Will was at work in his office, coatless with shirtsleeves rolled, writing one of the editorials about the abduction of Dirck Staats that would bring him national attention. He finished writing on a page of foolscap, tossed it into a box marked “copy,” and then he saw me, his face registering genuine surprise.
“Back so soon?” he said.
I told him straightaway of being put off the canalboat.
“Who would do such a thing?”
“It must have been John the Brawn.”
“The man’s a villain.”
“I think I will have trouble forgiving him.”
“And I as well,” said Will. “But more important than that is what do we do with you? If you want to peddle the Chronicle you’re welcome to live with our other orphan newsboys on the third floor,” and his finger pointed to the ceiling.
“That would be good,” I said, and already I felt rescued. “But I think I am interested in a life of the mind. Would I get that as a newsboy?”
“A life of the mind?” said Will, much amused. “In that case we’d better make a reporter of you.”
“On what would I report?”
“On the nature of things,” said Will. “Does that seem a fit subject?”
“On the nature of what things?”
“All things.”
“It sounds a bit more than I can handle.”
“Nonsense. Before you know it you’ll be as expert on everything under the sun as all the other reporters in this world.”
“When shall I begin?”
“Now is as good a time as any. Do you have something in mind to report on?”
“I could report on my platter,” I said, and I fished in my sack for it and told Will my story. I’ve recounted his response about the potatoes, but I was thinking of my parents’ stories about bad times in Ireland, and of the presence on their table of very small potatoes, when there were any potatoes at all, while Will, I suspect, had the superabundance of the American potato in mind. Will stroked the platter with his fingertips. “It seems to be bronze,” he said. “Very old, and very handsome at that. Did your parents get it in Ireland?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “Except for Albany that’s the only place they ever lived.”
“It’s possible this is the work of the Vikings, or even the Romans. In any case I suspect it’s worth considerable money.”
“Is bronze worth money?”
“When it’s shaped this way it is.”
“Who would buy an old platter?”
“A museum curator, or someone who values relics from another age.”
“My parents wouldn’t want me to sell it. They said it would take care of me.”
“Yes,” said Will, smiling one of his patient smiles of forbearance in the face of idiocy. “But I suggest that money may be a way in which one is taken care of.”
“Then why didn’t my parents sell it themselves? They never had any money.”
“A good question,” said Will, a bit vexed, “and one you must answer for yourself. Rest easy, Daniel. We’ll not sell your relic against your will. But you must protect it. You can’t carry it around in that sack.”
“I could bury it again.”
“There are tidier ways to protect things,” said Will. “For the moment you may put it in our safe, if you find that agreeable.”
“Very agreeable,” I said. “But I think I would not want to live upstairs. I’ve lived with orphans on the canal, and they stole from me and fought over everything. I’d rather live with Mrs. Staats, if it’s all the same to you.”
“It’s all the same to me,” said Will, amused again, “but I can’t say how it will sit with Mrs. Staats.”
“I’d work for my keep,” I said.
“Work for me and work for your keep both?” said Will.
“I don’t need much sleep,” I said.
Will forbore, then said he’d take me to see Hillegond. He put my platter in his safe, told me to stop calling it a platter, then gave me a file of Chronicles to read while he finished his work. He pointed out what he and others had written about Dirck. “If you are going to live with Mrs. Staats,” he said, “you had better understand what is happening to her son.”
Dirck’s abduction appeared under Local Events at first mention in Will’s newspaper, written straightforwardly, not unlike the way I have already recounted it. But Will also took the liberty of charging the sheriff with provocative behavior, said he intended to follow the case with intensive fidelity to the facts and would pursue “the deeper darkness that lies beyond this black deed.” He also said Dirck never reached Utica, that his arrest was a fraud, and that Aaron Plum was a felon thrice-accused (always for grievous assault with a weapon), after which Plum became a wanted man. The sheriff was relieved of his duties but charged with no crimes, and vanished from his home. In all, the case of Dirck Staats overnight became synonymous with violence, collusion, and mystery.
Will did not, at first, write of Dirck’s secret ledgers, though they loomed large; and I began to understand the power of the word to transform this simple abduction of a man into an event that alters the trajectory of history’s arrow. I asked Will about Dirck’s book and when he would publish it.
“I would publish it tomorrow,” he said, “but no one can read it without the key to Dirck’s code, and we haven’t yet found that.”
The search for the code had been ongoing at the newspaper, also among Dirck’s friends, in the places he frequented, in the rooms he kept, and at the mansion. Nothing had turned up.
I ended my reading when Will appeared in coat and hat, saying it was time to visit Hillegond, and on the street he hailed a passing carriage. I anticipated the mansion with excitement and affection, as if I were going home, the complacent impoverishment of my former self now thoroughly transformed by the vision of luxury.
As we rode up the gravel driveway I thought that the house’s splendor was probably unmatched in this world, and though I have since seen greater monuments, such as Versailles and the Alhambra, I have not changed my mind about the Staats house’s singular beauty, or its wondrously eclectic sprawl.
Capricorn answered our knock, told us Hillegond was with a visitor in the east parlor, then announced us to her. Out she came, devoid of the bright colors that were her style, and wrapped instead in a slate-colored dress and black lace shawl, her uniform of mourning for lost kin. Her face was a mask of gravity, but she brightened when she saw me, and she hugged me.
“Master Daniel,” she said, and smothered me in her abundantly dark bosom. “Why are you here, and where are the others?”
“Gone,” I said. “John the Brawn put me off the canalboat while I slept, and I walked back to Albany.”
“A dreadful deed,” said Hillegond, but I knew she was of two minds about John and his deeds.
“The boy wants to stay here with you,” Will said.
“Well, he surely can,” said Hillegond, and my future exploded with rainbows. Only hours out of my family’s tumbledown house of death, now I was to become a dweller in this grand villa of life.
“You’re both just in time to see me magnetized,” Hillegond said with a verve that reversed her bleak mood. “It’s a very daring thing to do.”
She led us into the parlor and I saw that Dirck’s two portraits, face out, were draped with bright red ribbon — red the color of protection in Hillegond’s spiritual spectrum. A man in his thirties, wearing a hemisphere of whiskers along his total jawline, the rest of his face clean-shaven, rose to greet us.
“And this is Maximilian Schiffer,” said Hillegond. “He’s a wonderful animal magnetist. He’s helping me to find Dirck.”