The Runaway's Gold (31 page)

Opportunities

'm cursed,” I said, slumping down on the stoop across from Finney's Saloon. I couldn't be farther from Shetland. It was 2:00
A.M
. Drunken, ragged men staggered about the manure-littered street. Rats picked through piles of garbage, and the clanging sounds of an untuned piano blared through the windows. Inside, Billy Tweed and his Tammany friends were still “meeting” in full force.

“Bah,” Malcolm scoffed. “Made the delivery, didn't you?”

“Aye. But even if the coins slipped out of the city, Billy'll know I didn't keep me word. As me man in the hood so kindly put it, the job for Billy is never done.”

Malcolm slumped down beside me. “If he's not going to
deliver his end of the bargain, there's nothing stoppin' us from takin' what's due.”

“From
Billy
? In case you haven't noticed, he owns us, Mal. Just like Marwick.”

Malcolm shook his head. “No. Not just like Marwick. Billy sees we get paid, don't he? Cash for our wages every week?”

“Aye.”

“This is America, Chris. Not Shetland. Don't you think it's time we learn from Billy and take what's rightfully ours?”

It only took Malcolm seconds to pick the lock on the back door, and as we climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Skaden Brush Works, me heart was beating so loudly I thought they could surely hear it in the streets below.
Click
,
click
,
click
went the brass clock on the mantel behind Billy's desk, and the minute Malcolm lit the lamp, there was a loud thump at me feet and I nearly screamed.

“Do you want all of Finney's Saloon to know what we're up to?” Malcolm chided. It was Nolan, the white cat with gray patches. “He's only a kitty. Knocked a book down when he jumped from the shelf is all.”

Nolan purred, jumping up on Billy's desk looking for a scratch as we rifled through the stacks of receipts and journal entries. “Nothin',” Malcolm muttered.

We had already been there too long—I could feel it. And from the shouts and laughter from the street below, I could tell that the saloon crowd was starting for home. “Let's get out of here, Mal,” I said. “Before someone notices the light!”

It was at that moment that I glimpsed a thick volume at me feet that Nolan must have knocked from the shelf.

“
Longworth's American Almanac: New-York Register and City Directory, 1841
,” I read. Then I reached down and pulled it into the light. “This must list everyone in the city. That dreep Billy had it all along!”

I pushed Nolan aside, dropped the registry on the desk, and whipped it open.
Livingston
,
Ansel
,
Livingston
,
Carroll
, I read frantically, tracing me finger down the page.

“Heard somethin' fall out a' that when you picked it up,” Malcolm said, dropping to his knees and scrounging around the floor near me feet.

“Here it is!” I cried. “Livingston, S! He lives on 278 Greenwich Street!”

But Malcolm was too busy unlocking the desk to look up.

“Snuff out the lamp and let's get out of here!” I whispered. “We have everything we need!”

“Not everything,” he said, a wide smile stretching across his lips as he tossed me the key to Billy's desk drawer. “Must have been hidden in that registry.” Then he pulled out the folio of coins. I grabbed Sam Livingston's Pine Tree Shilling from under Nolan's white paw, and Malcolm grabbed the newly placed Dahlonega Gold Half Eagle from the pocket beside it.

WE KNEW WE HADN'T MUCH TIME—AN HOUR or two at most—before Billy discovered what we'd been up to and sent his thugs to find us. And so we raced across town
and waited on the stoop of 278 Greenwich Street until the sun came up and it seemed a respectful enough time to knock.

It was a stately brick home, with ten-foot-high windows and rosebushes adorning either side of the front stoop. A sharp contrast to the sagging boardinghouses to its right and left, and the paint-chipped saloon across the street.

“Looks like the neighborhood's gotten a bit rough since Livingston's day,” Malcolm muttered. Then he slapped me on the shoulder. “Good luck, lad. I'll keep watch from the street.”

The pointy-chinned butler who came to the door looked me up and down.

“Mr. Livingston?” I asked. “Is he at home?”

“At home?” the man asked. He drew his few remaining strands of hair across his scalp and set his shoulders back in disgust. “Certainly not!” And then he stepped back and started to close the door.

“Wait!” I said, grabbing to the gleaming brass knob with all me might. “Then can you tell me where I can find him, sir? Please! I've not much time to spare!”

“No time indeed!” the man scoffed, rolling his eyes to the back of his head. “As Mr. Livingston is no longer living, I can assure you anything you need to discuss with him will most certainly have to wait.”

“He's—he's . . .
dead
?” I asked, all air suddenly escaping me body.

The man cocked his head. “I should say so. Now, if you'll excuse me—”

“Edgar,” a faint voice called from within. “Is there something wrong?”

“Nothing to concern yourself with, Madam,” he said as a wee, wrinkled lady with a tightly stacked bun shuffled behind him. She was dressed in a faded lavender gown, and was so bent over that her back was nearly parallel to the floor.

“Did I hear someone ask for Mr. Livingston?” Her lively, somehow familiar green eyes flashed through the crack in the door. Confident and direct.

“Yes. A bit of a ragamuffin, I'm afraid. No need to alarm you. I'll see to it he's sent away.”

“Oh,” she said, peering at me. “He's just a boy, Edgar. Ask him his name.”

“Christopher Robertson, ma'am,” I said, too stunned by what I had just learned to remember that in New York I was Chris Roberts. “I was just leaving.”

“But you asked for my husband, did you not?” she inquired as I started down the steps.

“Aye. I did.” I hung me head. “I'm sorry for your loss.”

“You know of him?” she pressed, as Edgar slowly pulled the door back open.

“Aye. From me homeland. In Shetland,” I said. “Stories is all. He was quite famous there.”

