The King's Beast

by Eliot Pattison

  “But my foot, dear lad. The gout unnerves me.”

  “Just a dozen feet. I will carry your stick, and at the top I can pull the ladder up out of sight. Here they have a chance of discovering us. Up there, no chance at all.” Duncan touched a nearly forgotten lump in a pocket. “I have some coca leaves you can chew at the top, to ease the discomfort.”

  Franklin studied the ladder with a worried expression. “Can I close my eyes as I climb?”

  “If you can feel for the rungs to the top, yes.” Duncan looked down at the broad courtyard below. They had used up much of their hour.

  He acknowledged Franklin’s fortitude when, after several excruciating minutes, and a passing panic when Franklin cried out that he could not endure another moment, they reached the top. Duncan pulled up the ladder and they settled onto the ledge, out of sight from all but the birds. Duncan draped his cloak over Franklin’s legs and handed him the coca leaves that Huber had supplied on his first apothecary visit.

  “Quite the adventure,” Franklin said, though his enthusiasm was obviously forced.

  “We’ll have to keep you hidden somewhere until the day of your meeting,” Duncan said, “and pray they don’t learn where the incognitum is.”

  “Of course they don’t know. No one outside the Craven Street house knows.”

  “Excepting me and Patrick and Ishmael,” Duncan corrected. “And everyone else who sat around the table at the Neptune to make the plans. And half a dozen smugglers. Not to mention several crew members of the Galileo.”

  Franklin made a little rumbling noise in his throat but decided to change the subject. “Was that an owl?” he asked as a winged creature flew close to examine them. Duncan said nothing.

  “What a perch for November fifth!” Franklin proclaimed.

  Duncan thought Franklin was referring to some new astronomical event, but then the inventor started pointing at dark patches in the landscape. “Hyde Park, Tothill Fields, the Artillery Ground, Lincoln Inn Fields,” he said, naming the deep shadows. “All have displays, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Displays?”

  “Fireworks! Remember, remember the fifth of November, as the poem goes. You would not credit how we viewed the royal display last year. A front-row box not a hundred feet from the king! I was going to retain him in any event, but when Henry offered up some distant relative’s box, our discussions were quickly concluded, I assure you.”

  The words tugged at Duncan’s memory. “It’s why Polly suggested such a gift for you this year,” he said, recalling the day she had received her pearls.

  “Sweet lass, but she will never match what Henry did for us last year,” Franklin said, and began a lighthearted whisper of the poem, a favorite of English schoolboys. “Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot.”

  Franklin had nearly finished the poem when the words faded away, and Duncan realized he was studying clouds gathering in the west.

  “Has the cathedral installed your lightning arrestors, perchance?” Duncan asked.

  “The fools are just working on doing so now. A committee was formed by St. Paul’s to discuss it. Lightning nearly destroyed St. Bride’s Church several years ago. Every steeple and tower in the city should have a lightning conductor. The clerics are always our biggest obstacles, despite their churches having the highest aspects. Why, in Boston they preached that my lightning rods were causing earthquakes, if you can credit it. I am presuming upon God, the imbeciles say, for the secrets of lightning are for the Great Jehovah alone.” His words seemed to bring a painful memory to Franklin, and he fell into a brooding silence.

  “San Nazaro,” the inventor said minutes later. “The poor lost souls.”

  “Sir?”

  “San Nazaro haunts me, Duncan, every day it haunts me. The church of San Nazaro in Brescia, near Venice, stored gunpowder in its vaults for the Venetian army. Just weeks ago, lightning struck the steeple and touched off the powder. They say three thousand were killed in the explosion. My God, three thousand souls.”

  Duncan heard something in Franklin’s voice he had never heard before. “Surely you don’t feel guilt over those deaths.”

  Franklin took a long time to answer. “I came to London for selfish reasons. The glory of political office. Preserving my appointment as deputy postmaster for the colonies. Adding coin to my pocket for serving colonial governments.” He glanced at Duncan before making a new confession. “My highest aspiration was to obtain a charter for a new Ohio land company, of which I would be a founding member, with all the wealth that implies. It probably makes me no better than the starch-collared louts I am always complaining of.” He paused to watch a small cloud scuttle across the moon.

