The Ancient Nine

by Ian K. Smith, M. D.

  I looked around the room at the oil paintings hanging high on the pastel green walls. Of the portraits of eight men and one woman, I was surprised that I actually recognized a few of their faces. Teddy Roosevelt, hanging prominently on the center wall, was the most recognizable. I also recognized Charles Sumner, the namesake of Boston’s Sumner Tunnel. A painting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, once a professor at the college, hung adjacent to a circular glass clock.

  The security guard got up from his desk and walked to the front door and locked it. Forde promptly emerged from a small door in the center of the lobby and walked to the glass cabinet. He pulled out an oblong brass key that unlocked the cabinet, and carefully extracted the large leather box from its perch. Not until he had safely returned through the central door did the security guard unlock the front door and take up his position behind the desk.

  Forde returned to the reading room and sat behind the reference desk. He and the other man put on white gloves, then slowly pulled out the oversized book. Their movements were precise and delicate. Once the book had been secured and freed from its packaging, Forde wrote something on a sheet of paper in front of him, grabbed another pair of gloves from his desk, then walked toward me. I sat there frozen in disbelief. I was seconds away from putting my hands on the book on which Harvard’s entire legacy rested.

  “Please pull the cradle toward you so that I can rest the book in it,” Forde said, standing over me.

  Once I had the foam cradle situated in front of me, Forde gently rested the book in its arms and handed me the gloves.

  “Please touch the book only with gloved hands, and keep the book in the cradle at all times,” he said. “This helps prevent the cover from getting scratched, and it protects the spine. As you can imagine, these pages are extremely brittle, so your care in turning them is also appreciated. Do you have any questions for me?”

  I was almost too nervous to say anything, let alone touch a book that was three and a half centuries old.

  “Can I open it?” I said.

  “All yours,” he said. “I’ll be up at the front if you need any more assistance. Happy reading.”

  For the first five minutes, I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. I just sat there and examined the cover, faded brown leather with no title or publication markings. Then I slowly ran my hand along the soft cover, stopping to appreciate the indentations, little nicks, and areas where the leather had been pulled and stressed. I noticed what looked like water marks, small, darkened areas that made me picture the legendary John Harvard himself spilling some of his drink while reading himself to sleep.

  I looked up toward the reference desk. Forde was busy on the computer, and the other reference assistants had disappeared somewhere in the back. I opened the cover and at once appreciated the book with its interior battered and scratched. The leather was still crudely affixed to the board by some type of dense adhesive that surprisingly was still doing a decent job of holding everything together. A handwritten bookplate announced that it had once belonged to John Harvard’s personal collection. The title page was equally scarred, but still very legible and in excellent condition. I ran my hand over the thick paper, which had darkened considerably around its edges. I hadn’t expected to be so dazzled by its incredible history both known and unknown.

  I slowly turned to the first page, read it carefully, and moved on to the next. I was surprised that the ink had remained incredibly legible over these hundreds of years, and though the words were sometimes difficult to make out because of the strange letters, I was finally able to read Reverend John Downame’s original Puritanical masterpiece. I spent the next hour sitting there in the calming silence of the reading room, turning those old pages, absorbing the fiery words of an obviously spirited and opinionated preacher. “Allow your mind to abstract,” Davenport had said to me in his office. So I sat back in the cushioned seat and closed my eyes, trying to think of what might have been so important about the words on these pages that an exclusive brotherhood of affluent men would adopt them as their creed and an eccentric millionaire would have them engraved on the urn of a son who might’ve been murdered.

  34

  I WAS SUDDENLY awakened by the sound of a heavy door closing. I looked up and found the reading room bustling with bursts of quiet but frenzied activity. At each of the tables at least a couple of people sat hunched over, reading books and manuscripts propped up in the foam cradles. They furiously scribbled notes in their writing pads, some even tapping away into their laptops. Forde was still seated behind the reference desk. I looked up at the clock and realized I had been asleep for just over an hour. The sun beat heavily through the open blinds. The Christian Warfare was still in front of me, comfortably resting in the cradle. I got up and walked over to Forde.

  “How’s everything going?” he asked.

  “Great,” I said. “Am I allowed to keep this book a little longer and look at another one at the same time.”

  “Sure. You’re permitted to have three items out simultaneously. Do you have the title?”

  “It’s the same book, but I want the 1604 edition.”

  Forde wrinkled his forehead. “That’s the first edition.”

  I nodded my head.

  “Normally, I’d have you go to the electronic catalog and find the call number,” he said. “But I’ve retrieved the book so much for Professor Davenport lately that I have it memorized.”

  “When was Professor Davenport in here last?” I asked.

  “Sometime last week,” he said.

  Forde wrote down the number on a call slip and disappeared through the back door, and a female assistant replaced him at the desk. Her badge read VALERIE DUPONT. “Where exactly are all these rare books and manuscripts kept?” I asked her.

  “Downstairs in the basement,” she said. “Some in the stacks, but the more valuable items are stored in the vault.”

  “Where were the rare books kept before Houghton was built?”

  “The Treasure Room in Widener.”

  “And before Widener?”

