City of Dreams

by Martin, William

  They reached the spot where Gil and Big Jake had first seen Nancy Hooley. The river glittered in the starlight, more like a path than a barrier to the opposite shore.

  “Is tonight the night?” she asked.

  “Where’s the gold?” he asked.

  “Hid good. Not far from here. When I figured out what you meant by the Lord seein’ and lovin’, I snuck back to the churchyard and done what I thought you wanted. And the whole time, I could hear Ezekiel tootlin’ right across the street. I kept waitin’ for the Leaner to find me and drag me back. But I’m never goin’ back.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Gil. “Just keep the gold safe till we can do somethin’ good with it.”

  “Helpin’ ourselves to get out of here is somethin’ good.”

  “We’ll help ourselves, but . . .” He hesitated. He had been thinking hard on some things, and they bubbled up now. “We have to do somethin’ to help the cause.”

  “The cause?”

  He stood there, shivering . . . from the cold and from the sense that he was stepping ever deeper into the trouble he had tried to leave to others on Harlem Heights. “We have to make up for how we got that gold. It’s the only way to get the freedom we want.”

  Loretta wrapped her arm around him. “Then we will. As soon as we cross the river.”

  “That could be a spell. I give my parole. If I run off, it could go bad for Salomon, and he saved my life.”

  She shivered. “So . . . we can’t run tonight?”

  “We missed our chance for runnin’ on the night of the fire. When the rector—”

  “’Twas the right thing to do.” She took his face in her hands. “And remember this, Gil Walker. No matter what folks say about two street rats like us, we’re good people. And good people does what’s right. So keep doin’ what you’re doin’, and I’ll wait.”

  The steam from her breath sparkled in the starlight.

  GIL TOLD LORETTA to work as dutifully as always. And every night, she should go down to the bathing spot on the river and look for the signal.

  If she found a rock in the knothole on a certain oak, she would know that he had passed with another escaped prisoner. She would then go back to the bunkhouse and lie awake until she heard his owl hoot. Then she would get up and go out to the privy, so that any of the girls awakened by her movement would think nothing more of it. Then she would sneak down to the riverbank.

  If there were British dragoons in the barn, she and Gil would talk briefly. He would tell her the news of the city. She would tell him the gossip among the officers. If there were no redcoats about, she would lay her blanket on the riverbank. He would lay his coat over both of them, and they would make love.

  Then they would talk of the future.

  “When does it start?” she asked him one warm night some two weeks after his first visit. “This future of ours?”

  “Salomon says they trust us now, so they may release us from our parole, so we can come and go as we please. Then he’ll send me on a scavenge into the countryside, and if I don’t come back, he’ll blame highwaymen. I can disappear, if I want.”

  “Do you? Do you want?”

  “I can’t quit yet, not with Salomon riskin’ everything to help prisoners escape, and the prisoners so all-fired ready to get into the fight again.”

  His voice trailed off, and he rested his face against her breast.

  She stroked his hair. “Like I said once before, we got choices in this life, Gilbie. We made ours. Gold don’t wear out. The longer we keep it, the more valuable it gets.”

  v.

  Two weeks later, Gil Walker led another escapee across the orchards north of the city. With each journey, he had learned a bit more about how to time the British patrols, how to wait till the right moment to rush over open ground in the moonlight, and how to keep his latest charge moving northward until they arrived at the rocky promontory on the river.

  This one was a Rhode Islander named Eph Dolliver, tall and wiry and without much to say. He had been so weak that he had spent three nights in Salomon’s cellar while Mother Ramsey fed him. Then he said that he was ready to get back to fightin’. He even asked Gil for one of the pistols. And along the path west of the Bloomingdale Road, he picked up a heavy branch. He said it would make a good club.

  When they passed Woodward’s dock, Gil put the rock in the knothole.

  From what he could see, there were no soldiers around the manor house that night. The British army had moved north to get behind Washington. But Washington had escaped again. So the two armies were now stumbling about Westchester County. The only American troops on the island were the twenty-eight hundred who garrisoned Fort Washington, an earthwork on a bluff overlooking the Hudson.

