Franklin Affair (11 page)

“Give birth to a baby?”

“That's not clear. It was some kind of medical treatment.”

“When?”

“On or about June 23, 1730.”

William Franklin's birth date was largely accepted as being on or about then!

“So?”

“So what?”

“So why did you drop her as a possible?”

Rutledge didn't answer for a moment. “I don't remember. I'm checking.”

R listened to the sound of Rutledge's computer keys in one ear and that of the speeding train in the other. The Acelas really were more quiet than the Metroliners. And the ride was softer. He looked ahead through the windows of the alcove separating his car from the next one—which was the first-class car. Up there attendants in gray uniforms were bringing food and drink to the passengers at their seats. If R wanted anything he was going to have to go in the opposite direction to the café car. No big deal, though. His business-class seat was $42 less than first class. He wasn't hungry anyhow. Who goes on a ninety-minute train ride to eat a meal?

“I see now what happened,” said Rutledge. “It was a dead end.”

R waited for something else.

“She was barely thirteen years old, meaning she would have had to have been impregnated when she was twelve,” Rutledge went on. “No way, of course, that she would be giving birth to a baby, Ben Franklin's or anybody else's. She must have been treated by the doctor for some illness; that's why she got dropped. OK?”

“OK,” said R, with a lack of force he hoped Rutledge didn't pick up on.

“You need something else?” Rutledge asked. “I'm always here for you, Dr. Taylor.”

“Thank you, Dr. Rutledge.”

“I saw you talking to Harry Dickinson a couple of times. You're not thinking about doing a Ben book with him, I hope.”

“You have nothing to worry about, Johnny.”

They said their goodbyes. R shut down his cell phone and returned to his seat as the train approached the outskirts of Baltimore—and as
he
approached a terrible possibility.

• • •

It got worse.

First off, as R arrived at the Library of Congress, he remembered—and was struck by the awful appropriateness—of Carter Hewes's office being in the library's John Adams Building, just off Pennsylvania Avenue. Old John would have enjoyed the coincidence. Ben and Wally would not.

Then came Carter Hewes's exam of one of the twelve cloak sheets.

“It definitely has the look, texture, and feel of the eighteenth century, no question about it,” he declared, in just above a whisper after only ten minutes of fingering the paper, holding it up to several shades and intensities of light, and examining it first through magnifying glasses and then with a microscope.

Carter had the voice of a monk but the appearance of a linebacker, which he had been at BFU. He was a short muscular man who wore his brown hair closely cropped and his clothes mostly unpressed. R couldn't recall ever seeing Carter in a coat and tie of any kind or combination. Carter had come to BFU to study chemistry but a couple of elective courses—one of them taught by Wally in which R was the graduate assistant—led to his burning passion for early American history. He combined his interests at DuPont, working on new ways with chemistry to conserve and preserve the artifacts of history, most particularly books and other paper materials. He had been the chief of the library's conservation division for the last four years.

Carter then qualified his declaration. “I would not swear to it unless I had the chance to give it the full treatment—put some chemicals and specific comparisons onto it so I could pinpoint its exact maker and origins.”

R wasn't going to give him that chance. Maybe sometime in the future if it should become necessary, but certainly not now.

“What about the ink—the handwriting?” R pressed.

“Can't say anything conclusive about the ink either, without putting it under special lighting and doing some other little tricks of the trade, which would take awhile.”

“What does it
look
like to you?”

Again, after a few more minutes dusting it with powder and staring at it, Carter said, “Seems to match the paper dating. But without knowing exactly what it's made of I can't be sure. Different inks were made of different ingredients at different times—”

R interupted him.

“How good are you at matching handwriting?”

“Not my specialty and you know it.”

“The question was, How good are you at it?”

“Pretty good, actually.”

R pulled out the copy of the receipt Joshiah Ross signed for the cloak. “Did the person who signed this also write the notes on those other sheets?”

They were now sitting side by side at a large table that was tilted like a drawing board or architect's workplace. The other tests and examinations had been conducted at various other work stations in the room.

Carter put the two documents side by side. He shined a gooseneck lamp with high-beam light onto one—and then the other. Then back and forth several more times.

Then, his right hand palm up as if stopping traffic at a school crossing, he turned to R and said, “My amateur conclusion would be that, yes, both were written by the same person, or at least by a most skilled forger. But, like I said, I'm no handwriting expert. Go to the FBI for that kind of stuff.”

But R was packing up his papers. He wasn't going to the FBI or anywhere else. He was going to his house in Georgetown.

• • •

R loved his little house, a narrow three-story red-brick Georgian that had history and location as well as comfort going for it. The place was built by a senator from Illinois in 1847, and four cabinet officers and a couple of ambassadors had lived there since. General George Marshall, the statesman of the 1940s, supposedly often dropped by for drinks with an old army friend who lived here. There was also an unconfirmed report that Kim Philby, the Soviet mole in the British foreign service, had had both sexual and espionage liaisons in the house when he was stationed in Washington.

The house was on an alley corner on a small one-way street that opened onto 31st Street and the west side of the large house where the late, great Katharine Graham once lived. R had never met her but, as a historian, he considered her autobiography one of the most honest and best of the genre. It had been his professional experience that most famous people will tell the truth about others but seldom about themselves. Mrs. Graham talked as forthrightly about herself as she did everyone else.

It wasn't until he paid off the taxi driver and was walking up the five steps to his front door that he realized what he had done. By agreeing, in a moment of a panic about Clara Hopkins's possibly going to Eastville, to taking Clymer's BFU offer, he had committed himself to moving to Philadelphia.
Living
in Philadelphia! And that would mean giving up this fabulous place.

