The Glendower Legacy (20 page)

Listening intently they heard the crash of the surf, the hiss of the tires on the wet road, the groan of a foghorn somewhere offshore. The headlamps picked out sandy hillocks, gorse-covered, beaten down brown and hard by the winter and the spring storms. When the road threatened to lead them into the Atlantic it swung to the left, rounding a point of land’s end with rocks spraying down toward the beach and water to the right, large summer houses looming vaguely, dimly to the landward side.

A shielded bare lightbulb shone upwards against the weather-beaten sign announcing at the roadside, with an arrow pointing up the driveway, The Seafoam Inn. The gravel crunched underneath as he turned off the deserted highway.

She looked at him: “Well, we’re here …” She leaned forward to get a better view up the hill at the inn itself. Two windows shone, blurred yellow through the rain, like blind eyes, cataracts. A white porch stretched the length of the green-shingled building and turned the corner along the side with large windows behind the spokes and spindly gingerbread columns. It was clearly intended for summer habitation: like all the surrounding houses it was built on a shelf of rock that made underground pipes and whatnot impossible. “It reminds me of
Psycho,”
she said softly. “If Anthony Perkins answers the door …”

Chandler sucked in a deep breath and drove on up the driveway, pulling the car flush against a shelter of evergreens near the stairs to the porch. “Let’s go,” he said, and they bounded through the rain, up onto the porch with the rain drumming on the shingles overhead. The light over the door went on and the door opened, presenting a tall, white-haired, slender, and slightly stooped man wearing a beige cardigan over a plaid shirt.

“Professor Chandler, I presume,” he said. “I’m Percy Davis. You folks come on in, I’m mighty pleased to see you got here all right.” He gestured them inside, took their coats. “Heck of a night, heck of a night.” They found themselves in a warm lobby area with a desk backed by a switchboard that had a distinctly antique look, a bulletin board with notices from the previous summer, and a calendar from a local auto repair shop. There were some overstuffed chairs, a horsehair sofa, two glass-fronted bookcases, a set of stairs disappearing upwards, and the darkened restaurant which faced outward across the porch toward the ocean.

Chandler introduced Polly.

Percy Davis nodded laconically: “I recognized you right off, miss. You’re not exactly anonymous up this way.” He gave the observation a sad inflection as if anonymity was anyone’s most valuable possession. “You’re not workin’, are you?” His voice carried the autumnal rustle, the dryness Chandler remembered from the telephone. “I don’t want you comin’ in here with cameras, gettin’ me mixed up in all this …” He waggled a forefinger at Polly, shook his head. “A person’s got his privacy, that’s the law—”

“Never fear, Mr. Davis,” Polly said. “I’m here strictly as a friend.”

Percy Davis regarded her with squint-eyed doubt, hooked a thumb in the pocket of his sweater. He was expensively dressed but he hadn’t lost, or forsaken, what in Maine is usually referred to as flintiness.

“Well, maybe not just as a friend,” Polly clarified, retreating under the squint. “But there’s not a camera in sight, no microphones—”

“Well, young lady, see that none of them come poppin’ up from nowheres. Now let’s get to business, Professor. Come on out to the kitchen.”

They followed him through the dark restaurant with its bare tables and upturned wooden chairs, through a swing door past a pantry into a large, well-lighted, old-fashioned kitchen, vast and clean with real patterned linoleum on the floor and a wooden rack for dish towels and a rubber drying rack. It smelled of soap and coffee and one look told you that Percy Davis kept it spotless.

“You can’t live here year round,” Chandler said.

“Could, could if I was a mind to,” Percy said, rummaging in a cupboard. “But I’ve got more sense. I come out for a week at a time, use space heaters, keep the place spic and span. Ah, here it is, back behind the pots and pans …” Slowly and with nerve-racking care he slid the parcel out of the cupboard.

Chandler nodded at the parcel: “Thus, the macguffin.”

“Don’t be a smartass at a time like this,” she said under her breath. “This is it, for God’s sake … people have died for this, Colin …”

“Here it is, all right,” Davis said. “It was all wrapped up like this with another wrapper around it. I read you the letter from the late Mr. Underhill, here it is.” He handed the piece of closely written paper to Chandler. “Now, let’s adjourn to the library. I’ve got a nice fire going and it’s more comfortable.”

