Forever (32 page)

70.

I
n his pursuit of Tony Warren, Cormac moved alone. This was a private
affair, after all, not the business of the Revolution. So he walked through the dark, sour, occupied city like a ghost. The gaunt skeletons of the lower town, with their cold chimneys and formless mounds, looked at midnight like a zone in the Christian purgatory: black, glistening, a place where lost men moved with the rats. On moon-bright nights, all was as clear as a drawing. Cormac seldom went out without clouds to smother the moon.

Then, almost a year after his escape from the Bridewell, he picked up the trail. Warren now lived in a house on Beaver Street. A house taken from Americans and shared with three other officers. But the Englishman was never alone there, and a redcoat stood on permanent guard at the door. There were rumors (brought to Cormac by Roger and Quaco, and whispered by another in a grog shop) that young Warren was building a new house on his father’s land, high in the Bloomingdale. That he had a young family in England. That he planned to settle in New York, once the rebels were destroyed. All rumors. All noted. Cormac knew he could not go to the Bloomingdale in hopes of somehow repeating what he and Kongo had done in 1741. There were soldiers all over the area now, making a show of their presence so that Washington would not be tempted to make a sudden assault on Manhattan, thinking he could cut it in half. If the soldiers felt safe in the denuded upper island, so, surely, did Tony Warren.

During his walks through the lower town, Cormac saw Tony Warren four times, but he was never alone. The city remained ruled by martial law, but it was more relaxed now, as social life returned. Cormac could even hear the music of string quartets drifting from a few of the mansions. The English had created routine to make their duty both safe and pleasant, and a guard on the doorsteps of officers’ quarters was part of that routine.

Then, one rain-drowned night, easing out of Canvastown into Cortlandt Street, Cormac started toward Broadway. Across the street, Warren stepped out of a bordello. He was alone. He began walking toward his billet on Beaver Street, ignoring the rain, taking small, precise steps, like a man who had sipped too much wine. Cormac moved past him, then turned and placed himself in front of the man. Warren was suddenly tense. He squinted at Cormac and drew his sword.
The
sword.

“Clear the way,” he said in a slurry voice.

“Sorry,” Cormac said. “I can’t do that.”

“I’m ordering you to do that.”

“I respectfully decline the order, Mister Warren.”

Warren’s eyes widened.

“What is this? Who are you and what do you want?”

“I want that sword,” Cormac said. “It belonged to my father.” Warren squinted, his face puzzled, and raised the sword. Cormac took a dirk from his belt.

“This is my sword,” Warren said. “I paid for it. I own it. And if you don’t leave, you’ll taste it quick.”

He smiled then in a cold way and stepped forward.

“I want that sword,” Cormac said.

Warren took another step, put his weight on his left foot, and swung. Cormac stepped inside the arc and deflected the sword with the dirk. Warren smiled, shifted to another angle, grunted, and swung the sword in a wider arc. Cormac backed away almost daintily. A third swing knocked the dirk from Cormac’s hand. Then Warren charged, lifted the sword to finish the fight, and Cormac stepped inside the arc of his swing, grabbed Warren’s right arm, and spun him, slamming him against a wall. Before Warren could again cock the sword, Cormac grabbed his sword hand in both of his own and drove his thumbs into the cleft between his first and second knuckles. Drove them with splitting force. Until Warren made a whimpering sound, dropped the sword.

“You’ll be hanged for this,” Warren said.

“Perhaps.”

Cormac picked up the dirk, then started for the sword. Warren jerked a pistol from inside his coat. Cormac didn’t wait. He rushed Warren, pushed the gun hand aside, and drove the knife into his chest.

Warren’s eyes widened. His lips moved, but no words emerged. The rain pelted him. Then an arm jerked and a leg moved and he fell to his side on the wet street with the knife handle jutting from his heart.

Cormac picked up the sword and walked quickly into the rainy wilderness of burned houses.

Something went out of Cormac after he killed Tony Warren and recovered the sword. He could feel it in his bones, and in the odd lack of feeling about killing another man, another Warren. It was something he was bound to do, by the terms of an old contract. And Tony Warren was a mean man. The earl without the smile or the juggling. But he felt no satisfaction. The earl sometimes appeared in his dreams, floating in black rivers, but there was no trace of his son. It was as if he had never existed. Or that the killing on Beaver Street had been an affair between two strangers.

