Vanessa, a freelance writer who grew up in Spain, is fleeing the pain of an unraveling relationship when she goes to her grandmother's house on Canada's east coast, near Oak Island. Here her discovery of a 400-year old diary written by a failed Spanish Dominican monk rekindles her obsession with an international, multi-million dollar treasure hunt that has drawn investors, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, from Canada, the United States and Europe for more than two hundred years. Vanessa's arrival at a new solution to the mystery, by learning how to see beyond the barriers of reason, plunges her into an underworld from which "there is no turning back, where the rules that run the surface world do not apply..."

Preface

During the last 217 years Canadian-American treasure hunting consortia have sunk several million dollars into the search for gold on Nova Scotia’s Oak Island but still, at the time of writing, the little island continues to guard her treasure secret.

Facts about the real Oak Island treasure hunt presented in The Oak Island Affair come from the many books and articles on the subject.

All characters past and present, their writings and their actions, are the product of my imagination.

Jane Bow

Peterborough, Ontario

Vanessa’s Map of recorded Oak Island discoveries.

I

The walls of Gran’s white shingled house shuddered in the wind of a spring storm off the Atlantic. Gran had died six months ago and the For Sale sign Uncle Vilhelm had hammered into the front lawn was squealing in the rain when Vanessa climbed the drop-down ladder to the attic. The air up here smelled of must. She would rather be running or lifting weights, pushing and pulling into the grunting repetitions that would shut out everything, everybody…Charlie; but the wind was too high, the sheets of rain too harsh to run through, and there was no health club in Chester, Nova Scotia. So she would clear out the attic.

Her hand found the overhead bulb’s hanging string just as the storm reached a new crescendo. Nails squeaked in the roof as she pulled the light on but not until she had worked her way past the steamer trunks, between broken bed frames and legless chairs, a wicker pram full of baleful china-headed dolls, did Vanessa glimpse a glint of metal in one of the farthest crannies, where the attic’s dust-coated floor met the roof beams.

The box she pulled out was no bigger than a jewelry case and maybe it was the smell of its cedar lining, of trapped heat, leather and ancient paper that quickened something, as if her nerve endings were divining a message her brain could not yet fathom.

Inside the box a package was wrapped first in silk embroidered with strange designs, then in oil cloth tied up with rotting twine that fell apart as she slid it off. When she tried to open the oil cloth, it broke into pieces. It had, however, done its job. The black leather book inside, its cover tooled with a simple cross, had been well protected.

The spine cracked as she opened it. The pages were thick, rudely made, speckled with inlaid hair and thread and the trails of tiny bugs that had crawled between them to die. The writing was faded, reddish brown under the attic’s bare bulb, the downstrokes wide, upstrokes light, done with a quill pen, the letters angular, loosely jointed, austere, ancient…Spanish.

Skin oils, sweat, human breath should not touch this artifact. Carefully Vanessa laid it back in its box, came to her feet, her nerve endings tapping a tattoo now as, gathering the metal box, she snapped off the light, forgot the sorting job.

Dogeared dictionaries—Spanish to English, archaic to modern Spanish—and Spanish word derivation books had been sitting in the bookshelf downstairs since Vanessa’s family had had to leave Spain eighteen years earlier. After that her father, who had grown up in this house, had liked to spend his summer holidays here translating Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and later, when Vanessa had returned to Spain to study history at the University of Madrid, research documents she had found and copied for him. Occasionally Vanessa would lean over his shoulder to offer variations of interpretation—not that he ever took her suggestions seriously:

“Finish your PhD and then I’ll be inclined to listen.” Knowledge, to Carl Holdt, had been the Earth’s greatest treasure. “You can find knowledge anywhere—under rocks, inside churches, at the bottom of the sea—all you need to know is how and where to look.” Vanessa could still see him standing in the Spanish sun, arms raised like a preacher, extolling the perfect symmetry of the Roman aqueduct at Merida, not far from their home in Altamira on Spain’s south coast, or standing center stage in the ancient amphitheater he had helped unearth down the coast at Cadiz, where Roman wisdoms had played out a thousand years before the Spanish treasure fleets had sailed in from South America: “The Romans gave us our irrigation, transportation, parliamentary systems...” But in those days Vanessa had been too busy—poking her older brother Adrian, or practicing with the spinning plate and stick set she had just used all her savings to buy, or waiting to ask permission to run down to the fishing wharves where once the great treasure galleons had been unloaded—to pay attention. Now her father was dead, struck suddenly with a heart attack one morning last year on his way to teach at the University of Ottawa.

