by Spain, Laura
Lowry came over and stood beside me for what could well be the achievement of a lifetime. Maybe he had learned the first principle of survival in a hierarchical organization in the Army: the most junior person takes an inconspicuous role in the presence of so many who think they know so much more. Or perhaps he did not want to draw attention to himself or invite any questions about who had financed the expedition.
After mapping the site and photographing the tombstone with its skull and inscription, the first shovel went into the earth and stopped. Two hours later, they had removed about six inches of earth, revealing a layer of stones. Gary said that watching men move dirt with brushes was about as exciting as watching grass grow. Lowry laughed and promised me a ride back so he could return to town.
Someone had wanted very badly that John Addleton never emerge from that grave, not even at the Resurrection. All the stones had the same dimension as the tombstone. After measuring them, one of the archaeologists went over to the section of the wall of the old mill and measured the stones there. They were all cut exactly the same.
“That’s Dr. Sims,” Lowry said to me. “He’s supervising my thesis.”
“Where did all this stone come from, Lowry?”
“I’ll show you,” he said and led me around the partially collapsed wall to a drop off five hundred feet down.
“We’re on top of a limestone bluff,” he said. “Somebody cut the stone right out of the side of the mountain. You can see the marks if you climb down there.”
What sort of people, I wondered, would risk their lives cutting stone blocks from a cliff face to make a mill as strong as a castle?
“Want to see something really amazing?” he asked, breaking my reverie. “Come over here.”
He led me back to the inner part of the wall and pointed to stone steps running up part of the wall, cut off by the fallen section, then starting again above the first steps and going up to the third story and a window slit at the top.
“You can get up there, if you can pull yourself from the first row of steps to the second. Think you can make it?”
Without answering I started up the first staircase, put my hands on the base of the second, and felt how much strength I had lost in the last 30 years. Then he was pushing me up until I was sitting on the ledge, legs dangling over the side.
“You got it,” he cried, as I turned to the side, pulled myself up against the wall, and started going up.
When I reached the top of the second flight, he boosted me up again to the third story by the window. The stones were cut out at an angle from the slit, as if the builder wanted to have as wide as possible view to either side. The window framed the spectacular fall landscape, more brilliant than a painter’s palette, stretching south over the Appalachian foothills. In the far distance, the hills opened into a blue haze, like a gateway to a garden of the gods. It was the Cumberland Gap, through which John Addleton had led his exhausted men looking for Welsh speaking Indians.
Hanging on to the window for support, I looked back over my shoulder down the mountain. Grass and scrub stretched from the field around the stone house down to a fence. Beyond the fence was more scrub, and then freshly cleared fields. Farther away were stone fences and more freshly cleared fields surrounded by dead corn stalks running down the mountain and out of sight.
“That’s the Taylor place,” Lowry said.
I would have to ask Lowry if he had heard anything more about the Taylors’ Patterson Colt.
“Be careful,” he said as I started down.
He had to guide my legs from the upper stories to the first.
“Only place I ever saw slit windows beveled like that was in a castle in Wales the English built to hold the country,” I said, panting from the climb.
“It was so archers had a wide field to shoot,” Lowry said.
“Why would anyone build a mill in Kentucky like that?” I wondered.
“This never was a mill.”
“How do you know?”
“Look at the water source,” he said, leading me to a pump set in the fallen stones with a pipe running down the slope to the stone house.
“It’s a natural spring, never enough to power a mill.”
By mid afternoon, about five feet down, they uncovered Addleton’s body. There was no coffin; just an opening in the layer of stones.
“My, God, look at that,” Dr. Sims exclaimed.
The body was remarkably well preserved, as if it had been mummified and interred in a pyramid. Sandy hair stuck out over the black, grinning face, and his coat, breeches and boots were intact.
The forehead was caved in around an indentation in the center.
“Our forensic people will love this,” Professor Trachet said, pretending to study the bullet hole.
While Dr. Sims called for a body bag with an airtight seal, the TV crew pushed through the archaeologists to film the find. That night, on the six o’clock news, all Kentucky would know that violent death was their ancestors’ constant companion.
It was starting to get dark when Gibson Trachet said, “Let’s call it a day.”
Like a golfer who concentrated on the 19th hole rather than his swing, the professor preferred long, beery evenings back at the motel discussing other archaeologists’ findings to working in the field.
“Dr. Trachet, could we remove the next layer of stones?” Lowry asked, the first thing he had said to the archaeologists all day.
“Why?” Trachet said, irritated.
“We haven’t found Addleton’s map yet.”
The head of the department turned from the second year master’s student to the other archaeologists, trying to decide whether he would lose more face with them if he didn’t put down the student or if he neglected what could be an important next step.
“We should take the bottom layer of stones back with us for analysis anyway,” Dr. Sims said.
