The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

by Katherine Howe

  She paused for a beat. “Wait—Harvard?” she asked, in a small, unbelieving voice.

  “Why yes!” cried Beeton. “They pretend to care how old one’s money is, but of course they don’t really.” He waggled a thin, gray eyebrow at Connie.

  Gears ground together in Connie’s mind, and she felt the muscles in her hands contract, wanting to dig into the copy of Junius Lawrence’s will that was clutched between her fingers. “Do you think that Junius Lawrence ever read any of the books that he bought from the Salem Athenaeum?” she asked, her voice sounding very far away in her ears.

  Mr. Beeton pursed his lips together, seeming to think for a moment. “Unlikely,” he finished. “Rather too busy enjoying his money, I should think.”

  The book was at Harvard. It had been there this entire time! She looked down again at the will, and up again at Beeton, dwarfed by his precious catalogues and papers. He smiled a watery smile at her.

  “This has been very helpful,” Connie said, struggling to keep her voice even. “May I keep a copy of this list?”

  “It’s yours,” said Beeton, waving his hand in a shooing motion. Then he sighed. “If only today’s collectors were as interested as you are, Miss Goodwin.” Beeton shook his head. “Hell in a handbasket, I am afraid.”

  “Indeed,” said Connie, rising. Her mind leaped ahead, shooting through the dim marble halls of Widener Library at Harvard, where Deliverance’s book was waiting. She could find it tomorrow! Then she could figure out what Chilton wanted with it. The book was hovering, just out of her grasp, but she finally knew exactly where to look. “Thank you so much.”

  “Good luck,” she thought she heard Mr. Beeton say as she made her way back down the hall, the photocopy of Junius Lawrence’s will grasped to her chest.

  “IT’S AT HARVARD, MOM!” CONNIE BURST JUST AS THE RECEIVER WAS picked up in the Santa Fe desert.

  “What is?” asked Grace Goodwin.

  Connie exhaled. “Deliverance’s physick book. I met the funniest little man today. He’d done half my research for me already.” She pulled the long phone cord behind her as she made her usual rounds through Granna’s dining room, running her hands over sundry objects in the dark.

  “How fortunate,” said Grace, her voice tinged with irony. “I don’t suppose you thanked him?”

  “Mom,” Connie warned.

  “Yes, my darling, I know.” She sniffed. “Well, what do you do next? Look under ‘Exact Book I’m Looking For’ in the card catalogue?” Grace chuckled, a surprisingly girlish sound, high and in the back of her throat.

  “I wish,” said Connie. She was not at all clear how the book would have been catalogued. In a sense its proximity, while tantalizing, was also frustrating. Widener, the main central library at Harvard, was on par with the New York Public Library for vastness and complexity. Though Connie, like most graduate students, had call numbers in the library for which she felt a proprietary sort of affection, the whole of the Harvard University library stacks loomed before her, stretching under the Yard walkways in multiple moleish directions, a vastness barely navigable even with a specific book title in mind. Connie did not relish the task that lay before her.

  “Of course nothing says that you have to find it,” Grace ventured.

  Connie clenched her jaw, draping her fingertips over a chubby earthenware teapot on Granna’s end table. “Chilton wants to include me in his big presentation to the Colonial Association in the fall. If I’m going to do that, I have got to find the book.”

  “And are you going to do that? You don’t sound very excited about it.” Grace kept her voice mild, but Connie could hear the faintest hint of reproach. The phone receiver slipped for a moment, then was replaced on Grace’s shoulder, and Connie knew that she was working away at something with her hands.

  “It’s an amazing opportunity,” Connie said, aware that she sounded as if she were trying to persuade not only her mother but also herself. Connie hooked her free thumb into her cutoff belt loop and leaned against Granna’s sideboard.

  “So you’ve said,” Grace commented. Then, “Dammit!” she said under her breath.

  “What are you doing?” Connie asked. “You’re not cooking, are you?”

