Benjamin Franklin's Bastard: A Novel

by Sally Cabot

Finally, in November, Benjamin’s letter came.

  I honour much the Spirit and Courage you show’d, and the prudent Preparations you made in that Time of Danger. The woman deserves a good House that is determined to defend it.

  Deborah’s spirits lifted at the receipt of that letter, and again when news came that after a speech Benjamin made to Parliament arguing against the Stamp Act, it was repealed. Her spirits flagged again after an altercation with the workmen, who refused to carry on without the master of the house on hand; her mood dipped again after harsh words from William over her decision to allow Sally to marry Richard Bache; they dipped again, and again . . .

  DEBORAH FLIPPED THROUGH THE packet of letters faster, stopping only at those hints that might tell her what her future might hold.

  It seems now as if I should stay here another Winter . . .

  I this Morning am to set out for a Trip to Paris . . .

  I shall chuse to leave England about May or June . . .

  I must stay a few Weeks longer . . .

  I hope to be able to return about the middle of next Month . . .

  As you ask me, I can assure you, that I do really intend, God willing, to return in the Summer . . .

  And here it was winter again. Deborah thrust the pile of letters aside and picked up the pen, despair and anger mixing now, taking charge of her words.

  Varius air the Conjeckters of our nabors sum say you will Cume home others say not. I cante say aney thing as I am in the darke and my life of old age is one Continewd State of suspens. I muste indever to be Contente but fear I lose all my reseylushon and this verey dismall winter will be verey long.

  Sally came into the room. “What, Mother, are you not ready? We must leave soon! Mr. Whorton expects us in time to dine.”

  Deborah laid down her pen. “I’m ready.” She got up, fastened her shawl, and followed her daughter and her new husband outside. Ahead of her on Market Street, Deborah could see the crowd; ever since the trouble over the Stamp Act, Deborah had stayed shy of any such large gatherings and she lagged behind.

  Her son-in-law tried to ease her. “ ’Tis only a whipping, Mother. Come along.”

  But Deborah had never been able to stomach a whipping either, and by the time they reached Mr. Whorton’s the poor victim’s cries had brought on one of her fiercest headaches. Mr. Whorton came to the door himself to hurry them in out of the ice and cold, and Deborah found herself leaning more heavily than usual on his arm. He spoke and she didn’t hear; she tried to speak and her tongue wouldn’t move. There were people around her, more people gathering around her, but she couldn’t tell who they were. Oh, she was so tired of all of it! So tired of trying to make sense of it, of trying to be heard! That was what she thought of—her extreme tiredness—and then the blackness came down.

  46

  ANNE WAS PASSING BETWEEN tables on her way to mind the fire when she heard one of her patrons speaking Deborah Franklin’s name. She slowed.

  “An apoplexy,” the patron said. “She was dining at Whorton’s and they had to carry her home.”

  “Dead?” a second patron asked.

  “Not dead, no. I called there this morn. But she’s insensible—no speech, recognizes no one in the room.”

  “And Franklin in London yet.”

  “Of course he can’t say he wasn’t warned. ’Tisn’t her first, and the doctor wrote him after the last, hinting that if he wanted to see his wife again he’d best come home.”

  “Well, he didn’t come home.”

  “But the daughter’s with her. And the son’s come racing over from New Jersey. She’s not alone.”

