Saturnalia Read online

  Tut aimed the pair down the street and sighed. How would he pay for his lodging at this rate? The telescope, he’d been promised by its seller, would feed and clothe him the rest of his days. He considered the location he’d chosen. There was no better thoroughfare than King Street. And the Mermaid was a popular spot. Perhaps if he planted a torch in the snow, by way of attracting—

  “Algol,” said a voice.

  Tut, gave a start, as if the night itself had spoken, whirled around, and found himself facing a man instead.

  “Algol,” he repeated. “The demon star.”

  “Yes, sir,” sputtered Tut. “Straightaway, sir.” He felt an additional chill climb his spine. “If you’re certain ’tis the one you wish.”

  Gravely, the man nodded in reply. Tut aimed the telescope almost straight up, rummaged among the stars and planets, then drew back his head. “There you are.” He smiled, yet felt cheerless within, and watched uneasily as his patron, towering over Tut by two heads, slowly stooped and put his eye to the glass.

  “Saturn’s bright as a button tonight,” chirped Tut. “Would you care for a gawk at that too?”

  His customer offered no reply. Nervously, Tut cleared his throat and eyed the man’s long, coffin-shaped face. It was not the first time he’d looked through the telescope. Two weeks back, when Tut had first set up the instrument near the Town Dock, the man had materialized out of the night. Later, when he’d tried out a spot near Belcher’s wharf, he’d approached Tut again. He always paid well, far more than Tut’s price, as if money mattered little to him. And yet, his clothes were as tattered as Tut’s own. And he always asked to view this same star, despite its frightening associations. . . .

  “’Tis fiendish cold tonight,” Tut piped up, then wondered if his patron might be a tithing-man. “As the Lord meant winter to be,” he added.

  Apparently not in reply to Tut, the man muttered the words “I see you.” His teeth were clenched. His hands trembled slightly. “I’m looking upon your face,” he hissed. His voice was no longer private, but public. “Do you hear? Staring into your awful eye!”

  Tut’s dog raised its ears. Breathing heavily, the man squinted through the eyepiece, then pulled back his head in disgust, straightened up, and finding that Tut had retreated toward the Mermaid, dropped a pair of gold coins on the tramped-down snow at his feet and continued up King Street.

  Shuffling slowly through the crusted snow, he cursed the star that had failed him again, glimpsed a man with a lantern approaching, and decided against ducking down an alley. It was now three months back to the September morning his daughter had died of smallpox, and to the night he’d begun taking aimless walks. As he was known by day as a hardworking man—his shop sign declared him to be Joseph Speke, Furniture Maker and Carver of Sign Boards, Mantelpieces, &c.—he’d at first hoped to hide his time-wasteful wanderings, concocting elaborate excuses for his wife and for anyone met in the streets. Lately, however, he’d ceased to bother. He exchanged raised hats with the passerby.

  Sturdy arms crossed beneath his frayed cape, Mr. Speke burrowed ahead through the blackness. He turned down a narrow lane, then turned again, stopped, wondered where he was, then found he was standing nearby the sundial in front of his brother’s apothecary shop. He approached the stone column and felt the brass dial. He ran his fingers over the roman numerals, then over the inscription whose words he couldn’t make out but knew from memory: “The Hour Is At Hand.”

  Mr. Speke walked on, eyed the almost-full moon, and meditated on the sundial’s motto. Days had shortened to mere interludes between nights. The gloating moon was now master of the sky, the frail winter sun her vassal. No green thing grew. No insect sang. The once-soft earth was stiff beneath the snow. The hour was indeed at hand. The world was dying. Judgment was near. A thought the wood-carver found comforting.

  He strolled to the end of a wharf and stood, listening to the conversation of the waters. Before his daughter had died, he reflected, he’d never have been found at this spot, at this hour. Nor would he have stared through a telescope at Algol, the star denoting the face of Medusa, the snake-headed face reputed to turn all who looked upon it to stone. But since then his heart had slowly frozen, like a pond icing from the edges inward. He’d begun to long for his own demise, to yearn for his naked soul to be judged. A soul burdened by a deed accounted most commendable by all. By all, that is, but Mr. Speke himself.

