Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (27 page)

“And we haven’t? You would excuse him going away like that with no thought for us?”

“I’ll speak to him.”

“And I’ll wait for it.”

But the next morning it was Deborah, of course, who ended up railing at William as he sat spooning her porridge into a mouth that managed to look disdainful even as it opened eagerly enough to swallow it.

“I wonder if you have the least idea what worry you’ve caused us,” she began. “I wonder what your plan was. Were you to disappear without a trace? What were we to think happened to you?”

William set down his spoon and stood. “I don’t know, Debby, but I’m quite sure you’d have thought neither long nor hard on it.”

So Deborah had answered: “Do what you will then, and see what I care of it! See what I ever cared of it!”

WILLIAM NEVER SLEPT UNDER
his father’s roof again, going from the army to the residence of Joseph Galloway, Benjamin’s lawyer friend, and Deborah was glad of it, a thing she could admit only in the silence of her own mind. Benjamin, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to reconcile himself to the boy’s absence. Here he had his little daughter, so amiable, so bright, so lively, already so helpful around the house, and all Benjamin could think about was how to lure William back into it.

The answer proved to be electricity. The pair closed themselves inside Benjamin’s study, and whatever it was they did, Deborah’s part in it was only to keep Sally out of it. After a time lightning entered the mess; Benjamin configured a system of wires that resulted in the ring of a bell when an “electrical event,” as he called it, passed overhead, and after six months Deborah had had enough of those bells to last her life. She might be crossing the room with a mug of cider and the bell would ring and startle her so, she’d slosh the drink onto her skirt; she might get Sally to sleep at last and the bell would wake the child;
Deborah
might be drifting to sleep and the bell would jolt her awake so violently she was lucky if she could sleep again the whole night.

Glass tubes began to appear. Glass jars. Boxes of glass jars. Benjamin was particularly proud of that box, calling it his “battery,” after the military term.

“But what does it do?” Deborah asked.

“It captures and stores electricity.”

“For what purpose?”

But Benjamin had already moved on to a peculiar wooden frame with a wheel and more glass jars. “And this is my electrical motor.”

Deborah tried again. “Do you see in this some kind of employment for William?” This was the latest subject of discord between them, for on William’s return from his enlistment he hadn’t been returned to the print shop, or, in fact, to anything, except reading—
reading
—at Mr. Galloway’s.

“He studies law,” Benjamin explained, which was fresh news for Deborah, but there Benjamin hastened away from the conversation
and
the house in search, he said, of a turkey.

The turkey was electrocuted. So was Benjamin, but he appeared to sustain no permanent damage, although the turkey was killed instantly. “ ’Twas quite a jolt, I must tell you,” Benjamin offered afterward, to all appearances quite pleased with both the purposeful and accidental halves of the experiment.

“I might have wrung the turkey’s neck for you and saved you both the pain,” Deborah said, after which Benjamin looked at her as he’d begun to look at her more often of late, as if she were no older than Sally.

Electricity brought other changes—a houseful of friends and strangers who ate Deborah’s food and then left her alone in the kitchen with Sally, while they returned to the study and the latest experiment. A great deal of mail began to travel back and forth to London—letters and packages—but now, if Deborah inquired about any of it, she received a single-word answer: “Electricity.” Benjamin no longer attempted any explanation whatever. He did manage to find time to lobby for a free school and a hospital and to get himself elected to a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly. He also perfected a new kind of lantern for lighting the streets of Philadelphia and wrote a piece for the
Gazette
that got talked of all through town and brought more strangers calling: If England planned to continue to export their convicts to the American colonies, it was time for the colonies to export their rattlesnakes to England. Deborah assumed that pieces like that made her husband no friends across the ocean, but the opposite appeared to be true. Benjamin and William erupted into great excitement when word arrived that some of his electrical experiments had been published in an important scientific journal in London, but Deborah couldn’t see the benefit of such distant fame. They lived in
Philadelphia
.

