Digging Up History Page 3

  “Got it,” Alice said. “Let me take a look.”

  I’d give Alice points for being thorough. She donned latex gloves, then turned on a high-intensity light over the work area and examined the paper, then she turned it over and looked at the other side. Then she found a magnifier and repeated the process. In all she took about five minutes to look at the single sheet before turning to us. “Dylan, I think you’ve got the basics right. Nell, what do you know about paper and inks in the later eighteenth century?”

  “Not as much as I should, considering what my job is,” I told her. “Can you read it?”

  “In a minute. First let me tell you that it is pretty basic. It’s probably written in what was called portable ink.”

  “What?” Dylan and I said in unison.

  Alice smiled at our reaction. “This was not a piece of art, it was a simple letter, written with whatever was at hand, quite possibly during the Revolution, or at least thereabouts. Back then a lot of people, including soldiers, used a kind of powdered ink, made by grinding up a short list of ingredients. It was easy to carry around in a little packet, and all you had to do was add water, or even wine, and presto, you’d have ink you could write with. The main ingredient was oak gall.”

  “Which was what?” I asked. Why had I never known this?

  “To be precise, oak gall is the common name for a large, round gall commonly found on many species of oak. It ranges in size from two to four centimeters in diameter and it’s caused by chemicals injected into the tree’s bark by the larvae of certain kinds of gall wasp in the family Cynipidae. Dry it, grind it up and sift out the lumps, and then with the addition of binding agents and a solvent, presto, you have ink, if you do it right. You can imagine even a soldier on a battlefield could manage that. You get a nice shiny black ink, although in some cases it can fade to brown—which is probably what you would see most often—or even fade entirely, which is what I’d bet you have here. Am I right in assuming I can’t soak it in something to bring the writing out?”

  “Please don’t!” I said. “Maybe you could bring it back, but we don’t know what we’re dealing with here, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. Isn’t there another way?”

  “Sure. Ain’t modern science grand? Because the oak gall contains iron, we can irradiate it harmlessly and the iron will react to the proper lighting, and we take a picture of what appears. Easy.”

  “Does it take long?” Dylan asked.

  “Nah, just as long as it takes to find the right exposure. Watch.”

  Alice placed the letter on a ruled surface beneath a contraption I couldn’t begin to identify. She turned the machine on and fiddled with a couple of dials until she was satisfied. Then she stepped back. “Come take a look,” she told us.

  Dylan and I all but fought for the first look. No longer was the page brown and blank, it had words on it, and the wavering lines that Dylan had thought he had seen. He’d been right: it was not a piece of correspondence with tidy sentences; the lines took up most of one edge of the paper, and there were various words and even numbers scattered among them. I had no idea what they meant, but at least they were visible now. Alice stepped forward, turned the page over, and repeated the process, and a few more details appeared on the second side. “Let me get some pictures of this. Step back, will you?”

  Dylan and I stepped reluctantly away from the machine while Alice pushed some more buttons. “I’m putting these into a file, so you can take a flash drive back with you, but I’ll print a few copies out for you so you can look at them now.”

  “That’s great,” I said, and meant it. “Do you have any idea about what’s on the page?”

  “Not a clue. It’s not a puzzle, but I think you have to know something to make sense of what you see. I think we’ve got the date right—1770s or 1780s, but you’ll have to figure out the rest yourselves. Is that all you need?”

  “For now,” I told her. “I’d love to bring half of the Society’s collections over here so you could do this with all of them, but I guess that’s not practical. Does this machine travel?”

  “It could, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You might want to buy one for the Society, though—could be useful.”

  “And how much would that cost us?”

  Alice named a figure that took my breath away, but I didn’t let that discourage me. I could see a practical use for it, and I was going to be talking to the board in a week’s time—maybe I could interest one or more of them in supporting this marvelous toy.

  But one step at a time. “Alice, I can’t thank you enough. Whether or not this piece of paper is worth anything remains to be seen, but you’ve shown us a detail that could be valuable to us, and we’ve learned something new. Let me know when you want that behind-the-scenes tour.”

  “Will do, Nell. And I love talking about the process with newbies like you. It’s kind of magic.”

  James, who had remained silent, apparently enjoying Dylan’s and my wide-eyed excitement, stepped forward. “We’ve taken up enough of your time, Alice, but I think you’ve given us what we need. We’ll get out of your hair now. Many thanks.”

  “Any time, Jimmy. Nice to meet you, Nell, Dylan. Dylan, don’t forget your letter.”

  James—Jimmy?—led us back toward the elevators. Good thing he knew where he was going, because it appeared that both Dylan and I were still churning over what we’d seen and would have been lost without a guide. Once we were outside, we stopped again. “I’ve got to get back to work,” James told us.

  “Fine, go. And thanks—that was exactly what we were looking for. I’m guessing that Dylan and I are going to go back and lock ourselves into a room at the Society and study what we’ve got until it makes sense to us. I’ll tell you later if we figure anything out.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Mr. uh, Agent Morrison. That was really great.”

  “Glad I could help. See you at home, Nell?”