Realizing that Percy Davis was not a man to be hurried, Chandler fought off his impatience and followed Polly and the old codger back out through the restaurant and lobby into what must have been a sitting room fifty years ago but was now lined with a dozen unmatched bookcases obviously collected over the years from a dozen different estate sales. A coal fire blazed, crackled. Comfortable chairs were everywhere. Davis led the way to a cane-backed couch, sat down, and put the package on a low coffee table.

“It’s all yours, Professor. And welcome to it.”

Confronted with the moment itself, Chandler felt the fine sense of well-being slipping away. Even a blind pig, his grandfather had been fond of saying long ago, was bound occasionally to find an acorn. And here was his acorn. His fingers trembled as he began fumbling with the knotted string which crosshatched the brown-wrapped package which measured about eight inches square. Percy reached out with a bone-handled pocket knife, blade extended, looking at Chandler for approval. He nodded and the strings fell quickly away. Kneeling beside the low table, her hands balled into little fists of excitement, Polly held her breath. The grandfather clock ticked in one corner and the waves crashed on the rocks below the road and the rain lashed at the window, hissed coming down the chimney: the moment was frozen forever in his mind. He was no longer the Harvard professor, the expert, removed from events, insulated by the protective layer of two centuries … The past had risen like an adder in the dark and taken new victims, and now he held the past in his hands.

He peeled the paper away.

Revealed, in a thickish frame of plain oak, chipped in places and with a split along the grain here and there, was a small oil portrait of a woman. It had dried out over the years and the recent shuttling about had brought on some additional flaking, but there it was, a competent piece of work which struck Chandler rather oddly, almost as if he’d seen it before.

“My God, it’s just a woman’s face,” Polly whispered, angling toward Chandler to get a better view as he tilted it up. “Not the plans to blow up Boston or sack Harvard.”

Percy Davis stroked his chin: “If that isn’t the Davis mouth I miss my guess. Long time, two hundred years, but bloodlines will prevail.” He paused, then harrumphed: “Well, pardon me, but I don’t get it. Every two-bit museum and antique shop in New England’s got stuff like this …”

“Why kill people over this?” Polly leaned back and looked accusingly at the portrait: “What is it with you, lady … what gives?”

The woman in the frame stared impassively back at them: a middle-aged woman, though people looked older then—maybe she was only thirty or so. A severe face, good bones making it oval with a becoming wideness across her cheeks, dark brown eyes which were giving away no secrets, just a hint of humor in the curvature of the eyebrows, a mouth which looked made for genteel sarcasm. Her dress so far as it could be seen was beige and white with a cornflower-blue ribbon woven in at the bodice, just above the bottom of the frame. Her hair was dark brown, matching her eyes, drawn tightly back from her face, showing off a high, rather noble forehead. Percy was right: his mouth was a replica of hers.

She had been painted against a pale blue wall with a painting within the painting on the wall behind her, partially obscured by her hair. The conceit of the period presumably was intended to provide a clue to the subject’s personality: in this case, the painting within the painting depicted an all-purpose high-steepled New England church with parishioners standing about outside, horses obediently lounging by a white fence. A churchgoing woman, pillar of the community, well aware of right and wrong and God’s place in the universe.

“What’s the matter, Colin?” Polly had grown attuned to him, saw the curiosity behind his eyes.

“There’s something about this portrait—”

“Well, there’s an envelope here in the wrapping paper,” Percy said.

“I know what it is,” Chandler said softly, “I know what it is … and I know why it was me, only me, they were trying to get the painting to … this painting was done by Winthrop Chandler! Not a great figure in American art history but by God he makes the textbooks, barely, but he makes them. And he’s the only Chandler who made a mark in art—”

“He’s not—”

“Damn right, a bona fide ancestor of mine—”

“This is what always happens in these parts,” Percy said. “I’m descended from Davises up the whazoo and half the family will never let you forget it, horse thief or procurer or peddler, if he was a Davis we’ll claim the poor son of a bitch—”

“Well, Winthrop is one of our family,” Chandler noted a trifle testily while Polly smiled. “He was an itinerant portraitist from Woodstock in Connecticut, came to Boston to study painting painted houses, too, and tradesmen’s signs. Had to make a living. We figure he was in Boston all during the revolutionary war … And the man could paint a portrait, one of the best of his day. We’ve got five or six in the family, there’s a honey in Brookline at the Historical Association—anyway, Underhill knew I’d have a feeling for a Winthrop Chandler and he had an idea that this was one …”

“Is it?” Polly asked.

