The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  I reached the village—a loose collection of small thatched-hut buildings, some wattle-and-daub, but many full-timbered, and many with second floors. A subtle but pervasive odor of waste wafted about the hot, dusty streets, and I felt the porridge curdling in my stomach. There were no street signs, but having memorized the map of Cambridge for this era, I knew the bookseller would be on the right at the first intersection I came to, at Water and Long Streets (or as I knew them, Dunster and Winthrop). A block farther up Water would be the Meeting House, which was also the church. We had considered my taking a copy of the psalter from the pews there, but decided that in such a small community a newcomer would be eyed ceaselessly, and perhaps suspiciously, at church. I would have to pinch it from its secular source.

  There was the bookseller’s, just ahead. It was a two-story building with planks lying on the ground in front of the threshold to approximate a front stoop. The door was open, and two front-facing windows were unshuttered. I saw a wooden floor within, and a long table, and many barrels and crates: it was not specifically a bookshop, but a shop that happened to sell books. I leaned the shovel against the building and went to the doorway. I wiped away a layer of grime and dust from my face, using the sleeve of the waistcoat, and looked in.

  Behind the long table (his position suggesting he was the proprietor of the place) was a round-faced, proper-looking gentleman of perhaps five and twenty, frowning up at a taller fellow on my side of the table. The taller fellow was frowning back down at him. The proprietor looked unaccustomed to frowning. The tall fellow looked quite used to it. They were both in grey doublet and breeches. The shorter man also sported a canvas merchant’s apron. Between them, on the table, was an impressive stack of leather-bound books.

  “It will destroy my profit to reprint them,” the tall fellow was complaining. “Let alone rebind all the reprints. I have created an errata to go with it, that suffices. ’Tis selling well enough for you, isn’t it?”

  “’Tis selling very well, but the errata misses half the errors and I am forever deflecting comments about it from the people who have given me their money for it,” said the merchant, in the tone of a parent issuing a firm but gentle rebuke. He had a benign energy to him. Instinctively I liked him more than the other fellow. “It makes them disinclined to give me their money for other purchases.”

  “It’s the only book you’re selling,” protested the printer.

  “I’ve got Bibles coming over from England, due next week,” said the merchant. “And there is plenty I sell here beside books.”

  The printer looked taken aback. “Why be you importing Bibles from England when you have finally got a printer in your own backyard?”

  “Maybe he is not a very good printer,” said the merchant, as kindly as possible. “Also there is a new book written by a doctor, about the circulation of blood. ’Twill be here on the next ship.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about the blood, ’tis a ridiculous rumor,” said the printer, quite put out. “And nobody decent will ever want to read about such unsavory subjects. Especially in this town, where we have a college!”

  I decided this was a fortuitous accident, and that I could use it better than any of the scenarios Tristan had proposed for the theft. So I stepped into the shop.

  The merchant gestured to the pile of books. “They are no good to me, Stephen. Reprint them. I’ll buy them from you at a higher price if that will help keep you from ruin.” At that moment, they both saw me, and paused from their discourse to examine me. The merchant nodded and then returned his attention to the books, while Stephen the Printer ogled me a moment longer, before saying hurriedly to the merchant, “You’ve a wife and babe to feed and another due this leaf-fall, Hezekiah. ’Twould be wrong of me to take money from your children’s mouths.” He said it not as if he really meant it, but as if he knew he must because there was a witness present.

  “’Twould be wrong of me to sell any more of this printing,” said Hezekiah matter-of-factly.

  “Is that the new psalter?” I asked.

  “’Tis,” said the merchant, looking at me with some skepticism. “You’re not here to purchase one, are you?”

  “No, sir, I am here to purchase three. My master sent me to fetch them up,” I added, since nobody dressed as I was dressed would be in a position to buy one for personal use.

  “Who’s your master, then?” asked the printer, in an almost lecherous voice.

  “A squire of Boston,” I said with a little attitude. “He wants one for himself and two for family gifts.”

