“To your health, squire.”
My heart was thumping. I kept looking at the stranger in the tricorn, tho’ I could not see much of him in the tavern’s meager candlelight.
“Excellency, might I welcome you to Saint John?”
He said nothing, nothing at all. I looked again. He did not have Washington’s pale complection. This was a dark and dour fellow, no taller than myself. He demanded a pannikin of ale. My lieutenants tried to tell him there was nothing to drink but spit and blood.
“And who’s the publican here?” asked this ferocious stranger.
“I am,” I volunteered.
He unfurled his cape to reveal the pistols and the hanger that lived near the well of his britches. I was too lazy and too forlorn to have my own yobs make a mess of him. But why was he so willing to fight a house full of pirates sworn to me?
Then I caught him in profile and could scarce believe my eyes. He resembled a bird of prey, and even with the hat masking most of him, I recognized his dark demean—I’d seen him last coming out of the shitter a good two years ago, with Sergeant Champe waiting to deliver him to the hanging tree in Weehawken.
“May I ask the publican his name?” says he.
I knocked the hat off his head, but he had no fear.
“You abuse me, publican.”
“I do, sir. And don’t I have the right? I served under you, starved in the woods, ate my own stockings.” I had chewed on those wormy things. “General Arnold, do you not recognize your late secretary?”
The pirates pricked their ears at the mention of Arnold. They would have torn him to pieces had I but signaled once. They’d been expecting the commander in chief.
Arnold looked at me out of his own bitter gloom.
“Publican, you should not give a name to a man that has not introduced himself.” He looked again. “Scribbler, is that you?”
We fell into each other’s arms. The pirates were amazed. But I didn’t answer them. I still loved the filthy traitor.
ARNOLD RELAYED TO ME that he could not thrive in a London where both the populace and people of quality spurned him as a parvenu. So he’d come to make his fortune in the West Indies and the wilds of Canada, like some phantom trader who was still in the service of the Crown. Ye gods, how he had fallen! All his ventures had failed. He’d offered himself up to command some small fleet at the edge of the empire, but the admiralty would not have him. And so he sailed the seas with his rotten cargo—rancid banana oil, coffee beans alive with ants—that he planned to deliver to desperate, starving towns. But he had enough sense not to unload his coffee beans on us, else my lads would have made him swallow every ant.
“How’s the missus?” I asked.
“Peggy sups with the queen, rides in a carriage I can ill afford, but I am loath to deny her the littlest thing. She has been the best of wives, Johnny, the best of wives.”
Perhaps she was, and I had been unjust to call her Salome and Satan’s strumpet. Arnold might have tilted to the British on his own. Perhaps he needed a wife such as Peggy Shippen. The warrior who had tried to take Quebec could not be this sorry man. He had much stubble about the chin, and his eagle eyes were listless in Saint John. He could have been part of the derelict cargo he was carrying.
I had to unload my own cargo, all the bile deep inside myself. “General,” says I, “Mr. Washington has sentenced me to the wilderness. I have become an affliction for him.”
I expected Arnold to excoriate Washington’s little cabal and commiserate with its victim—me. But Arnold’s eyes seemed sharper of a sudden.
“Johnny, the commander in chief is not a precipitous man. What could ye have possibly done to merit the Bay of Fundy?”
“Nothing. I fell afoul of his intelligence chief. You must have met him—a certain major.”
“Malcolm Treat. And what did ye do to earn his wrath?”
“Exist, is all. He had an immediate and most irrational antipathy toward me.”
“But that is what armies are all about—immediate antipathies. And to satisfy Malcolm Treat, the commander rid himself of you. I would have done the same thing.”
“Then you are a monster, and not the Arnold I once knew.”
“Johnny, I would have drowned you in the Dead River had my chief of intelligence been against ye—you are a novice in the art of war.”
“But Malcolm Treat is a crazy man.”
“All the more reason to put a protective cloak around him.”
