Back Bay (24 page)

She didn’t know whether to laugh or call for Wilson. She detected no change in voice or expression, and his shadow did not move from the window. She decided that any reaction was worse than none.

Pratt flipped open the copy of
Paradise Lost
on the table beside him. He read the blank verse with a powerful voice. “ ‘Satan with thoughts inflam’d of highest design,/Puts on swift wings, and toward the Gates of Hell/Explores his solitary flight; sometimes/He scours the right-hand coast, sometimes the left,/Now shaves with level wing the Deep, then soars/Up to the fiery concave tow’ring high./As when far off at Sea a Fleet descri’d/Hangs in the clouds, by Equinoctial Winds/Close sailing from Bengala or the Isles/Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring/Their spicy drugs: they on the trading Flood/Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape/Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole. So seem’d/Far off the flying Fiend.’ ”

Pratt closed the book. “Milton compares Satan to a merchant shipper, and this merchant shipper sees himself in Milton’s Satan.”

“It’s only a poem, Father.”

“It carries truth, Abigail. I am Satan. I am proud, acquisitive, vengeful. I answer to no one, and I have fought every day of my life to advance my own interests against the Molochs, Belials, and Mammons of my world, against the Appletons, Cabots, and Perkinses who have been my competitors for forty years. I have gloated when I won. I have schemed revenge when I lost.”

He stepped away from the windows and put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “And I have led my innocent children into sin, as Satan led Adam and Eve.”

“You have given us nothing but love.” Abigail threw her arms around him and held tightly, like a mother comforting her child.

Gently, he pulled away. “I doubt that Franconia would agree with you. I invested her husband and son with the same drives that infect me, and they’re both dead.”

“My brother was lost at sea, and so was my husband,” blurted Abigail. “It is in the nature of men to endanger themselves in the pursuit of riches.”

“And apparently, it is the nature of grandfathers to endanger their grandsons, if it be profitable.” Pratt’s voice was losing its strength.

Abigail stepped back slowly. “Then the boy was not trapping crabs when he slipped into the channel and took cramp?”

“Blueclaws have not been found in that area since I was a boy,” said Pratt softly. “I devised that story to protect the real purpose of our nightly trips to Gravelly Point.”

Instinctively, Abigail sat down on the edge of the bed.

Slowly, softly, Pratt unraveled the story of the tea set, from its presentation in 1789 until young Horace’s death. When he finished, Abigail did not move or speak for several minutes. She simply stared at her father’s face, which now seemed serene, composed.

She stood slowly and walked to the fireplace at the end of the bedroom. A model of the
Alicia Howell
, made for Pratt by the shipbuilder himself, rested on the mantelpiece. The large mirror hanging above it reflected the length of the room and the dark figure at the other end.

“I cannot believe,” she said, just loudly enough for his reflection to hear, “that one of the most important merchants in America, one of the lions of the China trade, one of the symbols of Federalist opposition in Massachusetts, would indulge himself in such a scheme and involve his grandson, as well.”

“Satan must follow his nature, Abigail. I must answer my instinct to survive.”

“By stealing a national treasure?”

“The nation and its leaders wronged me, Abigail. They wronged every merchant in Massachusetts. Satan is vengeful. I sought revenge.” He stated his position as though it required no further explanation.

She could not argue with such logic. “Where is the treasure now?” she asked weakly.

“Still sunk deep in the mud of the Back Bay. This morning, I rowed out with Wilson. We saw it there, where we left it forty days ago. I thought someone would have noticed it by now, but the
water is murky, and the currents have covered it with a thin coating of silt. I am pleased that no one has found it.”

“No!” She turned on him. Out of pity, she had restrained her anger for weeks. Now it poured out of her. “You will not go out there again. You have no more grandsons to waste. Use the business brain that made you a rich and respected man. Save your company before your son destroys it. For the sake of us all, leave that strongbox where it is and return—”

He raised his hand to silence her. “Save yourself, Abigail. I agree with you. The tea set will remain where it is.”

“You’ve been lying to me for months. Why should I believe you now?”

“Other than Wilson, you are the only person alive who knows the story.”

Abigail turned back to the mirror. She replaced a few strands of hair and composed herself. “I have your solemn word on this matter?”

“I am returning to my office to confront our problems.” He paused to separate his thoughts. “And I am making you the custodian of our family secret.”

“It is a secret better forgotten.”

Pratt’s black eyes flashed fire, and he advanced on his daughter. She watched him walk toward her, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see his reflection growing in the mirror. When he stood beside her, he surrounded her.

“Would you forget twenty thousand dollars? Twenty that will one day be a hundred, then two, then a million?”

“We will all be long dead before anything made by Paul Revere is worth a million dollars.” She could not help but sound cynical.

“But our children will live on.”

“I am a childless widow. I am now the sister-in-law of a childless widow.”

“You are also a Pratt!” he exploded. “You have a duty to your blood. You have a responsibility to the ages.”

“Rubbage.” She tried to walk away, but he blocked her path with his arm.

He spoke softly now, but his voice was strung tight, like a mainsail shroud in a stiff breeze. “I have led my children into sin. I have led them to death. But I leave them a promise of redemption. I
leave it in your hands.” He pulled a large envelope from his breast pocket. “Contained herein are quotes from
Paradise Lost
. Studied carefully, they will reveal the exact nature and location of the treasure.” He held out the envelope.

