by David Liss
“I believe I was merely making an inquiry,” said the lady.
“You’ve never merely done anything in your life, Flora, so let us not pretend otherwise.” He turned to me. “Shall I tell you what it means to serve Hamilton at Treasury?”
“You may attempt to do so,” I answered, “but as I’m the one who is so engaged, and as you are not, I cannot imagine you have much to say that will enlighten me.”
Mrs. Pearson laughed and then covered her mouth. Her husband grimaced, as though this mirth had caused him physical pain. He then turned back to me. “Hamilton is a worm. Did you know that?”
“Once I cut him in twain,” I said, and then leaned forward to whisper theatrically, “and now there are two of him.”
“He is a worm, but he is a worm who does the businessmen’s bidding. His bank is a ruse to trick the nation into funding a scheme to make Hamilton and his friends richer, but you may be sure I’ve taken advantage of it. Because of the bank, there is an excess of credit, and that means a man of significant commerce, such as myself, can find the money to invest in government issues when before it might have been difficult. I do not like Hamilton, but I will use him. What do you say to that?”
I sipped my wine. “It’s all very interesting, but it does not precisely tell me what it means to serve Hamilton at Treasury.”
“My partner in business once worked for Treasury, and he informed me in no uncertain terms that Hamilton is a prig with no imagination and no spirit.”
I sat up straight. “Who is your partner?”
“William Duer. I thought all men knew that—or all men of substance, I suppose. Once you are drummed out of the army, you no longer hear the same things as the rest of us.”
“Jack,” said Cynthia.
“I say no more than the truth,” Pearson said. “If he does not like the truth, let him stop up his ears. We have no shortage of candles. Where is the footman? Nate, bring us some soft wax for this gentleman’s ears. He wants them stopped at once.”
I closed my eyes and turned away, trying to shut out the noise, though I would not resort to candle wax to effect this aim. Pearson’s words did not trouble me, not in the way he intended. If he wished to rub salt in the old wound, I could endure it. I turned not in pain but because I needed to think. He believed Duer was his partner, and yet the communication I had intercepted informed me, in no uncertain terms, that Duer was his enemy. And Duer had, most clearly, attempted to avoid being seen by Pearson at the Bingham house.
I understood then that there would be no answers to these questions without speaking to Duer, and Duer had returned to New York. I would have to follow him there. Cynthia was here, and Cynthia needed me, but I could no longer avoid the simple truth that I must go to New York to protect her.
I had turned away from Pearson and his harsh words, and then I had set my face in determination. It must have looked like pain, for I felt a hand upon mine, and when I looked up Mrs. Maycott was smiling at me with warm sympathy. Who was this good woman, I wondered, to feel so strongly for a stranger in what she thought was distress?
I cast her a glance and I smiled, hoping to show she had misunderstood my mood. Then I turned to Pearson. “What is the nature of your business with Duer?”
“What concern is that of yours?”
“I believe he is inquiring to be polite,” Mr. Vanderveer said.
“I believe you are a fool,” Pearson answered. “Well, Saunders, why do you wish to know? Did Hamilton send you to ask me? The Jew gets nothing, so he sends a drunken traitor, is that it?”
“I was invited here,” I answered. “Hamilton did not send me, and this gentleman is correct. I merely make conversation.”
“Make it about something else,” Pearson said. “My business with Duer is private. We are engaged in a new venture, and we play it quietly. That is all you need to know.”
It was not all I needed to know, but it was something. The entire world speculated on Pearson’s declining capacity. What were the chances that William Duer would trust him with a secret venture?
