More books were in the trunk, thicker volumes with dog-eared pages. Hume’s controversial Enquiry on the Principle of Morals. A tattered edition of Gulliver’s Travels, another of the essays of Berkeley, the great philosopher who had spent part of his life in the New World. Two collections of poetry, one in French. A volume on the flora and fauna of the Americas, which he spent several minutes perusing. Under the books lay three more of the wooden boxes Evering used for his collections. The first was filled with dried flowers, in small compartments made of stiff, interlocking sheets of wood. One of the compartments, labeled Thistle, was missing its specimen. The second box was nearly empty, its only occupied compartment containing the bones of a small mammal. One compartment of the third was untenanted, while the others were filled with lenses and faceted glass. As he lifted out the last box, he felt a thrill of discovery. At the very bottom lay Evering’s journal.
Duncan’s heart raced as he opened the worn leather binding. The first page bore a date nearly two years earlier, and all the early entries were long, dry descriptions of daily life in London. But then the following year’s entries turned into poems, or efforts at poems, for many lines were crossed out. The verses he could decipher were stiff and heavy, strangely filled with science-the musings of an intelligent, though not passionate, man, an empiricist who for some reason had begun to speak in verse. After twenty pages these verses stopped, replaced by a several pages of lines strangled with emotion, most of them crossed out. Evering’s wife had died abruptly, Duncan recalled, taken by a fever. There followed several pages more of cramped lines of poetry, some stained with what he guessed was wine. Several poems were about life aboard ship, with references to rigging like spider webs and sailors with lobster-claw hands and oyster-shell faces. Several more were about seabirds. The last half-dozen pages of writing were filled with verses about women, not typical of those before-romantic verses, sympathetic, soulful verses. Duncan would never have thought them from the same man had they had not been so obviously written in the same hand.
A beaver. He suddenly looked up at the doorway where Jonathan had disappeared. The boy had wanted prayers for the laughing man who had carved him a beaver. Duncan had known a joyful man who had carved a beaver into a mast. And Jonathan’s friend, too, needed prayers. Because he had gone to see a crooked man. Not a crooked man, Duncan recalled, but Old Crooked Face. But it was impossible the boy could have known Adam, let alone learn the news of Adam’s death so quickly.
Evering was on the desk in front of him, reduced to his essence. Duncan read the pages with the care he had learned in dissecting the dead, pausing over every word as if it were a symptom, gradually realizing all the recent poems were about not women but one woman. At first he thought they were reminiscences of Evering’s dead wife, for the awkward lines were heavy with tragedy. But then two unconnected verses, a quartet and a couplet, described the subject:
Is this a goddess or god’s own blunder
She who, waking, opens a door for us
I watch and weep, for how I wonder
Stay she so sad in the arms of Morpheus
then
Face so frail between long red tresses
Belongs to the land of sleeping princesses
Evering had watched his subject as she slept. Duncan read on. Evering had written about youth and age, about riches of gold and riches of the spirit, and how he thought the two incompatible. Throughout was a wrenching melancholy. The last lines he rested his eyes on were another couplet:
You claim all that beauty and wealth may yield
Yet silent sadness be the power you wield
Duncan found himself looking out the window, remembering the sick passenger, the nameless woman he had saved, the one Lister, too, had called a princess. So ill she had slept most of the time, Woolford had told him, usually watched over by Arnold, Woolford, Evering, and the captain’s wife. But she had awakened in the storm, alone, and risen from her troubling dreams to act out a new nightmare. He recalled the two ribbons hanging above Evering’s cot. He might have suspected a tragedy between lovers had Evering been younger. But in the poems Evering’s affection was not one of passion, but of worship for the woman with the long tresses. And she could have grown attached to a man who might seem like a father to her. Had she learned of Evering’s death, and been so stricken with grief she had wanted to die? Or, as Frasier insisted, had she been a witch who, once revived by Evering, had rewarded him with a hammer to the skull?
At the bottom of the penultimate page were notes for new compositions of a similar tone. With tiny cramped writing, no doubt to preserve his precious paper, Evering had written a series of disconnected words without punctuation. Lost, Duncan read, then heart and stony run, oak, then bones. He faltered at a word he could not fully decipher, written three times. Tastgua, it said, or Tashgua. It could have been Teshqua, Latin for wastelands-the kind of word Evering would use in his poems. At the end of the strange ciphers came two more words, written clearly though just as perplexing: King Hendrick.
He looked up, startled to see that without conscious thought he had lifted the black stone from his pocket onto the table. Lifting the book from the table, he studied the binding. The page after the last entry had been torn out, as had perhaps twenty pages at the back of the journal. The paper matched that which had been used for the prisoners’ letters. Evering had sacrificed his precious paper so the prisoners might write home. But only one page was taken from the end of the text. He examined the next page, a blank one, noticing tiny indentations-faint embossing from the nib that had been pressed on the missing page before it. Duncan lifted a quill from the desk and slipped into the empty kitchen, where he dabbed the feather against the soot on the wall of the huge fireplace.
Back at the desk, he stroked the feather lightly across the empty page, turning the indentations into words, or fragments of words, white against the black. They were more notes, disconnected phrases that the professor must have memorized then decided to destroy. The crow, the faint first words said, the crow will keep you alive. Duncan touched the medallion under his shirt. Adam had given Evering the crow before Duncan had taken it from the bloody compass. Show the fishspeaker, he read next, followed by unintelligible scratches. Keep McCallum from the army, he read with a chill. The remainder of the marks offered remnants he could not connect in any logical sequence. The ghostwalker at the ox wheel, he read, then below that, his tongue is in his heart.
He studied the poems another quarter hour, then he tore the last four pages of writing from the book and folded them into his pocket with the stone. Tossing his scholar’s cap onto the desk, he returned to the kitchen, found a small crockery bowl, filled it halfway with water from a bucket by the door, then carried the bowl back to the desk. Into it he dumped the contents of the cloth scrap Cameron had given him, the shards of glass from Evering’s cabin.
He roamed back through the quiet house into the dining room, hoping to read some of the American journals he had seen on the shelves. He halted at the entrance to the library as he saw that Sarah still stood at the portrait of the woman, tears streaming down her cheeks, one hand trembling again as the other clenched it. He stepped into the shadows and watched her, flushed with shame for doing so but unable to look away. Her hair was loosened, sweeping over her shoulders, and she had a feverish appearance. She raised her arms slowly, extending them from her sides as if she were trying to embrace the woman on the canvas, a strand of russet hair falling across a cheek as she did so.