She needed gloves. A pair of elbow-length white cotton evening gloves in the cedar chest at the back of Gran’s bedroom closet looked as if they had never been worn. In the bottom drawer of her desk Vanessa found a supply of the exercise books Gran had used for accounting.

Outside, rain slapped at the living room’s picture window, wind whipped Gran’s lilac bush at the bottom of the garden, roiled the grey sea. Bringing a desk lamp to the long pine dining table, wriggling her fingers into the gloves, opening the diary, Vanessa did not notice.

The spellings were strange, the s’s shaped like f’s, but how many times had she teased the meanings out of the ancient records stored in the archives at Cadiz? And though that was six years ago now, language skills, once imprinted on the cortex, are never far from reach.

Within a few minutes Vanessa had the title page:

The last living testament of Bartolomeo, Brother in Christ of the Holy Order of Santo Domingo in Altamira, Espana.

Altamira? Where the flat blue sea reached out to meet Spain’s southern sky? Where the wavelets had rolled her child’s body over and back, over and back in the sun warmed sand; where the old Dominican monastery had housed Vanessa’s convent school; where stout women dressed in black called ‘Uno para hoy!’ (Buy one for today!) at the Plaza Mayor market, their calloused hands moving among the onions, garlic, peppers, olives, oranges laid out on stalls, their eyes sharp as crows’; where the butcher hacked the legs off a lamb carcass, blood dripping onto the cobblestones, and the town potter guarded his terra cotta wine jugs from the gaggle of darting children; where storms were sudden, hot, full of the smell of lightning, then gone.

Written at Santa Alicia de la Estrella, Cuba June, MDLXXXIX

M: 1000

D: 500

L: 50

XXX: x 10

IX: 9

1589: this little diary was more than four hundred years old!

Vanessa stared at it. Four hundred years ago Philip II was king of Spain, his Inquisition rooting out, torturing and killing infidels while overseas his conquistadores filled the king’s treasure fleets with South American gold and silver. Across the English Channel Queen Elizabeth I was searching out and hanging Catholics, forcing her people to pray to the Protestant God. An evil ruler according to Sister Maria Teresa of Avila, Vanessa’s history teacher -- who would not hesitate to rap you over the knuckles with a ruler on God’s behalf or make you stand in the garbage pail if you accidentally got out of your chair -- Queen Elizabeth was also sending out seafaring plunderers, including the Devil’s own Sir Frances Drake, El Draque (the Dragon,) to steal Spain’s God-given treasures.

1589: in London, William Shakespeare’s plays had not yet reached the stage; Spain’s Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote, had just published his first novel; while in Cuba a feverish Dominican monk was penning this little book:

Dear Father in Heaven, As I lie here in the summer heat, the fever sweeping through me, racking my limbs, soaking my bed sheets, leaving me weak as a lamb and quaking with fear, I know that the horses are bridled, the chariot is waiting. But You and I know also that as it stands now this poor monk’s last journey will take him straight into the fires of Hell.

Please though, I do beseech You Father, grant a few last moments of attention to a poor brother who has tried since the innocent age of nine to devote his life to You—not that I had any choice. My father having died at sea, my mother had too many mouths to feed. There was no choice but to give me to the monks. Now, forty years later, my kind host has placed a pen, ink and this little book on the stand beside my cot, and in these lucid dawn hours while the cocks crow and the cat stretches in a patch of sunlight on the windowsill, I can use what little courage You have bestowed upon me to try to show You, before it is too late, that whatever evidence there is to the contrary, this wandering and very faulty soul does have Faith. For although I was the first white man to behold the gold—

Gold? Here? Vanessa looked at the metal box, the broken the oil cloth, rotting twine, the embroidered silk. Why hadn’t her father ever found this book? He had been an expert in antiquities, head of the Altamira Institute for the Study of Roman Ruins and then a classics professor in Ottawa. He would have recognized its value. And he had spent his boyhood here.

