City of Glory (14 page)

Half an hour later Andrew was done. He and Zachary Fish drove out of Five Points in the old trap. The soft clop of the horse’s hooves on the mostly dirt streets between this northerly neighborhood and Andrew’s comfortable home on Ann Street to the south made the only sound in the nearly midnight dark. The heat was only slightly less formidable than that of midday, and the air was still thick and full of moisture. For a time neither man spoke, both enjoying the slight breeze caused by the movement of the wagon. After a while Andrew asked about his namesake.

“Andrewena be fine,” Fish said. “She’ll be sorry she missed you, but I believe a ten-year-old should be abed at such an hour.” He sighed. “Though I warrant it won’t be more than a few years and she’ll be thinking of marrying and setting up on her own.”

“Indeed.” They married young in Five Points, and bred until such time as either the breeding or something more lethal killed them. “Greet her for me.”

“I be doing that, Dr. Turner.”

The two men had exhausted the only bit of ordinary life they had in common. More silence, until Zachary Fish said, “There be something else.” His voice was a soft sound in the night.

“Yes, Reverend?”

“I hesitate to mention it because I don’t be exactly sure…”

“Not being sure is a condition of existence, Reverend Fish. We have to act anyway.”

“Yes, I believe that be a fair statement. That conversation we had some months past, Dr. Turner…”

“Last year, I believe. Something about a regiment being raised from here in the Five Points.”

In the starlight Andrew could see Fish’s nodding head. “You remember I told you it be a Connecticut man seemed to be doing the organizing?”

“I do. Someone you’ve never seen, you said. And you didn’t think he was acting for our government.”

“That be right. Didn’t think so then and don’t think so now. All his activity was with the whites, so I don’t be likely to have any particular confidences. Thing is…lately seems there have been suggestions made to my people. No one will admit it straight out, but I do hear things.”

“Signing up volunteers for the Committees of Defense,” Andrew offered. “The city’s awash with men prepared to defend her if the British invade.”

Fish looked straight ahead and kept his loose hold on the reins. “Not defense of New York City, no sir, Dr. Turner. They don’t be signing we coloreds up for that.”

“I see. So you think this man from Connecticut is perhaps acting for the enemy?” During the Revolution the British had offered any black who would fight for the king his freedom when the war was won. No surprise that plenty had taken them up on it, but those Negroes who survived the fighting had mostly gone to Canada. Like Cuf, the mulatto that Squaw DaSilva had raised alongside Morgan. Cuf fought beside Morgan and Andrew with Washington for the cause of independency, but in the end they’d made no place for him in their new republic. The way Andrew heard it, Cuf went to Nova Scotia after the war. “The redcoats up to their old tricks?”

“No,” Reverend Fish said. “I don’t think it be the British as are trying to enlist my people in their cause this time. Nor the man from Connecticut who be here last year. I believe the recruiters to be working for someone right here in New York. I’m still trying to learn his name. That’s why I haven’t yet brought you the information. But seeing as you’re here…”

“I’m grateful, Reverend. And if you find out any more—”

“I’ll let you know, Dr. Turner. I promise.”

The East River on the Brooklyn Side, Midnight

The schooner was called
Le Carcajou
—the Wolverine—and her figurehead was a carving of the beast, mouth agape and fangs bared, claws ready to strike. She slipped silently up the inlet on the flood tide, flying only the mainsails of her two masts. Rigged thus, she was maneuverable but not fast. Silence and stealth mattered, not speed.
Le Carcajou
had made this voyage under various flags. At the moment she flew none.

Gornt Blakeman stood on the rocky beach below the cliffs that sheltered the cove and waited until the vessel dropped anchor. Then he lit the lantern he carried and waved it right to left four times. As soon as he’d done that, he extinguished the flame. A few minutes passed. Blakeman heard the soft splash of a dinghy being lowered, then the rhythmic sound of oars cutting through the water.
“Bon soir, mon ami,”
a voice called out. “You have not, I hope, waited long.”

“Lower your voice. And I’ve been here five godrotting nights in a row. I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

The man rowing the dinghy beached it, got out, and waded to the shore, tugging his small craft behind him. “
Alors, ça suffit,
there is a tide here,
bien sur.
But not one that comes this high. At least I don’t think so. What is your opinion,
mon ami
?”

“I have none. I don’t know a damned thing about boats and water.”

“Exactly. So you will keep a civil tongue in your head when you address a seaman who has run a blockade from Nouveau Orléans to here. A thousand miles at least, and His poxed Majesty’s poxed Royal Navy on the prowl for most of it. Not the easiest of voyages, monsieur. It will, I hope, be worth the while of myself and my companions.”

The moon had set, but there was enough starlight for Blakeman to see the man wore a shabby jacket and breeches, and an eye patch as well as a bandanna tied around his head. Christ, the costume wanted only a parrot on the shoulder. “Don’t try to disguise your profession, do you?” And before the pirate could answer, “And I know another who ran the blockade for six times the distance. And brought me a fortune in silks and porcelains in the bargain. So what did you bring, Monsieur Tintin?”

“Congratulations,
mon ami.
I take it the ship you spoke of, the one from Canton, has arrived. You will see a fine profit, I’m sure.” And never mind that it’s a damned sight easier to run a blockade on the high seas than along the coast. I am not here to see who can piss the furthest, Monsieur Blakeman. “Now, we have much to discuss, have we not?”

“You have the agreement of Lafitte and the others?”

Tintin shrugged. “Jean Lafitte is many miles distant, monsieur. I am here.”

Friday, August 19, 1814

Chapter Seven

Rivington Street, the Northeastern Edge
of New York City, 1:30
A.M.

