by Sally Cabot
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.
But now William must write something worse. Far worse. But what choice did he have? How else to keep the only accomplishment that could not—it could not—be credited to his father—this governorship? How to keep his life? William wished only to go on as they’d gone on before; it was his father who wished to change it all, ruin it all, cast William into obscurity for all time as the “great inconvenience,” the “base-born brat,” to elevate himself as “the great genius of the day,” as he was already being called in the newspapers.
William got out of bed, relit his lamp from the fire, returned to his library, and sat at his desk. He drew the blank piece of paper toward him again and began to write.
It has come to my attention that a secret delegation moves northward through New Jersey with plans to prevail on the Canadians to enter into the confederacy with the other colonies. The delegation consists of: Samuel Chase, Charles Carroll, John Carroll and
There William stopped. He could not. But he could not not.
William set down his pen, covered his letter with his arms, dropped his head onto his arms, and wept.
51
Philadelphia, 1776
THE BOY CAME BACK, without his grandfather but with a girl, one who’d served at the Penny Pot for barely a month before she’d run away with a deserter off one of the ships. Anne had seen this girl about town since, showing some wear but still shining bright enough to latch on to the occasional man for a month or two before casting him off in the face of a better offer. But Temple Franklin? What kind of offer could a boy his age make to such a girl?
The same old one, as it turned out. They ate a platter of bread and cheese and drank a bottle of wine while Anne took note of Temple Franklin’s long, slender fingers, his long, delicate nose. Just as Temple’s father had grown to be handsomer and taller than his father, so Temple had grown to outshine them both in looks, and both the younger Franklins seemed to have captured at least a measure of the elder’s charm; Anne watched the way Temple leaned into the girl and whispered, then drew back and smiled, then leaned in again and whispered. The girl laughed, shook her head, laughed again, and then Anne saw it, the glint of silver passing from boy to girl, the girl’s hand opening and closing and opening, looking from the coin to Temple Franklin and back again, as if to determine which shone brighter, or whether, if added together, the shine would grow bright enough.
Temple stood up and walked toward Anne where she lingered yet, at the foot of the stairs. He smiled at her as another had smiled at her, as sure of the result as the other had been. “How much for a bed?”
“Full up,” Anne said.
The boy gave a sheepish grin and shrugged, perhaps his most charming performance yet, and would have turned away, but Anne caught his arm.
“Perhaps your grandfather never mentioned to you that I used to care for your father when he was young.”
“No! He made no mention!”
“How fares your father?”
The boy’s face, so open the moment before, took on a wary look. “He writes he is well.”
“And you answer his letter as fast as all dutiful sons do, which is to say never quite fast enough?”
The boy smiled again, familiar again. “Next you’ll tell me to go home now and write my letter.”
Anne looked behind Temple; the girl had gone, taking Temple’s coin with her, as Anne had hoped she would do—nothing like receiving a cheap lesson while still young. And oh, this boy was so young! He was William in those years when Anne could discover all that was new in him only glimpse by glimpse; William when he ran away to be a pirate, William when he turned to soldiering and she fretted over his fate as his father never seemed to do.
“You’ll find your own time for your letter,” Anne said. “Come and join me for a plate of mutton stew and we’ll talk of your father.”
But again, the face turned wary. Had his father or his grandfather warne
d him of talking of the family to strangers? “I thank you for the kind offer,” he said, “but indeed, I must go.” He picked up her hand and bowed over it.
52
Perth Amboy, 1776
WILLIAM’S FATHER HAD ONCE taught his son a method he used when addressing any difficult decision—“prudential algebra,” he called it—a listing of the pros and cons of the case, canceling one against another of equal weight until only one option was left. With something like hope William set aside his half-written dispatch and pulled a fresh sheet of paper from his desk. He labeled the left side pro, the right side con, and sat considering the matters that might be worthy of a list with such deadly intent. Any such columns of his father’s would no doubt be filled with world affairs and discoveries that would shatter long-held suppositions and beliefs—William hadn’t a prayer or an intention of competing with that; let the son’s list read like the boy’s it was, for there in the boy he was stuck.
Pirate, William wrote under pro, and Alexander Annard’s Classical Academy, but before he could name a third thing his pen had already traveled across the page to the right. Across from Pirate he wrote Privateer, and drew a line through both, the one canceling the other out. And what of Annard’s? Had not his father listened to his stepmother, pulled him out, and returned him to the hated printing office? Across from Annard’s William wrote Printing Office and lined that pair of entries out. But he returned to the pro column and quickly, before he could drift over to the right side of the page, he wrote King’s Army, Law Studies with Joseph Galloway, Inns of Court, London, London, London, set down his pen, and sat back in his seat.
For what came next was Elizabeth, the royal appointment, the royal oath. William had become who he’d become, and in the end, prudential algebra couldn’t solve that. For William, now, there was no choice. He was who he was. He picked up the columned sheet and tore it down the middle, tore it again, crumpled it. He pulled into place the letter he’d begun so many hours ago and read what he’d written thus far: