Chapter Two: The Instrument of Providence

The morning post arrived at half past seven, and Pickering did not look up.

He was engaged with the manifest of the schooner Liberty, taken by a French privateer on the fourteenth of February some sixty leagues north of Martinique: cargo of barrel staves and dried cod, value assessed at four hundred and twenty dollars, captain and three hands held at Pointe-à-Pitre pending payment of a sum the privateer's commander had the effrontery to term a droit de visite. He entered the figure in his running tally, noted the date, and placed the manifest to his left. The quill scratched. The fire had not yet taken the morning chill from the room, and the smell of cold ash and tallow from the night's extinguished candles still lay beneath the newer smell of ink and heated sealing wax.

The desk was orderly. It was always orderly. Fourteen vessels seized in the past six weeks, their manifests arranged by date of capture, their losses set down in a column that mounted with the steady weight of a tide. Eleven more awaiting confirmation. The dossier for the President's review was taking shape: not an argument, precisely, but a record—and a record from which only one conclusion could be drawn by any mind not deliberately averted from the evidence.

He took up the post.

Bills of lading from the consul at Kingston. A letter from the port collector at Baltimore, routine. A report from the naval committee, which he set aside. Three personal letters addressed to the department in error, which he would return unopened. And beneath these, on cream paper of a quality that announced its European provenance, a dispatch from Fulwar Skipwith, the American consul general at Paris, bearing the date the fifth of March.

Pickering broke the seal with his thumbnail and read.

Skipwith was a hedger by temperament. He qualified every sentence. He attributed his intelligence to sources whose reliability he could not vouch for absolutely. But the substance, stripped of its diplomatic upholstery, was this: that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Talleyrand-Périgord, had through an intermediary—unnamed, described only as a person of consequence in the Directory's confidence—communicated a private inclination toward receiving an American envoy for the purpose of regularising relations between the two republics. No formal overture. No commitment. A private inclination, conveyed at one remove.

He read it again.

A splinter from the rough edge of the desk caught under his thumbnail as he turned the page, drawing a thin line of blood he blotted against the corner of a shipping manifest without pausing.

A private inclination. From Talleyrand, who had spent the past eight months authorising the seizure of American vessels with the Directory's blessing. From Talleyrand, who had refused to receive General Pinckney on any terms. Offered now—now, when the special session was six weeks distant and the President was assembling his address—with the timing of a man who understood precisely what a hint of negotiation would accomplish in Philadelphia.

It would accomplish this: Adams would take Skipwith's cautious, hedged, unverifiable report and transform it, through the alchemy of his own convictions, into a mandate for forbearance. The address would invite further communication. The session would open on a note of restrained hopefulness. The naval appropriations would be deferred. The frigates would remain unbuilt.

France would have purchased six months of American inaction for the price of a rumour.

Pickering rose from his chair. He crossed to the window, turned back, stood over the desk. Below on Chestnut Street a cartman was arguing with a drayman over the right of way, their voices carrying sharp and unintelligible through the glass. He listened to them without hearing them.

He picked up the Skipwith communication. He carried it to the cabinet on the far wall, opened the lower drawer, and placed it face-down beneath the consular returns from Martinique, which he then replaced in their folder and returned to the drawer. He closed it. He stood with his hand on the brass pull for a moment, feeling the cold of the metal, then returned to his desk.

The dossier for the President would contain what the record required: fourteen vessels seized, eleven pending confirmation, crews imprisoned, cargoes forfeit, the law of nations violated in the waters of the Caribbean with systematic regularity and the Directory's evident approval. If Adams encountered Skipwith's report through other channels—through Skipwith himself, through some Republican correspondent who had heard the same rumour from a different mouth—then his Secretary of State would explain that he had judged a single unverified private communication, from an unnamed intermediary, insufficient to warrant interruption of the President's deliberations during the preparation of a congressional address. The explanation would hold. It would hold because it was, in its own fashion, true.

