Time's Convert

by Deborah Harkness

“It’s Marcus—Marcus de Clermont.” He extended a hand in friendship. “From Paris.”

  “Hey, mister, you’ll have to wait your turn,” one of the boys said. His fists were bloody and his nose was running with the cold.

  Marcus turned on him and bared his teeth. The boy stepped back, eyes wide.

  “Find some other source of entertainment,” Marcus growled.

  The boys stood their ground, uncertain of what to do next. The pack leader, a burly thug of a teenager with a bad complexion and no front teeth, decided to take Marcus on. He stepped forward, fists raised.

  Marcus flattened him with a single blow. The boy’s friends dragged him off, casting anxious looks over their shoulder.

  “Thank you, friend.” Thomas Paine was shaking, his limbs trembling from exposure to the elements and strong drink. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Marcus de Clermont. You know my grandparents,” Marcus explained, plucking the jug of rum from Paine’s hand. “Let’s get you home.”

  Paine gave off a distinctive scent of alcohol, ink, and salt beef. Marcus followed his nose and tracked the combination down to the source: a clapboarded boardinghouse set in the middle of a block of Herring Street just to the south. Inside, candles illuminated the slats in the shutters.

  Marcus knocked on the door. An attractive woman in her late thirties with eyes the color of brandy and brown curls threaded through with silver flung open the door. Two boys stood with her, one of them bearing the poker from the fireplace. “Monsieur Paine! We have been so worried!”

  “Might I bring him inside?” Marcus said. Paine hung, lifeless in his arms. He had passed out on the short journey. “Madame . . . ?”

  “Madame Bonneville, Monsieur Paine’s friend,” the woman explained in accented English. “Please, bring him in.”

  The moment Marcus crossed over the threshold of the boardinghouse on Herring Street, he traded in his life of isolation and work for one of lively debate and familial concern. The Bonneville family took care not only of Paine—who was a drunk and prone to apoplexy—but Marcus, too. It became his habit to return to Herring Street after working in the hospital, or after a busy day of attending private patients in his home on nearby Stuyvesant Street. France had rejected Paine, and Marcus’s fellow Americans now ridiculed the elder statesman’s radical ideas about religion. But Marcus liked nothing more than to sit with Paine by the south-facing window on the ground floor, the sash raised so that they could eavesdrop on the conversations in the street, and discuss their reactions to the day’s news. There were always books on the table before them, as well as Paine’s spectacles and a decanter of dark liquid. Once they’d exhausted current events, they reminisced about their time in Paris, and their shared acquaintances, like Dr. Franklin.

  Marcus brought along his copy of Common Sense, so well-read that the paper felt plush and soft to the touch, and would sometimes read passages aloud. He and Paine talked about the failures of their two revolutions, as well as the successes. The colonies’ separation from the king had not resulted in greater equality, as Paine had hoped. There was still hereditary privilege and wealth in America, just as there had been before the revolution. And it was still possible to enslave negroes, in spite of what the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence stated.

  “My friend Joshua Boston told me I was a fool to believe that Thomas Jefferson was thinking of people like him or the Pruitts when he wrote that all men were created equal,” Marcus confessed to Paine.

  “Well, we mustn’t rest until America lives up to its ideals,” Paine replied. He and Marcus often discussed the evils of slavery and the need to abolish it. “Are we not all brothers?”

  “I think so,” Marcus said. “Perhaps that’s why I carry your words with me wherever I go, and not the Declaration of Independence.”

  As the weeks passed, Marcus got to know Marguerite Bonneville, Paine’s companion. Madame Bonneville and her husband, Nicholas, had known Paine in Paris. Bonneville had published Paine’s works, and when the authorities tried to shut his press down the man fled. When Paine returned to America in the autumn of 1802, he brought Madame Bonneville and her children with him. Marcus’s friendship with Madame Bonneville deepened after they started conversing with each other in French. Not long after that, the two became lovers. Still, Madame Bonneville remained devoted to Paine, managing his farm in the country and his affairs in the city as well as his engagements, his correspondence, and his declining health.

