The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (21 page)

“I…I don’t know!” she cried, eyes darting from Connie to the far corners of the little shop.

“Someone,” Connie said, “
burned it
into the door of my grandmother’s house. Trying to scare me.” She pressed her palms on the counter as the woman’s eyelids started to flutter. Connie wanted someone else to bear responsibility for the unrelenting fear that had gripped her since the circle appeared. Meanly, she willed this woman to argue with her, to give her an excuse to raise her voice, to vent some of the terror that she had to keep hidden in her everyday life. “
Burned it
. And I would at least like to know what all the words involved
mean
.”

The woman swallowed and looked at Connie with a mixture of alarm and concern. “This circle,” she began. “How…perfect was it?”

“What do you mean?” Connie asked.

“I mean, were there any stray burn marks? Variations in the depth of the scoring?” the woman pressed.

“No,” Connie said, folding her arms.

The woman opened her mouth to speak, seemed to think better of it, and stood, gesturing to Connie to follow. “That’s what I thought. Come with me,” she said. “I don’t know what it means, but I know where we should look.”

Connie trailed behind her to the rear corner of the shop, the one with the racks of books on one side and the expired herbs on the other, and the
woman plucked a dense tome down from one shelf.

“Look,” she said, pages ruffling under her fingers. “I know a lot of people in the Wicca community here. And some of them are even level-three initiates, which is
really
hard to do.” She looked to Connie for a sign of recognition and received none.

“And a lot of the covens have gotten very adept at conjuration, and make it a part of their sabbaths. But the thing of it is…” She ran her fingertip down the page that she wanted, then turned the book around to indicate an entry to Connie. “Nobody that I know of”—she paused—“
nobody
has ever been able to manifest a circle like the one you are describing. I know one group that tried once to manifest a circle by making a kind of brand, but it was very small. And even then the burned circle that resulted was incomplete. It pretty much didn’t work.”

The woman had pulled down a heavy encyclopedia of paganism and the occult, and Connie looked down at the entry under the woman’s finger.

“The mirror of art and nature,” said Connie aloud, and the woman hovering over her asked, “What is that?”

“A book title,” said Connie, eyebrows furrowed. “German. From 1615.” She glanced up, meeting the woman’s gaze, and read in her face a concern that felt genuine. Connie shifted the book’s considerable weight back into the woman’s hands and stood, arms crossed, thinking. “Do you think this is the kind of thing that a vandal might put on someone’s door at random?” Connie asked finally, watching her out of the corners of her eyes.

The earringed woman took a breath, pursing her lips together. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” she said, “but no. A manifestation like that would take
a lot of work. Nobody would do it just to do it.”

The two women regarded each other, the store proprietor’s eyes wide and sensitive, willing Connie to believe her. Connie’s reason rebelled against what she was suggesting—manifestation! What did that even
mean
? She was implying that someone had simply willed the circle to appear. What a preposterous idea. Wasn’t the world wondrous enough without a lot of make-believe?

“Look,” the woman began, closing the book and pressing it to her chest, “I know that you don’t believe in the Goddess religion. I can read it in your face.” Connie frowned, not disagreeing with her. “But if you like, I can fix you up a really powerful protective charm.”

“What?”
Connie asked, incredulous.

“You know. A charm. To make your grandmother feel safer in the house.” The woman’s eyebrows rose, two little sincere quarter-moons over her eyes, and Connie thought,
It all comes back to money, doesn’t it.

“My grandmother has been dead for twenty years,” Connie replied.

“Suit yourself,” the woman replied, replacing the book on the shelf. “But remember. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

Muttering a thank-you, Connie strode to the shop door and yanked it open just as the sky outside broke apart and the rain started to fall like drumsticks beating down on the earth.

H
OURS LATER, AFTER THE RAIN PASSED
, C
ONNIE SAT LISTENING TO THE
silence in Granna’s house, broken only by the click of Arlo’s toenails on the wide pine floorboards and the breath of summer air stirring the leaves in the sitting room windows. The air in the house still felt close and heavy. Connie caught herself straining for a sound that seemed on the point of being audible, or glancing over her shoulder as she worked, expecting someone to be standing there.
The police said there’s nothing to be afraid of
, she reminded herself, heart thudding in her ears.
There’s no one. And if there
were
someone, Arlo would scare them away.
Though she found her logic utterly sound she nevertheless, after five more minutes of quiet, twitched her head up, ears open, listening.

