“I know the maid,” added the Bookworm.
“You know all the maids,” said Rooster.
Gil thanked Stuckey and said, “We’ll take him there, then rejoin you.”
“No,” said Stuckey. “Pukin’ Mary here can take him. You two, step off now.”
“But we’re militia,” said Big Jake. “There’s militia desertin’ all over this island.”
“There’ll be no desertin’ from my unit.” Stuckey puffed himself up. “I won’t lose two men who stood enemy fire like you boys just done.”
Rooster held his hands to the bloody wound and said, “Get goin’, but Gilbie boy, don’t be holdin out on us . . . that there would be somethin’ to break up a friendship.”
So Gil and Big Jake marched on toward Harlem Heights.
iv.
By ten o’clock that night, Gil Walker had come to a conclusion: no man ever got rich swinging a shovel. He got calluses and a sore back. He got dirty. He got tired. And no man ever got rich in an army, either. He got shot at, and chased, and yelled at, and sometimes he got killed, and sometimes his friends got killed.
And no army had ever spent more time digging than this one. The only thing they did more than dig was run. And such an army would never win freedom for anyone.
Gil’s mother, who had scrubbed floors in the homes of rich Tories, who had seen as best she could to his learning and his faith in the Anglican church, had told him that he was made for bigger things, but here he was, in the miserable drizzle, at the end of the most miserable day these new United States had yet seen . . . digging a trench. And behind him, men were digging more trenches, and behind them, more men were digging.
And out there, beyond the greasy tallow light of the American torches, lay the British army.
Gil did not say what was on his mind, because Stuckey was too close. So he swung the shovel and tossed the dirt. Swung the shovel and thought his thoughts. Swung the shovel and stopped for a moment and fingered the brass finial in his pocket.
“Keep diggin’,” muttered Big Jake, who dug right next to him, “or that one-eyed dog fucker is liable to come down and hit you with the shovel.”
“Dog fuckers . . . educated fools . . . officers who don’t march for common sense but do for a bit of playactin’ . . . these ain’t the men to be desertin’ your friends for, Jake.”
“Nope. No honor in servin’ fools. No gold, neither.”
The shovels crunched. The dirt thumped. And the smell of turned earth reminded Gil of an open grave.
“It was a bad idea to start,” said Big Jake. “It’s a worse idea now. Best thing would be to slip away, find the others, then find that gold. Pretend like we was never in this army.”
“Well, I do have to admit it”—Gil swung the shovel again—“sure is a helluva way to get rich.”
“Quiet down there!” shouted Stuckey.
And Gil Walker made his decision. He put down the shovel, picked up his musket, gave Big Jake a jerk of the head, and dropped into the shadows of the hillside on the far right of the American line. He did not worry that he was now a deserter, a fugitive who might be hunted by two armies instead of just one. He was on his own again, answering only to the few friends he trusted.
GIL AND BIG Jake knew the woodlands and meadows of Manhattan Island as well as Aaron Burr did. These were places where they had hunted as boys, places that were like old friends, even in the dark. And nature was a friend, too, bringing a steady drizzle that dampened the sound of their movement and settled into the folds of the landscape so that they could disappear when they saw a British patrol or a pair of British officers clopping along, passing a bottle between them, drunk with port and the arrogance of victory.
Rich men owned most of what they crossed that night. The land north of the city had been divided into farming estates not long after the Dutch had bought Manhattan from trusting natives for a pile of beads. The names of some of the estates, like Hoagland’s and Vandewalker’s, still spoke of olden times. Others, McGowan’s and Apthorpe’s, told of the British who had come later.
When Gil and Big Jake spied a line of torches, tents, and tethered horses—the forward units of the great army—they reckoned that they were still a mile from the Woodward estate. So they dropped again toward the river and meant to swim if they ran into pickets on the beach.
But the hallmark of the British was professional contempt for the amateur rebels they faced. So they had not bothered to extend their line to the water, as if they could not imagine a flanking attack launched through the mudflats and along the Hudson.