She didn’t want it. She did not want to partake of the madness she saw in his eyes. But she did not wish to upset him further. She had no choice. She took the envelope and started to open it.

He snatched it back. “It is not to be opened until you deem it absolutely necessary. You may never need to open it.”

“What harm can there be in reading your little puzzles?”

“They are not puzzles. They are the promise of Christ.” His face flushed, and he fanned himself with the envelope.

“Your apoplexy, Father.”

“Damn my apoplexy.” He crossed the room and sat down. After a moment to catch his breath, he spoke. “You may open the envelope and read the quotes, but no one else is to see them until after I am dead. Perhaps no one will see them until after you are dead, until after Artemus and Elihu and their children are dead, until well into the twentieth century.” He gazed out the window for a moment, as though he were trying to imagine what his hillside would look like in a hundred years.

“If I am to be the custodian of your wishes, a duty I do not happily accept, you must explain yourself fully. Why are these lines to remain secret?”

He looked at her like a minister lecturing in Sunday School. “Because, Abigail, redemption is earned only through suffering. If we never face a crisis that threatens to destroy us, we will have no need for the Golden Eagle, and we will have no right to it. But it is there, always.”

She waited, expecting more, but he was finished. He had spent so long with his new beliefs that he felt no further explanation was necessary. He gazed out at the garden again.

She crossed the room and stood in front of him. She would end this foolishness right now. “Why is it there always?”

“Dammit, girl!” Pratt slammed his hand on the arm of the chair and leaped to his feet. “I raised you to be as smart as your brothers. Why must you be so damn obtuse? The tea set is our second chance. Pray God that we never need it. But if He decides that the
death of my son and my grandson is not enough payment for my transgressions, if He decides to visit the sins of the father upon future generations, He has at least left us the promise that His Son brings to all mankind. If He takes our fortune, He leaves us hidden treasure upon which to build again. If He rends us with familial strife, He leaves us the quotations. Distributed one each to disputing brothers or cousins, the quotations will bring us together again.”

“In greed to find the tea set.”

“Do not be disrespectful.”

“I am simply being truthful.”

Pratt approached his daughter and put his hand on her shoulder. “Abigail, we are living an allegory. Birth, death, resurrection. But within our story, everything has two faces, dual meanings, and it is up to us to find the face of goodness and hope. I am Satan, but I am also God the Father, who has given his grandson for future generations. The tea set is the symbol of my greatest sin, my greed, but it is also the promise of resurrection, bought by my grandson with his life. My descendants are mankind. They will be good and bad. We must always hope that they will build their fortunes by God’s light, but we must be ready to forgive them if they fail.”

Abigail knew now that her father was mad. “Why have you made me the guardian of this secret?”

“Because you are the most trustworthy of my descendants, and you are a woman. You will never be plunged into the maelstrom of business life. You will always be apart from our worldly struggles and able to judge our needs in detachment.”

“When you die, Father, I shall take active control of the stock you leave me. I do not intend to shrink away from the world.”

“To that, I have two responses. First, I do not plan to die for many years. There is too much undone. Second, the thirty percent I have promised you is the thirty percent you will get. I am giving young Horace’s share to Jason. I will settle any disputes between you and your brother before they start. I will teach Jason all that I can, and when I die, he will take my place at the head of the company. He is, after all, my son.”

“And I am your daughter.” Abigail felt the rage welling from deep within her. He wanted her to exchange her fair piece of Pratt Shipping and Mercantile for an envelope of worthless quotations. She refused. “I am entitled to the same privileges as my brother. I will not settle for less.”

“You are entitled to what I give you. Jason has produced two heirs. You have none. The responsibility I have given to you is as great as any I give my son.” He forced the envelope into her hand and headed for the door.

“Father!”

He kept walking. “I’m late for work. My final word has been given. Reject that envelope and you reject me.”

Abigail marched back to the fireplace. She looked at the coals still glowing on the grate. She looked at the envelope.

I
n earlier days, suicide was considered a sin. No such stigma attaches itself to Christopher Carrington. In a moment of black despair, he lost control of the precision instrument that is the human mind, and he decided to escape the problems which so brutally oppressed him. In the eyes of God and man, he is blameless.”

Suicides make for difficult eulogies, but Father Henry Henison had been a friend of the Pratt family for years, and he did his best to comfort them. The funeral was held at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in the Back Bay, two days after the discovery of Carrington’s body.

Evangeline Carrington sat in the first pew, her mother and stepfather to her left, her grandmother to her right. She had seen her brother seldom in the last few months; they had little in common beyond their name. But she found it difficult to believe that he would kill himself. He was too full of the sense of his own importance, and he enjoyed life too much.

However, the police investigation had revealed no evidence of homicide, and when she had last seen him, she had sensed that something was deeply wrong. He had told her that he was sick of his work and disillusioned with his uncles’ efforts to retain control of Pratt Industries. She had suggested to him that he quit. He had refused; he was a member of the family company, and he would not desert.

Now he was dead. The stupid sense of family pride and loyalty,
which had been hanging around the family neck for two hundred years, had killed him. When he could no longer help the corporation, when he could no longer do the things that Pratts and Carringtons had always done against their business adversaries, he had committed suicide.

After their father’s death, their mother had shielded Evangeline and Christopher from the realities of life. She had protected them and overprotected them. She had never prepared them for failure or tragedy. Now, Evangeline had retreated into a world of plants and tranquillity; Christopher had taken his life.