Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (18 page)

At first Anne didn’t notice that the woman and child had walked past the turn to Christ Church and kept on toward the river. Anne kept on after them. A number of people paused and spoke stiffly to Deborah Franklin, condoling with her; she appeared to answer with composure, but she always hastened along, each time looking down at William, as if to . . . what? Compare the dead with the living?

They walked on, William skipping higher the closer they came to the river. They passed the shops and warehouses on Front Street and continued onto the wharf; Anne took care to keep herself concealed in the crowd as she edged after them. The wind was much stronger out on the wharf; Anne watched it tug at Deborah’s skirt just as William tugged at her hand, pulling her from ship to ship, pointing here and there, now pointing at a group of three pilings atop which some no doubt liquored sailor had nailed up his shipmate’s bright red bandanna.

“Look! Look!” William cried, and tugged at Deborah, but she was shaking her head; she would go no closer. She let go of William’s hand. He began to run toward the pilings.

It was as if Anne saw it twice—the first time in her mind’s projection, the second time as it actually happened—sturdy, blue-stockinged legs pinwheeling over the planks and leaping up onto the first of the staggered pilings. Anne started to run, but she was too far back and too hindered by the crowd she’d purposely ducked behind; Deborah, far ahead of her, didn’t run. Didn’t move. Didn’t cry out. She stood where she was and watched as William grasped the top of the second piling and began to pull himself up, hanging out over the water, connected to land by eight fingers and a knee that had somehow managed to gain purchase on that second towering piling. But no, it was four fingers and a knee now; William had let go with one hand and was reaching for the top of the highest piling, reaching for the sailor’s bandanna.

Anne was still far behind Deborah and William when a spry young fellow leaped in front of both of them, danced up the first piling as if it were a stepping-stone, and plucked William out of the air just as his knee lost its purchase. William scrambled free of his rescuer and dashed up to Deborah.

“Look, Mama, for you! A kerchief!”

ANNE PERCHED ON THE
edge of William’s bed that night and guided him to talk of it; it was no great trick, the adventure being almost all he’d spoken of since he’d gotten back.

“Mama said
church.
She made me dress in church clothes. And then we didn’t go to church! I saw the ships and she said would I like to visit the ships and we walked right past the church!”

“And you saw the ships.”

“And I saw a red kerchief on top of a great post! And I climbed up and got it for Mama!”

“And what did Mama have to say of that?”

“She said how brave I was.”

“She wasn’t afraid you’d fall in?”

William gave a small-boy snort of dismissal. “Papa takes me to swim. But he doesn’t let go.” He paused. “He doesn’t let go of me on the wharf either.”

“But Mama let go?”

William slid down inside his sheets, grew silent.

Anne said, “William?”

William said, “I’m sleepy now.”

24

DEBORAH FRANKLIN COULDN’T SLEEP.
Only the night before she’d decided it was time to give up her nighttime dose and had been pleased and proud of her little experiment; she’d waked that morning feeling more alert and alive than she’d felt in some time, more able to
cope.
She’d looked sideways in the bed, half expecting to find Benjamin lying there, and had even been disappointed to discover Min still in his place. For the first time she began to consider what she might do to remedy that, to at least get back that part of her old life; what Benjamin had done all those years ago and the consequence of it was not, after all, something that could ever be erased. It was time to make the best of it and move ahead, perhaps to another child, not one who would ever replace Franky, but one who would put something living into the dead house.

Such were Deborah’s thoughts that morning when she entered the kitchen and saw William at the table, noticed as if for the first time what a fine-looking boy he’d become. Indeed, it must be said that Franky had not been so pretty a child, that if the three walked about in the street it was William who drew the eye first each time, but as Deborah examined this inherited son of hers, she saw too the look in his eye, an eye fixed on her alone of all the people in the room, an eye so full of question and hope and
expectation.
Could it be possible that this boy, after all of it, still wanted her to come to him and take him up in her arms? Could she still become that person the boy expected her to be? That Benjamin expected her to be? She could, she decided. She would. The mere presence of that thought so filled her with gratitude that she decided to go to church to give her thanks. And she would take the boy. Begin again with him as she would begin again with Benjamin. With her life.