So Gil and Big Jake skittered along the bank until they saw, perhaps a quarter mile ahead, torches burning at Woodward’s Landing. The house would be up above. But even from this distance, they could see redcoats on the dock.
“Do you think they have Rooster?” asked Big Jake.
“If he’s alive.”
Then something much closer caught their attention, a rustling in the water to the right. The bank here dropped down from the trees onto a little plain of brush and mudflat dotted with deeper pools. And standing in one of the pools was a woman.
They had not noticed her at first because they had been moving with their eyes on those British torches. Now they were mesmerized.
She was washing herself. Her naked body seemed almost silver in the gray-black darkness of a cloudy night. She rubbed the bar of soap on her neck, then passed it over her breasts. Then she raised an arm to wash the tuft of hair beneath, a motion that caused her breasts to rise and Big Jake to gasp.
Gil whispered, “Close your mouth.”
“But I know her. She was one of the Bookworm’s girls. She—” Big Jake’s words caught in his throat as she dipped, rinsed, then stepped out of the water altogether.
When she bent to pick up her towel, Gil and Big Jake dropped down from the tree line. Startled, she pulled the towel against herself.
“Don’t be afraid, miss,” said Gil.
“Damn you.” She sounded more annoyed than afraid. “Can’t you leave me be for a minute? You all been gawkin’ at me ever since you got here . . . wait a minute . . . you ain’t redcoats.” And she took a step back, as if she suddenly was afraid.
Big Jake said, “We’re Augie’s friends.”
“Augie? The Bookworm?” She looked from face to face. “Gil and—”
“That’s right, Gil and Big Jake.” Big Jake gave her a grin.
She ordered them to turn around, dropped her towel, and pulled on her shift.
Gil looked off toward the torchlight and said, “We come to get them, but—”
“Augie’s gone, and Rooster”—she pulled on her shirt, then she picked up her skirt and shook the twigs off it—“Rooster’s gone, too.”
Gil turned. “Dead?”
She stepped into the skirt. “When we heard the redcoats comin’, I told Augie to run. I stayed with Rooster till he passed. I come down here to wash the blood off. Couldn’t do it up there, not now, not tonight. There’s officers in the house and dragoons in the barn. And every one of them looks at me like they want to”—she glanced at Big Jake—“they look at me like you’re lookin’ at me now.”
“I told you to close your mouth,” said Gil to his friend.
The girl picked up a bloody shirt and skirt from the bushes.
“Rooster’s blood?” asked Gil
“Aye. They drug him out and left him for the meat wagon. They say there’ll be plenty more bodies by tomorrow.”
She boosted herself up from the bank, up into the trees above.
“You’re going back?” asked Gil.
“I serve breakfast at dawn. The British are braggin’ on how they’ll bag a fine fox in the mornin’. And Squire Woodward, he’s a lot more of a loyalist than he ever let on.”
“I’m thinkin’ most folks’ll be loyalists by tomorrow night,” said Gil.
“Miss—” Big Jake boosted himself up and stood next to her.
“My name’s Nancy. Nancy Hooley.”
/>
Big Jake touched her hand. “I’d like to thank you for helping our friend.”
She took the hand. “Augie told me about you boys, said you was like family.”
“Where did he go?” asked Gil.
“Back to the city. Back to tell Rooster’s mother.”
Big Jake said, “We’re goin’ back to get—”
“Get back to normal,” said Gil. He feared that Jake was so mesmerized by her beauty, he might tell her right there that they were going back to get a stash of gold in a Tory house.
She wished them luck and said, “I’ll tell you what I told the Bookworm. In the city, act innocent. I hear the British sayin’ they’ll round up the arrogant Yanks and the ones who go about armed and the ones who pull long faces. But they can’t arrest everyone. So don’t attract attention, and you’ll be all right.”
THREE
Tuesday Morning
AT EIGHT THIRTY, Peter Fallon crossed the Henry Hudson Bridge at the northern tip of Manhattan.
