City of Glory

by Beverly Swerling

  “I’ll do that,” she promised as she lifted her face for his good-night kiss.

  Chatham Street, 5:30 A.M.

  Eugenie slept fitfully, her hand pressed between her thighs, conscious of the emptiness beside her in the bed. When she woke, it was with the unrelieved ache that had become her constant companion since she was widowed.

  Damn Timothy Fischer for freeing the wanton spirit in his eighteen-year-old bride, then dying four years later and leaving her with nothing but debts and a constant hunger she was terrified to satisfy lest it destroy her status as something to be desired because it was difficult to obtain. Damn Gornt Blakeman as well. No, double damn him. May he rot in hell for indulging his need to brag, thinking that would more quickly gain him access to her bed. In reality, if she had not so soon realized how much she had to gain by refusing him, he would by now be her lover.

  Eugenie felt a touch. It was far too early for her maid to come to wake her. And that stroke along her cheek—a man’s hand. Her heart thumped. Gornt? Would he be so brazen?

  “Madame, vous ne dormez pas. I felt you stiffen at my touch. I stiffen as well.” There was a small chuckle that only served to stoke Eugenie’s growing terror. “But that is not why I am here. Open your eyes, Madame Fischer. We have business to discuss.”

  Eugenie opened her eyes. Her gasp threatened to become a scream. Tintin placed his hand over her mouth. “Ne criez pas! I am here on business, madame. If I wanted something else, I would have it by now.”

  He took his hand away and Eugenie scuttled to the other side of the bed. Tintin did not try to stop her, only noted the way the lace of her nightdress reached from her ankles to her neck but somehow left more exposed than covered. Eh bien, what would it be like to lie between those luscious thighs? He’d been watching her before he let her know he was there. He could smell the heat of her dreams. No husband for two years. She would shriek with pleasure. Tant pis, he was there on business.

  “What are you doing here? What do you want with me?”

  “I have brought you something.” He reached into the pocket of his satin coat. Earlier, when the dice would not fall for him, he had been tempted to put this treasure on the table. Then Blakeman had pushed himself into the picture, and, merci à tous les saints, the locket had not been lost to his foul luck.

  Eugenie looked at the bijou swinging from his hand.

  “Where did you get that?!”

  “From a gentleman who made a bargain, madame. Your late husband.”

  Eugenie reached out and snatched the bauble from his hand. Tintin let it go.

  It was impossible, but yes, it was Timothy’s mother’s locket. Timothy’s father had given it to her as a betrothal gift, a gold oval with the letter M for Mariah inlaid on the front in pearls. And there on the side were the teeth marks said to have been made by baby Tim himself. “But it was given to a…a gentleman in New Orleans. A business matter. I myself sent word to say that my husband had died and to ask for the locket’s return. That was two years past.”

  “At your service, madame.” Tintin bowed with exaggerated formality. “I am sorry to have been delayed in bringing your treasure back to you.” He would never have risked a thousand miles of blockaded coast simply on the chance that Gornt Blakeman’s scheme might succeed. But coupled with the likelihood that Monsieur Timothy Fischer’s widow would be as willing to do business as Fischer himself had been…That had been a gamble worth taking.

  Eugenie looked at him, as if seeing for the first time the eye patch and the bandanna. Timothy had spoken of a pirate and a distant place near New Orleans called Barataria Bay, where clandestine slave auctions took place by candlelight in hidden caves and great wealth was to be had if only one were sufficiently daring. Holy heaven, it was true! “Turn around.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wish to get out of this bed.”

  “And why should I deny myself the pleasure of observing that?”

  “Turn around, damn you!”

  Tintin chuckled and faced the window, listening to the rustle of the sheets and her soft steps on the Turkey carpet. Some pleasures were best kept separate from business. But the mulatto bitch who thought herself good enough to make a wager with a white man and win, that was another matter.

  “Very well, you may turn back.” She had put on a negligee made of the same lace as her nightdress.

  “Now, madame, we must talk. Perhaps we can sit?”

