“Mr. Grumby, he calling for you, Cap’n—he got somebody out there he holding.”
Grumby was the guard on duty at the front door. Lewis was almost finished with this damnable list and he didn’t welcome the interruption, but he capped the inkwell and wiped the quill.
He found Gmmby planted in the doorway, cudgel in hand, and heard him snarl, “Mister, you’re fixing to get yourself a sore head, you keep on like this.” Lewis had a confused impression of a heavyset man rushing the guard. Grumby hurled him back, so he fell on his seat, and charged him with the cudgel raised.
“All right, Sam,” Lewis said. “I’ll take over.”
Face red, breathing hard, Grumby said, “You do that, Cap’n. Leave him to me, I’ll split his damned head.”
The intruder scrambled up, turning his back as he did so, and it took Lewis a moment to recognize Mr. Callender, the Richmond editor with all his mad grievances.
“Aha! The soldier boy,” the editor squalled. He laughed. “Soldier boy, errand boy. Here’s your errand: You get your ass up those steps and tell the great president that James Thomson Callender is here and he’s wore out waiting, and he wants what the man can give in a stroke of the pen and he wants it right now!”
“Mind your tongue, Mr. Callender,” Lewis said. His voice shook in his rage, his fists so tight they ached.
“Don’t you use that tone on me, Mr. Soldier Boy. I tell you, I’ve waited long enough. I suffered for the Democrats. They were happy to use me when I was winning elections
for ’em. I went to jail, I lost my press and my paper—well, Democrats won like they wouldn’t have without me, and now I want mine! I want that postmastership at Richmond. It’s mine by right, and I want it! You go tell him!”
For a moment the image of this impossible man in hopeless love with a society belle in Richmond softened Lewis, but sympathy fled as Callender continued his obscene caterwauling. Lewis took him by the arm and marched him down the gravel path toward the iron gate. When the editor lunged about trying to break free, Lewis lifted him almost off the ground and said in a venomous whisper, “You scurvy bastard, you give me trouble and I’ll beat you bloody!”
Callender’s head whipped about. He looked at Lewis wide-eyed and made no further effort to break away. But he gave a low moan and then, with his voice a compressed hiss, said, “I’m warning you. I know everything about this holier-than-thou, this oh-so-important man, whole country looking up to him, thinking he’s just the most noble thing, when all the time he’s rotten to his heart. You can drag me around and threaten me, you can get away with it now, but I’ll win in the end ’cause I’m going to tell the world. Tell the whole vile story. I’ve got it all, every bit, names, everything. Whole world will know …”
His voice rose to a kind of howl as they reached the gate. Lewis restrained his impulse to kick the bastard into the street. Instead he growled, “Walk on, Mister, while you’re still able to walk.” Callender scuttled away.
At a safe distance, he turned and shouted, “I’m going to tell! The great man, he won’t be nothing but dirt when I’m done with him. You wait and see!”
Samuel Clark was standing in front of the carriage, holding the horses while Miss Danny was in the office over the wharf doing business. The square-rigged brig
Sallie Mae, ar
riving the night before from Santo Domingo, was off-loading cargo; and what with the stevedore yells and the creak of the windlass and the cracking whips of carters backing their
trucks into place, the horses were restless. Samuel held their bridles and talked to them, voice low and soothing. Now and then he rubbed their noses, one and then the other. Presently he saw a big black man in seaboots with a slouch hat pulled low, a red feather in his hatband, come down the gangway.
“Hello, Tinker,” Samuel said, his lips scarcely moving. Tinker didn’t break stride. “Come see me at Miss Molly’s,” he said from the corner of his mouth. Samuel watched him go and shook his head—those seaboots, that red feather, that swagger, someday they would fetch the man a load of trouble. Tinker was a free black, and he never let anyone forget it. Bo’sun mate on the
Sallie Mae,
bossing black and white alike, they said he could bring a ship through seas that made the captain piss his pants and ashore he would kill any man who fooled with him. Fighting knife a foot long tucked in his boot. Samuel admired him but from a distance because one of these days Tinker was going to get killed himself.
