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  Philadelphia

  October 16, 1737

  The tension that hung in the air last night lingered still.

  Anna was on the upper deck of the Charming Nancy, spreading freshly washed laundry on a ship’s yard to dry in the sun.

  Bairn lowered his voice. “Is something wrong?”

  “You tell me.” Anna hung the last shirt over a rigging and leaned her back against the railing. “You seemed different after supper.” She tilted her head. “Did your mood have anything to do with the quarrel you had with your father?” The afternoon sun caught Bairn full on the face.

  “Y’ think I was to blame for the quarrel, dinnae y’?”

  “Truly, I don’t know.” Who was to blame for the quarrel seemed far less important to her than the anger that flared between them. In that moment they were no longer father and son, but strangers.

  How could a man and son be reunited after years apart with such rejoicing . . . yet scarcely a week later, they had stood glaring, hands on their hips, legs stiff, thoroughly frustrated and exasperated with each other?

  “Then am I mistaken in my thinkin’?”

  “The land your father chose, he described it differently than you did.” For the last week, Jacob Bauer waxed eloquent as he filled everyone’s minds with images of pristine wilderness. A man could see a long way from anywhere, he said, the sky was that big, the horizon that far. He spoke of the clear, cold creeks and streams that crisscrossed the land and teemed with fish, the plentiful virgin timber for houses and fences and firewood, the wild game that was there for the taking, the untouched soil that was ripe to plow.

  “’Tis true what he said, I dinnae disagree. We are in the Land of Penn and Plenty. But there’s good reason the vast wilderness remains unsettled.”

  “I heard your father refuse to consider your suggestion to go west to Lancaster.” Everyone heard. “He seems determined to see this through.”

  “This thing Jacob Bauer has set out to do—he encourages at great risk.” He sat on the ship’s railing and looked out toward the mighty Delaware, at the wooded islands that dotted the river.

  “You speak of him as if you don’t belong to him. As if he is another man’s father.”

  “When I left the ship as a boy, I stopped being my father’s son.”

  It isn’t true, Anna thought. A man is always and forever his father’s son. But what was true was that Jacob Bauer was not the kind of father, or bishop, that Bairn wanted him to be.

  The initial excitement of arriving in the New World had disappeared quickly for everyone. They all had such high expectations, unrealistic and unfounded ones. Everyone assumed their troubles were behind them, left in the Old World.

  Port Philadelphia was so young compared to ancient Rotterdam, the only other city she’d been to. From the docks rose a well-planned grid of wide streets, a few paved with cobblestones but most remained unpaved, lined with brick houses. Building was going on everywhere. Meant-to-last kind of buildings. The State House was half built, the steeple of Christ Church stood tall and proud. The young city was in a state of flux, with horses pulling carts filled with bricks to building sites or farm wagons filled with vegetables for sale at market.

  And the sounds of industry that carried in the air! Steady hammers that sounded like woodpeckers, the rackety sound of metal wagon wheels on the cobblestones, the clip-clop of the horses. A riot of languages too. Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian—languages she’d never heard spoken. Anna had an ear for languages, a gift from her professorial grandfather, but the variety of tongues overwhelmed and bemused her. Accents too. So many variations of the King’s English—Irish, Scottish, and now she had learned to recognize a new accent, the American one, where it added r’s in some places and dropped them in others. A confluence of influences.

  This New World was an exciting place to be and Philadelphia was at the center of it. A few days ago, Felix had brought a newspaper to her, the Pennsylvania Gazette. The headline reported Philadelphia as the fastest-growing city in the colonies, surpassing New York and Boston.

  But travel due north or west a short distance and the roads were primitive, dirty, filled with ruts. And beyond that, toward the top of the Schuylkill River, a person would be face-to-face with wilderness.

  And wasn’t that the crux of last night’s quarrel between Jacob and Bairn?

  She watched Bairn for a while; his eyes did not leave the busy port. “The last few days, you’ve been so quiet . . . so removed,” she said softly. “I’m beginning to think you wish yourself back at sea.”