Fenton knocked at the open door. 'Shall I log the Paris dispatch in the morning register, Mr. Secretary?'

Pickering did not look up from the ledger. 'Log it received. It requires no immediate action.'

'And the dossier for the President's secretary, sir—shall I note the Paris dispatch among the materials reviewed?'

The quill stilled above the page.

'Note it received. The dossier is complete as assembled.'

Fenton withdrew. The ink had gathered at the nib and now dropped—a single dark bead on the white page, spreading at its edges into the grain of the paper. Pickering blotted it without expression.

He had perhaps four days before Adams sat down to compose his address. Four days in which Skipwith might write again, or some Philadelphia merchant with Bordeaux connections might carry the same rumour to Jefferson's house on Maiden Lane, or the French consul might present himself at the State House with a letter of conciliation folded in his breast pocket. Four days was not a long time. It was, however, sufficient—provided he did not waste it in contemplation of what he had just done.

He returned to the ledger.

---

The claret arrived before Wolcott did, set down by a boy who disappeared without speaking. Pickering poured a measure, tasted it, and set the glass aside. Vinegar and something beneath the vinegar—the rot of wine stored too near the kitchen. He did not pour a second measure.

Wolcott arrived seven minutes past the appointed hour, shaking rain from his hat, his colour high from the cold. He sat across from Pickering without ceremony, examined the fowl on the platter between them, and cut himself a portion with the unhurried attention of a man reserving his energies for whatever unpleasantness was coming.

'The estimates,' Pickering said.

Wolcott chewed, swallowed. 'Good evening to you, too, Colonel.'

'Adams expects them within ten days. If they do not arrive in a form that supports the programme, the naval appropriations fail in committee before the session is a fortnight old—and everything the General has built toward is finished before it has begun.'

'He will have them.' Wolcott refilled his own glass, held it to the candlelight, and drank without apparent objection to the sourness. 'He will have accurate ones.'

Pickering pushed his plate away.

'The depredation losses alone,' he said, 'if properly aggregated—the Eliza, the three brigs out of Baltimore, the schooner Perseverance taken off Barbados in January—'

'I know the vessels.' Wolcott cut another piece of fowl. 'I have the manifests. The aggregate loss runs to approximately eighty thousand dollars in cargo, with freight and insurance claims running perhaps another twenty. That figure is in my estimates. It is a real figure. I intend to present it as such.'

'And the frigate programme.'

'The frigate programme requires money. Money the Treasury does not presently possess in the quantities that would satisfy the General's ambitions.' Wolcott set down his knife. 'We are servicing debt at a rate that leaves perhaps twelve percent of annual receipts for discretionary expenditure. If I present Adams with estimates that paper over that constraint and the real numbers surface in committee—and they will surface, Pickering, there are men on the finance committee who can read a ledger—then the administration's credibility is destroyed, mine is destroyed, and the whole programme collapses under the weight of its own fabrication.'

'No one has asked you to fabricate anything.'

'You have asked me to emphasise certain figures and suppress others. The distinction may satisfy your conscience. It will not satisfy a Senate committee.'

The candle between them wavered. Wolcott reached forward and steadied the holder.

'The debt-service figures can be presented in an appendix,' Pickering said. 'The aggregate depredation losses, the projected cost of unprotected commerce over the next twelve months, the insurance premiums already elevated beyond what Philadelphia houses can sustain—those figures belong at the front of any honest accounting. That is not suppression. That is organisation.'

Wolcott regarded him with a measured stillness, the look of a man whose scepticism had long since hardened into something beyond argument. 'If Gallatin calls me to testify—and he will call me, Pickering, he will make a public spectacle of it—I will be required to account for every figure I have placed in the foreground and every figure I have placed behind. I will not answer falsely before a Senate committee to satisfy the General's timetable.'

