The Oak Island Affair

by Jane Bow

  Vanessa looked into her glass, swirled the golden scotch, pride and disappointment and the censor jostling for the centre of a stage that did not seem to contain any Right Choices.

  “If only I could have searched his room.”

  “You should have.”

  Dream and memory often sprout from the same roots, twisting, curling, growing one into the other in that fertile movie land between sleep and consciousness. Pan to a man in a black Victorian tailcoat, black hair swept up into wings, with a goatee, and dead eyes. I never lose.

  Cut to Carlita’s grandfather taking them out onto the sea in his red rowboat, lowering his glass-bottomed box.

  “Mira.” His old face broke into a million wrinkles when he grinned. “See my treasure?” Shiny blue, orange, yellow striped fish, a plump red snapper then suddenly, right near the surface, a bulbous grey jellyfish streaming poison-filled tendrils glided into view.

  “The Portuguese man-of-war,” said the old man. “If it wraps itself round your thigh it can make you very ill, maybe even kill you.” He pointed to his eye. “Tienes que tener cuidado.”

  Dissolve to Vanessa’s father’s face, a close-up, jaw muscles tight as he told them they would have to leave everything they knew.

  Wind rattled the window. Handfuls of rain became shards of glass shredding the image.

  How, she wondered on waking, had this headache let her sleep at all? Out in the living room the telephone rang.

  “Good morning, doll.” A low, guttural American chuckle.

  “I’m sorry Ed, I really don’t want to talk to you.” Vanessa hung up.

  The telephone rang again, again, again. Vanessa held her head. Brigit came in from the kitchen to snatch up the receiver.

  “Hello … No, I’m sorry, Mr. Sanger, she’s in the shower … Yes, I’ll tell her.” Brigit hung up. “He wonders why you would come across so lovey-dovey last night then not even—”

  “Did you tell him I don’t make love to thieves?” Vanessa closed her eyes.

  “Van listen, I’ve been thinking.”

  “God help us, not again.” Vanessa dredged up the semblance of a smile. “Because really, Brig’, what do we think we’re doing? How likely is it that we two are going to find a treasure that men with drills and backhoes and millions of dollars have not been able to bring up?”

  “We have to go back to the library, Van, this morning. We still have the translation and if Brother Bart’s treasure is here, we need to find it now, before Sanger buys the island. That way he’ll lose interest.”

  Vanessa squeezed her eyes shut.

  XII

  “BROTHER BARTOLOMEO’S JOURNAL IS GONE?” The library’s fluorescent lights sapped the color out of the old librarian’s cheeks. “But how?”

  Outside the wind had died. Vanessa watched the raindrops dribbling patterns down the library windows.

  “Blackbeard had someone remove it from Vanessa’s suitcase while she was having dinner with him,” said Brigit. “Whoever it was waited until I went out for a walk. They took nothing else.”

  “Please, I feel badly enough!” Pills were just beginning to dull the pain slicing through the back of Vanessa’s head.

  Mlle Durocher stared, blinking, and then gestured toward the kitchen.

  “We will make some tea.” As they sat around the kitchen table there was no place in the old lady’s psyche for recriminations. “How far had you translated?”

  “Not far enough.” Vanessa took out the exercise book then got up and jerked open the door into the library.

  “It is all right today,” said Mlle Durocher. “The rain will keep the adults at home. The children will come a little later. Tell me.”

  Vanessa sat down again, opened the exercise book.

  “Brother Bart was here, Mademoiselle, and on Oak Island.” She found her place. “Remember they had taken his rings and then buried him? Well, now listen.”

  Hauled up out of the earth after I know not how long, naked and pale as a grub, my eyes were blinded by the light as they washed me and then, dressed in someone’s clean white shirt and breeches, I was inducted through an elaborate ceremony involving swords and incantations I could not follow, into the pirates’ secret society. An extra ration of rum all around, backslapping, huzzahs followed. I knew not what to make of it all.

  “Goodness and love lie beyond the religions,” the advisor told me. “You find them in your own heart. That was the real teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Vanessa looked up. Mlle Durocher’s head was bobbing, quick birdlike nods in time with her blinking. Vanessa continued.

