Two came from Ridley with attachments: the term paper and diary. The other came from . . . EvangCarr. He immediately forgot about brown Toyotas and Back Bay stalkers, took a deep breath, and clicked on the little envelope:
Hi, Peter. Good to hear from you the other day. Sorry I wasn’t in. I’m in Italy. Doing a piece on Tuscan villas for
Travel Life
while I forget bad divorce.
Divorce?
Peter took a swallow of port. That’s what it said.
Divorce.
Evangeline Carrington was divorced. Like him. He realized that they hadn’t talked in a couple of years. Just enough time for a divorce to unfold, especially if it was messy.
Peter’s divorce hadn’t been messy. Just sad. His wife had been a legal secretary until their baby was born, a patient and loyal wife until one night he came home late and she threw a plate of cold spaghetti at him because he had been out with other women. It didn’t matter that the women were named Austen, Brontë, and Cather, part of a collection of first editions he was building for a client who focused on female novelists. His wife had simply tired of his obsessions and the danger he seemed to attract . . . like those two in the brown Toyota.
So he sipped his port and went back to the e-mail:
Coming to Boston on Tuesday. See you then. By the way, do you remember a classmate named Ridley Wedge Royce?
Tuesday? To see Ridley? Another Ridley Riddle. At least he wouldn’t have to wait too long to solve it.
He took another sip of port and opened Dorothy Wedge’s term paper. It had a typical term-paper title: “The Confessions and Diary of Thomas Shepard: The Birth of the New England Puritan Literary Style.” And a typical term-paper opening:
One of the most important figures in the early history of Harvard College was a minister named Thomas Shepard, born in England, on November 5, 1605. He came to Massachusetts during the Puritan migration and settled in the First Parish of Cambridge. One of the reasons that Harvard College was established in Cambridge was because of his presence.
Shepard’s contemporary, Edward Johnson, in
Wonder Working Providence,
describes him as “a poor, weak, pale-complectioned man . . . of humble birth, timid by nature, no great scholar, sweating out every sermon with moans and groans at his own vileness and inadequacy. His natural parts were weak but spent to the full.”
There is no record of his words at Harvard’s first commencement, but we know that he was there, leading the young men in prayer. . . .
1642-1647
I
SAAC
W
EDGE
could see that Thomas Shepard’s hands were shaking.
Shepard’s hands always shook when he preached, so deep was his humility before God. But he could be forgiven his nervousness on that September day, for he had received the honor of invoking the Lord at the first commencement of Harvard College, the first event in the new college hall.
On a platform behind Shepard, wearing their best white bands and doublets, sat Governor Winthrop, the magistrates, the overseers, and college president Henry Dunster. Before him sat the candidates for
Ars Bacheloris,
“ten young men of good hope,” as Winthrop called them, who had completed a course in the liberal arts, the three philosophies, and the learned tongues. At the rear of the hall sat those gentlemen fortunate enough to have secured places for perhaps the most significant event yet to occur in the colony of Massachusetts Bay.
Shepard gave thanks to God for bringing them safe to New England, for allowing them to plant a colony, despite the enmity of nature and the evil of heretics, and for sending them Henry Dunster, a Lancashire schoolmaster who had revived their “School of the Prophets” a year after Nathaniel Eaton fled.
Isaac thanked God for Shepard himself, who had taken up Isaac’s care, lodged him, and sponsored him as an apprentice to printer Stephen Day.
“Learn to print the Lord’s word,” Shepard had told him, “and thou shalt have a greater impact than all the preachers yet arrived. Learn to print it, then to preach it, and God will smile upon you twice.”
So, in the year that the college had been closed, a year made worse for Isaac by the death of his mother, he had buried his grief in a printer’s apprenticeship. He had inked galleys for the Freeman’s Oath. He had set type for the
Bay Psalm Book.
And on that day of commencement, he could take pride in the
Quaestiones in Philosophia,
for he had done the whole printing job himself.
