Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “Yes, sir. I’m a student. My name is Isaac Wedge.”

  “And we be the Nicholsons,” said the father.

  “The family of James?” asked Isaac. “James Nicholson of Boston?”

  “Do you know him?” she asked.

  And Isaac found that months of recitation under the threat of Eaton’s rod made it easy to find words before a beautiful girl. “Miss, there be only ten of us. We are all acquaintances, and I’m pleased to say we are all friends.”

  He wished for more talk, but Eaton appeared now in the doorway, and Isaac, knowing his place, excused himself with a polite bow.

  The Nicholsons bore gifts of food—ten packages for ten young men who had eaten too little beef and too much spoiled fish at the School of Tyrannus. Each package contained molasses cakes, hardtack, a small round of cheese, and a jar of pickled oysters.

  Eaton did not object to their distribution, since the Nicholsons brought a larger basket of food for the master and his wife. He did, however, object to the attention that several of the boys paid to Master Nicholson’s daughter.

  “This be a godly school,” he shouted after the Nicholsons had left. “I will not have any of you slobbering over a young lady of such quality as Jamie Nicholson’s sister. Any further slobbering will be met with punishment.”

  But for the next month, Isaac Wedge could not erase her image from his mind. To his disappointment, when she and her father returned in February, Isaac was cutting firewood at Reverend Shepard’s, so he missed seeing her. When they came in March, he managed to speak with her briefly before Eaton appeared and scowled at him.

  That night in commons, James Nicholson told Isaac that Katharine wished to be remembered to him and that she would look forward to meeting him on their visit in April. Nothing in his life had ever made Isaac Wedge happier.

  There was an assistant at the college named Nathaniel Briscoe, who slept in the upper chamber with the students. Most nights, after the candles were snuffed, he would call out, “Remember Onan, boys. Remember that his sin be a hangin’ offense, so banish temptation from your mind.” But most nights, there would be furtive movements and sounds that suggested someone was ignoring Briscoe’s words. And most nights, Briscoe would ignore the sounds.

  But one March night, Briscoe was in Boston. So Master Eaton paid a visit to the upper chamber. He came on stockinged feet and masked his lamp, so it gave off no telltale shadows. He silently climbed the ladder from below and stopped when only his eyes and ears had risen through the attic hatchway.

  Isaac did not see him, for Isaac was busy. The only person Isaac saw at that moment was a certain young lady. And she was only in his mind’s eye. And it was her image that made him busy, and he rose toward a release that—

  “Isaac Wedge! Stand up! Now!”

  At the explosion of sound, Isaac leapt to his feet, even as his body leapt in a series of spasms that were suddenly no more than wet embarrassment beneath his nightshirt.

  “We are here to root out sin,” cried Eaton to all the boys, “no matter where it be found. Strangle the eel in my house and feel the sting of my rod!”

  Why was Eaton the man that he was? And why had they made such a man the head of the college? Those were questions that Isaac asked himself as he was led, barefoot, to the master’s chamber to receive twenty snaps of the rod. But there was no answer, except that some men were cruel and some men were kind.

  And some cruel men considered cruelty a strange kindness, usually voiced as Eaton put it to Isaac: “I do this for your own good,” the words followed by whistle and whip. “I have the authority, and I will exercise it!” Whistle and whip. “It is my right and it is my duty.” Whistle and whip. “What you’ve been up to is a hanging offense.” And whistle and whip once again, all the way to the count of twenty.

  Then Eaton stepped back, breathed deep, and spoke in a voice as soft and gentle as always after a beating. “Now, then, Isaac Wedge . . . ’tis said that an idle mind is the devil’s playground. Be your mind idle?”

  “No, sir. I have my studies.”

  “Then it must be your hands that are idle. We’ll give them something to do and save you from hanging.” Eaton pointed to the two trunks in a corner. “Master Harvard’s books. They be yours to catalog . . . in your idle time. Do a good job.”

  “I’d do nothing less, sir. I promised Master Harvard on his deathbed.”

