City of Dreams (94 page)

Squaw DaSilva had followed him all the way from the house. She had neither cloak nor shawl, and her dress was soaked through as a result of the many times she’d fallen in the snow. Her hat and veil had been lost some time back. She seemed unaware of the fact that she was baring her face in New York for the first time in thirty years. “Morgan, for the love of God! There’s nothing you can do.”

He ignored her. He spotted a dinghy tied by the wharf and ran to it, slipped the moorings, and jumped in. There was only one oar. An old trick when someone left a small boat like this without guard. “I need another oar! For sweet Christ’s sake, someone toss me an oar!”

“Here you go, Cap’n Turner. Look sharp.”

A man carrying an oar rushed to the edge of the jetty and tossed it toward the dinghy. “No!” Squaw shouted. “Don’t give it to him! Don’t go, Morgan. Listen to me!” Her screams pierced the night, louder even than the crackling sound of flames gorging on timber and pitch and resin and canvas.

“Morgan!” she cried. “Look!”

Almost in spite of himself he turned to follow her pointing hand. Someone stood high in the rigging of the mainmast, a man dressed only in a nightshirt that billowed in the wind. His white hair streamed behind him like trails of cloud. The creature clung to the lines with his one arm. His mouth was open and he appeared to be screaming, though his voice couldn’t be heard above the roar of the fire.

Holy Savior. The flames were racing along the upper deck from the direction of the stern, climbing the mizzenmast, eating the halyards with jagged crimson teeth. The mainmast would be next. Then everything was lost.

Morgan stood up and stripped off his cloak, tossing aside his cutlass and his pistols. He dove into the icy water, not allowing himself to feel the shock tear the breath from his lungs, conscious only that if he didn’t get to the
Maiden,
if he didn’t raise her anchor and head her out to sea, every ship in the harbor could go down with her.

“Morgan! No!”

Her voice came to him over the waters even as he swam toward the blazing inferno that had been his ship. A deep rumbling and shaking began below the sea; he felt it before he heard it. The fire had reached the munitions store. A heartbeat later, with a thunderous crack like the roar of a hundred cannon, the
Fanciful Maiden
blew apart, her two halves rising out of the water and spreading open like the petals of a terrible and deadly blossom.

The man who had been clinging to the rigging above the deck was thrown high into the air. The last thing Morgan remembered was seeing him fly through the reddened night sky, his single arm outstretched, like the swift descent of a wounded eagle, still swooping down on its prey because that was the only thing it knew how to do.

“He’s passed out!” the man who hauled Morgan out of the sea shouted to those waiting onshore. “But he’s alive.”

His mother sank to her knees, heart thudding, her hands covering her face.

Book Seven

War Path
A
UGUST
1776-M
ARCH
1784

Better to die in war, the Canarsie people said, than to dry up and blow away because your hunting grounds have been stolen and your fields cursed so nothing will grow.

In war you die with the sound of the drums in your ears, and the memory of a woman, and the sweet smell of your enemy’s blood in the air.

Chapter Twelve

“I
NTROIBO
ad altare Dei.” I
will go unto the altar of God.

The priest was gray-haired, thin, and stooped. Roisin had expected someone young and vigorous. Instead it was a dried-up old man who had dared to slip into New York now that all the talk was of war.

“Ad Deum que laetificat juventutem meum.”
To God who gives joy to my youth.

The altar boy was Josie Harmon’s nephew. Fourteen, with a squint and a face full of pimples. Tall for his age, his head almost touched the rafters in this attic room of Josie’s grand house on Wall Street.

Ah, to see Clare living in a house like this someday. If Josie Harmon—who had been Josie Ryan before she married fat old Leominster Harmon, who’d become rich turning sugar into rum—could make that kind of match, why not Clare? Probably Josie was pretty once. But she couldn’t have been as beautiful as Clare, with her lustrous blue-black hair, her pale skin, and her enormous blue-violet eyes. Clare’s eyes were closed now. The girl was praying as if she went to Mass every week, for all this was only the second she’d ever heard. Fifteen years old, and a true Woman of Connemara. A healer, devoted to the Virgin and the Church.

Roisin shifted slightly. Kneeling on the bare floor was making her knees ache, and apart from the priest and the server, there were eleven people squeezed into the hot, stuffy little room, seven women and four men. She knew them all at least by sight, had treated a few of them, but in truth they had only their forbidden Catholicism in common.

Roisin kept her head bowed but let her lidded glance wander left. Josie Harmon was madly fanning herself, her face flushed and dripping with sweat. Three years Roisin had been treating her with a tincture of dittander and pepperwort to dry the humors that drenched Josie in perspiration much of the time. Didn’t help much. Her ankles were still swollen to twice their normal size, despite the tisane of monk’s rhubarb that Roisin prescribed, and smoking her with a mixture of liverwort and mustard had done nothing for the way Josie huffed and puffed at the least exertion.

“Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.”
Our help is in the name of the Lord.

