The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  “Tell me, Connie, where do we stand with your colonial shadow book?” he barked, breaking into her thoughts, and she felt the warm glow dissipate, replaced in an instant with the quaking anxiety of the malingering student.

  “Shadow book?” Connie asked. “My latest research suggests that the book is a kind of almanac.” She quavered as she said this, hesitating to correct him.

  “I have been doing some checking of my own, my girl,” he said, leaning forward. “And a book of shadows is one contemporary term for a collection of recipes and spells that a given witch has found to be particularly effective, often handed down from master to initiate. You may call it an almanac if you wish, but I have satisfied myself that we are dealing with a book of shadows and little else. But if you do not know this, then I presume you have yet to locate it. So tell me, if you please, where we stand.” He brought his hands to rest in a knot on the table and stared at her expectantly.

  A book of shadows? Connie recoiled at the preposterous name. She wondered where exactly he had been doing this “checking,” as he called it, and further, why he would have been following up on her research if his own work was in such a precarious position. A strange, territorial feeling gripped her, and she felt irrationally angry that he had been working on her research rather than on his own. Sorting through the details that she had collected, she chose ones that she felt willing to spare and hid the rest away in her mind, unwilling to give him access to the total scope of her thought. Was this new territoriality duplicitous? The desire to conceal her plans from her advisor suffused her. She would tell him her progress in locating the book but keep her suspicions about its contents for herself.

  “I found that the book was de-accessioned from the Salem Athenaeum in the 1870s. My next step will be to visit the auction house archives, which I have been assured are quite complete.”

  “Sackett,” Chilton interjected, sounding bored.

  “Yes,” Connie replied, raising her eyebrows in surprise. “How did you know?”

  “My girl, all nineteenth-century Boston auctions of any consequence would have been handled by Sackett,” he said, waving his hand in dismissal. He fixed her with a distant gaze that indicated the barest glimmer of surprise that she would not have known this fact already.

  Connie continued, undaunted. “The librarian at the Salem Athenaeum seemed confident that the book would have been acquired by a collector of early Americana, and as such it would have left a traceable record, probably traveling through private hands. I just need a little more time.”

  Chilton sniffed, reaching for the gnawed pipe in the ashtray on his desk. “A little more time,” he echoed, voice cold. He picked up the pipe and dug its bowl into a pouch of tobacco from the top drawer of his desk, his hands moving automatically through these preparations while his eyes stayed locked on Connie’s face. The sweet, burnt smell of the cake box blend from the tobacconist’s in Harvard Square reached Connie’s nose. Idly, she wondered if the pipe was a habit left over from Chilton’s undergraduate self, something adopted as a boy to buy himself a cheap sort of sophistication. She tried to imagine a teenaged Manning Chilton: hair slicked back, club bow tie sloppily knotted, lifting the glass lid of a wide jar of dried tobacco leaves. But the image jarred, impossible to resolve with the grim patrician man who sat staring at her with such disapproval.

  “Connie,” he began, after a long draw on his pipe. “I was going to wait to tell you about this until after you found the book, but I can see that you are in need of some more forceful motivation,” he said, and Connie glowered in response. What could he possibly expect? Research takes as long as it takes. Surely Chilton must understand that.

  “In the last week of September, as you know, I have been invited to present the keynote address to the Colonial Association on my recent research into alchemical technique and magical thinking in first-period America. My research, I think it’s safe to tell you, has attracted some considerable interest. I would like to invite you to join me in this presentation.”

  He puffed on his pipe, bemused eyes seeming to expect an outpouring of gratitude in response to this invitation. Connie’s initial feeling was one of pleasure and surprise. To be invited to present together with her advisor was a momentous development indeed. Still, a tiny cloud on the edge of her consciousness reminded her of Janine’s characterization of Chilton’s current research. She watched him, waiting.

