Authors: Margaret Ronald
“Myths and hyperbole. The stuff of Gothic romances and anticlerical potboilers.” Her lips twisted, and she folded her hands before her in a gesture as forbidding as Rena with badge in hand. “I am a serious historian, not a conspiracy theorist pretending at historical accuracy. If you want sensationalism, I’m sure I can find you a novel or two.”
Great. The kind of historian I needed, and I’d already pissed her off. “Okay, then. Thanks. What about, freedmen and-women in Boston? I mean, how long were there slaves in town?” It was a hell of a leap to make, given that all I had to go on was the color of Meda’s skin, but something about how she’d said “the master” had stayed with me. Or maybe I just didn’t want her to have been a slave.
Venetia’s eyes glinted, but she nodded. “Much more realistic, if unrelated. Officially, slavery ended in 1783, when it ended in Massachusetts, but it was certainly unfashionable for a long time before that. Not that that stopped some families from getting rich off the triangle trade then or for some time to come.” I blinked, confused, and her lips quirked again. “It’s all right, girl. I’m descended from those same rich scoundrels, I’m allowed to say that my ancestors were terrible people.
“No,” she continued, turning back and reaching for a switch on the wall, “slavery wasn’t common in Boston for some time before that. Of course there were exceptions, and sub rosa incidents, or idiots like Grauchy and his curio—”
“Grauchy?”
Old Grouchy,
the man had said. “What curio?”
Venetia’s lip curled.
“That
story. Hm. Grauchy was a ship captain who wanted to flaunt his riches. He
chose the worst possible way … he had a personal slave whom he tried to promote as a rarity, an ‘intelligent negress.’” She shook her head and turned on the lights in the parlor (which would have been light enough, had she not had the blinds down). “In hindsight, he’s possibly related to your other query, since he did have the Townsend house for a time, before his money ran out. The man wasn’t even a P. T. Barnum; he didn’t have the brains.”
“But she did,” I said slowly. “Her name was Meda, wasn’t it?”
Venetia paused, her hand on the closest chair, then moved back to the light switch and turned it off. “It was,” she said, glancing back at me with a furrowed brow.
I held my breath.
Whatever standards Venetia went by, apparently I’d just passed them. “You’d better come into the back, Genevieve,” she said finally. “I don’t have a kettle, but you’re welcome to coffee.”
My face lit up before I could help it, and that to, seemed to meet with her approval. “Please,” I said.
The kitchen was in the back of the house, a little crowded nook with barely enough room for one person to move, and there were pictures everywhere, crammed in over every shelf and any wall space. Venetia slipped between table and cabinets easily. The coffee was half-caff, brewed up in one of those really old percolators, the kind that splashes the coffee up and around the top of the kettle with a vaguely digestive sound. Venetia set it to brewing again (“to aerate it”) and stalked around the kitchen like a lioness checking the boundaries of her territory. I stayed quiet while she searched through bundled books at the back of one shelf.
“There is not much on Grauchy,” she said, dragging down a small photo box from a high shelf. (I’d started to get up to help, but the look on her face made me stop right there.) “And there’s even less that’s reliable.
The good people of Boston have always been horrible gossips, and they cared as little for fact then as now.”
She drew a few pasted-together volumes from the box, sniffed at them, and produced a yellowing page from one. It was a copy itself, of a crude drawing in a newspaper or whatever the equivalent had been back then, and showed a clown dressed as a captain—or maybe the other way around—beating a drum and yelling, while a bear balancing on a ball and what could have been a woman followed him.
A certain CAPTAIN wishes to begin CARNAVAL to lighten our spirits,
read the caption, and you wouldn’t think sarcasm could translate over centuries, but it came through clearly.
“His girl Andromeda has a little more about her, simply because she was his showpiece. And yes, they probably did call her Meda.” She took another book from the box, set it flat on the table, and returned to the coffeemaker. This book wasn’t scraps, but notes, closely written, and I didn’t need to ask to know it was her own work. “But she’s only a different matter because Grauchy made so much of her.”
I took a sip of the coffee she slid in front of me: burnt, thick, and tasting very slightly of every other pot that had been brewed. Just the way I liked it. “Go on.”
