Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (30 page)

Anne considered. Resolved. What did she care for this Finn? He might have arranged to seat her beside the overweight woman instead of the coughing man, but little beside. Anne climbed in next to the coughing man, turned her face to the window, and pretended to fall asleep at once, then surprised herself by actually falling into a half doze.

It was long after dark when the stage pulled into the courtyard of a poorly lit inn; the overweight man began to joke with the cougher about who should share a bed with whom, grinning all the while at Anne. Anne pushed ahead of the three of them and entered the inn, walking straight up to the innkeeper. The bed he offered Anne was in fact but half of one, in a quarter of a room, a couple occupying one of the room’s beds and an old woman occupying the other. The old woman stirred as Anne dropped her shoes and slid into the sheets. She smelled of spirits, overused linen, and another thing Anne could only describe as slightly turned ham.

“Where are you coming in from?”

“Philadelphia. And yourself?”

“Here I was born and here I am now. Thirty-four years in.”

The man in the opposite bed called across, “Quiet, there!”

“Ah, stuff yours!” the woman shouted back. “If she is yours!” She cawed.

Whatever the man might have answered, his woman—if she was his—shushed him.

Anne’s bedmate rolled away and began breathing in starts and stops through a congested nose. Anne closed her eyes, but this time she couldn’t even come close to a doze. Thirty-four years. An “old woman” not as old as Anne, intoxicated and foul mouthed. Most likely an old whore. What was it in an old whore that forever showed? Was there something in Anne that had prompted that lewd exchange between the men as they approached the inn, something that had convinced the innkeeper this was the bed in which she belonged? Was this woman what Anne was to become?

Anne slept beside her shadow self perhaps an hour, no more.

THE STAGE RATTLED INTO
New York, a place as narrow and cluttered as Pennsylvania was wide and ordered, yet somehow more somber while at the same time sounding twice as loud. The streets turned this way and that as if commanded by the buildings and not the reverse, but Anne found the livery and the White Horse Inn, and a pleasant widow innkeeper who seemed well acquainted with Franklin and interested in taking good care of Anne. She was given a bed of her own, as clean as her own, and fresh water to wash; when she recounted her exhaustion, a plate of bread and cheese arrived at her door. Anne ate, and although it was not four o’clock, climbed between the cool sheets and slept till dawn.

FRANKLIN’S NOTE CAME THE
following morning and said simply:
We’re aboard. Come.
Anne read the note with damp palms. How odd, she thought, that she should remain cool all this long journey till now.

The carriage arrived to collect Anne; her trunk was loaded in and they set off for the wharf, the sunlight beating sporadically through a line of high white clouds, adding and subtracting shadows so fast Anne couldn’t capture any sense of New York’s tumbled-together streets and buildings. To ground herself, she moved her thoughts from where she was to where she was going: London. With her son.

The wharf was mad with carts and carriages and vendors and foot traffic; the tide must have been at the flow, for the ships rode high above the dock. The driver pulled Anne as close to the gangway as he could maneuver, leaped out, and set her trunk down. She swung around for a last word, perhaps only to delay him while she accustomed herself, but already he was back in his seat, whipping the horse ahead through the crowd. Gone.

Anne turned back to the ship, scanning its bustling deck, holding out little hope of finding either of the Franklins in such a swarm, and was surprised to find the elder almost at once, a tall, broad-shouldered man standing at the gunwale, also scanning the crowd. Did he truly tower over all the others aboard the ship or did it only seem so to Anne, as if he might reach up and pull his lightning from the sky where he stood? Once at London, how high might he reach? Standing below on the wharf, it suddenly struck Anne exactly why Deborah Franklin would have wished to stay behind.

But Benjamin Franklin was not the reason Anne stood on the wharf about to tread the gangplank. William was. And there he was, joining his father at the rail, even taller than his father now, similarly dressed in a dark suit meant for traveling but with a flare all his own—a ruffled stock at his neck instead of a plain one. Here was a man grown, ready to follow his father across the sea, but once there, his own life would be waiting for him, his reach for the heavens also unlikely to exceed his grasp. Anne could see his future before him as sharply focused as if it were hers.

