Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (37 page)

The two men settled in front of the fire. Anne retreated to the stairs, but there were his steps, heavier but just as nimble, behind her.

She turned.

“And how fare you, my dear Annie?”

“Well. And you, sir?”

Franklin’s face, still so strong, so changeable, sobered. “You must know I’ve lost my old and faithful companion. I every day become sensible of the greatness of that loss, which cannot now be repaired.”

“Yes, well.” Anne paused. “This boy. This
god
son. Yours?”

Franklin studied Anne as he’d been known to study her before, assessing her risk to him, but he certainly knew that whatever her risk to him, she was no risk to William. “William’s. We say he is the child of a close relation. Deceased. Thus far no one has dared question.”

“So. He takes after his father, then.”

“Godfather, please.”

“I speak of William. William takes after his father. And this boy’s mother?”

Franklin looked down the stairs, up at the ceiling, back to Anne. “I should like to think she’s as well settled as you are. I did my best to make it so.”

“A Grissom’s shop for her?”

“I had naught to do with Grissom’s shop. That was his own suggestion. But I kept an eye, Annie. I kept an eye. I would never have left you worse off than before.”

“And now you have this boy with you, and you bring him here. Why?”

“I bring him here because I’m proud of him, and I wished you to see how straight and tall and fine this little seedling grows.”

“And what of William?”

Franklin’s features moved again, locked, darkened. “William grows in his own direction. He is lost to me now.”

“Lost! Lost? What do you mean by lost? You’ve always worked to see him well.”

“I can do nothing for William. He hears nothing but his own counsel. But I
can
make sure his boy sees a better example.”

Anne sank down onto the stair. “I hear such talk. I hear it every day, such rumbling! Do you agree with this fellow Paine who writes with such certainty about independency?”

“Any man with the wit to read must think so.”

“But William. What will become of William?”

“God knows.” Franklin picked up Anne’s hand, squeezed it, and dropped it. How unsettling that change in her skin, from cold to hot to cold again!

50
Perth Amboy, 1776

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT
when the knock sounded on William’s library door. As royal governor he was used to being disturbed with matters both trivial and monumental at any hour of the day or night, but there was something about the insistent tempo of this knock, as well as about the particular time in which he now lived, that caused a small thrumming to set up in his throat.

“What!”

Hamilton stepped into the room. “I’ve news, sir.”

William Franklin looked at his servant in irritation, but he couldn’t have said whether his irritation was with Hamilton or with the letters to his recalcitrant assemblymen that he’d been attempting to write. “Then give it, Hamilton.”

“Your father’s passed through Woodbridge in a fair-size convoy; the word goes he’s on a secret diplomatic mission to Canada to treat with the French.”

William stood up. He’d noticed a marked change in his son’s letters from Philadelphia of late, a dutiful neutrality that not only avoided all mention of the grandfather’s politics, but avoided all mention of the grandfather himself; the fact that the dough-faced Hamilton should carry the first news of the man in months galled William almost as much as the news itself. But that news was, of course, too insane to even credit. First was the intended purpose of the mission—as if anyone in his right mind would credit the French in Canada with taking such a fool’s leap; second was the fact that his father, at his age, would ever undertake such a mission in March. March in Philadelphia or New Jersey was one kind of thing; March in Canada was altogether something else.

“Where do you hear this nonsense?”

“From Fitch at the King’s Arms.” Hamilton pinched his lips. “Not to say the likes of such a party would stop there. But Fitch knows Potter at the Dog—the Dog’s more in the rebel way and they stopped there. Potter told Fitch he overheard talk of a diplomatic mission to Canada to enlist the aid of the French in their cause, which is to say, in the rebellion.”

“Who’s of the party?”

Hamilton unnecessarily and offensively named William’s father again. “Dr. Franklin, and one Samuel Chase, a pair named Carroll. And a Jesuit priest.”

William knew the names Chase and Carroll from his own spies, but it was the unnamed Jesuit priest that convinced William of the rumor’s validity; only someone as cunning as his father would think to bring along a priest to deal with the Catholic French. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Despite their violent argument, William had not until this minute truly believed that his father could cast him off so completely as to travel within a few insignificant miles of him and not stop with him, to stop at the Dog instead. The
Dog.
Christ in heaven!

