by Jane Bow
We turned west soon after that, running before a south east wind toward what looked at first like a solid land mass. As we came closer, however, the forest broke up into islands, hundreds of them, in what turned out to be a bay, a most beautiful panorama of blue sea and green islands and nowhere, in any direction, a sign of human habitation. Orders were given to furl the mainsails as we had no chart of these waters.
Vanessa looked up. “Wouldn’t that have to be Mahone Bay? Where else?” She returned to her notebook. “They anchored near a bluff.”
I noticed, as we began to cut out a clearing on the bluff, that I was feeling weak. I was stripped to the waist, trying to summon enough strength to hack branches off the trees the men were felling for shelters, when two seamen came to take me to the tent where Captains St. Clere and Du Moulin and the old advisor were sitting behind a table that had been brought from one of the ships. The seamen stood on either side of me as if I were a prisoner. The advisor spoke Spanish.
“You are a Dominican.” Beside him St. Clere’s face was peaceful but ruthlessly so, as if he could order my death with no more concern than if he were ordering his dinner. Du Moulin’s face was also without expression.
“Si, Señor.”
The advisor had the eyes of a raven.
“Why?”
“Why am I a monk?” In forty-some years no one had ever asked me that. I tried shrugging, “It was the will of God perhaps? I was only a boy.” I looked into the raven’s eyes and saw only a reflection of my own ragged self. The air in the tent was close. I was afraid I might faint. Sweat was running down my cheeks, my neck.
“He has the fever. Take him out.”
They built me a lean-to, leafy branches to keep out the sun and rain, and left me. The cook brought a mug of fresh water each morning and evening and my mind became a jumble of faces, whispering voices, swirling color while You performed what I can only believe was an internal cleansing that had naught to do with creeds and litanies and the Dominican doctrine. When I awoke some days later, in the wee hours, I felt a blissful coolness. I was too weak to move more than my head, but to the east I could see the first white rays of morning.
I thought I would cry at the beauty of it. The cook appeared and, seeing me smile, brought me some soup. By the end of the week I was back in the tent.
“So you did not die.” St. Clere looked at me the way you might look at a bull you were thinking of buying. The advisor was also looking me over.
“You recall, of course, the teachings of our own Lord Jesus Christ, Bartolomeo.”
“Of course.” Was this a trick? Was one of these men an inquisitor who somehow knew of my love and was watching, listening, waiting to pull out my fingernails, burn off my genitals?
“And do you also remember that those wisdoms defied politics, the powers of both church and emperor?”
“The teachings of Christ come from God.”
“But if Christ were here now, Brother, what state would he support, what church?” The old advisor smiled. “He would be here with us.”
And now I thought of Jose, may he rest in peace. “The Pope is against us,” he had said. The advisor signalled for the men to take me away.
“You, however, still have to die.”
A grave had been dug, lined with sail cloth, roofed with logs too heavy for me to shift. Resting on the top of it was a human skull, below it two crossed bones. They fed me salt meat, biscuit, filled me with a double ration of Cuban rum, and then they stripped me.
“But look,” said the cook. “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” He had found my rings, my own sun and Mia’s butterfly, all that I had left of her, except of course this journal which I keep buried under my cot. I tried to take back the rings.
“Non, non, mon fou.” He spoke quickly to the other men, who held onto me while he put my rings into his pocket. And Father it was then that finally I lost my spirit. Because, divested of this last connection with my beloved, my only moment of love in this world — no thanks to You dear Father, forgive me but I may as well utter the words — now my body, my life, the very centre of myself became nothing to me.
They laid me in the pit and shut out the daylight, and how I sobbed.
Naked in the dirt, in the dark, I cried until I thought my innards would heave up through my mouth. Had I had the means, I would have put an end right there to my life. For take, take, take, that’s what this earthly existence is about, Father. You know it as well as I do. All my life I have been taught about the sacredness of prayer and trial and denial in preparation for Heaven but now I had to wonder: if life on earth is nothing but pain inflicted one upon the other, what is the purpose in that? Where will it end? Will we simply take, kill, destroy until there is nothing left on this blessed Earth?