  How, I wondered, did that justify the pirates’ shooting people down in cold blood? But then I wondered that of You too, Father. Did you have me fall in love so that you could rip Mia out of my arms, murder the very beauty You had created? If that is the kind of God You are, I want nothing more to do with You.

  Life went on. Captain St. Clere kept going off in one of the pinnaces to explore, until one day at the end of July. The captain returned to camp so happy. He tried not to show it and there was no explanation given, but there was extra rum that night. The next day we set sail, just a short way, to anchor off one of a handful of islands on the west side of the bay.

  “The west?” asked Brigit.

  “The inland side, where Oak Island is.” Vanessa returned to the book.

  I then spent several weeks cooking for an endless stream of silent men on the island. They were working in shifts, sleeping on the ships, then working again, all day and all night. Some were soaked to the skin when they came to eat, others covered in dirt. But no one knew what, exactly, was going on. Anyone caught speaking would be shot.

  Vanessa’s reading voice was hushed in a kitchen silence counterpointed by the clock’s ticking.

  One afternoon I found myself with a few rare moments of peace. I took the liberty of strolling along the beach. I had noticed a place in the centre of the island where the terrain was lower, given more to grass and scrub than to forest. I turned inland. Jesus stepped out from behind a bush. He was holding a musket.

  “Stay back, Brother,” he whispered. “I am under orders to shoot.”

  “Why? What are they doing?” Was it Mia’s people’s treasure they were burying? It was the only thing I cared about.

  Jesus looked over his shoulder into the woods, then behind me at the beach.

  “I don’t know, they seem to be digging everywhere.” He grinned. “But if they are leaving gold here, we’ll know where to come back for it, won’t we?”

  Did he not realize that so would all the men, unless our captains did something about that?

  Vanessa looked up, stricken.

  “That’s as far as I got.”

  What had happened next? The question hung in the stillness of the library kitchen. How had Brother Bart and his diary survived?

  “It was a Spaniard who gave the diary to your Uncle Seamus,” offered Brigit.

  “That was two hundred years later.”

  “And pirates were bound by an oath of secrecy,” said Mlle Durocher. “To break it was to risk death.”

  “Which Brother Bart did by writing the diary.”

  The silence became a requiem until Vanessa, wriggling in her chair, looked defiantly at them.

  “I’m going to get the diary back.”

  How? The question hung in the air.

  “Well.” Mlle Durocher got up, pushed open the kitchen door. “In the meantime there is lots we can explore.” She had a tower of books waiting on the reading room table. “We have established links to Freemasonry.”

  “Which could include just about anybody,” said Vanessa.

  “—and in Scotland the source of Freemasonry is clearly rooted in the medieval Knights Templar Society. You remember I mentioned the Templars yesterday?”

  Brigit nodded. “They were excommunicated and tortured and burnt … Do you think those hands I saw on Oak Island yesterday, at the headstone, could have belonged to a knight? If I
could just get back there …”

  Mlle Durocher smiled. “You will. In the meantime, perhaps you will find your ring in one of these books.”

  Vanessa opened one of the volumes. The Knights Templar had built their first castle on the ancient site of King Solomon’s Temple. A page of Templar symbols included the Star of David that Sanger had showed her on the American dollar bill, and that had been embroidered into Seamus Holdt’s Freemason’s apron. Mlle Durocher pointed to it.

  “The star is made of two triangles, one pointing up, the other down. You will recall that recent books make much of these. The one pointing up as the male thrusting blade, the one pointing down as the female chalice, open, waiting. But the point of the symbol is that the two triangles are linked, part of the same whole.”

  “Like the Taoist circle symbol where the female yin, cool, moist, passive, and the hot energetic male yang are one,” said Brigit.

  “Exactly,” the old librarian smiled. “All the world’s great philosophies point in the same direction.”

