I willingly took myself off to the kitchen and boiled water in the electric kettle. I selected two large mugs, poured the sweet, spicy, aromatic masala chai into Arya’s ceramic black-and-white teapot, added water, and waited for two minutes to allow the chai time to brew. When it was ready, I poured it and added milk. Masala chai is another detail from home and from Arya’s house that has always stayed with me: the perfect end to any Indian meal, its gentle vapors calm the stomach and ease the last remains of the fiery peppers out of the sinuses. When I returned to the dining room, Arya was engrossed in my copy of Isabel Hardwick’s document. She had pushed some dishes aside and laid the pages out together under the pewter chandelier above the table. I didn’t interrupt. I left her chai a safe distance from her right hand and sat down opposite her to wait.
She didn’t seem to move a muscle for two or three minutes. Then she looked up and took her mug of chai in both hands, almost as if she was using it to keep warm.
‘Kiah, you copied this exactly as written, right?’
‘Yes. We all made an exact copy – Sam, Arlene, Powalski and me.’
‘But exactly as written?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the original is where?’
‘Sam has it. Aunt Meg gave it to her. It’s hers now.’
Arya nodded. ‘Would it be all right if I hold on to your copy for a day or two?’
‘No problem. Do you…?’
I suddenly stood and made my way around the table.
‘Arya, I know that look. You’ve seen something, haven’t you? What have you seen?’
She smiled. ‘I’m not sure yet. Don’t get excited. It may be nothing at all.’
‘But –’
‘There are one or two things about the way she writes that I find… interesting, and I’d like to follow them up.’
‘You’re seeing something, aren’t you?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. Tell me, you’ve read this document how often? Quite a number of times by now, haven’t you?’
‘I’ve lost count of how many times.’
‘Don’t you think there’s something curious about the way she writes certain things?’
I stared at the sheets of paper again, but nothing was jumping out at me. In all honesty, by then, I didn’t expect it. I guess I’d read it too often, and was too familiar with it, and with the pressure I’d put myself under to come up with something, I’d stopped using my critical faculties. At times I felt stupid, and sometimes it seemed that the sheets of paper in front of me were mocking me. It was not a good frame of mind in which to stand back and take another hard look.
‘You’re going to have to show me,’ I admitted.
‘Sit down here, beside me,’ she said. She pulled the sheets closer to us.
‘Look at this. There are three events she writes about for which she gives us not only the date, but also the place and the time. The first is her own birth: “I was born Isabel Johnstone on the fourth day of June in the year 1788, in the early evening, less than an hour after the sun had set, to Ezra and Mary Johnstone of Upper Merion Township in the State of Pennsylvania.”’
I nodded. ‘OK.’
‘Then there’s the way she talks about her writing of the document itself: “I, Isabel Hardwick, being the wife of James Hardwick of Upper Merion Township in the State of Pennsylvania, being of sufficient age and of sound mind, have taken up my pen at ten o’clock in the forenoon, on this third day of December in the Year of our Lord 1813, and desire thereby to record the matters following.’’’
She ran her finger over the pages until she found the place she wanted.
‘Then, lastly, the occasion when she handed over the two-and-twenty papers to Jacob’s Brother, capital B. Oh, and while I’m focusing on that: the capital B is in the original, right? You said you copied it exactly.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I remember that specifically.’
‘The word is used twice and it’s capitalised both times.’
‘Yes.’
‘All right. Good. So, this is what she says about it: “I agreed to perform the task he had asked of me, and delivered the said papers to his Brother in Philadelphia at eleven o’clock in the forenoon on the fourth day of September in the Year of our Lord 1810.’’’
She paused.
‘You don’t think that’s curious?’ she asked, when I didn’t respond immediately.
‘Is it?’
‘Kiah, she was making a record of important events, so you can understand her giving us the dates; and maybe the place was important in the case of delivering the two-and-twenty papers to the Brother, maybe it’s important for us to know that she took them to him in Philadelphia. But why does it matter where she was when she wrote the document, or what time she took up her pen? Why does it matter where she was born, and at what time?’
I nodded. ‘That’s a good question.’
‘I mean, look how careful she’s been about it. She says she was born, “in the early evening, less than an hour after the sun had set.” That’s the one time, of the three she tells us about, that she couldn’t have known herself. How does she know? Someone told her, obviously. Well, all children ask their parents what time they were born, don’t they? Today, we all have watches and phones and clocks. Some people had clocks back then too, but did Isabel’s parents have one? We have to assume not, because if they had, her parents would have told her the time. If you didn’t have a clock, you had to get as close as you could, and you did that by comparing notes about what else was going on when the child was born. So they told her, “in the early evening, less than an hour after the sun had set,” and if you have an almanac it’s easy enough to find out what time sunset was in Upper Merion Township on that day, and then you have a pretty accurate time; not exact, but close enough to work with.’
‘OK. I get that,’ I said. ‘But it still doesn’t explain why she wanted to share that with us. Why was it necessary?’
‘Exactly,’ Arya replied. ‘That’s the question.’
‘Do you have any ideas?’
