Authors: William Dietrich
S
ACRED
M
ASONIC ARCHITECTURE, IT TURNED OUT, WAS A STREET
pattern that appeared—if studied on a map—to make Pythagorean triangles, stars, and pentagrams of the type I’d seen in Masonic lodges and documents. Given that the geometry could really only be grasped on paper and that the “avenues” were little more than tracks, I failed to see any mystical significance.
“Magnus, this architecture of yours is no different than the stars and patterns I saw in Egypt and the Holy Land.”
“Exactly! Look, there’s the new Capitol, its cornerstone laid in a Masonic ceremony, facing a mall like a new Versailles. And at an angle to them, connected by an avenue to make a right triangle, the President’s House! See how the streets echo the Masonic symbols of square, compass, and rule? And did not the colonies themselves total the mystical number 13?”
“But there’re sixteen states now.”
“They rose as one when there were thirteen. Surely it is no coincidence, Ethan, that the cornerstone of the executive mansion was laid
by high-ranking Freemasons, led by Washington himself, on October 13, 1792?”
“Coincidence of what? No, let me calculate…ah, the four hundred and eighty-third anniversary of Black Friday, you’re going to tell me, when the Templars were crushed. But isn’t it more likely that it was three hundred years and a day after the landing of Columbus?”
“But why add that day?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it rained.”
“You’re being naïve! Or intentionally obtuse. Why the thirteenth instead of the twelfth? Because thirteen has always been sacred. It is the number of lunar months in a year, the number of attendees at the Last Supper, the number of days after our savior’s birth that the magi appeared before the baby Jesus, and the age at which the Jews considered a child to become an adult. It is the number of Norse gods when Loki invaded their banquet and slew Balder with a shaft of poisoned mistletoe. The Egyptians believed there were thirteen steps between life and death, just as the English put thirteen steps to the gallows. Thirteen is a Fibonacci sequence number. In the Tarot, the thirteenth card in the Major Arcana is Death. And thirteen because now the Templars’ Freemason descendents are building a new nation on the continent the Templars saw as their refuge and repository. Half your revolutionary generals were Masons! Your own mentor Franklin, who helped draft your Declaration of Independence and Constitution, was a Freemason! All this is coincidence? No, Ethan. Your new nation’s destiny is to stretch west, my friend: west to discover the sacred relics that Norse Templars left for them, as the foundation to a better world!”
“You believe this because of a street plan for a capital that hasn’t even been built yet?”
“I believe it because destiny brought you and me together, here in the utopian wilderness, to follow my sacred map to the end. Fate is our ally.”
“Utopian wilderness? You’re quite mad, Bloodhammer.”
He grinned. “So was Columbus. So was Washington when he challenged the world’s biggest empire. So was your Franklin, flying his kite in a lightning storm. Only the mad get things done.”
D
ESPITE A RUSTICITY THAT WOULD HAVE MADE A
F
RENCH
aristocrat laugh, flags to celebrate the inauguration were everywhere. Patriotic bunting hung from roofs, and visiting carriages were jammed hub-to-hub under hastily erected plank sheds. Several cannon sat poised for celebration, and militia drilled. Magnus and I sent word we wished to meet with Jefferson and that I bore tidings from France, but any audience had to wait until he took office. So on the morning of March 4 we awakened at Blodgett’s Hotel to a breakfast of biscuits, honey, cold ham, and tea, dressed as formally as we were able, and hurried to the Capitol. Adams had already sourly crept out of town at four that morning, unable to bear the sight of the political enemy who’d defeated him.
Only the Senate side of the Capitol was finished. A planned lobby and squat dome was still a gaping hole in the middle, and the Representatives’ chamber lacked a roof. Magnus and I found seats in a Senate gallery jammed with a thousand spectators like a Greek theater, the place smelling of paint and plaster. The construction was so hastily done that there were already stains on the ceiling from roof leaks, and wallpaper was starting to peel in the corners. Two fireplaces threw smoky heat, unnecessary given the throng.
