Franklin Affair (15 page)

The steps down were narrow, still under repair but not dangerous.

At the bottom, immediately in front of where the steps ended, was the kitchen.

“That's where Mrs. Stevenson prepared those marvelous meals for Dr. Franklin, and his son, William, and the many, many visitors of importance who came to this house.”

R only smiled, and she led him to the basement room where the bones were found.

“I assume you know the whole story, Dr. Taylor?” she asked, and continued without waiting for an answer. “It was about three years ago. They were doing some archaeological excavation and—lo and behold!—they came across some bones buried belowground here in the cellar.”

Yes, young lady, thank you.
R had followed the story closely. The local coroner of Westminster determined the bones to be from at least ten different people, all of eighteenth-century vintage. There was some initial concern and mischief over how they might be connected to Ben, but the mystery was quickly solved. A doctor named William Hewson married Polly Stevenson in 1770 and came to live at 36 Craven Street. He set up an anatomy laboratory in the basement, where he taught medical students how to cut up cadavers. The modern-day investigators concluded that Hewson, rather than throwing out the remnants of his work, simply buried them on the premises. One of the grocery store tabloids in the United States had run a full-page story under the headline:

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN SHOCKER!
He was a Founding Father, a signer of
the Declaration of Independence
—AND A SERIAL KILLER!

Nobody else picked up on that nonsense, and the episode moved quickly to focus on the history of surgery in Britain in the eighteenth century.

Stephanie pointed toward a spot in the corner, now covered with loose boards. “That's where the bones were found,” she said. “Some irresponsible people went as far as to suggest the bones were evidence that Dr. Franklin might have been involved in murder. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous?”

R said he couldn't.

They went back upstairs, and Stephanie left him in the parlor, after R said he'd appreciate some time to simply sit there by himself.

• • •

“It's me, R Taylor, Dr. Franklin. Do you remember me?”

Ben said nothing.

There he sat between two of the parlor windows in a high-back Windsor chair covered in dark red fabric.

He was naked.

His legs were crossed, but otherwise only his eyes were unexposed. He was wearing a pair of silver-rimmed bifocals—Franklin Splits, they were called by most people after his death, in the mistaken belief that he had invented them rather than simply made them popular.

His was a physique of bulges. Some were made by muscles in his huge arms and hands and in the calves and thighs of his legs, but others—in his hefty midsection, breasts, and under his chin—were most likely fat. What else could be expected of a man already seventy years old, particularly one who enjoyed few things more than a good meal here at Craven Street or elsewhere with people who shared his curiosities and interests.

I was about to take an air bath. They are far superior to water baths, in my opinion. My use of them sometimes sets the ladies of Craven Street all a-twitter, but such is the price one pays for cleansing oneself one's own way. I would prefer they be set a-glitter. Alas, that is no longer to be.

R was sitting on the floor directly across the room. Ben and his air baths were part of the Ben mythology, a part, like so many others, that was based on fact. R knew Ben often began his days, no matter the temperature, standing at one of these parlor windows bathing his body in the cold morning air. Mrs. Stevenson suggested that he halt the practice in the name of modesty but to no avail.

So it was no problem for R now to see Ben naked in the chair, although he had been mostly clothed in their earlier conversations when R was researching his Craven Street book.

The Craven Street restoration folks had done a super job here in the parlor. The three large-framed floor-to-ceiling windows that faced out onto Craven Street had been left unobstructed. There was a stand-up desk against the wall between two of them, a tall grandfather clock and chairs between and away from the others. To Ben's right was the man-high fireplace with built-in bookshelves on both sides, over which hung a painting of knights on horses. On the floor was a square rose and off-white patterned rug, fifteen by fifteen feet. A small round table with another chair was opposite Ben on the other side of the fireplace. All of the furnishings were, to R's trained eye, authentic to the eighteenth century.

He would have had no trouble imagining men of science, politics, and the arts sitting here with a fully dressed Ben, playing chess, listening to him play music on his handmade glass armonica, or discussing the origins of electricity, the heat lost from open fireplaces, the true cause of the warmth in the Gulf Stream, and the urgent need to repeal the Stamp Act and later the Townshend Acts, two legislative moves by the British government that were pushing the American colonies toward rebellion. . . .

But that was not what he wanted to say this morning.

“Was Melissa Anne Harrison, later Wolcott, the mother of William?” R asked Ben.

I have never spoken of that subject, and I will not do so now.

“Why not?”

It could do harm to the woman involved.

“She is as long gone now as you are.”

Some of us never are gone.

“I asked you before but I do so again: Didn't William have a right to know from whose womb he came?”

No.

“Why not?”

Because he was a traitor to his father and to his country.

“Did you know a woman named Melissa Anne Harrison, later Wolcott?”

No.

“Did you not see her on visits to her family home? Her father, Arthur Harrison—was he not a prominent Quaker businessman of your time and an acquaintance of yours?”

Many prosperous Quaker businessmen in the Philadelphia of my time who were my acquaintances.

“So you didn't know him or his family—most particularly a daughter named Melissa Anne?”

I think I have already answered that question. Move on, please. I'm getting a bit of a chill.

“I can wait while you dress, sir, if you'd like.”

No, you may not wait. What else is on your mind?

“Did you have William's mother killed?”

That is an absurd and insulting question. Remember to whom you are speaking, young man.

“What is the answer, sir?”

