Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (19 page)

The shop. That was it. Deborah sat and listened to the house; if Benjamin had the sense of a goat he would have gone out and left her to herself, and in fact she could hear nothing but Min, now thumping about with the kettles. But what of William? Likely with Min in the kitchen, when he should be dressing and getting ready for his tutor. This, then, was how Deborah’s day had already changed: She must tend to William. Curiously, the thought didn’t displease her—instead, it filled her with a sense of things come right for the wrong reasons. She’d already determined to make good with William and now fate had conspired to make sure she did.

Deborah went into the kitchen but found Min alone. “Where’s the boy?”

“Asleep yet.”

But Deborah had heard him in the hall. Or was her guilt so roused that she’d now begun to imagine the boy’s calling her? She climbed the stairs to William’s room, pushed open William’s door, and discovered his tousled, empty bed. Well then, he would be below stairs amusing himself with his toys or books as he so often did; she turned to go and noticed the empty peg that should have held his jacket, and the open cupboard door, also half empty, the shelves holding only a few too-small shirts, a torn pair of breeches, some old shoes.

Deborah turned and nearly fell down the stairs, but made use of the momentum to carry her the rest of the way down as fast as she’d ever dared go. She banged open the parlor door, study door, bedroom door, kitchen door, only to find Benjamin now at table, eating his porridge as if it were any normal Monday morning. He looked up.

“My dear. What—”

“The boy. He’s gone.”

Afterward, Deborah remembered thinking it strange how quickly Benjamin accepted her unlikely words, how fast he leaped up and pounded up the stairs and down, repeated Deborah’s tracks through all the rooms. He gathered his jacket from the peg in the hall and opened the door.

“Benjamin!”

“I’ll fetch him home. Don’t worry.”

“You know where he’s gone?”

“I’ve some ideas where to look. You needn’t worry. He’s not alone.”

“Anne?”

Benjamin nodded.

“But why? For spite? Does she mean to ransom him?”

“I don’t think so. I think she’s grown . . . overfond.”

The words, spoken with such care, implied the others that mirrored them. She wanted to blame Benjamin for this too and could not, because it was true, true, true—she had not been fond enough.

25

AFTER FRANKLIN HAD GONE
Anne set herself into unthinking motion, like an ox on a worn track, dressing herself for the street, putting her few things into her satchel, securing her money pouch in her pocket. She would have liked to risk a last visit with William, to explain to him that she would be looking after him even from afar, but she didn’t know what kind of scene might erupt if Deborah Franklin spied her. Anne picked up her bag and made her way down the stairs, pausing before the door to listen to the last sounds of the Franklin household: Min rustling about in the kitchen, the two voices going back and forth and up and down from behind the closed bedroom door. No one would be leaving that room soon.

So why
not
say good-bye to William? What kind of coward would sneak away without a single word, a single last touch, leaving the boy to a stepmother who was as cold as a winter stone and a father who could be as warm as a bed rug, but only when it occurred to him? William shouldn’t have to go through life thinking the one person who had loved him with utter constancy could disappear in a single night without even a farewell. And besides,
she
needed to see him; she needed to touch him one more time.

Anne turned and flew up the stairs as fast as silence allowed. She opened William’s door and crept in, reluctant, after all, to wake him. She eased up to the bed and looked down at the boy, at his father’s wide brow and well-made chin, at his mother’s slender nose and hands. He belonged to Franklin, yes, but he also belonged to Anne, Anne who had given him up once and was now expected to give him up again. The first time she’d accepted the notion that William’s father might provide him with the better life, but now she knew he was not loved as he should be loved, he was not being kept safe. That was Anne’s first thought; the second was simpler, and with it all further thinking ended: She could not give William up again.

Anne reached out and encircled William’s ankle.

“Sleepy boy! Come!”

William opened his eyes and smiled, happy at the sight of her, secure in the sight of her. Yes, Anne thought, this is right, even William sees it so.

“I’ve a surprise for you,” she said.

William shot up. “What surprise?”

“Well now, if I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Hurry and get dressed and be quiet. Your parents are asleep and shouldn’t like to be disturbed.”