—and although this gold was a most glorious sight, and I weep to think that I might have been the reason it was won at such high cost, I can promise in the best of faith that never once on this God-forsaken journey have I coveted it for its own sake—

This gold, a most glorious sight! You must have gone into the attic, Dad. And what about you, Gran?

Beyond the lamplight only grey silence and the lashing rain responded.

Deciphering the letters of the ancient script, looking up every other word, rooting through derivations, guessing at the meanings of phrases that were not in the dictionaries, was slow going but soon Vanessa found herself slipping into the method she had worked out during her first post-graduate year in Spain. Studying the history of the treasures that, gathered by Spain, had made their way into so many conundrums across the world had required a vocabulary beyond Vanessa’s adolescent Spanish, so she had developed the habit of translating the archival texts into English first. A much more voluminous language thanks to its roots in Latin and Greek and bastardizations of Anglo, Saxon, medieval French, German, Gaelic and Norse words, English gave her the analytical tools she needed and a breadth of nuance she then learned, painstakingly, to transfer into her modern Spanish treatises. Now, gradually unraveling Brother Bartolomeo’s narrative, she climbed with him and a retinue of Spanish soldiers into the high mountains of South America’s Nueva Granada, now Colombia.

Spain has been taking gold, silver and emeralds out of the Nueva Granada mountains for years, engaging the labour of “savages” in our mines while teaching them the ways of our Lord. But still there are pockets of pagans in the remote regions. We Dominicans are sent to teach simplicity, devotion to God, but now I find myself agreeing with my esteemed namesake and Brother-in-Christ Bartolomeo de las Casas who has warned both King and Church again and again that enslaving the native people, bringing them disease, hopelessness, death, could not have been Your intention. So let us be honest, Father. The truth is that You are only the excuse. The real prize is not the souls.

It is the gold. That is why in the spring of 1588 I traveled with twelve soldiers into the interior.

The mountaintops were shrouded in clouds one minute, bathed in sunlight the next, the path so steep the natives had carved steps into the rock but these were so shallow that only the balls of the great paddles I call feet fit onto them, and so slippery. A thousand feet below, the Rio Oro foamed down through the cleft between the green mountainsides.

I prayed aloud as I climbed. Jose laughed at me. He too came from Altamira. A burly brute, the first to fight in the street, always the wrestling champion at school, Jose was the kind for whom the soldier’s uniform was a second skin. Now he was a sergeant and the leader of our little expedition.

On the twelfth day the path began to angle down, the landscape opening into a bowl surrounded by snow-capped peaks. A little cluster of dwellings stood at the edge of the most beautiful, emerald green lake.

New spring growth had turned the ground and trees into a panorama of greens. On catching sight of our little band the women, dressed in cotton skirts and skins against the mountain cold, stopped sweeping their doorways, planting a freshly tilled patch of ground, bending to fill their water jugs at the lake. Their children hid behind their skirts.

There were no men. The natives were not the only ones frightened. We had the eerie feeling that we were being watched. Our soldiers kept reaching for their swords.

It was noon, the sun high overhead. I sat on a rock down by the water, took out a chunk of bread. Jose put some men to patrol the village perimeter. Soon the children were edging close to me, their jet black eyes fixed upon my lunch, my white whiskery face. I smiled.

They pointed at the silver crucifix that hung from my monk’s robe, whispering to each other, giggling while the women glanced around at the woods. I was eating my bread and ruminating on the incredible beauty of these people, their sun-darkened skins so smooth, when a light emerged from the woods by the shore, suddenly blinding me. I squeezed my eyes shut. When I dared to open them I saw that it was a man’s chest plate made of solid polished gold that was shooting rays of sunlight into my eyes.

