The gilded door opened, and it all made sense. ’T was Mrs. Loring in her winter boots and a hood of white fur that lent a paleness to her cheeks. Hadn’t seen her since Gert’s supper party this past week. She’d picked Paul as her coachman, and she could ride unmolested through the darkest street or the sinister ruins of Canvas Town. Africans were not allowed to wear a pistol, but Paul could have injured any party with his coachman’s whip.
I climbed up into the chariot. And one little detail kept rubbing at me. I was curious as the Divil. “Mrs. Loring, ma’am, might I press you to ask if you own a Christian name?”
“Does it matter so much? You might call me Liz, Betsey, or Elizabeth, if you like.”
“And what does Sir William call you?”
“Cunny when he’s sober and Mrs. Loring when he’s drunk. But it’s of little interest to us right now.”
She started to fondle me, tho’ I was still thinking of Clara and the fact that Black Dick could feed her licorice wholesale. Suddenly I felt the softness of Mrs. Loring’s white hood against my ear.
I could talk of passion and light any lamp on the island with a bounty of words. But ’t was not at all like that. We did not sigh or groan or sweat in that dark chariot with the turmoil of acrobats. Never mind that the chariot did not have the proportions of a proper bed. And it had little need of a stove. Neither of us undressed. She parted her skirts, sat on my thighs, and unbuttoned my britches, while the wind rattled against the chariot’s walls. And when she grew warm, she knocked against the ceiling with her hood and pronounced my name in her Boston lilt as if it were the line of some melody. Then she twisted around and sat sidesaddle as we rode along. She had her fingers in my scalp. “What thinks my brooding boy?”
“I could kidnap you.”
“I’m not much of a prize. You might consider a merchant’s daughter who’d never slept with a man. Or find yourself a rich widow, like the general from Virginia.”
“Mrs. Loring, you dishonor me by offering yourself as my matrimonial agent. Manhattan is small, ma’am, and my interest is uncommonly large. I will chase your chariot.”
“And if you found another inside?”
“I’d sample her wares while dreaming of you.”
Liar that I am, I thought only of making a fortune and marrying Clara. But I could not silence that rascal tongue of mine.
“I surrender,” she said. “You’re shameful. You wear a woman out.”
The chariot stopped. Milady slid off my lap. The general must have given Mrs. Loring her very own birdcage, a lovely little yellow house on Dock Street. Or perhaps the birdcage belonged to someone else. She went inside without looking back once.
I wondered where the chariot would bring me next. I should have liked to share a pint with Paul. But the chariot swerved about and delivered me to the general’s mansion on Broadway.
“Coachman,” I said to Paul, “methinks you have missed your mark.” But when I climbed down the chariot’s single step, I didn’t discover Paul in the coachman’s box. He must have been discarded while I was with Mrs. Loring. Instead, one of the king’s assassins sat in the box. A great big brute with black holes in his mouth instead of teeth, Mortimer his name, and he was the general’s very own bodyguard and valet, I would soon learn. He’d been a prizefighter who enlisted in the army and followed Sir William to America, just as he followed me into the house.
Sir William waited in the parlor, drowning himself in port. He seemed rather melancholy for someone in a jealous rage. He stood in his bare feet, a nightshirt over his military tunic. He really did remind me of General Washington. Sir William had his own tall elegance, even in a nightshirt. I wondered if he’d hang me for having knocked about with Mrs. Loring.
“Milord,” I said, “it wasn’t her fault. I waylaid her chariot, forced myself upon her.”
“Mortimer, he prattles on and on, when I’m sick to death about my brother. We couldn’t find you, Johnny One-Eye, and I said to Mort, ‘Do you suppose he’s with Cunny in her carriage? Should we hazard a guess? Him with a classical education. And my brother suffering so.’ It seems the nuns at Gertrude’s shop are also classicists. That is, a particular nun. Clara by name. Gorgeous girl. Never saw a Negress with such blond hair.”
Mortimer corrected him. “An octoroon, Master Will. With a surprising mix of blood.”