“General, you never would have drowned me.”
“I most certainly would. With my own hands, and I would have suffered not one sleepless night over it…”
“And,” says I with a pith of cruelty, “should I emulate George Washington and send assassins after you?”
Arnold scraped his stubble with the palm of his hand. “I miss the Old Man. How was he last you saw him?”
“High on his sorrel, at Yorktown,” I said.
“Would it astonish ye to hear that I love him? What wounds me most is that I will have to live out my life without recapturing his grace.”
There was a wildness in Arnold, a reckless folly that had taken him to the precipice, to the very edge of humankind.
“General, how could you ever have thought you’d find a place among the Brits?”
“But I have found a place,” he said. “Not on dry land. I can only breathe on board a ship.”
We kissed for the last time, and he went off into the cold with his cargo of ants.
I HAD LEARNT VERY LITTLE about America from Benedict Arnold. But news began to trickle in from certain traders and victuallers who plied the Atlantic seaboard that winter of ’82. Washington and his army crouched on both sides of the Hudson. The war had been taken away from them. Peace commissioners met in Paris, but they commissioned naught, not even the simplest end to hostilities. Instead of warfare, there was much barking and biting in the southland. A bit of mutiny here and there, the abduction of some colonel, with British spies moving in and out of American camps. But it mattered very little. Save for Manhattan, the Brits had nowhere to hide. American raiders set fire to their arsenals, attacked their supply trains, until the British evacuated their last two southern outposts before the end of the year.
And I had to wonder what part Washington’s intelligence chief had played in driving the Brits out of Charleston and Savannah. Had Malcolm Treat and his agents skulked into Savannah, prepared an uprising, plucked out the eyes of redcoats stationed along Charleston’s seawall? It gave me pleasure to imagine this mischief, to believe that I had been sacrificed and bruited about for some cause, that Treat’s cunning was so absolute, his actions would determine the fate of the war. Without such imaginings I might have gone mad.
Anno Domini 1783
CLARA
Newburgh
MARCH 1783
It had become a dog of a life for the commander in chief. He disrelished the very Madeira he drank. Nothing could please him. Rochambeau had sailed away from the Chesapeake with all his whitecoats in January, and Washington could not harass the British in Manhattan without French military engineers and the French fleet. His own army had begun to unravel. ’T was near to mutiny—with officers circulating petitions against the commander in chief and the new country itself, a country that could afford to pay them not a farthing. Washington was moved by the eloquence of their petitions. Yet he longed to rescue these officers from the civil horror into which they would soon plunge.
He summoned a meeting of officers at a primitive town hall his own carpenters had built, tho’ he did not plan to attend. He would have an aide read his words. Yet he did appear at the meeting in his winter cloak, and aroused much wonder when he clambered onto a stage that shook with the force of him.
The country they hoped to abandon, he said, was their own. Override reason with rhetoric, and speech itself might be “taken away, and, dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”
The officers listened in silence, their
faces still flushed with anger, as if Washington himself was the country’s own python. Then he took a piece of paper from his pocket—a letter he hoped to read. But he lost his momentum, seemed frozen for an instant. He could not decipher the words in front of his eyes. The officers were startled, suddenly attentive. He fumbled for a pair of spectacles. They had never seen the commander in chief with spectacles bestride his nose. He bowed. “Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now feel myself growing blind.”
All the arguments were gone, all the rancor. Some of the officers wept. They did not even listen to the letter, could not have recited a single word. A pair of spectacles, a bit of tin and ground glass, had brought them back into the fold.
Sixty-Four
I MISSED MY FAMILY OF NUNS. THE OLD YEAR had passed, and I heard not a syllable from Holy Ground. Robinson Street might just as well have been on the moon. There was constant banter about peace and war in gazettes that reached us from London Town. The king had been adamant for years about protecting his children of the thirteen American colonies—he swore again and again that he would never countenance our independence. But Yorktown, it seems, had changed the king’s complection. He no longer talked of us as his children, according to the gazettes. King George was ready to cast off his colonies, convinced that Americans would go to the Divil. But he wouldn’t abandon the Loyalists. He offered acreage and credits or cash to his former subjects who agreed to settle in the far country of Canada.