But it wasn’t hers; how clear it became as he stood above and she below! And as Anne stared up at the two men a curious thing happened; she heard, as clearly if he stood beside her, Solomon Grissom’s words.
You’re sure?
She’d begun to lift her hand to signal one of the crew to attend her trunks, but now she dropped it to her side. What was it
Anne
reached for? A London rooming house somewhere, the kind of house that would allow of gentlemen callers at stray hours, the kind of house where William would likely never go. His father would, of course, but for how long?
You can’t enchant us all forever, you know.
Anne thought of the guinea-a-lie whores and how long she might carry on that kind of trade; she thought of the woman of the previous night, lying old and stinking in her bed at the inn, perhaps waiting for the chance traveler to drop her a coin. She thought of the solitary man’s interest that might ward off that end, and how long she might count on that interest to hold.
Was
he a friend? Was she
sure
?

She wished to answer other. Indeed, she stood some time attempting to call up that other answer, but in the end she could give but one only.

No
.

Anne turned her back to the ship, scoured the crowd for a carriage just emptying its fare, and flagged it down. The driver loaded her trunk and pulled away; Anne turned for one last look at the two tall sentinels at the rail, but from that distance she could no longer determine father from son.

40
London, 1760

WILLIAM FRANKLIN WOKE EACH
morning asking himself the same thing: Is it a dream? London! If he only ignored the strangling smoke from the coal fires, the beggars, the heaping manure piles that ringed the town, there was nothing of it he didn’t adore. The ancient architecture; the shops full of everything from the finest lace to pistols and swords; the coffeehouses in which he and his father could instantly strike up scintillating conversations with erudite, educated men; the fine English homes whose doors were eagerly opened for this American Benjamin Franklin, already more famous abroad than he was at home.

And then there was the Inns of Court, the most renowned legal institution on earth, where William could walk across six-century-old courtyards, dine under Van Dyck and Titian portraits of kings and queens in the same hall where Raleigh and Bacon had dined, then retire to his comfortable rooms and read in
Blackstone’s
Commentaries,
“The King can do no wrong . . . The King is and ought to be absolute . . . all-perfect and immortal,” and know that he walked over the same ground as this immortal king. Oh, what didn’t William owe his father now?

It was true that the Franklins’ rooms were on the cramped side, that the landlady fluttered about them too much, that she had a prim little daughter William’s father had already begun to push his son’s way. Polly Stevenson was, to all appearances, unencumbered with a single asset beyond her obvious admiration for the elder Franklin, and William had other ideas in mind. He’d seen the whores on the street corners and in the sex shops; there were also any number of women who appeared to be nothing more nor less than willing, and clearly Polly Stevenson was not, or at least not in the manner William had in mind.

IT DIDN’T TAKE WILLIAM
long to find someone who was. He first saw her in one of those dusty London coffeehouses that was tucked up in the back of nowhere; she sat with a number of men and it was clear from the look of her that at least one of those men had expectations that might likely be met before the night was done. William might have moved on at the first words out of her mouth, but the mouth was so plump and it had just been wet by some dusky Madeira; then she leaned down to straighten her shoe buckle and gave William an extended view of as fine a bosom as he’d seen in the entire decade since he’d begun to notice such things. William sat down at the table and struck up the kind of easy conversation he’d first learned on his father’s lap. It soon became clear to the others at the table that they were outmatched; they drifted away, and William purchased his new acquaintance another bottle of wine, accompanied by a barely edible roast duck. When he discovered she lived in a room above the coffeehouse, he offered to make up for the poor meal with another bottle of claret and an escort upstairs to her room—there were few men alive who wouldn’t at least have chanced it—and he was unsurprised when she accepted.

