Four
I DIDN’T HAVE TO GUESS WHOSE HAND IT WAS.
“Majesty,” I said, with a bow that could have been spectacular at court. “I would be forever grateful if you introduced yourself with less passion.”
She was in her morning gown, a peignoir from Paris. She was nowhere as tall as Clara, and couldn’t glide across a room the way Clara could. Madame was plump, with a few islands of gray hair, but she had a fire that rose from her belly. And she was fearless.
“John Stocking, you will not use your education against me, all your fancy talk.”
“How have I offended you?”
“You disappear like a wisp of smoke and return with such nonchalance that you can bury yourself in Clara’s pipe without greeting me.”
“Madam, you rarely wake before five of an afternoon. And if I am not mistaken, the clock struck five but a minute ago.”
“Impostor,” she said. “You could have knocked once and announced yourself.”
“What? And disturb your paramour?”
She ripped me right out of my chair, and while I crawled about like a baboon, she kicked and scratched and robbed me of a fistful of hair. The nuns were horrified. Not even Clara, her favorite, had an inkling of what to do. But Gertrude’s door opened and Harold Morse marched out, with nothing on but his britches, like a prize fighter—his sinews could have been worms set on fire by some sinister god. He was the only one who could risk the queen’s wrath.
“Dearest,” he said, “would you murder the boy?”
“Yes. With much glee.”
“Fine. Murder him, do. I shan’t weep. But it is not quite becoming to watch you nag at the boy like a common chicken plucker. Your legs seem small.”
Gert released my scalp. “My legs are not small.”
She rose, defeated by Sir Harold’s remark.
“May I borrow the boy?” he said, and he grabbed my neckcloth as if it were a wooden collar, navigated me into the queen’s boudoir, and locked the door. The queen had mirrors everywhere, mirrors from the quarters of sea captains, from harlots’ houses in New Orleans, from the mansions of Loyalists who had to flee our island, from the bedchamber of some marquesa along the Spanish Main. A clever thief could have found a market for himself in Madame’s mirrors, but he wouldn’t have survived his pillage. Harold would have chopped him off at the legs and fed him to Madame’s cats, limb by limb. He was no ordinary soldier-assassin. He traveled incognito, without epaulettes. He was a knight of the realm, but no one was privy to this information except myself and the king who had knighted him.
I was waiting for Sir Harold to congratulate me. But a minute after he closed Gert’s door, he gave me a hiding such as I have never had. It was much worse than what Washington’s little major had inflicted upon my body and soul. I didn’t bleed. But my kidneys were so sore, I lay curled up like some homunculus.
“Sir Harold, I followed your plans to the letter. And we won. That half-blind major will welcome me into Washington’s secret service. I swear on my life.”
“They were readying to hang you, Johnny. And don’t call me Sir Harold. Someone might hear you.”
“But Major Treat said—”
“Quiet. Wasn’t Arnold meant to be our rescuer? All he had to do was swear that you had lost an eye fighting for him. Wouldn’t have cost him a farthing. ’T was his silence that convicted you. Johnny, they’d prepared the tree.”
“Then who is my savior?” says I.
“Gert. She met with the major, convinced him that the nunnery was now a patriotic nest.”
“And he believed her?”
“After a little grog and a lot of kisses,” said Sir Harold. “And you forgot to thank her, to let her know you’re still alive.”
“And that’s why you bruised my kidneys? Best sleep with both eyes open. I mean to kill you.”
“What, and lose your only anchor?” And he turned poetic in that false inflection of his. “Dost thou still love me, boy?”
But I wouldn’t play his game and mouth the expected remark. I love thee not.
I loved him the way you could love a poisonous spider that you lived with. And he loved no one but a king for whom he would commit any crime. He would have cut all our throats in a single night, dispatched the entire nunnery, if it could have given him America.
I WALKED OUT OF THE BOUDOIR, licking my wounds. The nuns weren’t about. They must have gone to their own rooms. The sheriff was gone. Gertrude sat alone in the parlor. She was sucking on a pipe without a lick of tobacco and contemplating the known and the unknown. A wrinkle appeared on her brow.
