precepts. Its emphasis on moral probity and charity, instead of dogma and superstition, make its commonsense teachings suspect to religious conservatives. Its exclusivity makes it a subject of jealousy and rumour.
‘Why don’t all men follow it?’ I asked Franklin.
‘Too many humans would gladly trade a rational world for a superstitious one if it calms their fears, gives them status, or gains them an advantage over their fellows,’ the American philosopher told me. ‘People are always afraid to think. And alas, Ethan, integrity is always a prisoner of vanity, and common sense is easily eclipsed by greed.’
While I appreciated my mentor’s enthusiasm, I was not a notable success as a Mason. Ritual tires me, and Masonic ceremony seemed obscure and interminable. There were a good deal of long-winded speeches, memorisation of tedious ceremonies, and vague promises of clarity that would come only when one advanced in Masonic degree. In short, Freemasonry was a bore, and took more effort than I was willing to give. It was with some relief that I left with Franklin to the United States the following year, and his letter of recommendation and my proficiency in French caught the attention of a rising New York fur trader named John Jacob Astor. Since I was advised to keep some distance from the Gaswick family – Annabelle had been married to a silversmith in hurried circumstances – I leapt at the chance to experience the fur business in Canada. I rode with French voyageurs to the Great Lakes, learning to shoot and hunt, and at first thought I might find my future in the great West. Yet the farther we got from civilisation the more I missed it, and not just that of America, but Europe. A salon was a refuge from swallowing vastness. Ben said the New World was conducive to plain truth, and the Old to half-forgotten wisdom just waiting to be rediscovered. He was torn his whole life between the two, and so was I.
So I descended the Mississippi to New Orleans. Here was a miniature Paris, but hot, exotic, and newly decadent, a crossroads of African, Creole, Mexican, and Cherokee, of whores, slave markets, Yankee land speculators, and missionary priests. Its energy whetted my appetite for a return to urbanised comforts. I took ship to the French sugar isles, built on the back of restive slave labour, and had my first real introduction to the horrid inequity of life and the soothing blindness of societies built atop it. What sets our species apart is not just what men will do to other men, but how tirelessly they justify it.
Then I rode a sugar ship to Le Havre in time to hear of the storming of the Bastille. What a contrast were the Revolution’s ideals to the horrors I’d just seen! Yet the growing chaos forced me out of France for years, while I made a living as a trade representative between London, America, and Spain. My goal was uncertain, my purpose suspended. I’d become rootless.
I finally returned to Paris when the Terror subsided, hoping to find opportunity in its chaotic, feverish society. France boiled with an intellectual sophistication unavailable at home. All of Paris was a Leyden jar, a battery of stored-up sparks. Perhaps the lost wisdom that Franklin longed for could be rediscovered! Paris also had women with considerably more charm than Annabelle Gaswick. If I lingered, fortune might find me.
Now the police might instead.
What to do? I remembered something Franklin had written: that Freemasonry ‘made men of the most hostile feelings, the most distant regions, and diversified conditions, rush to the aid of each other.’ I was still an occasional participant because of its social connections. France had thirty-five thousand members in six hundred lodges, a fraternity of the able so powerful that the organisation had been accused of both fomenting the Revolution and conspiring to reverse it. Washington, Lafayette, Bacon, and Casanova had all been Masons. So had Joseph Guillotin, who invented the guillotine as a way to alleviate the suffering of hanging. In my country the order was a pantheon of patriots: Hancock, Madison, Monroe, even John Paul Jones and Paul Revere, which is why some suspect my nation is a Masonic invention. I needed advice, and would turn to my fellow Masons, or to one Mason in particular, the journalist Antoine Talma, who had befriended me during my irregular lodge visits because of his bizarre interest in America.
‘Your red Indians are descendants of ancient civilisations now lost, who found serenity that escapes us today,’ Talma liked to theorise. ‘If we could prove they are a tribe of Israel, or refugees from Troy, it would show the path to harmony.’
Obviously he hadn’t seen the same Indians I had, who’d seemed cold, hungry, and cruel as often as they were harmonious, but I could never slow his speculations.