I must have slept. When I awoke no light came in through the cracks between the logs. There was only darkness, damp earth, salt-stained sail, my own breathing, too close. I tried to sit up, banged my head.
So, they had buried me alive. I saw St. Clere’s eyes, ruthless, and the advisor’s raven eyes, and Du Moulin who had shot two men. I closed my eyes, tried to make ready for my death. But now everything I had been taught, the catechism, the vows, all of it was gone. Even You, Father.
Was this the way to Hell? I lay very still, listening to my breathing.
Pictures came: Mia in the meadow. I felt her body, her love, and how I cried. I watched again as the pictures rose then faded. A life lived. My breathing slowed. I listened to it, completely empty now of thought or prayer or plans or hope. Peaceful at last in my grave.
Dust motes, lit by a stream of sunlight coming in through the reading room window, pirouetted through the silence.
“Brother Bart had carried his diary out of Cuba, and kept it hidden on the ship. He wrote in it all the way up the coast, while Captain St. Clere was off searching for the rock knight, and then by candlelight at night in his tent up here,” said Vanessa. “He writes that it was risky but once started, he could not give up expressing his thoughts openly, honestly, and ‘who better to hear them than You, dear Lord?’”
“It is a miracle that he was not caught,” said Mlle Durocher. “He would have been executed.”
“Someone must have found it eventually though.” Brigit had started doodling crosses.
“A Freemason maybe,” said Vanessa, “another pirate devoted to truth, goodness, brotherhood?”
Mlle Durocher nodded.
“Do I not keep telling you, chérie, to understand history you must think it through, put yourself into the skin of the people you are researching. If Freemasons met in secret for the purpose of developing new ideas at a time when power was held in the hands of tightly knit cliques, some of these men were bound to be revolutionaries. Some were intelligent men, privy to education, knowledge, but not to privilege. Younger sons maybe, or cast out for political reasons. We know only, from Brother Bartolomeo, that these pirates hated their king.” The corners of her lips twitched up. “They knew each other by the secret handshake. Did you know, by the way, that a stone with a Masonic compass and square, dated at the turn of the 17th century, just a few years after Brother Bartolomeo’s pirates were here, was found near Champlain’s original settlement at Port Royal in Nova Scotia?”
“Wow! “Brigit had begun to doodle skulls. “The headstone they found on the Oak Island cross, could it have been one of these, a skull?” She looked from Vanessa to Mademoiselle Durocher. “I did see something, an image, just for a fraction of a second, when I was kneeling at the headstone. I was running my hands across the face, and behind the twitter of the birds and the rustle of leaves there was this sense of peace, and then hands with short strong fingers, and tiny golden hairs glinting on the backs of them. They didn’t belong to Brother Bart. They were holding an iron-topped hammer and a sculptor’s chisel, tapping, then feeling the surface of the stone, checking the contour. And one of the fingers had a heavy gold ring on it. Flat topped, very ancient I think. There was an animal — a horse maybe
? — with two men on its back.”
“An insignia,” said Mlle Durocher. “But I do not know it.”
Vanessa picked up the pen and pad of paper.
“Let’s make some sense of all this. We’ll start with the journal’s new facts according to Brother Bart. First, Brother Bart was on a French pirate ship carrying Spanish treasure. And the pirates had a secret hand signal and flags with an hourglass, a scythe, a skull and crossbones on them.”
“And they came north to a bay that must be this one. But,” Brigit said looking confused, “if they were looking for something why would they bury the treasure here?”
Mlle Durocher smiled.
“If they found what they came here looking for — remember the carving of the knight, how happy the captain was? — they would have had to leave something behind before loading up to cross the Atlantic.”
“So what could they have found?” Vanessa stopped writing.
“The group Jose and then Brother Bart joined in Cuba was a renegade pro-king, anti-Pope group,” said Brigit.
“Anti-Pope, but not necessarily anti-Christian,” said Mlle Durocher. “Look at the Knights Templar, for example. They were Christian crusaders but still Pope Clement V excommunicated them. Life was so dangerous then. Torturing, burning, beheading people, this was routine.”