No matter, the chatter was excited and proud. A hotly contested election like that of 1800 was something new in the world, as different from Napoleon’s coup d’état as a feather from a rock. Vice President–elect Aaron Burr, restlessly ambitious but restrained this day, took the oath of office first. I was curious to see him because he’d been compared to Napoleon. He was dark like the Corsican, and handsome, too—both conquered the ladies. Given his reputation
for ambition I expected him to try to steal the stage from Jefferson, but in fact he was a model of frustrated restraint, greeting the chief justice and then taking a seat behind the podium to scan the crowd with sharp eyes, as if trolling for additional votes. His expectant pose communicated that Jefferson’s triumph was but a momentary setback in his own inevitable rise to the presidency.
And then with a thump of cannon and a swirl of fife and drum, Jefferson arrived from his boarding house, walking like a common man because there were still too many stumps for a grand procession of coaches. He entered in a plain dark suit, without the powdered hair and ceremonial sword of Washington and Adams, and without cape, scepter, or courtiers. He was tall, red-haired, handsome in a ruddy, country way—and taken aback by the crowd. After a quick glance to the galleries he shyly focused on the papers he held in his fists, licking his lips.
“He doesn’t like to give speeches,” one of Adams’s outgoing cabinet ministers whispered to a lady friend.
“Good. I don’t like to sit through them,” she whispered back.
My first reaction was disappointment. Jefferson was almost as much a hero in France as my mentor Franklin, but I was used to the command and bluster of Napoleon. The sage of Monticello was unexpectedly diffident before an audience, with a scholar’s bent posture and a voice soft and high as a woman’s. I could see his sheen of sweat, the windows checkering the inauguration with light and shadow. Chief Justice John Marshall gestured and the new president began to read, his voice firm but quiet.
“Why doesn’t he speak up?” Bloodhammer asked, and the Norwegian’s baritone carried so well that everyone briefly looked at us instead of the new president. Jefferson, thankfully, seemed not to notice and plowed on while we strained to listen.
We relied on the reprints in newspapers to clarify what we did hear, and yet the Virginian’s famed intelligence shone through. After
a bitter and nasty election, he assured that “we are all republicans, we are all federalists,” and called for a “wise and frugal government” directed not by ministers but by the American people. The federal government should be small, and civilians masters of the military. Napoleon would laugh at such sentiments and I began to realize just how extraordinary, how revolutionary, this quietly confident man really was.
The blood of the American Revolution, he said, had been shed for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to fair trial, and these were “the creed of our political faith.” Jefferson made it sound so extraordinary that I found myself blushing over my long stay in France. Well, I was home now! No guillotines here!
So was the entire idea of my country planted by shadowy Templars and secretive Freemasons? Was the extraordinary idealism of my nation an accident of geography, or did it really have something to do with dim Norse history? I knew Jefferson was no Freemason, and not even a Christian in the traditional sense: he was a freethinking deist elected because a majority of his countrymen didn’t go to church either, despite my nation’s Puritan origins. It seemed obvious in 1801 that religion was dying before science and rationality, and would be entirely gone by 1901. So how could there be a whiff of ancient secrets and musty gods in this bright new American world? Or was America simply a place where every man, even Magnus Bloodhammer, could read his own desires onto what was still mostly an empty map?
Jefferson finished, the rattle of polite, somewhat puzzled applause died—“What did he say?” people whispered—and then Marshall administered the oath of office. The new president walked quietly back to Conrad and McMunn’s, where he waited like every other boarder for a chair for dinner. He would not follow Adams into the President’s House for another two weeks, because he wanted modifications done.
A
S WAS MY CUSTOM,
I
LIVED—WHILE WE WAITED FOR AN
official audience—on my modest fame, my skill at cards, and my affability, making friends by telling stories of an Egypt and Jerusalem my listeners couldn’t hope to see. I also kept an eye out for menacing strangers and an ear ready for rumor. Oddly, the threat seemed to have disappeared: there were no narrow escapes, no skulking strangers. Magnus busied himself by studying his texts of Indian legends and making lists of supplies for our expedition west and, not as trusting as me, put up makeshift bars across our hotel door and windows.
