“He was but a boy when he met her,” Madame finally volunteered, “and she the wife of a neighbor and a friend. Sarah Fairfax, the good Sally, a bride of eighteen, and he could not cease to look at her. She flirted with him.”
“A harlot,” I said.
“Hold your tongue. She was not a harlot, child. I’m the nun, not Sally Fairfax.”
“And you should be proud of it. Nobility need not come at birth, madam. You are queen of the finest nunnery in North America.”
She laughed, and the skin around her neck rippled with small explosions. I was jealous of George. He could lead a revolt, while I was stuck in a hospital ward, a lad without a lady, unless you counted Clara, who wasn’t my lady at all.
“The commander in chief insists that all civilians must leave the island. We’re being sent to Albany like cattle, Johnny.”
“Not Clara, I trust. She belongs to Major Treat. She’s his bitch.”
“Clara’s a saint. She kept Robinson Street alive as long as she could by visiting that reptile.”
“Methinks the reptile made her groan, madam. Groan with pleasure.”
“Child, you do not have the littlest notion of a woman’s pleasure. Clara vomited into the slop barrel after each visit.”
I was calm. Clara loves him not.
“And where’s His Lordship?”
“Harold’s disappeared, as of yesterday. Without a note, without a pat on my bum.”
“Sounds like him. Perhaps he joined the rebels under a different name. He’ll return when the colors are more to his liking.”
“You shouldn’t malign your tutor. You’d never have grown into a gentleman without Sir Harry.”
“Gentleman? I’m the king’s scholar in a new little country of regicides. I now live by what I learn from the Town Crier,” I told Madame.
My new mentor was Harvey Hill. He was the one who sang out the declaration of independence to Washington’s entire troop. ’T was on the 9th of July, in the Year of Our Lord 1776, whilst I was still here at the hospital. The Crier had stood on the Commons with mechanics and soldiers, and rang his bell. Most of the Loyalists did not hear him. They’d already fled. We lived in a village of deserted houses, with soldiers bivouacking wherever they pleased.
“The Crier’s a besotted fool,” Gert said. “He invents half of what he hears. He’s been barred from the nunneries on account of his lies. But I’ve struck a bargain with him. He will bring you your vittles. I’ve promised him a handsome sum.”
“Mother, when will you be back?”
The color collapsed from her eyes. I had not meant to wound Madame.
“I didn’t raise you. The Divil did.”
And she was gone without sampling a sweet. The biscuits she brought lasted eleven days. I was lucky, because the Town Crier hadn’t come to feed me, no matter what his arrangements were with Madame. But he would prance onto the ward like a wolf, wearing a coat with long skirts, his long hair tied in several knots, and I had to furnish him with my biscuits. He couldn’t be fastidious about his person in all the fury of waiting, waiting for war. He had holes in his stockings, and his britches weren’t very pure. It was hard to fathom where his voice came from. He had no neck and was cursed with a narrow chest that protruded in a pair of sharp points. But when he rang his bell and shouted “Oyez, oyez,” half the island seemed to wake to his call. The redcoats might have listened to Harvey from across the bay.
There were no more gazettes on the island. The rebels had destroyed all the Tory printing presses and ran the last printers out of Manhattan or drove them into the sea. But Harvey had become a walking gazette. He had a spyglass and a notebook and would climb from roof to roof to discover the best angle, the most unfettered vision. Harvey would hallucinate whatever he couldn’t see.
“Sir William’s on Staten Island, frying eggs on a rock.”
“Preposterous. I will not believe another word.”
Suddenly we could hear the cannons roar right in the middle of August. The planks of the college shook under our feet.
“The Divil take Sir William Howe!” Harvey screamed.
But there were no royal marines on our doorstep, no British admirals landing near Whitehall Slip, no Union flags flying under our window. The cannons were our own, from little batteries on both sides of the Hudson. The Rose and the Phoenix, two British warships, broke from the fleet anchored off Staten Island, entered the Narrows, and sailed up the Hudson like a pair of tarts put there to tease the American guns. They cruised the length of Manhattan unchallenged and unscathed, cannonballs sinking all around them. Not a piece of timber was sullied or scratched, not a flag was touched. The warships could have been on a picnic; their captains toasted one another while our cannoneers miscalculated and shot our own men.
