These circles were made literal in the yew hedges that surrounded the house like a fortress. Moseby Hall looked to be over two centuries old, a grand structure of oak, stucco, and slate, and though Sam was not one to be impressed by such things, he concluded that if there was a God, he must truly be an Englishman.
He was assisted from the carriage by a liveried footman. At the door, a servant took his hat and cape. A butler in white wig led him into the library and announced, to the man at the fire, “Mr. Samuel Hilyard.”
A gentleman, Sam concluded, as comfortable in London clubs as in the fields of Hertfordshire.
“Welcome, Mr. Hilyard.” He extended his hand. “I’ve always hoped to meet my American cousin.”
Sam felt the dragons jump across his waistcoat.
Squire John Bellamy was about Sam’s age, but there the resemblance ended. He was taller and more slender, hair light brown and very short, except on top. His clothes were cut in the latest fashion, his pantaloons reaching his ankles, his waistcoat straight around the bottom, the collar of his cutaway fitted to his neck. His features were smoothed into a mask of complete calm, yet his eye betrayed the pleasure he took in shocking his guest.
“Cousin?” said Sam when he was able to speak.
Bellamy poured two sherries and raised his glass to the portrait above the fireplace. “My grandfather and your great-uncle, Lemuel Bellamy.”
“Sam Bellamy’s brother?”
The Englishman shook his head. “An adopted name. He was once known as Solemnity Hilyard.”
Sam threw down the sherry and stepped closer to the portrait. The plate read, “Lemuel Bellamy, 1697-1775, by Sir Joshua Reynolds.” A bewigged English gentleman, dressed in silk finery, reclined against a hunt board in some half-world, neither indoors nor out. On one side were bookshelves, on the other, bright sunlight, blowing clouds, waving palm fronds. Two beagles slept peacefully at his feet, and there was… serenity in his gaze, yes, and in the pursed lips, the sure sign of bad teeth and the only resemblance to Serenity Hilyard.
“A tormented man,” said Bellamy.
“The teeth?”
“The life.” And over a meal of pheasant and sweetbreads, the squire told the story.
Lemuel Bellamy, born Solemnity Hilyard, had appeared in the West Indies some time in the 1720s, in the company of his wife Samantha. To anyone who would listen, he announced he had come to build his fortune. Then he bought a small piece of land and began to grow sugarcane. He worked hard, and Samantha worked with him, but she was not made for the steamy climate and soon took to her hut.
In those first years, Lem built nothing but debt and one day went to a Kingston bookseller to ask what a ship’s log would fetch, if the ship had brought the first Separatists to Massachusetts. Inquiries were made, and a widow of considerable means and not inconsiderable charm named Patience Moseby Moore expressed interest, as some in her family had been Separatist. She invited the Bellamys to tea, though Lemuel came alone. His wife, he said, was ill. In truth, she was drunk.
What went on between Lemuel and the widow, many guessed at. There was no doubt that they examined the log together. There was talk that they examined each other. And there was further talk that Lem Bellamy was buying rum every day at the local tavern to poison his wife. His motive could not be proved, but a year later Samantha died, nothing more than a skeleton in rum blossoms.
If Lemuel mourned the death of Samantha, he did it privately. After an acceptable time, he married Patience Moseby Moore and became lord of her plantation. Then he was able to secure credit to buy more acreage and more slaves. He bought only the best specimens and treated them with kindness, because even a little kindness would win the loyalty of such terrified creatures.
But early on, he learned that kindness was not enough. Such terrified creatures were also the strongest of the strong. When slave traders raided an African village, they took only the strongest young men and women. Only the strongest of
them
survived the trek from the interior to the coast. Only the strongest of
them
survived the five-week voyage in the fetid, shit-stunk tween-decks of the slave ship. Only the strongest and most wilfull of all lived long enough to reach the block. And for them, terror could turn easily to fury.
After one fine auction, Lem brought his new bucks back to the plantation and, according to his tradition, ordered that a pig be roasted to welcome them. While the meat turned on the spit, Lem went among them to hand out ragged clothes and deliver his message: God loved them, and their master was God’s spokesman on earth.