“Maybe we frightened the villains off,” I theorized.
“Or maybe they wait where we’re going.”
While my colleague studied, I cultivated an air of importance, trading on my connections to Bonaparte and Talleyrand. More than one Washington damsel hinted that she was available if I was interested in permanent disciplined domesticity but I was not, trying out the whores who served Congress instead. One adventuress, Susannah by name, said she’d made it to Washington one week after the clerks and two weeks before the first lawmakers, and it was the best relocation she’d ever made. “They seems able to get a dollar from the government whenever they need,” she explained, “and the most of them don’t take more than half the hour to finish off.”
Businessmen, meanwhile, tried to reform me.
“Now then, Gage, we aren’t getting any younger, are we?” a banker named Zebulon Henry put it to me one day.
“Aging does annoy me.”
“We all have to think about the future, do we not?”
“I worry about it all the time.”
“That’s why investments that compound are just the thing for a man like you.”
“Investments that what?”
“Compound! As your investment grows, you earn money not just on your original sum, but its growth as well. In twenty or thirty years it can work financial miracles.”
“Twenty or thirty years?” It was an abyss of time nearly inconceivable.
“Suppose you were to take a job with a firm like mine. Ledger clerk to begin, but possibility for a man of your ambition and talent. And let’s say you invest ten percent of earnings as I advise, and don’t touch it until, ah, age sixty. Here, lean in and we’ll do the arithmetic. You could purchase some property, take on some debt, let your wife supplement with mending or washing until the children are old enough to contribute…”
“I do
not
have a wife.”
“Details, details.” He was scribbling. “I say, Gage, even a man with as tardy a start as you—what
have
you been doing with your life?—could have a respectable estate by, say…” he pondered a moment. “1835.”
“Imagine that.”
“It requires punctuality and consistency, of course. No raiding the nest egg. A smart marriage, work six days a week, business contacts on the Sabbath, hard study in the evenings—we could develop a plan that makes sense even for someone as improvident as you. The magic of compounding interest, sir. The magic of compounding interest.”
“But this involves work, does it not?”
“Damn hard work. Damn hard! But there’s joy in a job well done!”
I smiled as if in agreement. “Just as soon as I see the president.”
“The president! Remarkable man! Remarkable. But by rumor not all that financially prudent himself. Spends beyond his means, what? Word has it he’s ordering bric-a-brac for Monticello out of excitement with his new executive salary while retaining no real financial understanding. The man, like most Virginians, is chronically in debt! Chronically, sir!”
“I hope he doesn’t want a loan from me.”
“Mention my advice, Gage. Tell him how I’ve helped
you.
I could straighten Jefferson out, I’m sure of it. Discipline! That’s the only secret.”
“If our talk turns to money, I will.”
He beamed. “See how men in high places help each other?”
I knew Zebulon Henry meant well, of course…but to live your brief life for compound interest seemed wrong somehow. I’m a man cursed with the compulsion to toss the dice, to bet all on the main chance, to listen to dreamers. I believe in luck and opportunity. Why else was I allied with Bloodhammer? Why else did I orbit Napoleon?
Magnus did say this hammer, if it existed, might be worth money, or power, or
something
. So treasure hunting was an investment of another kind, was it not? It’s not that I’m lazy, just easily bored. I like novelty. I’m curious to see what is over the next hill. So I resolved to let my lunatic have his say, nod encouragingly—and put it all in Jefferson’s hands.
T
HE
P
RESIDENT’S
H
OUSE, SMART ENOUGH ON THE OUTSIDE
with its limestone sheen and classical decorations, was still just half-finished without and half-occupied within. The pile was a grand two-story affair, ostentatious for a democracy, with a little republican rawness provided by a plank walkway that reached the posh porch and pillars by crossing a yard of mud and sawdust like a drawbridge. The house had two rows of ten grand windows each on the north side where we entered—hellish to heat, I’d bet—and the lower row was capped by fancy narrow pediments like eyebrows. The paneled door itself was unexpectedly human-sized, not some bronze gate, and when we pulled a cord to ring its bell the modest oak was opened not by a servant but by a secretary, in plain suit. He was a shy, strapping, strong-chinned young man with prominent nose and small, thin-lipped mouth who looked out at the pillars as if surprised at his own surroundings. His hair was neatly clipped in the Roman fashion I now favored myself, and his feet were shod in moccasins.