  Stephen gestured to the pile. “I’m Stephen Day, I’m the printer, have a look.”

  “I’m Hezekiah Usher, the bookseller, and I’m not selling these books,” said the merchant, still very matter-of-fact. “You’d best come back in a sennight.”

  I made sure to look crushed. “Oh, but Goodman Usher, it is a long way from Boston, and I’ve the harvest to help with when I return. I’ve not the time to return. Might you sell some of these to me, even if they be not perfect?”

  “Yes. Look,” commanded Stephen Day. The merchant was about to protest, but instead smirked and raised his eyes to God with a shrug of resignation. I walked to the table, ignoring the intense stare of the printer, and picked up a book. The leather was supple. When I opened it, the binding was stiff and fresh, a faint smell of glue still on it, as well as the clean smell of paper, and another smell, almost metallic, which might have been the ink. They were elegant, the shape a little narrower than modern books, with a bold exquisite font on the first page: “The WHOLE booke of psalmes faithfully translated into ENGLISH metre.” By modern standards, yes, okay, the typesetting was an embarrassment, but the book itself was handsome. I thumbed through a few pages, pretended to study a leaf, set the volume aside, thumbed through another with a studious expression. Then another. Then a fourth. The two men watched me.

  “What do you look for?” asked the printer.

  I was about to give him a polite smile and then remembered that this population never seems to do that. “You said these had faults and I am looking to find the least faulty of them.”

  “They are all from the same plates,” said the printer impatiently. “I don’t know if you can read but they’re all exactly the same.”

  “Not so,” I said, and presented the book I held. “Do you see how the printed area is slightly askew on this page? The others I looked at also had uneven pages. I am trying to find one where the paper was set just right on the press. I do not know the term for it, but I know what I am looking for.”

  The printer huffed a bit at that. The merchant chuckled and reached for a book. “Let us see if we can find any perfectly set books. If we can, Goodman Day, then I’ll buy them off you and sell them to my customer.”

  I expected Stephen Day to instantly declare he’d sell the books to me directly, as his profit would be greater and Goodman Usher had already refused to carry them. That is what any enterprising person of my era would do. But this notion did not seem to enter Stephen Day’s head. How very particular this society was: everyone kept to their place.

  Or perhaps Stephen Day was simply dull-witted.

  In any case, he agreed to this readily, and the two of them began to help me search for a book with every leaf of every octave perfect. As the three of us perused them, the men resumed arguing over the fate of the remaining books. Now their eyes were busy and their attention distracted. Good. I placed one book down to my right rather than back onto the pile (which was to my left). Each time I returned a book to the pile and reached for a new one with my left hand, I would push this hijacked volume an inch or so farther to the right, so that eventually I had inched it all the way around a small barrel on the table, where neither man could see it without searching for it. Their argument had continued to grow until they were truly bickering, so that when we finished reviewing all fifty-odd copies on the table, they looked not to me but to each other, teetering on the edge of vitriol.

  “I shall have to
disappoint my master,” I said decisively. “None of these would be to his standards. Good day.”

  “Do you hear that?” said Hezekiah Usher to Stephen Day, as I turned to leave.

  “This strumpet is failing to obey her master,” said Stephen Day to Hezekiah Usher. “He told her to bring back three copies of the psalter, and she leaves here without even one. He did not tell her to check the quality of the work—”

  But I was already out the door. I grabbed the shovel with my right hand and continued up Water Street.

  My left hand clutched the hijacked copy of the Bay Psalm Book.

  Reader, I had walked out the door right in front of them, holding it in plain sight, but they did not see it. Not only had they ceased to regard me, but even to the degree I was in their peripheral vision, they did not see theft. What I had just done was unthinkable to them. They could not see what they could not imagine. Still, it had been a shuddery moment, and I barely suppressed the urge to run, or at least look nervously over my shoulder. But I had it, and had gotten cleanly away.

