The Oak Island Affair

by Jane Bow

  Copyright © 2014 Jane Bow

  Published by Iguana Books

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 303

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5V 2R4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Publisher: Greg Ioannou

  Front cover image: courtesy of Shutterstock.com

  Front cover design: Meghan Behse

  Book layout design: Meghan Behse

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bow, Jane, author

  The Oak Island Affair/Jane Bow

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77180-040-2 (pbk.)--ISBN-978-1-77180-041-9 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-77180-042-6 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8553.O8985023 2014 C813'.54 C2014-900124-X C2014-900125-8

  This is a second electronic edition of The Oak Island Affair. This is the first electronic edition published by Iguana Books.

  For Sarah and Christopher

  &

  in memory of Malcolm Bow

  PROLOGUE

  During the last 217 years Canadian-American treasure hunting consortia have sunk several million dollars into the search for gold on Nova Scotia’s Oak Island but still, at the time of writing, the little island continues to guard her treasure secret.

  Facts about the real Oak Island treasure hunt presented in The Oak Island Affair come from the many books and articles on the subject.

  All characters past and present, their writings and their actions, are the product of my imagination.

  Jane Bow

  Peterborough, Ontario

  Vanessa’s map of recorded Oak Island discoveries.

  I

  THE WALLS OF GRAN’S WHITE shingled house shuddered in the wind of a spring storm off the Atlantic. Gran had died six months ago and the “For Sale” sign Uncle Vilhelm had hammered into the front lawn was squealing in the rain when Vanessa climbed the drop-down ladder to the attic. The air up here smelled of must. She would rather be running or lifting weights, pushing and pulling into the grunting repetitions that would shut out everything, everybody … Charlie; but the wind was too high, the sheets of rain too harsh to run through, and there was no health club in Chester, Nova Scotia. So she would clear out the attic.

  Her hand found the overhead bulb’s hanging string just as the storm reached a new crescendo. Nails squeaked in the roof as she pulled the light on but not until she had worked her way past the steamer trunks, between broken bed frames and legless chairs, a wicker pram full of baleful china-headed dolls, did Vanessa glimpse a glint of metal in one of the farthest crannies, where the attic’s dust-coated floor met the roof beams.

  The box she pulled out was no bigger than a jewellery case and maybe it was the smell of its cedar lining, of trapped heat, leather and ancient paper that quickened something, as if her nerve endings were divining a message her brain could not yet fathom.

  Inside the box a package was wrapped first in silk embroidered with strange designs, then in oilcloth tied up with rotting twine that fell apart as she slid it off. When she tried to open the oilcloth, it broke into pieces. It had, however, done its job. The black leather book inside, its cover tooled with a simple cross, had been well protected.

  The spine cracked as she opened it. The pages were thick, rudely made, speckled with inlaid hair and thread and the trails of tiny bugs that had crawled between them to die. The writing was faded, reddish brown under the attic’s bare bulb, the downstrokes wide, upstrokes light, done with a quill pen, the letters angular, loosely jointed, austere, ancient … Spanish.

  Skin oils, sweat, human breath should not touch this artifact. Carefully Vanessa laid it back in its box, came to her feet, her nerve endings tapping a tattoo now as, gathering the metal box, she snapped off the light, forgot the sorting job.

  Dog-eared dictionaries — Spanish to English, archaic to modern Spanish — and Spanish word derivation books had been sitting in the bookshelf downstairs since Vanessa’s family had had to leave Spain eighteen years earlier. After that her father, who had grown up in this house, had liked to spend his summer holidays here translating Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and later, when Vanessa had returned to Spain to study history at the University of Madrid, research documents she had found and copied for him. Occasionally Vanessa would lean over his shoulder to offer variations of interpretation — not that he ever took her suggestions seriously.

  Finish your PhD and then I’ll be inclined to listen. Knowledge, to Carl Holdt, had been the Earth’s greatest treasure. You can find knowledge anywhere — under rocks, inside churches, at the bottom of the sea — all you need to know is how and where to look. Vanessa could still see him standing in the Spanish sun, arms raised like a preacher, extolling the perfect symmetry of the Roman aqueduct at Merida, not far from their home in Altamira on Spain’s south coast, or standing centre stage in the ancient amphitheatre he had helped unearth down the coast at Cadiz, where Roman wisdoms had played out a thousand years before the Spanish treasure fleets had sailed in from South America. The Romans gave us our irrigation, transportation, parliamentary systems … But in those days Vanessa had been too busy — poking her older brother Adrian, or practicing with the spinning plate and stick set she had just used all her savings to buy, or waiting to ask permission to run down to the fishing wharves where once the great treasure galleons had been unloaded — to pay attention. Now her father was dead, struck suddenly with a heart attack one morning last year on his way to teach at the University of Ottawa.

  She needed gloves. A pair of elbow-length white cotton evening gloves in the cedar chest at the back of Gran’s bedroom closet looked as if they had never been worn. In the bottom drawer of her desk Vanessa found a supply of the exercise books Gran had used for accounting.

