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, sceptre, 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 ploughed 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 realise 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.
As 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 rumour. 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 theorised.
‘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.
‘Ageing 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?’