and to favor none, in death as in life. When I protested and asked if such duty meant a death of civility without Christian hope, he said, 'Aye, even so.' As I took my leave and wept, I saw Lear escort to Washington's bed chamber a runaway slave, Hercules, whose food I had occasion to taste. I had little chance to ponder this strange sight as the cries of the servants rang out in the courtyard, 'Massa Washington is dead!' I was nearly run over by three horsemen-the slave Hercules with two military escorts.
Conrad reread the text to be sure he got everything right. Then he looked at McConnell. 'So you believe that Hercules delivered the Stargazer text with the L'Enfant map on the back to my ancestor Robert Yates.
You think Hercules is the savage?'
'Maybe.' McConnell called up a portrait of Hercules.
Conrad looked at the picture of the slave with a proud look and fine clothing. There probably weren't too many slaves in those days who merited a portrait.
'Hercules may have delivered the Stargazer letter to my ancestor Robert Yates,' Conrad said, excitedly. 'But he's not the savage we're looking for.'
Conrad called up another portrait, and McConnell did a double take.
The Washington Family was a gigantic life-size portrait of President Washington and his wife seated around a table at Mount Vernon with Mrs. Washington's adopted grandchildren. Spread across the table was a map of the proposed federal city. To the left of the family stood a celestial globe and to the right a black servant. In the background, open drapes between two columns framed a magnificent view of the mighty Potomac flowing to a distant, fiery sunset.
'This is hanging in the National Gallery of Art?' McConnell asked.
Conrad nodded. The map on the table was practically a live-scale model of the L'Enfant map to Stargazer. And the celestial globe and servant completed the picture.
'That slave isn't Hercules,' McConnell said. 'That's Washington's valet, William Lee. He's not the savage.'
'No, he's not,' Conrad said. 'The painting is the savage.'
McConnell looked confused. 'Say what?'
Conrad clicked on the link with information about the painting and up popped the window:
Edward Savage
American, 1761-1817
The Washington Family, 1789-1796 oil on canvas, 213.6 x 284.2 cm (84 3/4 x 111 7/8 in.) Andrew W. Mellon Collection
1940.1.2
'The savage is the artist Edward Savage,' Conrad said triumphantly. 'And this painting is Washington's way of pointing us to whatever it is he wants us to find.'
11
As the Gulfstream 550 began its descent over the Atlantic toward the northeastern tip of Long Island, Serena rubbed her tired eyes, opened her window shade, and took another look at the high-resolution printout of the Edward Savage portrait from the image that McConnell had e-mailed her. The original oil, which she had seen herself in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was larger-than-life, like America itself. Seven feet tall and nine feet wide, the picture was the only group portrait of the Washington family developed from live sittings.
'The savage will show you the way,' she muttered to herself. 'How could I have missed it?'
There was the celestial globe, plain as day, along with a map and clues to its final resting place. The answer was right in front of her, if she could just crack the portrait's secret. If the L'Enfant confession was to be believed, she and Conrad had four days to unravel this prophecy before America would go the way of Atlantis.
She looked closely at the Washington family sitting around a map of the federal city. According to Savage's catalogue, Washington's uniform and the papers beneath his hand were allusions to his 'Military Character' and 'Presidentship.' With the L'Enfant map in front of her, Martha was 'pointing with her fan to the grand avenue'- Pennsylvania Avenue. Their two adopted grandchildren, George Washington Parke Custis and Eleanor Parke Custis, along with a black servant, filled out the scene.
Well, it's no Mona Lisa.
However iconic today, The Washington Family was hardly accurate in its details, let alone any sort of masterpiece. In the seven long years it took to complete the portrait, Savage had never even seen Mount Vernon. That explained the two columns in the background. They didn't exist. As for members of the Washington family, Savage apparently took individual portraits of each family member in his studios in New York City in late 1789 and early 1790 after Washington's first inaugural. He then threw them all together in his imagined scene at Mount Vernon.
That would explain the awkward grouping of the family and their stiff poses. Each one stared off into every direction but the map on the table.
Conrad, however, had another explanation.
According to the report McConnell had e-mailed her, Conrad insisted that this bland portrait contained a great secret, one that Washington needed to get just right to preserve for centuries. And Conrad had demonstrated a simple test at the abbey to prove to the monks that the firm hand of George Washington was behind Savage's seemingly slapdash composition.
Repeating Conrad's experiment, she laid the picture flat on her tray table and with a marker drew two diagonal lines across opposite corners-one giant 'X.' Smack dab in the center of the portrait where the lines intersected was Washington's left hand resting on the L'Enfant map.
The controlling hand of George Washington.
This 'secret geometry,' Conrad argued, was a sure sign that Washington wanted to show that nothing about this portrait was left to chance. Rather, he was communicating an important message.
And she had to agree.
Conrad Yeats, you clever wanker.
The question, of course, was what that message could be. And clever as Conrad was, she knew he would never guess that 'the fate of the world' Washington referred to in his letter to Stargazer was the location of the mysterious globe that America's first president had buried somewhere under his eponymous capital city.
Or would he? She had underestimated Conrad before only to regret it later.
Impossible, she concluded. Not without knowledge of the L'Enfant confession. Which she possessed and Conrad did not.
Using Conrad's experiment with Washington's left hand as a clue, she decided to take a fresh look at the portrait and what he was doing with his right hand. It was resting on the shoulder of his adopted grandson, a symbol of the next generation, who in turn rested his hand on the globe.
Just as interesting was what the boy was holding in his hand: a pair of compasses, Masonic symbols of the sacred triangle. It was as if he was about to measure something on the L'Enfant map.
An unbroken chain from the globe to the map, she marveled, with nobody to witness it save for the black servant.
Truly, Washington intended this portrait to work with the original L'Enfant map to lead Stargazer to the final resting place of the celestial globe.
All of which made Serena wonder about the more important question that Cardinal Tucci had warned her neither she nor Conrad should ever try to answer:
What was inside the globe?