“We thought of killing her, hiding her body in a swamp behind the Fields. But I can’t have my brother mourn. Of what good will he be to us? He’s insane about the blond apparition, he who prayed from morning to night and never looked at a woman outside his marriage. It was like a thunderclap, Mort, even worse. And she mocks him, quotes Aristotle, and he’s lost. I won’t have it. I lack the manpower to help Dick. His own officers have been serving since they were fourteen or younger. They can’t put Aristotle between their compasses and themselves. Confound it, Johnny One-Eye, I’ve come to your country to punish and bring fear, to startle you Americans into a state of submission, not to recite songs.”
“But I am not a songster, General.”
“Mort, will you knock him on the head if he doesn’t listen?”
“He’ll listen. Wouldn’t want to cripple your only candidate. Do I have your permission to convey him to your brother, Master Will?”
“Yes, but quickly, or I will not be responsible for that Negress’s loss of life or limb.”
WE TOOK THE SAME CHARIOT, Mortimer and I, and I sat upstairs with him in the coachman’s box, but I was worried about Paul, since the general had talked so much about murder and mayhem. But “Cunny’s coachman” had not been harmed. And I could see that there was a logic to Mortimer’s murderings. He wasn’t like King George’s own mercenaries, the Hessians, who plundered friend and foe. He’d been a boxer from the time he was eleven, traveling from fair to fair. He could neither read nor write, but he’d fought at Sir William’s side, tho’ a manservant shouldn’t have been on the field of battle. He was with William on Long Island and in Harlem, where he almost captured George Washington with his own hands.
“I was ten feet away,” Mortimer said. “In the buckwheat. He was on his horse. I confess, he was even fiercer than my William. I looked him in the eye. And he held my gaze like a bloody magnet. I might have shivered on another occasion. But I went for his stirrups with a roar in my throat. And his lieutenants poked at him, pulled him out of harm’s way. Johnny, you mustn’t tell Will. But you can’t win against a warrior like that. I’ll wager he pisses ice for breakfast.”
Mortimer gave me a scarf to wear as we rode into the wind. I wrapped the scarf under my eyes, and the two of us must have looked like avengers out of hell. I could see over the ruins of Trinity, over the sailcloth stitched to the blackened chimneys and walls of Canvas Town. No constable, no marauder, no drunken soldier, stood in our way. We arrived on Robinson Street with grit under our wheels.
“I’ll not go in with you, John. The admiral dislikes me. Says I have an undue influence over his brother. But he’s a babe in the woods, that man is. Wants to run away with his Clara, and I’m not so sure she’ll have him. Had to tell my master. ‘Black Dick ought to beat her silly.’ I offered to strangle her myself.”
“Then you would have me as an enemy for life. I’m attached to Clara…to all the nuns.”
“Right. Wouldn’t want a brainy lad like yourself on my bad side. Give us a kiss. To seal our reconciliation.”
I kissed the brute. I’d grown fond of him in such a short time, in spite of his absent teeth. Still, I couldn’t rely on Mortimer. These Brits, meseems, were great hunters of women and men. And I worried over Mr. Washington most of all. Sir William and his brute were looking for ways to murder him—that was foremost in Sir William’s mind. Such a man had nothing but mayhem in his heart.
We were near Canvas Town again, and I could see the path where the fire had leapt and raged. I remembered the horses I had found with charred manes, their eyes filled with wild fluid. They didn’t bolt, but stood like sentries in the infernal black
wind. I led them out of the fire, feeling the heat of their hides, clucking at them as you might sing to a baby.
Twenty-Two
I JUMPED DOWN FROM THE COACHMAN’S BOX AND went inside to Gert’s. The lamps were dying, and I found the admiral all alone in the parlor with as much melancholy as I’d ever seen on a man with a leather face. He wasn’t drinking port, like his brother. He was beyond drink, beyond war and the weather.
I helped him out of his boots, yet I had the urge to flay him, to find whatever blood could breathe underneath that somber cara-pace. He had the money and the peerage to have his own nun, while I had a changeling’s bitter, broken line. But I pitied him and the sullen mask he had to wear for life.
“Are you an orderly?” he said. “I cannot see your puss in this light.”
“’Tis Johnny One-Eye.”
