“They’re black as coal!” he’d exclaim. “And the rags…how can they work outside dressed like that?”
“How can an ox work without an overcoat?” said one of our coach-mates, a Virginia planter with a whiskey-reddened nose and gnawed pipe he never actually lit. “The Negro is different than you and I, sir, with smaller brain and broader shoulders. They’re as fit for the field as a mule. You might as well worry about the birds of the air!”
“Birds can fly where they wish.”
The planter laughed. “You have wit, sir! You have wit! And our darkies are as content as a good milker, following the path to the barn each night. They are certainly more content than they look, I assure you. They have longings, but only for the belly, music, and the bed. It’s a favor we’ve done, bringing them here. Saved their souls, we have.”
“Yet they don’t seem grateful.” Magnus, I’d observed, had a sly way of getting to the heart of an issue, and his eye would take on Odin’s gleam.
“God has made the order of things plain, sir,” the planter said, looking flustered. “The Indian has done nothing with America, and the black man nothing with Africa. The Negro harnessed and the Indian confined—both for their own good!”
I was too much the Pennsylvanian, exposed to Quaker beliefs, to accept this nonsense. “How can Americans claim to be free when some of us are in fetters?”
“As I told you, sir, they are not us.” He looked annoyed. “You have contracted liberal ideas in France, but stay with us here in the South and you’ll see what I mean. Washington knew. So does our new president. All things, and all men, in their place.” Then he turned his head to end the conversation, looking out the coach window at the endless trees. I could hear branches clawing at the top of our vehicle as we creaked on, the driver halting occasionally to chop the worst away.
I began to fear we were lost when we finally hailed a passing black freeman with a box of carpenter tools, and asked him where America’s capital was.
“Why, you’s in it!” he replied. “You passed the boundary stone half a mile back.”
I looked out. There were two farms, a pile of cleared slash smoking from a desultory fire, and a split-rail fence that seemed to contain nothing.
The Negro pointed. “That way to the Big House!”
We came to the crest of a low hill and saw the awkward infancy of Washington. Four months after its occupation by the three hundred and fifty clerks of the federal government, my nation’s capital was a cross between swampy wilderness and ludicrous grandeur. Mud avenues broad enough for a Roman legion cut diagonally across farm, forest, and marsh, extending grandly from nothing to nothing. Beyond, the broad Potomac glinted. There were thousands of stumps, still bright yellow, and three hundred brick and wooden houses thrown like dice on a plan a hundred times bigger than required. I’d heard the district for this city was ten miles square, but why? A decade after the start of construction, all of Washington had just three thousand inhabitants.
The houses, poking up from muddy yards paved with sawdust, led like crumbs toward a neighboring village called Georgetown, far away on the Potomac. There was a small port there, and more homes across the river on the Virginia side. The four official buildings in Washington were preposterously imposing and oddly isolated from each other. These, I was to learn, were the President’s House, Congress, the Treasury, and the War Department. Most of the legislators lived in a cluster of rooming houses and hotels between the capitol building and the president’s house along a road called Pennsylvania Avenue, still not entirely cleared of stumps. I suppose Washington will grow into itself—institutions have a way of evolving to serve their employees instead of the other way around, and any intelligent clerk will hire yet more clerks, to make himself a foreman—but still, it seemed laughably grandiose. The only good news was that the place was so empty it would be hard for assassins to sneak up on us.
“It’s as stupefying as Versailles, but in completely the opposite way,” I murmured. “There’s nothing here.”
“No,” Magnus insisted, leaning excitedly out the coach window. “Look at the angles those avenues cut. This is sacred Masonic architecture, Ethan!”
Chapter 14
SACRED MASONIC ARCHITECTURE, IT TURNED OUT, WAS A STREET pattern that appeared—if studied on a map—to make Pythagorean triangles, stars, and pentagrams of the type I’d seen in Masonic lodges and documents. Given that the geometry could really only be grasped on paper and that the “avenues” were little more than tracks, I failed to see any mystical significance.
