“That’s grand. Then we’ll all stay and have a picnic under the boiling lead…dearest, this is your house, but I’m the master in time of war. We’ll go to the green.”
The nuns wrapped themselves in their hooded cloaks like a gang of ecclesiastics and went off to the Fields with Harold. Tory merchants and their wives, who had shunned Holy Ground and its street of whores, drifted out of the smoke and flying debris and into the arms of the nuns, Manhattan’s newest nurses. Clara and the queen comforted other husbands and wives, while these same husbands were held in thrall by Clara’s green eyes.
Yet I did not see much lust in their own weary eyes. They had never encountered such singular angels of mercy. I’d misjudged Madame and the girls, who did not politick, wave banners or flags. Madame felt superior to these merchants, ’tis true, but her contempt for their narrow ways could not cut into her compassion.
I watched Clara feed water to a merchant’s wife, but I could not dally.
The smoke mounted and seemed to obscure half the village in wave after wave of oppressive heat. Horses and children wandered out of that shimmering black hole. Harold had to smother men who were on fire, smother them with his arms and his admiral’s cape. He sang songs to frantic children. He thrust a cloak into my hands. “Come, Johnny.”
And I followed him into the black hole, where the heat hit our faces like the heaviest of gloves. He improvised a path for us with a poleax, probing the remains of a wall, picking at a dead horse whose eyes glowed in the blackness like hot jewels. We found children, sobbing children, and I couldn’t point them to the Fields. I had no sense of north or south. So I let the children clutch at my clothes, and we composed a curious animal with many heads.
The smoke began to clear. I could see the fiery walls of Trinity, its roof gone. It was hard to imagine how a church could be scalped. But the fire had scalped building after building in its wake. Whole streets were gone, ripped by some strange Providence. And I wondered if we too would sit in a fearsome glow of wood and metal, like London and Pudding Lane.
Harold and I had escaped all the flying debris. At dawn the town rose in front of our eyes and offered us a panorama of the fire. I could trace the fire’s route with one of my fingers. It had moved westward from Whitehall, rode up through South Ward, flirted with Broadway, crossed into West Ward, and stopped dead at Barclay Street, just before King’s College and the nunneries. The fire had respected Holy Ground, but Trinity Church was now an ashen pit with one surviving wall. And then, idiot that I am, I remembered the sugarhouse on Cortlandt Street, where the Crown was holding American prisoners of war.
“Harry, we have to break into the sugarhouse.”
“Where’s the rush?”
“Some of those men might still be alive.”
I walked into the smoldering ruins. I couldn’t find the trace of a prisoner, not a hat, not leg irons, not a charred shirt, or a skeleton.
“Have they gone to heaven, Harold?”
“Hardly. The commander in chief set them free just before the fire started.”
“Washington was here? At the sugarhouse?”
“Ah, I thought you’d noticed him. A tall chap wearing mascara as his only disguise.”
“Then why did you not capture him?” says I.
“Come, come, can’t capture a general like that. Wouldn’t be up to snuff. I mean, we had to allow him a primitive laissez-passer.”
“Who authorized it?” I had to ask.
“I did. By George, we knew the rebels would burn the town. I had to contain the damage. They could have had three gangs of arsonists. I allowed one. A fire at three separate points would mean no more Manhattan.”
“And so you fiddled up a fire like some virtuoso of the violin…Harold, I do not understand your canons of war and I never will. What was the general doing on Robinson Street?”
“Having tea with his true love.”
“Then you’re familiar with Madame’s attachment to the general.”
“She has spoken of little else these past ten years. He has weighed much on her mind. She worries that he will not survive the insurrection. The Queen’s Yard was always a British bordello. You Americans have ostracized Madame and her nuns, but she will not wean herself away from the general.”
“And in all your conversations, did she ever speak of her own lost son? You sent me to George Washington, knowing that he could not evict me from his camp, that he would divine who I was and who I am. That was your trump card, the card you hoped to play.”
