Franklin Affair (14 page)

They crossed Wisconsin and continued walking west through a row of fairly new town houses. R pointed to one. “Somebody told me Meg Greenfield lived in that one.” Greenfield had been the editor of the
Washington Post
editorial page and a
Newsweek
columnist before her death a few years ago. She was a good friend of Mrs. Graham, once her neighbor down R Street.

“Question,” said Samantha. “Did you intentionally buy that house of yours because it was close to R Street?”

“I thought you'd never ask.”

“It only now just struck me.”

“The answer is no. I loved the house and the neighborhood. It's possible that its faint Georgian resemblance to Ben's old house on Craven Street had an effect too.”

“You should tell people that R Street is named after you.”

R laughed. Maybe now was a good time to bring up John Hancock and Samantha's writing problem. He wanted to know more about the specifics, the particular scenes or insights or whatevers that were causing her trouble.

She waved him off with a friendly but tight “I'm not ready to talk about that” and brought the subject back to him. Was anything else exciting or monumental going on his life besides the Rebecca drama and, of course, the death of Wally?

“Not really,” he said. It was a reflex answer. He wasn't quite ready to bring Samantha into any of his other truly monumental crises: the Eastville papers,
Ben Two
and the possible Three, or even running a Wally-Ben center at BFU. He had been thinking about telling her everything. He knew he needed some counsel, some wisdom, some reactions—some help. And to his mind at this moment, there was nobody else but Samantha from whom he could get it. He was almost ready—but not yet. She also really did have to deal with her Hancock problem.

They had been holding hands. Now he put his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. “Speaking of names as we were a moment ago, I assume you're not planning to take my last name?”

She stopped, twisted away, and look up at him. “Do you really still want to marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Please tell me why?”

“Because I love you—enough even to stay faithful to you.”

She moved back under his arm. Without another word, they turned around as one and hurried back to his house.

• • •

Afterward, still in bed and sipping chardonnay R had poured for them, they would talk some more about marriage and their lives together. Maybe, thought R, he might even bring up one or more of his other crises.

That thought reminded him that while he had checked his mail and his telephone answering machine, he had not booted up his computer and gone through any e-mail that might have come since he left for Philadelphia.

When was that anyhow? This is Tuesday. Wally died last Thursday. Good God almighty! Look at all that has happened to me—look at all the trucks that have hit me—in just five goddamn days!

With Samantha's permission, he detoured into the study to his desktop.

There was only one e-mail of consequence. It was from Clara Hopkins in Philadelphia.

r, dear boss:

no record of either a roger or “button” nelson in colonial census, medical, military, or tax records. nothing about either in any newspaper from the time. thinking of other places to look. are you sure they existed?

some good information on melissa anne harrison wolcott: born here in 1744, daughter of prominent Quaker family. married jonathan david wolcott in 1763, had four children. died in philadelphia in 1794. all of this confirmed from more than one source.

now will you tell me why you wanted to know this stuff?

hope all is well. look forward to your return.

your obedient servant,
clara h.

R, with a pencil on a notepad, did some fast adding and subtracting.

The Melissa Anne Harrison Wolcott in Clara's records could not be the same one in the Eastville papers or in Johnny Rutledge's records. She would have been twenty-two years old when Ben met her, and already married. And she would have still been alive years after Ben supposedly hired the Nelsons to kill her.

A Prophecy situation after all?

But what about Carter Hewes's fairly solid take on the dating of the pages and the writing? Unless they were a forgery. Joshiah Ross and his cloak certainly were real. Johnny Rutledge seemed sure about his data on Melissa Anne Harrison being a kid too. Unless. . . .

What now? What next? There was so much of this to check and recheck. There was also the farmhouse meeting. Is it even possible that Adams, Washington, Hamilton, and Madison, as well as Ben, could have conceivably gathered on that particular day in 1788? Their diaries and personal papers should be able to pinpoint where each man was on that date.

He chose not to discuss any of this with Samantha. So, once in bed, they talked about getting married: possible wedding dates, locations, size and style. Samantha said she'd call her mother in Kansas tomorrow. Her father, the marine she claimed had taught her how to cuss, had died two years earlier of lung cancer.

“This is the number-one wedding for me—and for my mom and my family,” said Samantha. “You've had some practice.”