A bachelor who didn’t share my interest in women, Antoine was a writer and pamphleteer with lodgings near the Sorbonne. I found him not at his desk but at one of the new ice-cream cafes near the Pont Saint-Michel, nursing a lemonade he claimed had curative powers. Talma was always faintly ill, and continuously experimenting with purgatives and diets to achieve elusive health. He was one of the few Frenchmen I knew who would eat the American potato, which most Parisians regarded as fit only for pigs. At the same time, he was always lamenting that he’d not lived life fully enough and longed to be the adventurer he imagined me to be, if only he didn’t have to risk a cold. (I’d somewhat exaggerated my own exploits and secretly enjoyed his flattery.) He greeted me warmly as always, his young features innocent, his hair unruly even after being cut short in the new Republican fashion, his day coat rose-coloured with silver buttons. He had a broad forehead, wide, excited eyes, and a complexion as pale as cheese.
I nodded politely at his latest remedy and asked instead for a wickeder drink, coffee, and pastry. The black brew’s addictive powers were periodically denounced by the government to obscure the fact that war made the beans hard to come by. ‘Could you pay?’ I asked Talma. ‘I’ve had something of a mishap.’
He took a closer look. ‘My God, did you fall down a well?’ I was unshaven, battered, dirty, and red-eyed.
‘I won at cards.’ I noticed Talma’s table was littered with half a dozen failed lottery tickets. His luck at gambling didn’t match my own, but the Directory relied on his kind of dogged optimism for much of its financial support. Meanwhile the cafe’s gilt-bordered mirrors, reflecting endlessly, made me feel entirely too conspicuous. ‘I need an honest lawyer.’
‘As easy to find as a scrupulous deputy, vegetarian butcher, or virginal prostitute,’ Talma replied. ‘If you tried lemonade, it might help correct such fuzzy thinking.’
‘I’m serious. A woman I was with has been murdered. Two gendarmes tried to arrest me for the deed.’
He raised his eyebrows, not certain whether I was joking. Once more, I had trumped his voyeuristic life. He also wondered, I knew, whether this was a tale he could sell to the journals. ‘But why?’
‘They had as witness a lantern bearer I’d hired. It was no secret her chamber was my destination; even Count Silano knew.’
‘Silano! Who’d believe that rascal?’
‘Perhaps the gendarme who discharged a pistol ball past my ear, that’s who. I’m innocent, Antoine. I thought she’d been in league with thieves, but when I went back to confront her, she was dead.’
‘Wait. Thieves?’
‘I surprised them tearing apart my own apartment and they clubbed me. I won some money at the tables last night, and an odd medallion, but…’
‘Please slow down.’ He was patting his pockets looking for a scrap of paper. ‘A medallion?’
I took it out. ‘You can’t write about this, my friend.’
‘Not write! You might as well say not breathe!’
‘It would only make my situation worse. You must save me with secrecy.’
He sighed. ‘But I could expose injustice.’
I put the medallion on the marble table, shielding it from the view of the other patrons with my torso, and slid it to my companion. ‘Look, the soldier I won it from said it was from ancient Egypt. Silano was curious. He bid on it, and even wanted to buy it, but I wouldn’t sell. I don’t see that it’s worth killing over.’
Talma squinted, turned it over, and played with its arms. ‘What are all these markings?’
I looked more closely for the first time. The furrow across the disc, as if marking its diameter, I have already described. Above, the disc was perforated in a seemingly random way. Below were three series of zigzag marks, the way a child might draw a mountain range. And beneath them, scratches like hash marks that formed a little triangle. ‘I have no idea. It’s extremely crude.’
Talma spread the two arms that hung down to make an upside-down V. ‘And what do you make of this?’
He didn’t need to explain. It looked like the Masonic symbol for a compass, the construction tool used to inscribe a circle. The order’s secret symbolism often paired the compass with a carpenter’s square, one overlying the other. Spread the medallion arms apart to the limit of their hinge and they would draw the circumference of a circle about three times the size of the disc above. Was this some kind of mathematical tool?