'The General has already outlined which appropriations to advance. Three frigates—not gunboats, frigates—with the Constitution and United States completion schedules accelerated. He has identified Sedgwick and Harper as the committee voices to cultivate. He has been specific, Mr. Wolcott. Specific in ways that require Treasury's numbers to support the case, not contradict it.' Pickering let the pause do its work. 'Your caution, at this juncture, risks something more than exposure. It risks your position in the only arrangement that will protect either of us when Adams discovers what has been done in his name.'

The claret turned in Pickering's jaw as he swallowed—sharp and flat simultaneously, coating the back of his throat.

Wolcott was quiet. He cut a smaller piece of fowl, did not eat it. The rain had resumed against the glass, a steady percussion that filled the silence between them.

'He wrote to you separately,' Pickering said.

Wolcott's knife rested against the edge of his plate.

'He did.'

'Then you know the scope of what is being coordinated.' Pickering kept his voice level, his hands flat on the table. 'You are not standing at the edge of a decision. You are already in it. The question before you is not whether you will support the estimates—it is whether you will do so in a manner that serves the programme or in one that hedges so carefully it serves nothing at all.'

Wolcott considered the untouched fowl on Pickering's plate. Then his own glass. Then the curtained window, where the rain pressed steadily against the pane.

'The debt-service constraints will appear in the appendix.'

Pickering reached across the table and refilled Wolcott's glass without being asked. The claret ran dark in the candlelight, nearly black. Neither man remarked upon it.

'There is one further matter.' Pickering set the bottle down. 'The General has indicated that certain communications—between himself and members of the administration, touching the naval programme—should not pass through the ordinary departmental post. The courier arrangements are to be private. Fenton will not handle them. Your own clerk is not to be informed of the contents.'

Wolcott met his gaze across the rim of his glass.

'Private couriers. Between the former Secretary of the Treasury and the sitting Secretaries of State and War.'

'Between men of common purpose, at a moment when the Republican press has demonstrated its willingness to publish what it cannot legally obtain. The Aurora has already printed extracts from departmental correspondence it should not possess. You are aware of this.'

'I am aware of it.' Wolcott set his glass down. The ease had gone from his posture; what remained was something more careful, and more cold. 'I am also aware that private couriers, if discovered, will be characterised as something considerably more injurious than a precaution against Bache's people.' His eyes went to the flame. 'I will want it understood—between us, and in whatever record exists—that the estimates I provide are accurate. Whatever use is made of them afterward is a matter of political judgement, not Treasury's.'

'Understood.'

'Then we are agreed.'

The rain against the window had not lessened. Somewhere in the building below them a door opened and closed, admitting a brief cold draught that reached even to this room, stirring the curtain's hem. Pickering did not look toward it. He was already composing, in the back of his mind, the letter to McHenry that would need to go out before morning.

---

The courier had come and gone before the watchman made his nine o'clock round, which was as it should be. Pickering placed Hamilton's letter on the writing desk and stood over it, his hands at his sides.

Third Street was quiet beneath the window. The night air carried the smell of wet stone and horse dung and, beneath these, the faint sweetness of the linden trees that lined the far side of the street—spring insisting upon itself regardless of what men arranged indoors. Somewhere several streets distant a watchman called the hour, his voice carrying thin and flat across the wet rooftops.

Hamilton's seal—the small lion's head in dark wax—sat intact at the fold. Pickering had carried the letter from the hall without breaking it. He sat down. Took up his penknife. Pressed the blade beneath the wax.

Adams's face came to him then, unbidden: the inauguration chamber, the old man's eyes moving over the gallery with that particular New England earnestness, that look of a man who believed himself equal to what the day required. The trust in the set of his jaw. The way he had held the Bible as though the oath were still alive in his hands after the words were spoken.

The penknife held. Pickering's wrist did not move.

Three seconds. Perhaps four.