R acknowleged that simple truth. His first wedding, to a wonderful woman who was meant to live with a Wall Street broker rather than a historian, took place on a small mountainside near Great Barrington, just a few miles over the line in Massachusetts from his Connecticut hometown. Two hundred people came in dark suits and long dresses, danced to a large orchestra, ate and drank well, and were merry under a large white tent. Trish had hated life in Philadelphia as the wife of a graduate assistant. Fortunately, there were no children.

His second wedding with a Methodist preacher friend officiating, was held in his own Philadelphia living room with only a few other friends present. Maggie, also a wonderful woman, loved campus life and its professors, instructors, and graduate assistants. She had trouble being with only one at a time. Fortunately, there were no children with Maggie either.

In both marriages, R had made his own major contributions to their failure. That was mostly because of his own inability to remember he was married when the young coeds and Clara Hopkinses of his work world made themselves obviously available. Samantha, within days of meeting R at that Jefferson symposisum, had learned through the small Early American historian grapevine of R's two soured marriages and of his reputation. At the time she had said often that, based on his record, she didn't trust him but she couldn't resist him.

She didn't say it now, of course. They had moved past all that to Why not have the wedding in Wichita? On the other hand, Samantha now had more friends here on the East Coast than she did in Kansas. . . .

R was barely listening. Since reading Clara's e-mail, his mind had been slamming with thoughts about Ben and the cloak and the papers, the murder and child sex charges, and the extraordinary trial in a Pennsylvania farmhouse. He felt a sudden intense need to get away—not just from Washington and this town house but the Ben papers and all of the rest. He needed to be in another location, another space, another environment to work everything out.

He sprang straight up in bed.

“Craven Street!” he announced.

“What about it?” Samantha responded with some alarm. “I'm not about to get married in an old house in London—”

“No, no. Not that. Let's go there.”

“On our honeymoon? You've got to be kidding.”

“Tomorrow. Let's go tomorrow. We'll stay at the Savoy, around the corner. Just for a day or two.”

Samantha was now also sitting straight up.

“Take your laptop,” R said. “We'll work on your writing problem. I'll take some stuff I need to do too.”

“What stuff? You already did that Ben-at-Craven-Street book, remember? You told me you spent days, weeks there. Now it's about the early presidency. Repeat after me: ‘I am now working on the early presidency, none of which happened anywhere near Craven Street.' ”

He leaped out of bed.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To the computer. I'll see what Expedia and the others have for tomorrow. Who knows, last-minute can sometimes turn up very cheap airline fares. Same for the Savoy.”

He had stopped at the door.

“Aren't you even going to ask if I want to go—if I
will
go?” Samantha said.

“I'm sorry—”

“I have to go back up to Pennsylvania and give that asshole John Hancock one more try. I really do. Maybe I can get him into a conversation—”

“I understand.”

She sighed. In a soft, quiet voice, she asked, “Why, R? Why, dearest one of all, do you want to go back to Craven Steet?”

“To talk to Ben—again.”

TEN

R hoped it was late enough in the morning for Ben's house to be open. He had taken the early overnight United flight from Washington Dulles, arriving at London Heathrow just after 6:30
A
.
M
. But with the deplaning, waiting for luggage, getting a taxi ride to the West End and all the rest, it was now almost ten o'clock. His hotel room on the seventh floor of the Savoy, a so-called deluxe bedroom he booked through an Internet discounter for $375 a night, had fortunately been ready early. It had a king-sized bed, a marble-floored bathroom and 24-hour butler service, none of which R had paid any attention to before heading out the door for the elevator.

In less than five minutes he was downstairs, through the lobby, and out onto the Strand, the busy avenue of commerce and show business that parallels a curvaceous bump in the Thames. It serves as a kind of man-made dividing line between the Embankment leading southward down to the river and Covent Garden and the major West End theater district to the north.

R turned left, went five blocks, and made another left at a side alley to Craven Street. It was a cool gray London morning and he was still in the blue blazer, open-collared cotton sport shirt, and khaki chinos he had worn on the plane. But he was too excited to notice whether he was hot or cold.

There was the house, 36 Craven Street, on the left side of the street. Of all the places Ben had lived during his long and illustrious life, including another house here on Craven Street, this was the only one that still survived.

