Franklin Affair (19 page)

R nodded.

“Did you know that Dr. Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson, came up with ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident' in the Declaration of Independence?”

Again, R moved his head up and down.

“Dr. Franklin also invented the armonica, a beautiful instrument for making the most beautiful music,” the man said to R. Each now turned to face the other.

The guy was definitely Caucasian but the once-white skin of his forehead and cheeks was stained with streaks of what appeared to be a combination of grease and common dirt. How long, dear God, had it been since this man had been anywhere close to running water, to soap, to being clean?

He was between fifty-five and sixty-five years old. That was R's guess after seeing his face. There was no way to tell more precisely.

“Yes,” R answered. He saw no need to tell the man that he had actually played an armonica one afternoon—very much in private—at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

“He took the little boy's trick of rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a water glass to make music and turned it into an instrument,” said the man.

R nodded, breathing only through his mouth.

“Both Mozart
and
Beethoven wrote pieces for Dr. Franklin's armonica,” said the man. “Did you know that?”

Yes, yes, R definitely knew that too. He had been so taken aback by the man's odor and appearance, he only now focused on the voice and the manner of speech. This was an astonishingly well-spoken, articulate person. What in hell was his story? Where did he come from, how did he end up like this? Could he be a disgraced or retired historian of the American Revolution scraping along by teaching on the streets? Move over, buddy, I may be joining you soon.

“He was also an expert at chess,” the man, whatever he was, continued. “He wrote an essay about it that is full of wisdom—and more than chess.”

R was most familiar with that essay. He particularly remembered the opening words: “The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the court of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it.”

The smelly man said, “I have always been particularly taken by what he said in the essay about getting out of difficult situations.”

• • •

R didn't run the thirty-five blocks back to his house in Georgetown, but he walked as fast as he probably ever had in his life.

It seemed like only a blur of minutes before he was in the library with Ben's 1,200-word essay on chess before him.

The apt phrases leaped out at him.

If you have incautiously put yourself into a bad and dangerous position . . . you must abide by all consequences of your rashness.

One so frequently, after contemplation, discovers the means of extricating one's self from a supposed insurmountable difficulty.

The most wrenchingly relevant one was:

No false move should ever be made to extricate yourself out of a difficulty or to gain advantage; for there can be no pleasure in playing with a man once detected in such unfair practice.

R went immediately to his desk. The words of confession came careening out of his mind into his fingers onto the computer keys like heat-seeking rockets. Never had he written so fast, so emotionally, so furiously.

It was ninety minutes before he stopped for a break.

By then he had, in rough note form, recounted how he had burned the Eastville papers and lied to Wes Braxton.

After going to the bathroom and gulping down a bottle of sparkling water, he tried to re-create the situation and recount every detail he could remember from the burned-up papers. But he also made the point as strongly as he could that he still was not convinced that Benjamin Franklin did, in fact, trigger two murders, especially that of the woman who bore him an illegitimate son while she herself was a child. The whole thing could be a cleverly perpetrated hoax. His own sin was that by destroying the Eastville papers he had made pursuing the truth more difficult. But it still had to be done. History demanded it. Benjamin Franklin's reputation, no matter the truth of the murder accusations, would survive because his accomplishments would ensure his proper and permanent place in history. Tricentennial planners and other Ben lovers could relax.

His points came out in a steady flow, because R was doing exactly what he knew he had to do. He was dealing with what Ben the Essayist called “the consequences of [his] rashness.” He was implementing what Ben the Ghost might have labeled, in upper case, a second, even more important choice of Honor.

He was writing a statement of confession—but for what purpose? To send to a magazine, to put in a press release? To read aloud at high noon in front of Ben's statue? A book? Could it even end up being the beginning of a book? One thing at a time. Whatever, he was surely writing a long-form suicide note, because once this was read both within his profession and by the outside world, he would be dead. His reputation, his very being as a man of history, scholarship, and principle would be no more.

He too would be ashes, impossible ever to be re-formed into anything of value.

So be it. In the parlance of
Law & Order,
he was ready to do the time, even if it meant dirty clothes, no baths, and hanging out near statues of Ben.

His only pleasure was deciding that, if there ever was a book, he would send the finished manuscript to Johnny Rutledge at BFU Press rather than to Harry Dickinson. Eat your heart out, Harry!

R had a further whiff of fun when he thought about using Harry's suggestion,
Ben Three,
as the title anyhow.

All foolish flights of fancy came crashing down once he focused on the fact that he had to make a real confession directly to Wes Braxton, the sooner the better.

And there was still—also the sooner the better, probably—another confession he had to make.

And he had to go to Williamsburg in the morning.

FOURTEEN

R waited until he was thirty minutes out of Washington on I-95 South on the road to Williamsburg. Then, with great reluctance and dread, he dialed the number for the Eastern Pennsylvania Museum of Colonial History in Eastville.

He could put it off no longer.