T
HE
D
ANCING
K
NAVE
was crowded in fair weather and foul. This hot and squally summer night was no different. Men filled the large room where the smell of tobacco mingled with that of rum, and the soft clack of the gaming counters didn’t quite drown out the sweet voice of a young woman accompanying herself on the hammer dulcimer. “Young maidens beware at the Pilgrim Street Fair…” Not to worry. There were few women in the gaming salon, and quite probably no maidens.

Men were gathered at various tables, some playing at cards, some at dominoes, others at dice. Occasionally, one would gather up his winnings or shrug off his losses and make his way to the adjacent room known as the Ladies’ Parlor—each “lady” young and charming and beautifully gowned, and smelling of Hungary Water or Devrey’s Elixir of Violets. They amused themselves with cards and dominoes (no dice, they were inappropriate for ladies), and there was no sense of that fevered intensity that prevailed across the wide entry hall. In the Ladies’ Parlor a harpist strummed softly in one corner, interrupted by the occasional tinkle of feminine laughter. Neither tobacco nor rum were permitted. Instead small glasses of Madeira were available, or tea in capacious porcelain cups and coffee in others half the size. The air of gentility was further served by the fact that everyone pretended not to notice when a man tapped a bared shoulder, or perhaps simply nodded, the chosen woman rose, and the pair disappeared up the stairs.

The Dancing Knave had six small but tastefully furnished working bedrooms on the second floor. Each had a heavy velvet curtain in front of the door and equally thick curtains at the window. It was occasionally possible to hear moans, shrieks, the rhythmic bouncing of a bed, or the sound of slaps on bare flesh as a gentleman indulged his taste for spanking or being spanked—but it was all muffled. The Knave’s ladies were a world apart from the four-copper hot-pocket girls of Canvastown, or the tuppenny Mollie O’Hannigans of Five Points, or the even cheaper prostitutes who walked the streets of the notorious Corlear’s Hook to the south, offering to lift their skirts right there in the open. The Dancing Knave was not unique; there were discreet parlor houses in other reputable sections of the town. But none could approach the elegant ambience of this pleasure palace that stood alone well north of the populous city.

When the British took Nieuw Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the thickly settled part of the town ended at Wall Street, while the Voorstadt—the out-city where the storehouses and the farms could be found—extended a half mile to the north. The rest of Manhattan was wilderness. When the colonies declared independence 112 years later, New York City had spread as far as Canal Street. In the chaos of 1776, Tories who still swore loyalty to the king fled with only such goods as they could pack. Among them were the heirs to the large De Lancey estate, a country house built by a former governor of the province. His land began at Canal Street and extended north to Kips Bay, two miles further up the shore.

Few Tories had been more hated than the De Lanceys. One of the first acts of the postwar Common Council was to put their property on the block. Most of it was bought by a group of businessmen who named themselves the Delancey Street Consortium, dropping the French spelling and pronunciation. The consortium planned grand private houses and dignified squares for their newly acquired holdings, a neighborhood for the best of New York society, but the idea gave way first to internal squabbling then to war. In 1812, when the woman calling herself Delight Higgins arrived from Canada, she was able to buy three of the newly mapped but undeveloped lots on Rivington Street for just under seven hundred dollars, or a little less than two hundred and seventy-five English pounds. In the panicked atmosphere that accompanied the declaration of war, none of the sellers had bothered to ask where a woman like Delight—not long since run out of York as a whore, and worse, a mulatto bitch who did not know her station—would come by such a sum in cash money.

In fact, the purchase took every last penny Delight Higgins had managed to bring with her in the form of gold coins stitched into the hem of her frock and the lining of a canvas satchel. Nonetheless, a glorious house was built to her exact specifications. When it was finished the rooms on the ground floor were paneled in luxurious mahogany, with fittings of finest brass, and the most talented joiner in New York had been called in to create a hidden balcony, a small and secret aerie from which it was possible to observe everything happening on the gaming floor. The hawk’s nest, Delight and the man who had financed the building of the house and become her silent partner called it, and it was so cleverly concealed high in one corner of the main salon that it was all but unnoticeable.

There was no access to the nest from the gaming floor. The narrow set of stairs that led to the balcony was concealed in a passage between the aerie itself and Delight’s private third-floor rooms. “My hawk flies only between my bed and his perch,” she’d said when she first showed her partner the arrangement. Back then he’d been satisfied, but lately both his plans and his desires had expanded well beyond the Knave. Delight suspected as much, though she pretended not to care.

“A good night,” she said when she joined him, slipping silently into the small space in a shimmer of dark red silk and a heady wave of scent, the silver pendants at her ears sparkling in the dimness. “I’m glad you didn’t let the rain keep you away.”

“I’ve long since learned I don’t melt.” He spoke softly, cautious even though the men below were intent on their gambling.

“Not even for me?”

“Ah, that’s different,” he said. “I always melt for you.”

No, not always. Less and less often these days. But she wouldn’t say so.

The balcony was barely big enough for two. Delight turned and pressed herself to him. His arms circled her waist from behind. Nestled together in that manner they could both look down on the gaming floor. After a moment she lifted his right hand and placed it on her breast, just to the side of the diamond brooch pinned in the cleft. “This kind of weather is always good for business,” she whispered. “See how generous the gentlemen are being?” A percentage of every wager belonged to the house. Good hard coin, Delight knew, was frequently the most effective aphrodisiac.

“From the look of it, tonight they’re not all gentlemen.”

“You mean Tintin?” she asked, conscious that his hand was still where she had placed it, but he had initiated no further caress.

“The fellow with the eye patch and the bandanna,” he said.