  When she failed to appear excited at this prospect, Chilton looked momentarily flustered but collected himself almost instantly. He cleared his throat. “As I am sure you know, this is a unique opportunity for a graduate student at this stage of your career. I would be very pleased to provide your research with such a worthy forum. And, it must be said, you would likely find some professional opportunities awaiting you from contacts made at this conference.” He paused, lowering his voice. “Considerable professional opportunities. However, I will be unable to present you to my colleagues if the book remains unlocated. So you see, we have a bit of a problem.”

  Connie swallowed, preparing to tread lightly. “Professor Chilton,” she began. “Perhaps if you gave me a sense of what the subject of your presentation will be, I would be in a better position to prepare.”

  He watched her, weighing his words before speaking. “A perfectly reasonable question,” he said. “And one that I will be able to answer in some detail once you bring me the book.”

  “I see,” she said.

  He gazed at her, drawing on his pipe, and a haze of smoke poured from his nostrils, forming a sweet-smelling cloud around his head. “Do you?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

  “Yes,” Connie said, unease radiating from her stomach. “And thank you. This is an incredible opportunity. I won’t disappoint you.”

  The words left her mouth as if she were reciting them from a script. Connie got to her feet, gathering her shoulder bag to her chest, not meeting Chilton’s steady gaze. She started to back toward the door, one foot behind the other, until her hand found the heavy brass doorknob and turned it. As she passed through the door she heard Chilton’s voice follow her out into the hallway.

  “Find the book, Connie,” the voice said.

  And then the door closed with a click.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Mid-July

  1991

  A CHIME SOUNDED, AND THE GREAT MASS OF HUMANITY IN THE TRAIN car bunched together near the doors, building up in a blockade of arms and legs and headphones and backpacks before pouring out, first in a trickle, and then in a slurry as the doors slid open. Connie felt herself carried along in the current of bodies roiling out onto the subway platform, closing her throat against the mixed smells of perfume, sweat, asphalt, melting tires. She gripped her bag more tightly under her arm, allowing the throng to float her along the platform, up a flight of stairs, over and around the man sleeping in a stained olive drab bedroll, and out the doors of the Arlington T station. The commuter mob dispersed in clusters of twos and threes once it reached the open expanse of the Public Garden.

  Connie stopped beneath an elegant weeping willow, its branches drooping down to the ground. She rested against it in the shade, enjoying the sensation of sweat gathered up off of her brow and arms and carried away on the breeze. Though Boston as a general concept could be said to encompass the vast assemblage of tight, ordered towns all along the northeastern spread of Massachusetts, each little fiefdom did a much better job of retaining its own stubborn identity than most outsiders would expect. She had spent her childhood in the comfortable woods around Concord, and her present life strolling the brick streets of Cambridge, but during both blocks of time, she had found little reason to venture into Boston proper. Utterly disoriented, she now gazed down the lawn that swept from Boylston Street to the lily pond in the Public Garden. Tourists placidly drifted by in swan boats, disappearing under the footbridge. She reached into her bag and pulled out a crumpled paper, casting her eye over the directions tha
t she had noted down over the telephone.

  “Providence Street,” she read, peering one way, then another. The address should only be a block or two away, but she always felt lost in downtown Boston, being accustomed to wandering past nearly identical town houses until she emerged on a street that sounded familiar. She eyed the Ritz-Carlton across the street, obscured behind a cluster of discreet Town Cars, and the facade of Shreve’s behind her on the corner, where women laden with shopping bags grouped before the windows, admiring the sparkling wares inside. Connie squeezed her eyes shut, made a guess, and crossed the boulevard just ahead of the onward crush of afternoon traffic.

  To her surprise, the guess proved more or less accurate, and after a few minutes’ walk Connie pushed open the substantial doors of Sackett Auctioneers and Appraisers. She entered a cool vestibule that bore the proud, slightly worn elegance shared by many Boston institutions. The dark blue Oriental rug on the floor was threadbare in patches, its floral pattern eaten away by moths. A painting of a clipper ship under full sail, held in a gilt frame and stained brown with tobacco smoke, hung over a cracked leather couch. A few copies of Yankee Home magazine, decades old, were fanned across a demure coffee table. New York looks ahead, she mused, but Boston can’t help but look back. She signed the guest register with a fountain pen and made her way up the stairs to the main gallery.