Any further questions were forestalled by the arrival of a plump, buxom, and not unattractive serving girl. She informed us we might remove ourselves to the dining room. I was pleased to find myself next to Mrs. Maycott and not next to Mrs. Pearson, for I should have found that awkward. That lady did her best to avoid looking in my direction the entire evening, and though Mrs. Maycott made much polite conversation with me, we said nothing of further import—no matters of government or Washington or even accusations of malicious flattery. Mr. Pearson was the sole arbiter of conversational topics, and he chose to speak only of the excellence of his own food, the comfort of his dining chairs, and then, toward the end of the evening, the gripping narrative of his rise from son of the owner of an importation business to the exalted heights of being himself the owner of an importation business. Mrs. Maycott and Mrs. Vanderveer both gamely attempted to join the conversation, but Mr. Pearson would not have it. As for the lady of the house, she had, I could only presume, long ago abandoned all efforts at civil discourse.
I therefore endured pea soup, boiled potatoes with bacon, roasted pig, chicken in wine sauce, roasted apples in sugar, and a whipped syllabub—all of it without a single pleasant exchange. The wine, however, flowed. Mr. Pearson seemed unduly interested in his wife’s consumption, commenting rather loudly when she finished her first glass and accepted a second, which went sadly unfinished. More than once, our eyes met over the embrace of this communion. She looked away. I did not. Mr. Pearson made the occasional unkind observation, but it altered neither conversation nor behavior. When Mrs. Pearson accepted a glass of port with her baked apples, her husband began such a paroxysm of tuts and clucks he sounded like a henhouse at feeding time.
“Have you not had enough to drink already?” he asked.
She now met her husband’s eye, and her expression was dark and foreboding. Perhaps she had indeed had too much wine. “I believe I am the best judge.”
“I think, of all possible judges, you may not be the best. The wife of one of the first men of the city ought to conduct herself with more sobriety. For all the world it appears as though you and that rascal are engaged in a tavern drinking contest.” The reader may be surprised to learn that he gestured toward me when he spoke.
“Really, Jack,” began Mr. Vanderveer.
“I’d advise you not to interfere,” said Pearson. “It is a foolish thing for a man to wedge himself between another and his wife. In addition, that great belly of yours tells us you know nothing of when a person has had enough. Another baked apple, Anders?”
“There is no reason to be cruel,” said Mrs. Vanderveer quietly.
“What is this? An entire sentence empty of flattery? All the toad-eating in the world shan’t help you in the matter of my will, so be easy on it.”
Mr. Vanderveer slapped the table. “I do object. That has never been our intention.”
Pearson waved a hand in the air. “Yes, yes, don’t be tedious.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Well, it has been very good company. Now I am tired, and I must to bed. Good night to the lot of you.” With that he left the room, leaving the rest of us in stunned silence and the unfortunate Mrs. Pearson with the responsibility of determining what must come next.
I, however, was not yet ready for the festivities to end, and I rose from my chair, excused myself to the company, and hurried after my host. He had stepped only a few paces out of the room and was on the landing at the stairwell, where only a single candle illuminated the gloom, when I caught him. He contemplated the darkness and had turned to call for a servant, when he saw me instead.
“What, Saunders? What is this?”
“I wanted to speak with you in private for a moment, if you will.”
“I’ve nothing to say to you. I ought never to have had you in my home. I shall speak to Mrs. Maycott about what manner of person she claims as a friend.”
I stared at him, his face—aging and on the very
cusp of becoming elderly—in the dim light, the yellow flame reflecting off the yellow teeth. He was frightened to be alone with me.
All I’d had to drink rushed about in my head, and I forced myself to focus. “I want to know about you and Duer.”
“I won’t speak of it. I am to say nothing, and I shall say nothing.”
“What of your properties in Southwark? You’ve lost them or sold them. And then there is the matter of your loan from the Bank of the United States. I understand your payments are past due, and you won’t even appear when summoned. Are you unprepared to talk about that?”
Pearson’s face twisted into a grotesquerie of hatred. All signs of the rugged man, the handsome man he had once been, were blasted away by an explosion of fury that altered, in a single flash, the landscape of his countenance.
“Do you mean to have your revenge, Saunders? All those years ago, you fled Philadelphia and I happened to marry the girl you once set your cap at. So now you must hound me?”
