Franklin Affair

by Jim Lehrer

  “I take it you’re not going to tell me why you need information about these three people,” Clara said.

  “That’s right,” R replied.

  • • •

  R seldom used his cell phone on trains. During his frequent trips on the Metroliner and the new Acela up and down the East Coast, he liked to read or write—or, sometimes, simply daydream. He often went to the Quiet Cars that were on some trains, which forbade the use of cell phones or any other device—including loud mouths—that made noise.

  But this morning was different. He would have an hour and half on the train to continue his pursuit of the validity of the Eastville papers. Clara’s assignment was only part of what had to be done.

  He had not taken the time to shave or change clothes before checking out of the hotel and hopping in a taxi to 30th Street Station. There was an 11:04 Acela to Washington. He made it with seven minutes to spare.

  He found a pair of empty seats on the left side in the rear of a car. The train was not even moving yet when he went to work.

  His first call was to Carter Hewes, an old graduate-school friend now at the Library of Congress who specialized in the dating of paper, ink, and other instruments of the writing and printing trade. Carter had begun his professional life as a historian for the DuPont Company in Wilmington, Delaware.

  “I need to come by for a quick dating on a piece of paper,” R said. “I’m on the train now from Philadelphia. I’ll come right from Union Station to your place in ninety minutes or so.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Carter. “How quick? I’ve got an alleged seventeenth-century will and testament for a guy in New York I’m looking at right now that I’ve been wrestling with for seven weeks, and I still haven’t been able to come up with a take on whether it’s real.”

  But Carter agreed to look at R’s paper.

  Call two was to Johnny Rutledge at BFU Press. R got Johnny’s answering machine, so he left his cell phone and Georgetown house numbers. “It’s not urgent, Johnny, but it’s important. Thanks.”

  Then from the briefcase, R carefully removed the copies of the documents Braxton had given him that authenticated the story and chain of possession for the cloak. He had not looked at them before, because there was no need. Now there was.

  Joshiah Ross. R found his name first on a copy of the original sales receipt the London tailor had issued for the cloak. The cost was ten pounds. The receipt was dated September 12, 1767. At the bottom, Ross had signed it under the words, “Taken possession this twelfth day of September, Seventeen Hundred and Sixty-seven.” Ross’s signature was flowing, confident, comfortable—no doubt reflecting his satisfaction with the cloak itself, R speculated. As with Philadelphia street scenes, these were the kind of speculations that came to R reflexively.

  R scanned the four-page single-space typed report on which the receipt was clipped. Who was Joshiah Ross, this “man of means and position” who had that beautiful cloak made for him in London?

  R raced through the text. It took only a couple of minutes for his eyes to pick out what he was looking for.

  “Mr. Ross was an officer in the Continental Army, serving under George Washington. Later, toward the end of the war, he worked directly for the Committee of Secret Correspondence.” That, R knew, was the name of a secret group organized to encourage and supervise the gathering of intelligence information from spies and other sources. Franklin was a member of the committee, in fact. So was Adams.

  What it meant for R was that Joshiah Ross probably had the spycraft skills to produce the invisible ink and the code writing on those twelve sheets of paper.

  The next find in the report: “Mr. Ross owned a farm of 3,000 acres and much produce and animal stock near Eastville. The farm remains in his family to this day.” The document, R saw, was dated in 1997. Somebody at the museum or in the Ross family probably wrote it or had it written.

  What this meant for R was that the Franklin trial, if there really was such a thing, could have occurred at Ross’s farm.

  Following that possibility, Ross thus—most likely without the participants’ knowledge and permission—could have borne witness to the entire proceeding and then, for whatever reason, chose to produce some notes and hide them in his cloak.

  For the first time since leaving Philadelphia, R looked out the window. Here came Wilmington. He had made this trip on these tracks hundreds of times, maybe thousands. But each time he saw something he had not noticed before. This time, it was a derelict bus that somebody had converted into a place to live. He didn’t know one bus from another, but this one resembled an old New York City transit bus. How did it get down here? And why? Who lived in it now? Was there really no other place for this person to live in all of Wilmington, Delaware? Or could it be somebody who simply enjoyed living in old buses. . . .

  R’s cell phone rang. It was Johnny Rutledge.

  R got up from his seat and walked to the end of the car. There were only a dozen or so other passengers, but for his own privacy as well as theirs he decided to talk to Johnny out of everyone’s hearing.

  After only a brief exchange of greetings, R said to Rutledge, “Has a woman named Melissa Anne Harrison—possibly under the last name of Wolcott—showed up on your list of possible William Franklin mothers?”

  “The name doesn’t sound familiar—I know she definitely hasn’t made the finals. She’s not one of the twenty-three possibles still in the running.”

  “What about earlier in your research? Was she there until you eliminated her for some reason? Could you check back for me?”

  There was a slightly too-long pause before Rutledge said, “You on to something I should know about, Dr. Taylor?”

  “No, no. I’m just running down a loose end for a friend.”

  “What friend would care about stuff like this?”

  “What about looking back over your earlier work, OK?”

  “That’ll take awhile.”

  “How long?”

  “Well, I could do a fast name check on my computer file . . . right now, I guess, if you wanted me to.”

  “I want you to.”

  The train had made its stop in Wilmington and was now on the way to Baltimore. Leaning to get a view out a window, R saw the small stadium where the Wilmington minor league baseball team the Blue Rocks played its games. He wondered what major league team owned them—or supplied them players as a farm team. He had gone to many a game over in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, when he was growing up in Griswold, forty miles south in Connecticut. Pittsfield had a New York Mets farm team in a Class A league. Wally always said that baseball was the sport of historians. It moved slowly, and precedents, process, eccentricities, numbers, and records were as critical as winning and losing. . . .

  “Here she is,” said Johnny Rutledge. “Melissa Anne Harrison.”

  R pressed the phone against his ear.

  “She came up in a list I got from the old records of a colonial doctor. She was apparently from a family with some resources. Certainly not one of the ‘low girls’ everybody, including Franklin himself, said he hung out with at the time.”

  “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 want
ed 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.