  “Not in here.” Eugenie led him from her bedroom to her boudoir, the adjoining parlor where just yesterday Gornt had bragged of his challenge to Bastard Devrey, and she had schemed for a proposal of marriage. Now, in less than twenty-four hours, everything might have changed.

  Chapter Eight

  New York City,

  Maiden Lane, 10 A.M.

  THE DUSTING was a fine excuse. A woman came to scrub and polish three times a week and another once a fortnight to deal with the laundry, but in the frugal Vionne household the women of the family had always assumed a large share of the daily tasks. Now, with dear mama gone to her reward, there was only Manon. She carried her basket of cleaning cloths and scented oils and waxes into the room above the shop that served as her father’s study.

  A tall bookcase stood on the wall opposite the windows, but the shelves did not provide enough space for all papa’s collection. Books of every size and shape were piled on the floor. This time of year, with no fire in the fireplace, there were even books on the hearth. Her hope was to find among them some notes papa might have made the night before when he received Gornt Blakeman. No such good fortune. The top of his desk was clear of everything but his loupe and more books.

  Manon selected a soft chamois cloth from her basket and dabbed it with comfrey-scented beeswax, then began polishing the top of the cherrywood desk. It had been made by a local craftsman to her father’s exact specifications, and it glowed with the patina of many decades of use and care. How many times had she seen papa spread a dark blue velvet cloth on this surface and carefully place upon it one or another sparkling treasure dug from the earth or wrested from the sea? When she was little, papa would often carry her up here and set her on his lap while he examined some precious stone that had come into his possession, a treasure that would remain with him only until he could find a buyer. “We are the temporary guardians of all this beauty, ma petite Manon. We must take the opportunity to appreciate it.” Then he would show her how to hold the loupe to her eye (she was too little to screw it in place and free both hands) and peer through it into the depths of a topaz or an emerald, even a diamond, and see the fire dancing within.

  His loupe was usually downstairs in the shop, but this morning it lay on the desk. He must have brought it up here the night before, but there was no sign of any jewels or of the soft square of velvet.

  But that could be a good sign! She had frequently seen her father use the velvet spread-cloth to wrap jewels that had recently come into his possession but which were not yet to be put on display in the shop. On such occasions he would lock the gems in a small wooden case, then lock the case in the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk. Always. Papa was a great believer in the sacred quality of routine. And inevitably, when the chest and the drawer held something of value, the tiny keys that unlocked them were placed on a chain that Papa slipped over his head and wore beneath his shirtfront. At other times the keys were in the little depression at the back of the desk that was meant to hold an inkpot.

  The two small silver keys winked up at her from their regular place, proving beyond doubt that nothing was wrapped in the velvet cloth, and nothing hidden away in the locked chest in the locked drawer. Manon’s disappointment was a physical thing, rising up to flush her face. But if he’d locked nothing away, where was the velvet square?

  She heard a step on the stairs, picked up the chamois, and venting her frustration on the desktop, rubbed so energetically that she knocked one of the stacks of books to the floor. They fell with a loud clatter.

  “Boo
ks are too valuable to be treated so, Manon.”

  “I know, Papa. I am sorry.” She knelt down and began gathering up the leather-bound volumes. One had fallen open. Manon could see the French words engraved in gold on the spine. Six Voyages…en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes by Jean Baptiste Tavernier, a great gemologist and world traveler. Papa had often used it when teaching her about the history of precious stones. Published in Paris in 1679, it had been the prize of his father’s collection. “The Tavernier! Oh, I really am sorry, Papa.”

  “I know, ma petite. Do not fuss. No harm has been done.” Manon had snatched up the Tavernier. Vionne knelt and picked up the other two volumes. When he did, Manon saw the square of dark blue velvet; so it had been in use to mark a place in Six Voyages. Without thinking, she had used a finger to hold the book open the way it fell. The heading of the page facing her was Le Grand Mogul: le plus grand diamant dans tout le monde—the Grand Mogul: largest diamond in all the world.

  A Meadow Just Below Canal Street, 11 A.M.