  He turned to her. “But if that were so, then the girl I have loved since childhood would not be beside me.”

  “Do you love me, Bairn?”

  He lifted his hand to touch her cheek, and creases angled at the corners of his gray eyes as he smiled. “How could I have ever stopped?”

  But what she should have asked: Was love enough?

  2

  Philadelphia

  October 16, 1737

  Eight-year-old Felix Bauer was having the best day of his life.

  In just one week, he had explored every single corner of young Philadelphia and declared it the most beautiful city in all the world over. The only other city he’d ever seen was Rotterdam, which was old and crowded and smelled like rotting fish, which was why, Felix decided, it must have been given its name. In Rotterdam, the cobbled paths toward the shops were narrow and winding; he had to cover his nose with his sleeve to stomach the stench of rubbish in the lanes. The streets of Philadelphia did not smell, other than of horses and fresh-cut wood. And here the roads were wide, big enough for two wagons to pass.

  Anna had told him that William Penn had witnessed the Great Fire of London, so that was why he designed the streets of Philadelphia to be wide, lined with trees. If there were a fire in Philadelphia, and no doubt there would be, the damage would be minimized. She had also pointed out that William Penn named the streets after trees: Chester and Oak, for example, which was impressive to Felix. Very easy to remember.

  Everything was new in Philadelphia. Each day, while his father and Christian Müller and Josef Gerber and Simon Miller and Isaac Mast gathered in a circle to pray and to wring their hands and pray some more (Who should stand in the portico at the Court House today to keep their place in line? Who should go into Germantown to buy supplies?), Felix would wait until the discussions began, and then he would quietly slip down the gangplank, taking care to remain unnoticed by his mother, who constantly hovered over him. And if it wasn’t his mother who hovered, it would be Maria Müller and Catrina, her walleyed daughter. They treated him as if he was nothing but a child. And here he was, nearly nine!

  Worst of all hoverers was the dead sailor Squinty Eye’s awful dog, who tracked Felix like he was a fox. Anywhere he went, the awful dog found him, looking so pleased, with its pink tongue hanging out.

  Felix had found a favorite route, a long walk through Philadelphia that gave him time to observe craftsmen at work. He made his way down Church Street toward the waterfront, dodging horses pulling heavy carts of bricks. Bricks.

  The wind rustled the yellow and red leaves in the trees lining the front of Christ Church. He stopped to count the bricks lining the enormous walls, built in the shape of a cross with beautiful arched windows, but he quickly lost track of brick rows and got bored. Still, the church was something special, something made to last.

  Someday, he would build himself a brick house. Another for his parents. Maybe one for Anna and Bairn too, if they ever married. No more flimsy wood houses, cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Wood houses burned like dry hay. He wondered where this busy brickmaker worked and if he could apprentice to him. He might keep a lookout for a horse pulling an empty cart and follow it back home.

  Other livelihoods interested him too. He walked past the ship chandler’s shop, then the cobbler’s shop, admiring displays propped in open doorways to lure patrons in. On a street corner, he watched a blacksmith pound nails with his
mallet on a broad anvil, then spent too long watching workers in a candle and soap shop—skimming rendered tallow from boiling cauldrons of stinky beef fat. It was particularly smelly. Cutting wicks and filling molds looked to be endless work. Cross “candle making” off the possible apprenticeship list.

  An old woman tried to sell him a withered apple from her fruit basket, but he had no coins to pay her. He was hungry, though. He was always hungry. Anna said he was growing so tall that one day he would be as tall as Bairn and his father. He hoped so. They were the tallest men he’d ever seen, taller than any in Philadelphia. Catrina didn’t want him to be tall, as if it was something he could control. She made no secret that she planned to marry Felix, which was a terrible thought, a truly terrible thought. He had no plans to marry her or anyone else. Girls were nothing but a nuisance and a headache. Other than Anna. Other than the Sally Lunn bun girl.

  She was his current favorite. On the first day he spent exploring Philadelphia, he followed the aroma of freshly baked bread. He peeked in the windows of the City Tavern and saw a group of men around a table, lifting their glasses and shouting “Salute!”