  That was where Farmer Dibble would be taking Dolliver.

  Once Gil got to the promontory, he gave an owl hoot.

  Out on the British man-of-war, the midnight bell rang.

  Gil waited. He could hear music—a squeezebox—coming from the ship. After a few minutes, he hooted again.

  Then he heard the splash of oars. But when Dibble did not hoot back or start complaining, Gil put his hand on his pistol and pulled back the hammer.

  At the sound, Eph Dolliver cocked the pistol Gil had given him.

  There was a sliver of moon, so Gil could see the rowboat coming in, but the man in the thwart was not round enough to be Dibble.

  Then Gil heard movement on the rock above him and a familiar voice somewhere behind him. “I been watchin’ you for a while, Yank. Now I got you dead to rights.”

  Corporal Morison.

  At the same moment, a second man rose from the rowboat and a musket cocked on the rock above. Four against two, a nice ambush.

  But Eph Dolliver had the right instinct. He went for the one above, the one silhouetted by the moonlight.

  The prime in his pistol gave a little pop, then blew a ball upward, then the soldier was falling and his musket was clattering down with him.

  In an instant, a string of muzzle flashes caught bursts of motion in the dark.

  A soldier was rising to fire from the boat.

  Gil was spinning and firing toward the flash of Morison’s pistol.

  Dolliver was raising his club as a soldier charged from the boat with his bayonet.

  Gil was on his knees, grabbing for the musket dropped from above.

  The soldier at the oars was firing a pistol.

  Dolliver was parrying the bayonet of the charging soldier.

  Gil was firing the musket at the soldier in the boat.

  Dolliver was slamming his club off the head of the charging soldier.

  And then the flashing stopped. The gunfire echoed out across the river.

  Gil crouched in the darkness, and looked at the shadows and shapes around him.

  Dolliver was standing with the club cocked.

  The four British soldiers were all down and motionless.

  Then Dolliver slammed the club viciously onto the head of the one who had come at him with the bayonet. The head crunched like a melon.

  “Stop it.” Gil’s knees began to wobble, but he willed himself to rise.

  “He won’t stick anyone else with that thing,” said Dolliver.

  “Did he stick you?”

  “No. But I took a ball in my leg meat.”

  Then Morison groaned.

  Gil went over and poked him with the bayonet.

  A dark stain had begun to spread across Morison’s midsection.

  Gil knelt next to him.

  “I been watchin’ you, Yank,” said Morison, “watchin’ since a publican told me you’d been askin’ about me and some gold guinea coins. Gold guineas? says I. What’s . . . what’s this, then? I done some askin’ and some thinkin’ and—” He groaned and curled up around the pain in his belly.

  “Kill him,” said Dolliver, “or he’ll turn in the Jew.”

  Morison managed to smile. “I stopped at Woodward’s, ’fore I come here.”

&nb
sp; “You what?” Gil crouched closer. “How did you—”

  Morison tapped his forehead. “I may be slow, but I remembered what you said to your whore the night of the fire. . . . Now I got you.”

  “What did you do at Woodward’s?” asked Gil.

  Morison groaned and his eyes fluttered.

  Dolliver smashed his club down onto Morison’s forehead.

  Gil jumped back, more shocked by that than by the ambush. “Are you insane?”

  “Time to go.”

  “Then go,” said Gil.

  “We’re both goin’,” answered Dolliver. “I’m bleedin’ like Jesus. My shoe’s fillin’ with blood. And I don’t know one damn bit about that dark water out there. You’re rowin’ me to Fort Washington.”

  But Gil had to get back to back to Woodward’s to find out what this redcoat corporal had done: Exposed Loretta? Found the gold?

  Dolliver fished some coins from Morison’s pockets and took another small pistol from his belt.

  “No gold guineas, are there?” asked Gil.

  “Nope. Just another redcoat carryin’ shillings. Now let’s go.”

  Gil said, “My job is to take you this far.”