The restoration work on the outside had clearly been completed. The narrow three-story Georgian brick town house looked fixed—gentrified—as did those around it. The last time R had been here there was still scaffolding on the outside and a mess within. An organization of mixed British and American sponsorship had raised the money and the energy to bring 36 Craven Street back to what it was when Ben lived there. The plans were for tours, archives, study centers. They already staged seminars and other functions and put out a publication called
The CravenStreet Gazette
patterned after a similar fun paper Ben published when he lived here. Both Wally and R had participated in fund-raising and various educational events. R had also joined the Friends of Benjamin Franklin House and had contributed $500 a year for the last five years.

The place looked absolutely perfect from the outside. There were the three lines on a 24-by-16-inch brass plaque:

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
(1706–1790)
LIVED HERE

There was fresh black paint on the iron railings around the lower outside steps to the basement entrance and the alcove window on the main floor above. That was the window of the parlor where Ben often took his strange air baths, as well as entertaining, reading, and observing the passing people, animals, and conveyances below on Craven Street.

R now did as Ben did; he looked down toward the Thames.

In a peculiar mind flip, R's thoughts went not to the real history of this street, which he knew so well from his own book's research. They jumped instead to the six Benjamin Franklin mystery novels written in the last few years by Robert Lee Hall,
Benjamin Franklin Takes the Case
being the first. Totally made up, of course, each is told in first-person mode by Nicolas Handy, Ben's fictional twelve-year-old illegitimate son. Nick serves as a kind of stenographer for the great man, and it is Nick's written records of Ben's excursions into solving murders and other dastardly London crimes that, according to the fictional preface, surfaced in 1987 among the papers of a Nick Handy descendant.

Art imitating life, truth told only in fiction, and similar clichés were foremost in R's thoughts at the moment. The possible parallels, real or imagined, between Nick Handy's stories and those in the twelve Eastville papers were inescapable. And possibly meaningless. And irrelevant. And stupid. Unless . . .

But it all seeped into R's mind nevertheless, as did what Nick said about Craven Street in one of the books. “The street was a pleasant one, with much rattling traffic.” Ben's house was “part of a row of brick terrace houses sloping gently toward a timber yard by the Thames” fifty yards away. On the river were “rowboats and wherries” along with fishermen with nets on “the gray-green waters.”

Craven Street was a piece of real history, beyond the fact that Ben once lived here. There were some thirty structures that came right up to the sidewalks on both sides of the street. The timber yard at the end of Craven Street was long gone. Now there was a tiny park and then Embankment Road, a major four-lane thoroughfare that followed the course of the Thames in both directions for several miles. Craven Street itself, now paved and marked neatly for permit parking only, was mostly dirt in Ben's time. Ben's carriage, driven by Peter, his freed-slave servant, often threw up dust or mud as it sped off on one of Ben's many diplomatic, and social—or detective—missions. R knew this from the scores of historicial resources he plumbed in researching his own book about Franklin in London.

“You had quite a life here, Ben,” R said. Without thinking he spoke the words out loud. Then he looked around to see if anyone could have heard him and decided a nut was loose this morning.

There were only two or three people nearby, well-dressed men in suits and ties with umbrellas and briefcases, seemingly on their way to the tube or to offices. None showed any sign of having seen or heard something unusual. Did unshaven Americans in rumpled clothes often come here to Craven Street in the morning to speak aloud to Benjamin Franklin?

The first time R visited Craven Street was with Maggie twelve years ago, while on a European summer vacation. They came at Wally's strong urging, on the grounds that this was where Ben had lived for fifteen years—except for one brief break, almost continuously from 1757 to 1775—during a most important time in his life. To know Ben, you had to know Craven Street, Wally said. That initial trip led to seven more and to R's writing
Franklin at Craven Street.

The book told the story of how Ben was here officially as the representative to His Majesty's government of Pennsylvania and eventually of other American colonies. His original purpose was to persuade the King and Parliament—anybody—to force the greedy descendants of the great William Penn, technically the owners of Pennsylvania, to submit to taxation just like all other citizens of the colony. Ben failed at that specific task, an outcome that left him and the Penns bitter enemies for life. But in the process, he came to represent to most Britons what was both good and bad about the rambunctious and ultimately rebellious American colonies. R's book also touched on Ben's personal life, which included his scientific experiments, social escapades, and intellectual pursuits.