  “They be the physical legacy of our first benefaction, which has inspired the Great and General Court to give our little school a name: Harvard College.”

  All the more reason, thought Isaac, to do the job well.

  But Eaton was a fickle man. What seemed a fine idea at night, after the pleasure of a good beating, might look less palatable in the morning, especially as March brought earlier dawns and warmer days, during which he hatched grander plans.

  The fence directly behind Peyntree House had been taken down, the cows squeezed into adjacent yards, and the posts and beams of the new college hall had risen. So Eaton proclaimed that he would plant an apple orchard to frame the grand structure.

  His account books would show that he paid local workers to do the planting, when in fact he pocketed the money and put students to work digging wild apple trees and going to Boston to fetch trees brought from England. When the ground thawed, the few hours of free time he had given the students each day he gave over to planting. By May, thirty trees were in the ground. Some died before they took up water. Some leafed out. And a few made pink blossoms that promised fruit and fresh cider by fall.

  And one evening, Isaac Wedge walked boldly beneath the blossoms with Katharine Nicholson.

  “What if the master see us?” she asked.

  “You say that your father has come to discuss a contribution?”

  “Aye. He offers to build a lean-to on the side of Peyntree House, as a library for Master Harvard’s books . . . at least till the college hall is completed.”

  “Then Master Eaton will pay no mind to anything else.”

  “But what if he glance out and see us?”

  “The beating will be worth it.”

  “You’re a brave one, Isaac Wedge,” she said. Then, with a conspiratorial little smile and a furtive glance toward the house, she brought her lips to his.

  It was the gentlest of touches, but Isaac’s legs went weak. He thought he might fall over. And later he thought it might have been a good idea . . . to fall over and feign sickness, for at that moment, Mrs. Eaton emerged from the outhouse, straightening her skirt. At the sight of a student kissing a girl in the orchard, she gave out with a shriek, almost as if the student had tried to kiss her.

  The beating was painful, but the greater pain came with the threat of expulsion that Eaton now laid upon Isaac, should he be so bold as to see Katharine again.

  “And what would John Harvard say, were such a thing to happen?” asked Eaton.

  Isaac could not imagine. But how terrible would it be to avoid Katharine until he graduated? And why? Because Master Eaton would control nature as he controlled everything else at that school? He seemed a man well disposed to satisfying his own natural appetites—for food, for drink, for lust, too, considering his four children and the nightly sounds that rose from the chamber below Isaac’s bed. But Eaton’s greatest appetite was for money, and therein lay the answer to Isaac’s predicament: Eaton feared to anger Master Nicholson before the latter had opened his purse for the college.

  To inspire Nicholson’s charity, Eaton set Isaac at last to an accounting of the books that would be housed in the library. This would show Nicholson the profundity of Harvard’s collection, and it would keep Isaac away from Nicholson’s daughter.

  One June evening, while the other students spent a few hours out of doors, Isaac and the blackamoor dragged the two trunks of books to the recitation room. When Isaac opened the first trunk, he felt as if he were looking into the mind of John Harvard himself. For the rest of his life, whenever he smelled leather—a new boot, an old saddle—Isaa
c would think of the bindings of Harvard’s books. And he would remember the words that Harvard had said so often: “A man will be known by his books.”

  As Latin was the language of learned discourse, there were books with titles such as Anglorum Praelia and De Habitu et Constitutione Corporis. Also in Latin was a seventeen-volume edition of Summa Theologica by the Roman Catholic Thomas Aquinas. Isaac read a few pages and found no “devil-worshiping Romanism,” as Eaton had phrased it, but a mind that was serious and supple and filled with the love of God. Aquinas, however, was flanked in the trunk by those plain thinkers of Protestantism, Martin Luther and John Calvin.

  There was a Latin grammar and dictionary, likewise for Hebrew and Greek, the other languages an educated man should know. However, Plutarch, Pliny, and Homer had arrived in English translations, and what wondrous worlds they must have shown John Harvard in any language.