  Anne moved on with her work, fumbling tankards, forgetting names, mindless of all but those overheard words. The son’s come . . . Three streets away he was. Now. It was no place for Anne to be, of course—under normal conditions she wouldn’t be welcome—but if this report was true and the woman wouldn’t recognize her, and as the son never had, what could be the harm? But what the gain? None, except to see him, perhaps for the last time. Reports from New Jersey had been sparse, but on the whole, complimentary, even after the bloody stamp crisis. William had taken a circumspect course by refusing to either attack or defend the act, thus avoiding much of the turmoil engulfing a number of the other American colonies, but when Boston emptied three shiploads of tea into Boston Harbor, William supported the royal line, that Boston must pay for the tea; until they did, British warships would blockade Boston’s harbor. Philadelphia, and apparently the main of her sister colonies, responded by sending food and fuel overland to the beleaguered Bostonians as fast as they could load and dispatch their oxcarts, and the day Anne heard that bit of news, a steady pressure developed behind her eyes. A line was being drawn, and William appeared to be positioning himself on the other side of it—the king’s side; how would such a line ever be crossed? William’s father, according to the chatter at the Penny Pot, despite some early wavering, was now firmly with the Bostonians. The line became a trench, dug deeper with each new issue of the Gazette. The pressure behind Anne’s eyes grew. Would she ever see her son again? And then he arrived in Philadelphia to attend his stepmother’s illness and for the second time Anne found herself walking the streets toward the Franklin home, uninvited, unwanted, undaunted. She must see her son.

  A FANCY ARCHWAY MARKED the entrance to the courtyard where Deborah Franklin now lived, and back on Market Street, Anne walked through it just as brazenly as she’d once walked through the print shop door. She approached the house and knocked. The servant who opened the door was not Min, the older woman no doubt long dead and unremarked; this one accepted her pronouncement, “Widow Hewe. Come to call on Mrs. Franklin,” without question and waved her in.

  SALLY FRANKLIN—SALLY FRANKLIN BACHE—met Anne in the front room. She’d collected her mother’s earthy features and heavy body and her father’s clever eyes; she seemed little concerned with Anne’s fumbled words of her connection to the family and would have ushered Anne into the sickroom at once had not William exited it at nearly the same time.

  “My brother,” Sally said, and no more, as if Anne’s name had already been forgotten. A queer, garbled sound erupted from the other room. “Excuse me,” she said, and left Anne and William alone.

  Anne’s first glimpse of her son after seventeen years would of course be a hungry one. She raked him over from head to toe, noticing that he’d grown more solid; that his hair had silvered much like Anne’s; that the open, hopeful smile the boy had once turned on her was now replaced by the man’s public one. As Anne gazed at him she realized that if she could wish for any one thing on earth, it would be for that boy’s smile to light him—and her—once again.

  “The Widow Hewe,” Anne said. “Or so I’m called now. You knew me by the name of Anne. I minded you when you were young.”

  “Of course,” William said, but the empty smile didn’t change. “ ’Tis most kind of you to call. I’m afraid my mother’s confusing faces yet, so you mustn’t expect—”

  Anne waved the concern off. “ ’Tis been a long time since I’ve seen you, Mr. Franklin. I hear of all your accomplishments and they come as no surprise to me, considering your cleverness at your early lessons.”

  Some of the blankness left William’s features, but only to be replaced by wariness, confusion. Did she dare go on? She was the Widow Hewe, as respectable as she’d ever be—if he was to learn of her now it could hardly cause the turmoil the word whore might have done. It was not the proper time or place, but would the right one—or even another one—ever come? Anne took a quiet, steadying breath. “There are infants who bear in themselves a look of such brightness one sees their future greatness in them at an early age. One might look at such an infant and know he deserves the best one has to give him, and if perhaps one’s best isn’t enough, one must make way for something better. I wonder if this is something you might understand.”

  But William wasn’t hearing. He wasn’t even listening. He stood halfway turned to the room behind
him, where the garbled sound had broken out again but in a more strident tone. Anne’s fingers itched to reach out and grip William’s arm, to shake him, to draw him back to her and what she was trying to tell him. You’re my son. Anne did, indeed, lift her hand, but before she could bring her fingers as far as William’s arm, he swung around.

  “I do beg your pardon,” he said, “but I must return to my mother now. Please do come and pay your respects.” He gestured toward the sickroom door, the long, elegant body inclining after the gesturing arm, the rules of his adopted gentility no doubt the only thing that kept him in the room with Anne at all. What to do? She could take her last look at William and leave the house now, or she could accept his invitation and step into a room where she didn’t belong.

  Anne stepped into the room. It was dim, close, and overly crowded, but she recognized only two people in it: Sally, at her mother’s bedside, and Solomon Grissom, leaning against the wall in the far corner. At the sight of Anne, his eyes widened in a surprise close to shock, reminding Anne, if she needed reminding, of how foolish it was of her to come.

