Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (3 page)
Read Benjamin Franklin's Bastard Online
Authors: Sally Cabot
“But how did you get back?” Deborah had asked.
“Paid a friend sixpence to carry my clothes around the pond and walked.” Benjamin chatted on about this and that amazing thing he’d discovered about wind and water as he blew across the pond, but Deborah only wondered that as he’d walked home wet and cold and short an entire sixpence it hadn’t occurred to him how foolish it was.
THERE MUST HAVE BEEN
a dozen ships lined up along the river, but every one sat with sails furled, as stagnant as Deborah, having long since discharged its passengers and cargo—if Benjamin Franklin had been aboard any one of them he certainly hadn’t come looking for her. Deborah stared down at the angry current again, so dark and rough she couldn’t see bottom, and shuddered. She should go home—her mother grew nervous when Deborah left her alone too long—but she felt too old and achy and worn out to even make the turn against the wind. She was seventeen and finished.
WHEN BENJAMIN FRANKLIN RETURNED
to Philadelphia, Deborah Read discovered it only along with the rest. Philadelphia had grown in his two years gone—it was not uncommon to see forty masts at one time against the river skyline. An upholsterer, a clock maker, and three new taverns had all sprung up along Market Street; the Scots-Irish had almost caught up to the Quakers in numbers, although not in money or influence. Deborah, watching all the new bustle from her window, one day spied the familiar mane of hair, the wide shoulders, the rollicking gait. She stepped back, hands flying to loosen her apron, but he walked on past her house without stopping. The hot flush of mortification was followed by a realization so cold that she shivered from it: She was no longer of account. But how could she be? Franklin would have heard of her marriage and seen it for the tar pit it was.
A number of weeks passed before Deborah saw Benjamin Franklin again. Her mother required her constant attention, and she found it easier to send a boy to do her marketing; this was what she told herself, but the truth was, she hid. After a time, however, the old itch drove her back into the street, and it wasn’t many days before they passed each other face-to-face. He appeared to have gained in size, as if all he’d experienced in London had added an extra inch to his height, an extra few inches to his already broad back. As he walked he was engaged in intense debate with another man, so it was understandable that he would smile, nod, dip his head, and pass without slowing. This was Deborah’s first thought; her second was a rage so hot it burned her teeth. She whirled around. “Mr. Franklin!”
He turned, smiling yet. The gentleman with Franklin touched his arm and moved off. Franklin stopped smiling. He took a reluctant step toward Deborah. “Mrs. Rogers.”
“Miss Read,” Deborah said.
Franklin looked over his shoulder as if in hunt of a friend. Finding none, he turned back. “Indeed, I heard of your abandonment, and I am truly—”
“Then you heard wrong,” Deborah said. “I left my husband, if he ever was, and I left his name with him, long before he fled. I only stopped you now to ask if you received my letters. Two, it was. Fearing the first one lost, I wrote another. I’d like to know if two got lost. If they did, I’ll not waste more paper on letters.”
Franklin’s face danced through a series of changes that Deborah discovered she could read better than she could read any book: surprise, guilt, something like admiration if not quite the thing itself, and, last, calculation. But he was, after all, an honest man. “Two letters did not get lost,” he said.
“Thank you,” Deborah said. “In that case, perhaps one day I’ll chance another.” She moved off.
THE NEXT TIME DEBORAH
came upon Franklin he was walking briskly ahead of her in a northerly direction, as if he’d just come from dinner at a tavern and was on his way home, or as if he’d seen her first and turned away. His being in front of her for several blocks, she could watch who he’d become, how he had a word of greeting for nearly everyone he passed, how nearly everyone moved on with a new smile, or an old smile made bigger; if he happened to pass two people walking together, their talk grew more animated after he’d gone by—talking of Franklin, no doubt.
The fourth time Deborah saw Franklin’s unmistakable form ahead she felt all the fire that had seen her through their previous meeting wash out of her; she’d done well then, letting him see she was not yet beaten down by him or Rogers or anyone else, but now she couldn’t summon a single word of address that could match his. Deborah crossed to the other side of the street, and they passed as if they’d never met.
