Back Bay (44 page)

Abigail looked out across the flats. She knew the distance from the Mill Dam, along the bed of the Easterly Channel, to the tea set. By walking west across the flats from the foot of Commonwealth Avenue, she could find the Easterly Channel. By following the Channel inland, she could pace out the distance to the tea set. But Abigail was frightened. By the darkness. By the scavengers. By the thought that she would not find the tea set. By the temptation she would face if the strongbox was there, the urge to open it and look, just once, at the Golden Eagle. She resolved that she would not look, then she stepped off the gravel at the bottom of the landfill and sank up to her ankles in mud.

“It’ll be slow goin’, Mrs. Bentley. You sure you don’t want me to go alone and do what needs to be done?” Sean did not know why they were going out there; Abigail had never told him about the tea set.

“I must be present.”

So they struggled across the mud until they reached the Easterly
Channel, a gentle depression about fifteen feet across which sloped three or four feet down to a small, putrid stream.

Any marsh produces gases, but the Back Bay had been an open sewage pit for fifty years, and out here in the middle of it, the stink was unbearable. Abigail gagged and leaned on her shovel for support. Even in the dark, Sean could see the color drain from her face. She was an old woman. She did not belong out here. He begged her to go back, but she refused.

“Follow the channel,” she said. “Count off two hundred paces, and take care that each pace covers three feet.”

A cold wind swept across the flats, and Abigail shivered.

Sean knew that it would be raining soon. “Please, let’s go back, Mrs. Bentley. Nothing can be so important that you should endanger your health.”

Abigail tenderly stroked his face. She hadn’t touched him affectionately in many years. “Do you love your son, Sean?”

Sean’s son Joseph was now a bricklayer with a small company of his own. Sean saw everything that his mother had hoped for in him reflected in his son. When he wasn’t tending Abigail’s needs—and the old woman had few—Sean worked for his son, pitching in with shovel, hammer, and trowel wherever needed. “More than my life.”

“Then try to understand that I am out here because of my child and children yet unborn.”

“Your child?”

Abigail smiled. “I speak symbolically, Sean. I learned the habit from a romantic young Irish poet I once knew.” For a moment, she thought she saw the old look of admiration reflected dimly in his eyes, the look that had excited her so many years before. She took him by the arm and turned him upstream, toward the tea set. “Two hundred paces, two hundred yards. And we’d better move fast, before the tide turns and we’re digging dirty water along with the mud.”

They slogged off through darkness, following the dribble which had been a six-foot-deep channel when Dexter Lovell had navigated it. With each step, their boots seemed to sink deeper into the mud, as if something were trying to suck them down and hold
them. The mud belched each time a foot pulled free. And each footprint filled quickly with water that obliterated any trace of their passing.

As she battled the mud, Abigail’s fears for her own safety and the tea set’s presence melted away. The Back Bay flats were cold, foul, depressing, and they led nowhere that was not more easily reached by land. No one but the most foolish schoolboy would cross the quagmire for any reason, and no one would be about on a chilly October night.

Sean stopped after about ten minutes and announced, “Two hundred paces.”

Abigail’s heart was pounding. In a few moments, it would be in her grasp. She hoped.

She told Sean they were looking for an iron box two to four feet beneath the mud. They staked a twenty-five-foot square of ground around the spot where Sean stopped, then, foot by foot, they drove their shovels into the mud within the square. After fifteen minutes, they heard clank of metal against metal. Sean found the strongbox in three feet of gravel and mud, halfway up the side of the channel bed. The ground above it was raised slightly, as though a log had been buried there.

Sean took off his coat, wrapped his pistol in it, and gave them to Abigail. Then he began to dig. At low tide, no water covered the strongbox, but water seeped into the hole from below, making the work difficult and sloppy.

At least it wasn’t buried beneath that reeking stream a few feet away, thought Abigail.

Sean fought with every shovelful of mud. The ooze stuck to itself, to his boots, and to the shovel, but he didn’t stop until he was scraping the mud from the top of the strongbox.

As he knelt to lift it out of the hole, Abigail swallowed hard and crouched beside him.

Sean scraped the mud from the handles and pulled. Half the box was still buried, and it didn’t budge. He picked up the shovel and began to dig around it. Abigail watched for a moment, then she grabbed a shovel and attacked the mud with him.