So Trachet nodded, and Sims and another archaeologist pried up the next layer. Sure enough, beneath where the dead man’s heart had rested, was another opening with something dark crumpled in it. The TV crew couldn’t believe their good luck: first a victim, then a mysterious object buried beneath him, all in one day.
“Hold it up,” the cameraman said to Dr. Sims, while the reporter moved into place to question him about it.
Gibson Trachet stepped to the edge of the grave beside the reporter and held out his hand, and Dr. Sims handed something like a crushed box to him.
“Be careful, Professor Trachet,” Sims said. “It’s fragile.”
Trachet was so excited to be on live TV that he grabbed it too firmly. Centuries-old leather dissolved, and a sheaf of papers fell out, leaving Trachet with only a handful of brown dust to show the camera.
“What’s that?” the reporter asked as the cameraman moved in on the papers.
“I think it was made out of leather,” Trachet began.
“No,” the reporter said. “The papers.”
Dr. Sims, still standing in the stone lined grave, picked them up and looked at the first one.
“Lowry, come take a look at this,” he said. “What was it William Spenser said about Addleton’s map?”
“It was written by the devil.”
Sims stared at papers barely discolored by 200 years underground, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“Can you tilt it this way,” the reporter pleaded. “What is it?”
“It’s a map of the Cumberland Gap showing the way here,” he said.
“And what’s all that writing around it?” the reporter asked.
“Numbers.”
Lowry and I moved up to the edge of the grave to see. In row after precise row, algebraic equations in beautiful 18th century script stretched from the top to the bottom of the page.
“And the other pages?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Dr. Sims said.
“Let me see those,” Lowry said taking a page, a note of command in his voice.
For a moment,
the camera and the archaeologists focused on him.
“It’s Arabic,” he said, amazed.
“What’s it say?” the reporter demanded.
“Something about the way to the city of Madoc.”
“The other pages are all numbers, too,” Dr. Sims said, distracting them. “And here’s another map, showing the way west to the Ohio River.”
“Dr. Trachet?” the reporter turned to the head of the department once more.
Gibson Trachet had nothing to say.
And there the interview and the most significant day in the history of Kentucky archaeology ended. We drove back to Addleton, the body and the papers sealed in airtight containers to protect them for their journey to Lexington for examination, and the party dispersed. Lowry bought dinner for Gary and me at the restaurant on the square.
“What do all the numbers mean?” I asked Lowry.
“I don’t know, but I’m sure I can figure it out.”
* * * * *
Two years into his work on his PhD in archaeology, however, Lowry was stymied. After a brief flurry of attention after his master’s degree thesis on William Powell’s letter was published alongside a paper on the exhumation of John Addleton with Gibson Trachet as the principal author, he could not find material to pursue his thesis on the Addleton expedition. I met him at Dudley’s in Lexington on my way south to appraise a collection in Knoxville. He was so down that he hardly ate.
“I’m dropping out of the program,” he finally said.
“What are you talking about?”
“The numbers on the map we found correspond to the solution of some of the equations on the other papers. But the closest I could come to identifying the unit of measurement is the Arab mile, about 2 kilometers.”
For a second I wondered if those years in Iraq were coming back to wreck him the way they were doing to so many others.
“What do the other people in your department think?” I asked, knowing how much he was respected.
“Gibson Trachet told me I’d find as many Arabs as Welsh Indians in Kentucky and laughed me out of a seminar when I even suggested it as a possibility.”
The only time I had seen him so discouraged was when he thought he would never go to college.
“And I can’t figure out where the numbers came from.”
“Herbert’s map?” I wondered, remembering Dinwiddie’s and Powell’s letter.
“I don’t know if there ever was a Herbert’s map. All we have are a bunch of numbers, something in Arabic about Madoc, and Addleton’s calculations.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“When I have enough money to excavate the whole site myself, I’ll bring in the best team of archaeologists in the world to do it.”
“The angel investor again,” I kidded him.
“Another good year like last year and I can do it,” he said.
“I’d be careful with that stuff, Lowry.”
I’d been reading about how the Kentucky State Police and National Guard were launching raids on the marijuana growers.
“Catch up with me in the fall,” he said. “We can talk about planning the excavation.”
We talked about other things: the girls he’d met but couldn’t really connect with until he had solved the riddle of the map, and my search for the perfect firearm.
“Have you seen that Patterson Colt again?” I asked him.
He glanced around and leaned forward, as if to silence me.
“They still use it for family business, Glen,” he said. “Let it go.”
“A .36 caliber lead bullet leaves a very clear signature,” I tried to argue with him.
“That’s if they find the body.”
He stared through me that funny way that made you think one eye was looking into yours and the other behind you.
“Only archaeologists find bodies up around Devil’s Mill,” he said. “Let the Taylors have their toy.”
* * * * *
I called Lowry that summer before I went to The Fine Antique Arms Fair in Bristol, England. You never know who will show you something a collector you have cultivated for years has been looking for, or if you will find a seller who wants to bring in an outsider so the word doesn’t get out that he has to let the family heirlooms go. Some of the finest collections of historic American firearms are in England.