If he did not read this letter—if he committed it to the fire unread and wrote to Hamilton that no communication had arrived—he would be free of whatever it contained. Free for perhaps a fortnight, until Hamilton wrote again, or until McHenry received his own copy and acted upon it without him, and the programme moved forward without his hand upon it. That was the cost of not reading: not safety, but irrelevance. The thing would proceed. It would proceed without him, and he would have surrendered the only position from which it could be shaped toward its proper end.

He broke the seal.

He unfolded the pages—three of them, covered in Hamilton's exact, vertical hand, each letter formed with the precision of engraving—and read them through once in silence, standing. Then he sat, drew the lamp closer, and read again, his lips moving over the sentences without sound at first, then with the faintest audible breath, the way a man commits a text to memory and wishes to be certain he has construed it rightly.

The frigates, and not the gunboats: I cannot overstate this distinction. Hamilton had underlined the word frigates twice. The gunboat programme flatters a defensive posture we cannot afford to assume. What the republic requires is the capacity to interdict, not merely to repel. Sedgwick understands this; cultivate him. Goodhue will follow where Sedgwick leads, and Harper needs only to be persuaded that the measure originated with himself.

Outside, a cart horse shifted in its traces—a slow iron scrape across cobblestone.

The address to the special session must foreclose the diplomatic path without appearing to do so. The President's language should speak of injury and remonstrance—it must not offer negotiation, nor hint at receptivity to French overture. Any such language will be seized upon by the Directory as licence to temporize, and by the Republicans here as proof that forbearance is warranted. The address is a military instrument as much as a political one. You are in a position to ensure it serves both functions.

Pickering set the pages down. He had known, in the abstract, that this was what the situation required. He had known it since the fourth of March, watching Adams take the oath with that expression of earnest, insufficient virtue. But to see it rendered in Hamilton's hand—laid out with the precision of a military order, each element in its proper sequence, the congressional voices named, the rhetorical strategy specified—was to feel the difference between a conviction and a plan. He had been carrying the conviction for months. He held the plan now.

He read the passage again, his eyes moving more slowly, the way a surveyor moves over ground he intends to claim.

I have, moreover, had occasion to speak privately with Mr. Liston on the subject of naval cooperation in the Caribbean theatre. His Majesty's government is not insensible to the advantages of a coordinated American presence, and the minister has expressed views—informally, and without prejudice to any formal negotiation—that suggest the possibility of concurrent operations against French privateers in those waters. This is a matter I would not commit to paper under ordinary circumstances. I confide it to you because you will perceive, as I do, that the architecture of the thing is already in place; it requires only the political will to complete it.

Pickering laid the pages on the desk.

Liston. The British minister. Hamilton had been treating with Liston about naval cooperation in American waters, and the President of the United States knew nothing of it. If this correspondence were found—if Bache's people, or Jefferson's, or any Republican with access to the post obtained so much as a précis of its contents—neither the General nor his Secretary of State would survive the fortnight. The whole design Hamilton described would be exposed as what its enemies would call it: a conspiracy between the head of the State Department, a private citizen of New York, and the representative of a foreign crown, conducted behind the back of a sitting president, to manoeuvre the republic into a war it had not chosen and could not yet sustain.

He knew this. He sat with it for the space of several breaths, the pages before him, the night quiet outside.

Then he drew the inkwell close and began.

Dear General McHenry—I write in haste, but with full deliberation. There are several matters touching the forthcoming session and the naval estimates which require your immediate attention, and which I believe you will find consonant with the views expressed to us both by a mutual friend whose judgment I need not here identify...

He wrote quickly, without hesitation, his own hand less perfect than Hamilton's but no less certain. When he had finished McHenry's letter he composed Sedgwick's, and when Sedgwick's was done he folded both and placed them beneath the paperweight, ready for the morning courier.

Hamilton's pages he read once more before folding them. The penmanship was exemplary throughout. Not a crossing-out. Not a word misplaced. He held the sheets over the lamp flame for a moment—long enough to feel the heat climb toward his fingers, long enough to understand that he was choosing not to let them catch—then folded them and slid them beneath the false bottom of the document box, where they would remain until he determined whether to destroy them or preserve them as the sole record of what had been asked of him.