Jose had unsheathed his sword. Two of his soldiers closed on the man.

“No,” I stood, “Deja le. He comes in peace.”

The chest plate must have weighed half as much as the man, yet his bearing was straight. And now I could see the designs worked into the gold—a sun, human and animal figures, snakes intertwined. Inlaid emeralds caught the sunlight. His headband was decorated with gold encrusted with jewels. Colored feathers waved above his eyebrows.

He must be the chief. Behind him his warriors now appeared, two score of them wearing short cotton skirts and cotton cape-like tops painted with red and black designs, knotted at the shoulder, leaving their arms free.

I offered the chief a piece of bread and we ate together in silence, each of us probing the moment. He watched me, his onyx eyes sharp with intelligence. After some moments of silence, he motioned to me to follow him.

Just outside the village an elaborate thatched temple had been constructed out of wood. Inside, sunlight angling in through openings set high in the walls lit solid gold paneling into which designs of sun and moon, people, animals, birds, plants and snakes had been worked.

I stood transfixed. The day's warmth, stored in the floor, came up through my sandals and I knew without thought or prayer that though these mountain people were heathens, standing inside their golden temple I was in Your presence.

By the time we returned to the village, the warriors had relieved my soldiers of their weapons.

Moving her pen word by word across the pages of the exercise book, Vanessa did not notice as, beyond the orb cast by her table lamp, shadows crept across the Indian carpet on Gran’s living room floor, edging towards darkness.

* * *

A tear dropped onto the diary, blurring the ancient ink. She jumped up in horror. Students, researchers, guardians of antiquities and the treasures that are all we have left of past worlds, do not cry all over them. How could she have been so careless, foolish, so selfish?

This book should be locked inside the safety of its box, away from her, the moisture of her breath, her sweat, her greed to know, to be there with Brother Bart, to find out what had happened. She tried to dab the tiny puddle with a tissue. The blotch seeped into the ancient parchment. Vanessa backed away, knocking over her chair. The living room's pearly gloom seemed to murmur of death.

Her eyes ached. She switched on all the lights, sank into Gran’s wingback chair. It still smelled of her lavender water. How, Vanessa wondered again, could Gran and her Dad not have known what was in their own attic?

Her Dad had been bright, so after his mother had died of polio when he was thirteen, Grandad Holdt, who was a sea captain, had sent him to a boarding school in Montreal. After that there had been summer camps, trips to meet his father in foreign seaports and then at eighteen Carl Holdt had left Chester, first for the University of Toronto, then on a scholarship to Cambridge. He had not returned to live here until the summer Vanessa was fifteen. Grandad had died by then. Gran had been Grandma Holdt's friend. She had moved in to nurse her, then had stayed on to housekeep and finally to marry the sea captain. She did not speak Spanish. Maybe she had never known what the diary was.

Or had she known and never told? Outside, beyond the sea-field of whitecaps running for shore, Mahone Bay’s scattering of islands was a smudged line of ragged, darkened green: a perfect, inhospitably wild and nondescript hiding place for gold. Stories about Captain Kidd, John Morgan, Sir Frances Drake, of found sea chests, stray bags of doubloons, had been circulating Mahone Bay taverns for several hundred years. Then there were the 18th century pirates who had lain in wait here for British and French army payroll and tax ships, and American privateers loaded to the gunwales with gold and silver ransomed from towns up and down this coast. Even the name of this bay, Mahone, came from the Turkish word for the low, fast ships pirates favored. Always there were Oak Island tales of strange sightings, of the two young men who, having spotted fires burning on the little offshore island, had rowed out to investigate. And never returned. But for some reason Gran’s eyes had flashed anger at the mention of the Oak Island treasure.

“Two hundred years men have been turning that poor little island into Swiss cheese, dying even, not to mention pointing guns, taking each other to court, and for what? A few doubloons, bits and pieces of old wood. You stay away from there, Vanessa. The Holdt family is not interested in Oak Island.”