  But Sally Franklin was lifting a hand and pointing at Anne. “Here, Mother, ’tis the Widow Hewe come to call. Can you say hello to the Widow Hewe?”

  Anne took a small step forward. Deborah Franklin lay so still and her flesh had melted so lifelessly into the bed tick that Anne considered for a mad second that the woman had died and no one but Anne saw. Anne said, “Mrs. Franklin.”

  Deborah opened her eyes and looked straight past Anne. Anne, following her gaze, spied William’s tall frame where it hovered just inside the door. Deborah Franklin’s limbs began to twitch, a hand to half rise from the coverlet. She struggled to make a sound.

  Sally leaned closer to the bed. “What, Mother? Are you comfortable? Should you like a drink?” She reached for the pitcher but Deborah rocked her head, left, right. She grunted again, something with a little more form to it, her eyes again fixed on William’s tall shape, so strikingly outlined against the light from the door. “Buh.” She tried again. “Bud.”

  Dear God, thought Anne, does she struggle to call him bastard? Was she to carry her old resentments all the way to the grave? Anne lifted her eyes to meet Solomon Grissom’s and had little trouble reading the same thought in them. But just as Anne had begun to feel so sure of the word, Deborah Franklin struggled through another revision of it. “Budin.” The twitching grew more violent. She lifted her trembling hand and stretched it toward William. “Buh-min. Beh-min.”

  Benjamin. As Anne caught it, so did the daughter. “No, Mother, Papa’s in London yet. This is William just come in.”

  William took a step away from the door, edged closer to the bed, and there he was again, as if three decades had been instantly washed from his face—the small, unsure boy, looking at this woman for the thing she’d never managed to find it in herself to give him. Of course he hadn’t remembered Anne, or heard a word she’d said to him, or cared who she was or why she’d come. What William craved was for Deborah, not Anne, to call him son.

  Anne backed toward the door.

  47

  Perth Amboy, New Jersey, 1774

  PAST MIDNIGHT AND WILLIAM Franklin had been sitting at his desk since eight, a candle on each corner, two letters set out side by side in the middle. The left-hand letter was dated October 1773, written in his father’s unequivocal hand, smudged with lampblack and dog-eared from much rereading.

  From long and thorough consideration of the subject I am indeed of the opinion that the parliament has no right to make any law whatever binding on the colonies, but you, a thorough courtier, will likely not agree.

  The letter on the right-hand side, dated May 1774, was only slightly more crisp, the hand of Lord Dartmouth only slightly more equivocal.

  I believe that in your position and with your connections a secret and confidential exchange of letters with the Crown Office might serve your king and country well and further secure your political future in the American colonies.

  No two letters, taken together, could make the thing more plain. William’s father had gone to the rebels; the Crown Office knew it and now demanded that William make clear where his loyalties lay. William might have taken his father’s letter as written in a moment of pique if it hadn’t been followed by the letter about the tea.

  Tea. William still cringed at the word, although it didn’t stop him from drinking it—the rebellion’s nonimportation agreement had made real English tea a scarcity for most colonists, but not for William; it came by the same secret route as his dispatches went back—but he cringed at the word itself because of the sheer audacity of the rebels who had darkened Boston Harbor with it. It had also caused an outright argument with William’s father. At first the elder Franklin had agreed with William that it was a shameful act that should be paid for by the Massachusetts colony at once, but later—after William’s father had received a humiliating dressing-down in the Privy Council for making public some correspondence that further damaged the Crown’s reputation in the colonies—William’s father sent a letter in which he declared the king owed Massachusetts—and indeed all the colonies—recompense for their illegal taxes! How clear it was which Franklin had stayed true to his principles and which one had decided to run rampant! William had answered his father’s letter in a most temperate fashion, hinting that perhaps the incident had at least given his father, safely tucked away in London, some idea of the kind of risk every loyal colonial subject must now ward against. In reply William’s father had called him obstinate. William obstinate!