Wes Braxton answered. It jarred R at first, because he had been unconsciously hoping, like the schoolboy waiting to see the principal, for a few more seconds of time before he had to confess his terrible sins. But, of course, acting directors of small museums have no secretaries, no assistants to answer the telephone for them.

R simply began talking to Wes. He had not worked out exactly how he was going to tell his story because he could not bear to relive what he had done any more times than absolutely necessary. The words, unprepared and unpracticed, just came.

“Wes, I'm sorry to say that I have been guilty of a serious breach of professional ethics. Those papers from the cloak may have been much more important than either Wally or I said. It's not certain, but they may very well have contained an account of a historically important and dramatically significant meeting among some of our Founding Fathers—”

“I know that. Dr. Taylor. I know.”

At first, R. wasn't sure he had heard Wes's interruption correctly. “You know? You know
what,
Wes?”

“What you just said. That they could be very important.”

“So . . . well, I'm a bit confused.”

“I spent some time researching those scattered words and phrases even before I called Dr. Rush,” said Wes. “I wasn't able to decipher them completely but there was enough there for me to pick up a real smell—of malfeasance on the part of Benjamin Franklin and of some authenticity.”

R was trying to keep his cell phone at his ear with his right hand, guide his car around three trucks in the slow lane with his left, and at the same time come to grips with what he was hearing.

“Are you still there, Dr. Taylor?” Wes said finally.

“Right, you bet,” said R. “I'm on a cell phone in the middle of traffic on I-Ninety-five at the moment.”

“I know why you and Dr. Rush did what you did, if that's your concern.”

R was now past the trucks and again reasonably clear in the heavy traffic, but he decided to remain silent anyhow. This kid, clearly even smarter and more clever than R had first noted, was in no need of any unnecessary prompting.

“Both of you were interested in protecting the reputation of the great Benjamin Franklin. I assumed that about Dr. Rush, and you pretty much said as much when you brought up the Prophecy. You really do have to be vigilant against hoaxers and debunkers. That is as much the mission of serious historians like you and Dr. Rush as finding, revealing, and analyzing new information and insights.”

Wes paused. R had to say something now. “I appreciate your understanding,” was what he said.

Then he sucked in his breath and confessed.

“The worst thing is that the papers—the originals I purchased from you—are no longer available for anybody to do any further research on or about. I did a most foolish, stupid, and unforgivable thing—”

“Please, please, Dr. Taylor. There is nothing to forgive.”

Again R's sense of self-preservation, his desire to avoid the principal's punishment as long as possible, caused him to shut up.

“I thought it might be possible you would find a buyer for the papers that would take them out of circulation or out of access to future scholars,” Wes said, “so I took the precaution of making several very clear high-definition copies. I have them locked up in our safe. They will always be available—to you or to anybody else who comes along: tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century—to pursue the accuracy of the story they tell.”

R almost rammed a gray Toyota SUV in front of him. He swerved to the right to avoid rear-ending the vehicle and its passenger load of what looked to be five or six small kids. There was a rest area ahead; he quickly exited.

“Dr. Taylor, did you hear me? Boy, cell phones still are not as reliable as they should be.”

“I hear you, Wes. I have pulled off and parked.”

“I hate driving on I-Ninety-five. The police, for reasons that escape me, have yet to figure out how to keep all those trucks from traveling so fast and so recklessly.”

R chose to leave the subject of dangerous trucks on I-95 for a future conversation. “What about being able to do further work to determine the age and authenticity of the paper and the ink?” he asked. “That certainly can't be done from copies.”

“Well, sir, I'm pretty sure about the dating. Several months ago some friends and former colleagues in the documents section at Colonial Williamsburg did a complete workup for me as a favor. I have their report, also in the safe.”

“For the record . . . what does it say exactly?”

“There's a seventy-five to ninety percent chance the paper was manufactured in the eighteenth century, a sixty to eighty percent chance on the ink.”

R had no more questions. Nothing more to say to the prin-cipal.

Wes went on. “So, like I said, not only do you not have anything to regret or apologize for, Dr. Taylor, you have my gratitude.”

Gratitude? R didn't say a word. He waited.

“I was appointed the real director of the museum last week. I was the unanimous choice of the search committee, thanks to you, sir.”

Thanks to
me?

“It was the twenty-one thousand dollars you got for the papers that did it. I will always be in your debt, Dr. Taylor.”

R turned the key in the ignition of his car. “I'm glad I could help,” he said.

“Where are you driving now, if I may ask?”

“To Williamsburg, as a matter of fact, for a meeting.”

“That is a wonderful place for people like you and me and everyone else who appreciates the eighteenth century.”

R said he agreed with Wes.

“Have a great time, sir.”

R said he would certainly try.

• • •

They were in a chapel-like conference room in William and Mary's 300-year-old Wren Building, supposedly designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the great British architect.

