“T
OUJOURS LA GAIETÉ.
Mistress DaSilva.
Toujours la gaiet
é
.”
Exactly what General Howe had said to her in ’76, and here it was 1780. Four years and Squaw was hearing the same words from Howe’s replacement, General Clinton, who’d been put in charge when London tired of Howe’s dithering and delay. And of the fact that New York City was a sink of corruption. General Clinton was not simply a better tactician, they said, he was a man of rectitude.
Henry Clinton visited her house every blessed night he was in New York.
She raised her red lace fan to her lips so he wouldn’t see her smile. “I entirely agree, Sir Henry.
Toujours la gaiet
é.”
The long room was warmer than she liked it to be, though every window was open to the June evening. Perhaps the heat came from the eight young women present, along with Henry Clinton and six British officers. These days ladies stuck out behind rather than at the sides; the wide skirts over wire panniers that were fashionable when she was young had given way to a craze for crimped and ruched bustles. Made it a little easier to move around. Sitting was more difficult, but given that the girls insisted on wearing three-foot-high wigs, they were better off standing. At least supporting such creations showed off their posture.
Her own red brocade dress had a fine big bustle. She had given up her widow’s weeds and her veil the afternoon Howe and his troops rode into the city, when she realized what would be required of her. Now the mantua-maker called regularly—Squaw still never left her house—and everything she owned was the latest fashion. But she refused to subject herself to the weight of a three-foot wig. At sixty-five she wore her yet entirely black hair in the simpler style of noncourt ladies, drawn into a tight roll over either ear.
She fluttered her fan and studied her guest. Sir Henry was craning his neck, examining the faces below the towering powdered and decorated wigs. “I see Amarantha’s not here this evening.”
“Amarantha’s a bit under the weather, Sir Henry. But have you met Gwendolyn?”
Amarantha was upstairs, eating her way through a pound of sugared violets, and devouring the latest pattern books from London. The girl had done her bit. She’d been Howe’s favorite for the two years he was commander in chief. He couldn’t get enough of her. God only knew how many times Amarantha had gone to Roisin to abort a Howe bastard. And through it all she kept her looks. Well enough so she became Sir Henry’s choice from the day he took over. Clinton, however, had a taste for spanking before he fucked. The man had blistered poor Amarantha’s backside fourteen nights running. Time to get him interested in someone new.
“Gwendolyn, come and meet the man we can rely on to keep New York a haven of civility despite this dreadful and endless war.”
“I am charmed, Sir Henry. Truly charmed.”
Her curtsy was perfect. Her tits were divine. And when Gwendolyn took off the powdered wig topped with a wooden ship under full sail, Sir Henry would find her dark chestnut hair a nice change from Amarantha’s blond curls. Most important, her buttocks were luscious, two halves of a perfect peach. Squaw DaSilva had carefully inspected all the girls’ backsides before deciding that Gwendolyn would take Amarantha’s place. As yet Sir Henry didn’t know what delights awaited him. He continued to look a bit petulant.
She leaned toward him, whispering behind the cover of her fan. “Lovely, I know, but you wouldn’t believe what a naughty lass Gwendolyn can be, Sir Henry. I do think she needs a firm hand. Perhaps a strong man like you could teach her better behavior.”
At that moment the young woman playing the hammer dulcimer struck up a lively reel. Gwendolyn put out her hand. “I am most forward, Sir Henry. I know I am utterly reckless and headstrong and require discipline, but I cannot help myself. Will you partner me?”
“With the greatest of pleasure, Mistress Gwendolyn.”
Squaw watched for a moment as six other couples followed them to the dance floor. What a good and clever girl Gwendolyn was. What good and clever girls they all were. She had a feeling the night would prove useful. Yes, exceptionally useful. She was sure of it. No one was paying her any mind. She gathered up the train of her gown and slipped out of the long room.
The sprightly notes of the reel and the sounds of dancing feet followed her out the door. For a moment she paused, looking at the ebony walking stick that stood in an urn beside her front door. She’d had the gold horse’s head with the ruby eyes remounted some years earlier. All during this miserable war it had stood where it was now, her single reminder of who she truly was. And who she had been.