  Preparations were under way for an auction of what looked like lesser American landscape paintings. Great canvases covered in dramatic clouds and blasted tree trunks were interspersed with undistinguished seascapes: still more clipper ships, and one scene of Gloucester harbor encased in ice, which nearly ran her over at the top of the stairway, art handlers’ feet just visible beneath the frame. She passed a few moments being overlooked and in the way, finally tapping the shoulder of the workman who had just leaned the frozen harbor painting against a wall. With a jerk of his head he indicated an obscure door in the corner of the gallery, and Connie nodded her thanks.

  She stepped through the door, finding herself in a long hallway lined with wooden doors bearing departmental placards. She passed MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS, FINE JEWELRY, PRINTS AND WORKS ON PAPER, finally stopping when she reached RARE MANUSCRIPTS AND BOOKS. Connie rapped softly on the door, but it yielded to the slight pressure of her knuckle, creaking open to reveal an office crowded with files and papers, a rotund, genial man with jeweler’s magnifying glasses clipped to his spectacles seated in the middle.

  “Ah!” he said, rising to a quarter-crouch, the gesture of a proper gentleman who is nevertheless always in a hurry. He made no move to introduce himself but instead seemed to be expecting her. “Sit, sit.” He waved one hand at a pile of papers across from him, which proved to be hiding a stiff armchair. Gingerly Connie lifted the pile—auction catalogues, most of them—and settled them on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” she began. “But are you Mr….?”

  “Beeton, yes,” he said, continuing to thumb through the catalogue open before him on the top layer of his desk. “I must say it’s been some time since anyone asked me something worth researching.” He exhaled a disapproving puff through his nose. “No real collecting strategies anymore, these people.” He flipped another page. “But then I was given your message. Whom did you speak to?”

  Connie started to answer, but Mr. Beeton cut her off. “Never mind. These useless girls at the front that they have. Only want to get married! Go to New York if that’s what you want, I tell them. Do they listen?” He flipped a page again. “No real intellectualism to them, poor slight little things. Come pouring out of Mount Holyoke and Wellesley thinking, ooh, with my little art history degree I shall find someone with real means! As if collecting were mere acquisition!” He spat out the word, reaching one gray hand up to adjust his jeweler’s lenses.

  Connie pressed her lips together to suppress the smile that was fighting to get out. “As a matter of fact,” she ventured, “I went to Mount—”

  “Tell me, Miss Goodwin,” the redoubtable Mr. Beeton interrupted. “What do you think is the hallmark of a truly fine collecting sensibility? Hmmm?” He set aside the catalogue that he had been perusing, marking one spot with a long slice of paper, and pulled out a thick file folder. “Is it just buying whatever one can afford, willy-nilly?”

  “No?” Connie guessed.

  “Is it merely gathering together those various symbols of taste and affluence that one’s decorator tells one to acquire?” He shuffled through the file folder as he spoke, licking his thumb with each turn of a leaf.

  “Ah,” Connie demurred.

  “Or is it rather the refinement of a given taste through study and contemplation, developing the understanding of what differentiates the merely expensive from the truly rare through discipline and self-education?” He looked at her expectantly, gazing over his complex lenses. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out at first. Mr. Beeton waited, tapping his fingertips together.

  “Discipline,” she said, finally.

  “Precisely!” he exclaimed, pushing the catalogue and the open file together across his desk. “Junius Lawrence,” he said, shifting himself in the seat, elbow swerving dangerously near a pile of papers stacked on the end of the desk.

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Connie, scanning the files that he had passed to her.

  “The fellow who bought the entirety of the Salem Athenaeum collection in 1877. Conducted through an intermediary, of course, as the man didn’t care to broadcast how utterly indiscriminate his taste was. And rightfully so.” Mr. Beeton settled back in his chair.

