Past Malice

T
O MOST PEOPLE, I
’
LL BET THE OLD PLACE LOOKED
nothing at all like a battlefield. To most casual observers, the Chandler House was the epitome of what they imagine the past to have been: a big colonial house by the ocean, a wind-swept lawn leading down to a dramatic cliff, romantic to the
n
th-degree. The reason that so many people think the past really was the good old days is because of the fine, lovely things that survive. These are the very best, the very richest things that would have inspired pride and a desire to preserve them. Seeing these objects causes people to confide in me how much they’ve always loved history, how they’ve always wanted to be archaeologists, how they would have loved to have lived “back then,” whether back then was ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, or, as it was in this case, colonial New England.

I have to smile when I think that they’re imagining big skirts, wigs, and courtly manners. They are not imagining a world without antibiotics or indoor plumbing or the hope of
democracy and equal rights. They are forgetting that they might be lost without supermarkets or instantaneous global communication or electricity. They are not thinking of a world where, to paraphrase Monty Python, the king was the only one who didn’t smell like crap, which isn’t such a bad summary for most of history.

It wasn’t even the neat row of trenches by the side of the house that reminded me of a battlefield: I would never have allowed my students to let things get that messy. No, our trenches were orthogonal, hell, even the back dirt piles were clean, made of well-sifted loam, filled with fat worms and sorted pebbles, the sort of thing that sends gardeners drooling. If we didn’t have to put it all back when we were finished, I would have brought it back home with me myself. And it wasn’t the fencing we’d put up around the site to keep the unwary, the unthinking, and the dim-witted from falling into one of our nice, square units and breaking a neck, or worse, disturbing my carefully exposed stratigraphy. We’d even deliberately chosen the portable wooden fencing to blend in with the scenery, so you couldn’t even claim that it resembled a military picket. No, I’m afraid it was the general background hum of negative emotions that made me feel like I was digging in for my own protection as much as I was trying to learn about the Chandler family.

I’m not usually so misanthropic; it’s just that I was tired of trying to fight to do my job properly and we still had another two weeks of work to go. It would have worn the patience of a saint down to a nubbin, and I’m no saint for all my sister claims I am a Puritan. I just knew that I had to bide my time and pick which battles to fight, and which ones to avoid. Anyone who tells you that the Ivory Tower is a quiet retreat from the dirty old “outside world” doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

I sighed and stood up from the bench, telling myself that
I would be better off for another walk around the property, and another long look out at the ocean behind the house. I was waiting to be invited into the Stone Harbor Historical Society’s board meeting to tell them all about the archaeological research I’d talked them into letting me do on their property at the Chandler House. I figured there’d be another half hour or so of their private business—to which I was pointedly not invited—before I had to go in.

The main part of the Chandler House was an early example of a brick Georgian structure, two floors with four rooms each, and an attic with dormers. As I faced the front, there was a small brick addition to the right; there was none on the left. When I walked around to the rear, there was another, later addition, also in brick; its two large cube-shaped rooms faced the ocean that relentlessly crashed against the Massachusetts coast.

I picked up a flat pebble from the path and slung it sidewise, making it skip three times before it lost momentum and sank. The one that followed it only brushed the water twice, then hit a wave with a plop. The next pebble I picked up ached to be thrown at the fat seagull I saw perching on a white-stained piling not too far away from the shore. I told myself that I could hit it, if I wanted to. But my aim is pretty bad and I didn’t really want to wreck my karma by taking out my bad mood on the poor bird, no matter how nasty I think gulls are. Besides, my veterinarian sister was staying with me and any slight I inflicted on the animal kingdom would be immediately telegraphed to her, and she would instigate a massive retaliation. So I dropped the stone back on the path and walked up the lawn to the house. After another half-perambulation around the building, I heard the sound of footsteps on the gravel in front of the house.

“Evening, Professor.”

I looked up to see Justin Fisher, one of three security
guards who worked here. A nice kid, maybe twenty-four or so, who looked like he was five years younger. He had straw-colored hair that was cut fashionably short and close to his head, a crooked smile, and a youthfully eager presence that was made positively gawky by the authority of his uniform.

