Back Bay (45 page)

They reached Commonwealth Avenue a few feet ahead of the rising tide. Abigail was supporting most of Sean’s weight, and his cries of pain were echoing back at her off the twenty-foot landfill. She tried not to hear. She was exhausted, but she needed one more burst of strength. She felt Sean’s body going limp.

She shook him. “No, Sean. You can’t give up. Just a little farther.”

Somehow, she dragged him up the cart path to the top of the landfill. Commonwealth Avenue stretched out before them, and the carriage was just a few feet away. But Sean couldn’t make it. He sank to his knees.

“Just a little further, Sean.” Her voice became frantic. “Please!”

He fell forward on his elbows.

“Don’t stop, Sean. You’re so close.” She knelt beside him. “Please, dear.”

His eyes were unfocused. He was moaning rhythmically. He didn’t seem to hear her. She rolled him over and cradled his head in her lap.

“I’m cold.”

Abigail was helpless. The tears rolled down her cheeks.

“So cold,” he said. “So cold.”

She had to save him. She tried to lift him. “If we can just get you to the carriage, we can get you to a doctor, Sean. Please.”

“Make me warm.” Sean took her hand.

“Oh, Sean.” Abigail buried her face against his neck. “I’m so sorry, Sean. I’m so sorry.”

His moans became screams.

“I never meant to use you. I never meant to hurt you. Never.”

The screams subsided. He was losing strength quickly.

“If you’d been born in Boston, or me in Ireland. If I’d been younger. Oh, God, if I hadn’t been a Pratt…”

His hand clenched tight around hers.

“I love you, Sean.” She kissed him. She knew he was going. She screamed, so that he would hear her once more, “I love you.”

“Abigail.” The word whispered out of him.

Sean Mannion was waked in the upstairs parlor of his son’s bowfront on Lenox Street. Abigail offered her home on Tremont Row—it was Sean’s home, after all—but Joseph Mannion preferred that his father’s body be waked in the home where his grandchildren would grow.

Lillian Mannion, heavy with age and distraught with grief, sat beside the coffin. Abigail Pratt Bentley, in dress as black as the widow’s, sat beside her. Mannion friends and family, the Pratts, and the few readers who still remembered the obscure Irish poet came to pay their respects. Even young Philip Cawley journeyed back from Worcester and said goodbye to the only man in the Pratt household he had ever liked.

Some of those who did not know Sean’s wife offered their condolences to Abigail by mistake. Lillian was not offended. She considered Abigail a kindly employer and a faithful friend. She did not know that Abigail and her husband had been lovers before she met him. Nor did she know the truth about her husband’s death.

Only Artemus knew that Sean Mannion had died protecting the Golden Eagle Tea Set, and Artemus would protect the secret, because he did not care to acknowledge that the tea set existed. He still believed that dreaming of treasure was a frivolous pursuit, something for old women, Irishmen, and hapless businessmen like his father. He wanted his children and grandchildren to learn that they would achieve nothing except through hard work.

Abigail paid for the funeral and made a contribution in Sean’s
memory to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the church where the Mannions had worshiped for forty years. She also enlisted Samuel Blossom, one of the Boston’s leading silversmiths, to fashion a silver crucifix for Sean’s coffin. Abigail was among Blossom’s best customers, and he worked quickly. By the second day of the wake, an eight-inch crucifix, with the figure of Christ engraved into the silver, rested on the pillow beside Sean’s head.

On the morning of the funeral, Joseph, Lillian, and Abigail stood beside the coffin as it was closed for the last time. Abigail took the crucifix and pressed it into Lillian’s hand. “Take this and always cherish it, dear. I loved your husband. Like a brother. I shall never forget him.” She looked at Joseph. “And I shall never forget the Mannions.”

Joseph smiled tenderly. He was rock-solid in every sense: built like one of his brick walls, good husband, father of two, and a respected member of the community. “There’s nothing you could do for us that you haven’t done already, Aunt Abigail.”

“Your father gave his life to protect me from thieves, Joey. Before I die, I will give something to his children that will show the depth of my gratitude. I promise you.”