I could not show how bitter his words made me, and I would not dismiss my feelings for Cynthia—not for his satisfaction or my advantage. I said nothing.
Pearson seemed to grow calmer. He said, “Mrs. Maycott seems fond enough of you, and she’s an excellent widow to catch. Put your mind to that, if you dare, and leave me and my family alone. You are not welcome inside this house again—or any longer, for that matter. I go to bed, but I shall tell my servants that if you are not gone in a quarter hour you are to be removed forcibly.”
Pearson now turned from me and ascended the dark staircase. He did not pause to say good night, which was rude.
When I returned to the sitting room, Mr. and Mrs. Vanderveer were rising and thanking their hostess for an enjoyable evening. Perhaps it was a different, earlier evening they mentioned. They spoke as though the meal had come to a natural and pleasant conclusion. They spoke of the lateness of the hour, the goodness of the food. They thanked the hostess and departed.
Then it was Mrs. Maycott’s turn. “You are a lovely hostess, Cynthia. Thank you so much for having me.”
“Joan.” She cast her eyes downward.
Mrs. Maycott raised a finger to her lips. “It need not be said. We are friends. I shall show myself out. I hope you have no objection if I first speak to your cook. That chicken was marvelous, and I would learn how she does it.”
“Of course.”
The two ladies embraced, and Mrs. Maycott allowed me to take her hand, which was very smooth for the time of year. Then she was gone, leaving me alone with Mrs. Pearson. We were both standing, looking to where Mrs. Maycott had gone, not quite sure what to say.
“She is charming,” said Mrs. Pearson. “And they say her husband left her wealthy.”
“It is good to know that husbands may be good for something,” I said. “Such as leaving money to their wives.”
I feared I may have exceeded my limits, but Mrs. Pearson burst out into a shrill, girlish laugh such as I never thought to hear again.
“Captain Ethan Saunders, let us take a drink in the library.”
“Mrs. Cynthia Pearson, your husband has informed me that if I am not gone in a quarter hour, I shall be tossed out by the servants.”
She smiled at me. “I’ve learned a thing or two after a decade of marriage. The servants are loyal to me. And the library is well removed far from Mr. Pearson’s room. There is no better place to go in the house to avoid his notice.”
“Then, Mrs. Pearson, let us go by all means. I do love a good library.”
Her pretty plump girl led us to the library, where a fire already burned. The girl lit a number of candles and provided us with an excellent bottle of port. She was good enough to pour a glass for each of us, and equally good enough to disappear afterward.
Cynthia let out a sigh and sat in a high-backed chair across from me and, just like that, something changed. That one small gesture did it. It was as though a master carpenter presented two pieces of wood and they fit together with such preordained snugness that they clicked upon joining. So it was that Cynthia, in her good-natured and indulgent sigh, in her uncomplicated slide into a high-backed chair, put me at my ease. I was not an unwelcome intrusion from her past but something far more pleasing.
“It was wrong of Joan to invite you here tonight,” Cynthia said, studying her port. “I think she is mischievous.”
“Such old friends as we are might be in the same room without mischief.”
“It was not what I meant. I wish you had not seen Mr. Pearson in one of his moods.”
“I understand, and yet I have seen it. Mrs. Pearson, you asked for my help before. You asked me to find your husband because you believed yourself and your children in danger. I cannot believe you wished me to find him for his own sake.”
“You mustn’t say that,” she said. “We cannot be together if you speak to me so.”
“Then I won’t speak to you so. It will be all business. I never mind a deception or two if it is to cover one’s own tracks, but you must own up if discovered. Did you ask Mrs. Maycott to invite me here and to do it publicly at the party so all could see it was not of your doing?”
She blushed deeply. “How did you know?”
“Only a feeling. It was a clever maneuver.”
“Thank you. I did learn a thing or two from you during the war. I always loved to hear of your tricks and schemes, and at last I had a chance to put into place a little scheme of my own.”