  Shovel—check. Psalter—check. That was the hardest part. Now to the cooper’s, and then to the boulder, and then the return trip. I could do this! Feeling more confident, I held myself more upright and walked more briskly. I turned right at the next intersection, passed a leather-worker and an apothecary, and then on the left, as I knew from the old maps, there was a cooperage.

  The cooperage had a yard that fronted the street. It was crowded with buckets, barrels, and casks, and on a huge tree stump in the center was a stash of metal hoops of different sizes. Various axes, knives, and adzes rested on a long, low bench beside this. The lovely smell of wood shavings neutralized the general stench of filth. The cooper, a man of Tristan’s build, dressed in Puritan garb of faded maroon with a leather work-apron, hatless and collarless, was bent over a large half-finished barrel, using a hammer and what looked like an adze to pound a hoop into place around the staves.

  “Are you a dry-tight cooper?” I asked.

  “Can be,” he said without looking up. “What is your need?”

  “I have a thing in need of storage,” I said, and held out the book.

  He looked up. He was handsome, and held himself like somebody extremely comfortable in his own body—very different from the other men I’d encountered today. His eyes glanced briefly at the book but then strayed to me, and considered me a moment—the whole of me, not my face. His look gave me shivers. Then he suddenly shook his head, made eye contact, and said, “What, then?”

  “I need this bound into a dry-tight vessel,” I said. “’Tis an errand for my master in Boston.”

  “Your master in Boston. Is that the book everyone has been speaking of?” he asked, without much interest.

  “The first book printed in America,” I said, and I confess I was (and to this day, remain) awed by the thought.

  He shrugged. “That’s fine for those who read,” he said. “It does less for our common good than did the first grist mill or the first forge.”

  “. . . True,” I said.

  He set down the adze, held out his hand. “Let me see the little treasure,” he said. I stepped off the street into the yard (in truth, there was hardly any difference between the two) and offered it to him. He took it in his large callused paw of a hand and regarded it. “Too small for a firkin,” he murmured to himself.

  He looked up at me. There was something slightly charged in his look—this had been true of Goodman Griggs, of the ferryman, and of the printer. Perhaps it was simply how Puritan men always looked at women. Perhaps my fear that they would find me suspicious was causing me to imagine things. “I have no barrel of the right size, but there is a lidded bucket I could alter to suit your need.”

  “I thank you,” I said. “If you are sure it will be watertight.”

  “You could throw it in the ocean and a hundred years from now there will be no moisture in it,” he said with casual confidence.

  “I must probably still pack the book in something to keep it from getting bumped around on the journey,” I said.

  “I’ve some felt in the shop for oiling staves. Wrap it in some of that, ’twill suffice.”

  “Again, I thank you,” I said, starting to feel slightly unnerved by the intensity of his eyes. He looked at the barrel he’d been working on, considered it, and then seemed to decide it could be left alone for a bit, for he then glanced around the yard until he found a small lidded bucket. He tossed the book into the bucket, with no reverence for either its physical or spiritual worth.

  After snatching some felt from the back of his shop, he hunted through the hoops for a small one, and used his cooperish tricks to seal the top as tightly as any cask. I stood waiting, confused by how handsome I found him and wondering how best to negotiate the payment. All I had was the white wampum bead from Goody Fitch. I knew that white wampum was less valuable than purple, but beyond that had no idea how this would rank against, say, the musket shot.

  When he finished, he held out the sealed bucket. I smiled gratefully and reached for it, but just before my hand touched it, he raised it out of reach. “Now for the issue of payment,” he said. “What have you for money?”

  “Just this, from my master,” I said, pulling the wampum out of my drawstring bag. I offered it to him.

  “’Tis a pretty bead,” he said, “and a good start, but it will not cover this.”

  “I have nothing else,” I said.

  “Of course you do,” he said in a low, meaningful voice. I felt a prickling down my spine.

  “I do not know what you mean,” I said.

