“Damned if I know.”
The box he laid on the ancient dining table was wood, as well; a sizable casket made of maple, darkened by years, soot, and handling, but with the workmanship still apparent to her practiced eye. It was beautifully made, the joints perfectly dovetailed, with a sliding top—but the top didn’t slide, having been at some point sealed with a thick bead of what looked like melted beeswax, gone black with age.
The most striking thing about it, though, was the top. Burned into the wood was a name: Jeremiah Alexander Ian Fraser MacKenzie.
She felt a clenching in her lower belly at the sight of it, and glanced up at Roger, who was tense with some suppressed feeling; she could feel it vibrating through him.
“What?” she whispered. “Who is that?”
Roger shook his head, and pulled a filthy envelope from his pocket.
“This was with it, taped to the side. It’s the Reverend’s handwriting, one of the little notes he’d sometimes put with something to explain its significance, just in case. But I can’t say this is an explanation, exactly.”
The note was brief, stating merely that the box had come from a defunct banking house in Edinburgh. Instructions had been stored with the box, stating that it was not to be opened, save by the person whose name was inscribed thereon. The original instructions had perished, but were passed on verbally by the person from whom he obtained the box.
“And who was that?” she asked.
“No idea. Do you have a knife?”
“Do I have a knife,” she muttered, digging in the pocket of her jeans. “Do I ever not have a knife?”
“That was a rhetorical question,” he said, kissing her hand and taking the bright red Swiss Army knife she offered him.
The beeswax cracked and split away easily; the lid of the box, though, was unwilling to yield after so many years. It took both of them—one clutching the box, the other pushing and pulling on the lid—but finally, it came free with a small squealing noise.
The ghost of a scent floated out; something indistinguishable, but plantlike in origin.
“Mama,” she said involuntarily. Roger glanced at her, startled, but she gestured at him urgently to go on. He reached carefully into the box and removed its contents: a stack of letters, folded and sealed with wax, two books—and a small snake made of cherrywood, heavily polished by long handling.
She made a small, inarticulate sound and seized the top letter, pressing it so hard against her chest that the paper crackled and the wax seal split and fell away. The thick, soft paper, whose fibers showed the faint stains of what had once been flowers.
Tears were falling down her face, and Roger was saying something, but she didn’t attend the words, and the children were making an uproar upstairs, the builders were still arguing outside, and the only thing in the world she could see were the faded words on the page, written in a sprawling, difficult hand.
December 31, 1776
My dear daughter,
As you will see if ever you receive this, we are alive. . . .
EPILOGUE II
THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
WHAT’S THIS, THEN?” Amos Crupp squinted at the page laid out in the bed of the press, reading it backward with the ease of long experience.
“It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire . . . Where’d that come from?”
“Note from a subscriber,” said Sampson, his new printer’s devil, shrugging as he inked the plate. “Good for a bit of filler, there, I thought; General Washington’s address to the troops run short of the page.”
“Hmph. I s’pose. Very old news, though,” Crupp said, glancing at the date. “January?”
“Well, no,” the devil admitted, heaving down on the lever that lowered the page onto the plate of inked type. The press sprang up again, the letters wet and black on the paper, and he picked the sheet off with nimble fingertips, hanging it up to dry. “’Twas December, by the notice. But I’d set the page in Baskerville twelve-point, and the slugs for November and December are missing in that font. Not room to do it in separate letters, and not worth the labor to reset the whole page.”
“To be sure,” said Amos, losing interest in the matter, as he perused the last paragraphs of Washington’s speech. “Scarcely signifies, anyway. After all, they’re all dead, aren’t they?”