by Pete Hamill
“We’ve got to leave this place,” she said. “It will be like the fires of Hell.”
“What are you saying, Mary?”
“I’m sayin’ we’ve got to run, you an’ me. I’m sayin’ that if you love me, we’ve got to pack a bag and be gone. To Philadelphia, or the bloody west, to somewhere. Maybe we could find a way to Ireland. Get out of this place, some way. We’ve got to feckin’ go….”
Her eyes were frantic and afraid.
“I can’t do that, Mary.”
She went very still then, her eyes slivering with ice.
“You can’t do that?”
“I’m obliged in other ways, Mary. To this shop and Mr. Partridge. And to something else, something that goes back to the old country.”
“You’re obliged?” Her voice was now a knife blade. “You’re fecking obliged?”
“Aye.”
“And are you not obliged to me?”
He looked at her hardening face, her disheveled hair, thinking: Am I? She saw the question on his face.
“You low bastard,” she said.
She stood up, looking around the darkened shop. A lone horse and rider trotted by in the night. The snow fell steadily.
“I’ll be goin’ then,” she said. “What happens to you will be none of my business.” There was bitterness in her voice now. “I have to fecking laugh. I actually thought you loved me. What a fecking fool I was.”
She jerked open the door.
“Don’t be looking for me in Hughson’s,” she said. “For I’ll be gone. With me child.”
She closed the door softly and hurried into the snow. Cormac grabbed a coat to go after her, but she was gone.
He stood there, his body trembling, but not from the cold. She says she’s carrying a child. Her child. But my child too. This is a girl, only sixteen, who sleeps with no men save me. A hard girl, lean and stringy and tough, but a decent girl too. And now she is enraged. She is enraged at being an indenture, a slave, caged in a city she didn’t choose. She is enraged at me. And in her rage, she might become what everyone in the Irish tribe hated above all living creatures: an informer. Able with words to create peril and havoc, flame and death. Like Samson toppling the temple upon himself. If she can’t have freedom, if she can’t have me, then feck it, bring everything down. Create ruins. Hurt everyone in sight. If Mary Burton went to the fort and told the English what she knew, Kongo and Quaco and all the Africans would be in danger of death. So would John Hughson. And so would he, whether called O’Donovan or Carson or Cormac Samuel O’Connor.
He should warn Kongo, tell him of the danger, explain his own stupidity, and take responsibility, no matter what the consequences. But if he did run through the snow and find Kongo, the Africans would almost certainly cut the throat of Mary Burton and slide her into the river. Before morning. They had too much to lose and would easily sacrifice one life to free hundreds. But (Cormac thought) if Mary Burton vanishes, so will my child. If there is a child. If she hasn’t built a lie to trap me. To make me flee with her across the North River and into New Jersey and keep going until they found a place where she would be free. Some lost, hidden grove in the back of beyond.
He glimpsed himself in a wall mirror and hurled unspoken accusations: How could you have done this? How could you have been so weak? Why didn’t you see the trouble coming? Why after sliding into that water with her didn’t you simply go away? Why did you keep going back? Again and again. Drawn to the softness within her hardness. His answers to his own questions were shapeless. Nouns without verbs. Lust. Desire. Connection. Weakness.
And then he felt a great pity for Mary Burton, seeing her moving tearfully through the snow, slapped down by his words, infuriated by his coldness, a victim in some way of that Irish story, the story of his father, the story he could not tell her. He addressed explanations to her, ones he should have made, and still might make this snowy night. You see, he told the absent Mary Burton, there’s something I must do first. Something that comes before my own life and your life and the life of any unborn child. Something I must do, because if I don’t do it, if I don’t first avenge the murder of my father, I can never be free. My vow comes before Kongo too, and before the rising. It comes before everything.
Then, just past the door, he could see a lean, coarse-skinned man peering through the glass. He wore a crumpled suit, a scarf, a wool hat. Little puffs of steam pushed from his nose. He gestured to be admitted. As if relieved to be free of his anguish, Cormac unlatched the door.
