Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (9 page)

“No, my dear, we must let him eat his fill; he’ll like his new home all the better for it. He’s been kept short till now and we must make it up to him as we can. There, you see? He snaps it up like a bird. What a fine boy you are, my little William!”

His
little William, Deborah thought, not hers, but she caught herself up at once; she must not let herself think it. This was now her boy too.
Her
little William.

“Now you must see if he’s wet or dry,” Benjamin said, once William appeared sated.

“I know how to change a clout,” Deborah snapped, already worn out from her efforts.

Both William and Benjamin started.

12

ANNE MAY HAVE SLEPT,
eaten, worked, cleaned, cooked, laundered, slept again—she imagined she did, but she had no memory of it. She felt she’d left the Anne who lived at Eades Alley and had become another Anne who lived—or at least hovered—on Market Street, at Franklin’s house. She knew the minute Franklin would have arrived home with William, the minute he would have handed William to his wife; she knew the way the wife would look down at the creature in her arms and wonder what other face in all Philadelphia could make some claim to it. All this Anne knew because she lived it in place of her own life.

Anne’s mother remained patient with such absence for two days, but there either her patience ran out or she saw only a single cure for it. “Get yourself to that upholsterer’s,” she said. “You’re no use in this house.”

Anne, who’d been slaving more than three hours at the hot fire, looked up in her own kind of heat. She rapped a long spoon against the side of the stew pot that hung over the coals. “No use, am I? ’Tis my wage filled this pot.”

“And you’ll make a better one at that shop; with your room paid you’ll be able to send enough home
and
take less out of our cupboard. After all, ’tisn’t like it was when your father needed a nurse.”

Well, it was true. All of it. If Anne’s father had been alive, he might have had another thing to say about it, but then again, he might not. And besides, with both her father and William gone, the house was no longer the place of even the smallest comfort it might once have been.

“If a thing’s to be done ’tis best to do it,” Anne’s mother said, and Anne couldn’t argue with that either. She went above stairs and collected her father’s small satchel from under the eaves; she went to her room and began to pack her few worn things in it. Her mother came in. “ ’Twill be better for you, Anne.”

“ ’Twould be hard to come out worse,” Anne said.

ANNE FOUND HER WAY
to the upholsterer’s shop and then found herself walking past it along Market Street until she’d reached the building Franklin rented for his print shop. He lived in the two and a half stories of rooms above the shop—Anne and all the rest of Philadelphia knew this; she stood across the street but at an angle so as not to attract the attention of the occupants. She studied the windows above the shop, making a map of the likely rooms in her head; there would be a parlor and kitchen at the first level and no doubt the sleeping rooms above. She looked from window to window, trying to imagine William’s exact place behind them at that moment. Would he be asleep in a cradle in the kitchen next to his new mother as she worked? Would he wake crying for Anne, or would he look up at his new mother’s face and notice no difference? For William she wanted the one, for herself she wanted the other. It was one thing to give up her child to a better life, it was another to be erased completely from it.

ANNE FIRST SAW THE
shelves full of bolts of rich damask and glistening silk and more familiar striped bed ticking; she next saw a fair-haired boy of perhaps nine or ten years, no doubt an apprentice, hammering away at a footstool; last, she saw the man of the money pouch, stretching a rough buckram over a chair back. The pair stopped their work together at the sight of her and stared. The man collected himself first and said, “Peter, this is Anne, she’s come to work alongside you; now get on with it.” The boy gave Anne one last examination and resumed his hammering. The man came up to Anne, took her bag from her without further word, and walked with it toward a doorway at the rear of the shop. It opened into a hallway containing a window, a door, and a steep flight of stairs; Grissom pointed at the door.

“The necessaries.”

Anne looked through the window and saw a narrow yard with a well and an outhouse at the far end; she took note and followed the man up two steep flights of stairs, looking back as she went to fix the route in her head—not just to the necessaries but to the world beyond should she find need of escape. The stairs stopped on a small landing that faced a single door to what had clearly once been a part of the eaves; the man had to duck to enter, but Anne passed with ease, and some eagerness.