  “Probably Gore Hall. That used to be the school’s central library. It was demolished to make way for Widener.”

  “Do you know when Gore was demolished?”

  “Not offhand, but give me a second.” She picked up the phone and dialed a number. After a short conversation, she said, “The books were evacuated from Gore Hall, then it was demolished in 1913. Widener opened in the fall of 1915.”

  “I wonder where they kept the rare books collection during that two-year gap?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Forde reemerged from the back door, carrying a small book wrapped in parchment. Judging by its size, I was certain he had retrieved the wrong book.

  “This is the book you requested,” Forde said.

  I reached my hand out.

  “I’ll have to carry it over to your working area,” he said.

  When I was seated again at the table, Forde walked over and carefully placed a small piece of felt inside the cradle before he rested the book in its arms.

  “And you’re sure this is the first edition of The Christian Warfare?” I said. I was having trouble reconciling the physical differences between the two editions. The 1634 book was almost four times the size and contained a lot more pages.

  “This is definitely the first edition,” he said. “The later edition that you looked at before has more than a thousand pages. This one has only six hundred seventy-six pages. Well, actually only six hundred seventy-four because two pages are missing. Please be extremely careful with this book. The pages are extremely brittle, and it’s one of the most valuable books in our collection. Unlike the book you looked at earlier, I can keep this out of the vault for only two hours at a time.”

  I nodded my head, and quickly turned my attention to the book with Davenport’s encouraging words ringing in my ears. Just as I had with the other book, I made a point of studying its physical characteristics first. It was no bigger than my hand an
d covered in a chestnut brown calfskin leather. Like the 1634 edition, there was no title on the cover. What I saw instead stunned me. I sat there and stared at it, forcing myself to believe what was in front of me.

  I immediately recognized the Latin words around the coat of arms: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense—“Shame to Him Who Evil Thinks.” They were the words of England’s most noble Order of the Garter, words Dalton and I had deduced were an inspiration for the Order of the Ancient Nine. This was a big break. I scribbled some notes in my pad, and then opened the cover. The interior was deeply weathered, the leather stretched and strained around the pointed corners and flat edges. Most prominent was a rectangular bookplate that had been glued onto the board. The design was some type of ethnographic artifact and there was the name of the owner typed underneath it:

  Lawrence Waters Jenkins

  Ex Libris

  I wrote the name on my pad. Then I lifted up the free end of the bookplate, and I swear my heart froze when I saw the handwritten note underneath it.

  From the library of King James I, title page torn

  I kept looking at the words, even mouthing them as I followed the curve and dip of each letter. I wanted to make sure there was no other way to interpret what I was reading other than that King James I had actually owned this book himself. The power of that possibility paralyzed me. I didn’t understand why Davenport had quizzed me about my knowledge of King James I and his insistence that I see the actual book. Now it made sense. He knew exactly what I would find, and like any good Socratic teacher, he didn’t want to steal the thrill of the discovery. My skin tingled.

  I looked at the reference desk. They were busy helping other patrons. I lightly ran my gloved fingers across the same pages that had once been touched by one of Europe’s most powerful monarchs and whose name was associated with one of the most enduring translations of the Bible. I looked over at the title page, which while slightly torn along the top edge as the note had said, it was mostly intact and the words completely legible. Could the death of Erasmus Abbott and the mission of the Ancient Nine be explained somewhere within these 674 pages?

  I turned the book over and examined the back cover. It was identical to the front, the same coat of arms surrounded by the garter’s motto. I then looked on the inside of the back cover and found a different bookplate design, this one also identifying LAWRENCE W. JENKINS as the owner, but also giving his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. Who was this man who had once owned one of the world’s rarest books and then donated it to Harvard?

  “I have your answer,” a voice said over my shoulder.

  I looked up and found Valerie standing over me.

  “While Gore Hall was being demolished, all the books had to be temporarily stored, so they devised a plan to spread them out all over the university,” she said. “Some books went to the lecture halls in the Yard and the Freshman Union, but almost two-thirds of the collection, including the rare books, went to Randall Hall, which had been in use as a dining hall.”

  “Where’s Randall Hall?” I asked.

  “Was is more like it,” she said. “It used to be on the corner plot where William James Hall now stands.”

  I lifted up the bookplate on the front page. “Am I reading this correctly? Was this book really in the personal library of King James I?”

  “Absolutely,” she said without hesitation. “It’s one of the greatest bequests to the library’s collection in the last century. That’s a handwritten notation by one of the old librarians. Someone would’ve written that only after making certain it was verified. We don’t write in books like that anymore, so it was definitely recorded a long time ago, probably at the time of acquisition.”

  After she left, I went back to the book, turning the thick pages, marveling over the antiquity of the typeface and the way sentences were constructed. Though the pages had been printed on a press, the words still looked like they had been written by a calligrapher. I turned very quickly to the five hundreds, then slowed when I neared the missing pages. I read page 544, then turned the page. It jumped to 547, as I had expected it would, but what surprised me was the condition of the slit of paper that remained from the page that had contained 545 on the front and 546 on the back. It wasn’t as if the page had been torn out and a jagged edge left attached to the binding. Instead, the page looked as though it had been meticulously cut with a razor. As I touched the remnant, I closed my eyes and thought about the photocopies I had seen in Davenport’s office. Abstract the mind. In just a couple of hours, I had a page full of notes and hopefully several new pieces to the puzzle. The central question, however, remained. What was specific to those missing two pages that would drive someone to deface one of Harvard’s most precious rare books? I closed my eyes for the next several minutes as my mind struggled with the possibilities. Was there a code to a royal treasure? Was there a secret they didn’t want exposed? Were there words printed only on the pages of this book copy that weren’t printed in others?

