From Bath they went to Oxford. Here their journey took them on smooth turnpike roads—a far cry, Mercy was forced to admit, from the rutted tracks of New England—and they made the seventy-mile journey in a single day. Oxford, with its cloistered colleges and dreaming spires, charmed her. But before returning to London, Albion had taken them to see the country house of the Churchill family, at nearby Blenheim Palace.

And here, as she had at Burlington House, Mercy received another shock. The country villas she knew back at home were handsome houses. But nothing could have prepared her for this. A park that stretched as far as the eye could see. A vast mansion, stone wings outstretched, that was half a mile across. It was a quarter-mile from the kitchen to the dining room. The library, which to her should be an intimate haven, was sixty yards long. The cold, baroque magnificence of the mansion was stupefying. And while Albion took them proudly round, and her husband and the two boys stared at everything in awe, her quiet Quaker intelligence saw the grandeur for what it was. This was not the pride of wealth; nor even the arrogance of power. The message of the Churchills was as simple as it was outrageous: “We are not mortal men at all. We are gods. Bow down.” The crime of Lucifer. And Mercy felt a sinking of the heart.

“I suppose,” John remarked to her that evening, “that to an English lord America must look as provincial Britain did to a senator of imperial Rome.”

It was not a thought that brought her any comfort. From that day, though she did not tell her husband, Mercy was ready to return to America.

They met Ben Franklin in December. His lodgings were quite close, in Craven Street, off the Strand. He lived modestly but comfortably in a pleasant Georgian house, of which he occupied the best floor, looked after by a devoted landlady and a couple of hired servants. John was eager that young James should have a sight of the great man, and urged him to take careful note of everything Franklin said.

Mercy also was excited. Though she knew that Ben Franklin’s experiments with electricity and his other inventions had brought him world renown, her memory of him from Philadelphia was as the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack: the jolly friend who’d gone with her to the preaching. The man with the round, spectacled face, like a kindly storekeeper; the thin brown hair falling to his shoulders; the twinkling eyes.

When the two Masters and their son were ushered in, the man who rose to greet them was still the man she knew. And yet he was different.