“Evening, Justin. You know you can call me Emma, right?”

“I know, it’s just that I made the mistake of calling you Emma in front of Mr. Fiske, and he wasn’t thrilled. So I figured I’d just better….” He shrugged. “You know.”

“Just to keep on the safe side.” I nodded and we both smiled uncomfortably, trying to find a topic that was a little less awkward.

“Hey, that book you told me about, for my paper?” Justin was taking classes at night, trying to earn a graduate degree in history.

“Was it helpful?”

He rocked his hand, mezzo-mezzo. “Kind of. It was a little off from what I needed, but there was an appendix with a whole lot of references that really paid off. Archaeologists really do look at things differently than historians, don’t they?”

I shrugged. “Well, I think the main differences are in the scale and focus of what we’re looking at—historians tend to look at major events on a global scale, and we’re more often looking at individual families or communities. The materials are different, but I wonder if the distinctions aren’t really just academic.”

Justin’s face showed he wasn’t convinced. “Feels different to me. But I like getting the alternative perspective.”

I couldn’t help smiling and waved a finger at him. “Ah, that’s the first step down the slippery slope, though. First it’s getting an alternative perspective, then you’ll start looking at
houses—looking to see what was original, what was added on later—and you’ll tell your friends you can stop any time you want. Except then, architecture won’t be enough for you. Your family will start to worry. You’ll begin to ask about old photographs and paintings and how Stone Harbor used to look before the war—Revolutionary War, that is—and then it will get worse. You’ll start walking with your head down, looking for broken bits of pottery that might have washed out of the fill they’re using to make the new sidewalks downtown. There’ll be an intervention—your girlfriend crying, your grandparents shaking their fists at the sky—but it will be too late. You’ll be an archaeologist and there’s no cure for that.”

“Yeah, except for the bad pay. Except for the snakes and spiders and worms and all that manual labor. Nice try, but no thanks. I think I’ll stick with teaching grade school history.”

“Okay, okay, but do let me know if you need any more help—oops, it looks like I’m on.”

We looked over to the house, where an older woman was waving to me.

Justin raised his hand in farewell. “Good luck. I’m going to walk down along the seawall and make sure there isn’t some threat coming to us by water.”

The woman called, “We’re just about ready for your presentation, Professor! Come on in!”

I went up to the front door and tried to banish my embattled feelings. I wasn’t particularly fond of Fiona Prowse—“call me Fee” was what she told everyone—but I did want to try to get along with her. Problem was, she saw my work as an unnecessary expense and kept trying to find ways to make it either vanish or make it pay into the coffers of the Chandler House, neither of which was likely to happen.

She clapped her hands to get me to speed up, and although I knew from the big grin on her face that she thought
she was being funny, I gritted my teeth against her false cheeriness. I decided that if she’d only loosen up, I wouldn’t feel quite so put off. She led me through the front door; the two rooms on the left-hand side of the hall were devoted to office space. The central hall held a small ticket area and a display of postcards and books on local history for sale; the rest of the rooms on this floor and the second were open to the public. The addition held an education space downstairs and a hall/auditorium upstairs. The education room was set up like a kitchen for demonstrations in colonial cookery and dyeing and other household activities, complete with period utensils like a mortar and pestle, earthenware bowls of various sizes, and big wooden spoons. There were herbs hanging from the rafters, and a string of dusty dried apple slices over a working fireplace, thankfully unlit during the summer. Fee Prowse led me into the central hall, and up the front staircase.