A year and a half later, with the Union secure and Artemus Pratt’s two sons returned from the war, building began on the Back Bay mansion. In the spring of 1866, the Pratts moved into one of the finest homes in Boston, five stories of red sandstone, with high windows, mansard roof, and the most beautiful woodwork, brass, and marble that money could buy. The first floor, with the music room, receiving room, and dining room, was for formal entertaining. The Pratts spent most of their leisure time on the second floor, in the bright parlor, in Mrs. Pratt’s withdrawing room, decorated in the latest Parisian furnishings, in a smoking room for the gentlemen, where they played billiards on a fine slate table, or in a library as well stocked as the Atheneum. The family slept on the third and fourth floors, and the servants had rooms on the fifth. The kitchen, service rooms, and wine cellar were in the basement, the carriage house in the alley. The era of gracious living had begun.

Abigail’s bedroom and sitting room were on the fourth floor.
From her windows overlooking Commonwealth Avenue, she could watch the filling of the Back Bay and the march of the Pratts across the nineteenth century, a parade as sweeping, in its own way, as Sherman’s March to the Sea.

The Civil War had proved enormously profitable for Pratt Shipping, Mining, and Manufacturing, and Artemus plowed most of the profits back into railroads, shipping, and the mass production of clothing. But, as he said later, one of the best investments of his life was one he didn’t make.

Just after the war, Artemus Pratt had been offered a chance to invest in Crédit Mobilier of America. An offshoot of the Union Pacific Railroad, Crédit Mobilier was to be the Union Pacific’s construction contractor during the building of the transcontinental line. Pratt was attracted, but, like his grandfather and father, he had grown conservative as he grew older, preferring to protect what he had built rather than risk the future in an undertaking so enormous. For one of the few times in his life, he did not invest in a railroad when he had the opportunity.

Three years later, the scandal broke. Crédit Mobilier had inflated its contracts to Union Pacific so that both companies could secure government bonds and clear huge profits. To aid their cause with the government, promoters of Crédit Mobilier had enticed Congressmen, Senators, and the Speaker of the House with shares of their profitable stock. When the investigations began, Union Pacific stock tumbled, Crédit Mobilier went into receivership, and Artemus Pratt congratulated his own good sense.

Artemus also had the good sense to listen whenever Abigail discussed business, and he was often rewarded.

Occasionally, Abigail took tea with Louis Agassiz, Harvard’s famous naturalist. One afternoon, he told her about his son’s recent discoveries at the Calumet Copper Mine in Michigan. Abigail told Artemus, who invested heavily in Calumet and Hecla. A few years later, his stock was returning dividends of a quarter million dollars a year. The Pratts entered their Gilded Age.

Artemus II, who ended the Civil War as a lieutenant colonel, returned to Boston and stepped into the position vacated by his uncle Elihu, who had retired after the death of his son and now traveled the world as an ambassador for Pratt interests. Artemus
II possessed all of his father’s intelligence and toughness but leavened it with his mother’s warmth of personality. Wounded three times and decorated after Gettysburg, he took to the battles of Boston business with the same enthusiasm he had showed leading his first charge at the Battle of Fair Oaks.

Artemus and Abigail were thrilled by his performance, because he assured the continuity of Pratt leadership in the Pratt company. They were further pleased by his choice of spouse. Artemus II married Lydia Hancock Lowell, distant cousin from another first family. As Boston riches grew and Boston money helped expand the continent, Boston society became increasingly insular.

But, as Abigail wrote in her diary, “That merely assures that the right blood is running in the right veins.”

Artemus’s oldest child, Sarah, married James Hannaford, a descendant of Horace Pratt’s closest English associate. Jason, the doctor, completed his medical studies, became the first Pratt to serve on the board of directors at Massachusetts General Hospital, and later retired to teach at Harvard Medical School. He married a Shaw. Olivia, Artemus’s younger daughter, fell in love with the son of a Central Pacific Railroad magnate and moved to San Francisco. Henry, the youngest son, joined a Boston law firm after four years of Harvard and two years of yachting, polo playing, drinking, and womanizing which his father called dissipation and Henry called the gentlemanly pursuit of leisure.