  The carver lifted his eyes to the sky. Two shooting stars dropped from the heavens, sowing themselves among the ocean’s furrows. He thought of his Dora, a sweet-voiced child of three, incomparably precious to him, her face scarlet and streaming with sweat. He inhaled deeply, and for the thousandth time since she’d died, recalled another December, back during his service in the Indian war, and endured the remembrance of another girl—running, a wooden ladle in her hand, a girl whose face he hadn’t seen but whose endless shrieking tormented him whenever he closed his eyes to sleep, the source of his night meanderings.

  He turned and started back up the wharf, passing the warehouse of Mr. Epp, who’d engaged him to carve a figurehead for his new brig, soon to set sail. The man had badgered him about it again this morning, the third time in a week. Despite which, as in matters of clothing and money, Mr. Speke had found himself hard put to care. He’d always sculpted the figures from live models, and of late he’d been unable to disengage himself from the world of the dead.

  “You there!”

  Mr. Speke peered into the darkness.

  “’Tis past curfew!” bellowed the speaker. “What’s your business?”

  A lantern’s beam advanced down the wharf, jerking back and forth and followed by the large, beet-shaped bulk of Absalom Trulliber, night watchman. Breathing noisily, he stopped a foot before the wood-carver and examined his catch from the top down with his light.

  “Taking the air, to help me sleep,” said Mr. Speke. “I never heard the curfew bell.”

  Mr. Trulliber shone his lantern on the carver’s feet, as if he might possibly find hoofs or flippers there instead. Apparently satisfied, he stepped back.

  “Up with your jib and be off then,” he ordered. “Take the air in your bedchamber, like the others.” His voice was scornful. With a pitying smirk, he watched as the man ambled on and finally disappeared from view.

  Sleepers! The watchman snorted his contempt for that sorry class of humanity. The moment the sun slipped out of sight they rushed toward their mattresses, snoring away the hours, knowing nothing of night. While Mr. Trulliber and his colleagues, members of a small and superior caste, walked the silent streets until dawn, fleshly replicas of the all-seeing and ever-vigilant Lord.

  He headed back up the wharf, glancing haughtily at the moon. He didn’t need its help in lighting his way. Or his lantern’s, he often bragged. He claimed he could read the Bible by the light of a single star, and that his mole’s eyes found midnight as bright as noon. Trudging steadily through the blackness, he searched with those eyes for any sign of fire, cocked his ear for fiddling or singing, then cut short the dreams of dozens of sleepers with his stentorian calling out of the hour—”Ten o’ clock!”—and his self-contradicting description of the night, “And all quiet!”

  Keeping close to the water, he sighted the shipyard where he wielded mallet and plane by day and napped briefly each noontime. Farther on, he brought to a halt a tipsy, Swedish-speaking seaman and informed him in incomprehensible English that all persons were to be in by nine o’clock. So that, he added privately, the exalted corps of watchmen might be undisturbed in their serene, planet-like circuits through the sleeping town.

  Two streets away, another regular traveler through the Boston night, one unknown to Mr. Trulliber, crept out of a door, fastened his cloak at the throat, took stock of the night, and set off. Having studied the watchmen’s orbits closely and seen Mr. Trulliber pass a minute earlier, he started cautiously up King Street, then hea
ded toward Mill Cove.

  The sky above him shimmered with lights like some vast illuminated city. The earthly town below was black but for the beacon gleaming on his left, close enough to cast his shadow. He studied this silhouette while he walked, then noticed that the moon had given him another, slanting in a different direction. He stopped and eyed the doubled being before him. No limner, he mused, could have drawn him more faithfully. He had known two worlds, had lived two lives, had even been called by two different names: Weetasket, bestowed by his father at birth, and William, the name he’d worn in his second life, chosen by his second father, the printer Mr. Currie.