  “What if it had been different?” he continued, his voice strangely hoarse. “What if I had been more of a responsible Christian? There will be a terrible reckoning for me at the pearly gates. I knew with certainty that my copper arrestors would stop such disasters and save lives. I could have traveled as an ambassador for human life, to convince town fathers of the importance of installing my rods. There would be far fewer widows and orphans in Brescia today if I had done so. I could have saved them.” He spoke with anguish now. “Three thousand souls, Duncan.”

  Duncan recalled the sadness that sometimes settled on the inventor’s countenance during his long spells of staring into his hearth. “What was needed, doctor,” he said, “was less stupidity in Venice about where to store gunpowder. They created a bomb under the high steeple, waiting for a spark. There has never been a successful ambassador against human stupidity.”

  Now Duncan was watching the clouds as well, with growing unease. “So St. Paul’s is the highest point in London and it is not protected?”

  “I honestly don’t know how far they’ve gone with the project, lad, though I see no evidence of it where we sit, which is the logical location for the arrestor rods. If not, and a storm rises, just watch the hair on your forearm.”

  “My hair?”

  “When it rises straight up you will have just enough time for a quick prayer to St. Peter to say you are on the way to meet him.” Franklin’s laugh was weak, and he looked away from the horizon.

  “Insurance syndicates,” Duncan said after a few minutes.

  “Sir?”

  “You should go to insurance syndicates. Many are based here in London. They are keenly interested in protecting against losses, and I hear they are expanding beyond maritime contracts to warehouses and other buildings. Tell them about your lightning arrestors. Write a pamphlet for them. Appeal to their economic interest, show them the small cost of arrestors versus the catastrophic loss of a building. Once they understand that the rods will mean fewer losses, they will become your ambassadors, spreading the word through their networks and making them conditions in their contracts.”

  Franklin brightened. “My God, McCallum! It’s the very thing! Yes, I shall make inquiries on Fleet Street.”

  They spoke of little things, of Mrs. Stevenson’s household and the likelihood that Hewson and Polly would soon be betrothed, then of Philadelphia and Deborah’s recent shipment of dried venison, cranberries, and Franklin’s precious Newtown Pippin apples. Franklin asked about the furnishings in his Philadelphia household and whether he should buy china for his wife as individual pieces or in sets. The inventor then inquired about the details of the Preston House fire, and was pressing Duncan on the performance of the fire company when he was cut off by a shout from the plaza below. A dozen mounted soldiers had appeared, quickly dismounting, and began ordering the score of people who lingered there into a line. An officer paced along the line, slapping a riding whip in his palm as he inspected each face as a soldier held a lantern to it.

  “You said there were supplies there, for manufacturing,” Franklin said in a tight voice.

  Duncan took a moment to understand. “At Preston House? For the Covenant, yes, including some tin that you helped smuggle. But we had taken everything out already. They wer
e saved.”

  “And how long afterward was Pierre Dumont murdered?”

  “That very night,” Duncan said.

  As he spoke Franklin kept an eye on the soldiers, who were now pounding on doors of the houses surrounding the plaza. “There are some on the Privy and War Councils who think the non-importation pacts are tantamount to acts of treason. I have sent warnings.”

  “Warnings of what?”

  “Doubtless you understand by now, Duncan. There are those in London who believe it is better to act quietly against treason. We must nip subversion in the bud, they say.”

  “You mean subversion as in secret meetings about an ancient beast,” Duncan said. When Franklin offered no answer, he continued, “How many officers of the king are working in the shadows this way?”

  “Who knows? There’s been a Black Chamber in the post office for years, reading London mail. I never suspected the Horse Guards until you came with your news,” Franklin said. “I have told them we have to be more careful.”