“Howdee-do,” he said in the patois of the frontier, pulling us in. “I’m Meriwether Lewis. Only arrived a few days ago from Fort Detroit and still exploring. You can make an echo in this pile. Come, come: President Jefferson is expecting you.”
The entrance hall had eighteen-foot ceilings but was barren of furniture or paintings. Like the Capitol, it still smelled of paint. Directly ahead was a paneled door leading into a rather elegant but empty oval room, its windows framing a view of the Potomac. Lewis led us to the right, past stairs that I assumed led up to the president’s private quarters, and into a smaller salon with a couch and side table. “I’ll tell him you’ve arrived.” The secretary stepped through another door with the stride of a hunter, his experience as a frontier soldier obvious.
Magnus looked about. “Your president isn’t much for furniture, is he?”
“Jefferson’s only just moved in, and Adams lived here only a few months. It’s a challenge to decide what fits a republic. He’s been a widower for nearly twenty years.”
“He must rattle around in here like a pebble in a powder horn.”
Then we heard a bird call.
A door to Jefferson’s office opened and we were beckoned again. This room, in the southwest corner, was more inhabited. The mahogany floor was bare of any carpet but a long table covered with green baize occupied the room’s middle, and fires burned at either end. Three of the walls were occupied by bookshelves, maps, writing tables, cabinets, and globes; the fourth was windows. One shelf bore an elephant tusk of extraordinary width, curled at its end in a peculiar manner. Others displayed arrowheads, polished stones, animal skulls, Indian clubs, and beadwork. On tables by the windows on the south side were terra-cotta pots, spring shoots just poking through the black dirt. There were also bell jars, boxes of planting soil, and, in one corner, a bird cage. Its inhabitant sang again.
“The most beautiful sound in nature,” Jefferson said, rising from a chair at the table and putting a book aside. “The mockingbird inspires me while I work.”
Close up, Jefferson was more commanding than he’d seemed at the inauguration: tall, with a planter’s fitness, his striking red hair matching his ruddy complexion. The speech I’d heard was one of the few Jefferson would ever give; with his high voice he preferred to communicate by letter. But his eyes had a bright intelligence more arresting than any I’d seen. Napoleon had the gaze of an eagle, Nelson a hawk, Djezzar a cobra, aging Franklin a sleepy owl. Jefferson’s eyes danced with curiosity, as if everything he encountered was the most interesting specimen he’d ever seen. Including us.
“I’d not expected the president’s office to be a naturalist’s laboratory,” I said.
“My habit at Monticello is to bring the outdoors in. Nothing makes me more content than tending my geraniums. I am a student of architecture, but nature’s architecture has the most pleasing proportions of all.” He smiled. “So you are the hero of Mortefontaine!”
I gave a slight bow. “No hero, Mr. President. Merely a servant of my country. May I introduce my companion from Norway, Magnus Bloodhammer?”
Jefferson shook our hands. “You look like your Viking forebears, Magnus. Not entirely inappropriate for your mission, perhaps?” The American commissioners in Paris had written him of our coming, and we’d sent a note ahead ourselves explaining our quest for evidence of early Norse explorers.
“I’d be honored to emulate my ancestors,” my companion said.
“Not with a war ax, I hope!” Our host had a sense of mischief. “But I admire your spirit of inquiry; it would do Franklin proud. And you, Gage, of Acre
and
Marengo? Most men are content to ride with just one side. How do you keep it all straight?”
“I have odd luck. And my fame, I’m afraid, pales beside the writer
of the Declaration of Independence. Few documents have so inspired men.”
“Compliments all around,” the president acknowledged with a nod. “Well. My gift is words and yours action, which is why I’m delighted you’ve come. We’ve much to talk about. I’m anxious to hear your impressions of France, where I, too, served—just after our revolution and before theirs. Extraordinary events since then, of course.”