But maybe not. As he turned the key in the front-door lock, he had a second and more pleasant revelation. It was partly with the ongoing proceeds from his half of the
Ben Two
royalties that he was able to live a life independent from the academics and, most specifically, in this nifty house. He had paid $450,000 for the place five years ago when he came to Washington to begin work on the early presidency project, and based on recent real estate sales in the neighborhood, he could probably sell it now for double that. But he might not have to do it. Those glorious checks from Harry Dickinson's Green Tree Publishers had averaged more than $175,000 a year so far. That was because both
Ben Two
and
Ben One
had become assigned reading for millions of American history students, from high school through the graduate level. Now, through Wally's will, his royalty checks might increase enough that maybe he could afford to have a really good place in Philadelphia and keep this one as well. It was a pleasant thought—a possibility. Maybe he could even figure out a way to actually live in Wally's Gray House. That would make it all the easier to keep
this
place. If, of course, he even wanted to take the BFU job. Later. He would think about all of that later.

Andrea, his Brazilian housekeeper, had come and gone for the day. The house had the lucious smell of scented cleansers and wood polish. She had stacked the day's mail on a small table in the entrance. He could look at it later. His intention now was to go upstairs, shower, shave, put on fresh clothes, and begin the serious matter of deciding what to do next about the Ben story.

Then he caught sight of a large, thick FedEx envelope on the table next to the regular mail. It was from John Gwinnett at William and Mary. The Rebecca material. The goods?

His mind jerked back to another of his real worlds, the one about Rebecca and
Me.

Later. Yes. He would look at the Rebecca stuff later, after he had cleaned up and dressed. . . .

Forget that. He ripped open the envelope as he went to his study in the rear of the house. This was his favorite place to be in the whole world. Here were the books he had read and cherished and the photographs of the people he loved, in addition to the computer, files, and other tools of his trade as a historian. The books were almost entirely nonfiction and about American history. He read an occasional novel but mostly, as with
Law & Order,
his fiction reading was for enjoyment, distraction. For the most part, he found the stories of the real people of the American Revolution wilder and funnier and more exciting that those the novelists made up.

The framed photographs were of his mom and dad and his two younger brothers and their families, either at the folks' house in Connecticut or atop mountains, horses, Ferris wheels, or other vacation getaways. R occasionally regretted that he didn't have children. Still, he figured that someday he might, even if he had to marry a single mother to do it. Samantha had not been married before. She had no children. Never mind about Samantha. That's over. Goodbye, Samantha. Forget Samantha.

Gwinnett had written a cover letter, addressed to all three members of the committee, which said:

Here are “the goods.” I suggest we have our call to resolve the matter as soon as possible. My assistant will be in touch to set up a time that is convenient for everyone.

Cheers. John.

What in God's name was there to cheer about?

“The goods.”

There was a page-long
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
from the research service. The meat was in the second paragraph.

Our search of
Ronald Reagan: The Last Founding Father
by Rebecca Kendall Lee produced a total of fifty-four Direct Instances. They break down as follows:

→Fourteen uses of one or more full and consecutive sentences from previously published works by other authors with no or only minor changes.

→Twenty-seven uses of near-identical phrases with five or more words from previously published works.

→Thirteen instances of similar phrasing with four or fewer identical word arrangements found in previously published works.

In addition, there were eighty-two indirect instances, where the material or idea was identical to previously published material but not in the form of an exact wording.

In every case, the previously published material was not in quotation marks or otherwise cited in the book as a direct use. While the original sources were listed at the end under a general bibliography, there was no mention of the fact that specific material from them was used in the book.

R turned to the backup material. There was a half-inch-high bound booklet of pages, each filled with matching citations that added up to what had been summarized. The format, eerily enough, followed that of those few terrible pages Rebecca had thrust on him about his
Post
op-ed piece.

He opened to pages and citations here and there, at random.

Page 133,
Dutch,
Edmund Morris:

“Finally he drove six hundred and sixty miles, until desert and sierra gave way to orange groves and the long Santa Monica highway, at the end of which the sun was setting, red with fatigue.”

Page 77, Lee:

“Then he drove the final six hundred and sixty miles, until the desert and sierra surrendered to orange groves and the long Santa Monica highway at the end of which the sun was setting, dark red with weariness.'

Page 125,
Ronald Reagan,
Lou Cannon:

“The mini-memo was designed to play to Reagan's strengths and dodge his weaknesses. He was good at making decisions, which the mini-memo encouraged, and poor at doing his homework.”

Page 14, Lee:

“The mini-memo was aimed at playing to Reagan's strengths and ducking his weaknesses. He was great at making decisions, which the small memo encouraged, but poor at doing his homework.”

Page 105,
The Right Moment,
Matthew Dallek:

“On television he did not appear strident. But the skills for which he would later become so well known were not yet tested in early 1965.”

Page 78, Lee:

“The television skills for which he would later become so famous were not developed in 1965 but, even so, he did not come over as strident.”

Page 67,
What I Saw at the Revolution,
Peggy Noonan:

“Speechwriting was where the adminstration got invented every day. And so speechwriting was, for some, the center of gravity in that administration, the point where ideas and principles still counted.”

Page 102, Lee:

“Speechwriting in the Reagan Administration was at the center—the core. That was where principles and ideas counted and where they became positions. It was where, on a daily basis, the administration got invented.”

R read carefully through the entire array of citations. Some of them, particularly those like the Noonan one where the words were not identical, caused the heat to rise in R's body, anxiety in his soul.