  Duncan fastened the top buttons of his waistcoat against the cool breeze as he chewed on the words. “America is in need of machines for production of its own goods,” he suggested.

  “Desperately so. The endless resources of the continent are going untapped because of the greed of men in England. It is economic servitude. They are holding the continent in bondage by their damnable rules restricting commerce. If the colonies could make the goods it needs, had its own industries, Whitehall would have to stop treating us like their serfs.”

  Duncan was feeling the fatigue of his strenuous day. His wound was aching. He watched the small uniformed figures below as they pulled people from their homes to question them. Gradually Franklin’s words filtered through the fog of his exhaustion. Franklin had said we in talking about the non-importation efforts. “You’re not just planning strategies for the Covenant, you’re providing them with supplies and English secrets,” he stated.

  Franklin looked up at the moon as if to ignore him.

  “The drawings of the machines.” Duncan paused, revisiting in his mind the scenes with the drawings at Craven Street. “And Olivia, who took such interest in your drawing of a machine. Olivia Dumont is involved in the secrets of the Non-importation Pact.”

  Franklin offered no denial. Here, hovering above the world, here where Duncan had invoked the white beads of the Iroquois, here was where truths were told.

  “It’s why you so readily offered her lodging at Craven Street. You were already acquainted, already coconspirators in the Covenant.”

  Franklin kept staring upward. “Look at the shifts in color as the cloud slips by the moon,” he observed. “How many shades of silver can there be?”

  “And the Faulkner House!” Duncan pressed. “Is that why there are drawings of other machines at the Faulkner library?” His mind raced. “Is Olivia making drawings there? You would put Pierre’s sister at risk?” he demanded.

  A small laugh escaped Franklin’s lips. “I doubt she has had time to make drawings there, but you have it wrong, my friend. I helped devise the Mississippi plan, yes, and I asked Ezra to help in the Shawnee country, but mostly I take orders from the Covenant leaders, not the other way around. Those agents operate in a tight group. Olivia was involved with the Covenant only recently, just before she arrived in London. I didn’t know until she offered to take the drawings of the machine back to the colonies. She proposes to sew them inside a petticoat.

  “The Covenant sends special requests to me from time to time through Charles Thomson, Mulligan in New York, or John Hancock, knowing that my reputation can get me inside establishments that most would be prevented from seeing. They ask only infrequently, because they say they do not want to put me at risk. The other day after the textile mill, after her alarm over your capture had subsided and after Henry left for the day, dear Olivia sat at his desk and made ten pages of notes and drawings of looms and shuttles.

  “The requests from the leaders of the Covenant have been coming in the same neat hand and in code, all from Boston or New York and all cleverly glued between two sheets of paper on which fictitious correspondence from merchants is written or else written in invisible ink between lines, the kind that must be held over a flame to read. The leader even has a code name, perfectly suited to the role.”

  “Hephaestus,” Duncan said.

  “Exactly,” Franklin confirmed. “The Greek god of the forge, the god of industry. The inquiries from Hephaestus are bold, I must say. Asking about the new steam apparatus in the mines, the new flying shuttle looms, the blowing cylinders being used for steel production, and even the mix of alloys used in making sword blade steel. There are those on the Privy Council who are as interested in eliminating Hephaestus and the Covenant as Milbridge has been in eliminating you.”

  “But why did I see similar drawings at the Faulkner House?” Duncan asked. “Madeline is so feather-headed she would compromise a secret without even knowing.”

  He sensed, rather than saw, Franklin shrug. “I do not know Madeline. And as I said, I am a mere private in that particular army, though I do know that Olivia is planning passage to Boston after the royal ball. I told her she should go to Paris to meet with Buffon as her brother had planned, but now she says that will have to be delayed because her business in Boston is more urgent. I deemed it indiscreet to press her, though I do know she asked Judith for lemon juice.”

  “Lemon juice?”

  “It is one of the substances used for invisible writing, and more ladylike than the urine others use.”