HER NAME WAS MAUDE.
The coffeehouse belonged to her brother-in-law, who in exchange for her help in the kitchen allowed her the use of one of his rooms. The room was as expected—passably clean, cheaply adorned—but Maude was both more and less than anything William had anticipated. The utter lack of inhibition, the way she melted open almost as soon as she was touched, this was thrilling and flattering to any man, but he was taken aback by her utter passivity after the thing was done. She didn’t seem to know how to get from
undressed
to
dressed.
She didn’t seem to care if he stayed or left. She didn’t seem to understand that another girl might ask for something in exchange for the service provided—at the very least, a promise to return.

Nevertheless, William did return. He called again and again over the next two months, expecting but never encountering any of the other men he’d seen sitting with her at the coffeehouse. The best thing about Maude was that she never seemed to want anything more from William than he wanted from her, and so they went along, until William met Elizabeth Downes.

HE FIRST SAW THE
lively flash of her green eyes over the sea of heads at one of those London parties to which William had early been inducted by his fellow classmates. The green eyes locked with his but didn’t dwell; they came back, drew off. It was hopeful, but it wasn’t enough. William cast about for something better in the way of introduction, and as he did so he happened to look down and spy a green velvet hair ribbon, either discarded or lost, lying on the floor. He picked it up and worked his way through the young men stacked up around Elizabeth Downes like termites, waiting for a gleam from her eye, a touch of her hand, a closer view of her lovely neck.

“I believe you’ve lost this.”

The girl lifted a graceful arm to her hair and touched the black satin ribbon wound into it; she touched her neck, where an enormous emerald hung from another satin ribbon, also black. “ ’Tis not mine,” she said. “You must try another.”

William gripped one of the silver buttons on his new silk waistcoat, gave it a vicious twist, and held it out, not smiling. “I believe you’ve lost this.”

Elizabeth Downes laughed. But no, that wasn’t the way to say it: She tipped back her head, closed her eyes, and began to bubble up with a melody so full of life that William believed he might survive a month on the sound of it. But William would admit—no honest man wouldn’t—that when the green eyes were disguised under those richly fringed lids, his own eye went next to the green emerald at her throat, calculating the weight of it.

Elizabeth opened her eyes and held out her hand for the button. “Forfeit.”

William handed over the button. “Now you must offer me a chance to redeem it.”

She pondered him, as somber now as she’d just been light—clearly a woman of intensity in all things, an intensity that William determined to get to know.

“Thursday next,” she said at last. “Six o’clock. My father’s house.”

ELIZABETH’S FATHER PROVED TO
be a wealthy Barbados sugar planter, which explained, in part, the golden luster of Elizabeth’s skin, the air of expectation that all things—and all men—would come to her simply on her command. When William appeared at the Downes mansion he was duly impressed—beginning with the gatekeeper’s cottage, the gates, the glistening stone drive, then the mansion itself rising up and up and up into a sky that seemed to bend low in deference to meet it. The massive oak doors themselves were bigger than his father’s shop front, the hall bigger than his father’s house, the servants in better clothes than William had seen most days on his father’s wife.

Mr. Downes had many questions for William, mostly about his father and his now-famous experiments, but he asked enough about William to allow him to shine; William could, in fact, recount some of his father’s most interesting experiments firsthand, having assisted in their execution, but neither was he shy about speaking of his own prospects. Once he completed his studies at the bar he intended to seek out a political appointment; indeed, as William announced this, Elizabeth’s father nodded as if he might have had a similar idea in mind.

That night at the Downes mansion led to other days and nights filled with music, literature, dancing, cribbage; walks in St. James’s Park along broad gravel paths that ran beside glistening canals lined with geese, ducks, deer. Soon those walks began to involve the kinds of kisses that hinted at a promising future ahead; William rode off on fire at the thought of that future with Elizabeth, straight into Maude’s present, to have that fire put out. William told himself he would never have contemplated such a double life if he’d possessed more confidence that a bastard son of an American printer could actually ever secure a woman like Elizabeth, or if Maude had been anything else but Maude.