As if she didn’t know. She was a foolish old woman, one who still thought of calling Tilda, though the dear creature had been dead three years. Or Flossie. Dear God, wouldn’t it be wonderful to summon Flossie? Ah, she would have made a remarkable ally in this business. Hard to imagine a more passionate patriot than old Flossie; anything that discomforted the English would have thrilled her Irish soul. But Bridget Hagen was also from Dublin, and entirely committed to the cause.
The Irish woman had been born with a grotesque red and puckered gash separating her face from nose to chin; her only speech was a series of grunts, and no one had ever bothered to teach her to read or to write. Bridget Hagen was the last person any English official would suspect of treason. It wouldn’t occur to them that she had wit enough for it. She had wit enough to hate them, however.
Bridget was waiting for her mistress in the kitchen by a basket full of soiled petticoats.
“Wash two black and one white tonight,” Squaw DaSilva whispered. “Hang them out to dry at first light.”
Bridget’s disfigured face twisted into a smile, and she selected two black petticoats and one white from the basket. When she hung them in the drying yard at dawn they would signal that there was information to be passed along, and when she went to the meat stall in the Exchange Market on Broad Street, the butcher’s wife would be certain no one else waited on her.
Bridget would point to the haunch she wanted and pay for it after it was trimmed and trussed. Prices were exorbitant these days. Food cost eight times as much as it had before the British occupied the town. A whole handful of coins was needed to buy a bit of mutton. Impossible for anyone watching to know that one of the coppers Bridget handed over was specially made to divide into two flat halves concealing a hidden space, or that inside were the notes carefully written by Squaw DaSilva with the finest of quills on the thinnest of paper, after her girls had reported what they referred to as the useful pillow talk of the night before.
Later, because two black petticoats and one white had been hung in the drying yard behind the most fashionable whorehouse in the town, old Nancy Devrey—a widow these past ten months, but done with her mourning and remarkably full of appetite—would send her cook to the meat stall in the Exchange Market. The butcher’s wife would serve her as well. And the specially designed copper would be in the change Nancy’s cook brought home.
Still later, a pauper woman—never the same one twice—would show up at the kitchen door of the Devreys’ Wall Street house and inquire as to whether there was any charity to be had. And so the hollow penny would pass along a chain of women, until it reached the rebel lines. And in a matter of days it would find its way back by the same route, ready to be used again.
So far this particular network hadn’t been detected, but none of the women was in any doubt about the risk. Being female wouldn’t protect them. Another ring of spies had been discovered a few months earlier; two of its leaders were women. A week after their capture they were trundled through the streets in an open wagon so everyone could see they were half dead from torture, then sent to the prison ship
Jersey.
Squaw hadn’t set foot outside her front door since the moment she’d dropped the rebel standard on the pile of steaming manure and invited General Howe to sample her hospitality, but once a month when the moon was full she climbed onto her roof through the hatch outside Solomon’s old room, and using the powerful spyglass that Howe himself had given her when he left New York—
A token of my esteem, Mistress DaSilva; sometimes it can be quite jolly to see close up what’s happening through a keyhole, can it not?
—she stood staring at the silhouettes of the prison hulks anchored across the East River, lying off Brooklyn in Wallabout Bay.
All night she kept vigil. Sometimes, if the wind was right, when the sun began to rise she would hear the shouted command that started each day in hell for those aboard: “Prisoners! Turn out your dead.”
Morgan. Oh, God, Morgan. If there is any mercy left in heaven, don’t let my son be alive to suffer such torment. Let Morgan be dead rather than on one of those ships. Or best of all, let him be alive, fighting with Washington. Free.
Dear heaven, why did she do it? There was no reason to think Morgan Turner was on a prison ship, even if he’d been taken. Captured rebel officers were permitted to rent rooms in the taverns and boardinghouses of the town. Why then did she come up here and stare at the
Jersey
and the others? And why, in her heart of hearts, was she sure Morgan was there, right across the river, suffering unspeakable torment?
Because for four years she had not heard his name.