It was a terrible taste of battle. The British seamen sang to themselves, and in the midst of their morning serenade they fired once or twice into the heart of Manhattan, ruining a house on Partition Street and leaving holes in the cemetery behind St. Paul’s.
I shuddered to think what would come next. But why should Sir William take Manhattan one house or street at a time? He hoped to have us as his prize jewel, and a jewel couldn’t be littered with dead men and burning wharves. He moved half his army across the Narrows. He meant to capture Washington and surround his military camp on Brooklyn Heights.
The invasion began in earnest but a week later, on August 22nd, when barges and longboats, accompanied by six men-o’-war, ferried a swarm of man-killers to Gravesend, with the sound of drums and fifes. Several of the barges contained a whole sea of Hessian bronze hats.
That’s what Harve the Crier sang to me. I’m not sure how much of the story came from his spyglass or his intuition or the tidbits he’d gathered from some officers near the Brooklyn ferry. But we began to hear the dull plock of musket fire across the East River, and then Washington’s surgeons reappeared, and the ward began to fill. I saw mutilated men, blinded men, but I could not assist them. The surgeons wouldn’t allow me to remain on the ward, and I moved back to Robinson Street, to the nunneries that had been my childhood home. They were deserted now, and I had the Queen’s Yard to myself.
My hands were trembling as I entered the Yard. I did not want to live around Sir William and his brother, Black Dick. Perhaps the king had paid for my tuition, but I was no bloody Englishman and would never be.
I claimed Gert’s boudoir with its gigantic bed. I searched the closets for her clothes. Faith, I found a pot of rouge and a swatch of silver hair on her wig stand, but not a single garment. I sat in front of her mirror, put on the wig, and painted my cheeks. Was it madness or my own sly need to evade the Brits?
A pinched face peered at me from the glass. I wondered if Beelzebub had followed me into the Queen’s Yard.
“Spirit,” I said, “speak, or you’ll wish you’d never spied on John Stocking.”
I tossed Gert’s pot of rouge into the glass, which cracked and multiplied the spirit, made it look more and more like Beelzebub.
“It’s me, the Crier. And I have malignant news. The redcoats have seized Brooklyn, captured three generals and fifteen hundred men, and the commander in chief barely escaped with his life. He would have lost his army but for a regiment of black fishermen from Marblehead, brave lads all, who found the means to row the rebels across the river in a fog. Lord knows how many men drowned or vanished into another world.”
“Crier, there is no other world.”
“I will not listen to a nonbeliever. But I admire your ruby complection.”
“Take one more step and I’ll throttle you.”
“Throttle me later. We don’t have time. The Continentals are still coming across. We have to help the commander in chief.”
I wiped off the paint and got free of the wig. Harvey took out his tinderbox, lit a torch, and we scrambled down Robinson Street to the East River docks. The light from Harvey’s torch danced off broken buildings, little hurried forts, and streets pocked with holes. The C
rier was a marvel at disentangling himself from snares on the ground, but I tripped twice and banged my shins against a disused water pump.
There was pandemonium at the docks. Men would rise out of the water from battered canoes, rowboats, and barges, and stumble ashore, moving into the fog like creatures born in wind and rain. Some of them were carrying tents and small artillery pieces. They seemed stranded in the dream of war. The tents were useless, ripped from corner to corner, but they continued to clutch them, as if such fabric had become the last comfort they had in the world.
I held a lantern up to their eyes, wanted to give them a hand, but they drifted past the Crier and me. We kept seeing black sailors, the men from Marblehead, bundling wounded soldiers out of barges and skiffs. They’d crawl along the edge of a barge in bare feet, the only people who weren’t stunned or petrified. They soared like powerful acrobats, and created their own cohesion among such a bamboozled army.