Hamilton left, and William climbed the stairs to his room. Elizabeth was sitting up in bed—the sheet, her shift, her skin all the same stark white in the glow from his lamp, as lovely as the Greek Venus and as easy to shatter into sparkling shards.

“William, I heard Hamilton talking to Cobb and Percy; they say your father’s passed through Woodbridge without stopping here. It can’t be true, can it?”

Damn Hamilton. And Cobb and Percy too. Elizabeth had remained in poor health almost continuously since that first altercation between William and his father; it had worsened again when Temple left to live with his grandfather in Philadelphia. The latest physician William had called in had told him to keep her away from smoky rooms, dusty roads, violent winds, extreme cold, but he’d said nothing about the state of nerves that seemed to accompany each attack. William sat on the bed and looked his wife over with care, noting her somewhat accelerated breathing but as yet no gray or blue tinge to her skin. He held out his arm and she came into it, leaning against him. He began to absentmindedly rub her back, but she shrugged him off.

“William. Tell me it can’t have come to this.”

William started in attempting to explain his father’s actions—
urgent business, haste, secrecy essential—
but halfway through he found himself out of temper and, in fact, out of caring anymore what Elizabeth might think of his father. “I don’t know why my father does what he does, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth pulled back and studied him, not liking what she saw in him if her cobbled brow could be taken as fair hint of it. When she spoke again her tone had changed from one of alarm to one of conciliation. “Well, I do, now I think of it. He’s afraid. If his cohorts discover him in communication with you, they’ll think he gives you their secrets. They’ll think him disloyal. ’Tis all it is, William; how silly of us not to see it.”

But if Elizabeth meant her words to soothe William, she’d picked the wrong ones; her argument only worked to prove the opposite point. Other royal governors had simply retired to their country estates to wait out this doomed rebellion, but this was a luxury William could not enjoy. His father being who he was, it was essential that William prove to king and Parliament again and again that his loyalties were unaffected by his unfortunate personal connection to one of the rebellion’s leading activists. Indeed, if all Perth Amboy knew of his father’s trip to Canada and the purpose behind it, what was to keep the news from reaching Lord Dartmouth at the Crown Office? And if the news reached Lord Dartmouth from other than William’s own pen, what would—what
should
—Lord Dartmouth think of it? That William’s loyalties were divided. That William would pass on some but not all of the rebel activity in his colony, and none of it that involved his father. Conversely, if William did write of this secret mission to Lord Dartmouth, if he did put his father’s name to paper, if the rebellion failed—
when
the rebellion failed—his father could be hanged as a traitor.

William stood up, now as unfairly irritated with his wife as he’d been with Hamilton. “I’ve work to do,” he said.

WILLIAM HAD JUST PUSHED
aside the empty sheet of paper for the fourth time when the library door opened and Elizabeth entered, trailing a pair of shawls over her nightdress. One of the shawls was an airy, becoming thing, the other ugly and coarse and much more practical for a chilly night. William looked at the shawls and thought how much they were the essence of Elizabeth now: The airy shawl had come from a fancy London shop, the wool one from a New Jersey farmer’s wife.

Elizabeth came up to William and slid onto his lap, encircling him inside her two shawls. “You work too long,” she said. “Come to bed.”

As if he’d heard them, Temple, home on a short break in his schooling, appeared framed in the library door behind Elizabeth. Only Temple could sleep through Hamilton’s and Cobb’s and Percy’s chatter on the landing outside his bedroom door and wake at a conversation one floor below him, William thought. Elizabeth slipped off William’s lap to give him an impulsive hug, the kind of hug that William had looked for in vain most of his childhood, and all William’s previous annoyance with his wife was washed away by a mad rush of love.

“Why is everyone up and about?” Temple asked.

“Your father’s up because he’s working. I’m up because I wish him to stop working. Come, if we leave him be he might finish before dawn breaks.”

Elizabeth and Temple moved toward the library door, arm in arm. Although William had found little time to spend with the boy, Elizabeth took every minute she could capture, but even so, William had barely cast his eyes back to his desk when Elizabeth returned, alone.