  Outside, rain slapped at the living room’s picture window, wind whipped Gran’s lilac bush at the bottom of the garden, roiled the grey sea. Bringing a desk lamp to the long pine dining table, wriggling her fingers into the gloves, opening the diary, Vanessa did not notice.

  The spellings were strange, the s’s shaped like f’s, but how many times had she teased the meanings out of the ancient records stored in the archives at Cadiz? And though that was six years ago now, language skills, once imprinted on the cortex, are never far from reach.

  Within a few minutes Vanessa had the title page:

  The last living testament of Bartolomeo, Brother in Christ of the Holy Order of Santo Domingo in Altamira, Espana.

  Altamira? Where the flat blue sea reached out to meet Spain’s southern sky? Where the wavelets had rolled her child’s body over and back, over and back in the sun-warmed sand; where the old Dominican monastery had housed Vanessa’s convent school; where stout women dressed in black called “Uno para hoy!” (Buy one for today!) at the Plaza Mayor market, their calloused hands moving among the onions, garlic, peppers, olives, oranges laid out in stalls, their eyes sharp as crows’; where the butcher hacked the legs off a lamb carcass, blood dripping onto the cobblestones, and the town potter guarded his terra cotta wine jugs from the gaggle of darting children; where storms were sudden, hot, full of the smell of lightning, then gone.

  Written at Santa Alicia de la Estrella, Cuba, June MDLXXXIX

  M: 1000

  D: 500

  L: 50

  XXX: x 10

  IX: 9
>
  1589 — this little diary was more than four hundred years old!

  Vanessa stared at it. Four hundred years ago Philip II was king of Spain, his Inquisition rooting out, torturing and killing infidels while overseas his conquistadores filled the king’s treasure fleets with South American gold and silver. Across the English Channel Queen Elizabeth I was searching out and hanging Catholics, forcing her people to pray to the Protestant God. An evil ruler, according to Sister Maria Teresa of Avila, Vanessa’s history teacher — who would not hesitate to rap you over the knuckles with a ruler on God’s behalf, or make you stand in the garbage pail if you accidentally got out of your chair — Queen Elizabeth was also sending out seafaring plunderers, including the Devil’s own Sir Francis Drake, El Draque (the Dragon), to steal Spain’s God-given treasures.

  1589 — in London, William Shakespeare’s plays had not yet reached the stage; Spain’s Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote, had just published his first novel; while in Cuba a feverish Dominican monk was penning this little book:

  Dear Father in Heaven,

  As I lie here in the summer heat, the fever sweeping through me, racking my limbs, soaking my bed sheets, leaving me weak as a lamb and quaking with fear, I know that the horses are bridled, the chariot is waiting. But You and I know also that as it stands now this poor monk’s last journey will take him straight into the fires of Hell.

  Please though, I do beseech You Father, grant a few last moments of attention to a poor brother who has tried since the innocent age of nine to devote his life to You — not that I had any choice. My father having died at sea, my mother had too many mouths to feed. There was no choice but to give me to the monks. Now, forty years later, my kind host has placed a pen, ink and this little book on the stand beside my cot, and in these lucid dawn hours while the cocks crow and the cat stretches in a patch of sunlight on the windowsill, I can use what little courage You have bestowed upon me to try to show You, before it is too late, that whatever evidence there is to the contrary, this wandering and very faulty soul does have Faith. For although I was the first white man to behold the gold—

  Gold? Here? Vanessa looked at the metal box, the broken oilcloth, rotting twine, the embroidered silk. Why hadn’t her father ever found this book? He had been an expert in antiquities, head of the Altamira Institute for the Study of Roman Ruins and then a classics professor in Ottawa. He would have recognized its value. And he had spent his boyhood here.

  —and although this gold was a most glorious sight, and I weep to think that I might have been the reason it was won at such high cost, I can promise in the best of faith that never once on this God-forsaken journey have I coveted it for its own sake—

  This gold, a most glorious sight! You must have gone into the attic, Dad. And what about you, Gran?

  Beyond the lamplight, only grey silence and the lashing rain responded.

  Deciphering the letters of the ancient script, looking up every other word, rooting through derivations, guessing at the meanings of phrases that were not in the dictionaries, was slow going but soon Vanessa found herself slipping into the method she had worked out during her first postgraduate year in Spain. Studying the history of the treasures that, gathered by Spain, had made their way into so many conundrums across the world had required a vocabulary beyond Vanessa’s adolescent Spanish, so she had developed the habit of translating the archival texts into English first. A much more voluminous language thanks to its roots in Latin and Greek and bastardizations of Anglo, Saxon, medieval French, German, Gaelic and Norse words, English gave her the analytical tools she needed and a breadth of nuance she then learned, painstakingly, to transfer into her modern Spanish treatises. Now, gradually unravelling Brother Bartolomeo’s narrative, she climbed with him and a retinue of Spanish soldiers into the high mountains of South America’s Nueva Granada, now Colombia.