Flying away: not just Deborah’s life, but Benjamin himself, leaving her behind to chase after him as she could, and as if to make the point, Deborah came into her kitchen one morning to find the table strewn with twine and sticks and paper and cloth.

“For kite making,” Benjamin said.

Deborah hadn’t witnessed the end result until it came home torn and sodden, but it wasn’t the kite that drew her eye, it was her husband’s face—as alight as she’d ever seen it. “We’ve done it, Debby,” he said. “We’ve pulled electricity from the sky.”

By now Deborah knew better than to ask
why,
but she could think it
.

NEXT CAME “POINTS”—METAL RODS
affixed to houses and churches and even ships, to protect them from the dangers of lightning. As he’d done with his stove, Benjamin made no effort to patent the objects, preferring the world to reap the benefit, and for a time Deborah hoped that his interest in his experiments might fade, that he would now turn to things the rest of Philadelphia found less fascinating, that she might get him back to herself, for at least the odd hour of an evening. But no. Benjamin was made deputy postmaster general over all America, and that set him on fire just as much as had electricity. He increased routes, put up mile markers, added nighttime riders, set up a common system of rates throughout the colonies. Indeed, the post office Deborah could and did understand, and she could and did see the immediate worth of all of these innovations, but of course Benjamin saw something else as well.

“I’ve long wished we might bring these disparate colonies into one cohesive unit,” he said, not to Deborah, but to William. “The post office is our opportunity to do so. With communication opened up amongst the colonies we might form a general council, with members from each colony elected by popular vote, with a president to preside over all.”

But this time it was William who asked, “To what purpose?”

“To manage all our common concerns—Indian treaties, trade laws, taxes.”

“Is that not the job of Parliament?”

“Parliament’s grown too distant. They’ve lost touch with our concerns here, allowed us no voice there. Just look at their utter disregard for our commerce in their system of taxes. ’Tis a right long acknowledged by all Englishmen that they be taxed only by their own consent, given through their own representatives.”

William answered with a thick silence, but even William’s silence could steal more of Benjamin’s attention than Deborah or Sally could ever borrow with their words.

36
Philadelphia, 1757

WILLIAM’S LIFE WAS COMING
along satisfactorily. At Joseph Galloway’s he learned there were other intelligent men in Philadelphia who didn’t live as his father did, running in dashes and spurts after this idea or that, catapulting from invention to invention and scheme to scheme, men who would allow William to settle into a steady course of his own thought. William read the law and the more he read the more he liked; he found himself back in the company of his old friends from the academy instead of the tradesmen’s sons of his father’s set, and he again began to copy his friends in their dress and talk. But his charm he’d learned at home, and he soon found that both men not his father and women not his mother found him an agreeable companion, an excellent partner for sharing a bottle of Madeira or a fancy-dress dance; he became a member of that social circle his father had managed to only just brush up against. That most of the members of that circle were pacifist Quakers and his father’s political enemies didn’t greatly trouble William’s sleep.

Yet William’s favorite times remained those that he spent with his father. No discovery in
Blackstone’s Commentaries
could match up to the day he tracked the path of lightning in a burned-out house and reported to his father that it traveled from metal to metal, not straight to earth. No dance with Philadelphia’s most sought-after belle equaled that dash across the soaking field clinging to the string of his father’s electrified kite, while his father hunkered down, safe and dry inside the barn door, and watched. No evening spent amongst Philadelphia’s most influential Quakers topped a quiet hour in his father’s study, hearing the latest news from the floor of the assembly even before it appeared in the press.

And yet, as smooth as William’s path appeared, there was a single stone in the road that he could not seem to miss no matter how often he feinted left or right, no matter how hard he tried to distract himself with dewy, giggling young ladies or rich wine and exotic, imported fruits.

William Franklin wanted—needed—to know who his mother was.

Most of what William knew he learned by—literally—listening behind closed doors. He was at his father’s house assisting with a demonstration of his father’s electrical battery; his father had sent him below to the print shop to gather up some treatise he wished to show off, and as William was about to exit the shop he heard two of his father’s guests, either just arrived or just leaving, talking privately on the stairs.