He had not yet decided which. He suspected he already knew.

---

The letters to McHenry and to Sedgwick had gone with the morning courier. The curated dossier had departed for the President's secretary an hour before the sun cleared the rooftops of Chestnut Street. The office smelled of fresh sealing wax and, beneath it, the faint horse-sweat of the street rising through the open sash—spring arriving in Philadelphia as it always did, with more odour than warmth.

Pickering was annotating the consular returns from Martinique when Fenton appeared in the doorway with Tench Coxe's card held between two fingers, at a distance that suggested the clerk had formed his own opinion of the visit.

Pickering set down his pen.

Coxe. Formerly Commissioner of Revenue, formerly a man who had occupied an office in this very building and understood its filing system with a precision Pickering had never found reassuring. Now drifting, by all report, toward the Republican press—Bache's circle, the Aurora's orbit. He knew which questions to ask because he had once been trusted with the answers. And if Coxe had come this morning—this particular morning, the day after the dossier had gone to Adams's secretary, the day after the letters had gone into the post—then Coxe had not come by accident.

If he had come to confirm what he already suspected about the Paris communication—if some thread of the rumour had reached him through the French consulate, through a Bordeaux merchant, through any of the dozen channels by which intelligence moved in this city—and if he left this office with that confirmation, the story would be in Bache's hands before nightfall. The President would read it over his breakfast within the week. He would send for his Secretary of State before the ink was dry on the page.

'Show him up.'

Coxe entered as men of diminished standing sometimes do: with excessive ease, as though to demonstrate that nothing weighed upon him. He was dressed well. He shook Pickering's hand and remarked on the view from the windows—the elms were coming in, he said, and the street had been newly laid with stone.

'Mr. Coxe.' Pickering did not invite him to sit. 'To what purpose do I owe this visit?'

'A trifling one, I hope.' Coxe smiled. 'I am engaged upon a pamphlet—a survey, you might say, of the commerce affected by French maritime activity in the past season. I thought the State Department's consular returns might provide a fuller accounting than the merchant reports I have assembled.'

'A pamphlet.'

'For public instruction. There is considerable confusion abroad as to the extent of the depredations, and I thought a sober enumeration—'

'The consular returns are not available to private individuals during the preparation of a congressional address.' Pickering crossed to the cabinet and removed a bound volume of the previous year's shipping registers, placing it on the desk between them with a deliberate thud. 'The department's files are under restriction pending the President's communications to the legislature. However.' He opened the register to a middle page and turned it to face Coxe. 'The published shipping registers for the preceding calendar year are available to any member of the public. They will provide you the aggregate figures you require. I trust that will serve your pamphlet.'

Coxe looked at the register. He did not touch it. 'These are last year's figures.'

'They are the figures available to private individuals, Mr. Coxe. The current year's returns are restricted, as I have said.'

A pause. Coxe's smile did not precisely disappear; it became a different thing—attentive, measuring.

'Of course,' he said. 'I had not thought of it in those terms.'

Coxe moved toward the window, unhurried, and looked down at the street. 'I spoke last week with a merchant of this city—a man with connections to the consular establishment in Bordeaux. He mentioned, in passing, that the French consul here had been making certain overtures. Conciliatory in character, he said. That the Directory, or persons close to it, had indicated a willingness to receive an American—'

A horse and cart came over the cobbles at that moment with a crack and clatter that filled the room, and both men paused, and the distance between them contracted by half a step as Coxe leaned slightly forward to complete the sentence, so that when he said an American envoy it arrived at a range that was nearer to confidence than conversation.

Pickering waited until the cart had passed. Then: 'The Directory has been making similar overtures since before the Jay Treaty, and they have uniformly preceded fresh instructions to its privateers. What your merchant acquaintance received was dissimulation of a pattern well established in the diplomatic record. The Directory speaks peace in its correspondence and war through its commanders in Guadeloupe.' He held Coxe's gaze without blinking. 'It is to be observed that private intelligence of this character can appear persuasive to those without access to the fuller picture.'