I was still a landlord, in spite of my disregard for lucre. I began buying up houses in Upper Cove, a world away from my wharves. I knew that these pretentious merchants, lawyers, divines, and government officials wouldn’t want to mingle with lowlife pirates.
But I could not risk having them devour Upper Cove and then coming to prey upon us, to steal our land and our autonomy. And so, like some insatiable child, I bought whatever houses I could find.
A “SPRING FLEET” OF THIRTY-TWO SHIPS left New York Harbor at the end of April, with twenty-four hundred souls. These Loyalists settled in Upper Cove and soon assembled their own Common Council. Then in August a boat full of free blacks—its men had served as stevedores in Loyalist brigades—also arrived in Saint John, but the new white settlers wouldn’t allow them near Upper Cove and its society of citizens and “freemen.” The blacks came to live with us in Little Manhattan.
The Loyalist aristocracy even had its own slave market in Upper Cove, where it would auction men, women, and children. I burnt that market down with my own hands. The Loyalists put up another market and hired guards. I had them kidnapped. They put up a whipping post and scratched laws about who ought to be whipped. I let them have their trappings—a sheriff, a poorhouse, a legitimate jail, even a public whip, a brute of a man.
A colored woman was convicted by the Common Council’s own little court, convicted of larceny—she stole five loaves of bread from a Loyalist baker—and received seventeen lashes at the whipping post and was burnt on the lip and on her hand by the brute. I happened upon this spectacle with my brigands and shook like a man with the palsy. I wrapped my cape around my fist, grabbed the hot iron, and branded the brute—burnt his arms, his face, his legs. The brute went howling into the streets and never appeared again.
The Common Council could have appealed to the redcoats on the hill at Fort Howe, but its members had already lived in a Manhattan of martial law and didn’t want redcoats prowling Saint John.
So the council came to me. “This must stop, Squire John, or we’ll never have a town.”
“Then you must not brand black or white women for stealing a few loaves of bread—I will make restitution for every loaf.”
And I turned my back on the Common Council. I hungered for news, but there was no regular packet between York Island and Saint John, no packet at all. And I wouldn’t ask bloody Loyalists about Clara and my mum.
The Treaty of Paris had been signed in September, we would learn after a month, but the British continued to sit in Manhattan. I waited for some signal from Gert, another note in Clara’s own scrawl. In the London gazettes I discovered that the Crown was scheduled to leave Manhattan the last week of November—but still no sign from Clara.
And then an envelope arrived right at my door, with a ribbon and the seal of the Continental Army. I shivered to open it—’t was not a letter at all, but an invitation to a banquet on the 4th of December, a farewell party from the commander in chief to his officers. First I thought I was the victim of some fancy folderol. I’d been the least bit of an officer, an honorary lieutenant, without pay, who’d taken part in one little skirmish at Yorktown. But the signature was genuine—G. Washington, Esquire, General and Commander in Chief of the Forces of the United States of America.
I didn’t bother to sell my belongings as a proper landlord should have done. I packed a velvet suit and my green sash, carried enough specie and gold to last me six months, and boarded the next victualler to Manhattan.
THE ISLAND SEEMED FORLORN. I could not locate a single tree. Buildings jutted out like black teeth. The Crown must have seized all the wood. Manhattan had still not recovered from the Great Fire. It slept for seven years. A little boat met us in the harbor—soldiers of the new United States serving as customs inspectors. My name wasn’t on the manifest since our ship was not permitted to carry human cargo. Not even my sash would save me. I’d be sent back to Canada.