Arlo appeared under her desk chair, tongue extended in a luxurious yawn. Connie reached down to scratch the spot between his shoulder blades as she flipped through her notebook.

“I really don’t see why you’re so relaxed,” she remarked. “You weren’t even freaked the night we got back from the fireworks and found the burn mark. Not until that cop shined his light in the window, anyway.”

He rolled onto his side so that her scratching hand could reach under his jaw, his whiskered mouth drawn into a sleepy smile. Mentally Connie gathered her strands of thinking into thick handfuls, trying to braid them into a coherent whole. Deliverance’s book had disappeared from Prudence’s life records, but Grace thought it might have just undergone a transformation of name, or of description. Chilton was furious about her stalled research, but Janine thought his own work was the problem. The Wicca shop woman with all her amulets and sincerity did not know anything concrete about the circle on Connie’s door. Her friends were worried about her staying alone in the house, while her usually nervous dog dozed, a bundle of contentment.

Connie propped her bare foot on the seat of the chair, pressing her shin against the Chippendale desk. Her notes lay scattered across the desk surface, occasional words leaping out from the blurred mass of her handwriting.

Home
, said one word.
Gardin
, said another.
Almanack
.
I have staid at home.

“She tried to sell me a
charm
,” Connie said to the dog. “Can you believe that?”

His breathing was slow and deep, a front paw twitching in sleep. She leaned over her notes again, fingers of one hand questing across her desk for something to handle. They settled on a sharp little metal object hidden under some papers in the far corner and picked it up, rolling it to and fro, pressing it for distraction while Connie’s eyes roamed through all her notes on Prudence’s journal. Day after day after day of gardening, weather, passing illnesses, strangers’ babies born and paid for. Prudence’s father dies. Mercy
moves in. Josiah, Prudence’s husband, comes and goes from town. Her daughter grows, assumes more responsibility in the house. Mercy dies. Patty moves away. Josiah dies—some kind of accident at the docks. And then, abruptly, in 1798, the journal stops. Her fingers walked the metal item from one digit to another and, squinting, Connie flipped backward in her notebook.

“‘December 3, 1760.’” she read aloud. “‘Very cold. Patty unwell. Mother looks for her Almanack. Very vexed when told it given to the Sociall Libar. Makes her poultice. Patty improves.’ Huh,” Connie wondered to the empty house. “Is ‘Sociall Libar’ an abbreviation for ‘Social Library’? What do you think, Arlo?”

No response from underneath her chair. She looked down and found that the dog had disappeared. “Ingrate,” she said. In her notebook she wrote down the words SOCIAL LIBRARY MARBLEHEAD OR SALEM? in block capital letters, and then drew little asterisks around it. She sat back in her chair, ruminating.

“An almanac,” she said, trying the idea out to see if it sounded plausible. It did. A smile crept from her lips and started to spread across her face until it reached all the way up, casting a glint into her eyes. She looked down into her hand, suddenly aware of the item that she had been worrying while she worked.

It was a tiny, rusted nail, four sided and irregular. The nail looked small and tired, as if it had been at work for a very long time. It had been spat out by the rotting doorjamb when she first jimmied open the front door of Granna’s house. Carrying the nail in her closed fist, she ventured out into the front yard.

Evening was starting to gather under the vine drapery overhead, and Connie stood on tiptoe, naked toes gripping the mossy flagstone stoop. Under the wet moss, the stone felt cool and hard to her feet. She pushed aside the tendrils of wisteria over the door, its flowers grown dull and papery in the heat, and found the horseshoe dangling at a sharp angle. Connie regarded the wide burned circle on her front door.

Dominus adjutor meus. Alpha. Omega
.
AGLA
. She clenched her fist
around the tiny nail, setting her jaw.

“Why not,” Connie said aloud. Pushing the horseshoe into alignment with the rusted shadow in the house paint, she pressed the nail into the yielding wood with the ball of her thumb. Connie stepped back, folding her arms, and gazed up at the house, which stared back at her with something akin to approval.

