The sideboard, which had been laden earlier in the evening with fat capons, ham and fish, Cheddar and Stilton, puddings and baked apples, had now been cleared off by the “newlyweds,” as Darwin still liked to think of the two young folk, who’d just arrived tonight from their home in Shrewsbury: the beautiful and bountiful Susannah “Sukey” Wedgwood, who, a bit more than two years ago, had married her favorite childhood playmate: none other than Darwin’s young son, Robert. A marriage that Erasmus Darwin cherished, and that would have filled Sukey’s father, Josiah, with joy, had he lived to see it.
As Robert was setting around the stone beakers of ale, flasks of whiskey, and platters of sweetmeats, Sukey now joined the group, sitting among these men of science as if she were one of them—as she’d often done, even as early as the age of seven or eight, by her father’s invitation.
Sukey Wedgwood was a treasure. Everyone knew the famous paintings of the Wedgwood clan, done when Sukey was young, and executed by “Lunar” artists like George Stubbs and Joseph Wright, who’d happily attended their meetings, participated in their experiments, even lived among them.
And Sukey was special in other ways: while all the Lunaticks believed that girls should benefit by a scientific education, and had trained their daughters accordingly, none had done more than Josiah Wedgwood, with Sukey, his favorite daughter. The boys might run the manufactory, but Sukey had Josiah’s spirit and spark, his scientific curiosity, and even his headstrong stubbornness; her father had favored her beyond all his passel of other children. Now Sukey was a fully blossomed young woman, radiant in her youth and in her recent marriage—which, as everyone knew, had brought to her new husband, Robert, a dowry of more than twenty-five thousand pounds from her father, Josiah’s, estate—a vast fortune to bestow upon such a mere slip of a girl.
And tonight, she’d come hither from Shrewsbury, to bring another bequest.
In anticipation of this, their host, Matthew Boulton, made certain that the servants were kept away, and that all the dining room doors were shut and locked. Standing beside his son’s lovely wife, Erasmus Darwin placed his medical satchel upon the table, and withdrew and unwrapped the medallion, placing it in Sukey’s waiting hands. Her husband, Robert, had already prepared the burner apparatus, and its blue flame, so familiar to all the scientists around this table, shimmered amidst the yellow candlelight.
Sukey stood beside the flame, her face illuminated from below, looking upon the cameo in fascination, just as she’d looked in all those portraits of her as a child watching scientific experiments, gazing into an orrery or watching a bird in a glass cage.
“Gentlemen,” Sukey said, regarding the face of each man around the table, these men who had been her mentors and father figures. “You are gathered here tonight to engage upon an enterprise that may prove to be a dangerous risk, and a risk for something that perhaps may be founded upon nothing more than the fantasy of a dead man and upon its explanation, tonight, by myself, whom you’ve only known as a girl. This medallion represents my father, Josiah Wedgwood’s, last will, which he wrote in secret ten years ago and entrusted me to interpret as best I could, for nothing was written down except what has been writ here, within this bit of colored jasper.” Sukey paused and added, “God help us, each and all, to determine, once we have seen it, what will be the right path.”
The men stood and gathered closely about Sukey; they all waited as she held the medallion lightly over the flame, with the uncarved side down. Slowly, within the yellow-and-black field of the raised carving itself, a shape began to emerge around the figure of the Negro slave: a large, luminous triangle that glowed in the dim light.
Then Sukey turned the medallion over to reveal its other side. And Erasmus Darwin gasped: “Good Lord, so he’d planned it all along….”
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Spring, Third Quarter Moon
Joseph Priestley dismounted from his lathered horse and took the sweaty reins in his hand to lead his beast to the wooden trough to drink. His clothes were caked with mud. What a night it had been.
The noted chemist and former Unitarian minister had ridden all day from his isolated place in the countryside; he’d departed from home, with just some cash and the clothes on his back, the very moment this morning that he had received the written message.