“What’s said nowadays of that lad’s mother?” the one gentleman asked.

William froze where he stood in the dark shop, on the other side of the partially closed door, his ears canted backward.

“ ’Tis said she’s the agreeable sort,” a second voice answered.

“No doubt.” The pair laughed. The first voice kept on. “No one he could have taken public notice of, I take it?”

“I’d say not. But some provision was made for the creature, as I understand it.”

“The young man’s a lucky devil. Most would have left him to rot.”

“But the brass! To drop his ill-gotten gains in his wife’s lap, and then look you in the eye, daring you to say the first word about it!”

“And no one does.”

“Well, not to his face.”

The two men laughed again. The first voice took it up at a new spot. “But this so-called
wife.
”

“Yes. I suppose ’tis there Franklin’s paid for his sins.”

More laughter, followed by a more somber note. “You know I’ve heard it said she’s his real mother after all, the brat got too soon and so denied till after they were wed.”

“But why not claim him now and put an end to all the talk? No, I don’t give that much credence.”

“Nor I. A common street whore she was.”

“I’ve heard ’twas a kitchen maid, the deed done right under the wife’s nose, and the maid continued to work in the house!”

“Or perhaps ’twas the governor’s wife.”

They laughed again, moving on to another rumor about the governor’s wife and the new customs officer.

WHICH WAS THE TRUTH?
No matter the nights William fretted his sheets while he pondered, no matter the legal concepts lost as his mind wandered away to consider this other case, he could never resolve himself to any of those overheard hypotheses. If his mother was a common street whore, why was his father so convinced of his paternity that he would take the infant to raise as his? And why would his
stepmother
agree to take in such a child? Likewise, if William’s mother was a servant who delivered a bastard child that his father then claimed as his, knowing his stepmother as he did, neither servant nor child would have remained many days in his stepmother’s house. And Deborah Franklin William’s natural mother? If so, then William knew nothing of a natural mother’s love. Which of course, as William considered it now, he did not.

SUCH WAS THE STATE
of William’s existence until one night in the spring of 1757 when William’s father appeared at Joseph Galloway’s door with an extraordinary offer that catapulted William into what he would ever after consider his real life.

37

BENJAMIN CAME HOME EVEN
later than usual from the assembly, his features pasted over with that particular calmness that always meant there was a great wave roiling underneath. Deborah set down his favorite supper—cold beef, bread, and pickles—and filled his mug with his favorite milk punch. He ate for a moment or two, set down his fork, and held out his hand. Deborah came around the table and allowed herself to be drawn into the seat next to him. “I’ve news, Debby. Important news. Delightful news. I’ve been asked to represent the Pennsylvania Assembly as their agent to the Crown. We leave for London next month.”

Deborah said nothing. First she needed to make sure she wasn’t deep in one of her old nightmares; next she needed to make sure that Benjamin did indeed mean to include
Deborah
when he said the word
we.
He so seldom did these days.

“You wish me to accompany you to London?”

“Of course I do. What should I be without my Debby?”

“How long should we be gone?”

“Three months. Perhaps six. As long as it takes to get the job done. William will enter the Inns of Court to formally take up the study of law, so he will of course stay on after we depart.”

Of course. Of course William would come along. “And what of Sally?”

“What of Sally! Why, she’s almost a woman already; what polish London will give her! What shine!”

Polish. Shine. Two things Deborah was long past hope of claiming.

Benjamin continued to speak. “I promise you, Debby, you’ll find London fascinating. The shops will amaze you. And the people! The variety is endless.”

Benjamin went on about this scientist, this author, this publisher, all of whom had been his correspondents for some time, until Deborah began to see the picture, but not the one Benjamin wished her to see: Deborah in some rented rooms with none of her own furnishings about her, with even Sally pushed out into the London social whirl, Deborah expected to either keep up or stay behind.