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 theatre, 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, sceptre, 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 ploughed 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 realise 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 rumour. 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 theorised.
‘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.
‘Ageing 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 rumour not all that financially prudent himself. Spend
s beyond his means, what? Word has it he’s ordering bric-a-brac for 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 FIFTEEN
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 panelled 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 favoured myself, and his feet were shod in moccasins.
‘Howdee-do,’ he said in the patois of the frontier, pulling us in. ‘I’m Meriwether Lewis. Only arrived a few days ago from Fort Detroit and still exploring. You can make an echo in this pile. Come, come: President Jefferson is expecting you.’
The entrance hall had eighteen-foot ceilings but was barren of furniture or paintings. Like the Capitol, it still smelt of paint. Directly ahead was a panelled door leading into a rather elegant but empty oval room, its windows framing a view of the Potomac. Lewis led us to the right, past stairs that I assumed led up to the president’s private quarters, and into a smaller salon with a couch and side table. ‘I’ll tell him you’ve arrived.’ The secretary stepped through another door with the stride of a hunter, his experience as a frontier soldier obvious.
Magnus looked about. ‘Your president isn’t much for furniture, is he?’
‘Jefferson’s only just moved in, and Adams lived here only a few months. It’s a challenge to decide what fits a republic. He’s been a widower for nearly twenty years.’
‘He must rattle around in here like a pebble in a powder horn.’
Then we heard a bird call.
A door to Jefferson’s office opened and we were beckoned again. This room, in the southwest corner, was more inhabited. The mahogany floor was bare of any carpet but a long table covered with green baize occupied the room’s middle, and fires burnt at either end. Three of the walls were occupied by bookshelves, maps, writing tables, cabinets, and globes; the fourth was windows. One shelf bore an elephant tusk of extraordinary width, curled at its end in a peculiar manner. Others displayed arrowheads, polished stones, animal skulls, Indian clubs, and beadwork. On tables by the windows on the south side were terracotta pots, spring shoots just poking through the black dirt. There were also bell jars, boxes of planting soil, and, in one corner, a bird cage. Its inhabitant sang again.
‘The most beautiful sound in nature,’ Jefferson said, rising from a chair at the table and putting a book aside. ‘The mockingbird inspires me while I work.’
Close up, Jefferson was more commanding than he’d seemed at the inauguration: tall, with a planter’s fitness, his striking red hair matching his ruddy complexion. The speech I’d heard was one of the few Jefferson would ever give; with his high voice he preferred to communicate by letter. But his eyes had a bright intelligence more arresting than any I’d seen. Napoleon had the gaze of an eagle, Nelson a hawk, Djezzar a cobra, ageing Franklin a sleepy owl. Jefferson’s eyes danced with curiosity, as if everything he encountered was the most interesting specimen he’d ever seen. Including us.
‘I’d not expected the president’s office to be a naturalist’s laboratory,’ I said.
‘My habit at Monticello is to bring the outdoors in. Nothing makes me more content than tending my geraniums. I am a student of architecture, but nature’s architecture has the most pleasing proportions of all.’ He smiled. ‘So you are the hero of Mortefontaine!’
I gave a slight bow. ‘No hero, Mr President. Merely a servant of my country. May I introduce my companion from Norway, Magnus Bloodhammer?’
Jefferson shook our hands. ‘You look like your Viking forebears, Magnus. Not entirely inappropriate for your mission, perhaps?’ The American commissioners in Paris had written him of our coming, and we’d sent a note ahead ourselves explaining our quest for evidence of early Norse explorers.
‘I’d be honoured to emulate my ancestors,’ my companion said.
‘Not with a war axe, I hope!’ Our host had a sense of mischief. ‘But I admire your spirit of inquiry; it would do Franklin proud. And you, Gage, of Acre and Marengo? Most men are content to ride with just one side. How do you keep it all straight?’
‘I have odd luck. And my fame, I’m afraid, pales beside the writer of the Declaration of Independence. Few documents have so inspired men.’
‘Compliments all around,’ the president acknowledged with a nod. ‘Well. My gift is words and yours action, which is why I’m delighted you’ve come. We’ve much to talk about. I’m anxious to hear your impressions of France, where I, too, served – just after our revolution and before theirs. Extraordinary events since then, of course.’
‘Bonaparte is a meteor. But then you’ve done well, too.’
‘This house is a start, but Adams and his architects had no sense. A privy outdoors? The man hung his laundry there too. Most undignified for a chief executive. I wouldn’t move in until they installed a water closet. There are a hundred improvements needed to make this a proper place to receive dignitaries, but first I must pry out of Congress more than the $5,000 they’ve allotted. They have no concept of modern expenses.’ He looked about. ‘Still, there is elegance here, a balance between national pride and republican sensibility.’
‘The place needs furniture,’ Magnus said with his usual bluntness.
‘It will fill up, Mr Bloodhammer, just as our capital and country will. But enough about housekeeping! Come, good dinner makes better conversation!’
He ushered us into an adjoining dining room for our mid-afternoon repast, Lewis coming too. As soup was served by Negro servants, I began mentally rehearsing the carefully edited description of the Great Pyramid I typically shared, certain Jefferson would be curious about Napoleon’s mystic experience in that edifice. Then a word about Jerusalem, an observation on French military success, some comments about my experience with electricity, an assessment of Bonaparte’s government, something learnt about one of Jefferson’s wines …
The president sipped his soup, set down his spoon, and took me by surprise. ‘Gage, what do you know about mastodons?’
I’m afraid I looked blank. ‘Mastodon?’ I cleared my throat. ‘Is that near Macedonia?’
‘Elephants, Ethan, elephants,’ Magnus prompted.
‘Ah. Franklin mentioned this once. Woolly elephants in America. You know, Hannibal used elephants.’ I was trying to hide my ignorance.
‘Just one mastodon would fill this room to the ceiling. They must have been extraordinary creatures, majestic and magnificent, with tusks like a curved banister.’
‘I suppose so. I encountered a lion once in the Holy Land …’
‘A mere kitten,’ Jefferson said. ‘I have the claws of a prehistoric lion of truly terrifying stature. For some curious reason, the animals of the past were bigger than those now. As for mastodons, no live specimen has been encountered, but then our cold, heavily wooded landscape is not the landscape for elephants, is it?’
‘Certainly not.’ I took a sip of wine. ‘Excellent vintage. Is this Beaujolais?’ I knew Jefferson was something of an obsessive when it came to the grape, and felt safer with a subject I had some practise in.
‘But in the west, beyond the Mississippi, the landscape reportedly opens up. Isn’t that so, Lewis?’
‘That’s the word from the French fur trappers I interviewed,’ the young officer said. ‘Go far enough west, and there are no trees at all.’
‘Like a cold Africa, in other words,’ the president went on. ‘Home only to Indians with their primitive bows, the arrows of which must just bounce off mastodon hide. There are rumours, Gage, that the great beasts might still survive in the west. Is it possible that where civilisation has not penetrated, the giant beasts of the past might still exist? What a discovery to actually find one, and even to capture it and bring it back!’
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