“Magnus, this architecture of yours is no different than the stars and patterns I saw in Egypt and the Holy Land.”
“Exactly! Look, there’s the new Capitol, its cornerstone laid in a Masonic ceremony, facing a mall like a new Versailles. And at an angle to them, connected by an avenue to make a right triangle, the President’s House! See how the streets echo the Masonic symbols of square, compass, and rule? And did not the colonies themselves total the mystical number 13?”
“But there’re sixteen states now.”
“They rose as one when there were thirteen. Surely it is no coincidence, Ethan, that the cornerstone of the executive mansion was laid by high-ranking Freemasons, led by Washington himself, on October 13, 1792?”
“Coincidence of what? No, let me calculate…ah, the four hundred and eighty-third anniversary of Black Friday, you’re going to tell me, when the Templars were crushed. But isn’t it more likely that it was three hundred years and a day after the landing of Columbus?”
“But why add that day?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it rained.”
“You’re being naïve! Or intentionally obtuse. Why the thirteenth instead of the twelfth? Because thirteen has always been sacred. It is the number of lunar months in a year, the number of attendees at the Last Supper, the number of days after our savior’s birth that the magi appeared before the baby Jesus, and the age at which the Jews considered a child to become an adult. It is the number of Norse gods when Loki invaded their banquet and slew Balder with a shaft of poisoned mistletoe. The Egyptians believed there were thirteen steps between life and death, just as the English put thirteen steps to the gallows. Thirteen is a Fibonacci sequence number. In the Tarot, the thirteenth card in the Major Arcana is Death. And thirteen because now the Templars’ Freemason descendents are building a new nation on the continent the Templars saw as their refuge and repository. Half your revolutionary generals were Masons! Your own mentor Franklin, who helped draft your Declaration of Independence and Constitution, was a Freemason! All this is coincidence? No, Ethan. Your new nation’s destiny is to stretch west, my friend: west to discover the sacred relics that Norse Templars left for them, as the foundation to a better world!”
“You believe this because of a street plan for a capital that hasn’t even been built yet?”
“I believe it because destiny brought you and me together, here in the utopian wilderness, to follow my sacred map to the end. Fate is our ally.”
“Utopian wilderness? You’re quite mad, Bloodhammer.”
He grinned. “So was Columbus. So was Washington when he challenged the world’s biggest empire. So was your Franklin, flying his kite in a lightning storm. Only the mad get things done.”
DESPITE A RUSTICITY THAT WOULD HAVE MADE A FRENCH aristocrat laugh, flags to celebrate the inauguration were everywhere. Patriotic bunting hung from roofs, and visiting carriages were jammed hub-to-hub under hastily erected plank sheds. Several cannon sat poised for celebration, and militia drilled. Magnus and I sent word we wished to meet with Jefferson and that I bore tidings from France, but any audience had to wait until he took office. So on the morning of March 4 we awakened at Blodgett’s Hotel to a breakfast of biscuits, honey, cold ham, and tea, dressed as formally as we were able, and hurried to the Capitol. Adams had already sourly crept out of town at four that morning, unable to bear the sight of the political enemy who’d defeated him.
Only the Senate side of
the Capitol was finished. A planned lobby and squat dome was still a gaping hole in the middle, and the Representatives’ chamber lacked a roof. Magnus and I found seats in a Senate gallery jammed with a thousand spectators like a Greek theater, the place smelling of paint and plaster. The construction was so hastily done that there were already stains on the ceiling from roof leaks, and wallpaper was starting to peel in the corners. Two fireplaces threw smoky heat, unnecessary given the throng.
No matter, the chatter was excited and proud. A hotly contested election like that of 1800 was something new in the world, as different from Napoleon’s coup d’état as a feather from a rock. Vice President–elect Aaron Burr, restlessly ambitious but restrained this day, took the oath of office first. I was curious to see him because he’d been compared to Napoleon. He was dark like the Corsican, and handsome, too—both conquered the ladies. Given his reputation for ambition I expected him to try to steal the stage from Jefferson, but in fact he was a model of frustrated restraint, greeting the chief justice and then taking a seat behind the podium to scan the crowd with sharp eyes, as if trolling for additional votes. His expectant pose communicated that Jefferson’s triumph was but a momentary setback in his own inevitable rise to the presidency.
