- Thomas Harcourt’s parlor, main floor, early Saturday morning, 29 March 1755

Inside of Thomas Harcourt’s parlor contained a small mantel clock beneath a glass dome. A bracket clock stood upon a shelf beside the fireplace’s hearth. The tall case occupied the passage. Another, smaller movement rested without a case upon a workbench in the front room.

All were stopped.

Julian examined the mantel clock first. Its rear door opened easily. Nothing had been concealed inside. The bracket clock contained only its movement and dust.

He turned to the tall case. The lower door remained open. The hanging weights nearly touched the bottom. Julian lifted them one at a time, testing their mass. The first was solid. The second produced a faint movement within.

Julian held it near his ear and tipped it. Something slid inside the brass shell.

Pike watched Julian’s actions intently.

“Did you hear that?” asked Julian.

“Yes,” replied Pike.

“Then we are about to conduct an experiment.”

Julian took the weight out of the clock and carried it into the parlor. He placed it on the table. Its lower cap had been soldered, but the upper hook passed through a threaded brass fitting concealed beneath accumulated grime.

He wrapped the fitting with a cloth and turned. At first, it resisted. Finally, the cap moved. The weight opened.

Inside was a tightly rolled strip of paper wrapped around a small iron key. Pike whispered something that sounded like a prayer. Julian removed both objects.

The paper bore a single line in Thomas’s handwriting:

‘The box remembers what the books were made to forget.’

Below it, was a small drawing of a seven-pointed star. Pike leaned closer.

“What box?” asked Pike.

Julian thought of Thomas’ English dispatch box concealed upstairs. The box had already been searched - or it only appeared to have been searched. The key Julian now held was iron and too large for the small brass lock upon the dispatch box beside the kitchen door. He looked toward the stairs.

“The cabinet,” declared Julian.

They returned to the records room upstairs.

The tall, compartmented cabinet stood against the wall opposite the shelves. It contained dozens of narrow drawers intended for folded abstracts, index slips, seals, or correspondence.

The iron key fit a lock hidden beneath a sliding wooden panel at the cabinet’s base. Julian inserted the key and turned it. A section of molding was released. The cabinet’s entire lower plinth pulled forward like a drawer.

Inside rested a flat English dispatch box bound with dark iron straps. Unlike the box Julian had brought from Yorktown, this one was old, scarred, and remarkably heavy.

Pike helped lift it onto the central table. The lid bore no name. The lock had a narrow, elaborate keyway.

Julian tried the iron key. It did not fit.

Pike stared. “Thomas hid a key to a box that does not open the box.”

“The key opened the hiding place,” remarked Julian.

“Then where is the other?” asked Pike.

Julian examined the lock.

Its shape seemed familiar. Not because he had seen the box before, but because he had used a similar key every week since boyhood.

He drew out his mother’s silver watch. The winding key hung from a short black ribbon beside the case. One end fitted the watch arbor. The other was flattened and cut with three small teeth.

His mother had owned the watch long before Thomas left England for the New World. Thomas had sent it back after her death, when Sir Reginald ordered several of her possessions altered or distributed.

Julian had always assumed the double-ended key was merely an unusual watchmaker’s design. He inserted the toothed end into the dispatch box.

It turned! The lock opened with a heavy click.

Pike stared first at the key, then at Julian. “Did you know?” asked Pike, disbelievingly.

“No,” replied Julian.

“Did your father?” asked Pike.

Julian considered the repeated instructions concerning Thomas’s estate, the insistence that Julian carried his mother’s watch to the colony; and Sir Reginald’s refusal to explain why a second son without a professional office had been sent instead of an experienced agent.

“I do not know,” said Julian. It was the first answer Julian had given that day which he disliked for its honesty.

He lifted the lid. Inside lay a folded surveyor’s chain, several packets of papers, and a narrow wooden tray. No silver, no coins, and no jewelry.

Pike appeared both relieved and disappointed.

Julian removed the chain first.

It had been folded with extraordinary care, each length laid parallel to the next and bound by two leather straps. The iron links were smaller than those of a common hauling chain and connected at intervals by brass tally tags.

A surveyor’s chain.

Perhaps the chain Thomas had accused half the colony of using dishonestly. Julian placed it upon the floor and began unfolding it.

The chain continued farther than the room allowed. He carried one end into the passage, then returned for another length. When fully extended through the records room and bedchamber, it appeared ordinary.

He counted the links once. Then again.

Pike waited at the doorway. “How many?”

“One hundred and one,” said Julian, disbelieving.