Fee was a tall, big-boned woman with old-fashioned posture that spoke of determination or at least a capacity for endurance. She had a round face with cheeks going a little soft and sagging and her mouth was hard but not quite pursed, her jaw always set behind her smiles. Her hair was a carefully molded bunch of short, dark mahogany curls that in the back brushed her collar; maybe her hair had been close to that color in her youth—darker red than mine now—but at this moment, the gray in her eyebrows seemed much more authentic and I reckoned that both the curls and the color had come out of a box. She was the kind of woman who never lost an argument, at least not in her own mind. All of the dresses I’d ever seen her in were below the knee, short-sleeved, sensible professional prints. Low heels, because a lady didn’t wear anything else to work, but not too high, because that would give people the wrong idea and besides, they were so bad for your feet. Practical and thrifty and sin
gleminded, Fee had good qualities for someone in charge of the account books.

She gestured to a chair outside the meeting room. “If you just have a seat here, we should be ready in just a minute.”

“Thanks.”

I sat outside the room, which had been converted from the big upstairs room in the addition, and pushed my seat back so that it was leaning against the wall on two feet, evidence that I really was in a bad-girl mood. The door didn’t catch closed all the way, and I could hear the conversation as clearly as if I’d been in the room myself. Always good to get a feel for what was going on, I rationalized.

“—the police haven’t been able to do much. Though, honestly, what are they supposed to do?” I recognized that voice: It was Aden Fiske, who was the head of the Stone Harbor Historical Society and manager of the Chandler House site. “They can’t exactly do anything with a brick and a pile of rocks, or analyze the handwriting from a spray-painted wall.”

“The question isn’t what they can do now, the question is, where were they at the time the vandalism took place?” a cross-sounding man’s voice groused. I thought it might be Bradley Chandler, who was the manager of the Historical Society’s other property across town, the Tapley House. “As homeowners, we pay a lot of tax money and then this—”

I’d heard about the vandalism but didn’t know any of the details; I’d have to ask my husband, Brian, if he’d seen anything in the paper when I got home. There certainly seemed to be something about the historical district in Stone Harbor lately, I thought, and it wasn’t doing anything to dispel the notion of a place under siege.

“Now, Bray, I understand your frustration, but they can’t
be everywhere at once. They got there as soon as the neighbors called.” That voice was a younger man’s, quite arresting.

“And I suppose we should be grateful that anyone bothered to call in, the way things are going now. I thought that Perry was supposed to—” That was Bradley Chandler again, grousing.

“She is very late, isn’t she, Bray?” said Aden Fiske. “Has anyone tried her house?”

Fee spoke up then. “There was no answer. I think that we should just continue on so we can all get home.”

“All right then, if you would call in our guest, then.”

That was my signal to stop eavesdropping and straighten out my chair as quietly as I could. By the time Fee came out for me, I was carefully going over the notes I’d penned on a yellow legal pad.

“Professor?” She smiled and raised her eyebrows, too full of glee for my taste. Sunday nights were for watching television while folding the laundry, and that’s what I wished I was doing right now.

The room was filled with about twenty people, four sitting at one table set with water glasses and notepads for five. Aden Fiske was seated at the center of the table. He was slight and trim, in his sixties and a working definition of dapper, with white hair brushed back off his narrow pink face; his nose was straight but came to a sharp point, giving him a faintly comical air. He stood up and introduced me.

“Well, Fee and I both know what Professor Fielding is up to, but I think it would be useful for her to give us a little overview for the rest of you about the absolute mess she’s been making in our backyard!”

Everyone giggled at Aden’s naughty behavior, and I smiled. He really was helping me to disarm any more potential nay-sayers.

I briefly summarized my goals, to identify any archaeo
logical remains that might be affected by the proposed gift shop and restroom facilities, and to learn more about the early eighteenth-century Chandler family from their own artifacts and documents. Most people nodded, interested, a few smiled politely, a handful remained unconvinced.

Aden thanked me. “I’ve been following the project from its start and I for one am very excited about what we might learn. And, who knows? Professor Fielding’s expertise might be needed elsewhere on our properties, as we hope to expand their facilities.”

“Well, I hope it won’t become too much of a habit. Fee says it is very expensive.” I got a good look at Bradley Chandler then, a sloppy-looking man, carelessly dressed in business casual, his graying blond hair and a short, curling beard making him look like an overweight and annoyed garden gnome.

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