‘Birds can fly where they wish.’
The planter laughed. ‘You have wit, sir! You have wit! And our darkies are as content as a good milker, following the path to the barn each night. They are certainly more content than they look, I assure you. They have longings, but only for the belly, music, and the bed. It’s a favour we’ve done, bringing them here. Saved their souls, we have.’
‘Yet they don’t seem grateful.’ Magnus, I’d observed, had a sly way of getting to the heart of an issue, and his eye would take on Odin’s gleam.
‘God has made the order of things plain, sir,’ the planter said, looking flustered. ‘The Indian has done nothing with America, and the black man nothing with Africa. The Negro harnessed and the Indian confined – both for their own good!’
I was too much the Pennsylvanian, exposed to Quaker beliefs, to accept this nonsense. ‘How can Americans claim to be free when some of us are in fetters?’
‘As I told you, sir, they are not us.’ He looked annoyed. ‘You have contracted liberal ideas in France, but stay with us here in the South and you’ll see what I mean. Washington knew. So does our new president. All things, and all men, in their place.’ Then he turned his head to end the conversation, looking out the coach window at the endless trees. I could hear branches clawing at the top of our vehicle as we creaked on, the driver halting occasionally to chop the worst away.
I began to fear we were lost when we finally hailed a passing black freeman with a box of carpenter tools, and asked him where America’s capital was.
‘Why, you’s in it!’ he replied. ‘You passed the boundary stone half a mile back.’
I looked out. There were two farms, a pile of cleared slash smoking from a desultory fire, and a split-rail fence that seemed to contain nothing.
The Negro pointed. ‘That way to the Big House!’
We came to the crest of a low hill and saw the awkward infancy of Washington. Four months after its occupation by the three hundred and fifty clerks of the federal government, my nation’s capital was a cross between swampy wilderness and ludicrous grandeur. Mud avenues broad enough for a Roman legion cut diagonally across farm, forest, and marsh, extending grandly from nothing to nothing. Beyond, the broad Potomac glinted. There were thousands of stumps, still bright yellow, and three hundred brick and wooden houses thrown like dice on a plan a hundred times bigger than required. I’d heard the district for this city was ten miles square, but why? A decade after the start of construction, all of Washington had just three thousand inhabitants.
The houses, poking up from muddy yards paved with sawdust, led like crumbs towards a neighbouring village called Georgetown, far away on the Potomac. There was a small port there, and more homes across the river on the Virginia side. The four official buildings in Washington were preposterously imposing and oddly isolated from each other. These, I was to learn, were the President’s House, Congress, the Treasury, and the War Department. Most of the legislators lived in a cluster of rooming houses and hotels between the capitol building and the president’s house along a road called Pennsylvania Avenue, still not entirely cleared of stumps. I suppose Washington will grow into itself – institutions have a way of evolving to serve their employees instead of the other way around, and any intelligent clerk will hire yet more clerks, to make himself a foreman – but still, it seemed laughably grandiose. The only good news was that the place was so empty it would be hard for assassins to sneak up on us.
‘It’s as stupefying as Versailles, but in completely the opposite way,’ I murmured. ‘There’s nothing here.’
‘No,’ Magnus insisted, leaning excitedly out the coach window. ‘Look at the angles those avenues cut. This is sacred Masonic architecture, Ethan!’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sacred Masonic 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 thirteen?’
‘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 13th, 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 saviour’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.’
Despite a rusticity that would have made a French 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 4th 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 theatre, 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.