Despite the Calvinist roots from which they sprang and the strict regimen to which Artemus Sr. adhered, the Pratts were learning to enjoy their money. In winter, there were dinner parties and soirées, highlighted by the Pratt Winter Ball on Washington’s Birthday, which also happened to be the birthday of Horace Taylor Pratt. In spring, the Pratts strolled in the Public Garden and played polo on the grassy fields north of the city. In summer, the Back Bay house was closed and the Pratts went to Searidge, where they sailed, fished, and enjoyed the salubrious salt air. Autumn brought the family back to Boston, back to the business, the dinner parties, the recitals, the afternoon teas.

Abigail had lived to see the prosperity she had helped to ensure, and she saw the Golden Eagle Tea Set buried beneath the city of Boston. By 1871, two new streets, Dartmouth and Exeter, crossed
the Commonwealth Avenue axis, and two more were being filled. Abigail could walk to the spot where the tea set lay buried. Each day, she and Lillian Mannion, her personal maid and closest companion, would stroll the Back Bay, past the beautiful new homes and churches, past the shade trees just beginning to grow, to the spot where the tea set lay buried. Abigail would always linger for a while, talk with Lillian about the wonderful future that neither of them would see, then head home.

In April of 1874, Lillian Mannion died, and Abigail commissioned Samuel Blossom to fashion another silver crucifix for another coffin. At the wake, Abigail took Joseph aside and promised him, once more, that she would find a way to express her love for his parents. Joseph smiled and told her that she had already showed the Mannions her love and generosity.

In the next several months, Abigail began to fail. She suffered two heart attacks just before her eighty-fourth birthday, but she would not stay in bed longer than a few days. She said she could not rest until her business had been completed. When she was not sick, she walked almost every day past the site of the church being built above the tea set.

The workmen often wondered about the strange old woman who always greeted them cheerfully and always had a question or two about their work. How deep was the basement? What were the length-by-width measurements? How thick were the outer walls? How deep were the pilings? Was there any chance that the church would settle into the landfill? On several occasions, they saw her pace off the distance from the corner of the building to the spot near the entrance, as though she were taking measurements of her own. Each afternoon, she would go home, record the measurements and other information she had collected, and sit down to hunt through
Paradise Lost
.

In October, she sent for Joseph Mannion again. They chatted for a while about Joseph’s family, then she announced that she was going to fulfill her promise to him. First, she made him vow that he would not misuse her gift, give it away, or divulge to anyone except his most trusted child the information she was about to bestow. He agreed, and she presented him with a silver chalice. It
was crafted by Samuel Blossom, engraved with three scenes from the Passion of Christ and a single line from
Paradise Lost
. Abigail had chosen a chalice to convey her message because she knew that a Catholic family would cherish it.

“This is my gift to you, Joseph. Protect it. Never let it out of your house. And leave it to your most trusted child when you die. If ever you find yourself in financial straits which you cannot negotiate, if ever you are desperate, bring this chalice to the senior member of my family, and he will help you through your difficulty as though you were one of his own.”

“I’ll be needing no help, Aunt Abigail,” he said softly.

“You may, Joey. You may. And if ever a member of my family requests the cup from you, surrender it.”

Joseph smiled. He liked Abigail, but he had always considered her a bit eccentric. “I never say no to my Aunt Abigail.”

“One other thing, Joey. I’m leaving you five thousand dollars.”

He had been hoping for that. He flashed his Mannion grin, then stood and kissed her on the forehead. “You’ve always been too kind to us.”

“I can never be too kind to Sean Mannion’s son.”

Her hand was not as steady as it had been, but her mind was still clear and she wrote daily in her diary. She sometimes wondered why she wrote. She never read back over the years, and she knew now that she would never have the chance. Like so much in her life, filling the diary had become an act of self-preservation. Someday, someone would read her journal and know Abigail Pratt Bentley.