  “No,” Grace said through gritted teeth. “I’m trying to repot some of my succulents. This weather is just killing them. I keep stabbing myself on the spines.” Connie heard her mother put a bleeding palm to her mouth and soothe it with her lips.

  “They’re cactus,” Connie said. “Aren’t they supposed to like hot weather?”

  “Yes, but not like this. We’re in a warming cycle,” Grace said, distracted, and from the sound of her voice, Connie could tell that she was inspecting her wound. “It’s a natural shift, but it’s being hastened beyond belief by the hole in the ozone layer. My poor aloes just can’t take it.”

  “Ozone layer?” Connie echoed.

  Grace sighed. “You should pick up a newspaper, my darling.”

  Connie glanced at her dangling spider plant. “I’ve…” She paused, wanting to ask Grace about the Latin note card but unsure where to begin. “I’ve had some funny things happen with the plants since I’ve been here.”

  “Oh, I’m not surprised at all,” Grace said. “You had such a wonderful green thumb as a girl, before you got so involved in research.”

  “It’s a bit more pronounced than that,” Connie said, voice low. “Mom, I found a bunch of Granna’s old recipe cards in the kitchen, and…something happened that I haven’t been able to explain.”

  Her mother laughed softly. “You know,” she said, “it’s hubris to assume that we always ought to be able to explain everything. Take the connection between people and their environment, for example. I moved out here in part because this region of the earth has different things to teach me than New England does. The air is different, the light is different, the plants, the soil. Our bodies are living, breathing organisms, you know—it’s easy to forget that. We are profoundly influenced by the rhythms of the world around us. Most people don’t understand that the earth moves in cycles, not just over the seasons, but on a bigger level, too. They think that the natural world just carries on in a constant state of stasis. It’s silly, really.”

  “Mom,” Connie tried to interject.

  “Take this ozone layer business. It’s not the warming per se that is the problem,” Grace continued. “It’s the pace. It’s too accelerated. It’s happening before its time. These planetary rhythms, why, they affect everything around them. The weather will change, plants will shift, animals will lose their habitats.” She grunted with the effort of hoisting a large cactus out of a planter, and Connie heard crumbled dirt spill across the faraway patio. “Most people don’t understand this yet.” Grace paused. “All kinds of things about us are inextricably bound up with the nature of the earth. Our auras, our bodies, the way they work. The impact we have on other people. Some things—traits, inclinations, what have you—may grow more…pronounced.”

  “Mom,” Connie pressed, “listen!”

  “For instance,” Grace continued, undaunted, “did you know that this kind of disproportionate rhythm change has happened before, but in reverse? North America was in a miniature ice age when the colonists first arrived. It’s true!” Grace’s breath blew across the mouthpiece, and Connie held the receiver a little away from her ear. As she did so, Arlo walked out from under the dining table, wagged twice, and made his way into the kitchen. “…was one of the reasons that so many people died those first few winters,” Grace was saying when Connie brought the telephone back to her ear. “Have you ever read any descriptions of how people dressed through the eighteenth century?”

  Connie smiled a mirthless smile. “I am a colonial historian, Mom,” she said, patiently.

  “Well, then you know what I’m talking about. All those layers and wool, they wouldn’t be practical in New England with the weather like it is today, would they?” She grunted again, apparently heaving another pot over the patio edge
. “And those Yankees were nothing if not practical.”

  Connie inhaled in preparation for breaking into her mother’s non sequitur, but Grace cut her off yet again.

  “Of course, the little ice age reached its peak in the early 1690s,” Grace said, offhand. “It’s a shame, really. One can never predict exactly how these things will play out.” She sighed, a little sorrowful.

  1692. Connie paused, the telephone receiver gripped in her hand. Unaware of what she was doing, Connie reached to the sideboard to steady herself. “Mom,” she said, her voice detached. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Grace chuckled again. “Just thinking out loud, my darling. Reminding you to experience your body for what it is—a collection of wondrous coincidences assembled by an intelligent Goddess, engaging with the world on its own terms. But tell me—how is Arlo? You’re not forgetting to feed him, are you?”