“I need a broadside,” he said. Clipped English accent, accustomed to giving orders. “Quickly.”
“We’re closed, sir.”
“Is your master here?”
“Asleep, sir.”
The man exhaled in an exasperated way.
“Make an exception. This is for a ship arriving in a week’s time. We need two hundred posters no later than Saint Patrick’s Day. We intend to fill the hoardings of the town. First ship in—”
He fumbled in his jacket for a sheet bearing the copy, explaining that the bark was named the Valiant, carrying a consignment of raw sugar, rum, and thirty-six seasoned slaves. The first ship in two and a half months, since this bloody war over a bloody ear got serious. Politely, Cormac tried to explain that the Partridge shop didn’t do slaving business, but they could handle the sugar and the rum.
“Well, in that case… I’ll have to discuss it with the earl.”
Cormac’s heart skipped several beats. “Which earl is that, sir?”
“The Earl of Warren, young man. That’s why I’ve arrived so late. He lives way up in the bloody Bloomingdale.”
“I see. In that case, sir, I’m certain we can make an exception.”
The man smiled, showing crooked teeth, and handed Cormac the sheet of paper.
“Wonderful, wonderful. You can deliver them, of course? Here are the words, in the earl’s own hand. And—”
“I’ll need directions, of course.”
“Of course.”
They briefly discussed price and paper size and type fonts, then the directions to the earl’s mansion, and off the man went.
Cormac stared for a long while at the earl’s cursive writing. In the street, the snow was turning to a cold rain. He dressed in warm clothes and slipped into the night. He moved through the rain-pelted streets all the way to Hughson’s. Slivers of light leaked from the back door, and music strummed in a muted way. He went in and ordered a porter from John Hughson.
“Bloody wet night,” Hughson said. Then leaned forward and whispered: “Meeting tomorrow night.”
“I won’t be here,” Cormac said, glancing around the crowded room, searching for Mary Burton, who wasn’t there. Nor was Kongo or Quaco, Sandy or Diamond. “The master wants me to go to New Rochelle.”
“It’s important,” Hughson said. “Do we have your vote?”
“Whatever Kongo says.”
Then he saw Mary Burton coming in the blue door from the house, her eyes swollen, her mouth loose. She gathered empty glasses from a table. Then came toward the bar, muscles taut in her jaw. Cormac stepped aside, his back to Hughson, and whispered in her ear.
“Give me three days, Mary. I’ve business to clear up. Then we can talk.”
“Feck off.”
“Please,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be so cold back at the shop. I was just, well, shocked.” A pause. “And I’ve been thinking….”
She was listening but wouldn’t look at him. She ordered three porters and a rum flip from Hughson.
“Just, for God’s sake, don’t do anything rash,” he said.
She struggled for control.
“Three days…”
“Go away, Cormac,” she said. “For three days or three hundred.” She turned and plunged into the noise of the room, where three redcoats were singing songs about the King in one corner and six Africans were trying to push rhythm behind the tune.
Mr. Partridge was hesitant about breaking the rule against advertising
for slaves. And he knew Cormac’s story. He knew the young man had carried a sword from Ireland to kill the Earl of Warren.
“I suppose you think the posters will gain you access to his house?” he said.
“Aye.”
“And then you’ll lop off his head.”
The way he said this made Cormac laugh. Partridge smiled too.
“I suppose—”
“You don’t suppose. That’s what you want to do.”
Cormac’s voice went cold. “I have no choice.”
Mr. Partridge looked at him for a long moment.
“I suppose you don’t.”
He gazed at the copy and then walked to the type tray.
“He should be killed just for what he does to the English language.”
They both laughed.
“But if you must do this dreadful thing,” Partridge said, “you must be smart. If you go directly to the house and send the wretch to perdition, they’ll have you with the hangman three days later. And I’ll lose the best apprentice I ever had—and the primary investor in this shop. So please: Use your head for something other than parking your hat.”