  “I think you do,” he said, staring at me. Before I could move away, he reached toward me with his free hand and clapped it around my rib cage. I reflexively pulled away, but he had me fast. “That’s a body not wearing a corset. I could tell just from how you hold yourself.” I shuddered and tried to pull away; he held on tighter. “Your master sends you out to do his bidding, with insufficient currency, unlaced. Do you think I don’t know what that means?”

  “My . . . corset is damaged,” I said, trying to keep my composure. I could not hit him with the shovel, as I wanted to—he had the book! I had to keep him close enough to get the book back!

  He laughed at my claim. “And how does a maid’s corset get damaged? Did your master damage it? I trust there was enjoyment in the damaging.”

  “You have completely misconstrued—”

  “Don’t worry,” he said easily. “I will not report you to Reverend Shepard. But your master has set you up to be generous to me in exchange for my generosity. Luckily, it is an exchange I am happy to indulge in.” He pulled me closer to him and then wrapped his arm around my waist.

  I put a hand on his chest to repel him, but he mistook it as a sign of intimacy, and looked pleased. I could not avoid this problem, so instead I would have to use it: “You have hit upon the truth,” I said resignedly. His smile grew much broader.

  “Good,” he said.

  “However,” I pushed on, trying to keep my voice calm (I knew it would be best to sound suggestive, but I could not quite push myself to that extreme), “I have urgent errands to attend to, and you’ve a barrel not yet finished. Give me the bucket now and I will return here in an hour with the freedom to . . . be generous.”

  He looked even more pleased. “After you are generous, I will give you the bucket,” he declared triumphantly.

  “My errand requires the bucket,” I said. “But I will leave you with the wampum bead, plus a little taste of what’s to come.” I glanced up and down the street, but nobody was about. Knowing this was foolish—and yet necessary—I reached down and lifted my skirt halfway up my leg. I did not need to point out to him what was missing—no petticoats, no stockings, nothing but a skirt. I doubt he often saw a woman’s ankle, let alone her shin, and I was flashing him up to the knee. Immediately he pulled me against him and I could feel him growing hard. I made myself smile. He no longer looked at all handsome to me. “I shall
enjoy being generous with you,” I whispered, and kissed him on the cheek. Blech.

  At this he looked so radiant I feared he might fancy himself in love with me. He kissed me back, and released me. “You will return,” he said sternly.

  “Upon my soul, I will,” I answered.

  He gave me the bucket. I thanked him with a smile, and then hurried down the lane, my heart beating so hard that I could feel it pulsing in my neck.

  Reader, I am relieved to inform you that the next leg of my undertaking was without incident, although it was fucking hot and dusty work. I knew I had to take the Watertown Road (the Massachusetts Avenue of later centuries) to a certain bend, where it would intercept the creek that I could follow to the boulder. Easily done. It was peculiar recognizing the boulder in a world that was otherwise so unfamiliar.

  The shaft of the shovel gave me a nasty splinter in the web between my thumb and forefinger, and digging the hole took longer than I’d anticipated, perhaps because my body was fatigued by the stress of the day. As I worked, I unearthed a midden—a deposit of oyster and clam shells that had apparently been left there by the natives. I buried the bucket, reburied the shells, and stomped the earth down as firmly as possible. Then, shovel in hand, slightly begrimed on face, hands, boots, and skirts, I returned to the village. Sticking to the western wall (as far from the cooperage as possible), I hurried down to the ferry landing.

  Luck was with me again, for the ferry was on this shore. But of course I had nothing to pay for passage with.

  Except an offer of generosity. Clearly all the men who had been eyeing me today could tell from my posture that I was unfettered beneath my waistcoat. That accounted for their unsettling looks. Now that I understood this, perhaps I could use it to my advantage with the ferryman.

  Although there was his younger brother to consider. The younger brother had not eyed me—perhaps he didn’t go for girls, or was nearsighted, or was a fierce Puritan. In any case, he was in the way.