  Spain has been taking gold, silver and emeralds out of the Nueva Granada mountains for years, engaging the labour of “savages” in our mines while teaching them the ways of our Lord. But still there are pockets of pagans in the remote regions. We Dominicans are sent to teach simplicity, devotion to God, but now I find myself agreeing with my esteemed namesake and Brother-in-Christ Bartolomeo de las Casas who has warned both King and Church again and again that enslaving the native people, bringing them disease, hopelessness, death, could not have been Your intention. So let us be honest, Father. The truth is that You are only the excuse. The real prize is not the souls.

  It is the gold. That is why in the spring of 1588 I traveled with twelve soldiers into the interior.

  The mountaintops were shrouded in clouds one minute, bathed in sunlight the next, the path so steep the natives had carved steps into the rock but these were so shallow that only the balls of the great paddles I call feet fit onto them, and so slippery. A thousand feet below, the Rio Oro foamed down through the cleft between the green mountainsides.

  I prayed aloud as I climbed. Jose laughed at me. He too came from Altamira. A burly brute, the first to fight in the street, always the wrestling champion at school, Jose was the kind for whom the soldier’s uniform was a second skin. Now he was a sergeant and the leader of our little expedition.

  On the twelfth day the path began to angle down, the landscape opening into a bowl surrounded by snow-capped peaks. A little cluster of dwellings stood at the edge of the most beautiful, emerald green lake.

  New spring growth had turned the ground and trees into a panorama of greens. On catching sight of our little band the women, dressed in cotton skirts and skins against the mountain cold, stopped sweeping their doorways, planting a freshly tilled patch of ground, bending to fill their water jugs at the lake. Their children hid behind their skirts.

  There were no men. The natives were not the only ones frightened. We had the eerie feeling that we were being watched. Our soldiers kept reaching for their swords.

  It was noon, the sun high overhead. I sat on a rock down by the water, took out a chunk of bread. Jose put some men to patrol the village perimeter. Soon the children were edging close to me, their jet black eyes fixed upon my lunch, my white whiskery face. I smiled.

  They pointed at the silver crucifix that hung from my monk’s robe, whispering to each other, giggling while the women glanced around at the woods. I was eating my bread and ruminating on the incredible beauty of these people, their sun-darkened skins so smooth, when a light emerged from the woods by the shore, suddenly blinding me. I squeezed my eyes shut. When I dared to open them I saw that it was a man’s chest plate made of solid polished gold that was shooting rays of sunlight into my eyes.

  Jose had unsheathed his sword. Two of his soldiers closed on the man.

  “No,” I stood, “Deja le. He comes in peace.”

  The chest plate must have weighed half as much as the man, yet his bearing was straight. And now I could see the designs worked into the gold — a sun, human and animal figures, snakes intertwined. Inlaid emeralds caught the sunlight. His headband was decorated with gold encrusted with jewels. Coloured feathers waved above his eyebrows.

  He must be the chief. Behind him his warriors now appeared, two score of them wearing short cotton skirts and cotton cape-like tops painted with red and black designs, knotted at the shoulder, leaving their arms free.

  I offered the chief a piece of bread and we ate together in silence, each of us probing the moment. He watched me, his onyx eyes sharp with intelligence. After some moments of silence, he motioned to me to follow him.

  Just outside the village an elaborate thatched temple had been constructed out of wood. Inside, sunlight angling in through openings set high in the walls lit solid gold paneling into which designs of sun and moon, people, animals, birds, plants and snakes had been worked.

  I stood transfixed. The day’s warmth, stored in the floor, came up through my sandals and I knew without thought or prayer that though these mountain people were heathens, standing inside their golden temple I was in Your presence.

  By
the time we returned to the village, the warriors had relieved my soldiers of their weapons.

  Moving her pen word by word across the pages of the exercise book, Vanessa did not notice as, beyond the orb cast by her table lamp, shadows crept across the Indian carpet on Gran’s living room floor, edging toward darkness.

  A tear dropped onto the diary, blurring the ancient ink. She jumped up in horror. Students, researchers, guardians of antiquities and the treasures that are all we have left of past worlds, do not cry all over them. How could she have been so careless, so foolish, so selfish?

  This book should be locked inside the safety of its box, away from her, the moisture of her breath, her sweat, her greed to know, to be there with Brother Bart, to find out what had happened. She tried to dab the tiny puddle with a tissue. The blotch seeped into the ancient parchment. Vanessa backed away, knocking over her chair. The living room’s pearly gloom seemed to murmur of death.

  Her eyes ached. She switched on all the lights, sank into Gran’s wingback chair. It still smelled of her lavender water. How, Vanessa wondered again, could Gran and her Dad not have known what was in their own attic?

  Her Dad had been bright, so after his mother had died of polio when he was thirteen, Grandad Holdt, who was a sea captain, had sent him to a boarding school in Montreal. After that there had been summer camps, trips to meet his father in foreign seaports and then at eighteen Carl Holdt had left Chester, first for the University of Toronto, then on a scholarship to Cambridge. He had not returned to live here until the summer Vanessa was fifteen. Grandad had died by then. Gran had been Grandma Holdt’s friend. She had moved in to nurse her, then had stayed on to housekeep and finally to marry the sea captain. She did not speak Spanish. Maybe she had never known what the diary was.