But now he was dismayed by what he saw here around him: he’d not been in Philadelphia in nearly five years—not since he’d first arrived on these shores, an exile with the stench of his burnt house back in England still clinging to his clothes. His reception was poor, for at the moment of his arrival, the American Congress itself, in pandemonium, was clearing out of the city whilst the yellow fever raged all around them. That epidemic, it was said, had by now claimed the lives of more than four thousand Philadelphia souls. Even tonight, here beneath the bright blue moonlight, the streets appeared to him deserted and desolate.
Now, for the first time, the peril of Priestley’s immediate situation struck home to him. How would he even find a place to shelter himself, much less his horse, here in the Negro quarter of the city? But here was precisely where he’d been directed to go. He patted his horse on the flank and peered up the street anxiously.
Just then, in the cold moonlight, he saw a lone figure striding along the quai; the chap raised his arm aloft in a gesture of greeting. Priestley waved back and was about to call out, but the man gestured for silence. Priestley took his horse’s reins and went to meet the other.
“Hallo, Reverend Priestley, we’ve been expecting you,” the chap said, sotto voce. “We mustn’t be seen here, there’s a curfew, you know. I’ll explain when we reach our destination.” And with that, he took Priestley by the arm and the horse’s reins in his other hand, and led them away from the river, through the maze of ramshackle streets.
Priestley glanced over at the fellow as they went: he was a tall, slender chap of about thirty, clean-shaven, wearing a well-cut vest and breeches, his straight black hair tied back in a queue—exceedingly handsome. And somehow familiar, Priestley thought. Could this be the mastermind he was to make contact with, or merely an emissary?
They reached a stable, where a small black boy came out and took the horse’s reins. “Horatio here’s rather young, but an excellent stabler,” the man assured Priestley. “He will curry your horse and clean his hooves and make sure he’s fed. And we’ll do the same for you!” he laughed.
Then he led Priestley up the steps of a darkened building and rapped at a door, which was opened by a young mulatto woman. Mellow light flooded out, they entered the room, and the door was shut and bolted behind them. There a fire flickered in the hearth, a kettle swung from the soup arm above the flames; the overwhelmingly delicious aroma of victuals reminded Priestley of just how long it had been since he’d eaten. The man had already filled a large plate for his guest, and he dismissed the young woman.
As Priestley expressed his deep gratitude and broke bread into his plate of soup, the younger man studied him.
“You do not recall having met me, Reverend Priestley,” he said at last.
“You are familiar to me,” the scientist assured him. “Though at this moment, I can’t think when or where.”
“It was five years ago, here in Philadelphia, that we met,” said the other.
Priestley thought again how remarkably good-looking this young man was, more so here in the firelight, his cheeks flushed with health, his intelligent brow, the chiseled profile like a noble Roman cameo….
“We were both then in the company of Thomas Jefferson,” said the other.
And then Priestley knew.
“You’re the cook,” he said, in complete amazement. But here, in different clothes, in a position without subservience—dear Lord, the chap looked as white as anyone else! The younger man was nodding in wry amusement. Though, of course, thought Priestley, he couldn’t have felt all that amused. After all, the man now sitting before Priestley, when last they’d met, had been Thomas Jefferson’s slave!
�
��James Hemings, at your service,” said the fellow. “I’m free now: two years ago, my cooking finally bought me my freedom. I’ve just been back to Paris, where I’d first learned my trade when my former master had been Secretary to France. For five years we lived there, up until the Revolution; my sister Sally and I were among the household staff. I procured everything for Mr. Jefferson, from horses to houses. We were briefly in England, and that was where I met professor William Small, a founder of your Society.”
As flabbergasted as Priestley was at these revelations, now the connections were falling into place. Scotsman William Small, a physician and natural historian, had for some years been professor at the Virginia College of William and Mary, and mentor while there to the young Thomas Jefferson, whom Priestley himself, even now, mentored through their correspondence. After William Small’s return from America to England, he had also become one of the founding members of the Lunar Society: like Priestley and the rest, Small had never been reconciled to anything about the slave trade.