“He has divined nothing, except that you once lived with Madame,” said Harold.
“Milord, you lie, you cheat—”
“I’m not a churchman, John. I’m a harvester of secret agents.”
“’Tis much the same thing,” says I.
“I promise you. George Washington is not privy to the particulars of your birth. He has no awareness that Madame ever had a child.”
“Neither has Madame.”
“Reconsider. A young impoverished aristocrat falls in love with a tavern girl. Would you have them wed?” “Yes.”
“Then you are ignorant of your own America. Here men have to marry, and marry well.”
I had to listen to my mother’s romance. I could not imagine that Sir Harold, the king’s own homunculus, would be such a storyteller. I shook with emotion, lads. ’T was like having a magical show flicker in front of your eyes.
Eighteen
PICTURE A YOUNG COLONEL WHO’D COME HOME from the Indian wars without a penny in 1758. He had his own farm, this tall and handsome rider of white horses. He was already engaged to a young widow, the good little Martha who only came up to the giant’s waist, but was the richest woman in the commonwealth. “He loved her not,” according to Harold. The young colonel was in love with his married neighbor, Sally Fairfax, a terrible flirt. Sally’s father-in-law, Colonel William Fairfax, had been George’s benefactor. The boy had little schooling, nothing beyond the age of eleven. He’d learned the art of manners and war at Colonel Will’s estate. He’d gone hunting with Will. And he could not bear to philander and steal Sally away. Yet he would write her letters, demanding that she burn them. He grew ill, nearly died—he would suffer from dysentery and the flux right up to the moment he lost Manhattan to the British. He had even considered suicide.
’T was during this terrible state of unrest that he stopped at a tavern in Tidewater country, on the Chesapeake, near the end of a hunting trip. Plagued with the flux, he had to lie abed for a week. He could not even pay for his room. But he was a celebrated soldier who’d saved Virginia from the Indians and the French. And at this tavern in the middle of nowhere, he discovered a beautiful woman reading a book. She was radiant, with red hair, and reminded him of Sally Fairfax. She was not a guest like George. Young women did not travel alone unless they were whores. She worked at the tavern. It touched the giant, her voracious appetite for reading. She could discuss Plato and Pliny, talk about philosophers and writers of romance with a constant warble in her throat.
The giant recovered. But he did not want to continue his journey home.
“Child,” he said—she was a year older than George—“you shall instruct me. I’ll steal you from this inn and take you with me to Mount Vernon.”
“And what will I do? Feed you lemon tarts in front of your bride?”
“I will not marry, least not Martha Custis. You shall be my bride.”
The young colonel was in deep dilemma. Nothing he’d discovered at the frontier could help him now. He was trained to be a Virginia gentleman, a soldier, and a planter with an arsenal of slaves and his own crops. He could not maintain Mount Vernon on his own. He would be reduced to penury, would have to sell parcels of his estate, or manage another man’s estate. But he’d court a thousand disasters if that could keep him in Gertrude’s company. He rode to her tavern in the tidelands once a week, considered running off with her to the Ohio territories, becoming a trapper or some wild man with a farm.
And the
n one day he arrived at the tavern, and Gertrude was gone. He nearly went blind with rage, rage against himself. His white horse had to lead him back to Mount Vernon. He was like a dead man. He would not eat. His estate fell apart. Then he roused himself from his solitude, rallied his slaves, and mended every single fence within a hundred miles of Mount Vernon. Fierce, mindless activity seemed to cure him of his melancholia. He had no more wars to fight.
“Confound you,” I said to Harold, “what happened to my ma?”
She’d fled to Manhattan without realizing that she was already big with child. She had to break with her George in brutal fashion or he would not have let her go. She had little means and the town fathers would never have permitted a tavern girl from the tidelands of Virginia to teach school. Most school mistresses were the wives of church wardens. And so Gertrude gravitated to Robinson Street. Her intelligence, her beauty, and her wit helped her on Holy Ground. She had her own nunnery before the little boy was born.