And then with a thump of cannon and a swirl of fife and drum, Jefferson arrived from his boarding house, walking like a common man because there were still too many stumps for a grand procession of coaches. He entered in a plain dark suit, without the powdered hair and ceremonial sword of Washington and Adams, and without cape, scepter, or courtiers. He was tall, red-haired, handsome in a ruddy, country way—and taken aback by the crowd. After a quick glance to the galleries he shyly focused on the papers he held in his fists, licking his lips.
“He doesn’t like to give speeches,” one of Adams’s outgoing cabinet ministers whispered to a lady friend.
“Good. I don’t like to sit through them,” she whispered back.
My first reaction was disappointment. Jefferson was almost as much a hero in France as my mentor Franklin, but I was used to the command and bluster of Napoleon. The sage of Monticello was unexpectedly diffident before an audience, with a scholar’s bent posture and a voice soft and high as a woman’s. I could see his sheen of sweat, the windows checkering the inauguration with light and shadow. Chief Justice John Marshall gestured and the new president began to read, his voice firm but quiet.
“Why doesn’t he speak up?” Bloodhammer asked, and the Norwegian’s baritone carried so well that everyone briefly looked at us instead of the new president. Jefferson, thankfully, seemed not to notice and plowed on while we strained to listen.
We relied on the reprints in newspapers to clarify what we did hear, and yet the Virginian’s famed intelligence shone through. After a bitter and nasty election, he assured that “we are all republicans, we are all federalists,” and called for a “wise and frugal government” directed not by ministers but by the American people. The federal government should be small, and civilians masters of the military. Napoleon would laugh at such sentiments and I began to realize just how extraordinary, how revolutionary, this quietly confident man really was.
The blood of the American Revolution, he said, had been shed for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to fair trial, and these were “the creed of our political faith.” Jefferson made it sound so extraordinary that I found myself blushing over my long stay in France. Well, I was home now! No guillotines here!
So was the entire idea of my country planted by shadowy Templars and secretive Freemasons? Was the extraordinary idealism of my nation an accident of geography, or did it really have something to do with dim Norse history? I knew Jefferson was no Freemason, and not even a Christian in the traditional sense: he was a freethinking deist elected because a majority of his countrymen didn’t go to church either, despite my nation’s Puritan origins. It seemed obvious in 1801 that religion was dying before science and rationality, and would be entirely gone by 1901. So how could there be a whiff of ancient secrets and musty gods in this bright new American world? Or was America simply a place where every man, even Magnus Bloodhammer, could read his own desires onto what was still mostly an empty map?
Jefferson finished, the rattle of polite, somewhat puzzled applause died—“What did he say?” people whispered—and then Marshall administered the oath of office. The new president walked quietly back to Conrad and McMunn’s, where he waited like every other boarder for a chair for dinner. He would not follow Adams into the President’s House for another two weeks, because he wanted modifications done.
AS WAS MY CUSTOM, I LIVED—WHILE WE WAITED FOR AN official audience—on my modest fame, my skill at cards, and my affability, making friends by telling stories of an Egypt and Jerusalem my listeners couldn’t hope to see. I also kept an eye out for menacing strangers and an ear ready for rumor. Oddly, the threat seemed to have disappeared: there were no narrow escapes, no skulking strangers. Magnus busied himself by studying his texts of Indian legends and making lists of supplies for our expedition west and, not as trusting as me, put up makeshift bars across our hotel door and windows.
“Maybe we frightened the villains off,” I theorized.
“Or maybe they wait where we’re going.”
