City of Dreams (111 page)

The date of the official British evacuation of the city was set for November 3, 1783. Two days to go, but a great many patriots, the New Yorkers who’d fled the occupation, hadn’t waited. They’d been flocking back for weeks now. And sweet Christ in heaven, look what they’d found.

The streets were strewn with garbage and a fecal stench hung in the grayed autumn air. Houses had been used for stables—or worse, privies—and birds and rats nested in ruins no longer fit for human habitation. Most of Manhattan’s trees had been dug up, even on much of the Broad Way. Used for fuel mostly, or as here at the corner of Maiden Lane, cut down to make a barricade that was still in place because no one could be bothered to remove it.

Cuf turned his horse east. He had to go as far as the river before he found a way to turn again toward home. For a moment, before he put it behind him, he stared at the wreckage that had been the landing of the ferry to Brooklyn over on the long island. First day he ever lay with Roisin, they’d taken that ferry. A penny each for the ride. And he’d made her pay so everyone would assume he was her slave. Not far wrong.

He shivered as he did every time he thought of that Brooklyn beach. He could still remember how it had felt, lying over her in the sand that first time, knowing he was opening a door he’d have better left shut, but powerless to do anything but what he did. Mostly he didn’t regret it. More than twenty years they’d been together. But during the last seven of them—him off with the army, seeing her so seldom—he’d lain with a few others. Black women and white, moving between two worlds the way he always had, never one thing or the other, despised by both. Mostly, it didn’t matter. Mostly, the women didn’t matter, either. Only Roisin.

The shore each side of the ferry landing was a string of neglected, crumbling wharves. Seven years of misery and cold and semistarvation, fighting and risking and daring, insinuating himself where white men couldn’t go. He was never suspected as a rebel because of the color of his skin. For what? To come home to this desolation. And all the while remembering the general’s farewell. Two years back, after the siege of Yorktown, when Cornwallis finally surrendered, Washington had grasped his hand.

“It isn’t over yet, Cuf. I’m asking you to remain with General Lafayette and the French forces. They have need of someone who can go among the enemy with relative ease. Will you stay?”

“Yes, sir. If those are your orders, sir.”

“They are, Cuf. But I’ll never forget you. Your country owes you much.”

His country. Perhaps. Only back home, in Virginia, the general owned Negro slaves. Was it their country, too?

He wheeled the horse around and rode west on Wall Street to Trinity Church. It was a burned-out hulk, brooding over the remains of what had been the busy Church Farm district. That was Canvas Town now, a place of suffering and want.

He knew his bit of canvas from the rest only by the mark he’d made on his last visit, nearly three years past, after the campaign of the Carolinas. They sent him sneaking back into New York for a day or two, and he managed to spend one night with Roisin. He’d used his knife to scratch the words on the charred beam in front of her hovel: “The Fiddle and Clogs Taproom. Cuf, Proprietor and Landlord.”

There was a small lad sitting in one corner, with fat rosy cheeks and red curls. Couldn’t be more than a year or two. “Clare’s boy?” Cuf asked.

Roisin shook her head.

“Whose, then?”

She turned away from him. She’d touched him only once since he had come home. One quick kiss of welcome, and kind words about how glad she was to see him. Many kind words. Now she spoke only two. “He’s mine.”

“But not,” Cuf said softly, “mine.”

Sweet Jesus. Where had those words come from? He wanted them back. “Not mine,” he said again, the voice rising out of pain somewhere deep in his gut.

She was crying without making a sound; tears were rolling down her cheeks. “No, Cuf,” she whispered. “He’s not yours.”

Cuf thought he couldn’t breathe. Stupid, he told himself. Bloody stupid. Seven years and he’d been home to her four times all told. So maybe once she’d lain with someone else. Maybe even twice. That wasn’t unforgivable, considering all the things that marked their lives together. Except… “You didn’t have to bear him and shame me, did you? You know how to end a breeding. That’s what the sea gift is for, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t think you remembered. About the sea gift.”

“I do. I remember everything about that day on the beach. So this boy, you needn’t have—”

“I wanted him.” Roisin went to stand beside the child and put her arm around him. As if Cuf might try to take him away.

The gesture made him angrier than her admission of lying with someone else. “I’d never hurt him. Christ Jesus, Roisin, don’t you know I’d never hurt a child?”

“I know.” Talk of something else, she told herself. Anything else. Anything so he doesn’t ask the next question, the hardest one. “Cuf, are you hungry? Thirsty? I haven’t much, but—”

“I want nothing. What’s his name?”

“Joyful Patrick.”

“It’s a strange name.”

“Maybe. Joyful for how I felt, and Patrick for the Irish in him.” She touched the lad’s red hair.

“That’s all? Just Joyful Patrick?”

Holy Virgin, help me not to be such a coward. Cuf deserves better. “Joyful Patrick Turner,” she whispered.

A long moment passed when the world stopped and his heart stopped and there was nothing except rage and pain. “Morgan’s boy,” Cuf said finally.

He looked at her, waiting for her to say “No, not Morgan’s child.” Even though he knew she’d be lying, he’d believe her. Because he wanted to. Like always.