  “No, I…” Connie paused. Grace always talked in these oblique New Agey ways. She could sense that Grace had told her something important, but she was using her own language to do it. Connie glanced at her reflection in the spiderwebbed gilt mirror of the front hall, seeing the image of her face distorted by the layers of time built up over the glass. We can understand the world only through the language that is at our disposal. Every period has its own linguistic—and perceptive—lens. As this realization solidified, Connie saw the front door crack open in the reflection behind her, and Sam appeared, carrying a bag of groceries with a wine bottle poking out of the top. Her face split into a happy smile.

  “I’ll have to call you back, Mom,” she said, fingertip hovering over the telephone connection.

  “Connie, wait—” Grace began to say, voice urgent. “Is that him?”

  “I can’t talk now, Mom, I’ve got to go. Love you.”

  Grace started to protest, but Connie’s finger fell, and the receiver emitted a click and drone of the empty dial tone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Marblehead, Massachusetts

  Early August

  1991

  THE BACKS OF CONNIE’S EYELIDS GLOWED RED, AND SHE BECAME aware of gentle cheeping in the ivy over the bedroom window. She squinted, eyes still shut, and felt a slim sunbeam thrown across her face, its warmth brushing against her nose and cheeks. She could tell that the summer was nearing its end; this sunbeam used to fall across her waist when she awoke in Granna’s four-poster bed, but it had been making its way upward over the passing weeks, crossing the threshold of her chin around the end of July. Connie smiled, stretching her arms overhead under the pillows and knocking the backs of her wrists against the headboard.

  Next to her someone groaned a little in sleep, and she rolled onto her side, opening one eye to peer through the mesh of her scattered hair. Half submerged in a puff of white pillow rested a tanned plane of stubbly cheek and one closed, sleeping eye. On the inside hollow of the eye, just under the brow, glinted a tiny, dried droplet of gold paint. He moved slightly, the gold paint fleck twinkling in the morning sun. Then his mouth opened, releasing a deep, rattling snore. Connie’s face broke into a grin, and she pressed her mouth into the pillow, muffling the sound of her delighted laughter.

  “You’re shaking the bed,” said Sam, eyes still closed.

  Connie gulped down her snickers long enough to gasp, “What?”

  “Your laughing. It’s shaking the bed,” he said, the half of his mouth that she could see curving up into a smile.

  “You were snoring,” she explained.

  “Impossible,” said Sam, eye still closed. “I never snore.”

  “Oh, but you do,” she said, grinning.

  “Arlo?” asked Sam. “Back me up on this one.” The dog, who lay camouflaged on the comforter between Connie’s and Sam’s feet, responded by rolling onto his back, paws splayed in indifference.

  “He says yes,” Connie said, inching closer to Sam.

  “I didn’t hear that at all. I heard him say ‘Who’s shaking the bed while people are trying to sleep?’” Sam replied, smile widening, green eye now open and watching her.

  “Yeah? Maybe he was saying ‘It’s time to get up for everyone who has a cupola to paint.’” She snaked her hand over to him.

  “That can’t be it,” Sam began, ending in a yelp of protest as Connie’s questing fingers reached his armpit. A scuffle ensued. Arlo leapt leisurely off the bed, wandered into the second attic bedroom, and settled on the other, older four-poster bed. Flopping down with a sigh, the creature dozed, feet twitching, as the sunlight lengthened through the window of the second bedroom. Once the light reached the headboard the dog vanished, leaving a dust billow on the quilt in his wake, reappearing a few minutes later at the doorway into the kitchen, where Connie stood, in her bathrobe, holding a mug of coffee and still laughing.

  “So how will you be spending your day today?” Sam was saying through a mouthful of toothpaste.

  “If I were a good grad student, I would go into Cambridge and start looking for Deliverance’s book in the Widener stacks,” Connie said. “But if I were a good daughter, I would stay here and actually try to make some progress on this house.”

  “And which are you? Since apparently it’s impossible to be both,” Sam said, rinsing his toothbrush under the faucet in the kitchen sink.