“Blessed be,” she said, wryly, to Arlo, who had appeared at her feet.

Marblehead, Massachusetts
Mid-July
1991

D
ESPITE HER BEST EFFORTS TO FEEL AT EASE IN
G
RANNA’S HOUSE
, Connie often discovered herself to be confined—hiding, almost—in the kitchen. Her sharply circumscribed orbit could be blamed on the antique icebox, with its tempting, liftable lid, the only source of cool air in the dense heat of midsummer. She kept her notes restricted to Granna’s desk in the sitting room, camped in the four-poster bed overhead late at night, and passed through the rest of the house quickly. In the kitchen, however, she lingered, running the water in the sink, chopping vegetables at the counter. In the kitchen she felt more on top of things; its small space presented a finite, achievable task in the rehabilitation of Granna’s unsellable house, and its dated appliances at least gestured to a twentieth-century world outside, the world where Connie still felt herself to live. This morning she found herself leaning, one narrow arm propping the lid open, with her chin extended over the drifting mist rising out of the icebox’s depths, letting the cool air
creep up under the damp base of her hair, into the crevices behind her ears.

She felt calm this morning, focused. Her plans for the day were in place, and Connie liked nothing better than having her plans set firmly in place. Her tenuous sense of safety was bolstered when she stood in the little kitchen, with its cheap screen door into the backyard and its shelves of dead glass jars. She had developed the habit of each morning opening a few of the jars and scrubbing out their contents, black and desiccated, onto a compost heap in the far corner of the rear garden. She left the empty jars, rinsed and drying, lids open, in rows by the back stoop. She liked to peer at the rows from behind the screen door, admitting that the ever-growing compost pile and the ever-diminishing kitchen shelves formed her own private calendar system. The lowest kitchen shelf now stood empty, and Connie had even wiped away the last of the dust, washing it from a rag down the drain of the sink and feeling as she did so the release of a small chore finished.

Connie closed the icebox with some regret and turned back to the shelves, choosing the jars for that morning’s purge. Three medium-size ones stood at eye level, their labels crisp with age, and Connie pulled them down one by one, slotting them into the curve of her arm around her belly. As she grasped the last one, her knuckles bumped against an unseen object, which she grabbed and pulled to the edge of the shelf. It was an undistinguished metal box, small, gray, with a lunch box clasp but no lock. Connie left it there while she carried the three jars to the compost heap, returning some moments later, wiping her wet hands on the seat of her cutoffs.

She took the little box between her hands and pried open the clasp. Inside Connie found a cache of note cards, the first one of which read
Key Lime Pie
in a cramped script that Connie remembered, just barely, as having belonged to her grandmother. She laughed quietly to herself.
Lard
, she read, extending her tongue in a
bleah
of disgust though no one was in the kitchen to witness it. She laid the box aside and shuffled through the note cards, sifting through Granna’s penned recipes for almost defiantly 1950s cuisine: tomato aspic, pork tenderloin, bean and frankfurter casserole. Connie enjoyed
a bloom of mischievous pleasure as she contemplated saving the cards for the now vegetarian Grace, mailing her a concrete reminder of her New England childhood. Checking her watch, Connie slid the recipe cards into the rear pocket of her cutoffs, grabbed her shoulder bag, and banged out the door on her way to the Salem Athenaeum.

A
N AFTERNOON’S TELEPHONING TO THE VARIOUS RIVAL
N
ORTH
S
HORE
historical societies told Connie that there had, in fact, been something called the Social Library in Salem. Established at the end of the eighteenth century as an offshoot of a gentleman’s social club, it had been maintained for some years by exorbitant membership fees and the donations of books acquired by wealthy Salem merchants’ travels overseas. In 1810, however, the Social Library merged with a private membership library for science and technology, the Philosophical Library, to form the Salem Athenaeum. Connie was surprised, and deliciously pleased, to discover that the Salem Athenaeum had flourished through the nineteenth century, and while Salem’s shipbuilding fortunes collapsed and its importance as a port was first eclipsed, then utterly surpassed, by Boston, Baltimore, and the Carolinas, the Athenaeum had trundled along blissfully unaware of its growing irrelevance to American letters. As the Volvo rolled to a labored stop across the street from the “new” Athenaeum building, erected in 1907, Connie felt—not for the first time—a private affection for the commitment to the status quo that under-girds the fierce Yankee impulse toward thrift.