  The Rhode Islander raised Morison’s pistol. “Your job is whatever I say it is. Now we can go easy, Gil Walker, or we can go hard, but we’re goin’.”

  AN HOUR LATER, Gil could see torchlights outlining the ramparts some two hundred feet above the river. The foliage had dropped, so the earthen fort hulked in the moonlight like a wounded beast.

  The bank here was nothing but a steep hill approached by a narrow path of switchbacks. And somewhere in the dark, sentries were protecting it.

  Gil shipped oars and tried to decide what to do.

  The current grabbed the boat and began to push it downstream, and he had worked too hard to get here, so he decided to give out with an owl hoot.

  A voice came from the bank. “Virginia!”

  Gil knew that was the password for the night. He was supposed to know the countersign. If he didn’t, the guards were free to open fire. Gil hoped that the pickets might have been expecting Dibble’s rowboat, so he said, “Dibble is dead! I—”

  The response was a blast of musket fire from the bank.

  He saw the flash, then he saw nothing.

  GIL WALKER AWOKE to piercing pain and blackness.

  He tried to open his eyes, cried out, and fell back into a stupor.

  Later he awoke again and saw moving lights, torchlights, but only on one side. The pain was not as bad. He hardly felt it at all.

  He groaned and brought a hand to the bandage covering his eyes, but another hand took his wrist.

  Then he heard a familiar voice: “Gil, Gilbie boy.”

  The Bookworm?

  “Just lie still. They’ve given you laudanum. They say it makes you feel—”

  “Like floating,” mumbled Gil.

  And he floated. Time passed. Daylight burned through the fabric and the burning pain burned again into the left side of his face. He groaned.

  He heard the Bookworm: “Can’t you do something for him?”

  Another voice: “We’ve given him all the laudanum we can. We’re runnin’ out.”

  And a third voice: “Serves him right for desertin’.”

  Then the bandage was off and he was looking into the eye of Captain Bull Stuckey. “As soon as you can shoulder a musket, you’ll be in the line.”

  Gil brought his hand to the left side of his face. “My . . . my eye.”

  “I’ll give you one of my patches,” said Stuckey, then he was gone.

  But Augustus the Bookworm stayed close.

  “What happened?” asked Gil.

  “Musket ball caught you on the corner of the cheek. Played hell with your eye. It’s . . . it’s ugly, Gilbie boy, but another half an inch and it would’ve blown your head off. Killed that Rhode Islander as it was.”

  And soon, it was night again. The dark of November had come, so each day promised nothing but a quicker trip back to blackness.

  At least the dark lessened Gil’s pain.

  So did his friend. The Bookworm saw that Gil got soup when there was any, and fresh water when it was fetched up from the river. And each night, he helped Gil to bathe the ruined left side of his face in cool, wet cloths.

  WITHIN A WEEK, Gil could shoulder a weapon. So Stuckey gave him that eye patch and put him in a trench a few hundred yards in front of the dirt walls.

  By now, the British had left off chasing Washington and were turning their attention to this fort, the last American outpost on Manhattan Island.

  On the morning of November 14, Gil was in his trench when the British and Hessians began their attack. By afternoon, the enemy had taken every defensive position outside the earthworks and driven almost three thousand Americans back into a fort meant to hold a third of that number.

  Gil Walker and the Bookworm stood shoulder to shoulder in the mass of men and smelled fear and saw fear, even in the eye of Bull Stuckey, because once the British brought up their fieldpieces and began to lob cannonballs into that mob, Fort Washington would become a slaughter pen.

  Instead, the Americans surrendered.

  BY DAWN THE next day, a great scar of homespun and hats, of brown breeches and tan hunting shirts, of tattered coats and worn shoes, cut across the cold November fields and slashed down the Bloomingdale Road.

  Twenty-eight hundred prisoners marched to the slow, thumping cadence of the British drums. If there had been music, it would have been a dirge, because these men were going to the prisons, and once the prisons were full, to the prison ships.