“And look how many researchers have linked the Oak Island mystery to the Freemasons and Templars.” Vanessa turned to Brigit. “The Knights Templar were wiped out at the beginning of the 1300’s but some of them survived because there’s a story that one of them, called Henry Sinclair, came over here and built a castle up the Gold River at New Ross. The river empties into Chester Basin, and they say he planted the oak trees on Oak Island as a landmark for refugees.”
“But why, I have always wondered, would a Templar build his castle inland at New Ross?” Mlle Durocher chuckled. “History is so funny, the story so complete when you read it. Then along comes a new discovery — like the ancient ruins that have just been found up in Cape Breton that might be Chinese. The Chinese, here! And poof, there goes your established ‘history.’” The librarian got to her feet, picked up a feather duster she had left on one of the book cases. “And the whole idea of priceless Templar treasure being brought all the way over here in those days, secretly, then removed and taken all the way back with no record of its subsequent storage.” The old lady shook her head.
Brigit had started doodling triangles. Mlle Durocher came to look over her shoulder.
“Ah yes, the mighty triangle. Look.” She took the pen from Brigit, drew four dots in a straight horizontal line then, above it, another three, above them two, a final dot at the top. The result was a pyramid, shaped like an equilateral triangle, made of dots.
“The Greek Pythagoras’ tetractys, symbolizing ascension toward the Divine.” Brigit showed it to Vanessa. “See, the first four dots stand for the elements: earth, water, wind and fire, and so on up the pyramid to total consciousness at the top.”
“The Knights Templar were not the only ones to study alternative routes to the Divine,” said Mlle Durocher, looking pensive. “There were the Cathars, and the Arabs in the east from whom the Templars learned so much, and later, in Brother Bartolomeo’s time, the Italian Giordano Bruno, who lectured at John Dee’s secret ‘school of the night’ in London. The secret emblems the Freemasons use are the same signs and symbols that have come down from the ancient Chaldeans, Egyptians, Indian Brahmins, Greeks, Celts, the Chinese—”
“But why would people have risked joining those secret societies if it meant being tortured, burned at the stake?” Brigit wondered.
“Something incredibly powerful must have moved them,” said Vanessa.
“Like what?”
The library door opened, blowing in a flock of chattering toddlers and their mothers. Mlle Durocher smiled at Vanessa and Brigit.
“Now it is story time. We will continue.” She brushed a hand, a little self-consciously, across Vanessa’s shoulder. “Also, I will have something interesting to tell you, some news I would like to share.”
“Why would you think having dinner with Blackbeard would be fun?” Brigit was leaning against the doorway of Gran’s bedroom. “I thought you were off men.”
“I’m not going to get involved with him.”
“So why go? Why not stay home and finish the translation?”
Vanessa laughed.
“I’ll only be out for a little while.” Fresh from the shower, dressed only in her underwear, Vanessa was appraising her body in the mirror on the inside of Gran’s armoire. “I’m going out of curiosity. I don’t know why Edward upsets you and Mlle D. so much. He’s a perfectly respectable businessman and maybe he’ll have some information we can use, because once that real estate agent sells this house …” She turned sideways. Could it be that to Edward Sanger she really was goddess-like? Maybe Brigit was right, what each of us sees as real is the product of our individual senses.
“Isn’t Stewart Hall very exclusive, only a few rooms?” Brigit asked. “What if once you’re in there—?”
Vanessa had taken her burgundy silk cocktail dress out of the closet and was holding it against her. It was short, with spaghetti straps, Charlie’s favourite—
“You can’t wear that,” Brigit snatched at the dress.
Vanessa flipped it out of her reach, pushed her out of the room, kicked the door closed.
“I am going Brig’, so get over it!”
“Why? Do you think he’s going to tell you anything? What he will do is flatter you all to Hell, find out what you were doing on Oak Island and then—”
Vanessa opened the door just enough to frame her face.
“What? Rape me? For God’s sake, Brigit, I’m thirty-three years old!”