The priest was a Jesuit, Mr. Steenmayer. Josie said he’d come because he knew their great need for the comforts of religion now that there might be war. Nonsense. Roisin had heard it said often enough in the old country. If there was a chance to grab power, the Jesuits took it. Ah, what difference did it make? The man was a priest, Jesuit or no. He could give them the sacraments. Seventeen years she’d been in this city, and only twice had she been shriven and heard Holy Mass.

If the rebels, God bless them, defeated the English (though Dear Lord, that would take a miracle) Catholics would be free to worship openly in New York along with everyone else. Didn’t the grand Declaration they’d read aloud the month before say as much? All that wonderful talk about men being equal and having a right to … what did it say? “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Except for Negro men, apparently. The Declaration didn’t say a thing about Cuf having a God-given right to be free.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
The priest bent forward, beating his chest over his dried-up Jesuit sins.

Anytime she wanted, that bitch Squaw DaSilva could claim Cuf back and have him flogged. Both of them, if it came to that. Squaw knew where they were. Hadn’t she seen Roisin once in the Fly Market? She turned away and acted as if she hadn’t see her, but Lord, didn’t Roisin know very well that she and Cuf were free only as long as the bitch chose to let them be free? Ah, Holy Virgin, I know it’s stupid to worry about the veiled witch after all these years, and stupid to argue with Cuf about putting himself at risk for the rebel Declaration that clearly didn’t mean to include him.

Three years Cuf held out against Morgan and the Sons of Liberty. Until the English taxes were stealing the bread from our mouths. It was the English drove Cuf into Morgan’s secret society. Though the truth was, he wanted to join from the first. Anything to be in the same place as Morgan Turner, to be Morgan’s equal. Dear Lord, that’s an itch never goes away, no matter how much poor Cuf scratches.

“Kyrie, eleison. Kyrie, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.”
Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy.

On us all, Lord. For the Blessed Virgin’s sake … Look at Josie’s nephew, trying to seem so holy and sanctified when he makes the responses. The Jesuits won’t get him. The lad knows what the thing between his legs is for, else why was he watching Clare the way sometimes Cuf watches me? Especially if Morgan’s about. Oh Cuf, Cuf, it’s true, I love him with every breath that’s in me, but don’t you know I’d never betray you? Not after everything you’ve done. You must know. But that doesn’t matter, does it? Not when however many years pass, you still measure yourself against Morgan Turner.

“Credo in unum Deum, Patri omnipotentem …” I
believe in one God, the Father Almighty…

There were no guards, only a single red-coated clerk behind a desk made of a trestle and a couple of planks. About a dozen black men crowded into the canvas tent. Waiting, and sweating in the intense August heat, jostling for position, each eager to be the next to put his mark on the document that made him a member of the loyal forces of His Majesty, George III.

Cuf let himself be shifted by someone determined to sign before he did. Then, when the man was in position, he asked, “You certain they say you can be free after?”

The man’s face was thin, with a high-bridged nose and high-ridged cheekbones. Cuf had seen other black men with that same look. It meant their people came from a particular part of Africa, a particular tribe. He didn’t know where in Africa, or what the tribe was called. Neither did the man. All their history, who they were, where they came from, had been stolen from them.

The redcoat sitting at the table was holding a cloth to his nose, as if black sweat stank different from his own. And the black men were ready to accept that. Anything, long as they could get back what belonged to them. Never mind if it was the English Royal African Company first loaded their people on the Guinea ships, yoked and chained like cattle. In August 1776, the British were promising to make black men free. “You sure it’s true?” Cuf asked again.

The other man nodded. “It be a promise. Any slave as comes and fights for the King, soon as the rebellion’s put down, he be free.”

“What about that Declaration everyone was shouting about last month?” Cuf demanded. “You heard what it says?”

“I heard.”

“So?”

“So it don’t say nothin’ ’bout the slaves bein’ free, does it?” the thin-faced man said. “Way I sees it, that be a white man’s freedom Declaration. Negro man, he be best helped by these English soldiers right here.”

“What happens if the rebels win?”

The other man chuckled. “Ye ain’t seen much o’ this here Staten Island, has ye? There be thousands of redcoats dug in over here. Redcoats springin’ out o’ the ground like stalks of corn. Rebels ain’t gonna win.”

They’d moved ahead while they spoke. Cuf’s companion was next, and Cuf right after, unless he found another way to delay. The milling crowd offered plenty of opportunities to fall back and let someone else take his place. Except that just then a second red-coated clerk sat down beside the first. He glanced up at Cuf. “Runaway slave?”

Nothing for it now. “Aye, sir, I be that.” Hanging his head, using the speech that was expected of him.

“What’s your name?”

“Cuffee, master.”

“Who owns you?”

“Nobody.” Softly, looking directly into the soldier’s eyes. “Nobody owns me. I took my freedom.”

The soldier shrugged and put a crumpled cloth to his nose. “Put your mark right here.” He shoved a paper in Cuf’s direction. “Soon as the rebellion’s over you’ll be a legally free man. General Howe’s word on it.”

Cuf hesitated. The soldier held out a quill. Cuf took it and leaned down. Resisting the urge to write his name with a flourish, he marked an “X” on the document.