by David Liss
“But what sort of novel?” It was not a question I had anticipated, and it delighted me.
“The one I like best is Mr. Fielding’s Amelia.”
“That’s a good one,” he said.
“You see? Already we are compatible. Not only do you read novels, which I’m told most men do not, or at least do not admit to, but your taste in novels is sound. Do you not think that courting me would be a good idea?”
“Miss Claybrook, I do not believe there is anything anyone could say that could possibly dissuade me from courting you.” With this he began to walk again upon the road, bringing his walking stick down more jauntily than before.
We spent some moments in comfortable silence. Then he said, “Would you be so good as to tell me about your novel?”
How like him, I thought—though I hardly knew him and had no business deciding what he was like or unlike—to get so quickly to the heart of it. “That’s precisely the difficulty. I haven’t a notion of what to write about.”
Andrew laughed.
Perhaps it was childish, but I felt wounded. “You think my difficulties amusing?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I only like the thoughtful way your brow wrinkles when you wrestle with them. But, pray, tell me why you have such trouble telling your story.”
Even as I had been studying his face, glorying in his handsomeness, it had not occurred to me that he would regard me the same way, and I felt myself blush. “If I am to write a novel, I wish for it to be an American novel, not a mere imitation of what is done in England. I don’t want to move Tom Jones or Clarissa Harlowe to New York and set them to running about with Indians or fur trappers. The book must be American in its essence, don’t you think?”
Again he stopped and stared at me. “You are a clever woman and, if I may say so, a true revolutionary. I believe the war would have been over three years ago had you sat in the Continental Congress.”
“You tease me,” I said.
He looked me in the eye so I could see his earnestness. “I do no such thing, I promise you. You, on your farm, in isolation, have understood more about the Revolution and the new country than half our politicians and generals. We cannot do things the old way but must make our own new way. Though, to be honest, I am not entirely certain what an American novel would look like.”
“English novels are almost always about property,” I said. “Estates miraculously inherited or diabolically stolen. There are marriages, of course, but these marriages, regardless of protestations of affection, are ever about land and estates, holdings and rents, not about love, not really. I don’t want to write a novel about property. Here, in America, property is abundant so it is held cheap. It is not what it is in England: precious and scarce and hard to retain.”
Andrew stroked his chin and then nodded, as though listening to a voice only he could hear. “The American novel, if it is to be honest, must be about money, not property. Money alone—base, unremarkable, corrupting money.”
The moment he spoke, I knew he was quite right. I would write a novel about money. The notion contained such power over me that it was as though we were already married, and I took his arm and pulled him toward me. His brilliant suggestion, I knew, would be important, but I could not yet know that it would change everything.
Ethan Saunders
Cynthia Pearson had come to my home to ask for help. So many questions, so much confusion, and yet this fact stood out. This fact and one other—that it had been Cynthia I’d seen hurrying away from my house that morning. I was not a deluded fool dwelling pathetically on his past. The past, it seemed, was coming back for me.
I drained my whiskey and turned to Lavien. “Why were you following her?” I did not like the thought of someone so ready to slice off a man’s thumb slinking around in the dark after Cynthia Pearson.
His expression was calm and easy. “I have been looking for her husband, Jacob Pearson, but with no success.”
I remembered Jacob Pearson well. During the British occupation, I’d been in Philadelphia for nearly three months, attempting to infiltrate an enemy spy ring. Richard Fleet—my friend, my teacher, my fellow spy, the man who had recruited me into the business—had asked me to look after his daughter, then living in the city. He had not asked me to fall in love with her, granted, but these things often come unexpected.
During those months I’d met her future husband, Jacob Pearson, a successful dealer in properties, who managed to remain in the city, avoid the taint of royalism, and grow even more wealthy after the end of the war by snatching up properties from British sympathizers who were forced to flee. Pearson was perhaps five years older than I, not unattractive in person, and while he and I had never been friends, I had never had any reason to dislike the man. Not until circumstances forced me to flee Philadelphia, to leave Cynthia for her own happiness, and Pearson so successfully took my place.
“Why are you looking for him?” I asked Lavien.
“So I might speak to him,” he answered, holding my gaze a moment longer than he needed to, as if daring me to treat his answer as anything other than illuminating.
“Speak to him about what, Mr. Lavien?”
“Speak to him about things that do not concern you, Captain Saunders.”
“Once you start slinking about in the shadows, following people who come to visit me, it becomes my business, does it not?”
“No.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, you’ve quite thoroughly demonstrated your inscrutability, and now I know that if there is to be give-and-take between us, you wish to maintain always the upper hand, but you are going to tell me more of what you know, so let us not pretend otherwise. You came to find me, sir, and if you came to find me, it is because you want something from me, and since you shall not get it without telling me more, we might as well move forward to that part of the conversation.”
A faint smile crossed his lips. “For a beaten drunkard, you know your craft.”
I liked him for saying so. “Now, you work for Hamilton, and you want Pearson, and Cynthia Pearson herself is looking for me. Tell me what I need to know.”
