The Hellfire Club(81)



“Come with me,” Charlie said, not breaking stride.

Over the past few months, he and Bernstein had developed an easy friendship and even an affection, and while he wanted to encourage her scholarship, he also felt the need to establish some firmer boundaries so as to avoid any misunderstandings. Bernstein, looking a bit wounded by his brusque greeting, scurried after him as he proceeded up the stairway to the east end of the Great Hall’s north alcove, to the office of the Librarian of Congress.

“So?” she said.

“So.”

“So…what are we up to here?”

“Oh, right,” said Charlie, reminded that other people existed. “Why are we here. Both Mac and Senator Smith told me about this members-only section of the library.”

“Right. And?”

“And Smith suggested that there might be more information about the Hellfire Club. Do you remember from my book?”

“Of course! Ben Franklin and his lecherous adventures in England. I’d read a whole book on that subject alone.”

“The problem was I couldn’t find any more about the Hellfire Club when I was working on my book. I tried. Maybe this special collection will have more. In any case, I thought you’d be interested in joining me to see what they have.”

Charlie didn’t say it aloud, but beyond his curiosity, part of him was contemplating a return to academia—and a potential project of note might ease the path back to the Upper West Side.

But for now his path was to the office of the Librarian of Congress. The previous holder of that position had left to work for the UN, and President Eisenhower had not yet nominated a replacement, so the task of escorting the congressman and his comely young aide to the members-only section of the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room in the Adams Building of the library fell to Stuart Sneed, an earnest and deferential junior librarian who soon appeared at the office of the librarian and apologized for being thirty seconds late. He walked Charlie and Bernstein down to the basement, along a long hall, and then, once they were in the Adams Building, up two flights of stairs. He unlocked a heavy oak door and escorted them into the expansive Special Collections Reading Room, where a half a dozen scholarly types sat in silence in armchairs or at well-lit desks studying various books and documents. Sneed offered Charlie and Bernstein a cursory tour of items on display behind glass cases: the library’s Gutenberg Bible, published sometime around 1454; German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 Introduction to Cosmography, where it was first suggested that the New World be named America; two pairs of spectacles, a pocketknife, a five-dollar bill, and other items President Lincoln had had on his person that fateful night at Ford’s Theater.

“Spooky,” Bernstein said with a slight shudder.

“But other than that, how was the library, Miss Bernstein?” joked Charlie.

With a deferential tilt of his head, Sneed indicated that they should follow him. At another door at the far end of the room, he extracted an enormous key ring, shuffled through all the possibilities, and finally arrived at one that had been marked with red nail polish. He grinned triumphantly and inserted the key with a flourish. Opening the door created a sound of suction; the members-only collection was obviously tightly controlled for both climate and security.

“When was the last time anyone visited this collection?” Bernstein whispered.

“A couple months ago, I believe,” said Sneed. “It’s seldom used. Not too many members of Congress take the time to see the antiquities. If they want something from us, it usually concerns information about what’s going on today, and we have a page bring whatever is needed right over.”

The room inside was cozy, with an ornate Oriental rug, a large sofa, two plush armchairs, and wall-to-wall bookshelves and wooden file cabinets. Sneed pinballed around the room, turning on lamps, explaining how the various papers and letters in the collection were categorized, offering white cotton gloves and tweezers to Charlie and Bernstein for the handling of any document sealed in plastic. He also provided them with a binder detailing all of the various collections in the room and where they might be found.

“Library closes at ten,” he said, after which he disappeared and left them to begin exploring the caverns of ancient letters, in search of information about Benjamin Franklin and the Hellfire Club. They quickly found five folders of deeds, proclamations, books, drafts, newspapers, speeches, and correspondence to and from Franklin, and they divided them into two piles.

Two hours into the documents, Charlie threw his hands up in frustration.

“Still nothing?” Bernstein asked.

“No. A few mentions of his trips to England, but zero about the Hellfire Club, or the Medmenham Monks, as they called themselves. I guess I should have known better than to expect something to just be sitting here, waiting to be discovered.”

Bernstein sighed sympathetically. He’d asked her to look in the section on England in the 1700s for mentions of Sir Francis Dashwood, the founder of the hedonistic society. So far, all she’d found was information having to do with his duties as postmaster general in England.

Charlie stood and stretched and looked at his watch; time to get home to Margaret. “Let’s call it a night. Tomorrow, we’ll brainstorm about what to do next. Maybe there’s something in that binder detailing all the collections that we can study in the meantime. Can you ask Sneed to make a photocopy? Pretty sure the library has a Copyflo.”

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