“Johnny,” she said, “he’s safe, he’s safe.”
Gert touched the talisman at her throat, confident that her general would never fall into Sir William’s trap. But I stopped looking at Gert. Clara was the real sorceress at the table, and Clara had no souvenirs from Morristown. Her green eyes burnt with premonition, as if she could sense the nearness of General Washington—nay, could will it into being.
Twenty-Nine
ONE NIGHT, NEAR THE END OF APRIL, AS THE RAIN racked our roof and flooded Gertrude’s little garden, Sir William’s own bodyguards arrived at the card table with a wild look, their mouths opening and shutting in some strange awe. They were about to speak when George Washington appeared in a long cloak, accompanied by a much smaller man with the features of a girl, both of them like bandits with scarves covering their mouths.
I recognized the small man in a flash, even with the scarf. It was the same Alexander Hamilton whom I would espy every morning inside the chapel at King’s.
He had always been the firebrand, always first, with a temerity that would allow him to stop a mob that was tarring and feathering the wrong man. He was the orator of our class, the most patrician, tho’ he didn’t have a New York pound in his pocket and was but a bastard like myself. He would wander about College Hall and sing: “My blood, dear John, is as good as any of those who plume themselves upon their ancestry. I shall make my own.”
And he did. Scarce twenty years old, he was a lieutenant colonel with the Continentals and Washington’s chief secretary. There’d been all sorts of rumors running about—that his mother had a dollop of black blood, that he himself was an octoroon—’t was the secret of his life—and that his father was a Hebrew. The other little scholars chortled behind his back, but I did not. He said that he’d come from a slave island in the Indies, that Manhattan was another island of slaves, and that he himself had been tutored by a Jewess and was mightily proud of it.
I cannot explain why Hamilton’s Jewess reminded me of Madame—perhaps ’t was because a nunnery was like a college, an abbess like a tutor. But I was never able to get along with little Hamilton. He saw me as a lout who loved the king and whose life would go to wreck. Was he so wrong? My classmate now fought at Washington’s side and was chief among his aides, and I was a scuttlebutt, a conjurer without a single trick.
That’s not what ate at me. I was frightened to death that Clara would fall in love with a fellow octoroon, that she’d covet his azure eyes and elope with him to her closet. But Clara did not make a move. She was magnetized, like the rest of us.
Hamilton and Washington removed their scarves. They hadn’t come in civilian clothes. Indeed, they wore their uniforms under the long cloaks. Petrified, Sir William’s officers prepared to arrest the general and his secretary. But William waved them off. He bowed once, pulled out his hanger, and clanked it on the table, like a useless load of iron. He would conceal no weapons from Washington. And Mortimer did the same. He dug into his pockets and put three pistols on the table.
Washington smiled. “Sir,” he said to William while glancing at Mortimer. “I do admire your man. He nearly ripped my head off during a skirmish in the Harlem Heights. Had I ten or twenty like him, I could have recaptured York Island ages ago…Hamilton, why do you wear such a long face?”
“I was frowning at this contemptible fellow, John Stocking, whom I had the distinct displeasure of knowing at King’s. He sits with the British of late.”
“Hamilton, you are a prig. I like the lad. I can vouch for him…now introduce us, will you?”
“’Tis not necessary, sir,” said British Billy. “I assure you.”
“I think it is, or you might start calling me Colonel Washington, or the rebel farmer in chief, as your aides were fond of doing.”
“It was unpardonable, yet may I ask you to forgive them, General?”
“Done,” said the farmer, putting his own hanger on the table and asking little Hamilton for his hanger too. It was only then that he sat down on the chair allotted to him, across from Sir William.
I stared in amazement, mortified. Gertrude was in the room, the woman with whom he’d longed to hide in Ohio, wearing a love knot round her neck, a ribbon. But he would not glance at her, not even long enough to offer the flimsiest of hellos. Yet he’d come for her, I’ll wager, as much as vingt-et-un. He was reckless as only a principled man can be. His officers had begged for furloughs, had gone to visit their families, while he walked through camp, visiting with whatever little army he had left. And if he couldn’t be cavalier in risking his own men, men he didn’t have, might he not gamble himself, accept Sir William’s challenge by materializing once more on the wild side of Manhattan?