William looked at the window, faint gray lines barely streaking the shutter. “Is it morning?”

“Near enough to. This surprise requires an early start if we’re not to miss it.”

William leaped out of bed and took up the breeches that Anne held out to him. “I need the pot.”

“Soon,” Anne said. She stuffed another pair of William’s breeches, two shirts, and four pairs of stockings into her satchel on top of her own clothes; she would risk a boy’s wet breeches over being discovered before they’d left Franklin’s home. What else did she risk? As she led William down the stairs, the word kept pace with her quickening steps.
All. All. All.

HALF-DARK STREETS. HALF-DARK ALLEYS.
Thoughts only half formed. Top it all with a child whose nature, Anne must admit, did not come entirely from her
or
his father; he was not bold. It required teasing and tempting and prodding, making up races and all kinds of other games with this fabled surprise at the end, this surprise she didn’t dare name, to make William move along. Why, it took her two long, precious minutes just to get the boy to pee into a gutter! They’d finally gotten as far as the outskirts, where the houses began to thin and patches of green fields had begun to appear—indeed, they were halfway across one of those fields—when William simply buckled his knees and sat down.

“I want to go home,” he said.

“We’re almost there, William. Only this one more field. Do you see that pretty little house and barn at the far side? That’s your aunt Mary’s house! There’s your surprise! And guess what, they have a horse you can ride!”

“I don’t have an Aunt Mary.”

“That’s the surprise! A surprise aunt and uncle and three cousins. Come along now, they’ll have a wonderful breakfast laid out just for you.”

William looked up at Anne with that small, pinched face she’d come to love and dread together. “I want my regular breakfast,” he said. “In my regular bowl. At home.”

ANNE WAS ALREADY DONE
in when they arrived at her sister’s door, and she might have gifted Ezekiel Lee with many favors when he opened the door incuriously and ushered them in. But when Mary appeared with her newest babe in her arms she gave a little shriek and nearly crushed her infant by wrapping her arms around Anne at the same time, which startled William so much that he began to cry. The appearance of Mary’s four-year-old boy and two-year-old girl only drew him deeper into Anne’s skirt; Mary—blessed Mary—leaned down to William and said, “Never mind about crying babies. What say you to scones?”

William snuffed up his tears, and Anne led the boy toward the kitchen. Behind her Mary whispered, “Annie. It is him?”

Anne nodded.

There was no room to say more. They filed into the tiny kitchen and Mary dropped her infant into the cradle, settling the other three children around the table. William sat, but he kept his eyes on Anne. She smiled and smiled until she felt her teeth must fall on the floor from it, but when Mary distributed the scones and jam, William finally took his eyes away from her and turned to the table, to the two children perched on either side of him. As soon as William had his mouth good and full, Mary drew slowly backward toward the door, and Anne followed, only as far as the other side of the threshold. Ezekiel Lee came behind them.

“Whatever do you do here?” Mary began.

Anne explained, in part. The mad wife. The doubting Franklin. The boy—her boy—who must be kept safe from harm.

“Are
you
mad?” Lee asked. “You kidnapped Franklin’s child?”

“I did not kidnap—,” Anne started, but stopped. She would admit her reasons for taking the boy came out less convincingly than they’d first gone in; she could admit—now—that of course this is what they would all say if she was discovered: She’d kidnapped Franklin’s child. What on earth had she been thinking to imagine that she could keep William at her sister’s, still so near his home? She must get farther away. Soon. Anne turned and spoke directly to Ezekiel Lee. “I ask that you keep us this single night only. By morning we’ll move on.”

“And so must I, if Franklin discovers the boy here! Which he will, of course. Of course he will look at your sister’s! What were you thinking, girl?”

“Franklin knows nothing of my relations beyond the old house in the alley, and no one’s left there to direct him to you. He won’t know to look here.”

Lee ignored Anne, spoke directly to his wife. “My answer is no, Mary. I leave you to make your sister sensible before we all end up in gaol.” He exited the hallway. Anne gave a moment’s thought to what accommodation she might receive from Ezekiel Lee if she got him off alone, but Mary interrupted the thought.