The traffic had gone all-aggression-all-the-time at just about the spot that he started picking up 1010 WINS news radio. That would have been an hour back on the Merritt, when the Manhattan-bound businessmen started tailgating him at seventy-five, tripping the switch that turned him from the relaxed I-84 cruiser into Mr. Cut-the-other-guy-off-and-beat-him-to-the-tollbooth-too.
He could have taken Amtrak. The first Acela left South Station at 6:15, scheduled arrival at 9:40 in New York. And when it worked, it was the only way to go. But he’d missed too many early meetings because of signal problems, power failures, work crews, and trucks broken down on Connecticut grade crossings, so he wasn’t trusting the train on a day when his nerves woke him up after two hours of sleep.
Instead, he was sliding toward the E-ZPass lane on the highlands where Washington and his Continental Army had dug their trenches in 1776.
Continental Army? Stop thinking about them and watch out for that bastard cabbie trying to sneak into your lane before you get to the toll.
He outmaneuvered the cabbie, then he felt bad about it.
Just another guy working for a living, who maybe had a fare who needed to get somewhere in a hurry . . . like a hospital. So Peter reset his driving switch and tuned the radio to the morning market report.
He hadn’t come to New York for fun or history. He wouldn’t have come at all but for that phone conversation. He wasn’t letting Evangeline go downtown alone to meet some guy named Joey, who was wearing a Yankees hat. Sure, she’d been around the world on her own, but Peter didn’t like the sound of the guy’s voice. He didn’t like the part about the Yankees hat, either.
From the tollbooth, the Henry Hudson dropped quickly down to the river for one of the finest approaches to any city in the world.
The first explorers thought the Hudson was the fabled Northwest Passage. In the Revolution, the Americans and British fought over it, because control of the river meant control of the continent. In the nineteenth century, a visionary named Dewitt Clinton cut a canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson, so the riches of the heartland could ship straight to the wharves of Manhattan, guaranteeing that New York—not Boston or Philadelphia—would become America’s first city. And in the twentieth century, master builder Robert Moses had imagined a beautiful road and a beautiful park on the Hudson mudflats, and . . .
Enough with the history. Turn up the radio.
“Dow futures are lower on the heels of China’s announcement that they will be sitting out Thursday’s auction of U.S. Treasuries. Secretary Robert Lappen says there is no correlation between this announcement and the growing crisis over Taiwan, but . . .”
Peter turned at Seventy-ninth and headed straight for a parking garage. He had long ago learned that when driving into the city, the best thing to do was to get rid of the car as quickly as possible. And the further from Midtown you parked, the cheaper.
EVANGELINE CARRINGTON SPENT half of her time in New England, but she considered herself a New Yorker. And why not, with a two-bedroom co-op on the corner of Columbus and Seventy-eighth, a prewar building, twelve stories, big rooms, and that favorite real estate phrase, good bones? She also had a view over the Museum of Natural History and across Central Park.
That was like having good bones and a pretty face, too.
Peter stopped at the desk in the foyer: a marble podium with brass trim, glass apron, and Art Deco flourishes.
“No need to sign, Mr. Fallon,” said Jackie Ryan, the desk man. “With you two gettin’ married and all . . . it’ll be like you live here, even if you are from Boston.”
“Thanks.” Peter put his pen back into his pocket. “Is Miz Carrington in?”
“You mean the future Mrs. Fallon?”
“Jackie”—Peter looked over the tops of his sunglasses—“you’ve been around her long enough to know that even if we were married by the Cardinal in St. Patrick’s on Easter Sunday, she’d always be Miz Carrington.”
Jackie chuckled. “Yeah, you got that right. And no, I haven’t seen her go out.”
Peter pressed the elevator button. “How’s the left hook?”
“Haven’t used it since I decked Marvin Hagler.”