“The boy who bastinadoed my brother, cut him to the quick. I admire that. I have no such way with words.”
“An admiral must dream of the sea, milord, and nothing else. You have a grave disadvantage on land.”
“Then should I carry Mistress Clara aboard the Eagle? Is that what you’re hinting at? I ought to break your neck…where’s my secretary? Where’s Serle? I keep forgetting. Can’t invite him to a bordello. He’s on familiar terms with my wife…who sent you here?”
“Your brother, milord.”
“He’s a meddler, my Will.” The admiral began to pick at his fingernails with an enormous knife. For a moment I thought he’d gone mad. It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened to a tenant at the Queen’s Yard.
“Clara mocks me, licks my ear with Aristotle. And I can’t go to Serle. ’Tis a pity ’cause Ambrose has the gift. Do you know what he said about Mr. Washington? ‘A paltry little colonel of militia at the head of loathsome banditti.’ I’m rather fond of that.”
“They aren’t banditti. They’re farmers and mechanics who became militiamen.”
“Shut your mouth. She mocks me. ‘What must a theatre piece have?’ Mistress Clara asks.”
“A beginning, a middle, and an end.”
The admiral stared at me, his eyes murderous under the mask.
“Not more than that? And what is the most necessary ingredient?”
“Suffering,” I said.
“And it must imitate actions that excite…excite what?”
“Pity and fear.”
The rage had gone out of him. He stopped picking at his nails with a knife. “I’m still confused about the order of impossible possibilities in Aristotle’s art.”
“Think of it like a navy battle, milord. Poets and admirals should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities…the probable is what matters, or you couldn’t wage war.”
“Correct. The enemy cannot manufacture an improbable fleet, nor should I have to chase down an improbable ship of the line. Have I mastered Aristotle?”
“In a nutshell.”
“And will you teach me Plato and Plotinus? I’ll pay you a shilling per philosopher. And will you guide my hand in a letter to Clara? Confound it, Ambrose Serle does all my drafts. And I daren’t ask him to plead my case to a whore, delightful and cultivated tho’ she be. Besides, the little shit might fall in love with her. And I’d have to feed him to the sharks.”
“But I should warn you, milord. I’m already in love with Clara.”
“I’ll risk that. I’m not worried about her American admirers. But I cannot cobble. The words do not meet. I am like a joiner without his joints. Johnny, I have not composed a decent letter in all my life. I’ve always had someone to help me.”
Dolt that I am, I pictured myself as a knight of the realm entombed in a leather mask and crazily in love with Clara. It wasn’t that far from the truth. We were in the same careening boat, Black Dick and I, about to plunge into a waterfall.
“How shall we begin?” the admiral asked. “Dear Mistress Clara, or…” “My Lady with the Green Eyes.”
“Ah, that will wake her for me. Dost thou love thy admiral in the parlor?”
“Too direct, milord. You must feint like the fastest cruiser in your fleet. She must not be able to divine your purpose until you are prepared to pounce.”
“Then what do you favor?”
“A strict neutrality. Perhaps a note about Aristotle, something not so very large. My Lady with the Green Eyes. Brutes may mimic a man, but not his music. I come to you with all the fear and pity of a poet, a poet of the seas who cannot find comfort on land save to look into your green eyes.”
“A miracle. You must write it down.”
DIDN’T HAVE TO WRITE A LINE. I rode the admiral’s waterfall and its music tumbled out of my head. The force of it frightened me. I went into my opium den, the shoe closet, where I could live in war and peace with Clara’s slippers and shoes. I picked at the rhinestones on a slipper, smashed the silken toe of her favorite mule with meanness in my heart. I would ruin her whole collection.
Never got the chance.
Gert had arrived. She didn’t come at me with a broom or her pocket pistols. She didn’t even grab my hand. She must have seen my madness, seen my hell as she looked at me with her lantern.
“Child, Clara will have to go barefoot among the Brits if you destroy all her shoes.”
“I wish she would.”
“But you will defeat your purpose. It will inflame them to see a nun’s bare toes.”
“Then I will cut off their noses.”
“And have the British hang you and make a widow of me?”