The
Quaestiones
were theses, some as ancient as Aristotle, that served to stimulate disputations—in grammar, logic, rhetoric, ethics, physics, and metaphysics—which formed the final act of commencement. Article III on the sheet distributed to the gentlemen entering the hall:
An Anima partitur a corpore? Negat Respondens: Isaacus Wedgius.
“Is the soul part of the body? Arguing the negative: Isaac Wedge.”
The prospect of a Latin disputation should have been enough to cause Isaac’s own hands to shake, his mouth to turn dry, his stomach to clench. But there was another reason for all that: the specter of Nathaniel Eaton had returned. . . .
That morning, Isaac had gone to the print shop in Crooked Lane to collect the sheets of
Quaestiones,
which he had hung to dry the night before. As usual, he had found Stephen Day, master printer, bent over a box of type.
“So, Isaac,” Day had said, squinting up from his work, “commencement at last.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Master Dunster be a fine gentleman. We could have done much worse.”
“We did . . . at the beginning,” Isaac had answered.
“Eaton?”
“Aye . . . You knew him, did you not?”
“Enough to dislike him, though not so much as the Lord disliked him.”
The story of God’s retribution upon Eaton was well known: After he fled, it was discovered that he had left enormous debts and a college treasury emptied of hard money. So three constables had pursued him to Piscataqua, but by ruse and bluster, he eluded them and fled to Virginia, where he established himself as rector of a small parish. Then he sent for wife and children, but God sent holy punishment in the form of winds that roiled the sea and sank the vessel carrying Eaton’s whole family.
“I hear that he’s gone back to London,” Stephen Day had said, “gone back to find a new wife. Maybe a printer, too, eh?”
“A printer?”
“A printer, aye.” Stephen Day had again turned to his galley. “For a play.”
“Play?” The word had caused Isaac Wedge to drop the sheet.
“Aye. Before he fled, he asked if I knew a printer in London who would print a play, and what profit he could expect.”
“Did he name this play?”
“He spake only what I needed to know and swore me to speak none of it. But . . . since he’s gone, the Lord won’t mind if I tell you what I told him: there be half a dozen London printers who’d pay ten pounds for a play. I give him a list of them and wished him luck. . . .”
And now, Isaac sat in the new hall, thinking not of his disputation but of the play that had haunted him so long, part of the library that was the legacy of his greatest friend. The play had not been burned, as Eaton had said, but stolen, as Isaac had long suspected.
Nevertheless, Isaac delivered his disputation, withstood the pro forma arguments from the other candidates and the learned gentlemen, and sat to the approbation of the assemblage.
After all the disputations had been completed, President Dunster rose before the candidates and proclaimed, in Latin, “I admit thee to the First Degree in Arts. . . . And I hand thee this book, together with the power to lecture publicly in any one of the arts which thou hast studied, whenever thou shalt have been called to that office.”
They recorded their names in Dunster’s book, and it was done. Harvard College had made its first graduates.
And whither now, Isaac Wedge? He had been asking himself this question for weeks. Knowledge of the play would make an answer even more difficult to come by.
ii
“And whither
us,
Isaac Wedge?” Katharine Nicholson had been asking this question for months, and still Isaac could not answer to satisfy her. She asked again that night as they strolled Fort Hill, within the grass-covered redoubt that overlooked marsh and river and afforded them a most delicious privacy.
“Had I the money,” said Isaac, “I would go to England to study for a master’s, as Woodridge intends, or perhaps to Padua, like Harry Saltonstall, to study medicine.”
“But you have
not
the money,” she said. “So you must stay here. Ask my father for permission to court. Then may we go about more open. And my father will offer you work in the mercantile trade, or perhaps support you as a printer.”
“You know that my mind is bent to the ministry, Katharine.”
“An honorable life,” she said, “but a poor one.”
“’Tis one of the promises I made to Master Harvard.”
“There were others?”
“Aye . . . that I would see to his library . . . keep his books together for the future . . .”
She gave him a look that suggested he was mad.
He realized how strange his words must have sounded. So he said, “A man will be known by his books.”
