Benjamin pulled the crate very carefully forward on the shelf. He peered over the edge into the dim interior. He realized he'd been holding his breath for some minutes. The blue-tinted lights barely illuminated the contents. Regular lighting was too yellow for sensitive paper, and fluorescents were out of the question.
He pulled the crate a little farther forward-and suddenly its weight shifted, and the crate came tumbling toward him off of the shelf. He fell to the floor but managed to stop the crate from hitting his body. He stopped, listening, worried that the sound would bring Larry to see if everything was okay. But after a moment he realized the sound hadn't been nearly as loud as he feared.
He gently set the crate on the floor. He reached in, toward a large clear plastic container, one of the hermetically sealed bags used to contain specimens prior to restoration. There was no identifying information, which was unusual. Inside the bag was what appeared to be shapeless brown wrapping of some kind. Leather-so old it was almost as stiff as cardboard.
He lifted the bundle carefully out of the crate. Very carefully he unsealed the bag and extracted the bundle, then folded back the flaps of the leather.
Inside he could see the first page of a book, yellowed with age and discolored with mildew. In the middle of the page were perhaps a dozen handwritten lines… or once had been. Now, the lines were unreadable: faded, smeared, disintegrated. All that remained was a single line of text.
R 6:12-HPB
Just as he'd remembered.
He carried the bundle to a small table nearby, switched on the specially filtered reading lamp, and set it down.
Pulling back the leather wrapping as carefully as possible, he could now see that, while the book had a hard cover of black leather on the back, there was no matching front cover. Examining the spine, he could just make out evidence of a very clean cut. Someone had neatly removed the front cover and first page.
They'd been willing to multilate such a treasure, but not destroy it? Strange priorities, Benjamin thought.
He lifted the book and examined the top edge. He could see that many of the pages were practically melted together with age. To open it at the wrong place would be to tear these pages, or perhaps rip them out of the binding. He would have to be very careful, indeed.
Very slowly, he lifted the first page of the book.
Benjamin's hands were trembling.
He lifted them, watched until the trembling stopped. Then he rose, went back to the podium in the front of the room, and reopened the cabinet. Inside was a large yellow legal pad and several pens. He took the pad and one of the pens and returned to the table.
He sat down and, checking the edge of the page, made sure it was one that could be turned without damage. It was. He turned the page and began to read.
Almost immediately he began making notes on the legal pad. When he was done, again he examined the page's edge, but this one was clearly sealed to the next one. He simply couldn't risk trying to separate them, and he discovered he had to turn to several pages farther on.
Working this way, reading a page or two, then forced to skip several that were inseparable, he continued to make notes. He filled one of the legal pad pages, then another.
And another.
CHAPTER 30
Benjamin sat across from Anton, the small oval coffee table in his second-floor study between them. Spread across the table were a dozen yellow sheets from the large legal pad, covered with notes in Benjamin's tidy, squarish printing-so similar, he realized, to his father's.
Benjamin sat slumped against the back of the overstuffed couch. Ever since he'd returned to Anton's from the library, he'd felt the desperate urge to simply collapse and fall asleep. But his mind was far too excited by what he'd discovered to allow him to do that. And, if he was to attend the reception that evening at the Russian Cultural Center, he needed, somehow, to stay awake.
So he was drinking yet another cup of coffee-or rather glass of coffee. Anton had handed him the tall, flat-bottomed glass set on a saucer, warning him it was "black as the Devil's heart." Benjamin could see a sludge of grounds in the bottom, but he'd tried it anyway, discovered he liked it. First strong scotch, now strong black coffee… What other risky tastes remain undiscovered? he wondered.
As far as his "tail" at the library, feeling rather proud of himself, Benjamin had explained to Anton how he'd ditched him. Exiting the library when he was finished with the diary, he'd gone straight to the tunnel that ran from the basement of the Jefferson Building, under Second Street, to the James Madison Memorial Building. The tunnel was only accessible to library staff, and he'd known his shadow would never gain entry without identification; probably didn't even know of its existence. Once outside the Madison building, he'd immediately caught a cab to Anton's row house in Georgetown.
"Anyway, it's all there," Benjamin said, waving toward the yellow pages. "That is, everything I could get from the undamaged pages of the diary. But I don't know how you're going to enter it into Dr. Fletcher's program."
Besides the coffee, Anton had brought Benjamin some cheese and bread, but Benjamin hadn't touched any of it. He was simply too tired, and too energized, simultaneously, to even think about food.
Anton began, "Jeremy Fletcher very smart guy. This," he pointed to the laptop, " Grandiozno. Genius. Words in, formula out. But explain to me what's here." He pointed to the notes Benjamin had made. "Maybe it make my job little easier."
"Well." Benjamin rubbed his eyes. "You have to understand, much of the diary was too fragile, or too illegible, to read. So I had to piece all this," he waved at the yellow pages, "together, fill in some gaps from what I already know about the period. And make some guesses, which might not-"
"Don't excuse," Anton said, "just say 'maybe.' "
Anton's impatience reminded Benjamin of when Wolfe would interrupt him when he got too "lecturey." He experienced another twinge of sadness over Wolfe's disappearance. He shook it off, realizing he'd have to save such feelings for later, when, hopefully, there would be time for them.
Where to begin? Probably, he thought, at the beginning.
"What you have to understand, Anton, is that the Puritans weren't all the same. As I explained to Samuel, there were sects, factions, rivalries."
"Is always so," said Anton. "Why Puritans any different?"
"Well, one of the strongest rivalries was between the strict Puritans and a group known as the Antinomians. My father had always assumed that Hessiah Bainbridge-Harlan's father-was part of this radical group, because, when Anne Hutchinson and the other Antinomians were banished from Massachusetts in 1638, Hessiah went with them to Rhode Island. And he took his young son and wife."
"Banished?" said Anton. "Sounds like Tsar times, with dissidents and Siberia. And why you say 'assumed'? Your father not right?"
"I'll get to that," Benjamin said. "Anyway, the stricter Puritans considered the Antinomians blasphemers because they believed that each individual was capable of receiving God's grace all by him or herself, without the 'guidance' of the Church fathers."
"Bad for monopoly," said Anton, smiling.
"Exactly. But there was another reason the Antinomians were banished. You see, Harlan's father had been one of the so-called Radicals calling for better relations with the Native Americans. His dream was to build a Prayer Town that could serve as a kind of cultural embassy, where the Natives could learn English and European customs-and of course religion. According to everything my father and other scholars knew about Hessiah Bainbridge, this dream was his driving passion.