back from the parking lot, his smile was wide. “You shoulda seen them. People shoving tens and twenties at me. We must have a grand in here.” He held his plastic pumpkin bucket up.

  We carried it into the kitchen. Tracy, as our treasurer, did the official count.

  “Nine hundred eighty-seven dollars,” she announced. “And twenty-five cents.” She had scratched her face a little on her journey with the lantern through the woods, but she was smiling. “That’s so great.”

  “It really is,” said Harvey, looking genuinely happier than I remembered seeing him, as though he had been caught up in the spirit of our shared success. He clapped me on the shoulder. “Good job. Good idea.”

  Frank observed this with a lifted eyebrow, then in private tones advised me, “Hell hath frozen over. Watch your step.”

  But it felt nice to have the group’s acceptance and approval for that moment.

  Nice, too, to know that Frank, Rosina, Don, and Lara were out front and waiting by the parking lot to see that I got safely to my car. I could hear their voices as, alone inside the house, I started with my ritual of locking up.

  This time, I walked the same route backwards, starting with the upstairs rooms to get them over with. “I’m coming in,” I told the empty air as I walked through my office door. “Don’t scare me.”

  Nothing moved.

  “Thanks.” Quickly moving through into the old part of the house, I checked the upstairs chambers, being careful of the patched floor in the little northeast corner room, where Sam had also now repaired the wood frame of the sloping ceiling.

  Violet and Phyllis’s room, as I’d taken to calling it. Nothing moved here, either.

  As I descended the narrow back stairs to the buttery I could hear everyone’s voices outside with a comforting clarity. Lara was laughing.

  I crossed through the parlour and checked that the front door was bolted securely. Passed on, through the keeping room into the corner room under my office that would, from the floor plans, have once been a small chamber just off the kitchen.

  The window here looked to the side of the house, to the woods where I’d once seen the ghost light myself, and tonight as I turned I thought I caught a glimmer of something again through that window, out there in the dark.

  I shouldn’t have stopped, I knew. I should have carried on doing my rounds and ignored what I’d thought I saw. Left it alone.

  But I didn’t.

  I took a step nearer the window, and looked.

  It was there, gleaming brightly beyond the dark glass. I leaned closer. Cupped my hands against the glass so my reflection wouldn’t interfere. The light went out abruptly like a candle flame extinguished.

  As I pulled back from the glass, it came to life again.

  And that was when I realized it was a reflection, too. It wasn’t shining in the woods at all. It was behind me.

  In the doorway.

  As I spun around my heart shot up and started pounding at my collarbone.

  The light was there. The light, and nothing else.

  I couldn’t move. I thought the light moved upward as though somebody had lifted it to see me better, then it lowered. Travelled on away from me, with nobody to carry it.

  It seemed to disappear into the plain wall of the corridor beyond the door. A wall that had been built with the Victorian addition.

  But when Lydia’s French officer had lived here, there had been no wall. He would have walked straight from this room into the kitchen, and I knew that if I had been braver—if I’d forced my feet to move and gone around myself to look—I’d find the light there moving now, across the old and empty Wilde house kitchen with its long-cold hearth.

  Lydia

  He was carrying the lantern.

  It did make the walking easier, the sun not being up yet and the woods alive with small and furtive rustlings. Every dropping of an acorn seemed the footfall of a predator, and though she knew this path so well she could have walked it blindfold, she was grateful for the warmly swinging light of that one candle in its glass and metal box.

  Her father, having gone ahead, called back to them that Mr. Fisher’s sloop was there and waiting as he had arranged.

  She’d have much preferred to go by land, but Father had explained he could not spare the beasts nor waggon, nor could he afford just now to hire ones from Henry, but since Mr. Fisher owed him for the shelves he’d built last summer, this would cancel out that debt and serve their purpose.

  “This is very precious cargo,” said her father to his friend. “See you take care of it.”

  “You need not fear,” was Mr. Fisher’s answer. “As for the other, though, I’ve half a mind to dump it in the Hellgate.” But he nodded a terse greeting to the man who held the lantern next to Lydia. “Good morning.”

  Mr. de Sabran echoed those words in reply in his deep voice, but said no more than that, and handing off the lantern to her father he helped Lydia to board.

  The tide was at its highest point, and soon it would be turning, with a wind set fair to carry them straight in to New York’s harbour. Mr. Fisher’s single-masted sloop looked very small against the darkly looming shadow of the Bellewether beyond it, but she knew that it had speed, and they would be at William’s dock that afternoon.

  She had not realized just how long the hours between would be.

  The other times she’d sailed with Mr. Fisher she had been with Joseph and with Moses, and the men had talked among themselves and left her little to do other than to watch the passing shoreline and enjoy the sense of freedom. Except Moses was not here now, and each glance from Mr. Fisher made it plain exactly where he laid the blame.

  It did not help that on this day Mr. de Sabran wore his full and proper uniform, with shoes and stockings and the long white coat with its blue lining. With his hat set low above his eyes, hair fastened back, sword at his side, he somehow became less an individual and more a symbol on which Mr. Fisher focused all the hatred that he felt for those who’d killed his son.

  She understood. She’d felt the same at first, and Mr. Fisher had not had the chance, as she had, to observe the better qualities of Mr. de Sabran.

  So she could only do her best to keep the tension at a manageable level by diverting Mr. Fisher when she could with conversation.

  With the cold and wind and salt spray she was growing hoarse and welcomed their arrival at the Hellgate, with its swift and shifting currents that required Mr. Fisher’s full attention. And then they passed into New York’s harbour, and there was no need to talk.

  It was a sight that always filled her with excitement and with awe, although she would not wish to live in such a place. There were too many buildings—houses closely pressed together in a row along the shoreline, stretching farther to the north each time she saw it, spires of churches rising here and there amid the rooftops, and the solid walls and towers of the star-shaped fortress sitting for protection at the bottom of it all.

 
The harbour was itself a city built of ships—high masts and sails of every shape, tall ships and small, some riding at their anchors, others riding on the wind, all crossing paths and navigating boldly around one another so she was convinced that there would surely be a great collision. But there was none. Mr. Fisher brought them through the shadow of a giant British man-of-war, its colours flying crisply in the wind, and steered between a swiftly moving privateer brig and a rowboat full of raucous sailors, and delivered them in safety to the wharf.

  She knew the way from there.

  “Some men may build their mansions in the meadows,” William had once told her, “but a city’s beating heart lies in its markets and Exchange, and in the wharves and docks that keep them well supplied with their life’s blood of trade.”

  Accordingly, his own house was in Dock Street, flanked by finer shops and counting houses. And in truth the street was like some pulsing vein of life, filled with the noise of clopping hooves and creaking wheels and voices chattering above a constant flow of people from so many walks of life and varied places she would not have been surprised if Mr. de Sabran in his white coat drew no attention. But of course he did. Two women they were passing drew aside as though he were the very devil, and a carter going by them with his waggon tipped his hat and called down crude “congratulations” on Quebec’s surrender, but Mr. de Sabran neither broke his stride nor paid them notice. Like her father, with the manners of a gentleman, he walked between her and the muddy street, and as they crossed the road he gave his arm to her to help her keep from stumbling in the wheel ruts. She released his arm as soon as they had crossed, but she remembered her own manners enough to say, “Thank you,” and received his brief nod in reply.