I saw no officers. The black sailors could have been in command. They talked very little. Upon landing their boats, they formed a human chain, pulled soldiers and other sailors onto dry ground. They struggled until dawn when the last soldier was pulled from a boat. And then the commander in chief came out of the water in a wet cape, his hat low upon his forehead, his pale eyes brimming with alertness and a will to fight as he progressed along the human chain.
“Your Excellency,” the sailors said.
His sword belt hung by a hair. His boots were without heels. His gaze turned from the Crier to me, but he wouldn’t acknowledge Harvey Hill.
“Young John, are you here to collect trophies for the British?”
But he didn’t wait for an answer. He trod into town in his boots without heels, vanished into the darkness of Golden Hill Street, and not the Crier or myself could even guess where he was going.
Fifteen
I TALKED TO SOLDIERS THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON as they collected near the Battery to share what they didn’t want to remember. They’d been routed by Brits who landed on the beaches of Gravesend and fell upon Washington’s raw recruits with thousands of bayonets and Hessians in bronze hats, two regiments of Loyalists from Long Island, and hundreds of slaves who had deserted the American cause and carried King George’s supplies on their backs. The rebels could do little against this swarm of men and matériel, and a slaughter ensued during the last terrible days of August. The king’s soldier-assassins pinned Americans to tree after tree with their bayonets. Other Americans wandered in some forlorn field holding their guts in their hands. You could not fight these soldier-assassins. They never once broke their line. An entire company could turn like the spokes of a wheel and capture rebels before they had a chance to flee. Washington’s riflemen and musketeers had never encountered such precision. The enemy was like a musical clock with bayonets and musket balls. And the rebels could only tap out the pathetic little tunes of individual men. No one had bothered to teach them the art of stabbing with a bayonet. They didn’t even have bayonets.
Sir William Howe could have captured the whole kit and caboodle, but he hesitated. He sat in the rain, a few hundred yards from the rebel works on Brooklyn Heights, hoping that Washington would deliver his sword and surrender these new United States. But Washington would not surrender. A monstrous fog shielded him and his men as they trundled without a word to the ferry landing. He got the remnants of his army across the river, both the walking and the wounded.
And now he had an army adrift in the streets of Manhattan, with useless tents and other paraphernalia propped in front of houses like the signals of his defeat. He let the paraphernalia lie there. He wasn’t concerned with signals and signs. He had to regroup and rebuild. He didn’t have the luxury of warships to deliver his men to some battleground. Sir William could land his assassins at the far edge of Out Ward, cut off Washington’s routes, and trap him behind the old Indian wall. He would have had to fight from the rooftops, and Sir William could finish him a soldier boy at a time. He left behind one general and a few thousand men and moved his army out of town. Sir William’s warships cruised along the East River in mid-September and bombarded the Americans wherever they were. The fire of British cannons flashed across the hills of upper Manhattan. And then our lone general abandoned us to the Brits, skulking out of town with his troops. Suddenly the Asia, that ghostly galleon at the foot of Wall Street, was lit up with its own lanterns. British soldiers in brilliant red uniforms marched down the gangplank. With them was the late president of King’s, Matthew Pin, who hadn’t fled to London, as he had wanted us to believe. He’d been closeted aboard the Asia like the rattler he always was. He wore a fresh coat, shoes with silver buckles, and bright green stockings that emphasized his spindly calves.
“Gentlemen,” he said to no one in particular, “until Sir William arrives to take command, I’m declaring myself military governor of Manhattan.”
I could have lived with his foolishness, but another man rode down the plank with a lot more muscle in his calves. He wore the uniform of an admiral, with a pointy hat that seemed as long as the Asia’s bow. It was Sir Harold himself, my late mentor at the Queen’s Yard. I couldn’t hide my disappointment and dismay. An attack of the shivers told hold of me. I ran to Robinson Street.
Sir Harold followed me right into Gert’s boudoir.
“The king’s little orphan, are we not?” I growled at him. “Raised at Windsor like a royal Gypsy. It was the baldest of lies. Does Gert know you’re an admiral?”