“When we marry, we’ll keep a room for your books, though I’ll need no books to know you.” And she stood so close to him that he could smell the sweetness of her skin, so close that, were he not a young man of strong will, he might have reached out and touched the tops of her breasts, offered up by a tight bodice. As it was, he could not keep from kissing her. And she kissed back, but never before had she opened her mouth against his and touched her tongue enticingly to his lips, as if inviting him into her.
But Cambridge was a town founded to deny the darkness, whether it was the darkness of spirit confronted at the meetinghouse; or of ignorance confronted at the college; or of night itself, confronted by Diggory Venn, village lamplighter. Each evening, he moved through the town with a cartload of rushes, which he would pile into cressets—tall wrought-iron stands—which then he would light. The tallow-soaked rushes would burn two or three hours, just long enough, as he said, “to light honest men to their homes.” And his last stop was atop Fort Hill.
“A pleasant evenin’ to you, young’ns,” said Diggory. “Hardly noticed you in the shadows, me torch be so bright. Hope you be doin’ the Lord’s work.” He gave them a grin, lit the cresset, and said, “Let me lead thee home.”
Isaac looked at Katharine, and she shook her head, as if to say that they had business yet to finish.
But it was incumbent upon all members of a Puritan community to see that sin did not break forth, for any sin—public or private—might bring God’s displeasure upon all. So Master Venn went a few paces, then turned and said, “Come along. Evil vapors be risin’ off the marsh. ’Tis no night to be abroad.”
And they followed, like chastened children, with Venn’s torch bobbing and sputtering ahead of them. And Isaac felt a deep coldness radiating from Katharine, as though she expected a profession of love that he could not yet give.
At her garden gate, she turned and looked into his eyes. Her black brows, which by day offered such fine contrast to her pale skin, served only to heighten her anger in the moonlight. “We have known each other near four years, Isaac. ’Tis time to look to a future together.”
“And so we shall,” he said. But in truth he was not looking further than the next morning and a meeting with President Dunster.
No man who gazed upon the new college hall would ever doubt that the School of the Prophets had a future.
It was the largest structure yet erected in New England, presenting an expanse of clapboard a hundred feet in width and two full stories in height, with a steep sloping roof and a cupola from which one might see the hills of Boston. The back, however, by which door Isaac entered, reflected less austere majesty and far more utility. There were dormered wings at each end and a tower in the middle supporting the cupola. There were privies, woodshed, well, brewhouse, barn, and cow yards on either side. This was to be a college in the best English style, a place for students to live, eat, and learn together, immersed in their studies and in the company of other scholars.
President Dunster met Isaac in the library, directly above the Great Hall, where they had commenced the day before. Dressed in a simple collar and brown doublet, Dunster was a man of no great presence in public or private, yet his eyes did not stray when one spoke to him, and most students understood the message in his gaze: here was a man who listened and cared.
“How do you feel on your first day as
Ars Bacheloris?
” he asked, inviting Isaac to sit at the library table, the finest piece of furniture in the building.
“Inadequate, sir.” Isaac looked at the books around him. “I once made it my task to read all four hundred volumes in John Harvard’s bequest. I have barely begun.”
“The wise man knows that the more knowledge he gains, the more there is to get. So . . . you would now take a master of arts?”
“Under your direction, sir.”
“And how would you pay for it?”
“It has been my hope to serve as a tutor, sir.”
“I can offer a tutor no more than four pounds a year,” said Dunster. “And he cannot marry, for you know well that a tutor is expected to live in chambers.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So”—Dunster ran his hands over the tabletop—“if the temptations of the flesh that bring you to Fort Hill are too great . . .”
Isaac tried to hide his surprise, but his was not a face made for subtlety.
Dunster gave a gentle laugh. “’Tis a small place, this Cambridge, but I have a proposal that will take you far from here, all the way to the largest city on earth.”
“London?” This was more than Isaac could have hoped for.
He had lain awake all the night before, tossing right and left. When he lay on his right, his mind had filled with images of Katharine, angry in the moonlight. When he rolled left, he had heard the voice of John Harvard, charging Isaac to keep his books . . . including one stolen by Nathaniel Eaton. And here was Dunster, offering Isaac the chance to consider Katharine and her moods at leisure while voyaging to the city where Eaton had fled.