R would not have been surprised if a man in a long coat and breeches had banged an ornamental mace against the floor and loudly proclaimed: “Here ye! Here ye! Here ye! This proceeding in the matter of the Good People of History versus Bad Rebecca Kendall Lee is now in session! God save the United States of America and the American Revolution Historical Association!

But John Gwinnett offered no official call to order. He simply laid papers—the goods—out in front of Rebecca much like a dealer putting cards out for a game of blackjack.

“Here are the official results of our investigation, Dr. Lee,” he said. “This, of course, is the same material that we forwarded to you earlier.”

With the smack of paper on the long polished table came the message:
Here now, You Cursed Accused, is the evidence against you.

“I have read it all, thank you,” said Rebecca.

Gwinnett might have been expecting her to be intimidated by the setting he had created for this confrontation. If so, it wasn't working. There was nothing here she couldn't handle, her body language announced.

“This does not add up to plagiarism,” she said, without looking at the papers.

She and Gwinnett were seated across the table from each other. Sonya Lyman and Joe Hooper were on Gwinnett's left, R on his right.

“I most assuredly think it does,” said Gwinnett, as calm and self-assured as Rebecca.

Officials at William and Mary called the Wren Building the
soul of the college
because of its age and its location at the west end of Duke of Gloucester, the main pedestrian street that runs the length of Colonial Williamsburg's historic area. R had observed the eighteenth-century furniture and the large portraits of past William and Mary presidents and Colonial Virginia dignitaries, but only now did he note the smell of antiquity that filled the room. He had a sense that even the air in this place was old and preserved. The atmosphere, obviously as Gwinnett planned, oozed history, importance, gravitas.

Here now, in the presence of the great Patrick Henry himself, were serious people gathered to consider serious business.

Yes, Patrick Henry, alias Alexander Stockton, Gwinnett's chief assistant, was the sixth person in the room. He was all dressed up in white knee socks and lace collar, tight green breeches, and a long dark-brown coat with gold buttons down the front.

“You can see why we call him Patrick,” Gwinnett had said in introducing Stockton, who would take notes of the meeting. “He is an accomplished actor, so as an escape from his serious work for me and the college he regularly plays Patrick Henry for Colonial Williamsburg events. He has such a date later in the day, so I said it was fine for him to come here as a properly clothed and ready Patrick.”

R had seen many oil portraits and sketches of the famous Virginia radical, the man who created the revolution's major battle cry, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Stockton, in his late thirties, definitely bore a resemblance, with a similar sharp nose and facial features and an unwigged head of long curled dark-brown hair worn down his back in a ponytail. Of course they called him Patrick.

“We have gathered here for you to present whatever evidence you may wish in your defense,” Gwinnett said to Rebecca.

“
We,
a jury of my peers?”

“I would say we're only at the
grand
jury phase right now,” interjected Hooper.

After an annoyed I'm-in-charge-here glance at Hooper, Gwinnett said to Rebecca, “Terminology aside, our preliminary finding is that you have committed plagiarism, the writer's most mortal sin. Do I not speak for us all?”

Gwinnett then turned first to R, then Sonya. Both nodded in agreement. Joe held up his right hand:
Not yet, not until I've heard the defense,
was the message.

“Thank you, Dr. Hooper,” said Rebecca. “I am delighted to find at least one open mind in this lynch mob—sorry; on this distinguished ARHA committee.”

Rebecca had yet to make real eye contact with Gwinnett, Sonya Lyman, or Joe Hooper. She had given a stunned and then amused look at Stockton as Patrick Henry, but only R had had the benefit of a direct stare. That came in a whisk when she entered the room, silently and with no mutual acknowledgments. Hers was a look of comfort. If she was afraid, you couldn't read it in her eyes.

R saw John Gwinnett's calmness as just as unusual, considering the potentially explosive nature of this event for him as well. Maybe the presence of Patrick Henry raised the comfort level.

R himself was neither calm nor comfortable. He had spent most of the two hours of his post-Braxton drive sorting through concerns about most everything that had already happened to him and that would—could, even should—happen now.

“Maybe this distinguished committee would like to observe a demonstration of what I think of this evidence against me?” Rebecca asked.

It was not a real question.

In a stunningly swift and deft series of moves, she reached out and grabbed the documents from the table, stood up with them held before her like they were smelly garbage, took five long fast steps, and crashed the papers down into a large leather eighteenth-century trash receptable to her right.

“Now I'm ready for your questions,” Rebecca declared, her legs slightly apart, her hands on her hips. At that moment, she could have passed for an attack dog at a breached security checkpoint.

R, without consciously doing so, was on his feet. It had been a reactive move. Joe and Sonya remained seated, along with Gwinnett, the man with a new right knee, and his costumed assistant, Alexander Stockton.

Seconds clicked by. Soon this still life had to end. Somebody was going to have to say or do something.

R acted first. “Sit down, Rebecca.” The words came out of his mouth like a spontaneous bark, an uncontrolled air horn. “Now!” he shouted, when Rebecca didn't immediately move.