City of Glory
Page 47
Joyful took one deep breath, a pause long enough to remind himself that vows could be dangerous things, but that a man must have faith in his instincts about the future. “I am honored by the trust of all of you, sir. I do so swear.”
Maiden Lane, Near Midnight
It was hard to believe it was more difficult for them to be together now that they were betrothed, but it was. “The horse passage,” Manon had whispered, when he was leaving after dinner, in the very few seconds when they were alone. “Tonight.”
Joyful knew there was no way she could get out of the house at such an hour. She had to have meant the window.
And the window, it was opened just enough so she could hear his step. He saw her behind the glass, framed in the light of the lamp she held high just long enough to be sure it was him, then extinguished.
He heard the window open. Manon leaned toward him. There was only the starlight to see by now; it was enough.
“You are so beautiful,” he said.
“I will not always be so, Joyful. I will grow old.”
“But with me.”
“With you.”
“I cannot wait,” Joyful said, “to begin the journey.”
A Few Words More
THE HISTORY in this book is true—except for the bit I made up. There is no evidence that New York was in any way part of the secessionist movement that played such a large role in what is generally referred to as “the crisis of 1814.” Serious intent to break up the Union appears to have been confined to New England, and only to a few individuals. The Hartford Conference to consider the subject was held in October 1814, but by then talk of a separate country was petering out and the meeting became one of history’s footnotes.
The discovery of the Oregon Trail, on the other hand, was unquestionably a seminal event for the nation. Jacob Astor, who financed the expedition that found the southerly route through the Rockies—one which did not require a painfully slow passage up the Missouri by keelboat, and could be traveled entirely by wagon—nonetheless had one of his rare business failures in the matter of Astoria. He could not engage a war-preoccupied Madison as thoroughly as he wished in the venture’s potential, and a duplicitous partner (certainly not Joyful Turner!) resulted in the colony being bought by rivals before Astor could prevent it. The Oregon Trail, however, was the “open sesame” that filled the American West with settlers. The anti-Indian prejudice of the time was so pervasive that the fact that they were yet again displacing a native culture with a prior claim simply meant nothing.
The loss of Astoria did not prevent Astor from continuing to flower as the greatest businessman of his age and the country’s first true tycoon. By the 1830s he was living in a still more grand and more remote manor in what would now be the Upper East Side, and the site of the Broadway mansion (which truly was staffed by the first Chinese in New York) where Astor and Joyful met to hatch their schemes became the city’s first luxury hotel, the Park. Eventually, the Park was torn down and a new and even more grand hotel was built on the site and named the Astor House.
As for the war, the attack on Baltimore was repulsed and became the occasion for Francis Scott Key’s composition of the lyrics for “The Star Spangled Banner,” celebrating the glorious truth that, despite the efforts of the highly professional British military, the often bumbling Americans prevailed, and after a night’s desperate fighting “…our flag was still there.” A short time later, far from throwing in his lot with the secessionists, the pirate king Jean Lafitte (a man without a country and a smuggler and slave trader) showed himself to be nevertheless a great patriot and a true believer in the American idea. He and his Baratarians played an important part in the U.S. victory at the Battle of New Orleans, fought in December of 1814, after the peace was agreed but before the fighting men on either side knew the war was over.
Jacob Hays, the most famous policeman of his era and often called America’s first detective, was born to Jewish parents living in Westchester. He was put in service as a “bound boy,” a kind of cross between an apprentice and an indentured servant, to a Presbyterian family with whom he remained close throughout his life. Consequently, many resources claim he was a Protestant. However, Hays is listed on the Shearith Israel rolls as a member of the congregation, and when he died in 1850, he was buried in the Chatham Square Jewish cemetery. That evidence seems to me conclusive, so in this story he has at least an interior Jewish identity.
The tale of Dolley Madison and her heroic deeds in the hours before the attack on Washington, D.C., is part of our national folklore, and most of what she says in this book—including her refusal to allow French John (another real character) to set a booby trap for the expected British invaders—is taken directly from her papers and correspondence. The painting of George Washington, which she famously saved and gave for safekeeping to two unnamed New Yorkers, was one of a few copies the artist made from an original that was a gift to the first marquis of Landsdowne, a former British prime minister and a strong supporter of American causes in Parliament during the Revolution. It now hangs in the East Room of the White House.