  Gil and the Bookworm went together, near the middle of the two-mile-long column. They positioned themselves on the right side of the line, in the hopes that the girls would show themselves at Woodward Manor.

  “It takes two hours for the column to pass a single point,” said the Bookworm. “It’ll be hard for the girls to stay outside that long.”

  “Maybe so, but when you see them, don’t go runnin’. It’ll only make things harder for them, especially if the squire is watchin’.”

  Up ahead, they saw the cupola atop the Woodward house and the winter-bare arms of the great oak that grew before it. And there were the girls, wrapped in shawls, leaning against the trunk of the tree, as if trying not to attract the attention of the British guards.

  Loretta’s shawl was green, Nancy’s was gray. As soon as the girls saw Gil and the Bookworm, they cried out their names and began to walk along beside the column, though they were separated by a split-rail fence.

  And the Bookworm couldn’t control himself. He stopped and tried to step out of the ranks to go to Nancy.

  But one of the Hessians growled and poked him with a bayonet.

  And Gil pulled him back into line.

  It was then that Loretta must have seen Gil’s face, the eye patch, the raw, bruised flesh that seemed to be oozing out from under it. She gasped and cried, “Oh, Gil—”

  “Don’t worry, miss,” he said over his shoulder. “Just a scratch. It’ll be fine, miss.”

  And she seemed to understand, because even though she and Nancy kept walking on the other side of the fence, her voice took on a more formal tone. “I shall pray for you, sir. And I shall pray that you keep your faith. We ladies will never forget you.”

  “Never,” cried Nancy.

  Finally, a Hessian guard stopped the girls with the tip of his bayonet.

  The Bookworm said, “Good-bye, ladies. Good-bye and thank you for your good words.”

  Gil allowed himself a last lingering look over his shoulder at Loretta. He wanted to say that he loved her, that he would survive for as long as it took, that he would come riding in under the oak branches one fine day and take her away to the life that they dreamed of. But all he could say was, “Do somethin’ good with your gifts, miss. Do somethin’ good for your country.”

  “I will,” she answered. “The Lord seeth all and loveth all! So don’t despair!”


  “Despair? No, ma’am. That would be a sin against the gift of life that God give us!” And Gil Walker felt the tears sting bitterly in his ruined eye.

  FIVE

  Tuesday Midday

  PETER AND EVANGELINE CAME UP out of the subway at Broadway and Seventy-ninth at about eleven thirty.

  After St. Paul’s, they had gone to Delancey’s, but no Delancey. Not in his store on Book Row, not answering his cell.

  So they had come back uptown, because the New-York Historical Society was in Evangeline’s neighborhood, and Peter was planning to pay a visit, once he heard from Fitzpatrick. Besides, computer research was a lot easier on a laptop than an iPhone. And it was plain that they were onto something.

  But whenever he rose from that subway, Peter could think of only one thing: “Zabar’s.”

  “Zabar’s?” Evangeline started down Seventy-ninth. “You’ve just been tailed by a guy named Boris—”

  “Or Mary—”

  “On the uptown number 4. You’ve gone to a bookstore that’s always open and it’s closed—”

  “Maybe Delancey took the day off.”

  “And some guy you never heard of has asked you to help save America. And all you can think of is food?”

  “Food from Zabar’s.” He took her by the elbow and turned her up Broadway, toward the gourmet supermarket at Eightieth. NEW YORK IS ZABAR’S . . . AND ZABAR’S IS NEW YORK. SINCE 1934. It said so on the sign. “How about a Zabar’s kosher salami and a nice cheese, like a Drunken Goat, maybe?”

  “I have one at home.”

  “Drunken Goat? You like Drunken Goat?”

  “I’ve dated enough of them. I’ve also visited the Spanish village where they make it. I’ve even written about it.”

  “So let’s get a baguette and a salami to go with it.”

  “Only if you admit there’s nothing like Zabar’s in Boston.”

  “Sure. I’ll admit that.”

  “And if you admit that”—the light turned and Evangeline started across Broadway—“you’ll admit that we should live here instead of there.”