  “Yup.”

  James returned to the building. I took a deep breath. “Did anything jump out at you?” I asked Dylan.

  “Not really, but I didn’t have time to really study it. Cool how turning on that light brought all the words out. Kinda like Alice said: magic.”

  “I agree. I don’t know what we’re looking for now, but we’re already ahead of where we were when we started.” We began walking slowly back toward the Society. “You know, it’s almost like the precursor of the ballpoint pen. You carry this little packet of powder in your pocket, and when you need to write a letter you add water and you’re ready to go.”

  “Assuming you happen to have a quill pen on you,” Dylan added, grinning.

  “Well, yes, there is that. Or you run around until you find a goose and whip up one of your own. Can’t you just see a crowd of Continental soldiers running in circles trying to catch a goose so they could send a letter to Mom or a sweetheart?”

  Dylan nodded. “Definitely a different perspective on that particular war. So, we’re going to take a harder look at the images when we get back?”

  “Might as well, while it’s still fresh in our minds. But I don’t want to get our hopes up. It still may be nothing more than an old piece of paper with squiggles on it.”

  Chapter Four

  The heat had returned by the time Dylan and I started walking back to the Society, and I found myself wondering why this random piece of paper mattered to me. I knew that Dylan had been pleased by his find, and I had thought that studying it carefully would provide him with some solid experience. He was a good kid—careful, thoughtful, and committed to preserving the past, which was kind of rare in someone still in his twenties. I wanted to encourage him, but I didn’t want him to get his hopes up that he’d found something special. It was a discarded piece of paper, used to thicken a book cover two hundred years earlier. How important could it be?

  But I still hoped that there were happy surprises to be found in the Society’s collections, and things that people had discarded a long time ago could still tell us a lot a
bout the world at an earlier time.

  Besides, I had to admit I was avoiding going back to those pesky columns of numbers. Yes, it took money to keep our place running—to keep the building standing without leaks, and with some climate control. And sometimes we might want to acquire new items that helped flesh out the existing collections and made the past a little more real to us all. And that took money too. The staff and I couldn’t rely on the kindness of strangers to simply hand us what we wanted.

  “You hungry, Dylan?” I asked. He’d been curiously silent since we’d started walking.

  “What?” he said. “Oh, sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. You want to pick up a sandwich or something?”

  “Sounds good. I don’t want to waste too much time, because I want to take another look at that letter. Which is kind of silly because it doesn’t look like much, but we might as well be thorough. Besides, it’ll give you some practice in the correct formatting of accession forms.”

  “Okay,” he said amiably. “You want me to get the sandwiches while you go in?”

  “I guess.” It had been a pleasant morning, but I had work to do. “I’m not picky—just grab whatever looks good, and maybe a bottle of iced tea.”

  We’d reached the entrance to the Society, so I watched him head up Locust Street, then I sighed and walked in.

  “Hi, Bob,” I said. “Anything going on that I need to know about?”

  He shook his head. “No, all quiet. Oh, but Marty Terwilliger is here, somewhere in the building. She asked for you, but when I told her you were out but would be back soon, she headed for the stacks. I’m sure she’ll find you.”

  “Thanks, Bob,” I said, and headed for the elevators.

  Marty was someone who occupied a special niche at the Society. She’d been a board member for years, although she’d finally decided that board responsibilities were getting in the way of her own research. Her father had been involved too, for many years. And I counted her as a friend, after some of the unexpected events we’d been part of.

  She knew more about the nuts and bolts of Philadelphia history than anybody else I’d met, but even I knew that research was never finished, so she was often to be found lurking somewhere in the stacks. It occurred to me that I might as well offer her a look at our mystery letter—maybe she’d see something that Dylan and I didn’t. And she had probably known Harriet Featherstone since she was in diapers (Marty, not Harriet) and might be able to tell me something about how and where Harriet had put together her collection.

  I made a beeline for my office, and I wasn’t surprised to find Marty there waiting for me. “Where’ve you been?” she demanded when I walked in the door.

  “At the FBI,” I told her.

  “Trouble?”

  “Nope. Dylan found something interesting in one of the books that Harriet had collected—an old letter that had been bound into a newer cover—and he brought it to me. It’s pretty much illegible, but I thought maybe the FBI lab could help us interpret it, and James was willing to get us in.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it’s more legible now, but I have no idea what it’s about. Actually I would probably have gotten around to calling you—you know Philadelphia and its environs better than I do. Assuming, of course, it’s from Philadelphia. Could be from Tibet for all I know. To be honest, I’m pretending it’s part of Dylan’s training, but the reality is I’m avoiding writing the board report for next week. But it’s kind of fun. Like a puzzle. Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Not really, although I guess we haven’t talked for a while. Things good with James?”

  “Just fine, thanks. We love the house—it’s not too near the city, but not too far.” Marty had helped us move in and knew the house well. “What about you? Have you heard from Eliot lately?”