“Aren’t there meant to be one hundred?” asked Pike.

“Yes,” said Julian. Julian crouched beside the extra link.

It had not been crudely added. Its iron matched the others in age and wear. The connecting rings were uniform. Anyone counting only the brass tally markers or trusting the maker’s stamp upon the edges might never suspect the instrument exceeded the standard measure.

A chain with one link more would add less than eight inches to every eighty-six feet. A trivial amount. Unless the distance was repeated dozens or hundreds of times.

Unless no one checked.

Unless the false measurement entered a patent, a boundary agreement, or a processioning record. Then the land itself would appear to confirm the deception.

Pike squatted beside him. “Could a man tell by looking?”

“Not easily,” replied Julian.

“By carrying it?” asked Pike.

“Not unless he knew the proper weight it was supposed to be,” said Julian.

“By using it?” asked Pike.

“Only if he measured against a standard,” replied Julian.

Pike touched one of the tally tags. “And if every man trusted the surveyor?”

“Then the chain would become true,” said Julian. The words left Julian more quietly than he intended. He returned to the box.

The first packet contained a tobacco warehouse note.

The document represented a quantity of inspected tobacco stored at a named warehouse. It bore the date, weight, inspector’s signature, and the name of the person entitled to its value. ‘Ezekiel Webb’.

Across the face Thomas had written: Buried 17 June 1741.

The warehouse note was dated 1753.Pike read over Julian’s shoulder. “A dead man’s tobacco?”

“Or a living man using a dead name,” replied Julian.

“Could the note be old?” asked Pike.

“The date is clear,” said Julian. Julian held it near the candle.

The paper bore a watermark. He could not identify it, but the sheet appeared newer than its age claimed. He set it aside.

The second packet contained a folded deed bearing seals and the signatures of several colonial officials. It granted six hundred acres to ‘Julian Edmund Harcourt’.

Julian read the name twice.

The date placed the grant six years earlier, when he had been in London and unaware of owning so much as a Virginia fence post. The tract lay within Saint Orison Parish.

Pike frowned. “ I have never heard of that parish.”

“Nor have I,” said Julian.

“May be farther west,” said Pike.

“It refers to James City County,” said Julian.

“Then I would have heard of that,” said Pike.

Julian examined the boundaries. The tract began at a marked white oak, ran by various bearings and distances to a branch; then followed along the watercourse, crossed a road, and returned to the first tree.

The language was ordinary. The parish was not. More troubling was the consideration recorded near the bottom. The patent fees had been paid through an English intermediary acting on behalf of Sir Reginald Harcourt.

Julian’s father had purchased Virginia land in Julian’s name and concealed it from him.

Pike watched his face. “What is it?”

“My inheritance, apparently,” shrugged Julian.

“You did not know?” asked Pike.

“My father dislikes spoiling surprises,” advised Julian.

Julian turned the deed over. A message had been written across the reverse in Thomas’s narrow hand: ‘Every acre begins as a line. Find the man who has learned to move them.’ Beneath the sentence appeared the same seven-pointed star drawn on the paper from the clock weight.

Pike crossed himself.

Julian looked at him. “It is a geometrical mark,” said Julian.

“It may be both,” said Pike.

“It is not,” replied Julian.

“You have been in the colony one day. Allow Virginia time to make sense,” said Pike.

Julian laid the deed beside the warehouse note. Three objects. An overlong chain. A note assigning tobacco to a dead man. A deed granting Julian land in a parish that did not exist.

Thomas had chosen them deliberately. They represented measurement, value, and ownership; the three stages by which ground became wealth.

The chain measured the land. The deed defined its legal possessor. The warehouse note converted its crop into spendable credit. If each could be falsified, a man might create wealth without owning the acreage, growing the tobacco, or bearing his own name.

Julian returned to the box. The wooden tray contained several brass seals, folded ribbons, a stick of red wax, and a small linen pouch. Beneath the tray lay a shallow compartment.

Empty.

The dust there had been disturbed. Something had been removed. The searchers had found part of Thomas’s hiding place before Julian arrived - or Thomas himself had removed the final object.

Pike picked up the warehouse note. “Who was Ezekiel Webb?”

“We shall discover it,” said Julian.

“We?” asked Pike.

“Are we not in this together? You drove me here,” replied Julian.

“That was the full extent of our agreement,” said Pike.

“You also entered the house armed with firewood,” advised Julian.

“A decision I am reconsidering,” responded Pike.

Next Chapter: Chapter 10: The Visitor