“Well, he tried to promote her. Make a sideshow of her. Keep in mind when this was and how stupid people can be, and I’m sure you can understand why he made such a big fuss over ‘an African maid capable of reading both Latin and Greek, who sings both popular and puritanical songs.’ One is almost tempted to agree with the locals’ assessment of him.” She settled into her chair with a sigh, took a long drink of her coffee, and turned the page. “It was a clear case of the servant outthinking the master. He was merely an opportunist; she was a survivor. Quite literally: she was the only one left alive after a wreck on Lovells Island.”
“Lovells?” No, we’d been on Georges … and I hadn’t seen Meda there, I’d seen her later …
“Oh yes. Pretty island, but the wrecks on it—the
Magnifique
alone nearly lost us a navy …” She started to make a note, then frowned as she realized she didn’t have a pen. I took one from my bag and slid it across to her. “Thank you. Reading between the lines, it’s clear that she too lost something there; she’s listed as ‘one, carrying’ and then later as just one.”
I thought of Meda watching me on the Common. “Does it say where she was from? What she did, where she ended up?”
Venetia cocked a white eyebrow at me. “There isn’t an ‘it’ to say anything. This is sifted from primary sources, gleaned and cast aside. And no, there isn’t much else. Andromeda refused to play the talking dog for her master—good for her, and it made him more of a laughingstock—and ran off on the Dark Day.”
I was nodding all through “ran off,” but the last words caught me up short. “The what?”
“New England’s Dark Day. I’ve got a terrible water-color of it somewhere …” She stood, grimacing, then seemed to think better of it and poured another cup of coffee instead. “May of seventeen eighty. The sun went out for eight hours in the middle of spring. No clouds, no storm, just the light going out. You couldn’t even read by sunlight at noon.” She took a long sip. “I believe they’ve linked it to a colossal forest fire, but honestly that’s not nearly as interesting as people’s reactions to it: it was the end of the world, the sun black as sackcloth made of hair, and so on. Most town councils still met, though, putting ‘Judgment Day’ at the end of the agenda.” She gave a sniff that was almost a laugh. “Practical.”
I thought of the sunlight filtering through the grate below the North End, the strange, muted quality of it. What I’d seen—what I was now beginning to suspect Meda had deliberately showed me—might have been the Dark Day. If so, she hadn’t wasted any time
in leaving. And the sailor whose fingers I still carried in my jacket pocket … what had she done with him, once he brought her the sunstone?
It took one hell of a strong magician to set a spell in place that would remain after death. And most of the paths to strength in the undercurrent were puddled with other people’s blood.
“So the Dark Day came,” I said slowly, then stopped. “Do you know how silly that sounds?”
“Silly now,” Venetia pointed out, tipping her coffee mug to me. “When we have all the light we need and can summon more with a switch. But back then? I’d not scoff.”
I thought of Dina’s pitch-black room in Fort Warren, and nodded. She had a point. “Anyway, Meda took advantage of it to run. Is there any record of where she went?”
Venetia frowned and turned a page in her notebook. “Not quite. Grauchy was said to claim that his greatest treasure had gone to Greenwich, but there’s no indication of why he didn’t go after her if that’s what he meant. Poor roads, I expect, and his fortunes were much depleted by that point. He fades from the record soon after, leaving the whole matter just a footnote to Boston society.”
I paused at that. “So how do you know about it?”
A slow smile curved Venetia’s lips, like a crack running through frost. “I did say that we were terrible gossips, and I am no less. I simply restrict my gossip to things long past. It’s vaguely more respectable this way.”
Fair enough. I drank the rest of my coffee, including the sludge at the bottom, and set the mug down. “Thank you very much, Ms. Brooks-Parsons. You’ve been incredibly helpful.” She nodded as if to say
Of course I have.
“Do I owe you anything—a, a consulting fee, or something? At the very least I can leave you my card—”
At that her white brows rose. “You’re leaving already?”
“Well, if I’m going to get to Greenwich, I’ve got some driving to do.” Not to mention some thinking up what to do when I got there. Perhaps the scent would be stronger there, maybe I could just go searching for Meda … maybe she’d find me, if she’d thought ahead far enough to set a ghost-trap for me earlier …
“But Nathaniel said—” A car honked out in the driveway, and she looked up. “Ah. That’d be them now. Come along.”