The inspectors poked through my belongings, uncovered my invitation to Washington’s farewell, saw his signature, and apologized like chastised children. They themselves rowed me ashore.
I could scarce believe the desolation. Noisome vapors rose from the mud and brackish water near the docks. I found offal everywhere, pile upon pile of rubbish—the streets themselves were like rumpled pastures where cows roamed with bells attached to their tails. Men roamed beside them, soldiers of every persuasion, redcoats and Royal Deux-Ponts and Hessians who had somehow been left behind.
I walked one enormous beggar’s lane from Little Dock Street to Holy Ground. Giving out coins in my own wanton manner, I rewarded the petulant smile of a little girl or the unabashed greed of a frail old man.
I saw no commerce on Robinson Street, not one American soldier. Some new citizens’ committee must have condemned brothels as a strictly British affair. I did find some women in homespun milling about, as if they were end-of-war spies. They frowned when I entered the Queen’s Yard, or the spurious shadow that was left of it.
The place was all ashamble. The nuns’ closets had been ransacked. Clara’s was a pile of feathers and broken sticks. I shuddered at the thought of Gert’s own plight. But I did not pull away from whatever carnage I might find in Mum’s bedchamber. Had she been dragged from her house, sent to Wallabout with Clara, and now Washington himself could not retrieve them?
I entered without a knock. I was all agog—not a mirror was out of line. The silver posters of her bed had not been pilfered. Mum’s pillows were in their proper place. The queen’s boudoir had not changed since my childhood. And Gert wasn’t locked inside some prison ship. She was lying there on her comforter, looking at me.
She wore a peignoir of the finest silk or satin, silk that could not hide the starkness of her skin and bones. I could have carried her about like a bird. But her voice was far from frail.
“Is that my Johnny? I cannot see you.”
She would not wear a lorgnette or another eyeglass. The whole world was fuzzy ten feet from her bed. I sat down beside her, rife with emotion, yet Gertrude and I had seldom sat in such proximity.
Mum had a jar of marmalade on her lap, and the two of us poked into the jar with our fingers.
“What infernal wind has gone through this house?”
“A human hurricane,” she said.
“Were the ransackers British or our own?”
“Johnny dear, there’s always rabble when one army leaves and another comes marching in.”
“You and Clara could have traveled to Saint John. I’d h
ave rebuilt Holy Ground on my own wharves—but where is Clara?”
She dug a finger into the marmalade and filled her mouth with the stuff.
“Child, Clara is gone.”
“Mother, gone is much too grand a word. How can I find her?”
“Johnny, she does not want to be found.”
I would not listen. “But if she’s lost or in trouble, I will troll every street. I will burrow into the earth, bring in my brigands. I have brigands, ye know. I have settled on a line of endeavor—your honorable son is a pirate who lives on land. Mum, I have enough treasure to take care of you and Clara for the rest of our lives.”
“Clara is living with another man.”
I was nauseous and dizzy from all the marmalade. We had swilled half the jar without the blessing of a spoon. “Tell me his name.”
“I am not at liberty to do so,” said me own mum.
I was like a rogue elephant driven to despair—worse, a human about to prey on another.
“Mum, that Regulator, Mr. Jack Jennings, died in my lap—methinks ye knew the man.”
She tossed the jar of marmalade at my head—it banged against my skull.
“Viper, say what you want to say, that your own mother made a mockery of your life with her monstrous lies—Jack wasn’t much of a Regulator when I married him, tho’ he had burnt a lot of barns. He was a pirate, as you are. And the handsomest man in Tidewater country. He was also the Divil. I saw him murder nine men in a room. That’s when I fled, with only you in my arms.”
“But why did you invent the fable that George Washington was my dada?”
“’T was Washington’s wish.”
I was trembling now. “Mother, I am lost.”
“He loved you. And he wanted to protect you.”
“As a shit-in-the-pants rather than the rightful son of Gentle Jack?”
“Jack meant nothing to me,” Gert said.
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