October 1863
Abigail Pratt Bentley and Artemus Pratt stood on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Clarendon Street, at the edge of the Back Bay landfill. New lands—flat, dusty, neatly segmented into lots and streets—stretched from the Boston and Worcester Railroad tracks to the Mill Dam and from the Public Garden to Clarendon Street. Beyond Clarendon, the water receded daily as the landfill moved west. The Back Bay had been covered a third of the way to Gravelly Point in a layer of sand, gravel, and trash twenty feet deep.
This would be the new home of Boston’s aristocracy, and Abigail Pratt Bentley was certain that one day it would be a beautiful place. Few of the lots beyond Arlington and Beacon streets were occupied. The houses on other completed blocks stood like volunteers, with proud fronts and blank brick sides, waiting for their ranks to be filled. And as yet, there was not a tree west of the Public Garden capable of giving shade on a hot day. But the trees would grow, and the homes already built had set a criterion of French Empire elegance that others would follow. Abigail imagined an American Paris.
“This is where we’ll build,” said Artemus, recently returned from his mission in England. “As soon as the war is over and the land is judged stable.”
“My father would have cackled for a week if we had ever told him we were going to build a mansion on the Back Bay flats.”
Abigail squinted into the afternoon sun and looked toward the Easterly Channel, now just a few hundred feet away. It was a rut in the mud, covered by three feet of water at high tide, a bare trickle at low. To the south, a mile or so away, she saw landfill stretching out from the Neck to join the new lands in the Back Bay. Southwest of the Neck stood the handsome brownstone bowfronts of the South End, built in the fifties and already doomed to slow decay by the development of the Back Bay. Like her father before her, she shuddered at the changes she had seen in fifty years. They had come so quickly.
“Cynthia and I want you to know,” said Artemus softly, “that you will have a bedroom and a sitting room on the fourth floor. You shouldn’t be living alone.”
Abigail thought that she had come out to see the site of her nephew’s home. She was shocked. “Except for Sean and his family, I’ve lived alone for almost forty years.”
“And now we want you to move in with us. Artemus and Jason are grown men now. When they come back…” He hesitated. He remembered the death of Elihu’s son Francis. “If they come back, they will probably wish to strike out on their own. So there will be plenty of room, and Cynthia thinks you would be a marvelous influence on the younger children. Besides, what use will a Boston mansion be unless it is filled with people?”
She kissed his cheek and brushed a tear from her eye. “I’ve never had children, but with you to love me like a son, I’ve never needed them.”
“It’s our loss that you never had children, Abigail. They would have been extraordinary.”
She laughed. “They would also have competed with you for power, so don’t mourn too loudly.”
“I shan’t. Now, are you living with us or not?”
She started to say that she would.
“Good mornin’, folks!” Up from the mud of the Back Bay, dressed in filthy clothes, and carrying a sack, crawled a figure of indeterminate age and sex. It hoisted itself onto level land and stood face to face with the Pratts. “I said good mornin’. Are you deaf or somethin’?”
“Good morning,” said Artemus coldly.
It curtsied and grinned. Apparently, it was a woman, and she wore her hostility proudly. Layers of dirt were caked on her neck and hands. She dropped her sack in front of Abigail, who stepped back instinctively and held her handkerchief to her nose.
“Stink, don’t I?” said the woman. “I smell just like shit, ’cause that’s mostly what’s left down there on the flats. Shit and piss and stinkin’ tidewater.”
Artemus took Abigail by the arm. They turned to walk away, and the woman jumped in front of them.
“Don’t be runnin’ off so soon, folks. Give me a chance. It ain’t often rich folks like you runs into somebody like me. I’m what you might call a… a curiosity, a Back Bay scavenger. There’s hunnerts of us just now, and I’m one of the best. I lives damn good from the junk I dig outa the landfill. Looka here.” She pulled a spoon from her sack and wiped it on the sleeve of her filthy sweater. “Gen-u-ine silver from the Crawford House. Got threw out with somebody’s dinner and ended up here. Like to buy it?”
“No, thank you.” Artemus tried to push past her.
