Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,50

his land and his hopes for his children. Eventually he moved his family out to the old Chirke place. This, Nick guessed, was where the Balzars lived today. Clearly, he’d bought the building in which Nick now sat, and the Chirke place, with money Mulatta Belle, his mother, had left him. He had gotten nothing from Hyam–except a father’s love.

The evidence was there in the diary: Jacob had stolen Ivanhoe’s rightful legacy. He obviously suborned the three witnesses to swear to a bogus nuncupative will. Ivanhoe, in the room as his father lay dying, saw Jacob rip apart the legitimate written will, the will that really expressed Hyam’s intentions, the will that dealt generously with Ivanhoe and the sons of Mulatta Belle’s other unions.

Had Jacob acted alone? As yet, Nick knew nothing of the personality of Euphrozine Balazar.

Ivanhoe was about thirty when he started his journal; he reserved a few pages at the back for some vital statistics on family births and deaths, which Nick knew would be invaluable later in his investigations. It seemed to Nick that Ivanhoe had an intuitive understanding of the meaning of genealogy that most people lack in these times. Ivanhoe was facing the stark possibility of the destruction of his past, having already seen the hijacking of his present. He realized that knowledge of his ancestry, and especially the transmission of that knowledge, was of life-and-death importance to the generations that would follow him.

How many impossible gaps had Jacob Balazar created? His father’s dalliance with Mullata Belle was a humiliation for him. Thus the real will had to go. What else had he eliminated? Was this why there were no further courthouse records showing Hyam’s estate moving through the probate process? Jacob was a powerful man, who brooked no opposition.

And what of the letters to Ivanhoe, Jeremiah, and Chapman? As mini-wills, they posed a threat; they could cost Jacob a lot of land–and more, in the case of Ivanhoe. If, with his letter, Ivanhoe could prove he was Hyam’s son, could he have taken Jacob to court to claim some portion of Hyam’s estate? Maybe a thousand acres wasn’t all Ivanhoe would have been due if the issue had been adjudicated properly. Jacob might have faced coughing up more than his ravaged lungs.

Nick surmised that the letters to Mulatta Belle’s three sons were identical, each setting out Hyam’s bequests to the three of them, as insurance. That would explain why Jacob would want them all, why he would kill for those letters, and why Mulatta Belle was so careful with them.

For Jacob, it was a question of twisted honor, not merely land: he could not live with Ivanhoe as his acknowledged brother.

The letters were probably long gone now; but in this diary, written by his own hand, Ivanhoe had made his own immortality, attained his own silent victory.

Nick noticed a change in the style and content of the diary. Ivanhoe started with the noble intention of presenting his side of the story, of instructing his children; but as the years passed, his affairs become more complicated, and he seemed to reach a level of relative affluence and considerable respect in the community. His attention shifted to his business and civic affairs. Town gossip, only momentous family news, and balance-sheet concerns persist, without much of the humanizing spirit of the first entries, until an abrupt cutoff in 1881.

Isn’t that the way of the world? Nick thought, taking a last look at the room that had once housed Ivanhoe’s shop. We start with the grand visions of overconfident youth, with a simplistic lust for radical accomplishments, and soon we lapse into a belittling obsession with minutiae, like an old man on a park bench picking lint from his sweater.

Ivanhoe wrote his diary to preserve the truth; now it was Nick’s task to continue its destruction. He didn’t like the role he was playing. Ivanhoe’s testament should not remain silent forever. He should edit and annotate the volume, get it published. It would become an instant classic of the field, stocked in libraries around the U.S. and the world, translated into a dozen languages.

Nick would be famous. Posthumously.

He walked to his car, hearing Ivanhoe’s voice as if he’d spent an hour with the barber. Nick understood that Ivanhoe had intended his diary to shake the rotten fruit from his family tree, no matter how long it took.

A dangerous place for a genealogist to be sitting, under that tree, more than a hundred years later, Nick was thinking