And then Deborah had gone to the wharf. Against her closed eyelids she could still see those pilings and the water just beyond and the boy hanging there, her fear hanging there, as visible as either of the other things, veiny and red and full of fire. She’d let go of his hand, she knew that, had stood frozen, she knew that too; what kind of mother would let go of her child so near the water, no matter her own fear of it? Would she have let go of
Franky
? Would she have stood dumb and still if it had been
Franky
attempting to scale those pilings? And there lay the darkest, dankest corner in the great room of Deborah’s fears. Had she
wanted
William to come to harm? In some shameful corner of her tortured mind had she seen herself as the avenging angel that would at last see Benjamin Franklin pay for his sin?

Once they got home Deborah had sent William off to play with the servant, sent him to bed with the servant, unable, once again, to look the child in the face. Was this a thing she must wrestle with all her life? No. She would not. She need not. Deborah tossed away her bedclothes and got up. She lit a candle off the kitchen fire, worked her way through the hall and up the stairs to William’s room; he was, of course, asleep, but his legs and arms twitched, his small brow puckered. He’d come home elated about the bandanna, but now, perhaps, the trip to the wharf troubled his sleep as it troubled Deborah’s. She laid her hand on his fine hair and smoothed it from his face, waiting until she was sure he’d settled; only then did she leave the room, turning on the landing to go down the stairs, but she paused there. A faint noise came from the direction of the servant’s room, as if the girl struggled in the throes of the same vile dream that seemed to haunt everyone in the house. Well, Anne had comforted Deborah enough times to earn Deborah’s comfort now; or did Deborah go in search of her own comfort? It didn’t matter, she decided; comfort for someone lay at the end of those stairs.

Anne’s door was closed, but Deborah did indeed hear her voice behind it, harsh and half whispered.

“She
let him go
. At the wharf’s edge! She let him climb up a piling! How many times must I tell it to you? I saw him hang out over the water and—”

“Yes, you said. And I said I’ll keep a closer eye on them both. What more must I say to you? But please, my dear, you must keep your voice low.”

That second voice was indeed low, but Benjamin had long ago mastered the art of speaking untender things in tender tones.

Our boy is dead.

“I was in such fear,” Anne continued, but quieter. “You can’t know.”

“Yes, yes. But hush, please, before you wake all the house. I’ve seen to William and he’s suffered no ill effects—he’s safely settled in his bed. Now if we might but do the same—”

The voices ceased. A floorboard creaked, a bed rope. Then three words she’d heard before and knew well enough where they led. “Ah
,
my dear—”

Deborah stood in disbelief until rage destroyed the disbelief and with it her immobility. She lifted the latch and opened the door. The candlelight barely touched the bed, and half what Deborah saw she saw from the memory of her own fingers: the long, smooth swimmer’s muscles working along her husband’s back, the hard, clenched buttocks pumping slowly, slowly, against the air. Against Anne
.

Deborah shoved the door hard against the wall. Athlete that he was, Benjamin leaped in a single bound from bed to floor. “Deborah! Good lord!”

Deborah looked at her husband, pressing his hands over his groin, attempting to hide his nakedness from her. From
her.
She looked at the girl in the bed, shift pushed up and breasts splayed, her own nakedness of little concern to her. The girl sat up and the shift fell down of its own accord, as did her long, dark hair, like spilled ink against her shift.

“My dear,” Benjamin said, and then, perhaps seeing something better of her face, even in the half dark, he stopped.

Deborah stood, her heart snapped shut like a turtle’s beak, her rage beating against it, her mind refusing to think beyond the single fact that she wanted to be shed of the scene before her, the people before her—shed of Franklin as she’d shed herself of Rogers—but this time she had no mother’s shelter to flee to. She couldn’t demand Benjamin Franklin leave his own house, especially as she wasn’t even legal wife to him. She could do nothing,
nothing . . .
but hold; she could do one thing. Deborah turned from the girl in the bed as if she were no longer there, as indeed she was no longer there to Deborah, this mother of a dead son whose eyes Deborah had believed she’d known. Had
trusted
. She turned and spoke to her husband. “Get her gone.”