There was, of course, no notice of the death in the newspapers; the censors would not permit such dreadful news. So Cormac didn’t know where Tony Warren had been buried, and whether his mother would come to visit his grave. He had killed him. That was that. Now he’d go back to the war. Except that in New York, there was no war. The war was elsewhere. Upstate. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey and in the South. Cormac continued gathering bits and pieces of intelligence and passing them to couriers. He continued walking the streets of the sullen town, looking for vulnerabilities, for targets. He worked with the Africans on small acts of sabotage and carried his sword with him, strapped again across his back. But after Tony Warren, he never killed another British soldier.

“You lost something, Cormac,” said Quaco one evening.

“I did,” said Cormac. “And I don’t know what it is.”

The news came about Yorktown and the end of the war, and Cormac celebrated with Quaco and his wife and three of their children. There was little talk of the future. “We see what they do,” Quaco said, “not what they say.” The peace conference was held in Paris, lasting for months while Washington sheltered with his army up the Hudson in Windsor Forest. The war was finally settled, the treaty signed, a date set for the departure of the British armies. Cormac wandered among exuberant Americans who gathered around the Common, and greeted the few men he still knew from the Bridewell, as they were released a dozen at a time. Nobody talked about the Africans, and he saw them in small, cautious clusters, quiet in the celebrations, watching, pondering.

Now the Tories were leaving by the many thousands, boarding boats for Canada and England, carrying with them huge trunks and crates of goods and their slaves. On the ships, many of the Africans were smiling. They were going, they truly believed, to freedom.

A few Tories wept as they left the town they had come to love too well. Many turned sullen and withdrawn. Families from Canvastown began moving into the abandoned Tory houses, chopping furniture into pieces to make fires under the carved mantels. Bands of small boys threw stones and horseshit at redcoats and were smashed with rifle butts or chased down alleys. But the commander didn’t respond with great force; to avoid clashes, he ordered the redcoats confined to their barracks. The rented Hessians had been gone since Yorktown. Now English officers were forced out of the houses they had taken from Americans, and Cormac watched as officers loaded wagons outside the house on Beaver Street where Tony Warren had lived his last days. He felt no sense of victory.

In late summer, many Americans who had supported the Revolution began to return, to see what was left of their lives. They filled the taverns. They sampled the Shakespeare at the John Street Theater. They combed the flea markets in search of their stolen furniture, the portraits of their Dutch and English ancestors, engravings made of their now-ruined houses. Most of their businesses had been destroyed by fire, but they began to sketch out plans for what would rise from the ashes. They would drain the swamps and level the hills. They would build stone buildings. They would dig deep wells for water. Cormac asked some of them what they wanted in a constitution. They had clear ideas about individual liberties. With one major exception. Slavery would continue. “It must,” one of them said, “or we’ll have no country.”

They began searching for their own slaves, forming small posses of armed men to gather them as if they were stray horses. Many Africans fled into what was left of the woods above the town. Cormac and Quaco assembled a dozen armed Africans, divided into groups of four, all wearing the badges of the Revolution. They followed the slave-gathering posses, placed themselves between the Americans and their African quarries, and liberated them at gunpoint. But the Americans were relentless. They placed bounties on their former slaves, posted their names on the town’s walls. In one encounter, two of the bounty hunters were killed by Quaco’s sons. One enraged American pursued a slave in a longboat to one of the ships anchored in the East River. Cormac watched from the shore as the blacks rowed hard in a longboat of their own, came alongside the American boat, fought briefly, and then tipped the Americans into the river.

On many nights, Cormac went sleepless with rage.

71.

O
n Evacuation Day, the victorious army of George Washington
came into New York through McGowan’s Pass. They moved down the east side of the island, and Cormac, Quaco, and the others joined the ragged troops near the grave of Big Michael in Kip’s Bay. At the head of the long line of soldiers, Washington sat high on a pale gray horse, shoulders squared, head held as erect as a Roman statue, his uniform pressed and clean and sparkling. Other officers trailed behind him on horseback and his soldiers came on foot. Their uniforms were tattered and patched, their shoes held together with rope. Some of the men limped along, swinging on crude crutches. Some wore bandages across foreheads. Some were hunched and weary. All carried rifles. There was a small band of musicians, but no music. Hundreds of people came out to see them, most of them women and children, some of them cheering, many just peering at this rabble in arms, as a British general had called them. The children tagged along with the soldiers. The grown women stared with arms folded across chests, as if wondering what would happen on the morrow.