  “I’m sorry, but time’s up.” I looked up at Thomas Forde, and then down at my watch. Exactly two hours. “I’m gonna have to take the 1604 book back.”

  “Can I ask you a question before you take it back?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “I think I know the name of the person who donated this book, but how do I make sure it was really that person?”

  Forde opened the cover. “This bookplate lists Lawrence Jenkins,” he said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean he was the one who actually donated it. In situations like this, we’d have to locate the accession records and see what was written.”

  “What kind of information would be written in those records?” I asked.

  “Depends,” he said. “Some of the records are very specific while others tend to be extremely general. It all comes down to when the book was donated and who actually recorded the acquisition. Of course, we didn’t have computers back then, so unfortunately, some of the records for the older items in our collection have either been lost or misplaced.”

  Or stolen, I thought to myself. I still hadn’t heard from Archives if they had found the missing records. “Couldn’t you just type the name Lawrence Jenkins into one of the databases and see if he was the donor?” I asked.

  “If only it were that simple.” Forde smiled. “Sometimes we keep donor files, but depending on how far back the gift was made, we might not have the file any longer or it could be buried somewhere in Archives. Sometimes we can find out information about the donor from an accession number or the shelf list record.” He examined the inside of the front cover. “Well, here’s one of our answers already. This handwritten number indicates that someone from Widener assigned it to this library. This is how they used to code their books. So, the book was acquired prior to the opening of this library in 1942, when the rare books, manuscripts, and map collections were transferred here from Widener. But this also means that we wouldn’t have the accession records, because they’re too old. You’d have to either go to Widener to see if they still have them, or better yet, check with Archives. Many of the old records are stored in their depository.”

  So far, Archives had proved to be a dead end. “When can I come back and look at this book?” I asked.

  “It needs to be in the vault for two hours,” Forde said. “There’s already another request for it in the queue. Unfortunately, you’d have to come back another day.”

  “The electronic catalog says that there are two missing pages from the first edition, but it doesn’t say what happened to them,” I said. “Now that I see the book, I realize that it’s one physical page missing with 545 on the front and 546 on the back. Do you know anything about them?”

  “No more than anyone else,” Forde said. “But over the years, there have been all kinds of stories about what had been written on them. Ask a hundred different people, and you’ll get a hundred different answers.”

  “Is there one story you believe more than the others?” I pressed.

  “
Sure. I’m obviously not as much an expert as Professor Davenport, but I did my thesis on the Kings and Queens of England. James I was a major figure. He presided over the ‘golden age’ of Elizabethan literature—Shakespeare, Donne, Ben Jonson, and the like.”

  Forde shrugged his narrow shoulders. “My guess is that while it was widely known at the time that King James was bisexual, those pages contained definitive proof in the King’s own hand.”

  35

  TWO DAYS LATER, I walked into the Archives reading room and stood in front of Peggy and her automatic smile. I was blinded by her bright yellow sweater, hot pink corduroys, and green duck boots. They still hadn’t been able to locate the accession records. I told her that I had the donor’s name and address.

  “Maybe he was an alumnus,” she said. “Let’s check the directory.”

  She walked to a small bookcase behind the desk and quickly pulled out a thick book with a fading red cover. The words HARVARD ALUMNI DIRECTORY were still visible despite the wear. I held my breath as we searched through last names beginning with J. We found him within seconds. Lawrence Waters Jenkins graduated in the class of 1896. She wrote the name down on a call slip and disappeared through a door marked STAFF ONLY.

  I went through the timeline as I waited. In 1604, Reverend John Downame writes one of the pioneering doctrines on Protestantism and Puritanical ideals, a call to break with Catholicism and practice “pure” Christianity to fight off the temptations of the devil. A copy of that book ends up in the private library of King James I. Over the years, the book is sold who knows how many times until it’s acquired by Lawrence Jenkins, Harvard class of 1896. Assuming that Jenkins donated the book after he graduated, then it would’ve joined the library collection in Gore Hall sometime between 1896 and 1913. When Gore was demolished in 1913 to make way for Widener, it would have been transferred to Randall Hall. In 1915, when Widener opens its doors, the rare books are transferred from Randall to the Treasure Room in the new library. The Christian Warfare stays there for the next twenty-seven years until Houghton is built in 1942. The Ancient Nine’s 1936 succession book includes a creed taken directly from The Christian Warfare, which means they saw the text before it went to Houghton. During those years, hundreds, if not thousands, of people would’ve had access to The Christian Warfare, especially at a time when security was practically nonexistent. So, everything seemed to boil down to two critical questions: Who removed those two missing pages? And why?