Poor Billy. He hadn’t counted on a general who would turn vingt-et-un into a metaphysical maneuver. Yet I feared for Washington’s life. The British assassins meant to break his neck. Hadn’t Mortimer almost accomplished it at Harlem Heights?
Wouldn’t have been much of an effort for him to reach across the table and finish the job. And where in hell was that spy on parole, Major Malcolm Treat? The farmer could have used pistols behind him, but Treat was nowhere in sight.
Sir William must have given his officers some secret sign. They tossed in their cards and left the table. He had an unhealthy squint in his eye, imagining the farmer as flesh for the crows. I liked it not. Gert couldn’t intervene. Washington would not have allowed her to do so. And not even Clara’s sorcery could quiet this war between the generals. Billy manipulated the last nuns out of the game. The nuns could not sit on their cards and they constantly overdrew, while Billy nursed a nine or ten in the hole, doubled and tripled bets until the nuns didn’t have a New York pound in their pockets.
Vingt-e-un had come down to the farmer and him.
“General,” he said, “’tis quite noisy out here. I cannot concentrate on the cards. I fear I will lose my wig and my drawers to the Americans if we continue in this atmosphere. I suggest we play in quieter circumstances…Gertrude, am I correct? Is there not quite a wide closet behind that door?”
I could read the terror on my mother’s face. She was pondering how to answer the British war machine.
And I stepped in. “Sir William, methinks the general and little Hamilton have had a long journey, and—”
“Who is little Hamilton?” little Hamilton asked. “I am a lieutenant colonel attached to the commander in chief.”
“But you must both be famished. Could we not—”
“Thank you, Johnny One-Eye, but we’ll feast in private, commander in chief to commander in chief,” said Billy. “Mortimer will look after our wants.”
“Sir,” little Hamilton said to the farmer, fearing that he might be left out. “I ought to take notes.”
Washington smiled. “Later, Hamilton. Britain is not in the mood for notes tonight.”
He left his hanger on the table and was about to enter the back room with Sir Billy and the brute. I could not tell whether he was the biggest fool in Manhattan or the real master of vingt-et-un. Perhaps he was both. And finally he did acknowledge Gert.
“Madam,” he said, “might I borrow your ribbon?”
My mother reached beyond William’s snares and sported with her general, in spite of the danger.
“Your Excellency,” she said, “’tis a very old thing. I doubt it has much value.”
“But it has great value to me.”
Billy was aboil, red hot. He must have considered arresting Madame, charging her with high treason for having sheltered George Washington in her bedchamber, but alas, he couldn’t charge her without also charging himself. Washington had appeared during Sir William’s watch, while William was playing vingt-et-un under the same roof, in a house filled with redcoats. And so all he could do was look and listen while Gert tied that piece of silk round Washington’s neck.
There was such unmerciful intimacy in that little gesture—a tenderness he had never seen in Madame—that it bridled Billy. His jowls went blue, his eyes at
the very point of popping out of his head.
Washington bowed to Gert with a sweep of his arm that was like the motion of a duelist or a dancer of the minuet. For a moment he was outside Billy’s realm—Billy’s headquarters and house of cards—and was only with Madame. He committed the edge of her ribbon to his lips, said, “Now I have the luck I will need,” and ducked inside the closet.
I moved toward him out of some instinct of survival, the farmer’s survival, but the door shut in my face, and a pair of officers stood guard, almost as big as the brute. Madame whispered to Clara, and Clara took flight, but not fast enough to alarm Sir Billy’s guards. She disappeared from the parlor, and I thought for a moment that the nuns themselves might storm into the back room, with the pistols my mother kept in the cupboard. But I did not have my wits about me. Lads, I was too alarmed. I counted off the seconds like some musical clock, wondering how long Washington would last in that room, all alone.
Clara didn’t return with an army of nuns. ’T was Black Dick, with a rage that broke through his crust of leather skin. What had she promised him, what had she said? He approached the door. Billy’s guards were in a turmoil. They couldn’t knock an admiral over the head, an admiral who happened to be Billy’s brother.
They saluted him, but held to the door.
