What you have read up to now is what I wrote when Madeline and I returned to the St. Francis of Assisi Home for Foundlings.
Now we are in Paris. Madeline and I are legally brother and sister. Eliza Fisk adopted me, too. When we made it back to the orphanage, the Rebels were negotiating with the British to exchange Mrs. Fisk for a captured British general who had been taken at a battle near Ticonderoga. As soon as the exchange was made, she took Madeline and me with her to her home in New Haven, Connecticut.
At the end of the year 1776, we were reunited with Ben Franklin and made a dangerous Atlantic crossing on the American warship Reprisal. The voyage took six weeks. It was good to see only water and waves and sky. I prefer to look at the sky rather than fly in it. The sky is for birds, not ships. Yet storms followed one after another on the sea and did not let up. I confess there were times when I missed the sky and being so close to the stars.
After our voyage, we waited on the windswept coast of Brittany for several days before anchoring in the little port of Auray. I had expected the British at any moment to swoop down with their frigates and seize us. After all, Franklin is still wanted for treason. At Auray we hired a carriage for Paris — Ville Lumière!
Cook has written me many letters. She says nothing has really changed at the orphanage. Brother Nessus still plays the violoncello furiously and frightens the younger boys and girls. Captain Pennington, however, met a gruesome end. Cook says spirits took revenge upon him for White Dog’s death. He was found impaled on his own sword in the entrance to a bear cave some two days’ journey from the orphanage. Cook says that Brother Jean honours White Dog by holding chapel outdoors once a month so that the orphans can pray in the sunlight and wind.
I wrote to Cook to ask if she wanted to join us on our voyage across the Atlantic, but she replied that she wanted to stay in the country she knew best and with the spirits who cared for her. Cook said the American army left the plains of Quebec at the end of June 1776. But she said the Rebels continue to fight the British in the Middle Colonies and in the South.
Paris is beautiful and ugly at the same time. The stones in the streets are round and slippery. There are no sidewalks, and when it rains the streets are mud baths. The carriages do not stop for passersby, and one must be careful crossing the street. Madeline and I attend the School for the Deaf founded by the disciples of the Abbé de l’Epée. We are learning so much. Franklin has rented a little house in Passy, just outside Paris. His job in Paris is to secure France’s alliance while the war with Britain is waged. It will not be easy. The agents of the British Secret Service have been sent to France to thwart his efforts.
Franklin is using our dictionary more than ever. I have also proposed a combination code using home-sign symbols with a grid. In this method, messages are read through a mask or grille. This is known as the Cardan system, named after Gerolamo Cardano, a famous Italian code-maker and mathematician of the sixteenth century.
Today Mother and Madeline have gone shopping. Franklin is having lunch with the Montgolfier brothers, who are interested in hearing about Franklin’s flying machine.
Franklin’s patriotic duty is clear: to help win the war against Great Britain, the most powerful nation on Earth. To do this he will have to survive the net of spies that has been thrown around him. I am determined to root out these spies wherever they are. I will travel silently, like a shadow. They will neither see nor hear me. I will help Franklin win his war or my name is not Michael Flynn — spy, writer, and fly-fisherman of Quebec and the World.