Connie approached the desk on the left side of the sunny, well-appointed reading room, devoid of readers save for an elderly gentleman on the rear porch sipping lemonade, one long arm propped on a cane. At the desk a young matron was knotting thread on the underside of her needlepoint.

“Excuse me,” Connie whispered, and the young woman looked up at her with a smile, laid aside her sewing, and stood to clasp Connie’s hand.

“You must be Miss Goodwin!” said the librarian, and Connie was surprised that she spoke at a regular volume. She even had a cup of tea sitting
on her desk; the crisp smell of lemon pierced through the familiar wood-and-books aroma of the library. “We spoke on the phone this morning! I am Laura Plummer.”

“Hello,” Connie said, smiling, enjoying the woman’s warmth. Of course, in private libraries, one deals with little children and visiting oldsters more than neurotic graduate students. It must be easier to stay pleasant.

“You had inquired about seeing some of our original collection, is that right?” the woman said, ushering Connie toward the doorway into the stacks.

“Yes.” Connie nodded. “I have been trying to track down this particular almanac—at least I’m pretty sure it’s an almanac—that I have reason to believe was donated to the Social Library.”

“We do have a number of almanacs,” she said, snapping on overhead lights as she went. Connie felt the same sort of pleasure and safety in narrow book stacks that she had lately felt in Granna’s kitchen. She shivered with excitement, reflecting that any one of these anonymous brown spines might be Deliverance’s physick book. She might even be within an hour of finding it.

“Here we are,” said Miss Plummer. She could not have been much older than Connie herself, but Connie had trouble conceiving of such a tidy woman, in her Peter Pan collar and pleated skirt, as a “Laura.” She gestured to a short wall of books along the very rear of the stacks. “The Social Library only existed for fifteen or twenty years before the Athenaeum was formed. And the holdings, though impressive enough at the time, were modest by today’s standards. Mostly printed sermons, a handful of novels, a few almanacs and navigational guides and suchlike. I’ll be back at the front desk if you need any help.” She withdrew with a smile, and Connie dropped her shoulder bag at her feet, weaving her fingers together and stretching them out before her with a preparatory crack.

Some hours passed, with Connie checking in the card catalogue first for Prudence Bartlett, Mercy Lamson, and Deliverance Dane as book donors, or perhaps authors, with no result. Next came several fruitless minutes thumbing through the cards for “almanac,” though all examples seemed to
belong to well-known mainstream publishing series, providing weather and planting guidelines for farmers. The library held one copy of Benjamin Franklin’s satirical
Poor Richard’s Almanack
, but none of the books were either particularly old or self-written. Finally, awash in frustration, she resorted to reading the spines and, eventually, the frontispieces of all the books in the almanac section of the collection, with no success.

Connie emerged despondent from within the archive, the weight of her shoulder bag with its bulging notebooks and pens digging into her shoulder more acutely than usual. She hooked her thumb under its strap and approached Miss Plummer’s desk.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she said, and Miss Plummer looked up, smiling. The smile made the weight of Connie’s book bag marginally less pressing, and she felt her shoulders unknot by a fraction.

“Yes?” asked the librarian. “Did you find it?”

Connie sighed. “I’m afraid not. Was there ever a point where some of the collection was de-accessioned, do you think? I know for sure that the book was donated here. And I can’t imagine that anyone would have stolen it or anything….”

“We de-accession things all the time,” the librarian confirmed. “Usually bad novels and things after we have had them for a few years. There’s very limited space in the stacks, as you can see. Let’s check the files.” She stood, turning to a large filing cabinet behind her desk. “I’m sure we’ll find it,” she assured Connie as she pulled open the cabinet drawer.

I hope so
, Connie silently wished, wondering what she would tell Chilton if this lead failed.

