Free Benjamin Franklin's Bastard by Sally Cabot Page A

she’d left him, asleep in the cradle jammed in at the foot of the bed that Anne shared with Mary. Next to her bed she could just make out the other two beds, pushed in tight with barely a foot between them, piled double and triple with her remaining five siblings. She sat down. Mary said, “Is he gone? Did he bring more money?”
    “He brought no money.” She paused. Could she say the words? Could she make them doubly real by letting them into this room too? “He wants William.”
    Mary flew upright. “What for?”
    “To raise up.”
    “To raise up!”
    Unable to speak, Anne nodded, not knowing if Mary could see her or not, but she seemed to. “To raise up,” she repeated. “Oh, Annie, what luck!”
    Oh, traitor Mary!
    Anne went to the cradle and picked up the boy; he was either too full of sleep to cry or already understood inside his tiny self that one person crying in so small a space was sufficient. After a time Anne felt Mary’s thin arm creep around her shoulder, her sleep-knotted hair come down against her cheek. “Lucky William,” she said. “Poor Annie.”
    Cruel, cruel Mary. She could have picked any words but those that might have left Anne with her conviction.
     
    A WEEK PASSED AS a blink, even less when viewed through the never-ending tears. Anne raged at the tears, at Franklin, at poor Mary, at her mother, at any small child who crossed her path. The only one spared was William, but William did not spare her—he woke through the night as he hadn’t done for some time; he cried even after he was fed, he pushed and struggled in her arms. But five days passed with Anne still fixed in her resolve to keep her child with her; she went to bed on the fifth night, a hot one, so stifling that when William woke flushed and fussing she was convinced he’d fallen ill. She sat cradling him in her arms and thought no one single thought that she could name, but one minute she was convinced of one thing and the next minute all was over. She’d decided. She knew. Or perhaps she’d only understood what she’d known five days before. William must go with Franklin.
    Odd how it was that once the matter was settled in Anne’s mind, William settled too. She carried him below stairs and sat in the dark and told him all she could dream of his new life to come; her voice seemed to soothe him and she knew it soothed her; his dead-sleeping weight grew heavy in her arms.
    They sat so till dawn.
     
    ANNE DIDN’T WAIT FOR Franklin to come back. At the end of the week she sent a note to the print shop with her eight-year-old brother, George. Take him now. Now while her will stayed strong. She was above stairs, folding and refolding William’s fresh-laundered clouts and shifts, when the knock came. She picked William out of his cradle and changed him from wet to dry, put him in the best of the linen, took up her father’s China-blue flannel scarf and laid it over her shoulder for William to rest against. Mary picked up William’s clothes and they descended the stairs, but Mary only continued as far as the table, where she set down William’s clothes and turned around.
    Franklin was sitting alone in the kitchen in one of the better chairs, doing something to the rung of another. As Anne came into the room he set down the chair and stood up; looking from the frail babe to the man, she was aware more than ever of the strength and power in him, but she looked longest at his face, taking a final cast of it. She reminded herself that she’d never seen anything hard or cruel in it; in fact, Franklin had been fairer than most. The money, yes, but who else would have found a place for her child at his hearth or a situation for her in an upholstery shop? Not the corder, certainly. Not the shipwright. Anne thought these things as she carried William to Franklin and held him out; Franklin opened his mouth as if to speak, but she shook her head violently; she needed to get her own words out while she still had her voice.