Space. Low, narrow, angular, chopped up by a massive chimney and a dormered window, but space—more of it than Anne had ever had to herself. The window gave off a patch of northwest light, and the heat from the chimney would go far to counter the winter cold, if she were to remain there that long.

The man said, “Settle yourself. I’ll see you in the shop when you’re done.”

Anne said, “Mr. Grissom, is it? What’s my work, sir?”

“Stuffing ticks, to start.”

“And my wage?”

Grissom lifted his eyebrows. “You were told none of this? I expected you to be told. Sixpence a day, plus the room and your midday meal.”

“Very well. Thank you.”

“You needn’t thank me. ’Tis hard enough work. And besides—”

He didn’t finish his words, but Anne could guess at them—she needn’t thank him because she was a favor done for Franklin, no doubt in exchange for one Franklin had done for him. To take an untried girl of questionable character to work and live under his roof meant it must have been a considerable favor, but beyond simple curiosity it didn’t concern Anne; what concerned her was the sixpence a day with the room and the part board. Anne had never excelled at sums, but she could take it far enough along to see that it would put her ahead of the Penny Pot and the Indian King Tavern, but not ahead of the whore.

WHEN ANNE RETURNED TO
the shop, Grissom led her to a long table at the far end of it. Anne had already discovered how unlike Franklin the man was; he said no words that weren’t absolutely demanded of him, and now he chose to demonstrate her task in silence. A striped mattress ticking lay on the table alongside an open barrel of feathers; Grissom sat himself down on the stool and began to pull feathers from the barrel and feed them through a small slit in the tick; after a large lump had appeared under the cloth, he picked up a long stick and began to disperse the lump into the corners. Only then did he seem to feel the need for words.

“The tick must be full from corner to corner, stuffed higher in the middle, dense enough so it springs back no more than a hand’s width.” He rose from the stool and pointed Anne into it. Anne sat. She took a deep breath and reached into the barrel, but the deep breath had been a mistake—it drew a piece of soft down into her throat and she began to cough violently, loosing more feathers into the air to fly about the shop like gusting snow. Peter gave a snort of that pure delight that could only come from a young boy; Anne looked to Grissom to see what the grown man was likely to make of it, but although she might have sworn to a hint of amusement behind the shadows, his only response was to point Anne to the broom. She collected and made use of the tool; when she’d finished Grissom had already returned to his chair.

ANNE HAD IMAGINED HERSELF
equal and more to stuffing a simple bed tick by noon and was dismayed to see that she’d filled but half the tick when an old woman appeared at the door to the shop and called out, “Dinner!”

Grissom went for the stairs to his private rooms; Anne followed Peter to a small room off the rear of the shop where it appeared the help was expected to eat. The room was full of more barrels and crates, but space had been found for a table set with two bowls of pudding, two mugs of beer, and a platter of bread and cold beef, a far better offering than Anne had been allowed at the Pot or the King. Anne was hungry enough, but Peter had dispensed with half the loaf by the time Anne had dipped her spoon into her pudding. She made quick claim to an end piece of the bread and a slab of beef before she asked, “How old are you, Peter?”

“Eleven. You were thinking ten, weren’t you? Too scrawny, Pa says. That’s why I’ve been put out to the upholsterer and not the shipwright.”

“I should think upholsterers must be quite strong.”

Peter considered this, nodded. “I once saw Mr. Grissom catch a whole barrel of nails that fell off a wagon.”

“There you are, then. And where do you sleep?”

Peter pointed to a pallet in the corner of the shop floor.

This could have been William, Anne thought. She slid her piece of bread onto Peter’s plate and he beamed at her.