In the midst of this sermonizing, one of Bellamy’s new possessions flew at him. But Lem was ready. He had been watching this one because he was big and spirited, just the sort to cause trouble. Before the buck had moved three steps, Lem drew a pistol and shot him. Then he finished the sermon and left his slaves to their pig, though there were few appetites among them that night.
From that time forth, Lem conducted his welcomings as before, with one change. Soon after new slaves arrived, he would find one who had transgressed some rule, real or imaginary, and shoot him dead.
The other planters admired this, though they questioned the expense of killing a prime buck when a good flogging might do as much. Lem answered that one dead kept the rest docile, so that he could bring them to Christ while they brought riches to him.
He built a fortune on the backs of those dead Africans and, later, on the thousands who crossed the Atlantic in Bellamy ships and rendered two hundred percent profit on the block. Finally, after thirteen years, he crossed the Atlantic himself. Patience Moseby Moore Bellamy, mother of Lemuel’s three sons, had inherited Moseby Hall, and the new squire grew quickly in the esteem of Hertfordshire. He helped the poor and paid a good wage to his hirelings. He attended the Church of England. He rode to hounds and was received at court.
No one questioned the black sweat he had used to build his sweet fortune. After all, London chartered many companies to deal in Negro flesh. And Lemuel Bellamy was a learned man. He had even taken to collecting ancient books for his library. What slave would not be the better for having known him?
Lem thought, on occasion, of his sister, but he had come so far from her world and betrayed it in so many ways that he never considered returning. As for the Bigelows, what would victory over a handful of backwater aristocrats be worth, considering all that he had since achieved? Revealing himself to any of them, he concluded, could only endanger his standing in Hertfordshire.
So he lived his long and prosperous life and at the end had his comeuppance. His wife died before him, then his first son, killed in the siege of Quebec, and his second son, lost on a voyage out to India. His third son, the ne’er-do-well who once enlisted the care of Dr. William Thayer, stood as his only heir. This prospect sent Lem to his deathbed.
In his final days, he had the bed put by the window. Though the night air was known to be unhealthful, he wanted to watch the stars turn out in a moonless sky, to feel their cold gaze and wonder once more. What could God care of the earth in the majesty of the universe? What did he care for the devotion of the colony of Massachusetts in the black enormity of the American continent? Had he cared that a minister chose love over holy loneliness? That he deserted one love for a richer one? In a universe so vast, what had the death of a few niggers mattered? And would the death of an unfrocked Cape Cod minister matter more?
“My grandfather asked astute questions.”
“For which there may be no answers,” said Sam.
“You are not a God-fearing man, then?”
“It’s been said of me.”
“Nor am I, I must admit. But my grandfather feared a great deal, which spoiled his enjoyment of all that his sins had gained for him.”
They had returned to the library for cigars and brandy. Sam sank into a leather chair and inhaled the smooth tobacco. The food and drink, the newfound consanguinity, and the story of Solemnity Hilyard had nearly distracted him from why he had come. “You could not have been more than five or six when your grandfather died. Where would you learn of slaves and Separatist manuscripts?”
“A book.” Bellamy took the cigar from his mouth and studied the tip. “An even burn shows good tobacco. Bellamy tobacco, grown on a Bellamy plantation.”
“A fine smoke,” said Sam, believing that he and not Bellamy was leading this conversation. “But this book, and the Separatist manuscript—”
“They are stored together.” Bellamy went to a shelf and took down a metal box that sat among the red and brown leather backs of his books.
Sam looked at the dragons on his belly, to be sure that they were not jumping.
In the upper corner of the box was a foundry stamp: TW. Inside was a thin brown notebook on which the name Lemuel Bellamy had been written in several scripts, as though the writer were testing a signature and, perhaps, an identity. Bellamy took it out and flipped through the pages of tiny handwriting.
“This was my grandfather’s diary. He wrote in the hope of moving his sins from his soul to the paper. He wanted his descendants to learn that riches are not the end in life. It’s a hollow lesson, though he considered it valuable enough to store next to this.” John Bellamy lifted the other book from the box.