IN TIME, DEBORAH DEVELOPED
a public face of indifference whenever she saw Franklin or whenever his name came up in her hearing, but in private she found she was far from indifferent. She even took some poor comfort in the fact that her mother had been wrong about Benjamin Franklin and she had been right, but she took less comfort in the fact that the man’s rise took place right there on Market Street, where she was forced to watch. He opened a print shop that at once began to thrive, which no doubt gave him some new ideas about his worth. Rumor traveled Deborah’s way that he’d made a marriage offer to a relative of his landlord but had overreached himself with a demand of a hundred-pound dowry and was rejected. The next rumor Deborah heard was that Benjamin Franklin, the runaway printer’s apprentice, was now the owner and editor of the
Pennsylvania Gazette.
The paper was, of course, a great success. As word of its growing influence swept up and down the street, Deborah found herself taking a queer pride in it and, queerer yet, a sense of some small claim to it. She’d done nothing but believe in Benjamin Franklin, but surely that must have counted for something in his life; indeed, if she were to look back over her own life, there were times when that seemed her only accomplishment. She watched Franklin’s name leap from mouth to mouth until all Philadelphia seemed to ring with it; she expected daily to hear of his marriage, Franklin now being one of Philadelphia’s brighter prospects, but she heard no such news. She believed she knew enough of the man to know that he must be seeking—and no doubt finding—physical comfort from someplace, but if he did, she heard no name attached to it.
SHE WAS NAMED ANNE,
for the queen. From what she came to know of Franklin in later years, she knew he no longer approved, but back then he delighted in a king or a queen as much as anyone else. He delighted in many things—the heat of the fire on his back; the rich, greasy slice of goose on his tongue; the kick of the cider as it slid down his throat. She supposed that was part of what drew people to him—his childlike delight in things. In
them
. Simple enough, when you thought of it.
She saw him first at the hanging. She’d been to the butcher’s for soup bones when she saw the cart with the two boys seated on their coffins in the back of it. One of the boys was crying uncontrollably, the other was murmuring to him in a voice too low for Anne to hear the words, but the tone sounded brave and she decided to follow the cart to see how he managed. The bells had already begun to toll, and by the time Anne and the cart arrived at the prison the crowd had gathered into thick knots. The cart reached the hanging tree and pulled up close under it; the ropes were thrown over the beam and the sheriff addressed the boys. Anne didn’t hear the sheriff’s words but she saw the brave boy shake his head, the sheriff speak again, and then she heard the brave boy shout back: “What would you have me say? I am innocent of the fact and it will appear so before God!”
That was when Anne noticed Franklin, standing at the front of the crowd but also standing out from it—taller and handsomer than most, with thick hair the color of dark gold and curious gray eyes, a strong face and stronger shoulders, taking down the boy’s words in a small notebook. The sheriff raised his voice and began to read, the death warrant Anne assumed, until she fixed her attention on the actual words of it. Reprieve! At the good news the brave boy’s courage failed him and he fainted. Franklin—although she didn’t know it was Franklin then—was one of the first to reach the cart, and with one strong arm swept the boy off his coffin and into the street, laying him in the dirt; it would seem a poorer location to some, but Anne approved of it.
ANNE HAD BEEN SERVING
at the Penny Pot two months when she next saw Franklin. She’d been driven to the tavern the same way every girl her age ever was—by hunger—and by the fact that she’d seen the sign in the window of the Penny Pot and in none of the other taverns:
GIRL
WANTED
. Not the Penny Pot, her father said, but her mother paid him no heed; by then Anne’s father was good for nothing but coughing blood into a pewter cup, and Anne’s mother had gotten used to leaving the few words he managed to offer unanswered. Anne minded her father’s words better—studied them, in fact—even copied them as best she could, hearing in them something finer than those she heard elsewhere in the house; her father had once been a tutor at Philadelphia’s finest school for boys until the consumption struck. But in the case of the tavern, Anne took her mother’s tack. What did her father know of hunger? Anne saw to it that he got first pick at whatever food her mother managed to push together—a watered broth, a meatless pie, a thin custard. Anne never begrudged her father his lion’s share, nor did she begrudge whatever small child wasn’t still at breast being fed next and on up through the seven—but it did prove to Anne that if she wanted something better for herself she’d have to go out and get it for herself.
