City of Glory

by Beverly Swerling

  Andrew seemed to want to pretend the argument had not happened. “Perishing cold out there.” He thrust a poker into the mix of logs and coals in the fireplace. A funnel of sparks rose up the chimney.

  “A storm coming, I think,” Joyful said.

  Andrew grunted. “My joints say the same.”

  His cousin had still seemed young and vigorous when Joyful first met him. Now, seventy-three, with his hair gone entirely white, Andrew looked fragile and gaunt with age.

  He gestured to a decanter of brandy on a small table between the windows. “Pour us each a tot, Joyful. Then come over here and warm your bones.”

  Joyful covered the bottom of two bulbous snifters with spirit, but carrying two glasses at the same time was beyond him these days. He brought one to his cousin, then went back to claim the second before returning to the leaping flames and offering a toast. “Your health, sir.”

  “And yours.”

  Joyful took a long swallow, enjoying the flash of warmth that went from his throat to deep in his belly, then set the drink on the mantel. He had to consciously resist the urge to extend his hands over the coals. Instead he put a foot on the brass fender surrounding the hearth.

  “Let me see that.” Andrew reached out and lifted the arm that ended in the black leather glove. “Wound giving you any trouble?”

  “None. It’s well healed.”

  “I’d expect as much. Managed to leave plenty of skin for the final closure, eh?”

  “Exactly as I was taught.”

  “The glove’s clever.” Andrew ran his hand along the sleeve of Joyful’s black cutaway coat. “Got straps keeping it on, have you?”

  “Yes. I had the rig made by a blacksmith a couple of weeks ago. Taking a while to get used to the weight of the thing, but all in all, it seems to work quite well.”

  “Considered a hook? It would let you do some things. Not as good as a hand, but useful.”

  “No hook,” Joyful said. “Make me feel like a pirate.”

  He expected Andrew to smile at the weak joke. Instead the older man frowned. “Your father was a pirate for a time.”

  “A privateer,” Joyful said. “That’s not exactly the same.”

  “Perhaps,” Andrew said with a shrug. “Are you still determined to give up the practice of medicine?”

  “Yes. As I’ve already said, I don’t believe I have much choice.”

  “There’s a great deal of doctoring can be done with one hand.”

  “But not,” Joyful said, “a great deal of surgery.”

  “You took off that boy’s arm with one hand, didn’t you? And from what you tell me, that was the most difficult sort of amputation.”

  “Yes, I did, and yes, it was. But Jesse Edwards was a captive patient. He had no choice in the matter. Convincing the gentlefolk of New York to go under the knife of a one-handed cutter is a much more daunting prospect. Particularly when they can find the best surgeon in Christendom right here on Ann Street.”

  “You flatter me.”

  “No,” Joyful said. “I do not.”

  This time Andrew did smile. “Very well, you do not. But I shan’t be the best much longer, lad. I’m getting old.”

  “Hold out your hands,” Joyful said.

  “There’s no need—”

  “Next to mine,” Joyful extended his good right hand. After a moment Andrew stretched out both his beside it. Joyful let a number of seconds go by. “Not a tremor,” he said after almost a full minute. “Rock steady as you’ve always been. And if we stayed this way for a while longer, I daresay mine would be the hand to start trembling first. I know my place in the hierarchy, Cousin Andrew. In New York, with two hands, I was the next best after you. In the service, far and away the best. Now…” He shrugged and allowed his arm to drop to his side.

  “I still wish you’d reconsider, lad.”

  “I know you do, Cousin Andrew. But I won’t.”

  “And you won’t come home? This is your home, you know.”

  “I know that it was my home, and I am forever grateful for that. But I can’t live off your charity—” He held up his good hand to forestall Andrew’s protest. “I know you’re going to say it isn’t charity. And I know you mean it. But I have to make my own way.”

  “And that’s the end of it?”

  “That’s the end of it.”

  “I assumed as much, but I felt I had to make a last try. I take it then that you’re still decided on becoming a Canton trader.”