But something still puzzled Priestley.
“The message I’ve received,” he explained to Hemings, “the one bringing me hither tonight, had directed me to make all haste here, to ‘Come to the aid of a Man and a Brother.’ That is a motto you must know, referring as it does to an African slave. Yet, Mr. Hemings, you tell me that you, grace to God almighty, are now a free man.”
“Reverend Priestley,” said James Hemings, “was there a symbol written on the letter you received? Perhaps a triangle?” When Priestley nodded, mystified, James added, “You have heard, perhaps, of ‘the Triangular Trade’?”
It was a term that Priestley knew as well as anyone might, who was opposed to the slave trade: the highly lucrative business of interdependent financial traffic, called “triangular” because on the first leg, guns, shackles, and muzzles were exported from Europe into West Africa, where they were deployed to capture whole villages of innocent people; the ships there would refill their empty holds with cargos of captured humans—“black gold”—who were bound on the “middle passage” for perpetual enslavement in the West Indies and Americas; and the vessels then returned, on the final leg, laden with luxuries like coffee, chocolate, sugar, rum, and cotton for gluttonous European consumption. It was a business so lucrative, as Priestley well knew, that it had run its three-hundred-year cycle virtually unchallenged, creating fortunes for some of the noblest families in Europe—and with no end in sight.
“Reverend,” said James Hemings, “I may be free, and living in a free state like Pennsylvania, but all of my relations in Virginia, even my sister, are still enslaved by a man you know well. As I said, I’ve just returned from France, where, as you are aware, four years ago the French revolutionary government abolished slavery. While there, I realized that the war with England and the current crises in France make it impossible to know what will happen there next. The safest place for a free black man may well be England; I do not know. Reverend Priestley, mine are a people who have spent hundreds of years awaiting a miracle. We cannot wait to learn what the French or the British may plan to do.”
Priestley, a humanitarian who did admire Thomas Jefferson, but who loved freedom more, felt at this moment that he might weep from the weight of his emotions.
“I now understand why the Society sent me here with such urgency,” he told James Hemings. “I am to meet with you, to plan a concerted effort, hands across the seas, to create a multinational abolitionist movement!”
“Actually, Reverend Priestley,” Hemings said, “you are here tonight, just as the message said, to come to the aid of a man and a brother.” Hemings paused and added, “Now I would like to introduce you to the man you have been beckoned here to meet.”
At this cue, a tall, dark man in elegant clothing entered the room. He was a person of substance, as Priestley could tell by his demeanor. He seated himself before the hearth, between Hemings and Priestley, and turned to address the latter.
“I am called Horace Wright,” the newcomer said. “I am a trained master chef with twenty years of experience, and have recently, this past year, learned even more chef’s technique from our young friend here, who is a master of French cookery.” He smiled toward James Hemings. “However, I have learned that I cannot ply my trade openly—not even here in Philadelphia, where we of African descent are deemed free.”
“Why can you not?” asked Priestley.
“Because, sir, several years ago, President George Washington signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act, empowering whomever desired to do so to seize enslaved peoples who had escaped bondage, and, with the reward of large bounties, to return them to anyone who claimed to be their ‘rightful masters.’ ”
“From whom had you yourself escaped?” asked Priestley, already sensing what that answer might be.
It was James Hemings who supplied it: “Horace escaped from President Washington and his family,” he said. “He was their chef. His name was not Horace then: they called him Hercules.”
Shrewsbury, England: Summer, New Moon
Sukey Wedgwood Darwin stood upon the terrace of their country house, one arm about the shoulder of her husband, Robert Darwin. His arm was wrapped around her waist. Robert looked down upon her lovingly.
“Susannah,” Robert said, “your father, Josiah, did not die of natural causes. What caused him, do you think, to take his own life?”