  Midmorning and the heat already fierce. Canton was hot as well, but in China, Thumbless Wu was a man of power and wealth who could command shade and fans, and cool scented baths. Whatever he wanted to eat appeared almost as soon as he thought of it. In this diu ngoi gwok city of the foreign ghosts, except for the bits of disgusting gwai food he found in the foul drainage gullies that ran through each street, he starved. Even the hole on the diu suen ship had been better. At least the diu Irish had brought him food some times. But no fan. No fan. Ahyee! How could he live without fan?

  It did not seem possible he could sweat more or shake more or puke more, but Wu continued to do all three. Lying on his belly and retching into the grass on the edge of a field beyond the city streets, he would have wanted to die, except for what he saw ahead of him. A field of flowers, bright red and with their faces open to the sky. With such heat and sun they would soon drop their petals. The round pods left atop the stalk would burst with ripe seed. The man walking among the red flowers was obviously interested in the same calculation. Ahyee! Ho wan. Finally, good luck. All gods bear witness if he lied. Wasn’t this exactly what he had come to this barbarian land to find? The red flowers—poppies, in the diu suen speech of the diu suen foreign devils—poppies and an apothecary who knew how to make their seed into the black sticky stuff that produced white smoke. He knew this man was an apothecary; he had seen his shop. And now he had seen the red flowers. No fan, but he could not die now. Wu felt another wave of nausea rise in his throat and gave himself over to yet another bout of the shivering heaves that produced nothing, but he was smiling.

  Chesapeake Bay,

  Aboard the British Warship H.M.S. Griffin, 11 A.M.

  “So, General, we are agreed?” The admiral leaned over the map spread across the wardroom table and rested his finger on the little village of Benedict in Maryland, on the nearby Patuxent River.

  The general commanded a fighting force of forty-five hundred, but at the moment his troops were aboard twenty warships. It was the admiral’s job to get them to the place they could be best used, and he was the senior officer for this part of the operation. Nonetheless, the two men had conferred as equals since the previous month in Bermuda when they decided to sail for the Chesapeake. The area’s extensive shoreline and her large cities were without any fortification; the American secretary of war didn’t believe in fortifying cities. “There’s no barricade can match a bayonet,” he said often. The British general concurred, but only if one had a great many men to wield the weapons. The Americans did not. The entire Federal District and much of Maryland were a plum ripe for the picking. The immediate issue was where to land the troops.

  The general studied the area the admiral’s tapping finger indicated. “Benedict? You’re quite sure?”

  “We can take it easily. Our spies tell us there are supplies to be had, including plenty of horses, and it’s forty-five miles from their so-called capital city.”

  “And Baltimore?”

  The general was still of two minds about which city to attack first. The admiral was not, but that would be the next engagement. He was a methodical man who preferred to settle one encounter at a time. “Baltimore remains a possibility, General. There’s another road from Benedict leads directly there. And we’ve sympathizers among the Marylanders who will be happy to provide guides.”

  “Very well. Benedict it is. And either Baltimore or Washington to be their Waterloo.”

  The admiral smiled. “Perhaps not quite of such import, General.”

  “Perhaps not. But it will finish the job.” Wellington had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo; now only the defiant Americans stood between Britain and the world dominance that was her divine destiny.

  An orderly was summoned. Three days’ rations were to be cooked aboard and distributed—three pounds of pork and seven and a half pounds of bread per soldier. “I trust it will be enough,” the general said after the man left. “As long as this Benedict is as easy a target as you say.”

  The admiral smiled. “Not to worry. I’m told President Madison’s wife Dolley sets a fine table at the Executive Mansion.”

  New York City, Noon.

  “He won’t have me.” Jesse Edwards shuffled along Broad Street, ignoring the storerooms and shops that had once belonged to the wealthiest of the Dutch burghers who founded the town and called it Nieuw Amsterdam. There was a hard lump of something in the boy’s path, and he kicked it ahead of him while trying to resist Holy Hannah’s forward tug on his left arm. “He’ll take one look at this,” he jerked his head in the direction of the stump of his right arm, “and say no thank ye, I’ll not be needing any freaks.”