While my colleague studied, I cultivated an air of importance, trading on my connections to Bonaparte and Talleyrand. More than one Washington damsel hinted that she was available if I was interested in permanent disciplined domesticity but I was not, trying out the whores who served Congress instead. One adventuress, Susannah by name, said she’d made it to Washington one week after the clerks and two weeks before the first lawmakers, and it was the best relocation she’d ever made. “They seems able to get a dollar from the government whenever they need,” she explained, “and the most of them don’t take more than half the hour to finish off.”
Businessmen, meanwhile, tried to reform me.
“Now then, Gage, we aren’t getting any younger, are we?” a banker named Zebulon Henry put it to me one day.
“Aging does annoy me.”
“We all have to think about the future, do we not?”
“I worry about it all the time.”
“That’s why investments that compound are just the thing for a man like you.”
“Investments that what?”
“Compound! As your investment grows, you earn money not just on your original sum, but its growth as well. In twenty or thirty years it can work financial miracles.”
“Twenty or thirty years?” It was an abyss of time nearly inconceivable.
“Suppose you were to take a job with a firm like mine. Ledger clerk to begin, but possibility for a man of your ambition and talent. And let’s say you invest ten percent of earnings as I advise, and don’t touch it until, ah, age sixty. Here, lean in and we’ll do the arithmetic. You could purchase some property, take on some debt, let your wife supplement with mending or washing until the children are old enough to contribute…”
“I do not have a wife.”
“Details, details.” He was scribbling. “I say, Gage, even a man with as tardy a start as you—what have you been doing with your life?—could have a respectable estate by, say…” he pondered a moment. “1835.”
“Imagine that.”
“It requires punctuality and consistency, of course. No raiding the nest egg. A smart marriage, work six days a week, business contacts on the Sabbath, hard study in the evenings—we could develop a plan that makes sense even for someone as improvident as you. The magic of compounding interest, sir. The magic of compounding interest.”
“But this involves work, does it not?”
“Damn hard work. Damn hard! But there’s joy in a job well done!”
I smiled as if in agreement. “Just as soon as I see the president.”
“The president! Remarkable man! Remarkable. But by rumor not all that financially prudent himself. Spends beyond his means, what? Word has it he’s ordering bric-a-brac fo
r Monticello out of excitement with his new executive salary while retaining no real financial understanding. The man, like most Virginians, is chronically in debt! Chronically, sir!”
“I hope he doesn’t want a loan from me.”
“Mention my advice, Gage. Tell him how I’ve helped you. I could straighten Jefferson out, I’m sure of it. Discipline! That’s the only secret.”
“If our talk turns to money, I will.”
He beamed. “See how men in high places help each other?”
I knew Zebulon Henry meant well, of course…but to live your brief life for compound interest seemed wrong somehow. I’m a man cursed with the compulsion to toss the dice, to bet all on the main chance, to listen to dreamers. I believe in luck and opportunity. Why else was I allied with Bloodhammer? Why else did I orbit Napoleon?
Magnus did say this hammer, if it existed, might be worth money, or power, or something. So treasure hunting was an investment of another kind, was it not? It’s not that I’m lazy, just easily bored. I like novelty. I’m curious to see what is over the next hill. So I resolved to let my lunatic have his say, nod encouragingly—and put it all in Jefferson’s hands.
Chapter 15
THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE, SMART ENOUGH ON THE OUTSIDE with its limestone sheen and classical decorations, was still just half-finished without and half-occupied within. The pile was a grand two-story affair, ostentatious for a democracy, with a little republican rawness provided by a plank walkway that reached the posh porch and pillars by crossing a yard of mud and sawdust like a drawbridge. The house had two rows of ten grand windows each on the north side where we entered—hellish to heat, I’d bet—and the lower row was capped by fancy narrow pediments like eyebrows. The paneled door itself was unexpectedly human-sized, not some bronze gate, and when we pulled a cord to ring its bell the modest oak was opened not by a servant but by a secretary, in plain suit. He was a shy, strapping, strong-chinned young man with prominent nose and small, thin-lipped mouth who looked out at the pillars as if surprised at his own surroundings. His hair was neatly clipped in the Roman fashion I now favored myself, and his feet were shod in moccasins.
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