“I can’t and won’t tell you why I want him. I have taken an oath of silence to reveal what I learn to none but Secretary Hamilton or the President, and I’ll not break that oath. I can tell you that the man is missing, and has been for several days. I believe that is why his wife wishes to speak with you. She knew you from the war, I believe.”
“Her father and I worked together. He was my friend.”
“I see,” he said, evidently seeing a great deal. He was no fool, this Lavien.
“You’ve already spoken to Mrs. Pearson, I imagine.”
“Of course,” Lavien answered. “She was kind enough to grant me an interview, but she claimed total ignorance of her husband’s whereabouts.”
“Did you believe her?” asked Leonidas. He and I had been together a long time. He knew what to ask.
Lavien nodded. “I did. Mrs. Pearson did not at all strike me as a woman dissembling, only as a woman uneasy. A woman whose husband is missing may very well display concern, but she struck me as agitated. I believe there were things upon her mind she did not speak of, but I doubt if she lied about knowing where to find Mr. Pearson.”
“So you followed her to my home tonight. Then what happened?”
“After she was admitted, she emerged a few minutes later in the company of Leonidas. She proceeded to return to her carriage, so I inquired of Leonidas the nature of her business.”
“And you told him?” I asked Leonidas.
“He serves the government,” he answered. “I saw no reason to withhold what was said, especially since he already knew many of the particulars. Mr. Lavien asked if he might accompany me to find you.”
“It was my hope,” said Lavien, “that, in your company, Mrs. Pearson might be more forthcoming and say things she had withheld from me.”
I took a moment to consider everything he said and to make myself comfort
able with these surprises. Then I asked an obvious question. “Why does Cynthia believe herself and her children in danger?”
“That I cannot say,” Leonidas answered.
I pushed myself to my feet. Pain exploded within my head, and I had to grasp the side of the table to keep from falling over, but I steadied myself, and the worst of it soon passed. “Time to find out,” I said to Leonidas.
“May I join you?” asked Lavien.
“And what if I should say no?”
Lavien’s mouth twitched. “Better not to explore that possibility.”
I looked at him, prepared to let him know that his company was provisional, and if I did not like what he did or said, I should banish him at once. I said nothing, however, because I’d witnessed him in a flash of lightning, in the blink of an eye, overcome and disable three men. If he wished to join me against my will, I had no notion of how I might stop him.
By the time we left, the rain had mostly abated and we walked through the muddy ruins of Helltown. The walk did me good, set my blood to flowing, worked the pain out of my system. I’ve never been particularly good at fighting, it being a rough sort of work best left to rough men, and I’d learned long ago how to handle a beating with equanimity. Also, I had more important things to consider. Cynthia was in some sort of trouble, and she came to me. I’d only been in Philadelphia for four months, following my flight from Baltimore and a misunderstanding involving a cousin or niece or some such. Cynthia somehow knew I now lived here, and in her time of trouble she’d turned to me. No pain could compete with my curiosity, my buoyant and irrational enthusiasm at the thought of having, once more, some contact with her. I was not so ready to disregard reason as to believe that somehow, against hope and propriety, we might be together. I only wanted to see her, to hear her, to have her near.
As we moved, silent and huddled in the cold, toward the center of the city, the landscape metamorphosed from an outlying camp of poverty and debauchery to the height of American propriety. The streets, as if changed by magic, were all at once bricked, with lamps lit on walkways and watch houses occupied. The homes were no longer makeshift affairs, serviceable and expedient huts of castaway wood and thatch, but Philadelphia redbrick, stately and handsome, with stone fences that hid clever little gardens.
Jacob Pearson’s house, at the corner of Third and Shippen, was one of these. It was no great monument to American wealth like the Bingham house, or like the Morris mansion where the President resided, but it was a large and stately home of three stories, surrounded by denuded apple and—appropriately—pear trees, shrubs, bushes, and plots set aside for flower gardens when the weather turned warm. Pearson’s home was made of the same redbrick as the house where I rented, yet here was wealth on an order I could never hope to attain. Looking upon this fine building, could I wonder why Cynthia had married him?
During our walk, I’d heard the church bells strike ten, but Pearson’s home was bright with lit candles, and from the outside it looked a hub of activity. The rain, light though it had become, undid my time before the fire, and we were quite wet by the time the three of us approached. I stood upon the porch and contemplated the knocker. There was, I understood, no way to prepare myself for what must happen next, no way to make myself ready. There was nothing to it but to move forward. I wished I could face Cynthia in a clean suit, unbloodied and neatly ordered, but it was not to be. She thought herself in danger, and I would not ask her to wait while I made myself fit for presentation.
“Do you require that I knock for you?” asked Leonidas, having apparently noticed the gravity with which I regarded this moment.
“No, I believe I can manage.”
“I am quite willing to bear the burden,” he said, “and, with the rain beginning to fall harder, I am even eager to undertake the physical labor required to bring a servant to the door.”
“He’s very cheeky,” I said to Lavien, and then knocked myself. I was, after all, capable enough, requiring only a little browbeating from my Negro to make it happen.
A footman soon opened the door. His livery was rumpled, as though a dirty set of clothes had been thrown on hastily, and he had dark circles under his eyes. I’d seen the look before, and I had no doubt this was a household in distress.