  Toward something incredibly powerful. Something that defied reason and the usual defences in a person’s life, that formed the basis of secret outlaw societies people had risked their lives to belong to. Suddenly, Vanessa saw herself on the Canary Island beach, the lump of tomato landing on her breast, herself looking down at it, then into Charlie’s eyes as juicy new feelings erupted, deleting the need to question, to guard, to doubt, so certain had she been of the joy and the glory that came with nakedness and sunshine and Charlie in the warm sea. Something incredibly powerful.

  “Love.” Vanessa looked at the other two. “That’s why they joined the secret groups. For love.”

  “Love? Brother Bart’s secret group and the pirates who shot them without a second thought were in love?” Brigit yelped. “With what?”

  But Mlle Durocher looked as if she had just been given a gift.

  “Oui, chérie, I believe you are right, because when does human behaviour make no sense? When love is present. The crusaders for Christ who massacred thousands of Muslims in 1099, so that the streets of Jerusalem were running with blood, these knights, who became the Templars, came to worship at the same font as the Arabs. They learned ancient eastern astrology, mathematics, sciences, architecture from them. This is the knowledge that built Chartres Cathedral and hundreds of others in Europe and England during the 1100’s. The Templars did map-making, surveying, navigation, road building. By the end of the 13th century they owned huge tracts of land, had their own hospitals and doctors. They even knew about the antibiotic properties of mould extracts.” Mlle Durocher smiled. “Believe me, an educated Templar would have had no trouble digging the Oak Island tunnels.”

  “So what happened to them?” Brigit asked.

  “Ah, love may have been present, but it could not conquer. The great Turkish Muslim, Saladin, finally defeated them in 1291. They had to leave the east and then in 1307 the kings of France and England, who were heavily in debt to them, had Pope Clement V order their arrest and torture for worshipping heathen eastern symbols.”

  The voice of her Cornish Grampa came out of Vanessa’s memory. She echoed it, singing:

  “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?”

  “That’s right!” Mlle Durocher smiled. “Frère Jacques may have been Jacques de Molay, the head Templar. You remember,” the old librarian’s voice trilled, “‘Bon voyage, Monsieur de Molay. À Saint-Malo débarquez sans naufrage,’ Saint-Malo is an Atlantic seaport. According to legend, the Templars were warned that the King’s men were coming. They loaded their ships with money and treasure in the dead of night and sailed them down the river to the sea. Everyone in the Catholic empire had orders, on pain of death, to turn in any fleeing Templars but some of them made it to Scotland, where King Robert the Bruce had already been excommunicated.” She looked at them, her smile enigmatic now. “And who did these men worship, that caused them so much grief, but Sophia.”

  “The great goddess?” Vanessa was jolted out of her stupor. “I thought they were crusaders for Christ.”

  “Ah, here is where the water becomes deep. Because you see, over time, as they studied with the Arabs, the Crusaders became very like some of them, wearing white robes with a red cord, for example. Later, when the Pope rounded up and tortured the Templars, he said it was because they worshipped a severed head called the Baphomet. And this word ‘Baphomet’ turns out to be an old Essene code word for ‘Sophia,’ which is Hebrew for ‘wisdom.’” Mlle Durocher smiled. “As I said, signs and symbols aside, all the world’s philosophies come down to the same thing, hence the word ‘philo-sophy’: love of wisdom.”

  “And these Essenes?” The name was familiar to Vanessa. “Didn’t Jesus study with the Essenes?”

  “That is right. The Essenes — who also wore white robes with a red cord — were healers who believed there was no wrathful, all-powerful God, that the fountain of wisdom was within the human heart, and their message is there again and again, hidden in King Solomon’s beautiful Song of Songs, in the gospel according to Thomas.” Mlle Durocher’s old blue eyes were alive behind her glasses.

  “Did you know that Jesus also went to Egypt? The Arabs, Egyptians, Essenes, early Christians, all of them knew that completeness arises out of unity of the individual with the creativity of nature, out of love, that the initiate had to die to the world, to his distractions and the tyranny of constant thinking, grasping, wanting, hating, had to be plunged into the black depths of nothingness.”

  “Sounds like enforced meditation,” Brigit commented.

  “Or alchemy,” said Mlle Durocher. “Plunging hot metals into the cold depths.”

  “Gold, the heaviest, would sink to the bottom!” Brigit was excited.