That night Samuel left the house about eight.
“You going to get in trouble, black man walking the streets at night. You don’t know what—”
“Ain’t nothing going to happen. Ship in from Santo Domingo; he wants to see me? He’s got something for me. Got word from Joshua, I’ll warrant. I bet that rascal really did get there!”
No reason he shouldn’t walk at night, he was a free man, but he kept his eyes open all the same. When he turned down the alley that led to Miss Molly’s, he looked around first; and when he got to her door, he opened it just enough to slip through and closed it quickly. Smoke was thick enough to cut and a banjo was playing somewhere and the odor of rum and beer was strong. No white faces. Good-looking black girls with their gowns cut about to their navels and their waists snugged in so that a man’s hands could near encircle them moved about with trays, bringing drinks and eluding patrons’ slaps and tickles with practiced laughter.
Miss Molly’s was a nice little whorehouse that paid the constable in various ways and kept things quiet, and it was Tinker’s place of residence when the
Sallie Mae
was in port.
Samuel saw the big man at a table in a far corner, an absolutely beautiful woman with breasts like melons snugged under his arm. He felt a lift in his own groin at the sight of her. ’Course, he had a fine wife and he didn’t patronize fancy women, but a woman like that, she looked like she’d turn a man every way but loose.
Just then Tinker saw him and raised an arm. Samuel sat at the table and called for rum, tossing a coin on the girl’s tray. Up close the woman with big breasts looked like she’d kill you for a couple of coppers. Tinker rummaged around in his pocket.
“Feller in Santo Domingo come up to me, asked did I know you?” From the pocket came a small packet of papers, and Tinker sorted them out. “I said maybe I did and maybe I didn’t, and he pulls out this and asks me to give it to you.” He handed Samuel a crumpled, sweat-stained paper folded small. A letter! By God, Joshua had sent him a letter!
“You know this feller, eh?” Tinker asked.
Samuel smiled. “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.”
Tinker laughed. “I ain’t asking no questions and it don’t pay to talk much about no slave revolt in this town; but fact is, now that I see your ugly face again, that feller could have been your brother.”
“You don’t say,” Samuel said. He slipped the letter into his pocket. “I’m much obliged to you, Tinker. What say I have Miss Molly set aside a couple of bottles for you, my treat?”
Tinker grinned. “Make it four.”
“Done!”
An hour later he and Millie were reading the letter together by the light of a single candle. She was a better reader than he, but even she had to work hard to get all the words straightened out. It was written with a stub pencil and looked like it had been wetted through more than once. But the meaning came through loud as the exultant shout that Joshua used to give when he figured he’d beaten Samuel at something, a loud, yelping bark of triumph that Samuel could hear right now in their room.
For he’d made it—he’d reached Santo Domingo, and it
was a paradise! Black folk everywhere with their heads held high! Nobody shuffling and ducking and pulling off their hats and saying, Yassuh, Yassuh, none of that. Wasn’t many whites and the ones he saw were mighty polite. They were the plantation owners who once had owned the slaves, and now it was all turned around. Plenty of whites had been killed, good riddance, and the few who were left had mighty little to say and that was just as it should be, for this was black man’s land. He’d dreamed of freedom all his life, and now he had it and he’d never let it go. He had come expecting the French to return and fighting to resume, but such was the genius of Toussaint that the French had welcomed him. Santo Domingo was still a loyal French colony, and Toussaint was its ruler with official rank of captain-general in the French army! So he was figuring now on how he could get Junie and the children and bring them down. He begged Samuel to come on, bring Millie, they would all live free with a lifting spirit that he knew a mere set of papers couldn’t give in the United States. Come on down! He was alive as he’d never been before.