As if a fifteen-year old recently bereft of the only world she had ever known, of the Altamira sun and beach and harbor and La Moñtana lying like an ancient bone behind it, of her best friend Carlita, and Paco and Santi and the others, of a world full of stories about ancient ships and castles and treasures; as if she were not going to talk her brother Adrian, who was two years older, into borrowing two rickety bikes from Gran’s shed, riding down the coast road, hiding the bikes in the weed-choked ditch to jump the chain across the Oak Island causeway, to sneak around the dilapidated museum building and then the waterlogged pits that pocked the denuded east end of the island where treasure hunters had spent millions of dollars and more than two hundred years digging. Until seventeen-year old Adrian had found a holiday girlfriend and at the end of the summer their parents had moved the family to Ottawa.

Her father had always dismissed the idea of treasure on Oak Island.

Where, he wanted to know, was any hard evidence?

Vanessa looked at Brother Bartolomeo’s diary nestled among the dictionaries on the table. Maybe right here, Dad.

She had to tell someone—Gran’s old black telephone was still hooked up—but whom?

She dialed Brigit, her closest friend. She had called Brigit’s cell phone in British Columbia three nights ago after she had fled her life in Toronto, had cried into the receiver, but then Brigit’s phone had started to crackle: “Hang in, Van,” Brigit had shouted: “I’m on the mainland, up in the mountains, but on my way home. I’ll call you when I get there.” A jewelry designer, Brigit left her Vancouver Island studio regularly to augment her income by gathering mountain flora for a research biologist at the University of Victoria.

There was no answer.

Vanessa’s mother was in England on a pilgrimage back to Cambridge University where she and Vanessa’s father had met, and then home to Cornwall. Anyway, though her mother had a thin intensity that could have come out of an El Greco painting, her English tongue had never adapted easily to Spanish. Vanessa meanwhile had lived in the language from birth, chattering in it even with Adrian at home, her body and soul grounded in its sounds, rhythms, contexts. Inevitably a gap had opened.

Now Adrian was traveling in Australia.

She would not call Charlie.

Vanessa made a sandwich, opened a bottle of Gran’s favorite Chablis and flicked on the television, sat back as a ballerina twirled to a piano riff, beautiful; the music was reaching into her tired mind, the camera closing on the dancer’s supple grace, when a word crossed the screen: the name of a menstrual tampon.

“Oh for God’s sake.” Vanessa jabbed the remote’s “off” button, got up to open the French doors to the deck overlooking the sea.

The storm had blown itself away, leaving a sky studded with stars.

To her left rags of cloud were flying across the face of a three-quarter moon. Vanessa leaned against the deck’s railing, letting the breeze and the play of the heavens cool her. North American native people believed that when you died your soul went up to join the stars.

Now a single point of light detached itself from the canopy, shot across the blue-black night.

Dad? Gran? Brother Bartolomeo? The girl he had loved?

The star’s light went out, as if it had never existed, as if it had had no part in the shaping of this universe. Stars were random explosions of gas, nothing more. There was no divine plan, no ascension out of the nameless blameless pain of day-to-day existence. The elements, like the sea breaking against the rocks at the bottom of Gran’s backyard, had no care for the paltry existence of humans.

The deck was equipped with a hot tub. Vanessa turned it on, lit the candles in the glass globes of a wrought iron floor candelabra, brought her boom box out onto the deck and slipped Paul Simon’s Graceland into the CD tray. The house shielded her from the road. Unless someone pulled right up to the dock at the bottom of the garden, nobody could see her strip off her old York University track suit and underwear, tie up her mess of gold blond hair to lie in the water’s womb-like warmth.

Above her the moon sailed higher, laying a path of silver across the sea.

A chorus of candle flames danced inside their globes.

This fickle light, wavering on every passing breath of air, was the kind by which Brother Bart would have written. Her painstaking delivery of the ancient words into modern English had imprinted his story on her heart:

The chief found a hut for me and the women laid out fruits and fish and drink. Then the chief returned the soldiers’ muskets as a gesture of trust and they began to relax a little, even Jose.