When Sam held it in his hands, he felt no surge of energy. No grand thoughts filled his head. Yet this book might have changed lives… and might yet.
“My grandfather deemed this the most valuable book in his possession. I can’t fathom why he would consider the ramblings of some ordinary sea captain, observing the activities of an ill-planned colony, to be more valuable than a Shakespeare Folio.” Bellamy puffed his cigar and studied Sam. “Perhaps because it brought him to Patience Moseby.”
Sam wiped his hands on his breeches and opened the book. “ ‘
July 15, 1620
. At berth in Thames. This day have been en… engaged by agents of the London Adventurers, Mr. Thomas Weston, prop., to bring a company of colonists to the northern reaches of Virginia.’ ” Sam looked at his cousin. “This is the beginning of America.”
“Want it?”
“You’d give me this?”
“For a price.” Bellamy stood. “There’s a fine reading lamp in your chamber. Tell me in the morning.”
xii.
Sam read the night through—of the sixty-six-day voyage, the arrival off Truro, the first encounter, the first winter—and he searched for comeuppance. Was it to be found in the intimations surrounding Dorothy Bradford’s death? But such things would be meaningless today. Otherwise, the Bigelows came out quite well.
His own ancestor seemed the far greater troublemaker. In that respect, nothing had changed. The Bigelows stood for orthodoxy; the Hilyards were still casting about for… something.
Nevertheless, Sam wanted this log. He wanted it because of what it represented and what it might be worth… and what it still might do to the Bigelows.
The next morning, on their way to the stables, John Bellamy repeated his question to Sam.
“What is the price?” Sam asked.
“A voyage.”
“To where?”
“Africa might be nice.” Bellamy said it as though it had come into his head while he was buttoning his red riding jacket. “Yes. Africa, for a small cargo, then on to our plantations in the West Indies.”
Sam followed him into the stable, which was larger than most Cape Cod churches, and redolent of nothing worse than leather and horse liniment. The stablemen stopped their work and pulled politely at their forelocks.
“Mornin’, squire,” said the foreman, a semi-toothed brute called Runkle.
“Say hello to Sam Hilyard. He’s about to guarantee the wages of all the men in this room.”
Runkle executed a courtly bow that should have seemed ridiculous, if not for the sense of threat that accompanied it. Then he turned to the others and called three cheers for Sam Hilyard.
“Listen, John,” Sam whispered, “I’ve agreed to noth—”
“Come, Sam, these men have children, families all.”
“That has—”
“They’ve heard what service you will perform.”
“Indeed we ’as, sir,” said Runkle, scraping and bowing once more. “And we’ll not forget you for it.”
Before Sam could say more, Bellamy was mounting his horse and galloping off. Sam had no choice but to go bouncing after him on the fractious gray mare that Runkle seemed to have saddled just for the occasion.
Though the wind was willful and the sea had a mind of its own, there was never a horse yet that Sam Hilyard preferred to the deck of a ship. Riding was pure misery under the best of circumstances, for he never knew when to put his ass in the saddle and when to lift it out, and this bone-crushing gallop took them from one end of the estate to the other, through streams and over fences and at last to the highest hill in the shire.
Bellamy dismounted and looked down at the cloud of verdure and gray mist below. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Sam slid from the saddle and stood on legs that felt like pieces of twisted line. “This isn’t how I do business.”
“This is not business. I offer you a chronicle of your familial history, your national history. In return, you help me to preserve all of this. Do
not
call it business.”
“You planned this all, didn’t you?”
“Your fame precedes you.”
“And Africa?” said Sam. “There can be only one purpose in an African journey.”
“What you see below you did not come about by accident. It was built on the backs of the peasants it now supports. It is supported by Bellamy sugar and tobacco, which in turn are supported by Bellamy slaves.”
Sam went back to his horse. “Won’t do it.”
“Why?”
“Principles.”
“Principles?” The word and accompanying laughter rolled back to Sam from thirty years before.
“Principles.” Sam lifted a foot to the stirrup.
“Your backers are New England merchants, are they not? Of Boston, Salem, Newport?”
“Of course.”
“And they invest in other ships?”
“If they invest in my ship, they have profits to invest in other ships.”