Caller of Lightning Read online

  Jemima returned her attention to King. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten you,” she said, as she put the sliced turnips to one side and started pounding more flour into pie dough. “It is one thing to be down in the doldrums. Anybody can get in a mood. But this behavior of yours is not a benefit to anyone, least of all yourself. You need to find a secret place. Somewhere to hold your thoughts away from showing them.”

  King stood up in anger, his work forgotten. He turned on the older woman, eyes wide and all the hotter from the effort he made to keep his voice under control. “I need a secret place, do I? A secret place where I can remember the old gods of home, maybe?”

  Jemima just looked at him, saying nothing.

  “Or where I can be more than I am? How about that? Can I choose who I talk to, and when, in this secret place? Can I go there and stop pretending I’m just a thing, some object the masters own, same as they own these boots? What I need is a bugger-all place where I can do more than dub shoes or haul sacks of flour!”

  “That’s fool talk, and you know it.”

  “Maybe so. But I’ll not live and die under such a guise as you and Peter are content to.”

  “Content?” said Peter from the doorway. He stood there holding the meat he’d brought back from the cellar. “Master Ben is better than some. At least he pretends at guilt. But he isn’t going to manumit you if you destroy the tranquility of his home. Mind that.”

  King spun in surprise; fists clenched. His jaw moved as though he had something else to say, but the plain sadness in Peter’s eyes stalled him.

  Peter walked past, shaking his head. “Put those fists away, boy. They’ll only get you killed if you use ’em. Fists is a weapon for the weak.”

  King scowled in anger. “They use them on us.”

  “That’s what I just said. A weapon for the weak. At least they provide for us, King.” Peter handed his haul over.

  Jemima took the salted meat from her husband. “Provided for is something, not nothing,” she said to King, trying to get through to the boy. “You don’t know how it can be. Mr. Franklin hired Peter out a couple of years ago. I didn’t see him for six months. There’s no good being trouble to anyone, as all it does is cause trouble for all.”

  King glared at her and left the room, abandoning his task.

  Without a word, Peter picked up the dropped rag and set to finishing the shoes. There were other tasks still to get to, and at the end of the day, the first rule was always to make sure the work was done.

  The

  Franklin Home

  Philadelphia,

  Pennsylvania Colony

  June 27th

  5

  So Very Clever

  Ben Franklin closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, pushing back against the latest wave of a most pernicious headache. “I swear this’ll be the death of me,” he spoke to no one in particular. For a second he recalled a saying he had considered, but rejected, for the pages of Poor Richard’s Almanack: “Talking to one’s self is the surest way to be certain of having the listener’s attention. If one does not, then one shouldn’t be talking at all.”

  It was late at night and the heat was just starting to cool. Franklin leaned back in his chair and unbuttoned the top button of his three-button shirt, then stretched the muscles in his neck by moving his head in loose circles. After a time his headache began at least to recede, if not fully clear. Ben brought himself level again in his seat, opened his eyes, and stared once more at the Key.

  He wasn’t entirely certain when he had started to capitalize the word to himself. Definitely, he had made the mental shift sometime before the Key filled its thirty-seventh Leyden jar, though. There seemed no end—so far it had exhausted all his available supply of the storage devices. At that point, he had cleared the ledgers and law books from the desk William customarily used, and now its surface held only the Key. It emitted a soft ringing hum he could hear every time he focused on it, which no one else could apparently detect, and continued to glow with an unnamable light that only his eyes could see. But no one could miss the odd, intermittent sparks that danced round it on a schedule of their own conception, leaping merrily to any idle finger that came near.

  The story of the kite and the storm was all over Philadelphia now, but Franklin had sworn his son and wife and the Loxleys to utmost secrecy. Until he understood it, Ben wanted no one else to know—and so far, it had defied any and every test he could conceive.

  The frustration was maddening. The Key brought him back, again and again, to his memory of the frozen world, the lightning strike, and the threatened death of his son. It was a painful thing to relive. Children never truly grow up in the eyes of their parents, and William was no exception. He had earned the rank of captain in the provincial troops at just sixteen years of age and was a handsome, sought-after young man. Yet to Ben he was still rosy-cheeked little Billy, who refused to be put down and wanted his hugs. Franklin could acknowledge and accept the young man who bore his famous name with such stiff formality and decorum; but standing between the two of them, always, was the child who laughed from the tops of trees and played scotch-hopper and battledores in the street.

  In Franklin’s memory of the moment, it was the boy as well as the man holding the wet kite string. The fear that Ben had felt as he watched the lightning reach down the twine, strand by strand, inexorably carrying with it his son’s bright and burning death . . . the ferocious denial that had risen in turn from somewhere deep within . . . these things had changed him. The Key had changed him. And now he could do . . . things. He didn’t dare speak the word “magic,” as that seemed completely and utterly asinine.

  Yet still . . .

  He splayed the fingers of both hands flat on the table to either side of the Key, some six inches away. Immediately the light that only he could see shone brighter, the humming sound increased, and a ripple of small sizzling sparks danced from the Key’s plain metal curves. Franklin brought his fingers together: the light and humming increased. Slowly, carefully, he eased his hands closer to the Key, keeping his palms to the table. With every inch, the phenomena grew more vivid, the sparks longer and more energetic. When they finally touched the skin of his hands, tingling in small bites, he stopped and tried to grow comfortable with the sensation.