  Marguerite and Marcus were both at Paine’s bedside when the man who had given voice to a revolution quietly passed on from the world of men on a hot and humid day in June 1809.

  “He’s gone.” Marcus gently crossed Paine’s hands over his heart. The year Paine spent in Paris’s Luxembourg Prison in 1794 had left him frail, and Marcus had known that his friend’s devotion to strong drink would hasten his end.

  “Monsieur Paine was a good man, as well as a great one,” Madame Bonneville said. Her eyes were swollen with tears. “I do not know what would have happened to us, had he not brought us to America.”

  “Where would any of us be, without Tom?” Marcus closed the front of his wooden medicine case, the time for balsams and elixirs now over.

  “You know he wished to be buried at New Rochelle, among the Quakers,” Madame Bonneville said.

  They both knew where Paine kept his final testament: behind a thin panel of wood in the back of the kitchen cupboard.

  “I’ll take him there,” Marcus said. It was more than twenty miles, but he was prepared to honor his friend’s last wishes no matter the cost or distance. “Wait with him, while I find a wagon.”

  “We will go, too.” Madame Bonneville laid a hand on Marcus’s arm. “The children and I will not abandon him. Or you.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY REACHED NEW ROCHELLE DURING the lingering summer twilight. It had taken all day. Two black men drove the wagon carrying Paine’s body. They were the only team Marcus could find who were willing to haul a dead man nearly as far as Connecticut in the summer heat. The first three men that Marcus approached had laughed in his face when he proposed the journey. They had plenty of work in the city. Why should they take a rotting body up the coast?

  Marcus rode alongside the wagon, and Marguerite and her eldest son, Benjamin, accompanied them in a carriage. Once they arrived in New Rochelle, they checked into an inn, for it was too late to bury Paine at this hour. Marcus and the Bonnevilles shared a room while the drivers, Aaron and Edward, slept with the horses in the barn.

  The next morning, Marcus and Marguerite were turned away from the Quaker burying ground.

  “He was not our brother,” said the elder who barred them from entering the low stone walls.

  Marcus argued with the man, and when that didn’t work, he tried to arouse the fellow’s patriotism. That failed, as well, as did Marcus’s attempts to stir his pity and his guilt.

  “So much for brotherhood,” Marcus fumed, banging on the carriage door in frustration.

  “What do we do now?” Marguerite asked. She was sheet white with exhaustion, and her eyes were circled with hollows of grief. “I’m not sure how much longer we can keep the hired men.”

  “We bury him on the farm,” Marcus said, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze.

  Marcus dug the grave himself under the walnut tree where Paine had sat on summer days gone by, the thick canopy of leaves providing shade from the sun. It was the second time Marcus had dug a grave between the roots of an ancient tree. This time, his vampire strength and his love for Paine made short work of the task.

  There was no minister present, no one to say God’s words over the body as Aaron, Edward, Marcus, and Benjamin Bonneville lowered Paine into the ground. Marguerite held a bouquet of flowers she picked from the garden, and placed it on the shrouded figure. The drivers left as soon as their business was
done, and returned to New York.

  Marcus and Marguerite stood by the grave until the light began to fade, her sons Benjamin and Thomas standing quietly between them.

  “He would want you to say something, Marcus.” Marguerite gave him an encouraging look.

  But Marcus could think of nothing appropriate to say over the body of a man who did not believe in God, or the church, or even the afterlife. Thomas Paine had come to believe that religion was the worst form of tyranny because it pursued you through death and into eternity—something no king or despot had yet managed to do.

  At last, Marcus settled on repeating something Thomas himself had written.

  “‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’” Marcus took a handful of earth and sifted it into the grave. “Be at peace, friend. It is time for others to continue your work.”

  The death of Thomas Paine cut Marcus’s final ties to his former life in ways the close of the last century, symbolic though it was, had failed to do. Marcus had walked the earth for more than half a century, and during that time he had always felt the retrograde pull of Hadley, his family, and the War for Independence. Now that Paine was gone, there was nothing left to look back upon but a chronicle of loss and disappointment. Marcus needed to find a future that did not have so much of the past in it, and wondered how long the search would take.

