The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  George came over, took it, and opened it: a carte de visite of himself, twelve years younger, wearing a lieutenant’s uniform.

  “Your mother sent it to me,” said Bartlett. “She was so proud.”

  “Mothers always are,” said George.

  “Yours had so much to be proud of.” Bartlett looked over his shoulder. “A reputation damaged at Fredericksburg, damaged again when you couldn’t keep your prick in your pants at Millbridge, rebuilt in logging camps, on river drives, in forests all across New England … but then there was that Vermont town, and that poor little halfwit girl.”

  Bartlett made a gesture with his hand. “Turn it over.”

  On the back of the carte de visite, in childish scrawl, were these words: “Joshua Burns. He came to St. Albans the day before the raid. I swear. Annie Mills.”

  George swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. “Never heard of her.”

  “Have you heard of private investigators?”

  “Like the Pinkertons?”

  “They’re the most famous. I hired one named Milton Wigg, sent him to St. Albans. He found the halfwit girl. Showed her a dozen cartes of members of the Twentieth Maine, even Chamberlain. She picked you out.”

  George said nothing. So much of his life had come near to fulfillment in the last few days … in love, in business … he would have been happy to forget the revenge he had long dreamed of extracting from his cousin. And now it might all be lost, even the revenge.

  Bartlett smiled and looked into George’s eyes. “Make the deal with Saunders. Sign Sawyer River to him and have him commit his mill shares to me. Or give me the Constitution. I’ll sell it and put the money into the mill.”

  “Do you think I’d allow you to use that document as no more than a bargaining chip?”

  “It’s business, George. Business is business. The American way.” Then Bartlett gave a shrug. “Of course, I could ride to the telegraph office in Bethlehem. Send a wire. Wigg can have the girl here tomorrow. We’ll introduce her to Saunders, tell him how you used her, how you joined the rebels for a day, how you stole one of the most famous documents in America for … what again? To line your own pocket?”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “But people will whisper, as Uncle William used to say…. They’ll whisper that Chamberlain was wrong about you. You really were a coward and a traitor. Even Copperhead sympathizers like me look like better Americans because we took a stand.”

  “You never took a stand in your life.” George clenched his fists at his sides.

  Bartlett continued, oblivious to George’s rising anger. “And that fine woman back at the Fabyan House might like to know what it was got you thrown out of the mill, when everyone agreed you were smarter than I was….”

  George growled, “This won’t work.”

  “I deserve a piece of that Constitution. It’s part of my inheritance. I—”

  “You deserve shit!” George slammed both fists into the fat belly.

  Bartlett stumbled back. Then he tripped on a protruding slice of ledge. His eyes and mouth made three perfect circles of shock, and with no more than a grunt, the man who had a sound for every mood and emotion disappeared.

  George ran to the lip of the rock and looked down to the next ledge.

  Bartlett lay motionless. His left leg twisted out from under his bulk like a broken sawhorse under a cask of beer.

  And George saw his chance. Revenge on his cousin … freedom forever from his cousin’s claim to the Constitution. The document would stay where it was, undisturbed. And the fate of the Pike Mill would be passed to smarter men….

  It would have spoken well of George if these thoughts did not go through his head, but they did. It spoke better of him that he rejected them, took the rope from his saddle, tied it to a tree, and used it to lower himself.

  Bartlett was moaning now, “My leg is broken.”

  George took off his hat, wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’ll rig a splint.”

  Bartlett managed a smile. “Looks like I have you right where I want you, George … again.”

  IT WAS RAINING on October 15. It had been raining for three days.

  But rain did not stop New Englanders from their business.

  On State Street, black umbrellas bobbed along from the Old State House to Long Wharf, while the Blackstone Investors gathered at the offices of D. & C. Saunders for their annual meeting.

  Arthur Perkins—still forcing his voice through his nose, still pointing his nose at the ceiling—sat at the head of the table. He looked at Daniel Saunders and said, “Giving your vote to Bartlett Pike will cost you money. It will cost all of us money.”

  “But,” answered Saunders, “if we believe in heredity, we must give Bartlett more time to prove his worth. It’s what men of breeding always do. We owe it to Will Pike.”

  This was an argument difficult to resist among the men at that table. None of them could be accused of sentimentality, but many of them descended from hereditary fortunes themselves and sought to pass the same to their own sons.

  Bartlett sat at the far end, his leg encased in plaster and an attitude of supreme indifference on his face. He knew already that he was going to win.

  For his part, George Amory paid little attention. He sat by the window and watched the tops of the umbrellas bobbing by, while in his head, he framed the phrases he would put into a letter to Cordelia that afternoon:

  It is done. Yesterday I completed transfer of my land to Saunders. Today Bartlett retained control of the Pike Mill, though the name was changed to the Pike-Perkins Mill.

  The best way to keep Bartlett at bay is to align myself with Saunders. Should Bartlett come sniffing for more help, I can say that I have extracted all that I can from Saunders, that I have been forced to use the Constitution as collateral.