Cormac thought: He’s right.
That night, after most of the type was set (for there were two jobs even more urgent), Cormac wandered the town for an hour, the weather chilly but no longer wet or arctic cold. Near the Common, he gazed at the town’s two fire engines: side-stroked, goose-necked tub machines, with pump handles and foot treadles. If more than one blaze started at the same time, the town could burn to rubble. He’d seen the volunteers at one small fire, wearing old leather helmets slung low on the back of the neck to protect hair and skin, designed to be whipped around to cover the face. Remembering their foolish looks and clumsy efforts, he understood why the conspirators might believe in triumph. And yet he felt he could not join the rebellion without first killing the earl. Thinking: That’s why I’m here. That must happen first.
Either way, if the rebellion then succeeded or if it failed in a chaos of gunpowder and death, he could escape with Mary Burton. He could lead her across the river. He could try to find some refuge for both of them, and let all notions of permanence wait for the future. As he tried to imagine the future, he strolled through dark streets past the fort, where three prostitutes laughed together in the shadows. Zenger’s Journal called them “courtezans,” but there was nothing courtly about them. In daylight, their flesh was coarse, teeth missing. Better to work their sad trade in the dark. They called to Cormac, offering various services. He strolled on, ignoring them, looking at the high walls of the fort, thinking: This can’t work. New York could be taken without firing a shot; the English, after all, had taken it twice; but only if many-masted ships were in the harbor, loaded with cannon and soldiers. In New York, fear was more powerful than loyalty. But you created fear only with a show of force. The tutorials from Mr. Partridge were alive in his head. Wasn’t the older man right? The English were accustomed to cheap victories in their endless search for loot. But (thinking then in the face of the harbor wind) the Africans and the Irish of New York shared one terrible fact: In their own lands, they were defeated. Thinking: That’s why they’re here. Thinking: Defeat is a habit too.
He circled around through dark streets, where gorged pigs slept in doorways and dogs barked and rats slithered toward garbage. He turned through unlit streets toward Cortlandt Street, planning to enter the shop through the alley. A hand gripped his biceps in the blackness. Like a vise.
“Cor-mac.”
Kongo pulled him close. Cormac could see his eyes and teeth, smell Africa and the sea and hard work rising together from his skin.
“Come with me.”
He released his grip and began to walk, making no sound as he moved. They headed toward the North River. Streets vanished in rising mist, the river water now colder than the air. At the river’s edge, Kongo paused, as if waiting for a scent. Finally he relaxed.
“You need to kill that man?”
“Yes.”
“Before the big trouble?”
“I hope. And I now have a way in, to his big house.”
He explained about the proofs of the posters.
“Good,” Kongo said. “My friends, they have watch the house. And we have a man in the stable, he is with us.”
Cormac felt his blood streaming through his arms and legs.
“Here is what we do,” Kongo said.
58.
Quaco waited on the driveway in a borrowed phaeton while Cormac stood at the door of the mansion. The late-afternoon light was rosy, the wind soft. Three armed men watched him as he waited for payment for the posters. Cormac remarked on the end of winter and the beauty of the house. The men grunted. Cormac hoped they would not search him, for his long coat covered the sword. And nothing could cover the beating of his heart. The door opened. The lean man with the coarse skin, now dressed in the more formal clothes of a butler, handed him an envelope. Payment for the posters.
“The master says good work indeed,” he muttered. “And there’s a bit extra for delivery.”
Cormac thanked him and turned away, glancing at the stable, where three of the earl’s Africans were watching and smoking. He climbed back in the phaeton, and Quaco flicked a whip. They trotted back down the road to the south. When they were out of sight, Cormac thanked Quaco, asked him to hold the envelope until he saw him next, and dropped into the forest. He moved toward the river, along the Indian trail marked by Kongo on a rough map. The trail wandered past mounds of ancient oyster shells to another path that zigzagged down the cliff to the river’s edge. He waited in the shrubbery until the sun slipped down behind New Jersey and the sky turned mauve. He searched for the large boulder from Kongo’s map. Saw it twenty feet down the muddy river edge. On the near side of the huge rock, out of sight of the earl’s house, was Kongo’s boat. He was poised at the oars.