Madison was in his second term as president during the period of this story, and when it ended in 1816, he retired to his beloved estate of Montpelier in Virginia and died there—still a slaveholder—in 1836. Dolley Payne Todd Madison outlived him by thirteen years. For much of that time she was a popular Washington hostess, but her profligate son by her marriage to Todd all but bankrupted her. In 1842 she was forced to borrow $25,000 from Jacob Astor for what were to her “the bare necessities.”
As for the Great Mogul, that is among the most extraordinary of stories. Well documented by Tavernier and others, the huge and spectacularly brilliant but flawed diamond disappeared soon after it was taken from the Mogul Empire to Persia as part of the spoils of war that included the legendary Peacock Throne. Its present-day whereabouts remains a mystery. There are those who insist it is the Koh-I-
Noor, but that diamond does not have the fiery sparkle associated with the Great Mogul, and the Koh-I-Noor is believed to have had a separate existence recorded earlier. The Orlov diamond, part of the Russian crown jewels, is a more likely candidate based upon the appearances of both stones, but no one is prepared to state unequivocally that the Orlov and the Great Mogul are the same. Personally, I have an entirely different idea of what happened to the diamond after Joyful Turner became its guardian.
And finally, “Old Zip Coon” was an earlier form of the tune we now know as “Turkey in the Straw.”
Acknowledgments
Once more I must say that this book, like all books, stands on the shoulders of those that have been written before and owes a huge debt to authors without number, none more so than James Clavell, master of the genre. The resources for City of Glory were initially the same as those I used for the earlier two books about the Turner and Devrey families, City of Dreams and Shadowbrook, most particularly Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford University Press, 1999). That book remains the lodestar. In the matter of the geography of Five Points, however, I accepted the analysis of Tyler Anbinder, author of Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (Plume, 2002).
For details of the war that is the background to this story, I leaned heavily on The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict by Donald R. Hickey (University of Illinois Press, 1989), and John K. Mahon’s The War of 1812 (University of Florida Press, 1972). The description of the uniforms of the Maryland Volunteers is in fact quoted verbatim from the latter source. Were this a work of nonfiction I would, of course, credit Mr. Mahon in a footnote. Since that is not practical, I am doing so here. Any errors made in the depiction of the battles or the outfitting or maneuvering of the opposing forces are in no way attributable to either book, but are the result of my taking a novelist’s license with a few, hopefully unimportant, details.
I am enormously grateful for the kindness of friends and colleagues, without whom this book would be less than it is. Some deserve special mention: Tom Kirkwood, whose mastery of the writing of suspense is without parallel, is also a German speaker who was willing to consider with me the way the Astor brothers might have used the language in 1814. Janie Chang, teller of wondrous tales and keeper of many Chinese memories, supplied both the letter and the spirit of the Mandarin, and gave her imprimatur to my decision to use the Wade-Giles romanization because the Pinyin system had not been invented at the time of the story. (The Cantonese curses and slang came from English-Cantonese dictionaries downloaded from the Internet. I have no idea how accurate to the time they may be, but they certainly seemed sufficiently lusty to qualify for my purpose.) To check on the terminology appropriate to His Majesty’s army of the period, I relied on the kindness of Richard G. Lyntton, in another life a captain in the Life Guards, Household Cavalry Regiment. Mel Croucher proved himself still the most brilliant setter and solver of puzzles on two continents. Henry Morrison once more gave unstintingly of his professional skill, his patience, his constant belief, and above all his friendship, and Danny Baror yet again made it possible for my work to reach beyond my nationality and my language. Sydny Miner, editor nonpareil, can be relied on as always to give me back a better book than I give her, and here in New York’s “Village of Greenwich,” in a house built less than a decade after Manon and Joyful married, Jane and Jay Martin made celebratory the writing of these last few pages.
The book is the best thank-you I can offer; I hope it gives pleasure to each of its readers, but most especially to all of you.
Also by Beverly Swerling
Shadowbrook: A Novel of Love, War, and the Birth of America
City of Dreams: A Novel of Nieuw Amsterdam and Early Manhattan
Table of Contents
Colophon
Also by Beverly Swerling
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
A Time Line
Characters
Prologue
September–November 1813
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Thursday, August 18, 1814
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Friday, August 19, 1814
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Saturday, August 20, 1814
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Sunday, August 21, 1814
Chapter Thirteen
Monday, August 22, 1814
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Tuesday, August 23, 1814
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Wednesday, August 24, 1814
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Thursday, August 25, 1814
Chapter Twenty-one
Friday, August 26, 1814
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Saturday, August 27, 1814
Chapter Twenty-six
A Few Words More
Acknowledgments