  Eliot was a delicate subject at the moment. Marty had been a highly independent single woman for years now, but then out of the blue she’d gotten involved with Eliot Miller, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and things had been warming up nicely between them until Eliot left for a year’s sabbatical. His letters, emails and phone calls were few and far between these days.

  “No,” she said, and did not elaborate. “I’m sort of between projects, and I got bored. So this is where I headed. I guess it’s kind of my home away from home, and I always find something new. What’s this letter thing Dylan found?”

  “That’s just it—we don’t know. It looks late eighteenth century, but I’m no expert. The ink has mostly disappeared, but one of the FBI techs managed to make it visible again. But that didn’t help much—it looks like a few random lines, with some words and numbers scattered around. Maybe it was a page from a child’s exercise book, for all I know. But the FBI has some really cool machines—I think we could do a lot with them here, if only we could afford them.”

  “You just need to find the right donor. Who is not me, please.”

  “You’ve done more than your share, Marty.”

  Dylan appeared at the door, laden with plastic bags. “Oh, hi, Ms. Terwilliger. Don’t let me interrupt you. Nell wanted some lunch. There’s plenty if you want some too.”

  “Sounds good to me—I’ve been in the stacks for a couple of hours. Nell tells me you found something interesting?”

  I interrupted. “Let’s hold off on discussing that until we can actually look at it. In the meantime, why don’t you tell us about Harriet Featherstone and her family while we eat?”

  Marty rifled through the bags of food before answering. “Another old Philadelphia family. I went to school with a nephew of hers, back in the dark ages. You already know she never married, but she did love history, and she loved collecting—which two things are not the same. Did you ever see her house?”

  “No, I’m sorry to say,” I told her. “By the time I came along here, she wasn’t entertaining much. I take it you saw it?”

  “On and off for years. She had interesting tastes. I seem to remember a pair of Japanese silk shoes intended for bound feet, next to a Tiffany desk set, on top of an Early American table. Eclectic, to say the least, but she liked it that way. And I liked her—she was an original.”

  “How did the Society end up with her book collection?”

  “You’re a library, aren’t you? Where else would you put books?” Marty said tartly, as she bit into a sandwich.

  “Anything interesting among them that you recall?”

  Marty shrugged. “Not really. She bought things she liked, and she didn’t care if they were valuable. But she didn’t believe in wasting money either, so she wouldn’t have bought anything magnificent. Just things she enjoyed.”

  “Did she spend much time at the Society when she was younger?”

  “I think so. My father knew her fairly well. I remember catching glimpses of her here when I was a teenager, but I didn’t know her well.”

  “So now we have this book—which Dylan disassembled when he saw the letter—”

  Dylan interrupted. “The binding was falling apart. I tried not to do any damage, but I thought maybe the letter was important.”

  “Don’t worry about it. What do you think the letter is?” Marty asked.

  “I think it’s a map. Something somebody sketched out in a hurry, because it’s anything but finished. I haven’t had time to figure out what was written on it—mostly short notes, not anything like a description. But it’s definitely old, and hand-drawn, not printed. I couldn’t see it well enough at the lab to decipher anything more, but Alice at the FBI gave us a flash drive with the images, so we can enlarge it if we want. If you think it’s worth it,” he ended dubiously.

  Marty briskly bundled up her lunch wrapping and tossed it into the trash basket. “Why not? You never know what you’re going to find. Let’s finish eating and go take a look.”

  It didn’t take long for us to finish eating, and then we adjourned to the pitifully small area in the back of the building where we did what restoration we could. A
t least it had good light, both from the large windows (which could be covered to prevent overexposure to sun) and from the lights suspended overhead. There were work surfaces available, and they were reasonably clean. We all dutifully washed our hands to get rid of any sandwich residue, and then Dylan pulled out the folder and removed the letter, laying it in the middle of the work surface. Marty didn’t say anything, but leaned over it and studied it—or what there was of it. Then she walked around the cabinet and looked at it from other directions. She stopped opposite where she had begun. “This is the bottom end, here.”

  Dylan and I trotted around to stand next to her. It didn’t look particularly different to me, but I was happy to bow to Marty’s superior experience.

  After a few more moments of studying it, Marty turned to Dylan. “You were right—it’s a map. Not much to it, but there wasn’t much to the city when it was sketched. It was never meant to be pretty—it was for information only.”

  “Marty, are you saying it’s part of Philadelphia? You recognize it?”

  “I’m pretty sure I do. Hang on a second.” She picked up the case she was carrying and found a map inside. Then she laid it next to our mystery letter. “This is an official map of Philadelphia, circa 1780. You two should recognize the general outlines of the city, but only the colored parts existed at that date. In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s the Delaware River on the right.”

  “And those little jagged things are the docks?” I was beginning to get excited: even I could see what she meant.

  “Got it in one, Nell. A lot of them, weren’t there? It was an easily navigable river. Along the water there were lots of warehouses, and then street or streets behind that were where the merchants lived. At least for a while—the city grew fast, so the people with money moved west pretty early. Hey, you got a projector that will enlarge what we’re looking at?”

  “We’ve got the flash drive with the image. You want it bigger than just computer-screen size?”