Crap. Had Nate promised something else from me? I followed her back out into the hallway, then stopped as a familiar, lean shape appeared through the window. When Venetia opened the door a familiar sparky blue scent blew into the hall. “Aunt Venice!” Katie yelled, and knocked into the old woman with a hug. Venetia winced a little at the decibels, but her hand on Katie’s hair was kind. “We brought cookies from the bakery on Beatton, only they didn’t have the kind with the hazelnuts you like, so we had to go with the frosting kind—”
“Good to see you, Katherine.” Venetia untangled herself from Katie in time for Nate to give her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re late, Nathaniel. Your friend’s been here some time already.”
“Friend?” He glanced up, and his eyes widened as he saw me. “Evie! I thought—”
“You, uh, sent me the address of a historian,” I said weakly.
He shook his head. “Yes, but that was after—I thought you needed Aunt Venice’s address for the contract.”
I stared at Venetia, then at the picture on the wall next to her: a bright, attractive young woman in a 1970s dress, flanked by three grim middle-aged women. The one on the left, though her hair was iron-gray and shellacked up in a 1970s monstrosity, had to be Venetia Brooks-Parsons. In front of them stood a little boy wearing what looked like the world’s most
uncomfortable suit and gazing out with a kind of desperation. “Aunt Venice.”
“You said you’d found the book for her, remember?”
The book? I cast my memory back, remembering the job I’d taken on, the hunt that hadn’t even taken an hour. “Oh yes—the missing pages. I’m sorry, they’re currently part of an art installation at BU.” I started fishing through my bag for the notes I’d made, my face so hot it must have been fluorescent. What did you say when meeting your lover’s family? The closest I’d ever come to that was five years ago, a Memorial Day booze-up out in Southie with the guy I’d been seeing for a couple of weeks—and then it turned out that I’d been invited as the designated driver. Bastard got a ride home all right, but he didn’t get anything else out of me after that.
“I suspect there’s been a miscommunication somewhere,” Venetia remarked dryly, but when I looked up her eyes were sparking. “We’ll call it an even trade, then. And you’re quite welcome to stay for a while.”
“Can’t, not if I’m going to make it to Greenwich today.” I came up with my notes—I hadn’t even had time to write them up into a proper report—and smoothed them out, scanning them to make sure I’d gotten the name of the art installation right. “I’m afraid I haven’t written up a formal contract, but I can have it to you by Monday, and here’s the name of the artist who used the pages in a collage …” I handed her the note, and Venetia took it, her eyes crinkling just slightly at the corners. “I’m sorry I can’t stay.”
“That’s why I made you a snack!” Katie fished in her backpack—now that I knew what kind of a packrat she was, I was a little leery of what else might be in there “just in case”—and came up with a thermos and a squashed peanut-butter sandwich. Without asking to see whether I wanted it, she dropped the sandwich on my bag and unscrewed the top of the
thermos. “See? I made Tang, so the water wouldn’t taste bad.”
Even with the top still partly on, I could smell the chemical orange flavor—and below it, the same stink of the tap water. I turned away, breathing through my mouth. “Thanks,” I managed, and picked up the sandwich. “But this’ll be fine.”
“Of course your water tastes bad, Nathaniel,” Venetia said. “It’s Swift River runoff, from that mess of a reservoir—I wouldn’t drink it myself unless I had to.”
I stopped, then took the thermos from Katie’s hand. Swift River. The scent of the water. And this scent, the stink of dead things …
The water had only started to stink in the last few days. Since the fire. Since Roger and Dina arrived.
“Venetia,” I said slowly, still holding the thermos, “did the record say that Meda had actually gone to Connecticut?”
She blinked. “I don’t believe so. Only Greenwich.”
“There’s more than one Greenwich,” I said, and closed the thermos. “Or at least there used to be. I’ve got to go swimming.”
L
et me tell you a story my mother told me.
Once there was a city built on a thin neck of land stretching out into the ocean, and over time more people came to that city than the frail land could hold. So the city cut down its hills to fill in the harbor and dragged up the land from the bottom of the tidal flats. It ate up the sea, and looked around for more, and the land took over where the water had been.
But with so many people in it, the city began to thirst. And the rivers—those poor, polluted things that served as sewers and waterways and everything else—couldn’t keep up with the city’s demands. The clear springs that had once sufficed for that first, fragile settlement were now gone, built over or dried up or simply lost. The city built reservoir after reservoir, seeking more fresh water—not just for its thirst, but for its fires too, as those consumed neighborhood after neighborhood. But no matter how many reserves the city put in place, they were not enough.