“Yes,” she said. “Morgan’s son.”

He’d never hit her. It was unthinkable. But God forgive him, how much he wanted to. Cuf balled his big hands into fists and fought to draw one normal breath. One cool breath of air that would stop the roiling in his chest and bowels.

But this time it wouldn’t stay down, buried in his gut the way it always had. Not now. Not when he looked at Roisin with her arms around Morgan’s son. “Clare’s not mine either, is she?” The words burned in his throat. “Clare … all these years. Clare’s not my baby girl, is she?”

“No, Cuf, not the way you mean. But she loves you as if she were.”

“She’s Morgan Turner’s child. That day in Brooklyn … she was already there, growing in your belly. Both your children, they’re Morgan’s.”

“Yes, but— Cuf, for God’s sake, don’t look like that! It’s not the way you’re thinking. After Morgan left, all those years, and after he came back— I was true to you, Cuf. Always. I swear it.”

“True to me? You were true to me? In your heart as well, Roisin? Or only true between your legs? Except, of course, when you lay with Morgan Turner and let his seed grow in your belly again.”

“True in every way, Cuf. Every way that matters. You’re the best man I’ve ever known and I never cheated on our bargain. Not once until… Never before. I swear it.”

“Then why”—he was amazed at how soft his voice was when he wanted to shout at her—“why is it you never bore me a child in all these years we’ve been together? How many times have I had you, Roisin? How many times have I put my half-black cock in you? And no babe of mine ever grew in your belly. How come only Morgan’s white children were good enough for your breeding, Roisin? Not Cuf’s part-Negro children. Every time one of them started in you, you made sure it didn’t grow. Isn’t that how it was?”

“Oh, Holy Virgin, no. I never did that, Cuf. As God is my judge, I never did. In all the years we were together, no babe of yours bred in me. I swear on my mother’s— I’m telling the truth, Cuf. I swear it.” But it wasn’t the whole truth. That was why she couldn’t truly swear on her mother’s soul. There was her bargain with the Holy Virgin that no babe of Cuf’s beginning meant it was all right to lie with him though they weren’t married. “I’m telling you the truth.”

The child sensed the tension between them and whimpered. Roisin hugged him to her hip, smoothing his hair and making a gentling noise.

Cuf shook his head. The rage was draining away, leaving numbness behind. And when the numbness went, he knew, there would be emptiness and pain. Nothing, nothing could ever put back what he’d lost. “I thought Morgan was dead,” he said. “We all thought so.”

“All but dead,” she said. “He was a prisoner four years, on the
Jersey.
Then they moved him to Rhinelander’s. I found him there and his mother bribed a guard to let him out. After I got him well enough, he went back to serve with General Washington. Oh God, Cuf. Sit down. You must. You look as if—”

“I don’t want to sit down. You haven’t answered my question. Where is my old friend Morgan Turner now?”

“Dear God, Cuf, you wouldn’t do anything foolish? Promise me you wouldn’t. The British nearly killed him.”

Cuf took a step closer to her and the child. “Thing I don’t understand is, Morgan Turner’s a rich man. How come you’re still living in here?”

“Morgan wanted to find somewhere else for us, but I refused, Cuf. Same as I refused to move in with Clare and Raif after they got their place in Hanover Square. I had to stay here and protect what was yours. All the patriots coming back, saying this or that is theirs, grabbing whatever might have belonged to a Tory or someone they think might have been a Tory, they haven’t gotten the Fiddle and Clogs. I stayed and protected it. This place is still yours, Cuf.”

“Nothing’s mine,” he said. “Not a thing worth having. What I did have, you’ve thrown it in the mud and trampled it.”

November third came and went. The redcoats didn’t budge. Everyone knew it was simply a matter of time, but in Squaw DaSilva’s long room the officers spoke of how they wouldn’t go until the last Tory who wanted to leave had done so.

“And what of you, Mistress DaSilva? The rebels will be after blood when they come back. Wouldn’t you be wise to go home?”

“But this is my home, gentlemen. Where else would I go?”

“To London. Now there’s a thought! Love to be able to visit you in Mayfair or Piccadilly, Mistress DaSilva. All the rage you’d be, with your New York ladies.”

“That’s exactly the point, gentlemen. We shall miss you, of course, but we’re New York ladies.” And when they looked disappointed, or pretended to, she waved her fan and said,
“Toujours la gaieté,
gentlemen.
Toujours la gaieté.”

On November twenty-third Squaw went up to her roof with the spyglass Howe had given her. A few rotting hulks remained in Wallabout Bay, but she’d heard they were empty now. Anyway, she wasn’t looking at them. She was watching the streams of redcoats marching down the Bouwerie road and marshaling at the end of Queen Street, waiting to be ferried out to the ships waiting in the harbor.

She’d been poorly all the previous day, but felt better now. Indeed, she felt marvelous. Dear God, dear God… After everything, despite everything, they had won. She had won. Morgan was alive and well. He still hated her, or so he said. But Roisin insisted he didn’t mean it. She said now that the war was over she could make peace between them. And if she didn’t, there remained Joyful Patrick, the most adorable child in the world. Her darling grandboy. Roisin brought him whenever she could.