She pulled out a wooden hoop. “For the lady’s skirt?”
Artemus led Abigail past the scavenger woman and back toward the carriage.
“So you’ll have nothin’ to do with a woman of the earth?” she shrieked. She reached into her sack, pulled out a handful of oyster shells, and fired them at Artemus. “Take these. I sell them to the Chink down on Stuart Street. He grinds ’em into powder and sells ’em to his friends. Says they make your cock stiff!”
“Disgusting,” muttered Abigail. “Absolutely disgusting.”
“Vermin like that are all over the landfill.”
“I know,” said Abigail softly. “Something must be done.”
In the late afternoon, the winds shifted. By midnight, it was overcast and chilly. Abigail Pratt Bentley’s carriage stopped at the corner of Commonwealth and Clarendon, at the edge of the landfill, and she climbed out. She was wearing heavy riding boots, an old tweed skirt, and a loose-fitting jacket that would give her freedom of movement. A strenuous evening lay ahead.
Sean Mannion jumped down from the box. “Are you sure you want to be doin’ this, Mrs. Bentley? It’s mighty wet and muddy out there.”
“It must be done, Sean. By you and me and no one else. And you must promise never to reveal what you see tonight.”
Sean promised without question. He took his pistol from the carriage boot, then swung two shovels and a pick onto his shoulder. He was fifty-six, still brawny and strong, but now weighed down by a paunch that hung over his trousers.
They found a switchback path, used by the dumping carts to haul landfill, and started down. A few steps and Abigail tripped over the leg of an old chair protruding from the gravel. She was seventy-three, but only recently had her age begun to slow her down.
“Shall I light the lantern?” asked Sean.
“No. We’ll not attract attention. There’s light enough.”
The lands which surrounded the Back Bay were not as deserted as when Dexter Lovell had rowed into the Easterly Channel fifty years before. Light from streetlamps and homes reflected off the clouds and gave a dim, phosphorescent glow to the mudflats, tidepools, and sheets of water in the distance.
It was low tide. Since the building of the Mill Dam, the tide no longer flowed freely, and much of the bay was kept covered in a few feet of water, which lessened the stink of the polluted flats. However, during certain night tides, the water between the landfill and Gravelly Point was allowed to drain through the Mill Dam gates, so that some of the offending sewage was carried away. Tonight was such a night. There was nothing between the landfill and the Easterly Channel but mud.
Abigail looked out across the flats. She knew the distance from the Mill Dam, along the bed of the Easterly Channel, to the tea set. By walking west across the flats from the foot of Commonwealth Avenue, she could find the Easterly Channel. By following the Channel inland, she could pace out the distance to the tea set. But Abigail was frightened. By the darkness. By the scavengers. By the thought that she would not find the tea set. By the temptation she would face if the strongbox was there, the urge to open it and look, just once, at the Golden Eagle. She resolved that she would not look, then she stepped off the gravel at the bottom of the landfill and sank up to her ankles in mud.
“It’ll be slow goin’, Mrs. Bentley. You sure you don’t want me to go alone and do what needs to be done?” Sean did not know why they were going out there; Abigail had never told him about the tea set.
“I must be present.”
So they struggled across the mud until they reached the Easterly Channel, a gentle depression about fifteen feet across which sloped three or four feet down to a small, putrid stream.
Any marsh produces gases, but the Back Bay had been an open sewage pit for fifty years, and out here in the middle of it, the stink was unbearable. Abigail gagged and leaned on her shovel for support. Even in the dark, Sean could see the color drain from her face. She was an old woman. She did not belong out here. He begged her to go back, but she refused.
“Follow the channel,” she said. “Count off two hundred paces, and take care that each pace covers three feet.”
A cold wind swept across the flats, and Abigail shivered.
Sean knew that it would be raining soon. “Please, let’s go back, Mrs. Bentley. Nothing can be so important that you should endanger your health.”
Abigail tenderly stroked his face. She hadn’t touched him affectionately in many years. “Do you love your son, Sean?”
