I’d known nothing about residential schools until a royal commission in Canada held public hearings that brought many hard stories into the light, how for over a hundred years many Indigenous children had been taken from their own families and put into boarding schools where the objective was, as the founder of one such school in Pennsylvania put it, to “kill the Indian” in the child. Their clothes were taken from them, and their hair was cut; they were forbidden to speak their own language, often even separated from their siblings at the same schools; forced to labour for their “teachers,” and subjected to abuse both physical and sexual that left them, if not dead, forever traumatized. From watching the survivors talk I knew their scars were carried on the inside too and passed down through the generations.
“So when he came back from the Korean War, he traded in his helmet for a hardhat and took Grandma down to Buffalo, off reservation, so their kids wouldn’t ever have to go to residential school. That’s where my mom and dad met—Buffalo. He brought her back here. His mom ran a boardinghouse for ironworkers. Used to be a lot of Mohawks living here in Brooklyn.”
“And so you were born here?”
“Yeah. My mom,” he told me, “she’s a nurse, she got a job here at the hospital, and Dad tried not to travel too much with his work, and his mom helped look after us. My sister and me.”
“Is she older or younger, your sister?”
“Younger. She’s moved back up to my mom’s home community. So did my mom’s parents, when they retired. And Pete and my mom live in Rochester.”
“Who’s Pete?”
He smiled. “My stepdad.”
I thought back and tried to keep everyone organized. “The one who hangs the new doors for your grandmother?”
“He used to. Yeah.” He turned a corner, brought us back out onto the Belt Parkway with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in view. “My dad’s mom didn’t like Pete to begin with. Didn’t like him taking my dad’s place. But he’s a hard guy not to like. He kind of grew on her.”
Sam’s stepfather, a carpenter, had met Sam’s mom when he had needed stitches in his hand and she was on shift at the hospital. They’d married two years later. As a teenager, Sam worked construction with Pete in the summers, and got interested in that, and earned his university degree in architecture before he decided he liked building structures better than designing them. And so he’d certified as a construction manager and started his own business.
“Why in Millbank?”
“I don’t know.” He gave it thought. “I guess it feels right. Of the places I feel I belong, Millbank’s the one that fits me best.”
I wondered what that felt like, feeling you fit perfectly somewhere.
“Besides,” he said, “Malaika keeps on finding projects for me.”
We were on the bridge, now. Its high towers and suspension cables made me dizzy if I looked up, but the view was something else.
It was a shame to leave it and cross onto Staten Island, but we made good time from there. We stopped for lunch near Princeton and arrived at the museum in New Jersey right on time, although I had the strong impression the director would have been a whole lot happier if we’d been late, or better yet, not come at all.
He was a tall and well-dressed man who looked like someone who still carried proper handkerchiefs. And used them.
His assistant, on the other hand, was just as she had sounded on the phone—young, nice, and ready to be helpful. She had the Spanish chair set out and waiting for us in the entry hall.
It was a gorgeous piece. I’d also seen these called Campeche chairs, but I’d never seen one of this age before. Viewed from the side, its mahogany frame had been shaped like a smooth, rounded X that supported a long piece of dark brown tooled leather to form both the back and the seat, like an early recliner. The leather with age had acquired a lovely patina, and most of the brass tacks that held it in place seemed to still be there. Both the chair’s arms were intact, curved, and graceful, and worn at their edges from use, and the crest above the leather at the chair back had been carved to make a darkly gleaming seashell.
I could see why the director here had not been keen to part with it, not even as a loan.
Which made me wonder why he seemed so quick to help us wrap and load it in Sam’s truck. All I could think was that it must be us, and not the chair, he couldn’t wait to see the back of. Gingerly he shook Sam’s hand, then mine, and turned without so much as a goodbye. He’d nearly made it back to the front door of his museum building when his young assistant told us, “Don’t mind him. He might seem grumpy, but he’s actually relieved.”
I saw him stop, and start to turn again towards us, and his eyes revealed a blend of disbelief and resignation.
His assistant, smiling, friendly, remained unaware. “He was a little worried,” she confided, “that you’d ask him for the sword.”
? ? ?
It was like setting up for the best kind of show-and-tell. I’d laid everything out on the dining room table so all the trustees could see clearly.
“So, let’s start with this,” I said, meaning the drawing, now protected and supported in its storage box. My cousin had authenticated it and given it a valuation that, together with the painting’s, had made Isaac Fisher very happy. “It says right here, clear as day, that this was by Benjamin’s sister—by Lydia Wilde—when the Bellewether was being overhauled in the last year of the Seven Years’ War. And it’s a documented fact that the Bellewether was indeed overhauled, after a pirate attack in the fall of 1759. So that all fits. Now this”—I showed them, holding up an open reference book with brightly coloured illustrations—“is the uniform the man here in this drawing’s wearing. See? Same leggings, everything. Which makes him from the Troupes de la Marine, a French Canadian. An officer. And this”—I held the button up, the one I’d found on site—“would be consistent with the buttons that his uniform would have.”
I paused and looked around to make sure everyone was following. They were, though Sharon wore a frown.
Her disapproval energized me. “So,” I said, “I think we can agree that a French officer was living here at the same time the legend says he was. And so was Lydia.”
I let that sink in, waited for the nodding heads, before I carried on.
I’d kept the sword in the long wooden storage box that the director from New Jersey had produced it in. He’d really loved it, and I knew that it had wounded him to have to show me, let alone to give in to my logical persuasion that it properly belonged in our collection, not his own. But to his credit, he had kept it in immaculate condition. When I opened the box now to show my trustees, the silver of the hilt gleamed in the room’s light and I heard the gasps. It satisfied me knowing the effect was what I’d hoped it would be.
“Wow,” Tracy said.
Harvey leaned in closer, looking at the words inscribed along the blade. “That’s French, right?”
With a nod, I gave him the translation: “?‘Draw me not without cause; sheathe me not without honour.’ Now, that’s a pretty common motto for those times. It shows up on a lot of swords, both French and Spanish, but bear with me, because this one has a name.” With gloved hands, carefully, I turned the sword so they could read it. “See there? ‘De Sabran.’ Now, in the inventory made by Captain Wilde’s wife, she wrote . . . Frank, can you just read the third to the last listing there, on page fourteen?”
He cleared his throat dramatically. “?‘My brother-in-law’s sword, with silver hilt, marked de Sabran.’?”
I said, “The first time that I read that, I assumed she meant the maker’s mark. But look, the maker’s mark is here, in this cartouche.” I showed them. “So then de Sabran would likely be the name of the sword’s owner.”
Sharon interjected, “Likely. But not definitely.”
“Joseph Wilde,” I said, “was Captain Wilde’s older brother. So, to Captain Wilde’s wife, he’d have been her brother-in-law, right? And he’s the one the legend says killed Lydia’s French officer.”
Eve followed Sharon’s lead, though her voice lacked the same belligerence. “Well?”
I took a breath. And played my ace.
“This note,” I said, and set it down, “came with the sword when it was sold at auction in the 1800s.”
Signed by Lawrence Wilde, the poet—and the grandson of our Captain Benjamin—the note read: This belonged to Joseph Wilde, who took it from the officer imprisoned at Snug Cove.
Everybody read the note by turn, and Frank said, “I’ll be damned.”