Certainly not. In fact, I provided sums for her throughout her life.

“Was William's mother Melissa Anne Harrison Wolcott?”

How many times do I have to answer the same question?

“Did you know a man named Button Nelson in Philadelphia?”

The only buttons I have ever met were those on my clothing and that of others.

“You did not pay Button Nelson to murder Melissa Anne Harrison Wolcott?”

No, I did not.

“His brother Roger says you did.”

I would have thought any brother of a button would have been a hole, not a Roger.

“You are not taking me seriously, sir.”

Why should I?

“Because your reputation from this point on in history could depend on it.”

How would you describe my reputation now?

“Excellent, really—and getting better all of the time.”

Why is that?

“You are finally receiving the credit and admiration you deserve. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and recently John Adams, have, always received more serious attention as Founding Fathers than you.”

Washington was a statue, Jefferson a pose, Adams a tree stump.

“What about Madison?”

A peacock. But a special peacock—to me, at least.

“Special in what way? I would have thought the differences between the two of you in personality as well as on the issues would have precluded—”

He had occasion to see me through a difficult situation, and he did so.

“What situation, if I may ask?”

You may ask and I may choose not to answer, which I now do.

“What about John Hancock?”

A figure.

“What do you mean?”

Figure as in what goes with a head.

“My fiancée is writing a book on him now. She's having trouble doing so.”

Tell her to write an aphorism about him instead.

“Why?”

An aphorism can be as short as one sentence.

“Such as?”

A man who signs his name large is a man who thinks small.

“Was there an informal trial of you on charges of murder and other related crimes before a jury of your peers: Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Adams?”

Impossible.

“Impossible?”

They were not my peers.

“You think awfully well of yourself, sir.”

No man who does not think well of himself can do well.

“I have seen written evidence to indicate that you were . . . intimate . . . with a girl of thirteen—possibly even twelve—and that the girl was, in fact, Melissa Anne Harrison.”

Do you believe it, in fact, to be true?

“I don't know yet.”

When will you know?

“I don't know that either.”

That is what you mean about damaging my place in history?

“Yes, sir.”

What else?

“That this girl gave birth to William and later, when she was forty-five years old and on the verge of telling the world about her motherhood, you had her killed. That's what the Pennsylvania trial was about.”

I told you there could be no such trial. Why would I have done what you have read that was charged against me?

“You were ill, already over eighty years old, and you wished to depart this world with your place in scientific, revolutionary, and intellectual history unsullied by charges that you impregnated a twelve-year-old girl and then later, when she was a mature woman, had her murdered in cold blood.”

How many people know of these charges against me?

“As we speak, probably only one—me.”

Are you going to tell anyone else, after we speak?

“I am a historian. If I believe they are true, I have no choice.”

A man with no choices is no man.

“Is that from
Poor Richard's Almanack
?”

Have you read my essay on chess? Maybe it came from that. But, no matter, it is from Life itself. Choices are Life. Life is choices. I choose to play a game of chess, you choose to play a game of bowls. I chose revolution, my son William chose capitulation. I, you, he, she, we. They are personal pronouns; they are the beginnings of all sentences of action—of choice. Life choices are what make us different from the mongrels and the geese. The mongrel must fight and snarl; we can choose to do so or not do so. The geese must fly a certain direction at certain times of the year. We have no such musts. We are a species of choice. Some say it is God who put the possibility and luxury of choice in us; I say it matters less where it came from than that we recognize it as our Essence, our Power, our Force, and use it with gusto and purpose.”

“So what should I do?”

You did not hear me, did you? Choices are all individual. Groups make choices as the result of individual agreements. No man can make another man's choices for him.

“You wrote rules for the game of chess and many other endeavors. Are there rules for choices?”

Ah, yes, indeed, and they are simple and as follows: No matter the will and the wit that goes into each, it is not possible to make nothing but perfect choices. Choices of expectation, of deduction, and even of love must find their way to final judgment through many outside forces beyond our control. Only choices of Honor are free of uncertainties. That is because they spring from and depend solely upon what comes from within.

“Thank you, sir. I've asked you this before—but one more time, Dr. Franklin. Whoever the mother was, why did she give you William to raise instead of keeping him herself?”

The answer to that question will be found in the Almanack.

“Where?”

Under, “A man who noses into another man's business soon no longer has a nose to nose.”

“Yes, but what is to prevent one man from making a clear and free personal choice to so nose into the other man's business?”

Nothing except the risk of losing his nose.

“Thank you, sir.”

You are welcome.

• • •

As he left 36 Craven Street a few minutes later, R felt foolish. Only a complete idiot would have come all this way to have an imaginary conversation with Ben—with anyone. Wally's conversation/mantra aside, it was a silly, stupid, childish thing to do.

What is such an exercise anyhow other than a make-believe recycling of what the imagining one in the conversation—the imagin
er
—already knows or suspects?

Unless, of course, one really believes in ghosts of historical figures past. . . .

R pled a personal emergency to the Savoy and United Airlines and was on his way back to Heathrow less than an hour later without having unpacked or even put his head on a hotel room pillow.

Yes, coming here to talk to Ben had definitely been a waste of his mind as well as his time, money, and energy.

Although Ben's line about Madison was arousing. What “difficult situation” did Madison see Ben through?

That phrase must have arisen from something R came across in his real Ben research. It would have had no meaning at the time but stuck in his mind until it came out of Ben's imagined mouth. That must be it.