She looked at me, her familiar eyes crinkling at me words. “Was he?” she asked. “Then will you do an ancient lady the honor of coming inside and telling me what you know?”

As pointy-chinned Edgar poured tea and passed a plate of
scones, Mrs. Livingston told me the story of how, as the war began, she and Sam had wanted to marry. Her father was of the powerful Beekman family and didn't approve of the match. “The Livingstons, of course, are a prominent New York family, too,” she added. “But my Sam was from a distant branch. A family of stonecutters—a working-class line that my father found completely unsuitable.”

She slowly sipped her tea, then set down the cup and dabbed her mouth with a delicate lace napkin. “But we were madly in love, you see, and being apart simply wouldn't do. And that's when Sam came up with a plan.”

“You couldn't just . . . marry?” I asked.

“Oh no! It would have been a scandal!” she laughed. “What Sam needed was stature, and so he went to his cousin Robert Livingston. They struck a deal. Robert—the Chancellor, everyone called him—was the first chancellor of New York and a most respected gentleman. But what made him especially interesting was his service in the Second Continental Congress.” She looked at me, raising an eyebrow and dropping her voice. “It was rumored that he was a member of an important committee having to do with the war. The
Secret
Committee, they called it.”

“He was a spy?”

“No. Not quite.” She laughed, her eyes smiling as she spoke. “But Cousin Robert and the others on the committee were said to be in charge of getting secret cargoes of gunpowder delivered from the West Indies to General Washington's army. And
heaven knows, Washington was in desperate need at the time.”

“So it was Robert who sent your Sam on his mission?”

“Yes. With the agreement that, if he were successful picking up payment in Rotterdam and getting it to the West Indies to purchase what was needed, Robert would set Sam up in the law.”

“And you could marry.”

“Yes,” she said, blushing as she spoke. Then she lowered her voice once again. “But what Cousin Robert and my family didn't know was that we married in secret before he left.”

Edgar cleared his throat. “Another scone, Madam?”

“No, no.” She smiled. “I'm quite sated.”

“So it must have been when he was on his way to the West Indies that he wrecked in Shetland,” I said. I told her what I knew of his time at the Culswick Broch and in Lerwick Prison. Everything except the part about the ducats. “People in me homeland guess he died in the Tower of London. But no one knows for sure.”

“Hung for treason?” she shuddered. “Oh, thank heavens, no! Although that might have been better than the hours of torture he endured at the hands of the British while they tried to get the information out of him about who had financed his trip.” As she spoke, her eyes wandered to a portrait on the wall of a fair-haired man. He wore a handsome navy blue uniform with sparkling gold buttons and bright crimson lapels.

“That's him?”

“My Sam,” she said. “He never did wear the uniform, but
when we commissioned Mr. Copley to paint his portrait years after his death, the family thought it a fitting wardrobe.”

From the canvas, Sam Livingston glanced ahead, a wry smile on his lips, his right hand extended before him.

I swallowed hard. “If you don't mind me asking, how did he die?”

“It was Mr. Henry Laurens who managed to get him out of the Tower. Perhaps you've heard of him—the minister to the Netherlands who was captured at sea while bringing dispatches from Congress to Amsterdam? They say Laurens is the only American to have been imprisoned in the Tower of London, but it isn't true. While he was there he befriended my Sam, and, although there is no official record of the act, when they exchanged Laurens for General Cornwallis, Sam was part of the bargain. New Year's Eve 1781, to be exact.”

Mrs. Livingston labored to her feet and shuffled closer to the portrait. “When the letter arrived saying he was free, it was the happiest day of my life!”

“Mrs. Livingston,” I said, walking to her side. “While he was in Shetland . . . your husband left some things behind.”

She glanced back at me, her eyes direct and steady. Eyes that reminded me of ones I'd seen somewhere before. “Things?”

“Aye. A leather sack. Left in the broch near me home. Where he had been hiding. It had some stonecutting tools. And something else.” I reached into me pocket and held out the shilling. “Does this look familiar?”

Her eyes widened, and she grabbed it with trembling fingers.
Then she looked at me quizzically. “Do you know what this is?”

“A Pine Tree Shilling, I've been told.”

She stared at me a moment, her eyes studying mine, as if she was about to say something privately, but then Edgar moved in closer.

“More tea, Madam?” he asked.

She shook her head and turned back to the portrait. “It was considered a token of good luck. Probably given to him by Cousin Robert. As you can see, my Sam's holding just such a coin in the painting.” Me eyes widened as she spoke, as I hadn't noticed it before. In the painted hand of Sam Livingston, extended before him, lay the coin.

“They were all about the symbol of the white pine,” Mrs. Livingston explained, as if lost in a dream. “And all that it represented to the Revolution. General Washington even had it on his flag.”

“And the coin?” I asked, clearing me throat. “Did your husband ever mention it? Or”—I hesitated—“perhaps anything else he might have left behind in Shetland?”

But it was as if she didn't hear me words. And when she turned back to me, tears were streaked down the deep crevasses of her withered cheeks. “So ill was he from the journey home—we had very little time,” she murmured. Then she stopped to pull a yellowed handkerchief from her pockets and touched it to her eyes. “The consumption, you see—he picked it up in prison. And while at sea, on his return home, it festered
mercilessly in his lungs. It was but five days after he came back to me that he took his last breath.”

I looked at her, aghast. Sam Livingston's secrets, whatever they were, had died with him!

“Forgive me, child,” she sniffled. “Even after all these years my heart breaks when I think of it.”

“There, there, now, Mrs. Livingston,” Edgar said, guiding her back to her seat. “Come, boy. I'll see you out.”

As the door to 278 Greenwich Street creaked shut behind me, I stood for a moment, unable yet to fully comprehend what I had just learned. Until the door creaked open once again.