I kissed the back of her neck. Her body stiffened.
“Madam, why do you cringe whenever I touch you?”
“Habit,” she said. “I remember how handsome you were as a little boy. I could have swallowed you entire.”
“Then you should have.”
“You weren’t my child. And your father occupied my bed if I’m not mistaken.”
“But I’m a grown man, at the college now. Couldn’t we inhabit some neutral ground?”
“There is no neutral ground. We are like warriors, you and I, in a battle I can barely comprehend. I love you and hate you in the same instant, as if lightning struck.”
“I must be perilous for you, madam.”
No matter. I kissed her again. It wasn’t impudence. And she did not cringe. I walked out of the Queen’s Yard. The far end of Robinson Street had been turned into a ditch. Patriots were building their barricades, turning York Island into an armed camp, waiting for Howe’s warships to appear on the horizon. Those warships would come. ’T was as certain as Satan himself. The rebels had no navy, nothing but raw recruits and Washington’s white horse. He would ride along the roads, rallying his boys, but he must have realized that Manhattan could not be defended, that the thirteen forts his little boys had built wouldn’t stop redcoats and royal marines.
I caught Clara smoking in the shadows, her green eyes lit by the embers in the bowl of her pipe. Her mouth was hidden and I couldn’t tell if she was in a somber mood.
“Clara, what will ye do when the redcoats come?”
“Harold will welcome them, I won’t. I’m not in love with the Brits. I had enough of their royal ways in Dominica. My step-father wanted to crawl into me when I was twelve. He beat my mama. She helped me run to Manhattan. Sometimes I wish I had stayed long enough to kill him.”
“But the British can’t be all bad. They taught ye to read.”
“Oh, yeah, Stepfather Steven was a learned man. He sat me on his hip and poked a finger in my cunt while he turned the page.”
“I’m awful sorry,” I said.
She laughed, the embers giving her eyes a devilish hint. “Ain’t you Gentleman Johnny? But in your heart of hearts I’ll bet you’re as brutal as the Brits. You’d love to diddle me with your finger, only you’re too scared.”
And she went back inside the convent, to her very own closet that no man or boy could enter without Gertrude’s permission. Clara was the only nun who had so private a deal. Gert would laugh and say that she was protecting her property, that Clara would become the new queen and mother superior once Gert retired. But it had nothing to do with business. Gertrude loved her with a love that had no limits. Clara could have been the Queen of Sheba if she didn’t have blond hair. Or perhaps Gert was the Queen of Sheba, the white Sheba. Clara was her princess, and I some Solomon who fell under their sway, a Solomon without wives or gold or the least bit of sense.
Five
BUT A MINUTE AFTER CLARA WAS GONE, I ESPIED a pair of bodkins gleaming in the dark. Redcoats wouldn’t have used a seaman’s awl. ’T was the favored instrument of pirates and the two Westchester highwaymen I had hired to help me give Washington and his family a case of the flux. They were wearing masks, but I recognized them by their miserable slouch.
“How are ye, me lovely?” said the fatter of the yobs. “We’ll have your purse, since you paid us a pittance.”
The
y’d have punctured my throat no matter what I gave them. All I could think about was Clara. I still had the ribbon I stole from her when I was a little scholar at King’s. I would knot the ribbon round my neck and swear to the other little scholars that Clara was my sweetheart. Faith, I intended to marry her, but first I had to survive.
I didn’t have a rat’s chance. A bodkin was next my throat. Its handle grazed my ear. But then I heard a mooing from the harbor that could have been a ship’s horn, or the massacre of a dozen women and men.
“The redcoats, the redcoats,” these Cowboys sang. They dropped their bodkins and ran for their lives.
DEPRIVED OF CLARA’S face to dwell upon, I had me a bout of melancholia, and I knew of only one tonic that could lift a lad out of his own dark water. Clara’s shoe closet. All the nuns kept their shoes and winter boots in the same closet, but Clara had the most spectacular shelf. And when the blackness descended upon my shoulders, I would unlock the closet with a key I’d swiped from Madame and fondle Clara’s slippers and shoes. ’T wasn’t the shoes themselves, mind you, not their physical trappings, but their proximity to the mistress I adored.