“Lads,” he said, “do I have to piss on your leg? Get out of my way.”
He shoved them aside and knocked on the door.
“It’s me, Will. Your bleeding brother, Black Dick.”
The door opened from within. The admiral entered, and the door closed behind him.
I could have swallowed my own heart. I’d have felt some improvement had I heard the admiral, heard him once. One little shout. There was nothing. And then the door opened. Washington sallied out like some horseman. He was quite alive. The king had not won his war tonight.
Thirty
NARY A SOUL WOULD REVEAL WHAT HAD TRANSPIRED in Gert’s back room. Sir William wouldn’t talk to the likes of me, and I couldn’t ask Black Dick—the admiral was far too discreet. That left Mortimer as my only witness, and Mort was reluctant to break the seal of so mysterious a game.
I had to catch him alone after one of our carriage rides. He was more loquacious in the middle of the night. I watched him ponder while he scratched his head. “’T was wickedly warm within that room.”
“But did you have instructions to finish off the farmer?”
“That was the plan. But he was fearless.”
“The details, Mortimer,” I growled. “Can you not recall the moment?”
It had burnt into him like the hangman’s hot poker. It scorched his eyes. The two commanders in chief playing vingt-et-un on Billy’s tile table. And ’t was George Washington—not Billy—who broke the bank. His cards keep coming up twenty-one. No one had ever humiliated Mort’s general like that, not even some lord of gamblers. But Sir William looked Washington in the eye and said, “General, will you end the war and go back to Virginia? The king will pay you a handsome price, offer you a peerage. Your line will continue for as long as there are kings. Your people will be remembered past eternity.”
“I seek no such remembrance,” Washington said.
“Then what if I told you that you will never leave this room alive?”
Mort had put on the face of Death—a face that could frighten a battlefield—and this American madman returned Mort’s glare.
“Good,” said the madman. “It will inspire my boys, but you will not kill me?”
“And what if I say I will?” said Billy.
The madman smiled. “His Majesty’s subjects will say that General Howe is a toad, not a man. He extinguished poor Washington because he could not win at vingt-et-un.”
That’s when Black Dick came charging through the door, his leather mask of a face on fire. Mortimer hid his delight from his master, but he would have found it indecent to murder a man of Washington’s mettle.
Black Dick hopped around Billy and took Washington’s hand, warrior to warrior. “You must forgive my brother, sir. He is not himself of late. He shuffles cards so much he has forgotten how to lead an army. But please have the goodness never to visit Gertrude again. It would upset our officers to find the rebel chief in their favorite brothel and not have permission to pluck out his eyes.”
Black Dick did not acknowledge Billy until Washington was gone. Then he sat at the tile table with his hanger between his legs and started to weep. “What will become of us, Will? We have landed in a swamp.”
BLACK DICK NEVER RETURNED to the Queen’s Yard. I assume he said goodbye to Clara, but he left me not a single note. He sailed to Newport with half his fleet. So we heard. He was an upright, honest admiral who didn’t lose his dignity even when he was most puzzled by his love for Clara. If noble birth could make a man more humane, then Black Dick was an exemplar of nobility.
Somehow he made me think of Hamilton, who had no coin other than his wish to excel—that was his nobility, nobility in a much newer world.
Washington could have had his pick of the revolution’s richest sons, but chose Hamilton as his secretary and aide, the pauper from St. Croix. ’T was hotheads like Hamilton who would shake the continent. There were no such strivers among the Brits, only men who had bought their commissions and had studied the ways and means of bowing to His Majesty.
Washington had not been wanton in coming here. He’d studied the Howes, assessed them, but the Howes had not studied him, had not taken his measure. His men were without shoes, and his one surprise attack had to be himself. He gambled that he would get out of Sir William’s little den of vipers alive, and in doing so he would heartily discourage the Howes.
That night of vingt-et-un had doomed Sir Billy, sealed his fate. The fighting season would soon begin, but after Washington’s visit he had lost his eagerness to mount campaigns. Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, Britain’s playwright-general, would be coming down from Canada this summer on his way to Albany with his redcoats, his whores, his flunkies, and his baggage cars filled with clothes and copies of his plays. He had five hundred Indians, I hear, the fiercest fighters in the land. And Gentleman Johnny threatened to scalp the whole countryside if we Americans didn’t behave. There’d been talk that Sir William would ride up the Hudson with his men and meet General Burgoyne, building an invisible barrier across America that could break the back of the rebellion in a single blow.