  He moved stealthily down Sudbury Street, thinking of the Curries at home in their beds. They were all sound sleepers, except the infant Rose. It had always been easy to slip out undetected. What a shock it would come to them, and to so many others, to know where he was just then. He shuddered at the thought. He must never be caught! They’d think him another deceitful Indian. How could he face Mr. Currie again? At supper he’d felt as gleeful as the others, planning the coming Saturnalia—imagining the feast, hatching mischiefs, guessing who’d reign as the King or Queen. Afterward, he and Sarah and Mr. Currie had together pored over three more pages of the Iliad in its original tongue, taking them to the fleet’s landing at Troy. He loved reading Homer and deciphering Greek. He loved Mr. Currie and his family, into which he’d been welcomed like another son. Six sunny years he’d lived among them. But though his memories of the eight years before had begun fading, like footprints in falling snow, he hadn’t forgotten his first family’s faces. They’d loved him as well. Which thought now and then interrupted his typesetting or reading, and which now drove his legs through the empty streets.

  He glimpsed Mill Cove ahead, reached into a pocket, and pulled out a small bone flute. Cautiously, he glanced about. Then he put the flute to his lips and began playing softly, capping and uncovering its holes, releasing a restful tune into the night. Its scale and rhythm were foreign to the psalms and ballads heard in Boston. It wandered like a rivulet, patient, peaceful, while William viewed the windows he passed.

  He turned left down an alley, then right, his path winding through the town like a night-growing vine.

  The song he was playing had been learned from his father, one of the three from his past that he’d managed to keep alive in his memory. The flute from which it uncurled had been made by his grandfather from the wing bone of a heron. It was the one object he possessed from his old life, and its sound always led him back to the sweet aroma of his father’s stone pipe, the taste of parched cornmeal and ripe cranberries, the feel of the deerskin on which he’d slept. He was good at memorizing, he realized, because he’d more to remember than most people. His first world had been swept away in a day. To preserve that world, if only in his mind, had seemed to him, when he’d first reached Boston, a duty owed to the dead. Zealously filling his memory since with Latin quotations and Greek verb tenses, the Kings of Israel and the craft of printing, he’d found it a duty increasingly difficult to carry out.

  He strode up a new street and probed a lit window. He thought back to summer days spent in scaring off crows with his brothers, searching for them from the watchhouses built among the fields of corn. Glancing about him while he played, he now watched for something else entirely: for the face of a boy who would know the flute’s music, whose eyes would spring open and who’d dash to the window. A boy who’d also played a bone flute—Cancasset, his own twin brother.

  A dog began barking at him, then another. Quickly he bribed them with bread crusts from his pocket, then spied a moving light in the distance. A watchman, heading left. William stopped. He wondered if he’d been playing too loudly. And at once he recalled an added danger: Mr. Baggot. A watchman might only ask his business; the tithingman would strive to see him whipped until his blood puddled on the ground.

  He turned a corner and walked toward the west, softening his music slightly. His flute had rarely brought unwanted notice. Each time he’d easily escaped, having had plenty of practice at avoiding capture. When the English had attacked the Narragansets, he and Gancasset had been among the first to flee the island village. They’d dashed across the Great Swamp, frozen solid, had dug up a cache of buried food, and had made a shelter from fallen branches. His brother had even succeeded in stealing a musket from a sleeping soldier. For a week they’d evaded the English, then been surprised returning to their camp and caught. They’d been marched to Plymouth, then separated. William had continued on with a score of fellow prisoners to Boston, where they were assigned as servants to those who wished them and where he’d been apprenticed to Mr. Currie. It was from others that he’d learned that his father had fallen early in the battle; that his mother and sisters had perished when the soldiers had set fire to the village; that one brother had been shipped to the sugar plantations of the West Indies as a slave, while another had escaped westward into the country of the Niantics. He’d several times glimpsed his oldest brother, swaying for days from the gallows on the Common, hanged for taking up arms against the English. But no one knew what had become of Cancasset.