  “I am. I was raised in the Canton trade. It’s the one thing other than medicine I know.”

  “Have you talked to your Devrey cousin about the fact that you mean to go into competition with him? I fancy he won’t like it much.”

  Joyful tossed back the last of his brandy, and shook his head when Andrew motioned toward the decanter. “No thanks, not just now. And word is that Bastard Devrey has too many problems of his own to be worried about me.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that too. But this China trade business—there’s nothing you can do until after the war is over, is there?”

  “Nothing much,” Joyful agreed.

  “And as I recall, you supported this misbegotten military adventure.”

  “I thought it imperative that we not let Britain continue to treat us like a colony.”

  “So you did. Talked about it at the time, didn’t we?”

  “We did, sir.” Joyful was well aware of Andrew’s strong Federalist leanings and that his cousin considered President Madison and the Democratic-Republicans a pack of radicals.

  “Thing is,” Andrew’s voice was milder than his meaning, “you shouldn’t start a war with incompetent officers, and an army of mostly militia who refuse to carry the fight beyond our borders.”

  Joyful shrugged. “I’d have thought that would please you. I remember you telling me once that a standing army that answered to the president and Congress rather than the states would be a threat to civilian government.”

  “Did I? Well, I’ve said a lot of damn fool things in my day. What’s one more?” Andrew stood up and went to the window. The short winter day was ending, the dusk deepening. “Come over here, Joyful.” His tone had changed. “Look out and tell me what you see.”

  “Houses, Cousin Andrew.” The view held no surprises and he answered before he actually reached the other man’s side, though once at the window he obediently peered into the street. “The homes of up-standing Americans like yourself. But I warrant a good many of them are republicans, as they call themselves. Rabblerousers, as you would call them.”

  “And I warrant you are correct. But beyond Ann Street what do you see? Not just with your eyes, with your mind and heart.”

  Ah, perhaps that was what this was about. “The Manhattan forests and streams and hills you and your damnable Common Council mean to destroy with a grid of streets and avenues,” Joyful said. “Fit for a population as great as China’s.”

  Andrew chuckled. “Not quite that many, but nearly.”

  “You don’t sound upset by the prospect.”

  “I’m not. And given your present state of mind, neither should you be. More people means more business. That’s what you’ll need for this new venture of yours, isn’t it?” Andrew reached up and took hold of the curtains but didn’t pull them shut. “Light that oil lamp over there, lad. And the one by the fireplace.” He waited until Joyful had thrust a taper into the fireplace and did as he was bid, then the older man continued, “I risked my skin for the Revolution, Joyful. “Now…” Andrew’s voice trailed away as he pulled the curtains closed and turned to face the younger man.

  “Now what, Cousin Andrew? Your note said a matter of urgency. I admit I’m curious.”

  “Yes, I expect you are. But you’ll have to be patient a few moments more. Let’s sit down.” And when they were both in the chairs beside the fireplace: “Tell me what you know of the Fanciful Maiden.”

  “Only that she was a fine sloop, and a very fortunate privateer back in the 1750s
. And that my father captained her.”

  “Nothing specific about the voyage of 1759?”

  Joyful thought for a moment. “Nothing specific, no.”

  Andrew sighed. “I rather hoped Morgan had told you. It would have made this easier.” He reached inside his breast pocket, withdrew a small, much folded piece of paper, and put it on the low table between them. Dark now, the room full of shaded corners where the ghosts of the past could lurk, but enough light from the lamps for Joyful to see that a faint red stain indicated that once there had been a wax seal.

  “This is for you,” Andrew said. “It’s your legacy.”

  “From you?” Joyful was surprised. “I’d have thought Cousin Christopher…” Andrew had one surviving child, a son a dozen years Joyful’s senior, also a physician. Christopher lived in Providence, and father and son were not particularly close, but he’d never thought they were estranged.

  “My son will have what’s justly his. This belongs to you. It’s from your father.”