Sean’s son Joseph was now a bricklayer with a small company of his own. Sean saw everything that his mother had hoped for in him reflected in his son. When he wasn’t tending Abigail’s needs—and the old woman had few—Sean worked for his son, pitching in with shovel, hammer, and trowel wherever needed. “More than my life.”
“Then try to understand that I am out here because of my child and children yet unborn.”
“Your child?”
Abigail smiled. “I speak symbolically, Sean. I learned the habit from a romantic young Irish poet I once knew.” For a moment, she thought she saw the old look of admiration reflected dimly in his eyes, the look that had excited her so many years before. She took him by the arm and turned him upstream, toward the tea set. “Two hundred paces, two hundred yards. And we’d better move fast, before the tide turns and we’re digging dirty water along with the mud.”
They slogged off through darkness, following the dribble which had been a six-foot-deep channel when Dexter Lovell had navigated it. With each step, their boots seemed to sink deeper into the mud, as if something were trying to suck them down and hold them. The mud belched each time a foot pulled free. And each footprint filled quickly with water that obliterated any trace of their passing.
As she battled the mud, Abigail’s fears for her own safety and the tea set’s presence melted away. The Back Bay flats were cold, foul, depressing, and they led nowhere that was not more easily reached by land. No one but the most foolish schoolboy would cross the quagmire for any reason, and no one would be about on a chilly October night.
Sean stopped after about ten minutes and announced, “Two hundred paces.”
Abigail’s heart was pounding. In a few moments, it would be in her grasp. She hoped.
She told Sean they were looking for an iron box two to four feet beneath the mud. They staked a twenty-five-foot square of ground around the spot where Sean stopped, then, foot by foot, they drove their shovels into the mud within the square. After fifteen minutes, they heard clank of metal against metal. Sean found the strongbox in three feet of gravel and mud, halfway up the side of the channel bed. The ground above it was raised slightly, as though a log had been buried there.
Sean took off his coat, wrapped his pistol in it, and gave them to Abigail. Then he began to dig. At low tide, no water covered the strongbox, but water seeped into the hole from below, making the work difficult and sloppy.
At least it wasn’t buried beneath that reeking stream a few feet away, thought Abigail.
Sean fought with every shovelful of mud. The ooze stuck to itself, to his boots, and to the shovel, but he didn’t stop until he was scraping the mud from the top of the strongbox.
As he knelt to lift it out of the hole, Abigail swallowed hard and crouched beside him.
Sean scraped the mud from the handles and pulled. Half the box was still buried, and it didn’t budge. He picked up the shovel and began to dig around it. Abigail watched for a moment, then she grabbed a shovel and attacked the mud with him.
They were soon standing knee-deep in the hole, with the box free of mud and ready to be lifted. Abigail realized now how large it was. So much iron and so many locks to protect Paul Revere’s lost masterpiece. On one of the handles, she saw rotted strands of rope. She remembered how her nephew had died.
“Stand back, Mrs. Bentley.”
Abigail stepped out of the hole. Sean grabbed a handle with both hands, grunted, and heaved. The box weighed close to seventy-five pounds, but once he broke the suction, he was able to slip it out of the hole.
Now came the moment that Abigail had feared. She knelt beside the box and ran her hand along its surface. The iron was pitted and caked with mud, but she could almost see shafts of silver light flashing through the cracks and seams. She wanted to touch the tea set. Desperately. She wanted to feel the smoothness, the grace, the solidity. If it was as beautiful as she thought, perhaps the world should see it. She would be revered as a patroness of the arts. She would be famous as the woman who uncovered the Golden Eagle Tea Set. She touched one of the padlocks. She was tempted.
Sean didn’t help. He thought they had dug it up to bring it back. He stepped out of the hole and, with some effort, raised the strongbox to his shoulder. “We’d best be gettin’ off these flats, Mrs. Bentley. We don’t want to be caught here when the tide turns.”
She said nothing. She knelt in the mud and watched blankly as he balanced the box.
“Shall we be goin’?”