Cormac said good-bye to Quaco and slowly moved toward the head of the long column as it entered the Bowery. Then they all stopped. Washington dismounted, ran a fond hand on his horse’s brow, and walked into the Bull’s Head Tavern at Bayard and Pump. Here they would wait until the last English soldier had boarded the last English ship and moved out toward the Narrows. The general turned to his army and waved. He did not smile. The soldiers cheered him, and cheered themselves too. A cool November wind blew from the east.

“General Washington!” Cormac shouted from the crowd at the foot of the tavern’s wooden deck.

The general turned, smiled slightly, showing his caried yellow teeth. His nose was puffier, his hair whiter. He looked straight at Cormac.

“I’m the man who saved your life at Kip’s Bay!” Washington squinted. Two guards flanked him, bayonets at the ready. The general seemed to be searching his memory for one dangerous night out of two thousand. Then he nodded.

“Of course…. Do come in.”

He waited for Cormac to join him and then led the way into the crowded tavern. Everybody hushed. Washington was taken to a small table against the far wall. The air smelled of beer and sweat. They sat down while attendants created a small human fence around them. His officers remained standing against the wall to his right.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” Washington said.

“And I’m glad to see you too, sir.”

A fat man brought a pitcher of water and two glasses. Washington poured. The exhaustion seeped from him like fog.

“You grabbed the bridle of my horse,” he said.

“I did. Cormac O’Connor is my name.”

“You slapped the haunch and sent me flying.”

“That actually was done by a man named Bantu, one of the Africans.”

“A brazen lot,” Washington said, an amused smile on his mouth. “But you have my thanks.”

“We needed you alive, General.”

“Not everyone agreed with you—including some of my officers.”

“The men knew,” Cormac said. “Including my fellow soldiers.” Washington sipped the cold water. “You were commanding coloreds, if my memory serves me.”

“I served with five African soldiers, sir. We were irregulars. There was no commander.”

Washington’s nostrils widened and twitched, the old hunter detecting hostility.

“And where are those soldiers now, Mister O’Connor?”

“Dead, sir.”

Cormac quickly told him about the deaths of Big Michael and Bantu, of Aaron, Silver, and Carlito. He mentioned the great fire, and the Bridewell, and the escape, and the long campaign within the city.

“God…”

“But those soldiers had children, sir, three of them had children. They had wives. They talked sometimes about the future. About going to free schools. About working their own farms as free men, about opening shops…”

Washington drummed the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop. His mouth tightened.

“Yes?” he said, as if knowing what was coming.

“I hope, sir, that you will do all in your power to honor the promises made by our Revolution.” Hating the self-righteousness of his own words. “I told my men of those promises. I read them the Declaration of Independence, one that you read to us here in 1776.” Appealing now to Washington’s vanity. “They fought for those words, for ‘inalienable rights,�� for ‘all men are created equal…’ And right now, General, Americans are roaming New York, chasing their former slaves as if they were dogs gone astray….”

Washington sighed.

“All of that will be debated, I assure you,” he said. “But not in a tavern.”

He took a longer sip of the water. Cormac leaned forward, his anger rising.

“Debate will not be enough, sir,” Cormac said. “There can be only one decision. Slavery must end. Or all those men will have died for a lie.”

Washington was now annoyed. He was waiting for a ceremony of triumph, waiting to mount his horse and ride majestically into New York. He was waiting for the British flags to be lowered and the American flags raised. He was waiting for a moment of immortality.

“For now, all of that is in the future, Mister O’Connor.”

“This
is
the future, General Washington.”

The general stood up, his chair scraping on flagstones. He offered a hand to be shaken. Cormac gripped his large hand but didn’t shake it.

“If you don’t give the slaves their freedom,” he said, “this country will die in its crib.”

“Thank you,” Washington said in an icy way, withdrawing his hand and motioning with his head to his officers. “I have much to do now.”

Washington turned his back and moved to his waiting men. The guards stepped between him and Cormac. He had been dismissed. Cormac turned and walked through the crowded tavern into the American morning, hoping he’d live long enough to heal his aching heart.

He wandered alone to South Street to watch the last British ship leave. There were American flags waving now on some buildings, looking tentative and modest. Many Americans were moving toward the river and the Battery, some joking and laughing, others solemn. There were no Africans among them.

Around noon, they saw the ship easing from its pier above Wall Street, its decks crowded, its flags and pennants waving as if in triumph. Cormac could not read the name of the ship as it floated slowly downriver and he felt nothing. The crowd cheered and blew whistles and small horns, and then grew quiet and started moving toward Broadway to wait for the procession of Washington.