“Little boy, little boy. Milord, that was no anonymous creature. You’re discussing my own nativity. Shouldn’t the giant have been informed?”
“Not while Gertrude breathed. She knew how ferocious he would have been as a father, that he would have come for her at all cost, would have abandoned Mount Vernon, mother, bride, and stepchildren to keep his son.”
“Would that he had.”
She never let the little boy out of her sight. And she began to weave the fiction of a boy born out of intrigue in a brothel.
“’T was no fiction, milord. How ironic it is, how just, that George Washington should call me his changeling.”
“I cannot follow you, boy.”
“I thought it was a common term among spymasters. Are you naïve of a sudden? I’m Washington’s changeling, the son who was torn from his life and the spy who tears himself from one enemy camp to the other.”
Harold bowed to me and laughed. “Bravo! You can call yourself a double agent.”
And he disappeared into some dwindling curtain of smoke.
I THOUGHT TO GO INSANE with the incertitude of who I was and what I’d become. Luckily there was the fire. I still had children clutching at me, children who were discombobulated by all the pieces of ash that crept into their eyes. I took this dragon’s tail of lost children to the Fields, which had filled with Tories who carried whatever valuables they could on their backs—strongboxes, brocaded cloth, chairs and tables with gold filigree—and didn’t seem very mindful of their own lost sons.
The cloud of soot had completely lifted; Harold reappeared with five “fireflies”—river rats clad in irons—and a packet of armed men. As the island’s provost marshal, Harold was entitled to his own police.
“Hang ’em, but not him,” he said, pointing to Harvey Hill, who was also in irons. And I understood the latitude of a provost marshal. Harvey was still valuable to him, Harvey was as much of a changeling as honest John. But I couldn’t bear to look at the Crier, or consider myself as his twin.
I watched Gert and the nuns administer to men and women who had swallowed too much smoke. I could not even pretend to hate her. She’d loved a man, loved him unto madness, and I was born into her very own whirlwind. And that left me more of a child than a changeling.
And I wondered how the giant ever did find her again. He’d come to Manhattan in March with his ragged army and his secret service, had camped a little north of the Fields, near the old British barracks. He knew that he could never hold the town, but his presence served as a country in itself, proof that the Continentals had more than a flag, a fife, and notes of rebellion. He had no uniforms for half his men; there was a dearth of flint and powder too. For a while he lived at No. 2 Broadway, more like a nabob than a general recovering from dysentery. But he abandoned Broadway and moved in with his men, strolled among them, let them look at his linen and his long hair. His captains must have told him that Gert’s was the place to gamble, that he couldn’t come to New York and not visit the Queen’s Yard. Would her very name—Gertrude—have sent him running to the latrine? Filled him with anticipation and dread? And when he walked the few scant blocks from the old barracks to Robinson Street, with his bodyguards and members of his family, what could he have been thinking? And that first sight of her, red hair blazing, freckles like spotted fruit—didn’t it negate and nullify the last eighteen years, as if he were that boy colonel again, with the flux, mending in a tavern on the Chesapeake, while a redhead recited Plato to him, something about a cave, and men who could only see the image of an image on a dark wall? Didn’t he have the urge to abandon the new nation, the whole military apparatus, tents and manuals of warfare, and do what he should always have done, disappear with this redhead into the far country and never be heard of again?
Anno Domini 1777
VINGT-ET-UN
Morristown
MARCH 1777
He’d been encamped in Morristown since the 6th of January—his winter quarters a tavern right on the village green. He ate and slept with the stink of beer in his nostrils. He had his surgeons “prick” his men against that dreaded poison, the smallpox, by scratching their arms with a tiny portion of the pox. This infernal scratching was supposed to protect them, but his troops resisted, and the commander in chief had to travel on his white charger to each log hut. Not a single lad withstood being pricked once Washington entered these huts on Thimble Mountain.