“No,” she said firmly. The world would not remember her. The world would never care that she left the tea set for all to enjoy. Only her father’s descendants would think of her. They would remember her as the woman who navigated Pratt Shipping and Mercantile when Jason Pratt was at the helm. They would remember her as the guardian of the family treasure, the protector of the family secret. And the day might come, as her father had predicted, when her descendants would need the Golden Eagle. Then, Abigail Pratt Bentley would live again.
“Put it down,” she commanded.
He dropped the box. “What else is there to do?”
“Dig the hole deeper. Another three feet.”
Sean was confused. “Are we looking for something else?”
“We’ve come to protect that strongbox from marauders, to roll a stone across the mouth of the tomb.”
“You want me to bury it? Why?”
“We have little time, Sean. I’ll explain it all later. I promise.”
A scream slashed across the mudflats, followed by the pounding of cylinders and the clatter of forty cars crossing steel rails: the gravel train from Needham. In the dark, the engine looked like an apparition, with the yellow light of the headlamp lancing across the flats, the sparks pouring from the stack, the cockpit glowing hellish orange behind the boiler. The whistle screamed again, and Boston streets arrived at the landfill.
“The next train crosses in forty-five minutes, Sean. By then, the tide will be turning. Please hurry.”
Sean made no further argument. Forty-five minutes later, the hole was three feet deeper and three feet square. He leaned the shovel against the side of the hole and used it as a step to boost himself out. They had an hour before the Easterly Channel was again covered in three feet of water.
“Is it six feet deep?” she asked.
“As near as I can figure.”
“It must be exact.”
“I’m five-ten. The hole was five or six inches over my head.”
“Then we’ve buried it six feet, three inches below the mud.”
“Not yet.” The voice growled out of the darkness behind Abigail and felt like the blade of a knife against her neck.
There were three of them. The one who spoke held a Navy Colt revolver at his side. He was tall and scrawny, just barely visible behind an eyepatch and a black beard. His jacket, blue trimmed with yellow piping, belonged to a Union soldier. He was probably a deserter. The other two, smaller and scrawnier, stood behind him in the darkness. One held a club, the other a knife.
“Two old geezers buryin’ a box in the middle of the night. You got family jewels or somethin’ in there?”
Abigail said nothing. Sean looked toward the pistol, which lay wrapped in his coat on top of the strongbox.
“I’d like to look at what’s in that box,” said the deserter. “Might be it’s somethin’ look good in my boodwar.”
His mates snickered, as though he’d told a dirty joke.
Abigail took a step to her right, placing her body between the strongbox and the three men. Sean cursed her stupidity to himself. Then she glanced at him, and he realized that she was giving him a shield. He would not use it.
The deserter stepped toward her. “Now which of you folks has the key?”
Abigail looked again at Sean.
A whistle screamed, and the deserter looked toward the tracks. Sean threw Abigail to the ground and grabbed the pistol. He fired twice. The deserter went down. As the man with the club came at him, Sean fired again; the man’s face disappeared. The man with the knife leaped. Sean squeezed off another shot, but the man piled into him and they fell to the ground. The knife slashed viciously, expertly, cutting across Sean’s rib cage and flying at his face. Sean grabbed the man’s throat and held tight. As the gravel train arrived at the depot, the knife pressed against Sean’s throat. He could feel the cold blade breaking the skin. His fingers dug deeper into the man’s throat. Then he heard a shot, and the man went limp.
Sean flung the body aside and looked toward Abigail. He did not see a gun in her hands. He climbed to his knees, and a bullet slammed into him. He tumbled backward, landing in a sitting position, waist-deep in the water of the Easterly Channel.
The deserter was not dead. The first shot had missed him. The second had grazed his side. He watched for a moment, until he was certain that Sean would not get up. Then he turned to Abigail, who was again standing between him and the strongbox. “I’m sorry to shoot your husband, lady, but he didn’t want to show me what’s in the box.”
“And I’m sorry about your friends.” Her voice quivered. Her knees were shaking.
The man smiled. “That’s all right. They was scum anyways. Not like me. I’m a reg’lar stand-up gent, and I’m askin’ you nice and polite to open that box.” He raised his gun. “Or I’ll shoot you, too.”
“I don’t have the key,” she said. She was trying to buy time. She didn’t know what she would do.