“Good,” he whispered as Cormac climbed in. The African began rowing back upriver, until they saw the glow of the earl’s house against the darkening sky. Cormac could make out the earl’s dock, and the stairs leading up the cliff, and then the house itself, the balconied facade facing south, rosy near the roof from the final light of the vanishing sun. The March wind turned colder.
“Until later,” Cormac said. Kongo tapped his shoulder with a fist.
Now Cormac was driven only by the quest for the earl. He removed the long coat, and the sling for the sword, and dropped both on the bottom of the boat. He held the sword, feeling its weight and power. Then jammed it into his belt and waded ashore. Kongo said nothing. There was a plan. Now Cormac must make it work.
He knew the house from another sketch, made by Kongo’s man in the stable. And as he moved through dense woods, approaching the southern side of the house, Cormac saw the huge oak tree, its branches leading toward a second-floor balcony. He began to climb the trunk, but his shoes were wet from the riverbank. He removed them and gained traction with his bare feet, rising on the trunk into the branches. Through the sparse leaves of the tree, he saw an armed man dozing on the deck behind the first floor, and the line of the railing leading down to the river. He climbed higher. Lantern light burned beyond the doors of the second-floor balcony. That was the goal. The earl’s study.
Cormac paused, now feeling oddly calm, gathering strength, and then crawled out upon the thick oak limb leading to the balcony. The limb held his weight well but was three feet short of the balcony. He must leap. Silently. And grab the rail. Hoping that nobody saw him. Hoping he didn’t fall twenty feet to the ground. He looked down. A wide path of gray gravel surrounded the house. He saw nobody on patrol. Inside the room, a shadow moved. Bulky and male. The earl was home.
Cormac stood now, legs bent, on the thinnest end of the tree limb, balanced precariously, about to leap, when he heard footsteps below on the gravel. A man walked around the corner. A face familiar from the earl’s company in town. He carried a musket and whistled in the dark. If he looks up (Cormac thought), I’m dead.<
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He gripped the branch above him for balance. He stopped breathing. He held himself as still as the tree itself. The man below continued walking around to the deck in back, his whistling fading away.
Cormac thought: Now.
I must go now.
And he did.
He leaped. Fell short. Grasped the balcony railing. Held hard, his naked feet splaying for traction but finding only air. He saw himself falling. Imagined being impaled on his own sword. Imagined the earl opening the door, pistol in hand.
Silence.
Then he swung himself, his body twisting, and felt one bare foot catching the lip of the balcony. Now, he thought. I can do it now. He heaved, holding his breath, and then he was up, weightless, safe. He stepped over the rail and inhaled deeply. Once, twice, three times. Exhaling as silently as possible. Hoping there was no dog.
Cormac looked in at the room. The earl was at a desk with curved legs made of polished wood. French, like the goods sold on Hanover Square. Empty bookshelves rose behind him. There was a door in the wall past the desk. Closed, with a key in the lock. There was a pistol on the desk beside his ink pot. And he could see the three porcelain balls, red, white, and blue, that the earl had used to entertain his men outside a building in Belfast. He was wearing a white ruffled shirt, open at the neck, and his coat was folded carelessly on the desk where he’d dropped it. His brow was furrowed. The posters were stacked to the side of his writing space. He finished writing, blotted the paper, began addressing an envelope. Some vagrant thought passed through him and he smiled. Cormac turned the door handle gently. And stepped inside with his sword drawn. He moved quickly to the desk.
The earl looked up with alarmed eyes and reached for the pistol. Cormac placed the blade of the sword across his wrist, took the pistol and shoved it in his own belt.