  To that end, I have accepted the Saunders offer to manage their operations. It is an equity position, only slightly less than I had hoped for when we began negotiations. I will now help them build a town in the wilderness.

  As for the Constitution, you are the only other person who knows the truth. Like the trees that Saunders plans to cut, then cut, then cut again, the document will become our resource, secreted with us in the home we make together.

  All of this means that for a good portion of the year, I must live in the mountains. Might we not marry now and live apart—you in Portland, I on the Sawyer River—until the day when your father no longer needs your care? As in all things, I will abide by your decision….

  On a bright September afternoon four years later, Cordelia Edwards Atkinson Amory stepped off the train at the depot house at Sawyer River and felt the baby kick in her belly. Perhaps it kicked at the emotion that gripped its mother, because Cordelia was shocked.

  Where she and George had once looked up into the forest primeval, a long spur of railroad track reached into the hills. On a siding by the section house, an engine steamed. And somewhere upstream, a town rumbled and roared and chewed into the woods.

  She swallowed her shock and told herself that it was progress, which would bring a bright future for the babe growing inside her and for the one clutching at her skirts.

  And then George rushed up, swept little Aaron into his arms, kissed Cordelia, and said, “Welcome home.”

  They took the company buckboard up the right of way to the town, which was called Livermore, maiden name of Daniel Saunders’s wife.

  Its steeple was a brick smokestack rising above the steam-powered sawmill. Its center was a rail crossing, surrounded by a store, an office, a schoolhouse, various barracks for the workers. And perched on a road overlooking the town were the houses of the managers: substantial two-story dwellings with broad porches, painted shutters, and outhouses built close to the back doors.

  It would not be so bad, thought Cordelia. Here she would raise her children and send them to school, and in summers, when the tourists rode up in the trains, she and her family would leave for Casco Bay.
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  Cordelia felt better once they got to their new home. She had sent many of her things ahead, and they looked now as if they had been chosen just for this house—the settee and upright in the parlor, the Governor Winthrop desk in the foyer, the mahogany table in the dining room. She could live here.

  They left little Aaron on the carpet, playing with his new set of tin soldiers, and George led her down to a safe at the foot of the stairs. He had built it right into the granite foundation. He opened it and pulled out a leather map case. He took the lid off the case and slid the papers out.

  She took them and felt a chill.

  And the baby kicked, which gave her another chill.

  She knew that she carried the future of America inside her, and she now believed she held it in her hands.

  TWENTY

  IT WAS THREE THIRTY on Thursday and the October shadows were already crossing Route 302. The cooling afternoon promised a cold night in the mountains.

  Peter and Evangeline had changed into the clothes that Antoine had brought—blue jeans, long-sleeved shirts—khaki for him, denim for her. Peter had put on his hiking boots. Evangeline was still shoeless because her feet were killing her after the foot race through Portland.

  “What makes you think Judge Trask’s men didn’t already look around on the banks of the Sawyer River? After all”—Evangeline held up the letter from George to Cordelia, written a hundred and thirty years before—”they found this mixed in with the papers of Aaron Edwards.”

  “But do they have the draft?”

  “Well, no, but the letter says that the Constitution”—she read—” ‘will become our resource, secreted with us in the home we make together.’ “

  “So we should see that home,” he said.

  “No. We should be in a library, doing more research—”

  “Other people have done that—the judge, Bishop’s people. Antoine is doing it for us.”

  “Then we should be interviewing someone, trying to look through their eyes.”

  “That’s what we’re doing. That’s what we always do. That’s why we’re going to stand in the place where George Amory hid the Constitution and see if we can see through his eyes. See through time to the place where he left it.”

  She gave him a long look and pulled on her Reeboks.

  There was a sign on Route 302: Sawyer River Road, a left turn in to the woods.

  Peter started up. Pebbles clattered in the wheel wells. Dust puffed out behind the car. Yellow birch and Norway maples bent their branches over the road, forming a canopy of fall color that, a month before, would have been impenetrable green.

  Evangeline was looking at Belcher’s Logging Railroads of the White Mountains. “It says we’re on the bed of the old railroad. There’s a pond in further. Good fishing.”

  “I didn’t bring my rod,” said Peter.

  She looked at the pictures. “There was a sawmill and an engine house. There were houses along the road, built into the embankment so that they’d have a nice view.”

  “Of what?”

  “The sawmill and the engine house. Now it’s—”

  “Nothing but trees.”

  After about two miles, Peter made a U-turn, careful not to slip into the drainage ditch on one side of the road or over the embankment on the other. He parked on the shoulder, pointed back toward 302.

  The river was down to the right, down through the trees, down across a stretch of flat ground.

  “Is this the pathway though time?” asked Evangeline.

  “Humor me.” He took the book of maps and got out.

  “Peter”—she got out and almost slid down the embankment—”it’s a forest.”

  He brought a finger to his lips. “So be quiet and listen.”

  “To what?”

  Leaves were falling everywhere, catching the last sunlight, covering the ground like snow. Their flutter and the faint trickle of the river were the only sounds.

  She cocked her head. “What am I supposed to hear?”