I wasn’t always alone in that closet. Seems it was the meeting ground of Clara’s suitors; the richest of them would bribe the nuns, paying a handsome price to sniff Clara’s shoes. I never felt superior to these nabobs. Shoes were the closest they would ever get to possessing Clara. They might have wormed their way into Clara’s bed with their gold coins. But they could not penetrate her green eyes. It was Clara’s remoteness that aroused them, Clara’s indifference to anything but her dolls.
I caught a wavering light under the closet door. I wasn’t in any mood to commiserate with Clara’s suitors. But I didn’t hear a sound from within the closet. And that infernal silence troubled me. I clutched a handle in the form of a swan’s head and sallied inside.
An oil lamp sat on the floor. Near the lamp was Sir Harold Morse, a cape around his shoulders. ’T was most singular, since Harold and a couple of mice in Madame’s yard were the only ones on the planet immune to Clara. Yet here he was, contemplating in a shoe closet as if this little island of heels and toes were part of his treasure. He did not budge when I moved betwixt him and the light.
“Harold, have you put a red mark on Madame’s gate?”
“What the Devil for?”
“To alert the redcoats…that they shouldn’t slaughter us in our sleep.”
“Imbecile, who would dare slaughter us? I have credentials from the king.”
“But credentials do not count for much in the thick of battle.”
He did not take prettily to that retort. “Yes, you are the seasoned warrior.”
“Hardly. I lost my eye within ten minutes of entering the walls of Quebec.”
He softened for a moment, as was his wont. “I do not mean to scold you. I come here often in the middle of night, when the nuns pay no mind to their shoes. I think about the years before I arrived in your wretched colony.”
Harold’s childhood was almost as perilous as mine. He was the bastard son of a British lord, kicked and beaten by his older brothers. He might have died were it not for King George. The king had discovered him on the road to Windsor Castle. He was riding his horse in the rain, and he stopped for Harold, hoisted him onto his saddle, brought him to Windsor.
Harold grew up at the king’s side, learned to fence and fire a brace of pistols. And when George began to feud with his American colonies, he sent over his secret knight to assess the damage and recruit lads who would remain forever loyal to their king. Sir Harold landed in New York, recognized the enormous treasure of King’s College, where wellborn lads of the colonies went to school on a hill in Manhattan. But these lads were loyal to no one but themselves. And Sir Harold decided to manufacture his own college boy. I was the only candidate. I’d had no schooling. I was a scavenger and a scamp. Must have reminded Harold of himself when the king found him near Windsor woods. So while I delivered messages and served ale for Madame, Sir Harold insisted on sending me to the parson’s school for colored boys.
“Johnny,” he said, “’T will be an excellent masquerade. Who would ever suspect a spy among the human trash of Out Ward?”
Out Ward contained the gallows, a hovel called Little Africa, a home and hospital for paupers, and the parson’s school, where I sat for a whole year, while Sir Harold supplemented my learning with lessons of his own. And one day a letter arrived on the desk of Matthew Pin, president of King’s. The letter bore His Majesty’s seal. It nominated John Stocking, age fourteen, as the first king’s scholar, with a stipend to the college of three hundred pounds. Matthew Pin was avaricious, but he was no fool. He recognized me as the lad who delivered his beer. He kept the three hundred pounds, but refused to enter me in the college register.
“Stocking,” he said, “go away. We do not, and never will, groom beer boys at King’s.”
And that’s when Sir Harold pounced. He appeared at the college with cape and scabbard.
“You’re his sponsor,” Matthew said, his mouth moving contemptuously. “Any idiot can see that. But there isn’t the slightest chance that he could ever pass our entrance exam.”
Sir Harold stared into the president’s face. “Young John is the king’s ward.”
And he took a letter out of his wallet. It contained one sentence:
Whoever despises this boy, despises me.