  The next evening, Isaac worked on the second trunk, and before he had dug far, he came across several items that surprised him even more than the Aquinas had. They were plays. Two were in Latin, comedies by the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence. Another was Roxana, by the English author William Alabaster.

  But none of these was as shocking to find as the play in the red leather binding, about six inches by nine, ink-written on heavy paper about a hundred pages in length. The first page was blank but for the words “‘Love’s Labours Won’ by Will. Shakespeare.”

  Isaac almost threw down the book. His father had oft railed against theater, and against no one more loudly than this Shakespeare, who had written of regicides bedding their brothers’ wives, of blackamoors wedding flaxen-haired women, of fairies running naked through summer nights, of men dressed as women and women as men, of blind love and magic potions and murder, of man’s—here were John Harvard’s words on his deathbed—man’s vanities, his passions, his appetites, all the things that lead us toward sin.

  It was plain to Isaac that Master Harvard had been warning him that one day he would find this book and that he must respect it as he did the works of Martin Luther or John Calvin.

  But why? Had they not planted this colony as a place where such sins as would be found in London could not survive? What greater public sin was there than the theater?

  Still, Isaac could not deny his curiosity. How could reading a few pages damage his mind or his soul or his personal connection with God? And how much more would it teach him about John Harvard?

  A friend in London had once shown him a handmade book—drawings of men with erect members penetrating women in every angle of copulation. And though he knew it was wrong, he had not been able to take his eyes from the images or control his physical response as he turned the pages. Opening this book, he felt a similar excitement, a tingling in the mind and, strangely, in the loins, at entering a forbidden world.

  The second page contained the words dramatis personae and a list of characters. Then the play began: “Enter Ferdinand, King of Navarre, Berowne, and Costard, a clown.” And then came the words. Flowing, flying, all but leaping from the page. Furtively, Isaac read, and quickly, as quickly as ever he had. At times, he found himself laughing out loud. At other times, he gasped in surprise at the scenes playing, not on the page, but in his mind’s eye. And he was absorbed so completely, he did not notice the gathering darkness until he heard doors opening, students returning. . . .

  But there was one act of the play yet to read. And he had to see how it all ended, so he lit a candle. He should have known that while all lit candles attracted insects, lit candles in Peyntree House also attracted Eatons.

  First came Mary, who could skulk like a cat despite her girth. Drawn by the light, she peered into the recitation room, then went slipping away.

  Moments later, the master appeared. “Who is wasting money on—”

  Isaac came to his senses. He closed the book and stood, as embarrassed and frightened as he had been on the night that Eaton had found him strangling the eel.

  “What is that?” Eaton stepped close to Isaac, as if to intimidate him with his bulk.

  “A . . . a book, sir.” And for the first time, Isaac realized how much he had grown in a year, despite the bad diet, because he was now on eye level with the master.

  “Most boys don’t light candles to keep reading. They quit at the comin’ of dark.”

  “I do my job, sir. Sometimes I must read a bit to know the—”

  “You need only to read the title and author.” Eaton snatched the book and glanced at it, and his eyes bulged. “A play? Shakespeare! This be filth.”

  “’Twas one of Master Harvard’s books, sir. It can’t be filth.”

  “Most certainly it can.” Eaton flipped to the back and read the words “‘Transcribed by the author.’ The very devil himself. How much have you read?”

  “A . . . a few pages.”

  Eaton whipped his rod across Isaac’s face. “Don’t play sly with me, boy. You’ve been sitting here reading this play. How many murders have you read of? How many women have been ravished? How many bellowing oaths have you heard from besotted clowns like John Falstaff?”

  “Who, sir?”

  Eaton struck again, on the other cheek. “There will be no wooden theaters in New England. Glorified bear pits filthy with cutpurses and fops and courtiers in codpieces. And there will be no plays in this library, as long as I have breath.”

  “But, sir, Master Harvard wanted his books kept together.”

  Eaton raised the rod again. “Do you dare to question me?”

  “No, sir. I merely remind you.”

