Zebulon Wilde had been Benjamin’s father. And if I hadn’t known that to begin with, I’d have learned it from the handy family tree Frank’s uncle Walt had made, his tidy printing leaning backward just a bit, but keeping to the lines he’d drawn and noting dates and places of the births and deaths and marriages of everyone he’d found. He’d obviously taken genealogy very seriously, and had footnoted each entry, citing sources.
Zebulon had been the youngest of four children—five, if you counted the first-named boy, Samuel, who had been born and died all in one day. There were two sisters after that, one who was written down simply as Daughter, Unnamed, which I took to mean her name had not yet been found in the documents, not that her family neglected to give her one. Then one more brother, named Reuben, who’d married and had at least one child himself. And then Zebulon.
Born at Newtown, Long Island, in 1697. Married Patience Hallet at the same place in 1722. Died at Snug Cove, 1765.
Almost seventy years of a life distilled down to three dates on a page. It was humbling to think that my own life, someday, would be summed up as blandly for some future reader, and probably then only if I got lucky and had a descendant who did something worthy of being remembered. Zebulon Wilde, by becoming the father of a Revolutionary War hero, had hit the jackpot—assured of a mention in every school history book, even if that was no more than his name. Not too bad for a man who appeared to have been, from a glance through this section of Uncle Walt’s research, a farmer and carpenter. One of the documents copied here was a page from a receipt book for work he had done while in Newtown. For work about stairs read one line, and another: For building a bedstead and putting up ledges and shelves, and the still more ambitious: For laying on shingles and building a barn. He’d been paid in the way of Colonial trade in both money and shares of the livestock and crops of the neighbours he’d worked for, a good hog and winter wheat being as useful as cash to a man in those times.
He hadn’t stayed in Newtown, though. The last six of his eight children had been born here, at Snug Cove.
The family tree had them all listed in order of birth. First came William, whose name I had already learned. While he wasn’t as famous as his brother Benjamin, he’d made a mark of his own on New York, being one of its wealthier merchants and ship owners, making a small fortune through his trade with the West Indies in defiance of the British laws that tried to put a stop to it. The next son listed, Daniel, had been William’s partner in that trade. The family tree said Daniel had been married at Jamaica and had died at Hispaniola, so he’d evidently liked the warmer weather.
There were three sons after that, all with the same name, none surviving long. Samuel Wilde, born 1727, died 1727. Samuel Wilde, born 1728, died 1729. Samuel Wilde, born 1730, died 1731. Again, those spare numbers on paper seemed hardly an adequate record of all of the hopes and the loss and the sorrow that would have marked those painful few years for Zebulon Wilde and his wife. It appeared, for this family, that “Samuel” was not a fortunate name.
With the next son, they’d broken the pattern. And he had survived.
Joseph, born at Snug Cove, 1733. So then this was the United Empire Loyalist, as we in Canada called those who, in the Revolution, had stayed loyal to the British Crown, finding themselves fighting their friends and families in what could be argued had been America’s first civil war. Frank had been right when he’d told me the family didn’t talk much about Joseph—all he had here was a birth date, nothing more, the rest left blank as though they’d wanted to erase him. And if Frank was also right about the family legend, Joseph was the brother who had shot and killed his sister’s French officer.
Benjamin came next in line, but I skipped over him and all his details, having memorized them all before the board had interviewed me for this job. I could recite his children’s names and who they’d married and go down the line from there. That didn’t interest me this morning.
What did interest me was the name that followed Benjamin’s—the last child born to Zebulon and Patience Wilde, here at Snug Cove. Their only daughter.
Lydia.
Unlike her brother Joseph, she had been remembered by two entries: born 1739, died 1760—the source for her death date being cited as a letter in the Fisher family’s personal collection, written June eleventh of that year, which simply stated: Zeb Wilde’s girl was buried this day.
According to this chart, then, she’d been twenty-one when she had died. That hit me in a way the death all of those infants named Samuel hadn’t done. They, too, were sad, but this seemed worse, somehow. For someone who’d survived all the hazards of childhood, who’d gathered the knowledge and life lessons and the experience to start her out on her path in the world, to be blotted from the record before she’d had any hope or chance of taking more than a few steps along that path, seemed cruelly wrong. And so unfair.
If I’d been motivated before by my desire to prove to Sharon I was smarter and more stubborn than she thought, then I was motivated even more right now by seeing those two simple, soulless dates bookending what had been the life of a young woman; and by knowing that, through research, I could fill the space between those dates with something that approached that woman’s shape.
I’d have to wait, though. I could hear the door to the staff kitchen downstairs creak and bang above a cheerful rise of voices, and a half a minute later up the stairwell wafted one of the rare irresistible things that could draw me away from my reading—the scent of fresh cinnamon buns.
? ? ?
Frank’s way of chairing a meeting was much more laid-back than Malaika’s. Declaring the dining room too hot and stuffy, he’d moved us outdoors to a shady spot under the trees by the parking lot, crafting an informal board table by dragging two picnic tables together end to end. At the centre of these, in a large clamshell box, were the cinnamon buns that Dave Becker had brought from the Millbank bakery.
Dave was generous like that. I’d been in his antiques store several times now since I’d moved here, and even when I hadn’t made a purchase he had never let me walk out empty-handed, always giving me some little item—an egg cup or handkerchief—that he’d had tucked in the back of a cabinet or stuffed in a drawer; and this morning without any arm-twisting he’d taken on the job of keeping minutes for our meeting. He set his pen down now. “So let’s see if I’ve got this straight. I can keep doing appraisals for people outside the museum, the same as I’ve always done, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“But if somebody donates an article to the museum, and needs an appraisal of what they’re donating, for taxes, then I can’t provide that appraisal.”
“Right. That would be conflict of interest. I can’t appraise either.”
Museums weren’t private collectors. Whatever we held was considered to be in the public trust, meaning when people donated things to a museum they expected us to manage and preserve them for the benefit of everyone, not hoard them for ourselves or, worse still, use them for our own financial profit.
There were rules for accepting something into the collection, and rules for taking care of it, and even more restrictive rules for how and when we could dispose of it, all written down in our policies.
Frank moved the meeting along. “I’ve broken down the inventory Captain Wilde’s wife made of what was in the house when it was being occupied by Redcoats. On this first page, here, are all the things my family managed not to sell, the things that we held on to.”
It wasn’t a bad start. A four-poster bed that had been in the chamber of Benjamin Wilde and his wife, and two chairs and a small table matching the ones she had listed as being downstairs in the parlour; an old copper kettle, a soup tureen, six silver spoons and four candlesticks, and a long mirror, its frame carved and inlaid to match the description she’d made of a looking-glass, brought by my husband a gift from Jamaica.
Tracy, reading the list, asked, “And these are all in our storage facility?”
Frank replied, “If by ‘storage facility’ you mean my barn and the safe in Dave’s shop, then yeah, that’s where they are.”