And here we come to Mister Bishop’s current state of affairs. According to the matron of the institution, Mister Bishop—whom she described, dismissively, as “fey” and “a flibbertigibbet” while admitting he was enormously popular with his students: “The most popular teacher we have ever had, I am sorry to say”—requested a period of leave toward the end of January in order to tend to his sick mother in Burlington. （Obviously, a lie, as Missus Bishop is and has always been in excellent health.） Edward did indeed venture north, but here again, his account diverges from the truth. His first stop was to friends of his in Boston, the Cookes, a brother-and-sister duo who pose as a young married couple for reasons I will return to later in this narrative. His second stop was to Manchester, where Belle was living in a respectable boardinghouse and finishing her training as a nurse. It appears that Belle, despite her father’s admonishments, had remained in communication with Edward since his banishment from the family, even sending him a portion of her monthly allowance. It is unclear what exactly transpired between the siblings, but late in February, at least a week past the date Edward told the matron he would return, the two traveled to Burlington, where, it seemed, Belle hoped to reconcile her brother with his father. Laura, the younger of their elder sisters, had recently given birth, and Belle must have assumed that her parents would be in a forgiving mood.
Needless to say, the visit did not unfold as the siblings had hoped. Mister Bishop, upon seeing his wayward son, exploded in anger, and there was a heated exchange; he had by this point learned of his son’s theft of his wife’s jewelry and personal items, and confronted Edward with this information. Edward, hearing this, made a sudden lunge for his mother, who, even now, remains confident that Edward was simply reacting to the fever of the moment and had no intention of actually harming her, but his action alarmed Mister Bishop, who threw a punch at his son, which knocked the latter to the floor. A scuffle ensued, with all the women attempting to separate the two, and in the melee, Missus Bishop was struck in the face.
It was not certain that Edward had been the one to land the blow, but it no longer mattered: Mister Bishop ordered Edward out of the house, and then told Belle she had a choice—she could remain in the family, or she could leave with her brother, but she could not do both. To the Bishops’ great astonishment, she left, turning her back without a word on the family that had raised her. （Such, Missus Bishop weepingly told me, is the power of Edward’s charm and the spell he is able to cast over those he has seduced.）
Together, Edward and Belle—she now entirely dependent upon her brother—fled. They returned to Manchester to gather Belle’s valuables （and, certainly, her money）， and then continued onward to Boston, to the Cookes’。 Like the Bishops, the Cookes too were Colony orphans, and, like them, they too were adopted into a wealthy family. It is thought that Aubrey, the brother, met Edward in New York when Edward was living with Aunt Bethesda, and began a relationship—by all accounts deeply passionate and true—that endures to this day. Aubrey was, and is, a spectacularly handsome man of some seven-and-twenty years, educated and familiar with the ways of good society, and he and his sister were all but assured an easy life. However, when Aubrey was twenty and his sister, Susannah, nineteen, their parents died suddenly in a road accident, and when their affairs were settled, it was revealed that the money their children had always assumed would be theirs was nonexistent, diminished by years of bad investments and overwhelming debts.
A different man or woman would have turned to honest work, but that was not Aubrey and Susannah’s way. Instead, under the guise of being young newlyweds, they separately began to prey upon lonely, married men and women—they were indiscriminate about which—of great wealth, often in loveless unions, offering their friendship and company. Then, once they had made them fall in love, they would demand money on threat of exposing them to their spouses. To a one, their victims paid, too fearful of the consequences and too humiliated by their own gullibility, and together, the Cookes amassed a good sum, which, along with, presumably, the money Edward stole from his aunt and was paid by poor Mister D.’s parents, they intend to use to open a silk-weaving concern in the West. My sources indicate that Edward, along with the Cookes, have been arranging this for at least a year; their scheme is that, being mindful of the laws of ’76, Edward will pretend to be married to Susannah Cooke, and Belle to Aubrey.
As of November of last year, the plan was almost ready to execute when a blight killed the majority of the mulberry trees. Panicked, Aubrey and Edward agreed that they would try to find one last source of money. They know that it is only a matter of time before one of the Cookes’ victims speaks and they find themselves in grave legal trouble. All they needed was one final sum, enough to see them through the farm’s opening and first few years of operation.
And then, in January of this year, Edward Bishop met your grandson.
XVIII
There was more, but he could not bear to read it. Already, he was trembling so much—and the room was so silent—that he could hear the dry, rattling noise the paper made in his hands, his short, broken gasps. He felt as if he had been walloped about the head with something dense but yielding, a cushion perhaps, and it had left him breathless and confused. He was aware of his fingers releasing the page, and of rising, unsteadily, to his feet, and then tipping forward, and then of someone—his grandfather, whose presence he had almost forgotten—catching him and lowering him onto the settee, repeating his name. As if from far away, he heard his grandfather call out for Adams, and when he returned to himself, he was once again sitting upright, and his grandfather was holding a teacup to his lips.
“There’s some ginger in this, and honey,” Grandfather said. “Sip it slowly. There’s a good boy. Yes, very good. And there’s a molasses cookie—can you hold it? Very good.”
He closed his eyes and leaned back his head. Once again, he was David Bingham, and he was weak, and his grandfather was soothing him, and it was as if he had never read the investigator’s report, as if he had never learned what was within its pages, as if he had never met Edward. He was in too much of a muddle. It was dangerous. And yet, no matter how much he tried, no matter how he tried to separate one strand of the story from the next, he could not. It was as if he had experienced the story rather than read it, and at the same time, he did not feel that it had anything to do with him, or with the Edward he knew, who was, after all, the only version of Edward that mattered. There was the story he had just consumed, and it was an anchor falling rapidly through the water many thousands of leagues, falling and falling until it was swallowed by the sand at the bottom of the sea. And above this was Edward’s face and Edward’s eyes, Edward turning to him and smiling, asking, “Do you love me?,” his body skimming above the water like a bird, his voice made whispery by the wind. “Do you trust me, David?” asked the voice, Edward’s voice, “Do you believe me?” He thought of Edward’s skin on his, the delight in his face when he saw David in his doorway, how he had stroked the tip of David’s nose and had told him that in a year’s time it would be freckled, each speck the color of caramel, a gift from the California sun.