  A servant girl spotted him through the window and waved to him. She motioned to the door and tossed him a Sally Lunn bun, and he fell in love. He’d never tasted anything so delicious. Each day after that, he walked by the City Tavern and waved to the Sally Lunn bun girl, and each day she would come to the door and toss him a bun. She laughed at his attempts to say “thank you” in English, and said he was a cute little boy. If Catrina had called him a cute little boy, he would have slugged her. But the Sally Lunn bun girl could call him anything she wanted, as long as she gave him a bun.

  He thought he’d go by City Tavern in hopes the Sally Lunn bun girl was working, so he turned onto Second Street, then to Market, and passed The Printing Office and Bindery. A bespectacled man in a leather apron stood at the open door, cheerfully chatting with those who walked past his shop. He spotted Felix watching him and pointed to him. “You there, young boy. You look German. Are you? A Deutschmann?”

  Felix stopped, nodded, and crossed the street toward the man.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Yes. A little.” He understood more than he could speak.

  “Your English is better than my German. Would you try to translate a letter for me?”

  Felix followed the man into the print shop—struck at once by the smell of ink, fascinated by the large wooden machines that looked a little like the looms of the weaver in Ixheim, but these held thin sheets of paper and tiny metal letters. Large windows brought light in, yet there were lit candles everywhere. The man’s eyebrows lifted at Felix’s curiosity. “Every good German should know about movable type. Haven’t you heard of Johannes Gutenberg?”

  Felix shook his head.

  The man reached behind Felix to pull a metal piece of lead out of the wooden printing press. “See this? Type is cast into molten metal and poured into a carved mold. I can change the letters and reuse them. That’s the beauty of a printing press.”

  “So Johannes Gutenberg, he lives in Germantown?” Felix had heard a lot of talk about Germantown among the men in his church. If it were up to him, he would move to Germantown and leave Penn’s Woods as nature intended it. It would save everyone a lot of work.

  The printer laughed, and when he laughed, his stomach jiggled and shook. “That would be rather difficult, as Gutenberg passed on to his glory in, uh, let’s see . . .” He lifted his eyes to the ceiling as if the answer were written up there. “Deborah, when did Johannes Gutenburg die?”

  A red-faced, plain-looking woman barely looked up from her desk, where she was setting type into wooden boxes. “1478.”

  The man burst out with a laugh, as if she had told a great joke. “There’s a reason a woman is called a man’s better half. Anyway, this letter is from a fellow named Christoph Saur. In fact, he has a son about your age. They visited my shop last month to learn about my printing press. So he said, anyway.” He lifted Saur’s letter. “What does Saur mean in German?”

  Felix squinted. Was he jesting? “Sour.”

  “Aha! I’m not at all surprised. You know, his wife left him to go to Ephrata Cloister.” He gave Felix a knowing look, though Felix had no idea what he was talking about. Before he could ask, the printer waved off the comment. “Never mind. You’re too young to know of such things.” He handed him the letter, written in German. “Look at that dramatic handwriting. How can anyone make sense of it?”

  “It’s German. It’s the way we make letters.” Felix wiggled his hand in the air. “Fancy letters.”

  “And Christoph Saur wants German to be the official language of Pennsylvania. I simply cannot abide that man.” He peered at Felix. “So can you translate for me?”

  Felix read the letter. “He says that the Poor Richard’s Al . . . Alma—”

  “Almanack. Poor Richard’s Almanack.”

  “What is it?”

  The man looked surprised. “You don’t know? Of course not. How could you know? You’re fresh off the ship.” He hurried to his desk and returned with a pamphlet. He thrust it in Felix’s hands. “This is the Poor Richard’s Almanack. Tells you everything you need to know about life. Household hints, postal rates, sunrise, sunset, weather forecasts. Farmers can set their clocks by the time of the rising of the sun in this calendar.”

  “Are you Poor Richard?”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” The woman with the red face spoke up. “Everyone thinks so, anyway.”