  “Fortunately being a good daughter is also conducive to being sort of lazy,” Connie remarked. “I think I could use a break from dead witches and shadow books. I think,” she said, holding up her coffee mug in tribute, “that today I shall clean.”

  “Excellent,” said Sam, tucking his toothbrush into the front pocket of his coveralls. Connie had noticed the toothbrush that morning, and a part of her wondered if she should feel flattered or dubious. She reached forward, sliding it out of Sam’s pocket and fixing him with a wicked, arched eyebrow.

  “What?” he asked, widening his eyes, innocent.

  “Call me later,” Connie said, dropping the brush back into his pocket. He kissed her quickly, and she had just enough time to register the feeling of his warm stubble chafing against her chin before he was gone.

  “I DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD OVER-READ THE TOOTHBRUSH,” LIZ WAS saying. Connie had finished with her breakfast dishes, scrubbed out another few sealed glass jars in the kitchen, and stumbled over the drying mandrake root that she had stashed away her first night in Granna’s house. It did look sort of like a gnarled homunculus—a shriveled baby doll with long, coiling cilia for fingers and toes. Connie turned it over in her hands, brushing away the dried dirt and wondering if the lethal vegetable was safe to bury in the compost pile.

  “You don’t think?” Connie asked, chewing on a thumbnail. Remembering that first night at the house made Connie conscious of how much she missed Liz. Soon enough, the autumn would be upon them, and Connie would be able to return to their quiet rooms in Saltonstall Court. The thought of her life in Cambridge, her predictable days shuttling between research in the library, meetings with the anxiety-wracked Thomas, conferences with Janine Silva or Manning Chilton, produced an odd tug within her. That life now seemed at once wonderful and unfamiliar, as if it had carried on about its business despite her not being there to live it.

  “No way,” Liz insisted. “Maybe he takes it to work so he can brush after lunch. Lots of people do.”

  The sound of her roommate’s voice pushed away the loneliness that Connie often felt in Granna’s house. To Connie, Liz sounded like real life. With relief she had dispensed the new developments on the location of the almanac, before diving directly into an analysis of the previous night with Sam.

  “I guess,” Connie demurred.

  “Don’t ask him about it, though,” Liz cautioned through a mouthful of cereal. Connie had caught her in the hour between her classes, and she imagined Liz waving her spoon for emphasis. “You’ll sound insecure.”

  “I am insecure,” countered Connie.

  “Well, don’t be,” Liz instructed. “Listen, I have to go in a minute. We’re learning the Latin words for gladia
torial contests today, and for the first time all summer the kids are actually excited.” She sighed. “But I was thinking about those markings on your door.”

  “It’s still there,” Connie said, her voice dropping. “I was thinking of painting over it this weekend, but I don’t like to touch it.” She paused. “At least I haven’t heard anyone sneaking around outside. But every time I look at it, I get scared all over again.”

  “Well, anyone would,” soothed Liz. “At least you haven’t felt too weird staying in the house. But to tell you the truth, the more I think about it, the more I think we’re misinterpreting the circle.”

  “What do you mean?” Connie asked, perplexed.

  “We assumed that it was meant to scare you, right?” Liz said.

  Connie held the telephone receiver to her cheek with one raised shoulder and opened the front door. Leaning against the jamb, she surveyed the circle that stood before her. The wisteria blooms clinging to the façade of the house had all nearly died away, and their remnants smelled papery and sweet. The symbol with its Latin inscription and multiple crosshatchings stared back at her, impenetrable.

  “It certainly looks scary,” said Connie, brushing a fingertip across the shallow scorch marks. A little of the scoring lifted off in the grooves of her fingerprint.

  “Only because we’ve never seen anything like it before,” Liz said. “Think about it. The circle contains different forms of the name for ‘God,’ right? The alpha and the omega, referring to the idea that God is the beginning and the end. Agla, which you told me was a Hebraic acronym for God’s unspoken name. And Dominus adjutor meus: Lord God my helper, or possibly, God help me. Names of God in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, all written around a request for God’s help. And what surrounds the writing?”