“Yes,” he said. “She’s known for years. The king made me an admiral before I landed in America.”
“I shall never talk to that woman again.”
“How pretty, how full of flavor, you little bitch. You wouldn’t have arrived at seventeen without Gert’s ministrations, without her invisible hand. I will not thrash you whilst I wear the king’s clothes. But mark me, little one, if I catch you when I’m not in uniform…”
“You might start, milord, by getting out of your ridiculous hat. Faith, I’ll do it for you.”
And I knocked the royal battleship off Sir Harold’s head.
He came at me, the whole of him aquiver, and I calculated to myself—if die I must, Lord, let it be now. But not a hair of me was touched. We heard the brouhaha of an army outside Madame’s bedchamber. I imagined it was Sir William and his brother, Black Dick. But it was not the Howes. It was Madame herself, fresh from Albany with all her nuns in their finest capes and hats, and a contingent of redcoats behind them carrying their luggage.
I bowed à la française, a full sweep, with my head as low as my bum. But I didn’t see Clara, and my heart began to race. Had she gone off with Washington’s one-eyed toad, Malcolm Treat?
“How stunning, madam, that you should arrive on the very day Sir Harold disembarks from the ghost ship in our harbor. Did he communicate via carrier pigeon?”
She slapped me and twisted my ear in front of the girls.
“I worry about you and all I get is venom.”
“Madam, you shouldn’t molest me in public.”
“My closet is not open to the public. It’s for my family. And it’s my misfortune that you are part of this family.”
I no longer listened, or felt the ignominy of a crippled ear. I saw Clara in a hat and veil, redcoats buzzing around her. I didn’t know whether to kill her or kiss her feet. The nuns went into the parlor to smoke their pipes, and I had to watch Clara’s skirts disappear a hoop at a time. And while Madame’s maids unpacked her clothes, commandeered water from the Tea Water Pump, the only well in town that still had potable water, and delivered Madame’s room from the mess I had made, Sir Harold and I shared a pipe in a closet near her boudoir. He told me about the Asia, how it sat in the harbor without one lantern lit. It was Harold who’d arranged Matthew Pin’s flight from King’s College, while an angry mob prepared to feed him tar and feathers. Harold had put his name in the manifest of a merchantman leaving for London, and then sneaked him aboard the Asia, which could survey Manhattan while the rebels ruled
the island.
And when the rebels grew suspicious, he cut off all signs of life, and let the Asia drift in place inside the harbor. He could no longer use his supply barge. It was the nuns who serviced Harold’s ship, the nuns who managed to bring him his supplies, while Harold himself flitted between the Asia and Robinson Street. And when Washington’s secret service prepared to pounce, it was Clara who sucked certain plans out of Major Malcolm Treat, and Harold withdrew into the belly of the boat. I had to wonder if Clara was a British spy, or was only following Gert’s instructions. It rubbed me wrong. I could not comprehend the maneuverings of womankind. But then I had to recall that I had been raised around the nuns, and perhaps I was as devious as them all.
I could no longer return to the college. It was full of redcoats who took the wounded lads Washington had left behind, loaded then into the sugarhouse on Cortlandt Street, and placed their own wounded in the wards. And I had to occupy my old quarters at the nunnery, an alcove behind the kitchen. I earned my keep, sirrah. I shoehorned myself into this new world of the Brits. I wrote letters to British merchants for the nuns, who had a habit of not paying their bills. They had to have the latest London fashions, and since they bought so much tobacco for their pipes, they were penniless by the middle of the month.
The nuns began to worry that they would lose out during the British conquest. Generals might import ladies from London with stylish hats, ladies who could threaten the prestige of Holy Ground. The nuns could ill afford to anger their cloak-makers and boot-makers. And so I had to write letters to these distinguished men, outlining the nuns’ difficulties, with promises to pay.
It startled me when Clara appeared in my alcove. She required a letter, like the other nuns. She could read Aristotle but never learned to write save with a childish scrawl. I didn’t lord it over her, request a ransom for the use of my pen.
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