The Devil Colony(161)

Then there was Gray. He’d sunk into a dark pit of despair, but what would arise out of it: a stronger man or a broken one?

Only time would tell.

So Painter kept quiet for all their sakes. Even coming here was not without risk, but he had to chance it.

Reaching the top of the steps, he crossed under the dome and into the Capitol Rotunda. The huge vaulted space echoed with voices. He sought the second-floor gallery, where giant twelve-by-eighteen-foot canvases circled the dome’s walls. He found what he was looking for easily enough on the south side. It was the most famous painting up here: Declaration of Independence by John Turnbull.

He stood before it, sensing the waft of history that blew through this space. He stared at the brushstrokes done by a painter’s hand centuries ago. But other hands had also been involved in this piece, just as influential. He pictured Jefferson guiding Turnbull, preparing this masterpiece.

Painter gazed up, studying every inch of it, connecting to that past.

The massive canvas depicted the presentation of the Declaration of Independence to Congress. Within this one painting, John Turnbull attempted to include a portrait of everyone who signed the Declaration, a memorial to that pivotal event. But Turnbull couldn’t manage to fit everyone into it. Yet, oddly enough, he did manage to get five people painted in there who had never signed the final draft.

So why include them?

Historians had always wondered.

In his research, Painter read how John Turnbull had offered some obfuscating answers, but none satisfactory—and it was indeed Thomas Jefferson, master of ciphers and codes, who oversaw the completion of this masterwork.

So was there another reason?

At least Meriwether Lewis believed so.

The words deciphered from the buffalo hide ran through Painter’s head as he stared at the strokes of oil on the canvas: Jefferson will leave their name in paint. You can find it thusly: In the turning of the bull, find the five who don’t belong. Let their given names be ordered & revealed by the letters G, C, R, J, T and their numbers 1, 2, 4, 4, 1.

It wasn’t a hard cipher to decode.

Turning of the bull referred, of course, to Turnbull, who had been commissioned to do many public paintings in early America.

Find the five who don’t belong indicated the five nonsigners depicted on the canvas:

John Dickinson

Robert Livingston

George Clinton

Thomas Willing

Charles Thomson





The last of that list, Thomson, did sign an early draft, but he was not invited to inscribe the famous version with its fifty-six signers.

The next bit of the passage—Let their given names be ordered & revealed by the letters G, C, R, J, T—simply meant taking their first names and putting them in the order of those five letters listed.

George

Charles

Robert

John

Thomas





Then all that needed to be done was to select the corresponding letter in each name that matched the number: 1, 2, 4, 4, 1.





The name of Meriwether Lewis’s enemy, the traitorous and secretive family who had confounded the early Founding Fathers, was Ghent.

It seemed meaningless at first—until Painter pondered it more, especially in light of the conversation he had had with Rafael Saint Germaine. The Frenchman had mentioned that the Guild was really a group of ancient families who had been accumulating wealth, power, and knowledge over centuries—possibly millennia—until in modern times only one family remained. His story closely matched Lewis’s tale of the purging of America, in which one family turned out to be rooted too deeply to remove, with ties to slavers & rich beyond measure.

Were these two stories speaking of the same family?

Ghent.

Again, Painter might not have attributed much to this code breaking, except for one nagging coincidence. Ghent was a city in Belgium. That country had kept popping up of late: the team who attacked Gray in Iceland had come from there, as had that smaller burst of neutrinos similar to those at Fort Knox.

So Painter had kept on digging. Ghent was a common surname for people from that city. Someone was John of Ghent or Paul of Ghent. But in more modern times you became simply John Ghent or Paul Ghent. And sometimes just the anglicized pronunciation was used, as it was easier to spell phonetically.

And that’s where Painter found the truth—or so he believed.

Not that he could do anything about it.

He stepped farther back from the painting, taking in its entirety. He studied the figures of Jefferson and Franklin, picturing them standing before this same painting, faced with the same challenge and threat. His own hands were tied as surely as the Founding Fathers’ had been.

During Painter’s research concerning the suspected family, he had discovered that they indeed had roots going back to Ghent, had even used that name before extending their reach to America. They’d been in the colonies at the beginning, entrenched in the slave trade to such an extent that any attempt to remove that single family by force could have ripped the new union   apart.