“William,” she said. “Something’s more wrong than your father’s stopping at the Dog and Whistle. What is it?”

“Nothing. A bit of trouble with my assembly. Nothing of any consequence.”

Elizabeth bent down, touched her lips to his lips, smoothed the collar of his coat. “William,” she said. “My poor, dear William. Have you not yet learned about consequences? Now hurry up and finish so I might get some sleep.”

IN THE END ELIZABETH
slept and William lay awake, comfortable between crisp, warm sheets in his down-filled bed, thinking of his father at the Dog and Whistle, perhaps sleeping on bare tick, perhaps sharing his bed with another of his party who would no doubt stink of rum and smoke and God knew what else. William reached out and touched Elizabeth’s powder-soft skin, inhaled the scent of her English soap, imported yearly at greater and greater trouble and expense; his father still used the caustic soap his family manufactured in Boston and sent to him by the crate. Was this great divide between them perhaps first brewed in soap? Whatever the brew, it was his father’s making, and now his father must pay the price, as William had already begun to pay. Oh, how he was paying! His only relief was that he’d managed, thus far, to keep the extent of the damage from his wife.

Elizabeth did not yet know that the New Jersey Assembly was no longer paying heed to William’s admonition that
they
should be molding public opinion, not allowing the people—the
rebels
—to mold the
assembly’s
opinion. Neither did Elizabeth know—he hoped to God she did not know—that calls for the governor’s resignation had begun to come from others besides his father, within the New Jersey colony itself. William could tout a long list of successes as governor and, looking ahead, had begun to form another long list, but now his goals had shrunk to one, keeping his post by whatever means necessary. Keeping Elizabeth as she should be kept. Elizabeth Downes may not have fallen in love with the royal governor of New Jersey, but that was certainly whom she’d married, with every expectation of a lifestyle similar to the richness she’d left behind in London. Bad enough that she’d discovered herself married to a bastard, that she’d read for herself what that prig John Adams had written in the papers, what
Penn
had written. But was that not also his father’s fault? Only last fall a mutual friend had shared with William something out of one of his father’s recent letters, thinking it a kindness to apprise William of how the state of affairs—read state of the estate—now sat:
My son is lost to me forever,
William’s father had written to this friend, and he had gone on to announce that he was altering his will to favor Sally’s oldest boy instead. So there it was—from bastard to legitimate heir and back to bastard in the course of a single life.

There was but one thing, one
legitimate
thing, that William could now call his, and that was his royal appointment. His governor’s post. But if William were to remain in it, his father must be hung out over a cliff. But whose fault would
that
be? Not William’s! Not! William had never done anything but his duty and he would never do anything but his duty; if his father chose to treat with Canada, he put a noose of his own making around his neck.

Unless . . . A mission to Canada. An effort to enlist the French.
Could
the mission succeed? Could the Americans and the French in Canada combine forces and wills and together actually succeed in driving the English army, the greatest in the world, from the North American continent? And if they did, then what? Thirteen colonies adrift, ruled by nothing but a gaggle of politicians loosely assembled into a thing they called a congress. The English governors set in place in all the other colonies would go home, of that William had no doubt, which would leave William, the only American-born amongst them, to his singular fate. But what fate? Could it mean the younger and not the elder Franklin might end up dangling from the end of the rope?

No. No and no and no. It was not possible. Loyalty could never fail to be rewarded—William’s father had taught him that. His friends at the Crown Office would see to his safety and that of his wife and son. Unless he lost his friends at the Crown Office for failure to do his duty. For disloyalty, for it could never be called anything other than that. William’s duty was plain; he must write to Lord Dartmouth of his father’s mission to Canada, and his father must take the consequences of his decisions on himself. His father, who’d left William caught in such a position in the first place. He had been forced to write to Lord Dartmouth after the Stamp Act riots, after the nonimportation agreement, after Boston’s destruction of the tea, the same tortured words each time: “No attachments or connections will ever impel me to swerve from my duty to my king.” And afterward, and since, he’d sent the Crown Office specific evidence of the rebels’ contact with the Spanish and French, the ports they were using for smuggling gunpowder from the French islands, the names of known smugglers.