  “I don’t understand. I had my father’s legacy some years past.” A trunk of personal effects and a pouch containing coins worth two thousand pounds, put into his hands in 1809, seven months after Morgan Turner died, by a merchant captain called Finbar O’Toole. Fourteen years old I was when I fought in the Revolution, and if it weren’t for your da looking after me I’d o’ been dead in a month. Told him I’d bring you this. He gave it me night afore he died and t’ain’t a gram lighter now than it were then.

  “This bit made a detour,” Andrew said. “Go on, take it. It’s yours.”

  Joyful leaned forward and used his right hand to unfold the paper while it still lay on the table—he’d learned many such tricks over the past two months—then picked it up. The creases and the ink faded to the color of rust made it difficult to read, but there was no doubt it was written in his father’s hand.

  “Indulge me, Joyful,” Andrew said softly. “Read it aloud.”

  “Seventy-four degrees…thirty minutes west of Greenwich, just south of…twenty-two, no, twenty-

  four degrees north. Twice around thrice back.” He stared at the paper a moment or two longer, then looked up. “The first part’s navigation coordinates, but leading to where? As for the last, it’s gibberish.”

  “I’ve never been entirely sure where the coordinates lead, except that they’re in the Caribbean. But they’re clear enough for a clever seaman to find his way. As for the rest, if I were a younger man, I’d go after it and assume the words would make sense once I got to wherever it is.”

  “After what?”

  “The treasure.”

  “You’re saying…this note is a sort of treasure map?”

  “That’s what I think, yes. I can’t be certain, mind, but I believe your father wrote these directions with the intention of going back and getting what he’d buried, and that he never did.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I said I wasn’t sure. But the Maiden was in the Caribbean in ’59, and she never again sailed there. Then there was the Revolution, and Morgan was a British prisoner for almost three years. That’s how he lost an eye.”

  “I know.” Also that Morgan Turner had been a fighting man, and that all through the war Andrew allowed everyone to believe him a Tory, while he spied for Washington in the heart of the British stronghold that was New York. “My mother said my father was not the same after his time as a prisoner. He couldn’t concentrate; he forgot things.”

  “There was a good deal worth forgetting. You’ve wanted stories since I’ve known you, Joyful. The family history, what we did when we had to choose, your father and me. Most of the tales are too black for telling. It wasn’t pretty getting to independency. You have to have lived through it to understand.”

  “I’ve seen battle, Cousin Andrew. I know it’s never pretty.”

  Andrew swirled the remaining brandy in his glass, then finished it in a single swallow. “Not pretty isn’t the half of it. In 1759 we were at war with the French up in Canada and their bloodthirsty Indians. The Maiden was the most successful privateer afloat, but after that strange voyage she came back with only Morgan, his first mate, and a crew of three. And the hold dead empty. Morgan said they hadn’t taken a single prize. Since the Maiden had made most of the men who invested in her a good deal richer than they’d been before, his investors accepted that this time fortune hadn’t smiled. Except for the few who said Morgan lied. There were rumors that because one of the investors in that voyage was Squaw DaSilva’s—” Andrew broke off. “You know about my aunt, your grandmother?”

  “Jennet Turner DaSilva. Whoremistress to the city and my father’s mother. I know.”

  “Jennet was many things, not all of them what they seemed, but undoubtedly the best hater I’ve ever known. Forgiveness wasn’t in her vocabulary. She detested Caleb Devrey with a rare passion, and he was indeed one of the investors in that voyage. He thought she didn’t know that, but it appears she did. And so did Morgan. It’s not difficult to believe he would rather bury the profits of that cruise than see Cousin Caleb reap any gain from it.”

  “My father would have been taking an incredible risk.”

  “Indeed. If they could have proved anything, they’d have strung him up from the nearest tree, and cut him down before he was dead so they could hang him a second time. But that wouldn’t have stopped Morgan. Not in those days. Especially not if the thing could cause Cousin Caleb harm.”