“Father was dying of a cancer in the jawbone,” Sukey said. “Your father gave him enough laudanum to relieve the pain—and perhaps a bit more. Father took it, and locked the door. But Father only left us as he did, because he knew that we would set in motion the mission he himself had fought and prayed for all his life. As indeed we’ve done.”
“Only thanks to you, and to your well-celebrated infernal grit,” Robert commented blithely. “Those old men of the Lunar Society may have dreamed of, or even wished for, a better world. But you’re the one, my darling, who actually set those wheels in motion.”
Sukey shrugged. “I only gave them the key to their dreams and wishes,” she objected. “The rest they are accomplishing themselves, with very little help from me!”
“Admit it to me,” said Robert, “that you and my father, the ‘doctor,’ actually ‘doctored’ that medallion!”
“That triangle—my father’s message about the ‘Triangular Trade’—was already present on the medallion,” said Sukey. “Could I help it that all those names mysteriously appeared on the reverse? How could I have known that those names were the names of famous slave owners, whose slaves were already mounting, on their own, an important resistance to the slave trade? Could I help it that the Lunar Society rushed to the aid of these men, or that Messieurs Watt and Boulton had already minted copper coins that could pave their paths to freedom? My dear, far be it from me to interfere with a plot that may free hundreds of families that are still in bondage! Indeed, this entire scenario may have been the work of the angels!”
Robert bent and kissed his wife on the lips. “You are the angel,” he said.
The two were silent for several moments.
Then Sukey said, “Robert, when we have children, let us be sure that each and every one of them understands what we, and our parents, have lived for. Let us vow to one another that, no matter what the future brings, and at all costs, our children will destroy this vile abomination of slavery, that they will know and respect what the Lunar Society once stood for—as manifested in its secret code.”
“And what exactly is that?” asked Robert Darwin. “For I’m afraid that my father never shared any secret code with me.”
“It’s simple,” said Sukey. “We believe in reaching for the moon.”
End
Postscript: Another of the “favorite” slaves owned by George Washington’s family, Oney Judge, managed to escape to freedom, and later, so did six relations of James and Sally Hemings, once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Sukey and Robert Darwin’s son Charles became a lifelong, bitter opponent of slavery, and was inspired b
y his grandfather Erasmus’s example to pursue scientific research that supported the common origin of all humans: The Origin of Species.
HIGH STAKES
BY R. L. STINE
I noticed the man as soon as Denny and I stepped into the bar. His eyes were so unnaturally blue, like polished sea glass, they didn’t belong in that leathery, tanned face. He had a head of thick, white hair brushed straight back, his cheeks creased beneath a two-day bristle of beard, a blue bandanna loose around his throat, probably covering a tortoise-skin neck.
He appeared to be alone in a red vinyl booth against the back wall, one hand wrapped around the stem of a martini glass, the other rolling a short cigar between his lips.
I saw all this in a few seconds. I’m good with detail. I have a quick eye and a good lockup memory. For a while, I thought I wanted to be a journalist, before I decided to write novels, before I decided to be a wife.
Some people think having a father with a fortune of money makes life easier. But for me, it made it all so much more confusing and difficult because it opened up so many possibilities, I found it impossible to choose.
So I chose Denny. And now, I had no business studying the man in the back booth because I had to devote myself to celebrating our honeymoon, true love and all. I really was acting head-over-heels and the whole cliché. And not just because Dad was so against Denny and so opposed to my rushing to get married.
He was right. I’m only twenty-three, and I’d only known Denny for a month, after all. But Dad didn’t understand. I knew he was posing as a father figure, doing what he thought he was supposed to do, his duty to warn me away from the man who could only be after our money.
But I’ve always thought of my father as an offshore adviser. He was two wives past my mother and most of the time barely remembered that I—Ashli Bennett—existed, except as a name on a bunch of trust accounts (which don’t start paying off till I’m twenty-five).
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