“Captain Ethan Saunders to see Mrs. Pearson,” I intoned with an importance my hatless wet head belied—or at least contradicted.
The footman, tall and rugged in build as was common for his species of servant, looked to me like a stage actor who had only been waiting for another player to speak a line that he might speak his own. Practically biting off my words, he said, “I’m afraid Mrs. Pearson is not accepting visitors at this hour.”
“Of course she is,” I assured him, “as she went to the trouble to summon me, and I have gone to the trouble of answering. You need do no more than go to the trouble of inviting us in and presenting us.”
He looked me over, perhaps for the first time taking in my deplorable condition. “That shan’t happen, sir. Good night.”
The fellow was actually going to close the door in my face. Once a door is closed, it is not an easy thing to get it open again, so I stepped forward, pressed one hand upon the door, and strode directly toward the footman. The primary responsibility of such a servant is to see to the safety of his employers, so he ought to be possessed of a great deal of courage. Nevertheless, surprised, and faced with my alarming appearance, he took a fatal step back. This proved enough for my pair of worthies to move past him. It was an effective ploy, but I had no doubt that, had it not worked, Lavien would have dispatched him with little trouble. I was glad to avoid that outcome, however, as I did not wish to begin my reunion with Mrs. Pearson with the hobbling of her footman.
Regaining his confusion, the serving man stammered a moment and then managed to utter a coherent sentence. “I must ask you to leave. At once.”
“My God, man, have you never had a wet drunk, a Negro, and a Jew call upon Mrs. Pearson before?” I said. “Don’t just stand there. Tell her we’re here.”
“Get out or there will be trouble you shan’t like, violent trouble, sir.”
If this fellow thought he and a handful of kitchen boys were a match for Leonidas and Lavien, he was sadly mistaken. Nevertheless, it all proved unnecessary, for at the end of the front hall a figure emerged, silhouetted by the light of the sconces behind her. I could only see a shadowy form, but I knew her at once.
“It’s all right, Nate, I shall tend to this.”
The vibrating in my chest reverberated through my body. I could feel my pulse in my fingertips. My breath came in short bursts. After ten years, I stood in the same room with the woman I had once loved, once believed myself destined to marry. I wished to rush to her, and I wished to flee. Instead, I held my ground and attempted to conduct myself with the greatest possible dignity for a man so befouled and ill used as I was.
I attempted an awkward little bow, though my middle sections pained me considerably. “Mrs. Pearson, you have summoned me, and here I am.”
She advanced a step and at once became visible. She wore a gown of pale green, perfectly chosen to match the shade of her eyes. Her hair was piled into a bun, from which a few delicate golden-straw wisps escaped, and she wore a prim little bonnet that did no more than suggest the possibility of a head covering.
Once, a month or more ago, near the covered market, I chanced to observe Mrs. Pearson upon the streets as she went shopping with her maid, her two children—a boy and a girl—in obedient tow. It had been fleeting, for I dared not let her see me. In ten years I’d not had the chance to gaze upon her face. When I’d known her, she had been a mere girl of nineteen, but now she was a woman, and the soft features that had made her so pretty had sharpened into beauty: her eyes, wide and liquid; her lips, full and red; her nose, sharp and distinguished. If her loveliness were not enough to move me, I should have been undone by the sadness overlaid upon it, for it was apparent that Mrs. Pearson was a melancholy woman and, indeed, a
fearful one. I had not been a student of human nature for so long—it was what distinguished my service during the war—without being able to see such things.
“Captain Saunders, I am sorry to have troubled you, but it would appear I have made a—oh, dear God, what has happened to you?” She stepped into the far superior light of the foyer, and I was pleased to observe that her beauty was unharmed by greater illumination. “You are hurt, sir. Is this because—what I mean to say, are these injuries the result of my having—”
She did not know how to finish, and were she anyone else, I would have let her dangle upon her own words, to reveal what she feared, and I would have as much information as I could. But this was Cynthia Pearson, once Cynthia Fleet, and I would not be the cause of her suffering. “I have had an unfortunate encounter with some rough men,” I told her, “but you may be assured that it has nothing to do with your circumstances. Indeed, I may owe you my life, for had you not sent my man to fetch me, I cannot say how things might have concluded. But that is not important. You must tell me why you summoned me.”
She shook her pretty head. “It is nothing,” she said, and attempted a weak little smile. “My husband has gone away on business and neglected to inform me of where he visits and when he returns. I grew worried and called upon you, as the only person I have ever known who might be able to find him. But now I see that I am foolish. I have no reason to fear for him, and certainly no reason to trouble you.”
“You have assured me several times that your husband’s disappearance does not trouble you,” said Mr. Lavien, “and yet you sent for Captain Saunders, a man with whom you’ve had no contact for more than ten years?”
Mrs. Pearson spun and gave Lavien a most terrible look. I believe she had not seen the little man, for he stood near the door and had—no doubt intentionally—obscured himself behind Leonidas.
“Mr. Lavien, I’ve indicated our conversations were finished.” She turned to me. “I would never have called upon you if I had known you were an associate of this gentleman.”