  Well then, so be it. William rang the bell. “A cup of tea, please, Hamilton.” He pushed his father’s and Lord Dartmouth’s letters aside; they had failed to distract him from or assist him in the more important letter he needed to write now. He took out a fresh piece of paper and began to write.

  Honored Father,

  It is with great sadness that I must tell you of the death of our mother this December the nineteenth. She was buried on the twenty-second with a very respectable number of the inhabitants in attendance. She told me in October that she never expected to see you again unless you returned this winter and I heartily wish you had happened to have come over in the fall, as promised, as I think her disappointment preyed a good deal on her spirits. I do hope that you are able to return soon, and with a particular cargo dear to me in hand.

  But William, always sensitive to his own disappointments, decided in the end to cross that last sentence off.

  SUCH WAS THE WAY of that twisted, smirking thing called fate that William and Elizabeth had had no child of their own. The matter was a disappointment to William in that the legacy he strove to achieve was best effected if another generation could step in to carry it forward, but Elizabeth dismissed all such talk of legacies; her disappointment took the form of a vacancy behind the eyes whenever the subject arose. William had kept careful track of that gray film, thickening and thinning over the years, perhaps becoming thickest when nature made it clear that the odds in favor of parenthood were worsening fast. During those grayest days William had spent many nights in thought of his son in London, and when it neared time for the boy to enter school, had even written to his father. Perhaps this was the time to bring the boy across, have him take up his proper name, introduce him as the son of a poor, deceased relation for whom William had stood godfather and now intended to bring up as his own? But William’s father had answered with another plan, bringing “William Temple” into his London circle as the son of a friend, although after his father’s description of the boy’s strong family resemblance, William doubted anyone was fooled. Compounding William’s disappointment, his father enrolled the boy in a new, radical school not at all to William’s liking, but as the elder Franklin took on the expense, which William could ill afford, he said nothing.

  But the more William thought about the boy, and the longer he watched Elizabeth, it began to seem less and less likely that William’s son should suffer the same humiliation th
at William had suffered both inside and outside his home. Now, with his stepmother dead, the matter seemed even simpler, if all the more urgent; he decided to press his father again to send the boy across. But first, William must decide how best to tell his wife of the child. Of Maude.

  William chose a quiet winter evening when Elizabeth sat reclined on the love seat before the fire, reading a letter just come from her father, an activity that almost always created a certain melancholy in her that sent her in search of William’s arms. He pushed aside the fluff of skirt that covered the love seat and settled beside Elizabeth, picking up her hand. With Elizabeth, any delayed overture only allowed her active imagination to conjure up worse horrors than William could ever dream of; he’d practiced the words long enough through one unending night after another; he leaped in.

  “There is a boy,” he began. He pushed on. He told the tale—mostly—as it had occurred, with perhaps a slight adjustment to the time line; he hadn’t gone far when Elizabeth withdrew her hand and sat staring straight ahead; as he wore down she rose from her seat and approached the fire, revealing nothing to William but the back of a rigid neck.

  “Elizabeth?”

  She whirled. “Why did you not tell me this till now?”

  “I . . . I didn’t know what you should think of me. Or him. I couldn’t have borne it if—”

  “If I’d turned out like her?”

  “No. No.”

  “Can you not see the difference between us? Can you not think of your poor mother’s circumstance as something different from my own? She took you in to keep him—’tis clear as day to me and has been since the first minute you told me the tale. An abandoned woman of little means, not even a lawful wife, how strong she would have to be to refuse to take you in! How strong to not resent you day after day—a child born to a woman whose bed her husband chose over her own! And ever after, to watch this man’s infallible ability to make himself agreeable to every woman he passed—don’t look so, William, you know ’tis true—to feel herself under such constant threat, whether real or no, and then to have her own boy die . . . Oh, William, you’ve told me and I’ve heard what pain it was for you; I’ve seen that boy’s portrait, displayed so prominently in the parlor even as they move from home to home, with nothing of you on show anywhere. I know what it was for you. But I know what it was for her too. But I am not her.”