“I’d say it is, it’s got the style, even the colors he liked best. And I’m sure Underhill’s thinking went this way, if it’s a Chandler, Chandler’s the best man to authenticate it …”

“The letter,” Percy Davis said.

Chandler opened the envelope and unfolded the sheet of plain white typing paper, glanced at it for a moment.

“It’s not a letter,” he said. “It seems to be more of an explanation of how he found the painting. Here, we can all read it.” He flattened it on the table and they all leaned forward.

I found this old portrait in a trunk in the attic of my parents’ summer place in Chatham. I doubt if anyone had even opened the trunk in a hundred years, let alone gone through the not very interesting contents as I did. And never had anyone paid much attention to this old portrait of “Grandma,” as I call her—I think it’s easier just to call her that since no one seemed to have any idea who she was. When I found it I had been doing some outside reading for one of Professor Chandler’s courses and had somehow gotten into the art of the revolutionary period.

I handled the painting so much that one day I saw that the cloth backing had begun to come loose. So I finished the job. And that’s how I found what I’ve decided to call “The Glendower Legacy” which no doubt comes from reading too many thrillers. I’m not sure what it all means since it is open to so many possible interpretations, but I know damned well how important it could be.

When I’ve finished my own research I suppose Chandler and Nat Underhill will have to do some authentication and probably take over making my findings known. Chandler’s stature is such that any doubters will be disarmed before they begin. If what I’ve found is the real thing. And then, of course, it will no longer be my own little secret. I shall miss it.

“What
is
he talking about?” Polly said impatiently. “Or is this just building suspense? Is there anything besides the portrait?” She shuffled through the string and wrapping paper.

“Of course there is,” Chandler said. “Inside the backing of the frame, just where he found it. Percy, your knife, if you please.” Davis handed him the pocketknife and he slid the blade under the obviously new tape holding the cardboard backing against the frame. The backing was new, too, and tight against the wood. A few seconds later Polly was able to slide her hand under the felt. A tip of tongue protruding from between tight lips, she withdrew two more envelopes, new and yellow with metal clasps on the backs as if they were preserving pieces of evidence. One envelope was labeled in block capitals
WM. DAVIS’S LETTER.

The paper on which William Davis had written his letter two centuries before was thick and wrinkled and showed its age, but less so than it might have had it not been tucked safely behind the portrait. No one had ever seen it because no one had ever looked; the writing was somewhat faded but far less so than on many documents of the period. This one had never had to survive the light of day. It was dated
14 January 1778 Valley Forge …

To Whom It May Concern

I am desperate afraid and stricken with the awfullest terror. Last night I have seen the impossible here at Godforsaken Valley Forge and if I Die, as all my friends seem to be Dying, I cannot take what I have seen with my own eyes to my Grave. My belongings are few and this portrait of my dear Mother is all I have of value. It is, therefore, the most likely possession of mine to survive this terrible trial.

Yesternight I accidentally witnessed treachery the likes of which I could never have imagined in my worst Nightmares. We are Betrayed to the Redcoats, plain and simple. I do not rely on the evidence of my Eyes, which are not too reliable given our diet here and the rampaging Disease in this Hellhole. But I have a piece of Evidents, signed by the Traitor himself, acknowledging receipt of payment for his dastardly deeds and his new code Name, and the Evidents don’t lie, though my eyes might.

I cannot bring myself to write his name, this traitor—but I saw him in a clearing in the woods with his Masters when I was posted sentry. When they were interrupted by some of my fellows a fight broke out, men were dying, and I dashed into the clearing and took the piece of paper. Tho it tore in the process, as I discovered on my return to camp, it is Enough. But what dare I do with it? Where can I go for help? And what if I do not live to see the Spring? If I am found out, surely they will kill me. And Fate may carry me off anyway. I do not feel at all well as it is. I have no answers and must trust in the Lord to see me to Safe Harbor.

I will hide this in the back of the portrait of Mother and entrust it to my Friend John Higgins.

God Help Our Cause! And your servant, Wm. Davis,