Just about every British officer serving in the colonies had passed through her long room. Each one, before he fucked his brains out upstairs, told tales of glorious exploits against the Americans. Not a detail was neglected in those swaggering stories, yet not one had mentioned Morgan Turner as being among the rebels defeated, killed, or even met in battle. It wasn’t natural. Not to anyone who knew the man her son had been.
She’d gone as far as she dared first with Howe, now with Clinton. Further. “My loyalty to His Majesty is absolute, you know that, Sir Henry. But I am only a weak woman and a mother. Can you give me any news of Morgan Turner?”
Lately she feared she’d asked too often. Clinton had begun to look at her with doubt in his eyes. Particularly after his lusts were satisfied and he was leaving. They’d met in the front hall a few weeks past, in the wee hours. He had stood his ground and she’d stood hers, and she’d seen the way his glance traveled from her to the rooms above where his officers were dallying. Ever since, she’d been having nightmares about the cellar on Little Queen Street where they said the women spies had been tortured. The neighbors all whispered stories about hearing their screams. And she had a feeling her house was being watched. Especially by day, when no British officers were present. Nonetheless, she went on doing exactly what she had done from the beginning. As did they all.
The morning after Gwendolyn’s first encounter with Sir Henry she confirmed Amarantha’s stories. Clinton liked the girl he was about to paddle to give him the wooden spoon herself, and kiss his hands and beg him to punish her. And she must always be smiling through her tears.
II
They ferried Andrew across the river in an eight-oared longboat. He could smell the prison ships while he still had to shade his eyes and squint into the distance to distinguish their shapes. The stench was of excrement, vomit, and rotting flesh, undercut with the foul reek of the mudflats of Wallabout Bay. “Christ,” Andrew whispered. “Sweet Jesus Christ.”
“That’s the
Jersey,
sir.” The midshipman standing beside him in the longboat’s bow pointed to the nearest of the hulks. The four men doing the rowing turned their heads away as they moved up on her. Andrew forced himself to look.
The hell ship was splintered and rubbed gray with time and neglect, but her painted waterline was still visible a few feet above the muddy shallows. There were three decks above that, and a fourth structure of some kind had been built on the topmost. “How many men aboard?” Andrew asked through clenched teeth.
“Can’t say, sir.” The midshipman’s voice was neutral. “Hundreds, I expect. They’ve hollowed her out, of course, to make room for more rebels. She’ll never be seaworthy again. None of them will, for that matter.”
Over the years there had been as many as twenty of the floating charnel houses anchored off Brooklyn. He counted fourteen today. Moored fore and aft with chains, barely moving, riding, it seemed, under their own death cloud despite the bright afternoon sun. Thousands of men and countless corpses tossed overboard. Nameless, faceless, unrecorded, mourned only by families who never knew their fate. And probably better that way.
He was close enough now to see they had fixed a floating dock and an outside stair broadside of the
Jersey,
and that a guard stood on her forecastle. Andrew wondered what you had to do to draw such godforsaken duty. On the other hand, he’d heard stories about the men who guarded the prison ships. Terrible stories. The rowers, he noted, continued to look away, and a couple of pairs of shoulders were heaving at the stink. For his part, he’d thought his profession had made him immune to any stench, but he couldn’t resist covering his nose with his hand.
“We’ll be upwind of her in a moment, sir,” the midshipman said. “The
Laurel’s
anchored at the head of Bushwick Creek. C’mon, lads, put your backs into it. The doctor’s a busy man.”
The pace picked up and they rowed past the prison ships. Andrew couldn’t help himself. He had to turn and look back. God in heaven, what cause could justify such horror?
“There she is, sir.” Pride in the midshipman’s voice this time. “There’s the
Laurel.”
Andrew faced forward. The contrast was extraordinary. His Majesty’s ship-of-the-line
Laurel
was a two-masted, double-decked third-rater that carried a crew of seven hundred, and sixty-four heavy cannon. Her paintwork gleamed, but it was outshone by her brass. The red ensign fluttered gaily at the bow, above a laurel-crowned figurehead carrying Britain’s orb and scepter. The air around her offered only the tang of fresh brine. “Sweet Christ,” Andrew muttered.