  “The Holy One, blessed be He, helps those as help themselves. Proverbs. Look at all these places.” Hannah gestured to indicate the countinghouses either side of the wide street. “When I was a girl, they was businesses below and rich men’s dwellings above. Now rich men live as far away from the stink of their money as they can manage, and there’s so much business in the town, nearly every inch of Broad Street is taken up with it. Course he’ll have you, Jesse. Why not, when it’s Holy Hannah’s idea?”

  “You mean he’ll be feared you’ll put a curse on him otherwise?”

  “Never! Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Book o’ Deuteronomy. Holy Hannah don’t curse folks. All she does is sometimes make a suggestion as to what might please the Holy One, blessed be his name.”

  Broad Street had been an early Dutch canal, dug to let ships come inland from the East River and offload into the yellow-brick warehouses that fronted either bank. The rich burghers who lived above the warehouses used the canal as a sewer, counting on the tide to flush it clean twice a day. As it turned out, the Dutch were more industrious than nature and the tide could not cope. Eventually, the burghers and huisvrouwen found themselves living beside a stinking ditch so disgusting they had no choice but to pave it over and create what was then the widest street in Nieuw Amsterdam. Hannah pulled her charge along Broad and Dock, narrow and twisting side streets, and hurried him along to Hanover Square. “That’s the place right over there. Quite a few like it these days, but when I was a girl Devrey’s was the only shop of its kind.”

  The gold-lettered sign said DEVREY’S PHARMACY, FINE PERSONALS. It hung at right angles to a door set in a small house built catty-corner to the road, below an overhanging eave that protected the entrance from the weather. How many times had Hannah gone through that door? Too many to count. Mama used to buy her Number Seven Cologne from Devrey’s. Once the fine ladies of the town again had money to spend after the Revolution, Devrey’s new cologne attracted a goodly share of it. The pharmacy also sold face powder and wig powder and scented soap. Lord Almighty, what was the point o’ thinking on any o’ that now? “Come along, lad. Leave that kick-about bit o’ rubbish you’ve trailed all the way here and come inside.”

  A bell tinkled when they pushed the door open, just as it had when she was young. The pharmacy smelled exactly the same, sweet
and bitter in equal parts. Straight ahead, on the shelves behind the counter, were the tall glass jugs and ewers containing the many colored elixirs that Clare Devrey had simpled into being with the mysterious skills it was said she’d learned from her Irish mother, Roisin.

  The short, broad man standing behind the wooden counter in front of the apothecary bottles was Clare’s son. Thirty-some. Ten years younger than Hannah, but she remembered seeing him as a child, skating on the Collect Pond in winter and flying kites on the Common in autumn. You’re a foolish old woman, Hannah. Oh that today you would listen to my voice. Psalm of David. Today, not yesterday and not tomorrow. “Good day to you, Jonathan. I’ve brought you a message. And a messenger.”

  Jonathan Devrey stood exactly where he’d been when she opened the door. Good God, Holy Hannah with her flyaway white hair and her shapeless rags and those blue eyes that seemed to stare straight through a man. What could she want with him? “What message is that?” His voice spiraled up into a squeak. “I didn’t ask for any message.” All the town knew Holy Hannah had the gift of prophecy. But what had that to do with him? Except to bury his parents who died together in 1805 when the sleigh they were in overturned and dropped them into the freezing waters of Hudson’s River, he’d not been in a church since he was a boy. Besides, Hannah Simson was a Hebrew. What business could any Jew god have with him?

  “The Spirit of the Holy One, blessed be His name, breathes where it will, Jonathan Devrey. You need not ask for a message to get one.”

  Jonathan had been pasting labels on small containers of Devrey’s Elixir of Well-Being, a thick and bitter brown tonic that was the most popular of the simples sold in the shop. Now he started shuffling the bottles about as if the exact manner in which they were set out on the counter was of vital importance. “Very well, go ahead, tell me what you’ve come to say. Then get on with you. You’re not good for business, Hannah. No customer will come in while you’re here.”