DEBORAH RETURNED TO HER
bed and curled up next to Min. Min’s hand came out and tapped her on the knee, as if to make sure she’d returned, as if to make sure she planned to stay. Everything now looking different to Deborah, she began to doubt; was this old, familiar touch less the touch of a comforter and more the touch of a gaoler? Had that been Min’s job all along, to keep Deborah secured in her bed while her husband climbed the stairs to plunge himself into their servant? Had that been why the servant was hired? No, that had been Deborah’s idea, to hire that particular girl with the clouded, grieving eyes. She’d been drawn into those eyes; what great surprise, then, that Benjamin had been drawn there too, Benjamin who seemed to require that release in a woman in order to breathe. What fool Deborah that she could have imagined her husband sleeping alone in his study, night after night, while Deborah lay nurturing her blame and grief with Min.

The door opened and Benjamin stepped into the room. He said, “Min.” Min came awake and sat up and got out of the bed and out of the room as if in a single movement—such was his tone. Benjamin came up to Deborah’s side of the bed and pointed at the space left between her hip and her knee. “May I?”

Deborah slid her leg back as far as it would go, unable to bear the touch of him. Benjamin sat down, carefully keeping to the edge of the mattress. Solomon Grissom had made the mattress. Solomon Grissom who’d recommended that girl. Or had he? Or had they even asked? Deborah could not recall.

Deborah said, “Is she gone?”

“I told her she must go. She wishes to stay until another girl is found.”

“I’ve no interest in her wishes. I want her gone now.”

Benjamin said, “Very well, I’ll talk to Grissom on the morrow. Perhaps he’d be inclined to take her back into the shop.”

“Do you mishear me? Talk to Grissom when you like of what you like. The girl leaves now.”

Benjamin sat long enough to hear that more silence was all she would offer. He stood and left the room.

DEBORAH WAS AS BENJAMIN
had left her when he returned. This time he didn’t sit down.

“ ’Tis done. She’s packing her things.”

“Has the boy waked?”

“No.”

Deborah rolled away and bounced her next question off the wall; it had been too long with her and had bent its shape too many times to fly straight from eye to eye. “I should like to know why you married me. Was it for William? To make a home for William?”

The silence pushed against the back of her head. “I did not marry you to make a home for William,” Franklin said at last.

Deborah whirled around. “Why then?”

“Because all the life had gone out of you. Because I felt to blame. Because I wanted to make good on my earlier promise to you. But I did it in full confidence of a long, happy future together, and I’ve not lost that confidence.”

He crossed the room to the bed. He dropped to his knees and picked up, not her hand, which she might pull away, but a lock of her sleep-strewn hair. She might pull if she liked, but if he held on, she would only hurt herself. She lay still.

Dawn brightened the window. Out in the hall, Deborah heard a single pip from William, and a quick, answering
shush;
no doubt Min, her gaoler, hovering near the door. Had she conspired in this betrayal? The next sound Deborah heard was of the outer door opening and closing; Anne was gone.

So, that was that.

But of course it wasn’t.

She pushed back the bedcovers and rose, forcing Benjamin to scramble to his feet. “I wish you’d never gone to London,” she said.

“But I did. We cannot—”

“Then I wish you’d never come back!”

Benjamin gazed at her with a mix of sadness and disappointment. Well, let him be sad and disappointed all he liked. Deborah was sad and disappointed.

Benjamin left. Deborah stood for a time, unable to fix on a plan of what to do next, until she realized she was still undressed, that there was plan enough for the next few minutes. She got up, pulled on her skirt, bodice, stockings, and shoes, and washed her face in the bowl with greater care than she usually took. She took an even longer time fixing her hair, wishing she could use up the day with it, but she could not. When there was nothing whatever left to do to herself she sat on the bed again, trying to form up the rest of the day in her head; she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember what she used to do with it.