  * * *

  —

  MARCUS FOUND HIS FUTURE at the southern boundary of America, in the sultry city of New Orleans.

  “When did you arrive?” Marcus asked his patient, a young man of eighteen who had come from Saint-Domingue. Refugees continued to flood into New Orleans from the island that they had once called home, driven away by war between Spain and France.

  “Tuesday,” the man replied. It was now Friday.

  “Have you been vaccinated for smallpox?” Marcus asked, feeling his patient’s neck and examining the inside of his eyelids for signs of jaundice. Jenner’s new, safer method of preventing smallpox, which used a strain of cowpox to prevent the disease, had revolutionized medicine. Marcus felt sure this was the beginning of a brighter age for patients, with more effective cures based on stimulating the body’s responses to disease.

  “No, monsieur.”

  After examining him, Marcus didn’t think the man had smallpox, or yellow fever, or any of the other highly contagious diseases that struck terror into the hearts of the city’s residents. Instead, the man’s watery diarrhea and vomiting suggested cholera. With New Orleans’s poor drainage, poverty, and crowded housing, cholera was endemic.

  “I’m pleased to tell you, sir, that it’s cholera, not smallpox,” Marcus reported, noting the diagnosis in his ledger. He was tracking his patients by age, which ships they had arrived on, where they were living in the city, and whether or not they had been inoculated or vaccinated. In New York, medical records like these had helped Marcus react swiftly when new outbreaks of fever occurred, and here in New Orleans they were already a resource for city officials.

  “Cholera? Will it kill me?” The young man looked frightened.

  “I don’t think so,” he replied. The man seemed young and healthy. It was children and the aged who seemed to be hardest hit by the illness—though Marcus would have to wait and see whether that pattern held true for New Orleans.

  As Marcus gathered the herbs and tinctures he needed to concoct a medicine for his new patient, he had the unpleasant, uncanny feeling he was being watched. He looked up from his medical formulary, where he noted down his cures and their success. A man stood across the street from Marcus’s small apothecary shop. He was of an ordinary height and build, and dressed in a well-made though ill-fitting suit. He was shuffling cards and watching Marcus’s every move. Even from a distance, Marcus was struck by his mesmerizing green eyes.

  “Here. I’ve made you a packet of medicine.” Marcus had mixed spearmint, camphor, and a bit of poppy together to help with the nausea and cramps. “Put a spoonful in boiling water, and sip it while it’s warm—not hot. Don’t drink it down all at once, or it will just come up again. Try to rest. You should feel better in a week or so.”

  Once the patient paid for his services, Marcus went out onto the street.

  Marcus was sure the fellow watching him wasn’t a vampire, but there was no telling what his grandfather might do to keep an eye on him, even if it meant employing a warmblooded spy. Marcus had hoped it would take the de Clermonts years to find him in New Orleans, but perhaps Philippe was more powerful than Marcus knew.

  “Do you have some business with me?” Marcus demanded.

  “You’re awfully young to be a doctor, ain’t you?” The man spoke with the slow, rollicking speech of the southern colonies, tinged with a touch of a French accent and a twang of the local dialect that was too forced to be natural. Whoever this man was, he was hiding something.

  “Where are you from?” Marcus asked. “Not here. Virginia would be my guess.”

  The man’s eyes flickered.

  “Do you need medical help?”

  “No, Yankee. I do not.” The man spat out a stream of tobacco. It scuttled a bit of eggshell bobbing on a sea of filth in the gutter.

  Marcus leaned against the peeling doorframe. There was something intriguing about this man. His combination of brash insincerity and honest charm reminded Marcus of Vanderslice. Even after nearly two decades, Marcus still missed his old friend.

  “Name’s Chauncey,” Marcus said.