Ben never owned the place. He was a boarder of Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, a widow who, with her daughter Polly, provided room, food and companionship, and eventually love and devotion for Ben. But there was no hanky-panky that R and other serious Ben scholars ever bought. Ben was indeed an appreciator of women, but he didn't manifest his appreciation with each in the same way. Polly Stevenson was eighteen when Ben first came to live on Craven Street with her and her mother. There is no recorded allegation, much less a confirmation, that Ben ever even made a pass at her. Theirs was a father-daughter relationship.

“Tell me about Melissa Anne Harrison, Ben,” R said aloud, his eyes now on the parlor windows.

“It's open only occasionally for visitors, I rather think, sir,” somebody said. The somebody was a male with a British accent. R, startled, turned to see a man in his late thirties standing next to him, also looking across the street at 36 Craven Street. He was in a dark-blue striped suit, white spread-collar shirt, and dark-blue-and-white polka-dot tie, an umbrella in one hand, a leather briefcase in the other.

“Thank you . . . right, I know. Thank you,” R mumbled.

“Practicing your questions, I guess, then?” said the man, lifting his umbrella in a sign of adieu as he walked on.

R nodded and raised his right hand to give a wave to the man but stopped before doing so.

Instead, he waited another few seconds and walked across the street to the front door of 36 Craven Street.

It was time to get on with it.

• • •

A young woman answered R's knock. She appeared to be less than thirty, probably an American.

“Good morning,” said R. He was set to go on immediately with a short spiel of introduction but she interrupted him.

“I am so sorry, sir, but we are not yet prepared to handle drop-in visitors,” she said with a pleasant smile and an accent that R placed as Midwest, probably Chicago.

“I'm R Taylor—”

“
The
R Taylor?”

“Well, I guess—”

“Yes! You're R Taylor! Oh, my God!” The woman threw open the door. “I can't believe it's you!”

If R hadn't known better, he would have thought he was a rock star.

It seemed for a split second that she might actually grab him. But no. She stepped aside, and he went through the door into the front hallway.

“
Franklin at Craven Street
is my single most favorite book about Dr. Franklin,” bubbled this most incredible young person—possibly, R thought at that moment, his single most favorite young person in the whole world. “The stories you told about that man and this house, and the way you told them—well, they are truly superb. I loved
Ben and Billy
too. You're a beautiful writer, Dr. Taylor.”

She extended her right hand to him. He wanted to devour it.

You are a beautiful person, young lady. You are an intelligent, discerning, brilliant human being—among the very finest of your species.

That's what he thought. “Thank you, so much,” was what he said. “You have certainly made my day.”

Closer up now, he saw that her dark-blond hair was too long, her nose was slightly too large, and her skin was too rough, and as she escorted him away from the door he noticed that both her rear and her legs were slightly on the bulky and bowed side. But none of that mattered. Her beauty was in her mind, her judgment. Oh, yes. She had just provided for R an experience that seldom happens to historians and only occasionally to writers of any kind of books. John Grisham might get this treatment at a lawyers' convention, but that's about it.

Stephanie Thornton. That's what she now said her name was. She said it nervously, awkwardly.

She also quickly explained that the director, the curator, and the other staff members were away in Bath at a historical properties meeting. Only she and some of the restoration craftsmen were present.

“Everyone is going to be so upset that they missed you,” she said.

“All I really need is to see the parlor. I understand the restoration there is the farthest along,” R said, when she finally asked why he had come.

She made a sound that closely resembled that of a purring kitten.

“You're right about the parlor,” she said. “We've already put furniture in there, so it's pretty much back the way it was when Dr. Franklin lived here.”

She offered to take him through the entire house, but he declined. He had already been in every corner of the place, including the third floor, where, in Ben's time, Peter and the other servants slept, and to the second floor, where the two Stevenson women had their bedrooms. Ben's bedroom and the room he used for his scientific experiments were on the main floor behind the parlor.

They were actually standing at the entrance to the parlor now.

Stephanie's face lost some of its buoyancy. She clearly wanted to do something for him, to show him more.

“The basement,” he said. “Take me to the basement, where they found the bones.”

Once again, she appeared to be on the verge of grabbing him. But she resisted and said, “Follow me.” The woman seemed truly excited.