“Bonaparte is a meteor. But then you’ve done well, too.”
“This house is a start, but Adams and his architects had no sense. A privy outdoors? The man hung his laundry there too. Most undignified for a chief executive. I wouldn’t move in until they installed a water closet. There are a hundred improvements needed to make this a proper place to receive dignitaries, but first I must pry out of Congress more than the $5,000 they’ve allotted. They have no concept of modern expenses.” He looked about. “Still, there is elegance here, a balance between national pride and republican sensibility.”
“The place needs furniture,” Magnus said with his usual bluntness.
“It will fill up, Mr. Bloodhammer, just as our capital and country will. But enough about housekeeping! Come, good dinner makes better conversation!”
He ushered us into an adjoining dining room for our midafternoon repast, Lewis coming too. As soup was served by Negro servants, I began mentally rehearsing the carefully edited description of the Great Pyramid I typically shared, certain Jefferson would be curious about Napoleon’s mystic experience in that edifice. Then a word about Jerusalem, an observation on French military success, some comments about my experience with electricity, an assessment of Bonaparte’s government, something learned about one of Jefferson’s wines…
The president sipped his soup, set down his spoon, and took me by surprise. “Gage, what do you know about mastodons?”
I’m afraid I looked blank. “Mastodon?” I cleared my throat. “Is that near Macedonia?”
“Elephants, Ethan, elephants,” Magnus prompted.
“The American name is mammoth, while European scientists have suggested mastodon,” Jefferson said. “It’s the name scientists have given to the bones of prehistoric elephants that have been found in Russia and North America. Nearly an entire skeleton has been obtained from the Hudson Valley, and many bones from the Ohio. They dwarf the modern kind. Perhaps you noticed my tusk?”
“Ah. Franklin mentioned this once. Woolly elephants in America. You know, Hannibal used elephants.” I was trying to hide my ignorance.
“Just one mastodon would fill this room to the ceiling. They must have been extraordinary creatures, majestic and magnificent, with tusks like a curved banister.”
“I suppose so. I encountered a lion once in the Holy Land…”
“A mere kitten,” Jefferson said. “I have the claws of a prehistoric lion of truly terrifying stature. For some curious reason, the animals of the past were bigger than those now. As for mastodons, no live specimen has been encountered, but then our cold, heavily wooded landscape is not the landscape for elephants, is it?”
“Certainly not.” I took a sip of wine. “Excellent vintage. Is this Beaujolais?” I knew Jefferson was something of an obsessive when it came to the grape, and felt safer with a subject I had some practice in.
“But in the west, beyond the Mississippi, the landscape reportedly opens up. Isn’t that so, Lewis?”
“That’s the word from the French fur trappers I interviewed,” the young officer said. “Go far enough west, and there are no trees at all.”
“Like a cold Africa, in other words,” the president went on. “Home only to Indians with their primitive bows, the arrows of which must
just bounce off mastodon hide. There are rumors, Gage, that the great beasts might still survive in the west. Is it possible that where civilization has not penetrated, the giant beasts of the past might still exist? What a discovery to actually find one, and even to capture it and bring it back!”
“Capture a woolly elephant?” I was not prepared for this.
“Or at least sketch one.” He pushed his bowl aside. “Let’s talk business.” Our congenial host had revealed a new briskness. “You might expect me to be cautious about your proposal to look for Norse ancestry, but in fact I’m intrigued by it. Here is an opportunity for all of us. I can help you two look for whatever artifact you’re after, and you can look for my elephants, plus any other natural wonders you might encounter. Magnus,” Jefferson said, turning to my companion, “you’ve come to America to look for signs of Norse exploration, correct?”
“Aye. I believe my people came here in medieval times to found a utopian community and might possibly have left things of value,” my companion said with the enthusiasm one gives to a newly discovered soul mate. Having braced for skepticism, he was looking at Jefferson with delight. “Ethan, who is an expert in ancient mysteries, has agreed to help me. This would mean a great deal to the pride of my people and perhaps inspire them to seek our own independence from Denmark. From the cradle of liberty I can carry liberty, perhaps.”