He shoved her aside. “Guess I’ll have to do it myself.”
His first shot ricocheted off the side of the box and almost hit his foot. The second snapped one of the locks, grown brittle and rusty in the mud. He aimed the pistol at another lock and fired again; it popped open.
“Just one more, and we’ll know what you folks been buryin’ out here.” He aimed the pistol and squeezed the trigger. He heard a shot, but the gun didn’t kick. For an instant, he was puzzled. Then he felt the pain above the bridge of his nose. Then he felt nothing.
The derringer had blown a half-inch hole in his forehead and taken the back of his skull clean off. Abigail carried the gun in her boot, but she had never fired it. At close range, it was deadly. She looked once at the vermin she had killed, then dropped the derringer and ran to Sean’s side.
He was still sitting in the water with his hand over his stomach. She took his hand away and felt her own insides wither. She tore a clean strip of cloth from her blouse and placed it over the hole in his stomach. Then she replaced his hand. There was nothing more she could do.
“I’m cold,” he said feebly.
The tide had turned and the water was rising around him. She put her hands under his arms and pulled him a few feet out of the channel.
“I’ll be all right,” he whispered.
“Just rest here for a few minutes, dear. Then we’ll go.”
She had to get Sean to a doctor, but she had to bury the tea set. Abigail Pratt Bentley became a creature of instinct. Although she was seventy-three, she found the strength that comes to a mother protecting her child. She dragged the box to the edge of the hole. She sat down in the mud, put both feet against the box, and pushed. The box toppled into the hole. Abigail grabbed her shovel, and in forty-five minutes, she had buried the strongbox in six feet of mud. She kicked the bodies of the three men into the stream, and she was finished.
“Mrs. Bentley.” Sean was whimpering. “I’m cold, Mrs. Bentley.” The water had risen again to his waist.
“You must get up, Sean. We have to go.”
He looked at her blankly. “I’m cold.”
She felt the tears welling in her eyes. She willed them away. If she could get him to a doctor, he might still have a chance. If he was going to die, she did not want him to be found in the Back Bay. “Please, Sean, try to get up.”
He moaned and told her again that he was cold. He was in shock.
“If you do not get up, you will never see Joseph and Lillian again.” She spoke angrily as she put her hands under his shoulders. “Now get up!”
With her help, Sean Mannion stood. He moaned again, more loudly. Soon the pain would become too intense for the anesthesia of shock, and he would scream every time his heart pumped blood out the hole in his stomach.
Abigail gave him the shovel to lean on. She put her body under his shoulder, and together they lurched across the Back Bay. The coming tide would erase any trace of their presence at the edge of the channel and carry the bodies of the thieves inland toward the South End.
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.
November 3, 1874
There are finally enough leaves on the elms outside that their falling seems significant. The wind blows in gusts, tearing them from the trees and blowing them along the street like souls on their way to hell. From up here, three stories above, the trees still seem like little brushes losing their bristles. I suppose that one day, the branches of those elms will scrape against my window pane, but I shall never see it. I have seen enough. I am content.
The baby calls. I must tend to him—
Our little man is now changed into clean diapers, and Great-Grand-Auntie is back to her writing. I am babysitting today for little Artemus III while his parents and grandparents attend a contest of football between Harvard and Rutgers. It is a rather new sport combining all the worst aspects of military strategy and back-alley brawling. I’m told that the ruffians from Yale enjoy it immensely.
But back to my original thought. I am content. Or at least as content as anyone can be when she has outlived all her contemporaries and sees her body, like a sandy neck washed by the waves, growing weaker and smaller each day. But my mission is complete. I have added the codicils to my will and placed ten envelopes in my safety-deposit box. With the help of John Milton and a little common sense, the treasure will be found when the Pratts need to find it. The exact nature of the treasure is contained in a special envelope that will go to Artemus. Also in that envelope are instructions for the dispersal of the information.