“And he’s a predator who’ll do whatever it takes!”
Vanessa shut the door again, slipped into the dress, piled her hair up into a loose chignon, checked herself in the mirror.
A predator: powerful, dangerous. Beautiful.
But Athena, goddess of war, could hardly be called prey.
“Don’t worry,” she said later, shrugging into one of Gran’s soft Nova Scotia knit shawls. “I will not say a word about Brother Bart.”
His diary was locked away, inside its metal box, in her suitcase under Gran’s bed.
IX
THEY EXPLAINED THEIR RESPECTIVE TRESPASSES on Oak Island over scotches by Stewart Hall’s sitting room fire. Sanger was a prospective investor. Vanessa was down here cleaning out her Gran’s house and had gone sailing to show the island to her friend Brigit, who had just arrived from the west. Not that there was much to see there.
Stewart Hall guests guaranteed their seclusion by renting the entire mansion. The carpets were thick, the light over the dining room table cast by a crystal chandelier. A second fire crackled in the fireplace along the side wall while the picture window at the end of the room looked out over Mahone Bay’s patchwork of islands. Above them the setting sun had turned a fleet of fleeing clouds mauve, purple, mother of pearl. Sanger held out Vanessa’s chair, draped her shawl over the back of it.
The waitress, “Marlena” according to the plastic nameplate pinned over her left breast pocket, lit the table candles.
Sanger had taken the liberty of ordering ahead. She didn’t mind?
“Depends on what you ordered.” He carried such an aura of power; she must not allow herself to be intimidated.
“Lobster Bisque prepared with a brandy and cream sauce to start.”
Marlena wheeled in a pail of ice, took a bottle of wine out of it, showed him the label. He nodded. “And a dry Santorini white to go with it.” He swirled a first sampling round the bowl of his glass, sniffed it, tasted, and then nodded to Marlena to pour.
Nervousness straightened Vanessa’s back.
“While we wait, why don’t you tell me why you call yourself by Blackbeard’s name.”
Sanger parried with a smile.
“A coincidence
, I assure you. In my case ‘Teach’ stands for teacher.”
He told her about playing running back on his university’s football team, not having much time to study, how in his sophomore year he had cottoned onto the fact that if you told your history professors something they did not know and backed it up, they loved you. So when they were studying the settlement of the west he had quoted Chief Seattle — nobody had heard of him then — and had woven valour and misfortune into the Texans’ defeat at the Alamo.
“And now what do you do?” He did not look like a teacher.
“Well,” he laughed, “by the end of college it was clear that I wasn’t headed for the National Football League so I took up business. Turned out I was pretty good at that too.”
Vanessa took a sip of her wine.
“As a running back? Doing end runs?” She smiled. “Or Enrons?” No harm in letting him know that she read the news.
He sat back, regarding her.
“So you’re clever, too.” He let the silence play out. Vanessa struggled not to rush into it until finally he allowed his amusement to show. “Okay, sure, I like to win. And show me big business anywhere that doesn’t do what Enron did, gild the profit lily a little, give its big clients a few rewards, whatever it takes.”
“To make a profit?”
Sanger considered his wine.
“To make a bigger, better profit than the next guy because who knows what tomorrow will bring?” He smiled. “But I have never had to rape and pillage to lay my hands on a prize.” He raised his glass, waited until hers came up to meet it. “Here’s to the company of a beautiful lady. You grew up here?”
“No, my father did.”
“And what did he think of Oak Island?”
Vanessa laughed.
“That it was a big hoax, a way for the island’s owners to channel a steady stream of money.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“I don’t?”
“If you did why would you have sailed over there so early in the morning?” Quick, deft, leaving no room to duck, to prevaricate.
The bisque arrived. Vanessa took a slow spoonful, waited for it to cool, then another, conscious only of his blue “hawk’s eyes” on her, forcing herself not to react to the cascading realizations that he could have followed them all around the island this morning, could have heard their every idea, every reference to Brother Bart. Another spoonful — maybe two could play the silence card — until finally she dared to look at him.
