The Dakota Cipher

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 4^th. 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!’

‘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!’