They were soon standing knee-deep in the hole, with the box free of mud and ready to be lifted. Abigail realized now how large
it was. So much iron and so many locks to protect Paul Revere’s lost masterpiece. On one of the handles, she saw rotted strands of rope. She remembered how her nephew had died.

“Stand back, Mrs. Bentley.”

Abigail stepped out of the hole. Sean grabbed a handle with both hands, grunted, and heaved. The box weighed close to seventy-five pounds, but once he broke the suction, he was able to slip it out of the hole.

Now came the moment that Abigail had feared. She knelt beside the box and ran her hand along its surface. The iron was pitted and caked with mud, but she could almost see shafts of silver light flashing through the cracks and seams. She wanted to touch the tea set. Desperately. She wanted to feel the smoothness, the grace, the solidity. If it was as beautiful as she thought, perhaps the world should see it. She would be revered as a patroness of the arts. She would be famous as the woman who uncovered the Golden Eagle Tea Set. She touched one of the padlocks. She was tempted.

Sean didn’t help. He thought they had dug it up to bring it back. He stepped out of the hole and, with some effort, raised the strongbox to his shoulder. “We’d best be gettin’ off these flats, Mrs. Bentley. We don’t want to be caught here when the tide turns.”

She said nothing. She knelt in the mud and watched blankly as he balanced the box.

“Shall we be goin’?”

“No,” she said firmly. The world would not remember her. The world would never care that she left the tea set for all to enjoy. Only her father’s descendants would think of her. They would remember her as the woman who navigated Pratt Shipping and Mercantile when Jason Pratt was at the helm. They would remember her as the guardian of the family treasure, the protector of the family secret. And the day might come, as her father had predicted, when her descendants would need the Golden Eagle. Then, Abigail Pratt Bentley would live again.

“Put it down,” she commanded.

He dropped the box. “What else is there to do?”

“Dig the hole deeper. Another three feet.”

Sean was confused. “Are we looking for something else?”

“We’ve come to protect that strongbox from marauders, to roll a stone across the mouth of the tomb.”

“You want me to bury it? Why?”

“We have little time, Sean. I’ll explain it all later. I promise.”

A scream slashed across the mudflats, followed by the pounding of cylinders and the clatter of forty cars crossing steel rails: the gravel train from Needham. In the dark, the engine looked like an apparition, with the yellow light of the headlamp lancing across the flats, the sparks pouring from the stack, the cockpit glowing hellish orange behind the boiler. The whistle screamed again, and Boston streets arrived at the landfill.

“The next train crosses in forty-five minutes, Sean. By then, the tide will be turning. Please hurry.”

Sean made no further argument. Forty-five minutes later, the hole was three feet deeper and three feet square. He leaned the shovel against the side of the hole and used it as a step to boost himself out. They had an hour before the Easterly Channel was again covered in three feet of water.

“Is it six feet deep?” she asked.

“As near as I can figure.”

“It must be exact.”

“I’m five-ten. The hole was five or six inches over my head.”

“Then we’ve buried it six feet, three inches below the mud.”

“Not yet.” The voice growled out of the darkness behind Abigail and felt like the blade of a knife against her neck.

There were three of them. The one who spoke held a Navy Colt revolver at his side. He was tall and scrawny, just barely visible behind an eyepatch and a black beard. His jacket, blue trimmed with yellow piping, belonged to a Union soldier. He was probably a deserter. The other two, smaller and scrawnier, stood behind him in the darkness. One held a club, the other a knife.

“Two old geezers buryin’ a box in the middle of the night. You got family jewels or somethin’ in there?”

Abigail said nothing. Sean looked toward the pistol, which lay wrapped in his coat on top of the strongbox.

“I’d like to look at what’s in that box,” said the deserter. “Might be it’s somethin’ look good in my boodwar.”

His mates snickered, as though he’d told a dirty joke.

Abigail took a step to her right, placing her body between the strongbox and the three men. Sean cursed her stupidity to himself. Then she glanced at him, and he realized that she was giving him a shield. He would not use it.

The deserter stepped toward her. “Now which of you folks has the key?”

Abigail looked again at Sean.