—GEORGE REX
Pin grew apoplectic, but I was guaranteed a place in College Hall.
That was three years ago. And in those three years I studied at King’s, went with Arnold to Quebec, lost an eye, and nearly rotted in George Washington’s dungeon.
“Sir Harold, will I ever have an audience with the king himself?”
“Once we hang the farmer-general and his family.”
The picture of Giant George suspended from a tree pained the king’s little scholar.
“Does he mention me in his letters?”
“He’s a king, damn you. He has an empire to run…but we will go to England, I promise, and get you a knighthood.”
“I do not want to be the first American knight. I would like to meet him, that’s all. To feel his kindness and his modesty.”
I ABANDONED CLARA’S CLOSET, crossed Robinson Street, and went into College Yard. The front gate was open—’t was ethereal, with College Hall on its hill, a stone castle awash in moonlight. I was expecting to meet a multitude of angels or murderous redcoats. But there were only Washington’s militiamen and a fistful of students, stragglers who had nowhere else to live. Matthew Pin had left them in the lurch, run away to England with the college’s strongbox, and I had to fill the void.
Six
FIVE MONTHS AGO HAROLD AND THE NUNS HAD brought me home from the hospital in Albany, where I had been lying in my bed like a lonely dog with a black hole for an eye. ’T was in December of 1775. I had to walk with a crutch, since both my heels had been singed in Quebec. And how could I avoid a college that was but a street away?
Several tutors and clergymen pranced across College Yard in their black robes to give the impression that there still was a college. But King’s was in a state of anarchy. The few firebrands we’d had at the college attached themselves to the ragged tail of George Washington’s army. And the others—rich young Loyalists—smoked their pipes, drank wine near the harbor, and sent their servants on scouting missions to buy marmalade on Manhattan’s little black market. This marmalade was for the nuns of Robinson Street, who liked nothing better than to lounge in bed with a pot of jelly from the British Isles. With young scholars braying at their feet.
Yet these scholars were more than whoremongers, I’ll grant them that. They organized themselves, wouldn’t permit the revolution’s own watchdog committee onto the premises. This committee of lugubrious men, mechanics and merchants mostly—some of them the very speculators who had sold marmalade to the King’s scholars—decided they would rather torch the college than have it exist as a Loyalist hous
e of learning.
They were led on by their wives, women dressed in homespun. These wives had little use for high fashion, for gowns with a pannier underneath, a panoply of wire and whalebone that ballooned out like a basket. They did not wear painted feathers or silks. They looked like ghosts that harangued their misters and helped them light their torches. They meant to smoke the young scholars out of their barricade in College Hall, or see them burned alive. “Loyalist filth,” said their leader, a woman in a white bonnet. “Give up allegiance to your king, or die.”
And the scholars replied from their window, “Hurray for George, hurray for George, the kindest king ever to wear a crown.”
This only inflamed the women, who hurled torches at the window like bowlers on Bowling Green. The lads would have perished, but some other party wouldn’t let these patriotic wives have their bonfire. That party wasn’t the sheriff or Manhattan’s militia. ’T was the nuns of Robinson Street, Gertrude’s nuns in particular, who marched out of the Queen’s Yard in their panniers and embroidered boots, carrying cakes, tea, and marmalade on long silver serving dishes. The men of the committee gawked at the nuns and would have given them a laissez-passer into College Hall, but it was their wives who stood in the nuns’ way.
From my perch in College Yard, I could catch the glint in Clara’s eyes, the craze that would come over her whenever she was thwarted. She did not have the art of politicking that was peculiar to our colony. Perhaps politicking played no part in the Windward Isles. I knew little of her people or how she had been schooled, or whether she had been schooled at all. Still, she had her own strange aristocracy. Other waifs had appeared on our docks with lice all over them, but Gertrude had only welcomed one.
Clara stood perilously close to a torch.
Gertrude pulled on her sleeve to calm her down, and it was like calming an Arabian horse, an Arabian with green eyes. Smoke was coming out the window while the nuns stood face-to-face with wives who wanted to set fire to the panniers.
Johnny One-Eye Page 3