Coxe turned from the window. The ease was still in his posture, but his eyes had settled into something more deliberate. 'Then the department has received no communication of a conciliatory character from Paris. Nothing that might bear upon the President's address.'

'The department has received what it has received, Mr. Coxe.' Pickering closed the shipping register and returned it to the cabinet—the same motion that brought him within two feet of the lower drawer, which he did not open—and shut the cabinet door with a click that carried in the quiet room. 'Its contents are not a matter for public discussion prior to the President's communication to Congress.' He crossed to the door and opened it. 'I regret I cannot be of greater assistance to your pamphlet. The department's obligations to the legislature must take precedence over all other applications, however well-intentioned.'

Coxe retrieved his hat from the chair where he had not been invited to leave it. He studied Pickering for a moment with an attention that was not hostile and not satisfied. Then he looked, with equal deliberateness, at the brass-fitted document box—which sat in plain view of anyone who entered the room, as it always had.

Pickering did not follow his gaze. He held the door.

'I am grateful for your time, Mr. Secretary.'

'Good morning, Mr. Coxe.'

The door closed. Pickering did not move from it immediately. He stood with his hand on the latch, listening to Coxe's footsteps descend the stair—unhurried, deliberate, the tread of a man composing his next sentence as he walked—and then the street door, and then nothing.

He crossed to the cabinet. He opened the lower drawer and looked at the Skipwith communication lying face-down beneath the Martinique returns. He did not touch it. Three breaths, then he closed the drawer.

The document box sat on the corner of the desk. Hamilton's pages lay beneath its false bottom, neither destroyed nor safe. Tench Coxe was walking south on Chestnut Street toward Benjamin Bache's office on Fourth Street—carrying nothing Pickering had given him, and the confirmation of everything he had come to find. That single suppressed dispatch was the document that could unravel every arrangement Pickering had made in the past twenty-four hours: filed but not forwarded, recorded in Fenton's register as received and requiring no action—a description that would not withstand an hour's ex

amination by any man who understood what it contained.

If Coxe reached Bache before the President's address was drafted—if Bache had a correspondent at the French consulate, which he almost certainly did—the rumour of Talleyrand's overture would be in print within the week. Adams would read it over his breakfast. He would send for the document. He would find it in the lower drawer of a cabinet in his Secretary of State's office, filed beneath the Martinique returns, logged as received and requiring no action, on a date three days before the President had composed an address to Congress that contained no word of it.

He had perhaps three days. Perhaps fewer, if Bache's compositor worked through the night, as he was known to do when the material warranted it.

Pickering returned to the desk. He drew a fresh sheet from the stack beside the inkwell, uncapped the standish, and reached for his pen—and then held it suspended above the blank page, because the letter to Hamilton had to be written with precision that admitted no subsequent misreading, and he had not yet determined the precise degree of confirmation it was safe to commit to paper. Too much, and the letter became a warrant. Too little, and Hamilton would interpret the silence as hesitation and act without him, which was the one outcome more dangerous than the present arrangement.

He was still composing the opening sentence in his mind when the outer door opened without a knock.

Fenton stood in the frame, his colour wrong, his composure visibly assembled rather than natural. Behind him, at the edge of Pickering's vision, a second figure waited in the anteroom—a man in a riding coat, dusty from the road, holding his hat against his chest with both hands.

"A courier, Mr. Secretary." Fenton's voice had the particular flatness of a man delivering news he does not wish to be associated with. "From Quincy. He rode through the night."

Pickering set the pen down.

"The President," Fenton said, "has altered his intention. He writes that he will return to Philadelphia within the fortnight—and that he wishes the full correspondence with the French mission laid before him upon his arrival. All of it. His word, sir: all."

The courier did not move. The letter was already in his outstretched hand.