“She nearly drowned him, Annie? Are you sure?”

Yes, Anne was sure. Or she had been sure. But now, her sister staring at her so, it
did
seem mad. But neither did it matter anymore. “I can’t,” she pleaded. “Dear God, Mary, you know how it was before. I can’t give him up again.”

Mary took up Anne’s hands and half held them, half shook them, as if in a mix of sympathy and exasperation. But in the end she said, “I do know how it was. I do. Let me speak with my husband. Surely we might give you this single night alone with your boy. But what then?”

“What’s best for William,” Anne said, which proved to be sufficient answer, never mind that it meant one thing to the nodding Mary and another to her.

THERE WAS THE EXPECTED
trouble getting William to settle into the bed beside his cousin, but once he did, he chose that time to tell his cousin about his papa the printer and his mama who worked in the print shop and
Poor Dick,
and how his papa was teaching him to swim. The four-year-old cousin wouldn’t put the name of Benjamin Franklin to any of that, but the adult he might speak to next certainly would; Anne must get the boy out of Philadelphia now. But how to do it, without plunging William into a state of alarm? Anne sat by the boy, her fingers gripped tight in his hand, until his rambles changed course and grew disjointed as he mumbled drowsily to his cousin about the ships he planned to visit with his father when he got home.

The ships
. Anne almost swept the boy up and kissed him wide awake, but she held herself still, tight with impatience, until the exertions of the day caught William between words, he eased his grip on her fingers, and drifted away.

Anne returned below stairs. She could hear the soft rise and fall of the husband and wife talking to each other in oddly formal cadence behind the parlor door, but she had no intention of joining them yet; her interest sat there on the hall table, where the
Gazette
lay. She flipped past the editor’s increasingly anti-Quaker call for arms and the mundane advertisements until she arrived at the shipping notices.

Allgood’s ship, the
Nautilus,
was in dock, which meant, in the old days, his boy would be arriving in the shop with his message soon. Anne found her thoughts straying to Allgood’s wife, and wondered if she were glad or not of her husband’s return, thought of what the wife might think of her husband’s doings up above Grissom’s shop, thought of Grissom. Why on earth Grissom? Because, Anne realized, she’d just recognized a third voice rising and falling behind that parlor door.

Anne pushed open the door. Grissom rose from his chair; for a man so tight with his words he was oddly at ease with his limbs. He said, “Good evening, Anne.”

“I’m surprised to see you here, sir.”

“Are you? Indeed, I suppose you would be. Mr. Franklin paid me a call, thinking you might have returned to your old room with your charge; I assured him you wouldn’t be likely to do so.”

“No.”

“And then Mr. Grissom came here!” Lee cut in. “Imagine that! Figuring to come to your sister’s house! Clever man!”

Anne turned to her brother-in-law. “As you well know, while I worked at Mr. Grissom’s shop, I often visited my sister. I haven’t been able to get away for a visit since I began working at Mr. Franklin’s. Mr. Grissom knows where my sister lives, while Mr. Franklin does not. Or rather, he did not till now.”

Grissom turned to the Lees. “I must ask you to indulge a great rudeness and allow me to speak with Anne alone.”

The Lees stood in tandem. As soon as they vanished, Anne said, “I suppose Mr. Franklin’s sent you out to scour the town for me.”

“Anne. Think. You cannot take such a man’s child from him and walk away undiscovered. Nor could you possibly keep the boy better than he’s kept now.”

“He was near drowned by his so-called mother. And burned. And cut. What kind of keep is that? Or did Mr. Franklin neglect to report those particular bits of news? The wife has lost her wits. You of all people know this. You
told
me this.”

“And I’ve regretted having done so every day since. Think, Anne.
Think.
Franklin would take no undue risk with his only son. He has the situation in hand. He assured me of this. I came here only to assure you of it too, to reason with you. I can take the boy back if you like, and keep you out of any danger of punishment or retribution; I believe he’ll come with me happily enough—we were friends for a time.”

Friends? Grissom and William? And then Anne remembered. “You played handkerchief with him.”