THEY WORKED EACH DAY
till dusk, Anne’s fingers growing more and more accustomed to the movement of feathers, growing faster at stuffing ticks but still needing to rework too many. Grissom showed no anger or pleasure at whatever she’d done; in fact, he barely spoke to her at all, coming up to the table to observe her now and again in silence. With the boy he had more to say, and forcefully enough. “No! Goes the other way round. Watch your corner! Watch your corner! Fine, lad! Fine!” The blame and praise came with equal liveliness and she never heard the sound of a blow; it seemed a successful enough method—Peter worked to please and he worked hard. Anne watched him when she could and thought of William as he grew, taking his place beside his father in his print shop, being treated with like sternness and kindness. At their shared meals she continued to push a little something extra to Peter’s side of the platter and soon became a great favorite of his. She wondered what William would think of her when he reached eleven, but then realized: He wouldn’t.

AT THE END OF
each work day, Anne walked through the dusk past Franklin’s print shop, looking up at the candlelit windows. Now and then a shadow would move past the softly illuminated windows; once she believed she saw a small head resting against the shadow’s chest, once she heard crying and lingered till it stilled. She heard other sounds coming from the open windows, mostly men’s deep, rich voices and hearty laughter, Franklin’s clearly identifiable amongst them. Once she heard a woman’s raised voice, “No, I don’t!” Another time she heard the same voice spiraling upward into the beginnings of a song. Or a wail.

ANNE HAD BEEN AT
Grissom’s a full month before she saw William. Grissom allotted her the Sunday for her own, and she’d spent the first few at Eades Alley, sharing what she could out of her wage, taking with her some of the cheese and bread that she bought at the end of each week to supply her breakfast and supper for the week to come. After one such visit she decided to risk a daylight walk past Franklin’s house and was rewarded with a glimpse of mother and boy just returning home. William had put on a good deal of weight and perched in all apparent contentment against his new mother’s shoulder, looking around, as had always been his way, at everything new. Did he see Anne? She believed so; the round eyes fixed on her until a loose pig ran past the door. Did he know her? Anne couldn’t make a case for it; she and the pig had received equal attention.

13

THE FIRST THICK HEAT
of summer had just descended when Isaac Wilkes, the shipwright, stepped into Grissom’s shop. He spied Anne at her table and stopped just inside the door.

Grissom stood up from his work and approached the shipwright. “Mr. Wilkes. What can I do for you?”

The shipwright turned from Anne and faced Grissom. “I’m in need of a mattress.”

“Very well. Feathers or hair?”

“Hair.”

“Ours is the finest horsetail. Guaranteed clean and dry. Twenty pounds of hair to a tick.”

“What’s your charge?”

“Five pounds.”

The shipwright nodded.

“Choose your tick, then.” The two men turned to study the bolts of cloth and discuss cost; after a time a second customer entered the shop, and a moment later Wilkes was standing over Anne, bending low so only she could hear. “And what’s
your
charge?”

Anne looked up at the shipwright and saw the old, familiar hunger that had led him to climb the Penny Pot stairs night after night. She thought of her sixpence a day, and her private room above, and how by simply lying across her bed for no longer than it took to pee in the pot under it she could make herself something more. She thought too of the doctor’s words:
She’ll not have another.
What had come at great price before came at small cost now. She looked once more at the shipwright, the thickly corded forearms, the clean linen shirt, the neatly tied queue. Why not?

Anne spoke low as she could. “Same as before. Round the back and up the stairs. Eight o’clock.”

WILKES HAD CHANGED LITTLE.
He came in, looked around once and back at Anne, swallowing hard. He gave her his coins and she sat on the bed, lifting her skirt; he undid his breeches, picked her up under the knees, and pulled her toward him. He sawed into her once, twice, perhaps a dozen times altogether, then grunted, rebuttoned, and left without his feet ever leaving the floor. When he’d gone Anne looked down at the coins in her hand—a week’s wage in less than ten minutes.

WILKES CAME AGAIN, THIS
time to purchase a small piece of braid; as Grissom wrapped it he approached Anne and whispered as before, was answered as before. He must have talked—or bragged—for next the corder came. He had none of Wilkes’s sense, making no inquiries about a purchase, heading straight for Anne. “So! Here’s where you’ve gone. What of tonight, then?”

Grissom’s head swung around.

Anne said, “I’m told the meeting’s Wednesday nine.”

“Meeting!”