  “This will never do,” he admonished the Key lightly, as if it could hear him. “I do not dispute your nature, whate’er it may be, but if we are entwined, then you and I must find our way to a more accommodating partnership.”

  Straining with the effort, he sought the same emotion and resolve in him that had repelled the lightning, intent this time on consciously moderating their strength. “Come alive, come alive,” he whispered, reaching within. Face red, the veins on his temples throbbing with each heartbeat, the Key’s power hot against his fingers, he imagined himself holding the reins of a frightened horse he sought to calm. The image achieved little: if anything, the Key’s sparks grew more intense instead of lessening.

  Finally he gasped and slumped back, his hands coming away from the table. The Key quieted and went mute: sparks gone, hum gone, only the slightest of glows retained.

  Franklin closed his eyes. Headache or no, exhaustion took him and he dozed off sitting in his chair. He was woken by a hand massaging his shoulder. He smiled groggily, “Debby.”

  She reached past him with her other hand, setting down a Betty lamp on the edge of the desk, next to his, which had gone out. “You didn’t come to bed. Still obsessing over the Divine Spark you have received?” Deborah Read Franklin was a stout woman in her mid-forties, just two years younger than her husband. She dressed and acted simply and was comfortable with who she was.

  Ben favored his wife with a warm, if tired, smile. “You’ve known me since I was seventeen. When have I ever been prone to ascribe to the miraculous that which could be calculated and measured with reason?”

  “Ha! Just because you’re stubborn enough to pretend deafn
ess, don’t assume God isn’t speaking to you. And if this is not the Divine, then what? Witchcraft? The Devil?” Her massage dug into his shoulders as if to accentuate her point.

  “This is a taxonomy of energies we are unfamiliar with, that is all. Logic and reason shall guide me. As always.”

  “Yet you’re scared, husband, because I think you know it is something more.”

  “Pfaw. What have I done to deserve a tongue lashing from my own helpmeet?” It was a defense he often rallied to when she had him dead to rights, and he knew it.

  “If you didn’t want a woman with opinions, you should have found some Whitechapel maid to tend you during your time in London. Someone, perhaps, who would have been impressed by the muscles of a young man who could throw paper reams but had no fortune. But you didn’t, did you?”

  He chuckled. “It’s the mind that makes the woman. Can you imagine me with someone lacking in opinions? It’d be worse than trying to stay awake at a reading of the Assembly minutes, save that the torment would extend ad infinitum!”

  “You think you don’t deserve that?” Her hands tightened and loosened, digging into his weary muscles.

  “I wish you had come with me.”

  “I will never board a ship, Mr. Franklin. Dismiss the notion. I have nightmares, and, frankly, I feel faint just talking about it now. But to my point—which you sidetracked me from—your certainty that the world is just a puzzle to be solved shone from the first moment I met you. Dare I say it is fundamental to your nature? There you were, always half a step from running into something, completely distracted and preoccupied by your head. Your hands went about your labors on their own. It made you so handsome. But I always knew when you were close to your hard-sought solution, whatever it might be.”

  “You were? How?”

  “Because you would start muttering under your breath in Latin, all unaware.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. Exactly as you were doing in your sleep just now, when I came to find you.”

  She stopped massaging his shoulders and stepped to the side so she could look him in the eye. “Ben, you must open your heart to belief. Believe you are worthy of this gift. Believe you can summon God’s will. If all else fails, then throw in a little Latin for good measure.”

  He smiled warmly. “I may grab a quick bite and work for another hour. I promise to think on what you’ve said.”

  She bent over and kissed his cheek. “Jemima and I have banked the fire in the kitchen, but there is fresh bread for you in the breadbox. There’s no milk or butter, thanks to Sally. I told her she couldn’t make a favorite out of that kitten, but this evening I found her dressing it in a bed gown, feeding it butter, and treating it as a baby. I fear next she will fashion a pudding cap and leading strings.”

  “Well, I can think of worse things for her to do. Perhaps I shall bring her down to keep me company.”

  “Benjamin Franklin, don’t you dare. And don’t stay up all night, please. You may think you have the energy of youth, but you don’t. Remember that Newton saying you like so much; ‘Genius is patience.’ Well, patience gives you time for rest.”

  “Time aplenty for sleeping in my grave,” he answered, pursing his lips wryly as his gaze drifted away, latching onto the tools on his workbench.

  “We shall see. Good night.” Quite aware that her husband was once more fully distracted by the puzzle in front of him, she did not expect or insist on a response. Taking her Betty lamp with her, she departed quietly.

  Once more sitting in solitude, Ben’s thoughts turned inward. In the seventeen days since the experiment, he had not been idle. Upon awakening at Loxley’s the morning after, he had seen the ten filled Leyden jars and heard the testimony of his son and friend. That the other two men heard no sound from the Key added to the mystery, but even these were nothing to the moment they had all observed when he casually reached down to pick up the Key, meaning to drop it in his pocket, only to find a Vesuvius of electrical fire leaping up to greet his hand. Nothing like that had happened with either William or Loxley; when each subsequent attempt by Franklin engendered the same response, it had fallen to William to carry the Key home with them, wrapped for safekeeping in a sheath of thick leather.