  Connie looked more closely at the catalogue that advertised the sale when it was conducted, complete with estimates for some of the rarer volumes (of which the almanac appeared not to be one). Then she turned to the open file folder, which listed the buyer’s premium for the bulk of the Athenaeum collection, charged to an anonymous holding company. Behind this list in the folder Connie found a series of receipts and signatures tracing the holding company through various signatories to one Junius Lawrence of the Back Bay, Boston, Massachusetts.

  “But who was he?” Connie asked, looking up. Mr. Beeton emitted an ill-concealed smirk.

  “Industrialist. New money. Made a mint in something wretched—granite mining, I believe—and like many gentlemen of his ilk set about promptly purchasing the social credibility that he otherwise lacked.”

  “But why would he buy books?” Connie asked, confused.

  “Well, he didn’t just buy books,” said Mr. Beeton. “He also bought furniture—Belter mostly, and other high Victorian claptrap. And quite a few examples of American landscape painting. Got good advice in that department, apparently. One or two of his pieces wound up at the Museum of Fine Arts. Tried to spread his money around, that one. One of his paintings, a lesser one, should be installed upstairs right about now. Meant to be a Fitz Hugh Lane. Luminism. Probably fake. But the books, Miss Goodwin. Why do you think he would want them?”

  The man watched her, and Connie felt the dust of his overcrowded office beginning to sneak into her nasal passages and down the back of her throat. Her eyes were starting to itch. Why would someone back then buy old books, anyway? Expensive ones?

  “Why, to fill his new library, of course,” spat Mr. Beeton, as if responding to her unspoken thought. “I did a bit of research before you arrived. In 1874, he began building a great new town house on the water side of Beacon Street—I’ve a copy of the architectural sketches here somewhere—and his architect naturally included a library. Well”—Beeton sniffed—“the man was a miner. He had never collected a book in his life. Needed to get his hands on some, but quick. In December of 1877, his wife—she was a distant cousin of the Cabots, penniless branch, of course—threw a party.” He thrust a yellowed newspaper clipping into her hands, entitled “Seen Around Town,” with an engraving of the facade of the Lawrences’ town house.

  “Smartest party of the year, it was. Really burst Lawrence onto the scene. Good thing he had some nice old books to scatter around the
house. Much easier to be accepted if one manages to look the part. When the time came, both his daughters did quite well.” Beeton smiled a tidy, evil little smile and pushed his complicated lenses up his forehead. The man was able to expound about hundred-year-gone social machinations with such enthusiasm that they could have been happening to people he himself knew; his mind held maps of Brahmin interrelationship, intermarriage, bank account, and scandal, all throbbing with life. She sometimes forgot that to be a good historian one must also have an ear for gossip. She passed the newspaper clipping back to him.

  “This is fascinating,” Connie said, wondering what all this meant for her quest for Deliverance’s book. “I had never heard of the Lawrences.”

  “Endowed a small wing in the Boston Public Library in 1891,” Beeton said. “Married off the two daughters, who went on to a healthy obscurity. Family lost the last of the money in the crash of ’29. Sold the town house to a small local college.” He made a pshawing sound.

  “Do you think the almanac that I am looking for would have ended up in the Public Library wing? Or would one of the daughters have kept it?” Connie asked.

  “Oh, I think not,” said Beeton. “Here in Rare Manuscripts and Books, we like to keep tabs on some of the more major collections that pass through our hands.” He spoke with authority.

  “Naturally we hoped that the family would think of us if they wished to pass on the Athenaeum collection. But my understanding”—Mr. Beeton paged through another several papers in the file—“is that one or two of the volumes went to the daughters—not great readers, those two—and that on Junius Lawrence’s death in”—he hunted for a moment through another of the papers—“1925”—he passed Connie a clipped obituary from the Boston Herald, entitled “Junius Lawrence, Philanthropist, Granite Magnate, Dead at 74”—“the collection was donated to…yes, here it is…Harvard.” A slip of paper was thrust into Connie’s hands, which proved to be a copy of Junius Lawrence’s will, itemizing his charitable donations. Four years later his daughters must have regretted that generosity, Connie reflected as Beeton’s last comment sank into her mind.