  “In God’s name,” Joyful whispered, “how could you all have hated each other so much?”

  “I didn’t hate Caleb. I’d no reason to. If your father wanted to tell you his reasons, he’d have done so while he was alive. Just accept that they were sworn enemies.” Andrew leaned forward and tapped the note lying on the table. “That’s why I believe this is the answer to the puzzle of the voyage of ’59.”

  “Did my father give it to you?”

  “He did not. I took it from Caleb Devrey’s—”

  “But if Caleb had it, if he knew what had been done and where the profits were, why didn’t he go after them?”

  “You didn’t let me finish. I took it from Cousin Caleb’s dead hand. My assumption is that by the time he got this—however he got it—it was too late for him to do anything with it. And if you’re wondering, he died of natural causes. A malign tumor in his belly, I suspect, though he was never my patient.”

  “I see. Cousin Andrew, forgive me, but I have to ask. Did my father know you had that paper?”

  Andrew didn’t avoid Joyful’s gaze. “No, he never did.”

  For a time the two men sat in silence, the enormity of all the old hatreds and betrayals heavy between them. Finally, Joyful said, “This treasure…If it exists, you could have gone after it any number of times over the years. Why didn’t you?”

  “I had many excuses. No opportunity, no knowledge of seafaring, no captain I’d trust…The plain truth is, I always knew it wasn’t mine to claim.”

  Joyful stood up, the tension making his chest tight and every muscle quiver. “But it is mine. The blood legacy belongs to me.” His heart was pounding and he could feel the sweat running down his back.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Why now? I lived three years under your roof. Until a month past, I’ve been a constant visitor in this house any time I’ve been in the city. In good Christ’s name, Cousin Andrew, why now?”

  Andrew took a deep breath. “Because,” he said, “I believe the Union, everything your father and I and so many others fought for, to be in peril.”

  It took a few moments for Joyful to take this in. “Are you speaking of the United States?” he asked finally.

  Andrew nodded.

  “But we’ve bested the British in a number of battles this year, and even if they do invade New York, we—”

  “I’m not talking about the redcoats, Joyful. I’m talking about a far worse danger. The kind that comes from within.”

  “I don’t understand.”
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br />   “You must have heard the talk. New England and New York to secede, become a separate country.”

  “Well—yes, I suppose I have. A word here and there. But surely it’s not serious. War has always been a fountain of rumors.”

  “Indeed. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s talk and nothing more.”

  Joyful started to say something, but Andrew held up his hand. “Let me finish. Those few men promulgating this notion of disunion are the men with the most to gain. Men of business. Traders. Federalists with the most power.”

  “I always thought you counted yourself a member of that party.”

  “A Federalist, perhaps. When the war ended in ’84, I saw what so-called ordinary folk can do if you give them enough power. Right here in New York the very people we’d struggled and died to make free appointed themselves judge and jury and dispensed what they called justice on the Common in front of screaming crowds, no less. Women hamstrung so they’d never walk again, men tarred and feathered so they skinned themselves alive when they tried to clean up…The rabble disgusted me then and they still do. I believe in a strong central government, Joyful, led by educated and thoughtful men. I do not believe in money being the arbiter of all. Business and profit are fine in their place. They cannot be the ultimate goal of a nation.”

  “It’s not my intention to profit at the expense of my country, Cousin Andrew.” The words sounded pretentious enough to make Joyful feel slightly foolish. Nonetheless, they were true.

  “I know that, lad. That’s why I have decided to stake your venture into trade. I believe you will be an honest businessman, a leaven among the thieves, if you will. I’m not wealthy, and what I could offer you from my own resources would be hardly enough to make a difference.” He nodded toward the paper that still lay on the table in front of the fire, squinting at the faded words that might or might not lead to treasure. “That’s my contribution. Take it, Joyful, and take them on. Beat the bastards back. Don’t let them destroy what we gave so much blood and innocence to gain.”