  Each morning, Franklin rose from slumber with fresh ideas for experiments. Each night, he surrendered to sleep later than the evening before, more frustrated by how little he learned. William helped as he could; for the rest Franklin managed, through trial and error, to work out ways to conduct his tests without ever touching the Key directly. Ever the improviser, he had found it comparatively easy to modify the wooden galleys and type tools of his printing trade in order to move and hold the Key as required.

  Working thus, he had weighed the Key in comparison to several uncharged fellows, finding no difference when compensating for mass and volume. This did not surprise him; as he already knew, there was no difference in weight between a charged Leyden jar and an uncharged one.

  Next, he clamped an odd contraption of brass and glass lenses, affixed with moving arms on a pole, to the edge of the workbench. Then he had taken to examining the Key under those magnifying lenses, focusing different lights upon its surface and recording detailed notes of any observable discolorations or imperfections, no matter how small. This, too, yielded nothing.

  The non-generative keys he examined by way of comparison all showed the same natural flaws. From there he sought to exhaust the Key’s apparently endless charge, first by filling all the Leyden jars that could be obtained, then by immersing it in water, and finally by running it direct to ground through conductive wires. These trials achieved nothing, which only complicated his confusion, since the usual problem with electrical experimentation was managing to generate and keep, on hand, a sufficient supply. Nothing in Franklin’s experience or reading even mentioned the problem of overabundance, let alone offered an understanding of it.

  And then there was the matter of the filings.

  That test had taken William’s help. Wearing blacksmith’s gloves, at Franklin’s direction, the young man had taken a steel file to the Key, carefully rubbing along the center of the stem to extract a collection of shavings. In short order, there was a small but visible pile. Franklin intended these for various chemical and temperature tests, having wondered if grains of the Key would still carry some force from the whole, proportionally or not; and whether heating might reduce the force’s strength, as hot metal had long been observed to lower in conductivity. But when the two had examined the Key’s stem, curious to see what underlying material had been exposed, they were startled to see it still utterly unmarred. As for the shavings themselves, they were bright silver, not the brownish-black of the Key.

  Franklin, turning over the file, had found it ruined. All its teeth were shaved off smooth over the course of his son’s strokes.

  Nothing he’d tried since had been any more effective or shed any further light.

  But as Debby had reminded him, genius is patience. Sitting alone in the dark, listening to his house settle and breathe in the night, as even well-made houses do, Franklin considered this instruction and the man who had written it. Newton—scientist and alchemist both, inventor of calculus and believer in the astrological sway of planets . . . what would that great and contradictory man have done, faced with Ben’s current mystery?

  There would have been some Latin muttering then, right enough.

  Of course, Latin had its advantages. As a language it was more precise than English, and therefore a powerful tool for analysis and expression. There was good reason Newton had written his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in Latin instead of English. Ben considered the Third Law, most commonly translated by his countrymen as For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But that wasn’t precisely so. Newton had actually written Actioni contrariam semper & æqualem esse reactionem, which more accurately meant For every action there is always a reaction of equality in the opposite direction. The issues
of magnitude and direction were interrelated, and critical to a proper understanding of the forces involved—

  A notion blossomed in Franklin’s thoughts. It was much too simple to credit. Yet turning it over in his mind, he could feel the rightness of it. Breath hushed, he spoke his first words in more than an hour. “Oh, my Debby . . . so very clever, girl.” He rubbed his hands together. “And you too, Master Newton.”

  Without bothering to light a lamp, Ben returned his hands to the workbench on either side of the Key, this time keeping them palms up. The humming began and the Key’s residual glow brightened, augmented by an occasional visible spark.

  Taking several deep breaths to relax himself, Franklin cast out the memory of the lightning bolt and his fear. He focused his will and his belief into a single wish. Whatever you may be, I don’t reject you; I welcome you. “Et ego recipiam vos.” Warmth rushed through his palms and the humming quieted.

  He waited a moment, then brought his open hands toward the Key as gently as if it were a flower. This time sparks neither erupted nor snapped at his flesh. Warmth spreading throughout him, emanating from the Key, spread far and fast. He could feel it radiating, and there was no world for him other than this moment, which stretched on for he knew not how long before his hands, traveling leagues instead of inches, finally came to rest clasped round the Key.

  Snatching up a ledger, he began taking notes, never noticing young Sally sneaking away from the door, bored of watching him journal. She glanced down to Mouser, “What was that strangeness? What did Papa say . . . Et ego recipiam vos.” She whispered to Mouser, who purred in her arms, watching her intently. She felt a wave of warmth wash over her, like the kitten was a tiny oven. “How odd. Well, Mouser, I accept you!” She giggled quietly.

  The next morning, Debby walked into the workshop, blanket in hand. She draped it over her husband, asleep at William’s desk, then picked up the stack of papers he had written through the night and, carefully tracking the words with a finger, began reading.