  Duncan tried to make sense of the confusing information as he drifted off to sleep. He was aware of nothing until Franklin jammed his elbow against him. The sound of voices brought him instantly awake. Men were speaking on the outside walkway of the Stone Gallery at the base of the cathedral dome. The words were muffled by the wind, but not their angry tone.

  “If I were a religious man,” Franklin whispered, and his voice faded away.

  Moments later he heard a cry of pain, and what might have been a clatter of buckets on the stairs to the Golden Gallery, then the approach of ascending footsteps. Duncan’s heart leapt into his throat as two voices erupted from the walkway directly below them.

  “Like I said,” came one gruff voice, “ain’t no one up here and I cracked my knee on the damned stair for nothing. That old cow Franklin would never be able to climb up here. They’re gone. Probably grabbed a wherry and are laughing over their ale in some Billingsgate pub this very moment. Waste of time, and us having to be on parade at dawn.”

  “So now we go down and salute the major and report no enemy in sight, sir,” came a weary reply. “God in his heaven, how many damned steps did we climb?”

  Duncan and Franklin did not speak until long after the soldiers had retreated.

  “Five hundred twenty-eight,” Franklin whispered.

  “Sir?” Duncan asked.

  “Five hundred twenty-eight steps from the cathedral floor.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “It’s a curse. I compulsively observe. Some people rejoice at the song of a wren. I wonder how many feathers are on its breast.”

  “We need to stay until the crowds come tomorrow,” Duncan said after a few minutes. “Hastings may have posted watchers.”

  Franklin sighed. “I feared you would say that.” He shrugged. “So the Horse Guards strike a blow against our freedom,” he said absently. “For the night, at least.”

  “I am learning that freedom is a complicated notion,” Duncan said in a contemplative tone. “I think there may be levels of freedom just as Dante suggested there were levels of hell.” Franklin turned with a questioning expression. “Ezra had a friend in the Shawnee lands,” Duncan continued, “a Pennsylvania man named Boone, who I now think is something of a connoisseur of freedom. He said those of the wilds had a different understanding of freedom than those of the settled lands, that maybe it was that difference that got Ezra killed. I couldn’t understand until
I came to London. Here everyone is so bound up with obeying rules that they are blind to how far their freedom is compromised. If the ones sent down the Ohio to kill him had ever tasted the freedom Ezra knew, maybe they would not have enslaved themselves to men like Milbridge, and maybe he never would have been killed.

  “In the wilds a man is born to liberty and his freedom can only be curtailed if he agrees. In London men only have the liberty the king gives them. Not many seem to understand that difference here. Not yet. Conawago says that the American land itself breeds freedom.”

  “The world needs more such wise men,” Franklin said, and dropped into a brooding silence.

  After several minutes Duncan motioned to the sky. “The clouds are passing us. We should sleep.”

  “Sleep,” Franklin agreed, and took out his watch to read it in the moonlight. “My good luck piece has worked again,” he said, holding the watch for Duncan’s gaze.

  “Again?”

  “I was wearing this watch the night my son and I flew the kite in the storm. Only later did I learn that men had been killed attempting similar experiments in Europe. My son, who was just a boy then, decided my silver watch kept us alive, for he was touching the chain when the lightning struck. Later I had a lightning bolt engraved with my initials on the back.” Franklin pocketed the watch and spread the cloak so it covered Duncan’s legs as well. “Sleep,” he repeated.

  But Duncan could not regain his slumber, and knew from Franklin’s uneven breathing that the inventor too was unable to relax. The clocks of London had struck another hour before Duncan spoke. “There are one hundred ninety thousand and eighty barley corns in a mile,” he suddenly stated.

  Franklin stirred and raised his head. “Pardon?”

  “In a mile are three hundred perches, one thousand sixty-six paces, fourteen hundred eight ells, seventeen hundred sixty yards, five thousand two hundred eighty feet, sixty-three thousand three hundred sixty inches, and one hundred ninety thousand eighty barley corns. Conawago said it was a miracle that the author could count out all those barley corns because surely crows would have descended to eat them as he laid them.”