During the next few days I kept noticing the women, their wrists, ears, necks decorated with jeweled gold. When the sun rose they shook off their skins. Under them their cotton tops were pinned up to leave their breasts exposed. There was one particular young woman who, every time I needed food or a drink, brought it to me and I could not help admiring the grace in her long legs and her breasts so high and firm and virginal. When I thanked her the smile she returned was full of sunlight, warming the very marrow of my monk’s bones. Her name was Mia. One day she packed a basket and led me away, up a path through the woods into a small mountain pasture. I thought she had been detailed to show me something, a sacred shrine perhaps. Small birds twittered amongst the surrounding trees. Yellow, blue, orange butterflies flitted among the stalks of the many colored wildflowers while high overhead an eagle circled.

She spread a beautifully woven cotton rug and then proceeded to disrobe, her bracelets jingling, as if this were the most natural state, and the sun glowed on the roundness of her buttocks and breasts, the long slope of her back, the tautness of her thighs. She must, Heavenly Father, have been amongst Your most perfect creations.

She did not appear to know that monks must remain celibate, and I know that I am supposed to believe that this was my test: temptation proffered as surely as Satan offered it to Blessed Jesus in the desert.

But as she helped me off with my monk’s robe, so that for the first time in forty-odd years of memory I too could glory in the sun's warmth, the breeze on my skin, I thought that one could also, with the genuine sincerity of honest contemplation, take the view that it was You leading me, that if she was offering herself to me, I should give thanks for the opportunity to join myself to the perfection of Your creation. For You must know, dear Father, that there was, in the miraculous hours that followed, something much more precious in that mountain meadow than simple carnal gratification. It is a moment I hold sacred.

Mia told me, through hand sketches and sign language, that she was a half-breed, a baby born of a native to this village who had been impregnated by a Spanish prospector. Her mother had died in childbirth.

The tribe had raised Mia, but now it was time for her to begin a life of her own. Because of her racial impurity, none of the tribe's sons had chosen her. She thought I had a kind face and a mighty heart.

I listened and knew, in spite of a lifetime devoted to You, that here in the arms of this innocence was where a man’s truest communion was to be found. Never, even in church, had I felt this sense of total acceptance, of wholeness. Could there be a greater sweetness? Mia felt it too and I could not bring myself to believe that such gentle loving, the touch of her fingers light as a butterfly’s wings on my body, and such towering, shuddering, monumental joy could be any kind of sin against You. Hours of prayer, listening for Your voice, have not touched this, Father, in spite of what happened next...

High above the hot tub the three-quarter moon had a face. Her eyes were full of compassion, her nose long and straight, her mouth declining judgment though she had been there four hundred years ago, had witnessed the whole story.

The jangle of Gran’s phone brought Vanessa up out of the water, a tidal wave sloshing over the lip of the tub as, before she knew what she was doing, she was standing naked and dripping on the living room’s hardwood floor.

Uncle Vilhelm’s real estate agent was sorry to call so late, but thought he’d seen a light. And since she was there, would she please have the house looking presentable for a showing tomorrow morning?

Politeness, acquiescence. Why? “Before anyone comes to view the place,” Brigit had advised on that first night, before the phone had died:

“Burn something really vile smelling, rubber preferably.”

Gran’s house had been in the family for six generations. Vanessa had been coming here every summer since the age of fifteen. Her father’s and now Gran’s deaths had settled a clammy emptiness into the house, but if it sold Vanessa would lose the only place she had left to call home. Uncle William—Vilhelm, according to Adrian, as in the Kaiser who had worn one of those metal hats with a spike—had put it up for sale the day after Gran’s funeral. There was no choice, he had said. His share of the taxes and upkeep was too costly and the value of a heritage home on Chester’s waterfront meant that Vanessa, her mother and brother could not afford to buy him out.

Vanessa wrapped herself in Gran’s towel robe, made tea, sat back down at the dining room table and picked up her pen. view abbreviated excerpt only...

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