He also sent out raiding parties that robbed the Brits of their precious forage. Armies were not supposed to skirmish in winter, General Howe complained to his own officers. “For the past two months, or nearly, we have been boxed about as if we had no feelings—our cantonments attacked, and the forage carried off from us, our troops harassed beyond measure.”
But Washington’s own intelligence chiefs considered this complaint a mere subterfuge. Sir William Howe was up to mischief, hatching plots to dispose of His Excellency, and sending out assassins in one guise or another. They begged Washington to remain within the tavern’s walls.
“Sir, our spies say Howe is filled with folly—win or lose, he will have your head,” insisted one of the chiefs. But Washington would rather risk Sir William’s assassins than breathe the smell of beer. Damn the British and their rules of war! They were like aristocratic rabbits who wouldn’t come out of their holes ’til mid-May, whilst the rebels preferred to fight in February and March.
He thought of Gertrude ceaselessly in this dreadful solitude. He did not even have the war to contain him, nothing but the fear of smallpox, forage for his horses, and winter coats for his men. He wondered if a kind of lunacy had descended upon him—ten times a day he plotted and planned how he might smuggle Gertrude into Morristown. He had enough spies to accomplish such a mission. Yet he could not count on his ablest spymasters. The camp itself had been compromised. A lunatic had come at him with a hatchet but a week ago. He could not say how much gold Sir William had offered such a desperate lad. Hence he would have to plot all alone.
And while he was at his planning table, with a cup of Spanish wine to sweeten his solitude, a woman arrived at headquarters with a surfeit of red hair beneath her scarf. Even under duress he realized: How clever Sir William is to hire a redheaded assassin. He cared not whether she carried a dagger or pistols under her cloak. He invited her to sit down and drink Madeira with him from the very same cup, tho’ she was rude enough not to reveal the least part of her visage.
“Gen’ral,” she said in a voice that was much rougher than Gertrude’s, “I do not see your spectacles.”
“I wear none,” he answered, tho’ it was a little bit of a lie. His vision had gone blurry of a sudden, and he might or might not borrow Sparks’ spectacles to read a dispatch in the middle of the night.
“Would you care to kiss me?” Howe’s assassin asked.
Washington smiled for the first time in a week. Bold he was but not a fool—a kiss could only mean a knife in the neck. He sipped wine with the redhead, reached across the table, and shoved aside the hood of he
r cloak. Washington could not hide his disappointment. Britain had sent a man in a red wig.
The assassin laughed and lunged with his knife, but had never bothered to scrutinize the commander in chief, or calculate how long he was in the leg.
Washington kicked him brutally under the table, kicked him again. The assassin lay writhing on the floor when a pair of pickets burst into headquarters with bayonets. “Excellency, this monster has left a trail of blood a mile long…”
He was no longer listening. For a moment the madman’s company had lent him the smallest piece of Gertrude. But the moment was gone. And he would not involve himself in whether his pickets should double or treble their numbers this side of Thimble Mountain.
Nineteen
THE KING CAST A PALL OVER MANHATTAN FROM his palace at Windsor, while we sat in a welter of ice, like children waiting to be spanked, and thereby cured of our rebellious nature. But how could the king spank us from across the sea? And so we lived with his agents—the king’s own men—in constant unease. They were conquerors who pretended to be our guests. But a guest does not steal the fire from your hearth, a guest does not abandon you to your own wintry cocoon.
In my idleness I prepared a little portrait of our two main antagonists—Sir William Howe and Black Dick—a silhouette cut with venom.
They were the lions of the Western world, a general and an admiral who had joint command over the mightiest armada of munitions and men that had ever been seen on an American shore. These brave and bonny brothers hadn’t come to conquer, it seems, but to mollify brutal American farmers, bring them back inside Britannia—peace commissioners, they called themselves. Both were swarthy men, but Black Dick was shorter and darker than his younger brother. Their grandma had been the favorite whore of George I, and hence the Howe brothers were heirs to a bumpy royal line—their own mama was a bitch, a king’s illegitimate daughter, making them the two most prominent bastards of the realm.
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