“Who’s your master, then?” asked the printer, in an almost lecherous voice.
“A squire of Boston,” I said with a little attitude. “He wants one for himself and two for family gifts.”
Stephen gestured to the pile. “I’m Stephen Day, I’m the printer, have a look.”
“I’m Hezekiah Usher, the bookseller, and I’m not selling these books,” said the merchant, still very matter-of-fact. “You’d best come back in a sennight.”
I made sure to look crushed. “Oh, but Goodman Usher, it is a long way from Boston, and I’ve the harvest to help with when I return. I’ve not the time to return. Might you sell some of these to me, even if they be not perfect?”
“Yes. Look,” commanded Stephen Day. The merchant was about to protest, but instead smirked and raised his eyes to God with a shrug of resignation. I walked to the table, ignoring the intense stare of the printer, and picked up a book. The leather was supple. When I opened it, the binding was stiff and fresh, a faint smell of glue still on it, as well as the clean smell of paper, and another smell, almost metallic, which might have been the ink. They were elegant, the shape a little narrower than modern books, with a bold exquisite font on the first page: “The WHOLE booke of psalmes faithfully translated into ENGLISH metre.” By modern standards, yes, okay, the typesetting was an embarrassment, but the book itself was handsome. I thumbed through a few pages, pretended to study a leaf, set the volume aside, thumbed through another with a studious expression. Then another. Then a fourth. The two men watched me.
“What do you look for?” asked the printer.
I was about to give him a polite smile and then remembered that this population never seems to do that. “You said these had faults and I am looking to find the least faulty of them.”
“They are all from the same plates,” said the printer impatiently. “I don’t know if you can read but they’re all exactly the same.”
“Not so,” I said, and presented the book I held. “Do you see how the printed area is slightly askew on this page? The others I looked at also had uneven pages. I am trying to find one where the paper was set just right on the press. I do not know the term for it, but I know what I am looking for.”
The printer huffed a bit at that. The merchant chuckled and reached for a book. “Let us see if we can find any perfectly set books. If we can, Goodman Day, then I’ll buy them off you and sell them to my customer.”
I expected Stephen Day to instantly declare he’d sell the books to me directly, as his profit would be greater and Goodman Usher had already refused to carry them. That is what any enterprising person of my era would do. But this notion did not seem to enter Stephen Day’s head. How very particular this society was: everyone kept to their place.
Or perhaps Stephen Day was simply dull-witted.
In any case, he agreed to this readily, and the two of them began to help me search for a book with every leaf of every octave perfect. As the three of us perused them, the men resumed arguing over the fate of the remaining books. Now their eyes were busy and their attention distracted. Good. I placed one book down to my right rather than back onto the pile (which was to my left). Each time I returned a book to the pile and reached for a new one with my left hand, I would push this hijacked volume an inch or so farther to the right, so that eventually I had inched it all the way around a small barrel on the table, where neither man could see it without searching for it. Their argument had continued to grow until they were truly bickering, so that when we finished reviewing all fifty-odd copies on the table, they looked not to me but to each other, teetering on the edge of vitriol.
“I shall have to disappoint my master,” I said decisively. “None of these would be to his standards. Good day.”
“Do you hear that?” said Hezekiah Usher to Stephen Day, as I turned to leave.
“This strumpet is failing to obey her master,” said Stephen Day to Hezekiah Usher. “He told her to bring back three copies of the psalter, and she leaves here without even one. He did not tell her to check the quality of the work—”
But I was already out the door. I grabbed the shovel with my right hand and continued up Water Street.
My left hand clutched the hijacked copy of the Bay Psalm Book.
Reader, I had walked out the door right in front of them, holding it in plain sight, but they did not see it. Not only had they ceased to regard me, but even to the degree I was in their peripheral vision, they did not see theft. What I had just done was unthinkable to them. They could not see what they could not imagine. Still, it had been a shuddery moment, and I barely suppressed the urge to run, or at least look nervously over my shoulder. But I had it, and had gotten cleanly away.
Shovel—check. Psalter—check. That was the hardest part. Now to the cooper’s, and then to the boulder, and then the return trip. I could do this! Feeling more confident, I held myself more upright and walked more briskly. I turned right at the next intersection, passed a leather-worker and an apothecary, and then on the left, as I knew from the old maps, there was a cooperage.
The cooperage had a yard that fronted the street. It was crowded with buckets, barrels, and casks, and on a huge tree stump in the center was a stash of metal hoops of different sizes. Various axes, knives, and adzes rested on a long, low bench beside this. The lovely smell of wood shavings neutralized the general stench of filth. The cooper, a man of Tristan’s build, dressed in Puritan garb of faded maroon with a leather work-apron, hatless and collarless, was bent over a large half-finished barrel, using a hammer and what looked like an adze to pound a hoop into place around the staves.
“Are you a dry-tight cooper?” I asked.
“Can be,” he said without looking up. “What is your need?”
“I have a thing in need of storage,” I said, and held out the book.
He looked up. He was handsome, and held himself like somebody extremely comfortable in his own body—very different from the other men I’d encountered today. His eyes glanced briefly at the book but then strayed to me, and considered me a moment—the whole of me, not my face. His look gave me shivers. Then he suddenly shook his head, made eye contact, and said, “What, then?”
“I need this bound into a dry-tight vessel,” I said. “’Tis an errand for my master in Boston.”
“Your master in Boston. Is that the book everyone has been speaking of?” he asked, without much interest.
“The first book printed in America,” I said, and I confess I was (and to this day, remain) awed by the thought.
He shrugged. “That’s fine for those who read,” he said. “It does less for our common good than did the first grist mill or the first forge.”