  He leaned close to her. “Hear the quiet. And maybe you’ll hear the voices of people who’ve been dead for a hundred years. Listen and see.”

  “You’re getting way too mystical for me, Peter.”

  He went to the trunk, where he kept a bucket of tools, including one of his father’s old trowels. He pulled it out.

  Evangeline looked down the slope, at the slender birch and maple saplings, at the white pines and spruce. And the longer she looked, the more revealed itself.

  Halfway down the embankment lay a pile of brick entwined with autumn-red poison ivy. In a shaft of sunlight, a rusted old boiler sprouted goldenrod. Concrete pilings supporting nothing stood among the rocks in the river. There were indentations everywhere in the earth—foundation holes, some lined with stone, others concrete, and all overflowing with trees, brush, weeds.

  “It’s as if nature is gathering this place back to itself,” she said, “or trying to figure out what to do with it.”

  “When the logging died, so did the town.” Peter started down the embankment. “Imagine the trains, the sawmills, the people….”

  At the bottom, he opened the old book to the map he had marked. It showed the location of each of the homes and the names of the owners, as they appeared in 1882.

  Evangeline looked over his shoulder. “They had a school here, too?”

  “They had kids. They had to educate them.”

  “Can you tell where the sawmill was?”

  “Right there.” He pointed to a rectangle of concrete, about fifty feet by two hundred, revealing itself from the underbrush as they drew closer.

  Peter jumped up on top of the wall and looked around. No trace of the rail sidings remained. No remnant of George Amory’s world. But from there, Peter could look again at the map and gauge exactly where the Amory house had been.

  “Peter,” said Evangeline. “Listen.”

  A pickup was groaning up the road in low gear, tires thumping in the potholes, dust and leaves swirling in the wake.

  “It’s blue.” Evangeline started to hunker down behind the wall.

  “Coincidence,” said Peter. “Fishermen or hunters most likely.”

  They watched the truck thunder on up the road, not even slowing at the BMW.

  Peter was glad of that. He didn’t tell her that the truck scared him a bit. Even if the camo guys had followed them from Moosehead Lake to Portland, he didn’t think they could follow them all the way to the ruins of Livermore. But he had seen Deliverance. He knew that bad things happened in the woods … for no reason at all.

  The sound of the truck faded, so he turned again to the map. He determined that Amory’s house must have been along the embankment. They climbed again and found three foundations, each about thirty by twenty. Peter pointed to the middle one—granite stones lining a dirt-filled hole that had given birth to half a dozen trees and a tangle of underbrush.

  “Where do you think he’d keep a safe?” asked Peter.

  “Oh, I don’t know, in one of the corners with the poison ivy.” She watched his mind turning things over. “Sometimes, I just don’t understand you.”

  Peter pushed aside a few vines and jumped down into the hole.

  Evangeline stood on the wall above him. “You don’t think he buried the Constitution in his cellar, do you, and then just forgot it?”

  “Hard to say.” He pulled the trowel out of his back pocket and probed the crumbling mortar. A big granite foundation stone rolled loose and tumbled against a tree. Then he worked his way around, poking, prodding, looking for … something. Then he came to a place where the remnant of a staircase stringer was still affixed to the foundation, driven into the mortar with concrete nails. Right at the bottom was an empty space, as if something had once been there that was gone now.

  “A hole for a safe?” she asked.

  “Could have been.” Peter ran his hand around inside and came away with bits of rust on his fingers. He held them up to show her.

  “
So, there was a safe here. Was the Constitution in it?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He levered himself out of the hole and looked around, as if there might be clues that he was just not seeing. “The Constitution was here.”

  She kept talking. “You said the judge’s papers gave you a new idea. Is this it?”

  “I always believe that if you can see where it’s been, you might be able to figure out where it’s gone,” said Peter. “I guess it’s more a hunch than an idea.”

  “A hunch?” she shouted. “It’s Thursday. On Sunday, you want to put it on TV.”

  “Evangeline.” He grabbed the cuff of her jeans and tried to pull her down next to him. “I honestly don’t think we’re going to find this thing by Sunday. Maybe not in a month of Sundays.”

  She pulled away from him. “We promised Harriet Holden.”

  “I don’t care about her—”

  “I’m tired of hearing you say that.” She strode away.

  “—or any of them. Just so long as we find it.” He jumped up and followed her.

  “But where’s your political conscience?”

  “Two or three slots down the list from my sense of right and wrong.”

  “Right is controlling guns. Wrong is not caring.”

  “Well, I guess I don’t care,” he shouted after her. “That’s why I’m here in Middle-of-Fucking-Nowhere, New Hampshire, up to my knees in poison ivy, looking for a strand of information that might lead to another one.”

  “But you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons,” she said.

  “I’m doing it because it’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at.”

  “You’re doing it because it could be worth millions.”

  “If find it, I’ll have four different groups fighting me for it in court.”

  She shouted over her shoulder, “We’ve wasted an afternoon. We’ve wasted a whole day. We promised Harriet Holden that she’d have the document to present when the committee hearing starts, and her assistant asked you to have it the night before.”