I have also fulfilled my promise to young Joseph Mannion, and that makes me feel wonderful. Even now, I miss his father desperately, although Sean has been gone for more than ten years. If such a thing as reincarnation exists, perhaps we will meet in another life, where there will be no barriers between us, no greater matters to hold my attention. However, I do not expect to see Sean again, except in the hereafter. I will tell him then that I would not have done anything differently. I simply followed my natural inclinations. As my father’s old servant once told me, I’m an apple that fell too close to the tree. My only regret is that I bore no fruit.
Little Artemus Pratt III is crying for attention again. He is two years old, blond, and beautiful. (It seems that I have been saying that about Pratt babies for sixty years. Except, of course, for one half-Pratt baby who disappeared, like his father, many years ago. Pray he stays where he went.)
But how I envy baby Artemus. He will see things that I cannot imagine. Already he has the firm Pratt jaw. ’Tis a pity he’s not old enough to hear wisdom from the lips of his Great-Grand-Auntie. I could tell him so much! My, how he cries—
There, now. I’ve bounced him on my knee for ten minutes and fetched him a bottle all the way from the kitchen. I must have a talk with Artemus about the household help. It seems that when the master leaves the house, so do all the servants. I rang three times, and none of those lazy Irish girls answered. Lillian Mannion would have been at my side in an instant. I’ll admit it. I’m not quite what I used to be when it comes to climbing stairs. I’m still out of breath.
Baby Artemus. What a span of time is represented here! Me at my writing desk, he in his playpen, a woman born in the eighteenth century, a boy who will live in the twentieth. I would give anything to
The next word was illegible. She knew what she wanted to say, but suddenly, she couldn’t hold the pen. Her face went numb. Her right eye closed. The pain at the side of her head was excruciating but lasted only a second.
Artemus Pratt found his aunt seated at her desk, her head bowed on her chest, her left eye open. This time, the stroke had been merciful.
Abigail Pratt Bentley distributed her wealth evenly to her nephews, nieces, and their children. Everyone was satisfied when Henry Pratt, now the family attorney and the executor of Abigail’s will, prepared to read the final codicil. Henry cleared his throat and looked around. He had learned already that a large, well-appointed office inspired confidence in potential clients and was indispensable for the reading of a will. In front of his desk, in straight-backed chairs brought from the outer office, sat Henry’s wife, his mother, his brothers, his sisters, who had traveled to Boston for the reading of the will, and four spouses.
Artemus Pratt sat to Henry’s right, in front of a window, motionless as a lizard in the sunlight.
“ ‘There are ten envelopes contained in a safety-deposit box, and the name of a family member is written on each one. Envelopes shall go to each of the six couples I assume are assembled here today, the remainder to the four firstborn children of the next generation.’ ”
As Henry read, Artemus studied the faces of his children. His brothers and their children, except for a single mulatto bastard, were dead. The line of Pratt descent now traced directly through Artemus, and he was pleased that none of his children seemed especially interested in Abigail’s envelopes. He knew that most of them would entrust the money that Abigail was leaving them and pay no attention to legends. He had raised them well.
Henry paused for a sip of water, then continued. “ ‘Those envelopes are your means of communicating with me. They are the glue that will hold you together. They are your second chance for greatness. You may not open the envelopes for ten years, and you may never divulge the contents, unless three or more of you agree that the Pratts face a financial or personal crisis that cannot be overcome without a new inflow of funds. If you agree, you must then go to the eldest son of the eldest son and ask him for his permission and opinion. Bide by his decision, for it is my own. Remember that I am with you always in your pursuit of greatness. Signed, Abigail Pratt Bentley, October 9, 1874.’ ”
Henry put the paper down and folded his hands on his desk. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get her to be more specific about all this. But she said that these were the instructions her father gave her, and she was giving them to the future.”
“Toward the end,” cracked Artemus Jr., “I think Auntie’s pigskin needed a bit of air.”
“Don’t be disrespectful,” snapped his mother.
“Father, what do you think of all this?” asked Henry.
“We should do our best to abide by the codicil. It was her wish. The best way to abide by it is to forget about it. Our aunt was an eccentric old woman living in a world of dreams.” Artemus stood. “Face reality, and you’ll never need to concern yourself with her fantasies.”