‘One idea, and that’s why I want to keep this for a while, to check it out.’
She wasn’t showing any immediate sign of continuing.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’
‘I guess…’
‘Come on, Arya, you can’t leave me in suspense like this,’ I pleaded. ‘You have to give me some clue.’
She laughed.
‘Well, all right. I guess I shouldn’t keep you in the dark. But Kiah, please, bear in mind: I could be way off base here; I may be seeing something that isn’t there.’
‘If you’re seeing anything,’ I replied, ‘you’re way ahead of me.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I think Isabel may have left us a clue. Look what she said about Jacob schooling her.’
She found the passage with her finger.
‘“Mr van Eyck took it upon himself, with my consent, to school me. My parents had never done so, it not being the custom of our community generally to school girls, no purpose, according to the general opinion, being served thereby—’’’
‘Oh, yes,’ I interrupted, ‘I love that bit. Why would you want to teach the girls? Obviously, a complete waste of time. Arya, I had to read this aloud at Aunt Meg’s house, and when I got to that part I pretty much choked on it.’
She laughed. ‘I’m sure you did. But, you know, it was 1813, so… Anyway, she goes on: “But because of Mr van Eyck’s generosity with his time, I was instructed in reading and writing, in arithmetic, in the positions, transits, and retrograde motions of the planets, in the keeping of accounts, and in many other matters of business. This instruction, which I have passed on to my own daughters, has benefitted them as much as myself, and enriched my life more than higher wages could ever have enriched it.” What strikes you about that?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’’
‘Kiah, if he was going to school her, you can understand him instructing her in reading and writing, the keeping of accounts and other matters of business. That wasn’t just generosity on Jacob’s part, was it? Those were things she would have to know if she was going to be any real help to him in his business affairs, or even his personal affairs. But…’
Suddenly, I saw it.
‘The positions and movements of the planets,’ I said.
‘Yes. Why would he school her in that?’
I shook my head. ‘It does seem strange. Perhaps because astronomy was something you learned if you wanted to be seen as well educated at that time?’
‘Possibly,’ she replied. ‘But in her case, I don’t think so. Jacob wasn’t running a school, Kiah. He wasn’t going to send Isabel on to the university. This wasn’t an academic exercise. He was tutoring a young woman in the things he thought she needed to know. He was giving her what he saw as a very practical education.’
I looked at her blankly. She smiled.
‘The only people who are obsessed with times of birth,’ she continued, ‘are astrologers. You need a precise time to construct an astrological chart for an event. You need date, time and place. I think that’s why Isabel was so careful to give us the times. That’s why she went into detail about her birth. With the other times, she could be precise because she recorded the time herself, but with her birth, all she could do was to give us the information she herself was given, and leave us to do the rest.’
‘Wow,’ I said, helplessly. It was something that wouldn’t have occurred to me in a hundred years.
‘I think Jacob van Eyck was an astrologer,’ Arya continued, ‘and I think he schooled Isabel in astrology. She was obviously a bright young woman, and wise, too – she tells us how much she valued what she learned and how she passed it on to her own daughters.’
‘But when she says the positions and transits and so on of the planets, surely that sounds more like astronomy than astrology,’ I objected.
‘Until modern times there was no distinction,’ Arya replied. ‘That’s the way it’s always been in India with the Jyotish, our Vedic astrology. The great Indian and Greek mathematicians, the great Arabic and European cosmologists, didn’t distinguish between the mathematical aspects of the science – plotting and predicting the movements of the planets – and its interpretive aspects – attaching meaning to the movements of the planets, for the purpose of forecasting or seeking information. Today, of course, in the West, astronomers see themselves as pure scientists and they look down on astrology as junk science, if not outright superstition. But not in India: astrology is still regarded as a science in India, and in America in Jacob’s time, there would still have been many people who saw no contradiction between the two.’
She paused to finish her chai, and turned her head to look at me.
‘So that’s my working hypothesis.’
I stared down at the pages before me and held my head in my hands. Could Arya really conjure up some new insight from Isabel’s words, the same words that had been lying dormant and barren in my mind because of their sheer familiarity? The idea was startling, and at the same time intoxicating. What if I could hold such a breakthrough in my hands? It would be a game-changer: a revelation that would finally rip away the shroud that always seemed to hang over that long-gone winter of 1777–1778; a decisive piece of the puzzle that might finally provide a solution to the mystery of what Jacob had done, and what had become of his loan certificates? What if I could hold in my hands a piece of evidence that would finally put us on the front foot in our uphill struggle against the Department of Justice? But at the same time, I also began to imagine myself trying to explain to Sam how I had suddenly broken the case wide open with information that clearly wasn’t there on the face of the document, and for which there was as yet not a shred of physical evidence. Actually, I thought, Sam would probably take it in her stride, but I’d get some hard questions from Arlene and Powalski; not to mention that if I were to find something resembling admissible evidence, I would one day have to provide some account to Judge Morrow of how I had come by it. Arya, reading my mind as ever, interrupted my reverie.
‘Come with me,’ she said.