“Isn’t Bristol near where Governor Dinwiddie is buried?” I asked him.
“At St. Andrew’s Church in Clifton,” he said. “A few miles away.”
“Did he leave any papers after he returned to England?”
“Not many. He’s mentioned in a few newspaper articles, and in some records in the Foreign Office. After his stroke, he never left London except to travel to Bath or Bristol for the waters.”
“I’ll call if I find anything,” I said.
So we agreed to meet in the fall after the first frost, and I flew to London.
I had set aside a few days after the Bristol Fair to meet with dealers and collectors and to see what I could find about Robert Dinwiddie. St. Andrew’s Church had been bombed during the War, and only the graveyard remained. I wandered for an hour amongst the trees and flowers until I found his large rectangular gravestone and the loving inscription left by his wife and daughters. His personal qualities were remarkable, but not a word about sending the young George Washington to demand the French withdraw from the Ohio territory that precipitated the French and Indian War, nor about sending five men to their deaths on a fruitless expedition to find Welsh speaking Indians beyond the Cumberland Gap.
I even spent a day visiting manuscript dealers in London, trying to find leads to diaries or papers left by his wife or daughters. No one had ever heard of anything that even mentioned him or his family, until an elderly specialist in 18th century manuscripts stopped me on my way out of his shop.
“I think I read something about Dinwiddie in Boswell,” he said.
“The Life of Samuel Johnson?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, frowning. “It’s been too long to say. Just read Boswell, and you are sure to find it.”
It would take me the rest of my life to read through Boswell’s voluminous books and papers searching for a reference to Dinwiddie that may not even exist. Frustrated again, I thanked him and returned to my hotel for dinner with a collector anxious to sell part of his collection anonymously as far from England as possible. Lowry called just as I was falling asleep.
“What did you find?” he asked.
“The oldest manuscript dealer in London thinks he read something about Dinwiddie in Boswell,” I said. “But he can’t remember where. I’m flying back tomorrow morning.”
“You have to give it another day,” he said.
“I can’t read through everything Boswell ever wrote in one day.”
“He’s got to be online,” Lowry insisted. “I know a librarian UK, who can find the right data base and search him electronically. I’ll call you as soon as I have something from her.”
So I spent the next two hours changing my reservations. I had just gone to sleep when he called again.
“She found it,” he said. “Listen to this: ‘Monday 20 June. Breakfasted with Temple. He had read in The Chronicle that my countryman Robert Dinwiddie, Governor of Virginia, had returned to London after taking the waters at Bath. I resolved to visit him. Accordingly, I presented myself at his Pall Mall residence in the afternoon.’”
“Go on,” I said.
“I’m emailing it to you. Go to Oxford tomorrow and call me when you get there.”
I opened the document on my iPod. To Boswell’s surprise, he found Dinwiddie sitting in a room with the drapes drawn, wrapped in a shawl, unable to rise or return his greeting.
“His daughter Miss Elizabeth Dinwiddie observed that this had been her father’s sad condition ever since he had received papers from America from some disaffected office seeker. Being of a delicate disposition, the Governor had suffered a fit of apoplexy from which he had n
ever recovered.
“What papers might these be?” I inquired.
“Such that a lady may not describe,” she said passionately. “I have sent them to Mr. Hunt at Oxford, the author of all my father’s woes, with the fervent prayer that they would have the same effect upon him.”
“Who was Mr. Hunt at Oxford?” I texted Lowry.
“I’ll have that by the time you arrive,” he replied.
When I called, he said that Thomas Hunt was Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford in the middle part of the 18th century and told me to go to the Bodleian Library.
“And?”
“Ask for his papers. You know how to talk to these people. See if you can find the map.”
I had lunch at the King’s Arms pub and asked directions to the Bodleian.
“Go to the Admissions Office in the Clarendon building at the corner of Catte and Broad for a reader’s card first,” the barman said.
At the Admissions Office, I was directed to Radcliffe Camera, built midway in Hunt’s tenure and repository of the oriental manuscripts he had acquired. Entering the courtyard, I was struck by the famous circular library, with its ground floor pediments and niches, and the colonnaded second story topped by a dome. The inside was like a temple, with a vast central space rising into the dome and reading rooms along the exterior walls. I found the oriental manuscript reading room and presented my card to a young woman, probably a student, who seemed anxious to be helpful. The few students I saw and couldn’t be older than 18 and were dressed as if they had wandered in from La Jolla shores.
I began by asking for Professor Hunt’s papers.
“May I ask if you are looking for anything in particular?” she asked in a delicate English voice.
“A letter from Miss Elizabeth Dinwiddie to Professor Hunt dated sometime in 1762.”
“Yes, of course,” she replied and disappeared somewhere to check the catalogue.
When she reappeared a half hour later, she gave me that polite smile the English always use when they must disappoint.