Once they were alone in the kitchen, Anne’s mother made her own argument in favor of the tavern. “Past time you earned,” she said. “But if he thinks I’ll be waiting on him like you’ve been, he can get himself another thought. Not with the rest of this lot to wash and feed and dress.”
In truth, that was the argument that almost swayed Anne against the Penny Pot, but the greater argument was getting the food and clothes in the first place, and besides, she’d made up her mind already, on her own, as she usually did. She dressed herself in her best linen, or what she could find of it that came closest to fitting; in her sixteenth year she’d grown another surprise inch up and two more out, and there were gaps below the hem and between the lacings that couldn’t be bridged. She took a piece of not-clean toweling and scrubbed her face and neck, tipped herself upside down and ripped the comb through her hair until it lay smooth down her back, then tied it with a piece of shoe binding because it was less frayed than any of the ribbons her work box offered up. Her next oldest sister, Mary, lent Anne her shoes in exchange for the brightest of the ribbons; the shoes were too small but less scarred than Anne’s, and she knew she could walk in them at least as far as the Penny Pot. Her mother stopped her at the door and covered her in her own shawl. “ ’Tis cold,” she said, as if Anne didn’t know what a Philadelphia January was, but Anne also knew the greater meaning of the gift and softened her look.
Anne set off along the alley, taking care to keep her sister’s shoes wide of the gutter that ran down the middle, wishing it would rain and wash away the dead thing that still floated in it. She would
not
take up the creature and lug it to the river—not this time—there were two dozen others in the alley who could take a turn at it, just as they could take more care in disposing of their own refuse. She turned onto Second Street and braced herself against the turn onto Vine, straight into the river wind; she considered a longer walk to one of the inland taverns but decided she’d make better use of her time in less walking and more earning. As soon as she made her turn onto Vine she could look down the street and see the Penny Pot, a two-and-a-half-story brick building with an odd-shaped multifaceted roof, too near the river landing for winter comfort but good for trade no doubt. She walked through the door without pause, the way she used to drink down her mother’s tincture for the canker throat.
A roomful of men seated at a mix of long and short tables faced Anne, those nearest the fire packed tightest, but the heat of the fire didn’t reach Anne at the door. She went up to the first server she crossed, a woman her mother’s age but with enough flesh on her for the two of them, although this woman’s face showed the same fatigue. Despite the outer chill the woman’s forehead and upper lip were beaded with sweat.
“I should like to speak to the proprietor,” Anne said.
“He’s over there.” The woman pointed to a man passing out sloshing-full pewter tankards at the tap. “But if you’re looking to speak to the one who runs the place, you’re doing it.”
Anne looked to the man at the tap. He was perhaps the age of her father, but a far more robust version of it, with strength in his arms and color in his face, and the kind of free and easy laugh that Anne had never heard out of her father in all her life. When he looked up from pumping the tap, he caught her look and grinned; Anne was still so disconcerted that she only managed to twitch her cheeks into the beginnings of an answering smile when the woman in front of her spoke.
“Well? What are you after? Work?”
Anne returned her attention to the woman. “Yes, work.”
The woman looked her up and down and handed her a tray holding assorted pewter tankards and mugs. “Table at the corner,” she said. “They owe sixpence. Don’t hang about for chat. I’ll be watching; I’ll know soon enough if you’ll work or you won’t.” She moved off, wiping the sweat from her lip with the back of her hand, as if too tired to even lift the hem of her apron to her mouth.
Anne moved to the table in the corner, left off the contents of her tray, collected the sixpence, turned around, and saw herself being hailed by a table near the fire. She hurried to it, collected the empty tankards, and worked her way to the man at the tap. “Welcome to the Pot,” he said with another grin that Anne felt the need of even more than the first. “John Hewe’s my name. You’ve met the wife. And you be?”