“Yes,” she said.
“You have taken me so far, Jeannie. But I want my freedom now. My own room.”
Jane was trying to follow him. As it always was with Sir, it was hard to stay with his thinking as he spoke. It was like he was teaching her to read his thoughts instead of hear them, and she was halfway between the two skills.
“Soon an opportunity will be presented to you,” he continued. “You will see it when it comes.”
“And you would have me accept it?”
“I would have you control it. You don’t see yourself as strong, but you are. For Bennie, you have always been. Use that strength to help me come through. And I can bring him with me.”
A creak in the floorboards. Jane scanned the room, but there was no one but the two of them on the bed. Someone had come to stand outside the door. Listening.
The idea of a maid or sentry or Abby or—most unthinkable of all—Franklin turning the knob and coming in to find her sitting next to this unnaturally perfect man filled her with terror.
Go.
She directed this at whoever stood outside.
GO.
The weight outside the door shifted. Walking away. I would have you control it. Sir was right. She was stronger than she thought.
“What do I—”
She turned, but he was gone. Only the smooth depression his legs had left in the sheets proved he’d been there.
11
For the first years they were in Amherst at the same time they saw little of each other. There were sightings on the streets as they made their way to shops or church, nods from Franklin and gloved waves from Jane. But they spoke only at the gatherings at Jane’s grandmother’s house. Polite updates on each other’s activities, which, given that Jane spent her time mostly reading and playing piano and waiting for what she called, in her private thoughts, an “occurrence,” the conversation quickly petered out on her end.
Discovering what interested Jane Appleton fueled Franklin’s curiosity. He found himself thinking about her more than most of the young women he encountered, replaying their first meeting over and over and wondering what it was that had made her show that glint of mischief.
Now that, sir, is flattery.
He was able to speak at greater length of his accomplishments after his election to the New Hampshire state congress. He returned for four consecutive years, the last two as Speaker. All this well prior to his thirtieth birthday.
Jane was small. Every part of her miniaturized, so that one only noticed her size in comparison to something else. Her eyes were dark, hair parted in the middle and drawn over her ears. A fine nose, animated by flares and twitches, each breath an inquiry. People called her lovely, and she was, but in a way that inspired sympathy as much as desire.
Franklin’s attraction to Jane felt to him less of a compulsion than finding himself caught in a spider’s web, its threads sticky, inescapable. There was her place as one of the Appleton girls. There was the Amherst house with its respectability and order. There was the way he wished to repair her as if a miraculous, delicate construction, her thousand tiny screws insufficiently tightened. There was her mother’s discouragements, which made Jane a jewel in his mind where she might otherwise have been only another pearl from a good family.
He told himself he was freely considering all these factors even as the web tightened around him. And so, when Franklin was finally bound, he decided on her.
It was only when history was watching them, during the time they lived in the mansion, that he wondered if it had been she who had decided on him.
When he recollected how they fell in love and calculated the costs, years on, he always thought of the day they sat on the banks of Caesar’s Brook. It was Jane’s idea to walk as far as they did, a mile past the cemetery’s stone wall after a Sunday service in August. She suggested they rest before returning to town, and he chose a patch of clover in the shade of a plum tree for them to sit.
She kissed him in the middle of his guessing aloud about the chances of rain by suppertime. In return he held her so close she slid onto his lap.
“I’m like a bird in your hands,” she said.
“Would you fly away if I let you go?”
“I might. But ride on me and you would rise too.”
She leaned into him, the warmth of her words blooming over his scalp. His hands lay over her back, and he felt the disks of her spine, the liquid shifts of bone. Her body, slight as it was, aroused him. It came to him with a shiver: She would be more than a wife if he chose her. She would be a conjurer.
Jane was aroused and frightened too. In fact, her experience of both—the way their power flared when combined—was more acute than his.
“Do you feel it?” she asked him.
“What?”
“Where we could go together.”
He did feel it. Where we could go. She was speaking of their bodies and the pleasures they could take in them. She was speaking of marital adventure—babies and prosperity and the satisfaction of God’s plan. But she was also hinting at something bigger. Hidden forces they could discover only in each other’s company. Did all lovers think this? Likely so, Franklin considered. But those others were wrong. He and Jane could make something in their union that was more than romance or family or a good name. They could transfigure into a whole new being, mesmerizing and terrible as the unknown approaching from out of the fog.
“It would be like nothing else, wouldn’t it?” he said.
“I think not.”
“The question is, are we brave enough?”
“Bravery? I’m not sure that’s what’s called for.”
“What is?”
“Passion.”
“A yielding.”
“Yes. Submission. Total and irreversible.”
She was laughing, low and smoky. A nervous distraction from the precipice they’d come to. A height so great that if they took one step more they’d find they could either fly as gods or fall the same as any fools who’d gone too far.
12
Jane told the residence staff she was expecting guests. The president was not to be informed of the visit. Perhaps because they had so rarely been addressed by the First Lady directly, each of the sentries, service girls, and groomsmen she spoke to had accepted her terms without question, if only to escape her gaze as soon as permissible.
Franklin was out. A dinner that Abby was attending as substitute. Jane asked her to keep Franklin there as long as possible, which, if precedent held, meant ten o’clock at the latest. She asked the Fox sisters to come to the servants’ entry at the east side of the ground floor at eight. It was a quarter past now. Jane regretted setting the time so late. Seven would have been better. Or six. If these two girls were going to bring her together with Bennie she wanted all the time she could have.
From what Jane had learned subsequent to Abby’s initial reports was that Kate Fox was the quiet one, the younger at sixteen, and possessed with the most acute abilities. Maggie was three years older and had a reputation as a beauty among the husbands whose wives called upon their services, which is one of the reasons they were so often run out of town. Rochester, Albany, Syracuse, Cincinnati. In one place after another the Foxes would set up shop in a fancy hotel and do sessions by the hour. They were young, unmarried women living on the proceeds of witchcraft. It made them the objects of fascination and scorn in equal measure.