  A wolf bayed off in the distance. William knew it was late and pointed his toes toward Mr. Currie’s. After six years of intermittent searching, he was scarcely disappointed by his lack of success. He held little hope that he would find his brother. Of necessity, he’d learned to live without him. An impossible feat, he’d felt at first. He now thought about him far less than he once had. Still, he couldn’t help wondering if he might perchance be in Boston, if he were sleeping in a bed tonight or on deerskin, whether he was being treated kindly or cruelly. And whether he and the rest of his clan would be proud of William’s shining success in the world of the English—or scornful. Would they curse him for joining the enemy? Taunt him with being as English as King Charles? If nothing else, he hoped that his hopeless searches would at least quiet his conscience and show those remembered faces that he hadn’t entirely forgotten them.

  An owl swooped past William’s head. Hardly aware, wrapped in his thoughts, he marched ahead down Middle Street. So absorbed that he failed to notice the outline of a scrawny young man, humming and wearing a low-brimmed hat, who scuttled deeper into the darkness like a crab and with great interest watched the apprentice pass an eyeglass maker’s shop, slip his flute into a pocket, blow on his hands, and turn toward King Street.

  THREE

  TRAVELING BY DAYLIGHT, several mornings later, William made his way down crowded Queen Street, out on a round of errands. The December air might have been borrowed from May. Snow was softening in the streets and melting furiously from roofs, as if winter had given up its siege of the city. Birds chattered gaily in the treetops. The apprentice, however, felt none of their cheer. Stopping at an alley, he plucked the note from his pocket and peered at the words one more time.

  Brother,

  Join others of our kind in driving the villainous English from the land. Cautantowwit demands it. Noon, The Pearl Tavern, Flint’s Alley

  He studied the unfamiliar handwriting, then buried the paper in his waistcoat and strode on.

  Could it be, he wondered, that Cancasset had found him, rather than the other way around? He’d heard at Mr. Currie’s that another Narraganset servant had recently arrived, lodging somewhere in the North End. Or was “brother” merely a figure of speech? Either way, it was prohibited for servants or apprentices to visit taverns. And to do so to plan a war on the English! The thumbscrews, stocks, and gallows combined would scarcely satisfy the magistrates’ wrath.

  He passed the First Church, neared the Town House, and saw a group gathered about the whipping post. Though not of a mind to stand and watch, he found his head turning that way as he walked and spied, through the crowd, several slivers of the scene: flecks of blood on a swan-white back, the flogger’s groan as he arched his spine so as to bring down his whip to full advantage, the report that the woman tied to the post h
ad been heard maligning the Governor. William’s heart sped wildly at this news. Why was he carrying the note around with him? He ought to have flung it into the fire! His gaze on the ground, fearful his secret could be read in his eyes, he swore he would do exactly that the instant he reached home.

  He entered a pungent shop on his right and purchased tobacco for Mr. Currie’s pipe. Continuing on, he added to his basket a parcel of pins ordered from England, delivered to their author twelve just-printed pamphlets extracting God’s message from the fall’s smallpox scourge, then quickly filled that hole with nettle tops, nutmegs, and cloves for the printer’s wife.

  He commenced the trek back toward Mr. Currie’s, his mind, unlike his feet, aimed all morning in one direction: the note. Even though it was sealed with wax and addressed to William, hadn’t its writer been foolish to leave it out in plain sight, slipped underneath the shop’s front door? Or had it been written by someone who’d carefully studied the daily routine of the house? Someone who knew that William rose first, to light the fires, and would find it? Its author was surely a Narraganset to have claimed that Gautantowwit, the creator, had ordered the overthrow of the English. But what sort of tavern would be safe for such a meeting? Was its owner a Frenchman, keen to kindle an Indian rising against his country’s foe?

  A flock of questions flitting about his head, William marched along the harbor. He avoided a cart and dodged a string of casks being rolled through the slushy street. Then he halted, eyes wide. Flint’s Alley was on his right.

  He stood stiff as a scarecrow, amazed at where he was. Apprehensively, he scanned the alley. It was narrow and dim, its snow standing deep. Halfway down he glimpsed a signboard, fanged with icicles and featuring in its center a moonlike, painted pearl.

  A passing broom seller bumped off William’s hat. A slave merchant tugging two black children wearing chains and very little else barked at the apprentice to move aside. Not wanting to attract any further notice, he abruptly turned up the alley as if he’d been headed that way all along. The very lane, he castigated himself, that he’d vowed to avoid!