  “Sanger was talking about the Hermetic teachings that go way back to Egypt last night,” said Vanessa. “Didn’t they include alchemy? He ascribes to the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare-and-buried-it-here theory, by the way.”

  “So he would have you believe.” Brigit looked at Mlle Durocher. “Do you think the initiation burial could have been an alchemical process, a transformation of energy within?”

  The old lady was already nodding.

  “The purpose being to find Heaven. This is the key, I think.” Her voice quickened. “We know that the Bible’s gospels, upon which the Christian churches are based, contain only part of what Christ was trying to teach. Heaven is in the heart, said Thomas, just like your pirates’ advisor. Indeed, is this not what Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, all religions are about, au fond?”

  “‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’” Vanessa looked at them. “Brother Bart was right, Christ would have been horrified to know what’s been done in his name through all the years.” Her headache was receding, not so the cloud of despondency. “But what does any of this tell us about the treasure on Oak Island?”

  “Well for one thing, the men who left the Oak Island clues, who professed to worship at a deeper level than the established religions, were users, takers, and as twisted as their ancient teachers.” Brigit was tracing the wood grain in the tabletop.

  “Ah, but this has always been the case, chérie.” Mlle Durocher got up. “Three hundred years before Christ, Aristotle knew that alchemy was a metaphor for the transformation of leaden feelings into golden ones. Why? Because the leaden behaviour is always there. The gold, on the other hand …” The old librarian disappeared into the library stacks. She came back to hand Vanessa a tattered little book.

  “Take this home. It will tell you the story of Isis, the first love story, upon which so much is founded.” Mlle Durocher had been old for as long as Vanessa could remember, but always quivering with energy, delighting in new discoveries. Now though, something in her seemed to falter. Holding onto the table, she let herself back down into her chair.

  “Mademoiselle? What is it?”

  “Oh,” the old librarian said, shaking her head, “it’s just …” She looked sheepish. “All this talk of love. I have been wantin
g to tell you, my Robert has asked me to marry him.”

  “Oh! When?”

  “When did he ask me? Last night. I had made us a little dinner. I was so surprised. He went right down on his knee just before the coffee.” Mlle Durocher smiled a little. “And he has such creaky knees. I did not know if he would be able to get up again!”

  “And you want this,” asked Brigit. “To get married?”

  “Oh yes!” But something — apprehension? — flickered behind her glasses. “It is only that living with somebody every day will be new for me. He is English you know.” Mlle Durocher chuckled. “Well, originally he was. He has been here for forty-five years. Also,” she looked at Vanessa. “You have shared so much with me, chérie, now it is my turn. I have bought a little lot,” she said, leaning toward them to whisper, “on Oak Island. The treasure hunters are always in need of cash and I have my savings, so a few months ago I talked to one of them. Robert and I will build a little cottage just down from Joudrey’s Cove. No one knows about this. We will marry next weekend. Why wait, said Robert? We do not have any time to waste.” Mademoiselle’s smile opened wider. “We will start building right away.”

  “Oh, Mademoiselle!” Vanessa came around the table to hug her old friend. The old lady’s shoulders felt as delicate as bird bones under the silk. “When can I meet this Robert?”

  Mlle Durocher looked out the window.

  “The weatherman says the sky will clear. Perhaps you two will meet us at the Oak Island causeway the day after tomorrow, shall we say at one o’clock? I will introduce you, and then we will take the boat around to our new property. It will be quiet on the island, and we will make some sense of all these symbols. And then,” she said, looking from one to the other of them, “perhaps next Saturday you will be my bridesmaids there?”

  “On Oak Island?” asked Brigit.

  “Of course, where else?” Vanessa smiled. “Because doesn’t gold stand for love?”

  The rain had stopped, leaving the air heavy with the smells of fecundity and the sea. Mauve lilac, red quince and white chestnut blossoms drip-chatted with the new green trees along Gran’s road. The real estate agent was parked at the end of the front walk. He rubbed his hands, excited; there was the possibility of an offer, but now a second prospective buyer wanted to view the house. There could be a bidding war. So when could he have the next showing?