In his younger days, Jackie had been a club fighter and a club bouncer. When he couldn’t take the punches anymore, he took a job at the night desk in an East Village flophouse, then he worked his way uptown. But his uniform jacket still looked like a display case for his thick fists and broken nose.
“You fought Hagler?” said Peter. “I’m impressed.”
Jackie let out a loud “Pah” at a joke on the guy from Boston. “If I did, I wouldn’t be sittin’ here. I’d be rich or dead.”
“Dead, most likely.” Peter got onto the elevator. As the doors closed, he said, “Go Red Sox!” and heard another “Pah.”
On the eighth floor he gave a little tap, the chain lock rattled, the door opened, and Evangeline peered out. “So you decided I’m not crazy after all?”
“Not crazy,” he said. “Just misguided.”
“Misguided to be marrying you.”
Her eyes were puffy. Her hair was tousled. She was wearing a blue terry cloth bathrobe and silk pajamas. She looked just fine to Peter.
He followed her into the large living and dining area.
The morning sunlight poured through the front windows. The traffic hummed eight stories below. The coffeemaker burbled in the little kitchen.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Aside from being scared to death last night, I’m fine.”
“But if you’re scared, it means you might be onto something.”
“So that’s why you came down? Because I’m onto something? I thought you came down because you wanted to protect me.”
“I came down because if you want us to live in New York, I should see if I can stand the commute.”
“That’s an argument for another day.”
“Oh . . . and you asked me to come down.”
“Coffee’s almost done. Toast some English muffins while I shower.” She reached into her bathrobe pocket and pulled out the crown finial. “And have a look at this. See if you can figure out what it is.”
EVANGELINE SAID THAT the best way to get around Manhattan was on foot or the subway. So they rode downtown, got off at Wall Street, and walked the rest of the way because it was a nice day.
A charging bronze bull greeted them at the Bowling Green. The bull had been sculpted by an Italian named Di Modica, who deposited him one night in 1989, right in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Di Modica said the bull was a gift to the American people, to celebrate their resilience after the crash of 1987. Not quite as majestic as Lady Liberty, thought Peter, but that statue from France had helped to define the city and the nation in 1888, and this one from Italy said plenty about America a century later.
Peter gave it a rub as he went by. He wasn’t the first. The head and horns shone, as if a thousand hands polished them every day. The balls shone, too.
; But Evangeline barely gave the bull a glance. “Time for someone to sculpt a big bear and put it right here, just to keep that stupid bull from breaking any more china.”
“Is the bear a female?” he asked.
“You mean, do we need a female to keep the male from doing something else stupid or greedy to this country?”
“A different way of putting it, but . . . yeah.”
“Another question for another day.”
Right behind the bull was the Bowling Green, which looked far more innocent in the sunlight, a perfect little oval of grass, trees, and park benches surrounded by that fence. In the sunlight, it felt like one of the centers that held rather than a lonely outpost of greenery in a big city.
Peter said, “This is the kind of place I love. A pinhole in the fabric of time—”
“Oh, God, not another pinhole, Peter. I just want my cell phone back.”
He pretended to ignore her and kept talking. “—where you can feel the past, even see it. Once there was a statue of the king—”
“Do you see him?” said Evangeline.
“The king? No. They melted him down—”
“The guy. Do you see the guy? The guy who called himself Joey? The guy with my cell phone.”
Peter looked around at the suits and secretaries and coffee drinkers. “I see a few guys in Yankees hats. But no one seems to be looking for a Bostonian in a blue blazer.”
“Maybe you should have worn a Red Sox hat.”
“I’m not that crazy.”
“Just misguided . . . have you figured out that little brass crown?”
He took it from his pocket.
“While we wait for Joey . . .” She slipped it from his hand and led him over to one of the posts that supported the long, curving runs of fencing that surrounded the park. Then she told him to put his hand on top of the post. “What do you feel?”
“Aside from foolish?”
“On top of the post . . . what do you feel?”
“A little nob. It feels rough, as though something was hacked off . . .”
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