Though half-deaf, I could hear dogs barking and bells ringing.
Before I could do something more productive about my situation – like run – Magnus appeared again, waving my longrifle. I cringed, but he didn’t shoot me.
‘I charged her with a poker and she dropped this after she missed her shot and hit your basin,’ he explained. ‘You’ve used up three lives in thirty seconds! Plus my perfectly good cane!’
‘I thought I’d performed with her better than that,’ I said with numb wonder, shaking at my near-escape. I tottered towards him, my bare feet freezing and my body covered with feathers, and he began laughing. My assassins may not have killed me, but they had certainly finished off my dignity.
‘You look like a drowned chicken!’ my companion said. ‘You need more care than a three-legged dog!’
‘I wonder if the lovely Gwendolyn was really speaking German. Maybe it was Danish.’ I brushed at the feathers.
‘Too late to ask her. She ran to some horsemen and galloped away.’
A flabbergasted Philbrick was looking out at us from the gaping new hole in the side of his house.
‘Maybe it’s time to get on to Washington, after all,’ I said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Our hurried departure was in late February, shortly after Jefferson’s election in the House on the thirty-sixth ballot – a contest so drawn out and nefarious that it resulted in proposals to amend the Constitution. Burr would be vice president after all, and both men would be inaugurated on March 4th. I kept notes because Napoleon would press me for details. He was as curious about our democracy as he was sceptical.
‘Magnus, do you really think Danish assassins trailed us here?’ I asked, looking warily back as our hastily hired stagecoach rolled out of New York before Philbrick recovered wit enough to bring suit. ‘It’s not like we’ve found anything to prove your claims. Why bother? And why me instead of you?’
‘They could be church agents,’ he said, ticking the possibilities off on his fingers, ‘believing you a pagan blasphemer by association. If it’s the Danes, they assume you’re my guide and easier to finish off than a true warrior like me. The British, of course, will suspect you as an agent of the French. The American Federalists think you a Republican, while the Republicans are whispering that I bought too many maps from the disgraced Tory bookseller Gaine. French royalists no doubt believe you a Bonapartist, while French Revolutionary veterans might want to seek some measure of revenge for your defence of Acre against their comrades. The Spanish probably want to delay your announcement about the change in ownership of Louisiana, and all the powers fear I’ll prove Norway has first claim to the continent. Who cares who’s after us? The sooner we get protection from your young government, the better.’
The trip south over the rock, rut, and root of American highways was travel’s typical misery. We shared our coach squeezed shoulder to shoulder with six other male passengers smelling of tobacco, onions, and wet wool, and at the end of winter the road was a wreck. Puddles were the size of small lakes and brooks had swollen into rivers. At the Delaware, we ferried.
The landscape was a sombre brown quilt of winter farms and woodlots. At least twice a day we passengers would be commanded to shoulder the wheel to get us unstuck, and our privy was whatever brush we were near when need struck our driver. We’d shamble out, stiff and cold, to piss in line like a chorus. The inns were squalid, all the men having to share beds and all the beds sharing rooms. Magnus and I squeezed onto a tick mattress no wider than a trestle table, with four other beds in our dormitory besides. The crammed bodies provided the sole heat. My bedmate snored, as did half the company, but did not turn overmuch, and he was always solicitous enough to ask if I had enough room. (There was no point to stating the obvious: ‘No.’) Exhaustion brought me blessed unconsciousness each midnight, and then the innkeeper would rouse us for breakfast in darkness at six. Philadelphia is supposed to be a two-day journey from New York, but it took us three.
‘Do you really want to be Norway’s Washington?’ I asked my companion once to break the tedium. ‘It sounds like the kind of ambition Napoleon boasts of.’
‘That was just flattery for you Americans.’
‘So what is your modest goal, Magnus?’
He smiled. ‘Immodest. To be much more than Washington.’
Eccentrics always aim high. ‘More how?’
‘With what we seek. To reform the world, good men have to have the power to control it.’
‘How do you know you’re good?’ This is a more complicated question than many people admit, in my opinion, since results don’t always match intentions.
‘Forn Sior enlists the righteous and grooms the good. We try to be knights ourselves in ethics and purpose. We’re inspired by the best of the past.’
‘Not tilting at windmills, I hope.’
‘People call quests quixotic as if to ridicule them, but to me it’s a compliment. Purpose, perseverance, purity. Believe me, it will be worth the hardship to get there.’
In Philadelphia I was regarded as somewhat the prodigal son, having many years before unwisely deflowered one Annabelle Gaswick and fled to an apprenticeship in Paris with Benjamin Franklin, who offered refuge, thanks to his Masonic connections with my father. I’d managed to spend my meagre inheritance in six months of gambling, but now I’d returned with a measure of notoriety: a hero of sorts, bridge between nations!
‘We thought you a rascal, but you have some of your sire’s character after all.’
‘None of his sense,’ I admitted.
‘Yet you know men like Bonaparte and Smith and Nelson.’
‘Franklin’s mentorship allowed me to travel in high circles.’
‘Ah, Franklin. Now there was a man!’
We were stalled two days in Delaware by late snow, and then reached Baltimore a wearying five days after leaving Philadelphia.
‘We’re close, are we not?’ Bloodhammer finally asked crankily. ‘This is a big country you’ve invented here.’
‘You’ve seen but the smallest fraction. Are you beginning to wonder if your Norsemen could have marched as far as your map claims?’
‘Not marched, but rowed, paddled. Sailed.’
The road to the new city of Washington was little more than a track. Gone were the neat farms of Pennsylvania, and the woods between Chesapeake Bay’s principle city and the new seat of government were as raw as Kentucky. Our way would open to a clearing of stumps and corn, with shack cabin and ragged children, and then close up again into a tunnel of trees. Some homesteads were attended by two or three slaves, and while Magnus had seen Negroes in Paris and New York, he was fascinated by their ubiquity and misery here. They made up, I knew, more than a fifth of my nation.
‘They’re black as coal!’ he’d exclaim. ‘And the rags … how can they work outside dressed like that?’
‘How can an ox work without an overcoat?’ said one of our coachmates, a Virginia planter with a whiskey-reddened nose and gnawed pipe he never actually lit. ‘The Negro is different than you and I, sir, with smaller brain and broader shoulders. They’re as fit for the field as a mule. You might as well worry about the birds of the air!’