“To what end?” I asked. “I would like to flatter myself that you wished no more than my company, but I cannot think it so. Can you not tell me more of what you know?”
“It began some six weeks ago,” she said. “Mr. Pearson has never been the most even-tempered of men, but he grew much more irritable than usual. And he began to have around the house a very uncouth sort of man, very western-looking, with a scar upon his face.”
“I know who he is. He works for William Duer. Have you met Duer?”
“Of course. Several times. Philadelphia society, you know. When he worked for Hamilton and lived in Philadelphia, our families came into contact often.”
“When did your husband start doing business with Duer?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“And the reason you contacted me?”
“When Mr. Pearson disappeared last week, I hardly thought anything of it. That man Lavien came around, wishing to ask questions. He’d been around before, and Mr. Pearson had refused to speak to him. Now he wished to know where my husband was and what I knew of his business. It was uncomfortable, but nothing more. Then a man calling himself Reynolds—a tall bald man with an Irish accent—came to see me. He said I must tell Lavien nothing, and if I wished to preserve the safety of my husband, my children, and myself, I would not trouble myself with things that did not concern me.”
The tall Irishman. Yet another man pretending to be Reynolds and making himself conspicuously my enemy. I had no notion of what it could mean, but it made me uneasy. “And that was when you sought me out?” I asked.
She nodded. “I would hardly have concerned myself about Mr. Pearson’s absence. It was not his first, after all. But once the matter involved my children, I did not know what to do, and yours was the only name I could think of. I am sorry to have troubled you with all this.”
“You must not say so. It is my duty to help you.”
“And,” she said, “it is good to see you after so many years.”
It was at this point that the door opened and Mr. Pearson entered the room, red in the face, red in the eyes. His vest was unbuttoned and his shirt disheveled, and his mouth was twisted into a sneer. In one hand he held a silver-handled horsewhip. In the other, he dragged along a boy—perhaps eight or nine years of age—by the collar of a dull cotton sleeping gown. The boy’s hair was mussed from sleep, but he was wide awake. And terrified.
The boy looked very much like Cynthia, with his fair hair and even features and a nose the image of hers. He looked like Pearson to
o, particularly in the eyes, though his were red with fear and confusion, not his father’s diabolical mania.
Mrs. Pearson stood. “Jeremy,” she said.
“Mama,” he said, very softly, seeming both tired and terrified.
“I told you to leave,” Pearson hissed at me.
I rose to my feet slowly, careful to observe everything with crisp clarity. I saw the whip in Pearson’s hand, I saw the fear in the boy’s eyes, I saw the faded burn mark on the boy’s wrist, and the matching scar on his mother’s. Someone was clearly fond of burning wrists.
“I shall leave the moment I know all is in order here.”
“The ordering of my house is not your concern. My whore of a wife has bewitched the servants. They cannot confront you, for all are injured or frightened or unable to be found. I have therefore taken the trouble to awaken the boy. I shan’t threaten to hurt you, Saunders, since I hear you are too pathetic to mind a sound beating, but the child is another matter. If you are not gone from this house in one minute, I shall whip the boy bloody.”
“He is your son,” I whispered.
“And so I may do as I like.”
Cynthia was pale and trembling, and she held out her hands ever so slightly, from stiff vertical arms. Tears fell down her cheek. She bit her lip. I thought she must be a madwoman by now, gone into some lunatic maternal world of fear for her child, but she looked at me, and when she spoke, her voice was steady and strong and rational. “You must go.” The last word came out smooth and easy, not a command, as in telling me I must leave at once, but as a qualifier. I must leave in this particular instance. The future was another matter.
“Well,” I said to Pearson, “don’t mutilate your heir on my account. I’ve things to do, you know, taverns to visit. The life of a drunkard traitor. Very busy.”
“See that you do busy yourself with your wasted life,” said Pearson. “You were far better off vomiting in alleys than troubling yourself in the affairs of gentlemen. You are too unrefined to travel in the circles you covet.”