“Here we go,” said the librarian, paging through a discolored file. “Our first major de-accession occurred in 1877. It says here that books with no record of ever having been checked out were auctioned by Sackett”—she looked up and added, “That’s like the Boston equivalent of Christie’s or Sotheby’s”—before continuing, “to raise money for collection maintenance and the building of the new library building.” She closed the folder again and looked at Connie. “I’m afraid that there is no record of the titles of the books
that were sold, but I feel certain that Sackett would still have the records on file. I’m sure you know how Boston institutions feel about record keeping.”

Connie thought back to her experience at the Essex County probate department and chuckled through a gentle groan. “Thank you for your help,” she said to the librarian, who was sliding the file folder back into place in the drawer behind her desk.

As Connie turned to leave, the young librarian, seating herself at her desk and reaching again for her needlepoint, brightly repeated, “I’m sure that you will find it.” And for some reason, Connie believed her.

A
S SHE MOVED THROUGH THE SUMMER AFTERNOON TOWARD THE
S
ALEM
Common, book bag knocking against her flank, Connie’s thoughts roamed back to her conversation with Janine. As an undergraduate, Connie had read Manning Chilton’s seminal book about the professionalization of medicine in eighteenth-century America, and had known that she wanted to study under him for her doctorate. Professor Chilton viewed science as an intellectual historian might—treating science not as a set of facts that are true no matter what the time period, but as a way of looking at the world that depended on historical context. And yet for all its breathless sweep, his work never overlooked the individuals who peopled his narratives. Doctors with their bleeding lancets, irritated midwives, mail-order laudanum salesmen, all stirred to life in Chilton’s practiced words. The people in his history books felt as real to Connie as the students who passed her in the hallways of Saltonstall Court, or the panhandlers dotting the streets around her college. Chilton seemed to possess a special gift for peering from the present into the past, like the old glass-bottomed buckets that fishermen would plant in the water to view the secret depths below the boat.

Alchemy would naturally appeal to Chilton, with its search for transcendence through carefully honed technique. The alchemist sought to use the tools of chemistry and science to transcend reality—a spiritual quest, according to Janine, but with literal application. Alchemy sought to create
value and beauty out of nothing. The dumb natural object hid fathomless realms of possibility, or so they had thought, which could be unlocked, given sufficient practice, patience, and study. For the adept with the correct formula, the philosopher’s stone was within reach, with all that it promised: wealth, long life. Enlightenment.

Wealth. Connie frowned. Janine said that Chilton’s paper argued that carbon could be the base substance for making the philosopher’s stone, transformed in some heretofore unimagined way: it was a potentially precious thing but currently without value. Unknown, and yet known to all—the building block of life.

Connie stopped walking, lost in thought. Perhaps Chilton was not just risking his professional reputation, as Janine thought. Chilton was growing older, nearing the end of his career. He chaired the Harvard history department. He already had as much prestige as he could possibly need. Perhaps he was after something beyond prestige.

As she paused, Connie gazed through the latticed shadows lining the street that led to the church where, she knew, Sam was at that moment brushing thin gilding over the dome at the base of the steeple. Her head had been so sunk into her research that she was having trouble keeping track of her days. They had taken to speaking on the phone, five minutes at a time, late at night, but had not managed to see each other since the night the circle appeared on her door. Now she pictured him, one leg twined around the metal scaffold, ropes and harness fastened in place, droplets of liquid gold speckling the backs of his hands, dotting his forehead from the upward spatter of the stiff-haired paintbrush. Suddenly she saw how keenly she had missed him over the past several days, and she felt a pressing urge to detour to the church.

Connie lingered at the corner of the street for a full minute, shifting her weight from one sandal to the other. Finally she brokered an arrangement with herself in which Sam could work on in peace, provided that she call him that evening to make concrete plans. Satisfied, she continued her progress toward the Common, mind once again absorbed in thoughts of Chilton.

When Janine had said that Chilton claimed, in an academic conference no less, that alchemical work should be taken literally, surely he wasn’t going around claiming that lead could be turned into gold, like Rumpelstiltskin at his spinning wheel, surrounded by magical ingots. Connie smiled at the image. No. He must mean something else. But what? Substance, or idea? When Manning Chilton said “the philosopher’s stone,” what did he mean?