“Madame, I am not your husband. I am your son.”
I saw her in the lantern light. Her mouth twisted into a gargoyle’s grimace. “You must keep away from Clara. You must not interfere with Clara’s work.”
“Work,” says I. “Mixing her spittle with a man whose face is so worn it resembles a mask.”
“The admiral has been kind to us, or do you forget?”
“Not at all. I savor his licorice, but beware. Let Clara wiggle her toes at the Brits. I will break every last one of her shoes.”
“She will delight in your folly,” Gert said, and vacated the closet with her lamp.
Twenty-Three
AS FEBRUARY YIELDED TO MARCH, SIR WILLIAM continued in his sloth, while soldiers, sailors, starving blacks, Loyalist merchants and their wives swelled the island’s population six months after the British arrived in their longboats. Not even Sir William’s war marshal could contain the Hessian mercenaries, who robbed everyone in sight until a drunken gang of dockers battled them on the Commons. The Brits were much too busy playing golf on the heathlands of Long Island to bother about Hessian highwaymen. Cricket matches appeared on the Bowling Green. Sir William’s senior officers hunted wild pigs in Canarsie. Prices rose like rockets hurtling in the winter sky.
The poor had to come to Holy Ground, where nuns let them have the leftovers that always seemed to drop from their baskets by Divine accident. Clara was most prominent among these nuns. Black Dick must have given her extra rations. She could have attended cricket matches, but she remained on the ramparts of Robinson Street—the same ramparts the rebels had built—and led her own platoon of nuns whenever she wasn’t with Black Dick, platoons that fed the poor. The heels of her precious shoes wore down, but she cared not a whit; rhinestones fell into the mud. I could do nothing but dream about Clara. I’d watch her for hours—and she knew I was watching—until she called to me without turning her head of woolly blond hair.
“Mr. One-Eye, ain’t you gonna lend us a hand?”
I worked beside her half the night. Other nuns would bring us water. Clara lent me her silk handkerchief to wipe my brow, and once she even wiped it herself. I shivered at her simplest touch. This was the Clara I remembered from the time I was twelve and would sing her to sleep—the first and last honeymoon I’d ever had, when Clara shared my closet after Gert shaved all her hair. And now I was on the ramparts of Robinson Street feeding poor souls—black and white—that the Brits had left out of their family circ
le. Clara started to laugh while she swilled water in her mouth, and I had to fight the desire to lick the droplets off her chin.
“Master John, have you been visiting the closet lately? How doth my shoes appeal to your nose?”
I could have answered anyone else, parried with the Divil, but not with Clara. I dropped the nuns’ water ladle and decided to disappear.
BLACK DICK FOUND ME skulking on Gert’s verandah. He’d come with a hanger at his side, the short sword admirals were supposed to wear into battle. Sir William might have held to his winter home, unwilling to campaign, but Black Dick would not discontinue his naval maneuvers. He insisted that I accompany him.
We drove to the harbor in his carriage and boarded the Eagle in one great swoop. I’d never been near such a seabird, with masts as tall as most skies. I’d been on a boat with Benedict Arnold, a tiny skiff of sorts that leaked and nearly destroyed us, delivered all our souls to the bottom of the Dead River had we not followed Arnold’s instructions and bailed with our hats. But the admiral’s flagship was mysterious to me. It had objects and things I could not name, booms and gaffs and little nests within that endless universe of rope. We went down to the admiral’s quarters. I could not have imagined so many tunnels in the belly of a boat.
Serle presided in the cabin, Black Dick’s little secretary. He wore no uniform, no hanger at his side. He was a minor aristocrat, a married man. He’d come to America as Black Dick’s civilian secretary and saw the whole United States as a bunch of banditti.
“Ah,” he said, “this is the vagabond who serenades your high-yellow slut.”
“Careful,” Black Dick said, “or I’ll let the vagabond loose, and he’ll bite your nose off. His name is Johnny One-Eye.”
“How picturesque. A pirate of the lower depths. Does he prime the whore before you mount her?”
The admiral slapped his secretary. But I found little anger there. It was part of his naval maneuvers.
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