City of Glory (69 page)

Jacob Hays, the most famous policeman of his era and often called America’s first detective, was born to Jewish parents living in Westchester. He was put in service as a “bound boy,” a kind of cross between an apprentice and an indentured servant, to a Presbyterian family with whom he remained close throughout his life. Consequently, many resources claim he was a Protestant. However, Hays is listed on the Shearith Israel rolls as a member of the congregation, and when he died in 1850, he was buried in the Chatham Square Jewish cemetery. That evidence seems to me conclusive, so in this story he has at least an interior Jewish identity.

The tale of Dolley Madison and her heroic deeds in the hours before the attack on Washington, D.C., is part of our national folklore, and most of what she says in this book—including her refusal to allow French John (another real character) to set a booby trap for the expected British invaders—is taken directly from her papers and correspondence. The painting of George Washington, which she famously saved and gave for safekeeping to two unnamed New Yorkers, was one of a few copies the artist made from an original that was a gift to the first marquis of Landsdowne, a former British prime minister and a strong supporter of American causes in Parliament during the Revolution. It now hangs in the East Room of the White House.

Madison was in his second term as president during the period of this story, and when it ended in 1816, he retired to his beloved estate of Montpelier in Virginia and died there—still a slaveholder—in 1836. Dolley Payne Todd Madison outlived him by thirteen years. For much of that time she was a popular Washington hostess, but her profligate son by her marriage to Todd all but bankrupted her. In 1842 she was forced to borrow $25,000 from Jacob Astor for what were to her “the bare necessities.”

As for the Great Mogul, that is among the most extraordinary of stories. Well documented by Tavernier and others, the huge and spectacularly brilliant but flawed diamond disappeared soon after it was taken from the Mogul Empire to Persia as part of the spoils of war that included the legendary Peacock Throne. Its present-day whereabouts remains a mystery. There are those who insist it is the Koh-I-
Noor, but that diamond does not have the fiery sparkle associated with the Great Mogul, and the Koh-I-Noor is believed to have had a separate existence recorded earlier. The Orlov diamond, part of the Russian crown jewels, is a more likely candidate based upon the appearances of both stones, but no one is prepared to state unequivocally that the Orlov and the Great Mogul are the same. Personally, I have an entirely different idea of what happened to the diamond after Joyful Turner became its guardian.

And finally, “Old Zip Coon” was an earlier form of the tune we now know as “Turkey in the Straw.”

Acknowledgments

Once more I must say that this book, like all books, stands on the shoulders of those that have been written before and owes a huge debt to authors without number, none more so than James Clavell, master of the genre. The resources for
City of Glory
were initially the same as those I used for the earlier two books about the Turner and Devrey families,
City of Dreams
and
Shadowbrook,
most particularly Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
(Oxford University Press, 1999). That book remains the lodestar. In the matter of the geography of Five Points, however, I accepted the analysis of Tyler Anbinder, author of
Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum
(Plume, 2002).

For details of the war that is the background to this story, I leaned heavily on
The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict
by Donald R. Hickey (University of Illinois Press, 1989), and John K. Mahon’s
The War of 1812
(University of Florida Press, 1972). The description of the uniforms of the Maryland Volunteers is in fact quoted verbatim from the latter source. Were this a work of nonfiction I would, of course, credit Mr. Mahon in a footnote. Since that is not practical, I am doing so here. Any errors made in the depiction of the battles or the outfitting or maneuvering of the opposing forces are in no way attributable to either book, but are the result of my taking a novelist’s license with a few, hopefully unimportant, details.

The story of Jacob Astor’s involvement with the Oregon Trail is told in
Across the Great Divide: Robert Stuart and the Discovery of the Oregon Trail
by Laton McCartney (Free Press, 2003).

I am enormously grateful for the kindness of friends and colleagues, without whom this book would be less than it is. Some deserve special mention: Tom Kirkwood, whose mastery of the writing of suspense is without parallel, is also a German speaker who was willing to consider with me the way the Astor brothers might have used the language in 1814. Janie Chang, teller of wondrous tales and keeper of many Chinese memories, supplied both the letter and the spirit of the Mandarin, and gave her imprimatur to my decision to use the Wade-Giles romanization because the Pinyin system had not been invented at the time of the story. (The Cantonese curses and slang came from English-Cantonese dictionaries downloaded from the Internet. I have no idea how accurate to the time they may be, but they certainly seemed sufficiently lusty to qualify for my purpose.) To check on the terminology appropriate to His Majesty’s army of the period, I relied on the kindness of Richard G. Lyntton, in another life a captain in the Life Guards, Household Cavalry Regiment. Mel Croucher proved himself still the most brilliant setter and solver of puzzles on two continents. Henry Morrison once more gave unstintingly of his professional skill, his patience, his constant belief, and above all his friendship, and Danny Baror yet again made it possible for my work to reach beyond my nationality and my language. Sydny Miner, editor nonpareil, can be relied on as always to give me back a better book than I give her, and here in New York’s “Village of Greenwich,” in a house built less than a decade after Manon and Joyful married, Jane and Jay Martin made celebratory the writing of these last few pages.

The book is the best thank-you I can offer; I hope it gives pleasure to each of its readers, but most especially to all of you.

Also by Beverly Swerling

Shadowbrook: A Novel of Love, War, and the Birth of America

City of Dreams: A Novel of Nieuw Amsterdam and Early Manhattan