A whistle screamed, and the deserter looked toward the tracks. Sean threw Abigail to the ground and grabbed the pistol. He fired twice. The deserter went down. As the man with the club came at him, Sean fired again; the man’s face disappeared. The man with the knife leaped. Sean squeezed off another shot, but the man piled into him and they fell to the ground. The knife slashed viciously, expertly, cutting across Sean’s rib cage and flying at his face. Sean grabbed the man’s throat and held tight. As the gravel train arrived at the depot, the knife pressed against Sean’s throat. He could feel the cold blade breaking the skin. His fingers dug deeper into the man’s throat. Then he heard a shot, and the man went limp.

Sean flung the body aside and looked toward Abigail. He did not see a gun in her hands. He climbed to his knees, and a bullet slammed into him. He tumbled backward, landing in a sitting position, waist-deep in the water of the Easterly Channel.

The deserter was not dead. The first shot had missed him. The second had grazed his side. He watched for a moment, until he was certain that Sean would not get up. Then he turned to Abigail, who was again standing between him and the strongbox. “I’m sorry to shoot your husband, lady, but he didn’t want to show me what’s in the box.”

“And I’m sorry about your friends.” Her voice quivered. Her knees were shaking.

The man smiled. “That’s all right. They was scum anyways. Not like me. I’m a reg’lar stand-up gent, and I’m askin’ you nice and polite to open that box.” He raised his gun. “Or I’ll shoot you, too.”

“I don’t have the key,” she said. She was trying to buy time. She didn’t know what she would do.

He shoved her aside. “Guess I’ll have to do it myself.”

His first shot ricocheted off the side of the box and almost hit
his foot. The second snapped one of the locks, grown brittle and rusty in the mud. He aimed the pistol at another lock and fired again; it popped open.

“Just one more, and we’ll know what you folks been buryin’ out here.” He aimed the pistol and squeezed the trigger. He heard a shot, but the gun didn’t kick. For an instant, he was puzzled. Then he felt the pain above the bridge of his nose. Then he felt nothing.

The derringer had blown a half-inch hole in his forehead and taken the back of his skull clean off. Abigail carried the gun in her boot, but she had never fired it. At close range, it was deadly. She looked once at the vermin she had killed, then dropped the derringer and ran to Sean’s side.

He was still sitting in the water with his hand over his stomach. She took his hand away and felt her own insides wither. She tore a clean strip of cloth from her blouse and placed it over the hole in his stomach. Then she replaced his hand. There was nothing more she could do.

“I’m cold,” he said feebly.

The tide had turned and the water was rising around him. She put her hands under his arms and pulled him a few feet out of the channel.

“I’ll be all right,” he whispered.

“Just rest here for a few minutes, dear. Then we’ll go.”

She had to get Sean to a doctor, but she had to bury the tea set. Abigail Pratt Bentley became a creature of instinct. Although she was seventy-three, she found the strength that comes to a mother protecting her child. She dragged the box to the edge of the hole. She sat down in the mud, put both feet against the box, and pushed. The box toppled into the hole. Abigail grabbed her shovel, and in forty-five minutes, she had buried the strongbox in six feet of mud. She kicked the bodies of the three men into the stream, and she was finished.

“Mrs. Bentley.” Sean was whimpering. “I’m cold, Mrs. Bentley.” The water had risen again to his waist.

“You must get up, Sean. We have to go.”

He looked at her blankly. “I’m cold.”

She felt the tears welling in her eyes. She willed them away. If she could get him to a doctor, he might still have a chance. If he
was going to die, she did not want him to be found in the Back Bay. “Please, Sean, try to get up.”

He moaned and told her again that he was cold. He was in shock.

“If you do not get up, you will never see Joseph and Lillian again.” She spoke angrily as she put her hands under his shoulders. “Now get up!”

With her help, Sean Mannion stood. He moaned again, more loudly. Soon the pain would become too intense for the anesthesia of shock, and he would scream every time his heart pumped blood out the hole in his stomach.

Abigail gave him the shovel to lean on. She put her body under his shoulder, and together they lurched across the Back Bay. The coming tide would erase any trace of their presence at the edge of the channel and carry the bodies of the thieves inland toward the South End.