“The ideals of America may infect the world and bring fear to tyrants everywhere, from the czars of the steppes to the pasha of Tripoli.”
“I have a group, Forn Sior, dedicated to this goal. You’ve heard of it?”
“‘Old Custom’? It really exists?” The president seemed to know more about Bloodhammer’s group and mission than I did. “Why am I surprised? Look at Ethan here, always embroiled in the thick of things. I want you to see the elephant, Gage. I want you to prove it exists.”
I cleared my throat. “You support, then, the idea of our going west?” I’d rather hoped he’d prohibit the entire idea and send me back to Paris.
“What wonders must lie between the Mississippi and the Pacific!” Jefferson had the dreamy tone of one who’d never been beyond the Blue Ridge, did his exploring in atlases, and would be pressed to camp in his own yard. If I sound a little cynical, well, I’d been hard-used the past three years. “All kind of strange creatures could be out there, rivaling the menagerie already found. There are also rumors of odd volcanoes far up the Missouri. There has been speculation about vast mountains of salt. Not to mention more conventional prizes, such as waterways to cross the continent and furs to supply our commerce. We’ve found the mouth of the Columbia, gentlemen; now we must find its beginning! Geographers speculate it is but a short portage from the source of the Missouri to the source of the Columbia.”
I didn’t like the prospect of volcanoes any more than room-sized mammoths. “So you want Magnus and me to find the headwaters?” I tried to confirm.
“Actually, I hope to send young Lewis here on an expedition to answer what lies between the oceans. Captain Lewis is my protégé, a lad—well, you’re twenty-six now, aren’t you?—who grew up about ten miles from Monticello and for the last six years has served with the First Infantry Regiment, attaining the rank of captain. I have every confidence in him. But I must persuade Congress to finance an expedition. Plus, there’s a little matter of boundaries and empires. The Spanish stand in our way.”
Here I could earn my dinner. “Actually, sir, it is the French.”
Jefferson beamed. “Then that rumor is true as well! This is an auspicious start to my presidency.”
“According to Foreign Minister Talleyrand, a secret agreement was signed the day after the Convention of Mortefontaine conveying the Louisiana Territory back to France,” I confirmed. “The French
asked me to inform you. That gives Napoleon Bonaparte an empire in America as big as our own United States, but he’s not at all decided what to do with it. I’m to report back to Paris the condition of Louisiana.”
“And report to me,” Jefferson said. “We’re as keen as Napoleon. You’re the bridge between nations, Ethan Gage. You can serve Bonaparte and me at the same time. Are he and I at all alike?”
“In curiosity,” I assured. “The first consul envisions a friendly boundary along the line of the Mississippi and ready American access to the sea via New Orleans.”
“I’m glad to hear of friendship. We’ve come near war with the Spanish. And yet I see the west beyond the Mississippi as the natural territory of the United States, not the European powers. If Russia can stretch to the Pacific, so can we. A single nation, Ethan, from Atlantic to Pacific!”
First mastodons, now this. “What would the United States do with all that land?”
Jefferson glanced out the west-facing windows. “Hard to imagine, I admit. I’ve calculated that just filling up the frontier between the Appalachians and the Mississippi will take a thousand years. Yet our population
is
growing. We have more than five million now, a third of Britain and a fifth of France, and we’re gaining on those nations. That’s what you must impress upon Napoleon, Gage. Mere demographics suggest American hegemony. Do not tempt him with thoughts of American empire!”
“The French remain obsessed with the British. Talleyrand asked me to scout out their designs and inquire about alliances with the Indians.”
“So everyone is plotting, with Louisiana as the prize. Tell me, what kind of man
is
Bonaparte?”
I considered. “Brilliant. Forceful. Ambitious, to be sure. He sees life as a struggle and himself at war with the world. But he’s also ide
alistic, practical, sometimes sentimental, and tied to his family, and he has a wry view of human nature. He’s obsessed with his place in history. He’s as hard and multifaceted as a cut diamond, Mr. President. He believes in logic and reason, and can be talked to.”