  “Well, I suppose you could call him my alter ego. Poor Richard Saunders is an unschooled philosopher with a carping wife. Pure fiction.” He winked and tipped his head toward the red-faced woman. “But not really,” he whispered.

  Before Felix could open his mouth to ask another question, the man pointed to the letter from Christoph Saur. “So what are his complaints about Poor Richard’s Almanack?”

  “He says you are using German proverbs and passing them off as English proverbs. He wants you to credit them as German proverbs.”

  The printer’s mouth sagged to an O. “I have freely admitted that Poor Richard’s sayings are not original. They contain the wisdom of countless ages. They belong to everyone. They’re in the general vernacular. I have merely sharpened their point.” He huffed with offense. He reached over to pick up the Almanack, then went to the open door for better lighting and motioned for Felix to join him. “Son, have you ever heard of these? ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ ‘Rather go to bed supperless than rise in debt.’ Here’s one of my favorites: ‘When the cat’s away, the mice will play.’”

  “Wann die Katz fatt is, schpele die Meis.”

  The printer looked at Felix out of the corner of his eye. “A miss is as good as a mile.”

  “Net gschosse is aa verfehlt.”

  “Well begun is half done.”

  “Gut aagfange is halwer gschafft.”

  The man frowned. “The apple doesn’t roll far from its tree.”

  “Der appel rollt weit vum Schtamm.”

  “Interesting. So you’ve heard that in your dialect. In Germany.”

  Felix nodded. “And there’s an extra part too. Der appel rollt weit vum Schtamm ecksept der Baam schteht am Barig.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The apple doesn’t roll far from its tree unless the tree stands on a hillside.”

  The man’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, then his face crinkled up and he laughed like he was a boy. “I suppose I’ve been spending too much time in German taverns.” He broke up again, wiping tears from his eyes. “I certainly believe in giving credit where credit is due, but proverbs come from many sources. Most of them are anonymous and difficult to trace. Even King Solomon borrowed from the Egyptians. They belong to everyone, even Poor Richard Saunders.” He pointed at Felix. “I like you, young man. And I don’t believe I’ve properly introduced myself. I’m the youngest son of the
youngest son.” He lifted his hand and spread his fingers wide. “Five generations.”

  Felix took off his hat and scratched his forehead. “I’m the youngest son too.”

  “That is a salient feature of a man. The last of the litter. It often means we have to make our own way in this world. Those older brothers have taken the first of everything.” He reached out his hand to shake Felix’s. “My name is Benjamin Franklin.” He peered at Felix. “And who might you be?”

  “Felix Bauer.”

  “Well, Felix Bauer, it’s not every day that a man meets a literate young fellow in this town. Not just literate, but bilingual!” He lifted a finger in the air. “No. Wait. Trilingual! You read Saur’s letter in German, you speak your own dialect, and you can understand English. You, sir, are an anomaly in Philadelphia. Few are the readers in Philadelphia. As a printer, I am sorely aware of that sad fact.”

  “Felix!”

  Felix whipped his head around to see his brother Bairn striding across the street. “Uh-oh.”

  “I take it you are acquainted with that tower of a man.”

  “My brother.” He turned back to Mr. Franklin. “I must go.” He started across the street, but in two short strides, mid-street, Bairn reached him and grabbed his shoulder to stop him.

  “Did y’ let yer mother know where y’ve gone?”

  “I was helping the printer with German!”

  Bairn gave him a look as if he was telling a tall tale. “Yer to get t’ the ship right now and stop wanderin’ around. Yer apt to give yer poor mother another dose of the sea devils.”

  3

  Philadelphia

  October 16, 1737

  Dorothea Bauer felt the stares of others when they thought she wasn’t looking. She knew how they perceived her—as fragile as spun glass. Even her husband had sharp words for her this morning. “Why can’t you be happier?” Jacob said. “Our boy has returned to us, like Lazarus risen from the dead.”

  Of course she was happy to have her eldest son reunited with them. Of course she was! It was a miracle.