  “I know. Young Doc Chauncey is the talk of the town. The women are all in love with you, and the men swear that they feel healthier and more virile than they have in years after seeing you. Quite a racket, if you ask me.” The man smiled disarmingly. “Ransome Fayreweather, at your service.”

  “You shuffle those cards like a man who likes to gamble,” Marcus said. Ransome’s swift fingers reminded him of the way Fanny handled a deck.

  “Some.” Fayreweather never stopped shuffling, the cards moving smooth and quick through his hands.

  “Maybe we could play sometime,” Marcus suggested. He had learned a few tricks playing with Fanny, and felt he could hold his own against this Fayreweather fellow.

  “We’ll see.” Fayreweather tipped his hat with exaggerated courtesy. “Good day to you, Doc Chauncey.”

  * * *

  —

  MARCUS FELT SURE he would see Fayreweather again, and he was right. Two weeks later, he spotted him in the Place d’Armes, peddling medicine from a small table draped in a black cloth that was weighted down with a human skull. The residents of New Orleans—brown, black, red, white, and every shade in between—milled around the square, speaking French, Spanish, English, and tongues that were unfamiliar to Marcus.

  “Have you been vaccinated?” Fayreweather said in a fair imitation of Marcus.

  “Yes, sir,” his prospective female patient replied. “At least, I think it was a vaccination. One of the witches scratched my arm with a chicken’s foot and spat on it.”

  Marcus was horrified.

  “I’m pleased to tell you, madame, that you have cholera. And I have just the treatment for you. Chauncey’s Elixir—my own receipt.” Fayreweather held up a green bottle.

  Marcus continued to watch as Fayreweather performed the role of Doc Chauncey, the medical marvel from the north, recently arrived in New Orleans. After a few more patients, the trickster noticed his attention. When Fayreweather looked up, Marcus tipped his tall hat.

  Fayreweather began to pack up. He looked in no hurry, but Marcus could smell a whiff of fear about him and heard his heart speed up.

  “Doctor Chauncey, as I live and breathe,” Marcus said, strolling in Fayreweather’s direction. “What made you leave your storefront and take to the streets?”

  “The smell of money,” Fayreweather replied. “There is more of it here than on Chartres Street.”

  “Congratulation
s on passing the Cabildo’s examination and becoming certified to dispense medicines.” Marcus picked up the piece of paper tucked under the skull. It resembled the document Marcus had hanging on his shop wall to show he was a reputable physician and not a quack. He glanced at a knot of Garde de Ville standing nearby. Fayreweather had brass balls to fleece people within arm’s reach of the city police. “I hear the test takes three hours.”

  “So it does.” Fayreweather snatched the paper from Marcus’s fingers.

  “Listen,” Marcus said, dropping his voice. “I have no wish to deprive you of your liberty, or your livelihood, but please impersonate someone else.” He tipped his hat and walked away.

  Marcus had taken only a few steps when Fayreweather’s voice caught up with him.

  “What’s your game, friend?” Fayreweather called.

  Marcus turned. “Game?”

  “I know humbug when I see it,” Fayreweather said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marcus said smoothly.

  “You don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.” Fayreweather smiled. “But I’ll discover your secret. You can count on it.”

  After their encounter in the Place d’Armes, Fayreweather kept cropping up in the crowded city. Marcus spotted Fayreweather playing cards in the back of his favorite coffee shop. He heard Fayreweathers’s honeyed tones on Chartres Street as he tried to seduce a young widow. Fayreweather had a fiddle, and played it on street corners, drawing crowds of rapt listeners. Everywhere Fayreweather went there was life and laughter. Marcus soon envied the man.

  Marcus began to look for Fayreweather as he went about his daily business, and to be disappointed when he didn’t catch the man’s sardonic green eyes or have a chance to greet him in the market. One day, Marcus shared a table with Fayreweather at his favorite drinking establishment, the Café des Réfugiés on Rue de St. Philip.

  “I think you should call me Ransome,” Fayreweather suggested after they clinked glasses. “And I think you need to have some fun, Doc. Otherwise, you’re going to get old before your time.”