Samuel felt as if he’d been holding his breath, and now he let it out in a gasp and couldn’t stop himself as he cried, “Isn’t that wonderful! God, I’d like to go there, see—”
But Millie was on her feet. “Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain,” she napped, “and don’t you go to talking about going yourself! Someone in this family has to have a little sense, and that’s surely not that miserable brother of yours.”
“Miserable!” Samuel was outraged. “He’s a hero.”
“My foot, he’s a hero! Goes off and leaves his family untended, he going to get himself killed, and what good does that do them? How’s he going to get them out of those Louisiana swamps? How? You tell me that. What kind of hero is a man goes off and leaves his family?”
“But think, Millie,” Samuel said softly. “Think about walking around with your head up, not bowing down to any man or woman, no slavers with their whips and clubs, no one asking for your papers. You don’t think you’d like that?”
For a moment she hesitated and he saw a look of hunger flash over her face, and then she shook her head. “It ain’t going to last,” she said, her voice a whisper. “Joshua, he’ll be lucky to get out alive, and you and me, we’ll have to see to Junie and the children. Your brother ain’t going to do it.”
Her face was set in stone, and he knew better than to argue with her. But he lay awake a long time thinking about what it would be like to be where most everyone was black and they were free and proud and they didn’t truckle to every white face they saw. Someday …
After a while he realized Millie was crying and he got his arms around her and held her, she as little as a bird against his chest, and he stroked her hair.
Aaron Burr stood high on an upper terrace outside a row of windows on the east side of the Capitol, taking the sun and the brisk air, comfortably out of the wind. The Senate had gone into recess, and as it turned out in this most bitter political season of his entire life, sitting on the dais as president of the Senate was the sole duty that the vice presidency of the United States allowed him. He was empowered to vote only to break ties formed by men clashing in debate, men who were alive, active, living lives full of meaning. He was the third occupant of his august office; the other two had gone on to the presidency, while the third seemed destined for the ash heap. Or so the Virginia cabal was intent on placing him.
He long since had stopped imagining that Jefferson and Madison meant him anything but malignancy. He had liked them too, supported them, worked for them, seen to their great success. He had sewed up New York and handed it to them in a basket. Just as he had presented little Madison to his bride—he often thought of that day, Dolley an extraordinarily fine piece, radiant in full bloom, the little man gaping at her like a desert wanderer beholding a water hole.
And they had all turned on him, though Dolley was friendly when she saw him. She was still a damned fine-looking woman too, if heavier now and a little worn about the
edges. But the betrayal that her husband and his Virginia friends had worked on New York’s thoroughbred prancer showed how little honor was to be found below Mason and Dixon’s line. Of course, the contretemps over the election was just a ruse, for Burr had examined his conduct again and again and found it spotless. He hadn’t raised a hand in his behalf, not a hand. It didn’t matter that the Federalists’ call for him to come and take the place by storm would have done no good; the point was that he had resisted that call, he had shown no sign of grasping desire. Just a ruse. The Virginia cabal would do anything to remove the New Yorker who stood as its greatest rival, the great threat to its dominance.
He swallowed. It all made him a little sick. Everyone knew he’d been shorn of power—was emasculated too strong a word? Castrated? Were they laughing in the streets of New York? In the past his voice had cracked like thunder there; how loud would it be today? He took a deep breath, steadying himself. The story wasn’t over yet, not at all, and his enemies might find the chapters to follow much less satisfactory. Mr. Burr wasn’t finished, not by a long shot.
A horseman rounded the corner at a canter, riding a good-looking beast but moving too fast for a city street. Abruptly the rider reined up, and Burr saw with surprise that it was none other than the object of his ruminations, Mr. Madison. The little man proceeded at a sedate pace, slowly dismounted, and tied the horse to the hitching rail next to an iron gray on which Burr had seen that French diplomat, Pichon, the day before.
More and more surprised, he saw Madison tie and untie his horse three separate times. He’d forgotten how to tie a horse? Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw Pichon emerge from the Capitol. Pichon seemed about to turn back into the building, but Madison raised a hand in greeting and Pichon came slowly down the steps. So, something going on with the French.