Sir William had other plans. He meant to capture Philadelphia, America’s largest town, citadel of its wealth, and seat of our new Congress, but still he sat in Manhattan, where he attended cricket matches with his “lads”—officers who loved him and would have gone to the Divil with their Billy and stabbed every rebel in North America with their bayonets; even they had become a part of Billy’s tableau vivant, artful at striking one pose after the other until they were caught in the final pose of fighting men.
Thirty-One
IT ALL CHANGED IN A NONCE WHEN BURGOYNE swooped down from the north with his noxious army in late June and captured Ticonderoga, Washington’s one “impregnable” fort. Our island was ablaze with excitement when word reached us about Gentleman Johnny. We could sense that something was afoot.
There had always been some commotion in the British barracks north of Holy Ground—redcoats marching hither and thither, the sound of drums and fifes, the drunken roil of drill-masters away from their men. But that suddenly changed one morning in July. The redcoats where everywhere, thousands upon thousands, marching in unbroken, endless columns through the cobbled streets, with their drummer boys maintaining a miraculous rhythm that seemed to lend much power to the soldiers themselves.
The redcoats filed down the narrowest of lanes—past churches, the Hebrew synagogue, and the old slave market—toward the docks, where barges were waiting, like lions on a leash, to take them out to battleships in the harbor. I could not recall ever seeing such bounty. ’T was as if Sir William had removed all that was natural in the world, all that was kind, and replaced it wit
h cannons and colored coats. He sailed out of New York harbor with fifteen thousand men, having kissed his consort goodbye. Mrs. Loring perched like a widow in her yellow house, with only myself to comfort her.
“He’ll be loyal,” I said. I had to lie. “Sir Billy regards your silhouette while he plays vingt-et-un, says it brings him luck.”
Billy did keep a silhouette of Mrs. L. near his strongbox, but her likeness had gathered dust. That contest with the farmer had taken the blood out of Sir William. Loyalists in British Manhattan started to panic. Rumors abounded across Broadway. General Howe had left his filly but was still hibernating in July. He’s gone to Halifax, agonized our Tory merchants. They were frightened that George Washington would swoop into Manhattan with his ferocious farmers. But Billy wasn’t floundering in Canadian waters. Night riders brought the news: Billy’s invasion fleet had been spotted in the Chesapeake. He toyed with the Americans at Brandywine, utterly confusing them, and for a moment it seemed as if Sir William would “wash away the rebels,” as the Loyalist papers reported. There were bets at the coffeehouses that Washington would sink into the dust and that the war would be over in a matter of days. The Continental Congress had already packed up and dispersed to Lancaster, like dogs on the run.
Billy’s captains arrived in Philadelphia in late September without firing a shot. They expected the entire town to greet them as liberators. Beautiful Tory princesses would no longer have to hide from Washington’s smelly soldiers. Spies had assured the redcoats that “friends thicker than a forest” would appear. Yet the British drummer boys discovered a town with eerily empty houses along the route of their march and a row of women with wilted flowers in their fists.
But Sir William rejoiced. New York was a barbaric little town compared to Philadelphia, a veritable metropolis with water that a refined person could drink from one of Philadelphia’s five hundred pumps. Here London fashions still ruled, in spite of the farmers, and he could find dancing societies and literary clubs that were sophisticated enough to welcome him and his lady. He rented a house on Prince Street for Mrs. Loring and seized the most magnificent house in Philadelphia for himself—the Penn Mansion at Sixth and Market had become his headquarters. Billy’s officers built a magnificent playhouse within the old bones of an abandoned building. Howe’s Philadelphia Thespians opened on South Street. He was like a king in a new kingdom, but without a countryside. American snipers shot at the king’s men a mile from Market Street. Sir William had to surround Philadelphia with a fortified line. He had houses burnt near the no-man’s-land to deprive such snipers a hold on Philadelphia. And he made merry as best he could.
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