  Then Eaton seemed to give more thought to all of this. He opened the book and flipped through it. “His own handwriting. The handwriting of the devil. There be some—misguided sinners—who would pay handsomely for such evil.”

  Isaac picked up the other plays, thinking there might be safety for Shakespeare in numbers. “Here are Plautus and Terence, sir, and the English playwright Alabaster.”

  Eaton snatched at the Alabaster. “Roxana. ’Twas performed at Trinity College. Trinity men were less worried about such sin than the Puritan scholars of Emmanuel.”

  “And what of these?” Isaac offered the other two books.

  “They’re classical plays. Reading them will enhance a man’s spoken Latin. But this”—he weighted the Shakespeare in his hand—“this must be destroyed.”

  “No!” Without thinking, Isaac grabbed Eaton’s arm and tried to get at the book.

  Eaton must have been expecting an assault by some one of his students. For he was ready and responded with a closed fist.

  Isaac heard his own nose crunching, and he thought, for just an instant, that he saw the Big Dipper, all as he flew backward, banged against the wall, then bounced into Eaton’s fist again. He had been in plenty of scuffles and once had been struck by a falling roof slate on a London street, but never had he experienced the kind of ear-ringing senselessness that now staggered him.

  “You do not strike your master! And you do not question him!” Eaton raised his fist to strike again but stopped in midair, as though a better idea had entered his head. Then he turned and hurried out of the room.

  Isaac was too groggy to notice if Eaton had the book with him, but in an instant, Eaton was back with a cudgel, raised for action.

  Fortunately for Isaac, the front door opened at that moment, and Nathaniel Briscoe appeared in the foyer. “What goes on here, master?”

  “A student is chastised for laying hands upon me. See that the others are in their beds, and lock the trapdoor to their chamber.”

  “But that boy is bleedin’.”

  Only now did Isaac realize that the red droplets striking the floor were falling from his broken nose.

  “Do as you’re told,” commanded Eaton.

  “No. You’ve beat your last student.” And Briscoe threw himself into the room.

  But Eaton was as practiced with the cudgel as he was with the rod, and he delivered a single short stroke that sent Briscoe stumbling bac
k into the foyer. Then he drove his boot into Briscoe’s belly and sent him flying out the front door.

  Through the window, Isaac watched Briscoe land in the dirt, then stagger to his feet and pull out his knife. Isaac should have been watching Eaton, who rounded on him with the cudgel swinging. . . .

  Isaac awoke sometime later. He inhaled and breathed his own blood back into his throat. Where was he? On the floor. On the floor where? He saw shadows dancing on the wall. He heard the shuffling of feet, the groaning of a man . . . Master Briscoe.

  Then he heard Eaton’s voice, “Did you not pull a knife on me? Admit it!” This was followed by the hollow thunk of a walnut cudgel against a man’s head.

  “Sir . . . sir . . .” It was the voice of the blackamoor. “He can’t take no more.”

  “Be quiet and hold him up, or I’ll beat you, too,” said Eaton.

  Isaac scuttled from the room on all fours. As soon as he was outside in the starlight, he ran, half stumbling, to the house next door.

  There lived Thomas Shepard, minister to Cambridge, overseer of the college. He was considered a man of great probity in private counsel and great power in the pulpit, despite a body that was slender to the point of weakness and a complexion as pale and diaphanous as a cloud. He gasped at the bloody sight that greeted him when he opened his door, and gasped again when it said, “You must come, sir. You must stop a murder.”

  iv

  The General Court convened at the Boston Meeting House to hear testimony in charges brought, amazingly, by Nathaniel Eaton, who claimed that Briscoe had pulled a knife on him and had also—even more grievous—uttered an oath to God.

  Briscoe himself stood first at the bar, before the magistrates, learned men elected by the freemen of the colony to govern and to render judgments in criminal matters and disputes.

  “For what reason did you pull a knife?” asked one of them.

  “I feared that Master Eaton would kill a student that he was chastising,” said Briscoe. “The oath I uttered was a prayer. I cried out to God to save me from death when Eaton turned his cudgel onto me.”