Chains (20 page)

The city swelled by the hour with Loyalist refugees who wanted to live under the protection of British cannons. Some of the folk returning from exile were surprised to find strangers had taken over their houses and were sleeping in their beds and wearing the clothes they left behind. There were many fistfights, a great deal of name-calling, and threats of duels.

The British didn't mix in with the arguments. They had war on the brain, drilling their soldiers from sunup to sundown. At the Middle Dutch Church they pulled out the pulpit, the pews, and the floorboards and let the horses of the Light Dragoons practice. Horses in a house of the Lord made some folks grumble, including Lady Seymour.

Up to the Tea Water Pump, I found only unfamiliar faces, slaves who had freed themselves by joining the British. I could not bring myself to speak to them. The old man we called Grandfather had vanished. Maybe he had started his own revolution and led Curzon and the other slaves over the river Jordan to freedom.

A fanciful notion. 'Twas useless to ponder such things.

*   *   *

Friday stretched long and longer because the Hessians had moved in five more of their countrymen. I heard Lady Seymour arguing with the fellow in charge, but he would not listen to her pleas. I spent the afternoon chopping a field's worth of cabbage while a half pig roasted in the pit dug by the men in the flower garden. The soldiers ate their supper and drank more beer than I thought a body could hold. They lost the few manners they possessed and used the table linens for blowing their noses.

It was a relief when they finally left for merrymaking elsewhere.

I prepared a tray of supper and served it to Lady Seymour in her bedchamber, the one room where she could find peace. When my chores were done, I climbed to my attic room, kicked off my shoes, and laid down on the bed without even removing my skirt or bodice. Ruth's doll lay next to my head, her eyes staring up at the ceiling. I knew I ought pray for Ruth, or for Momma, or for anything; I ought just pray, but the words would not come. I feared the Spirit had left me.

I slept.

When I woke, the city of New York was consumed with burning hellfire.

THE FIRE RAGED WITH INCONCEIVABLE VIOLENCE AND IN ITS
DESTRUCTIVE PROGRESS SWEPT AWAY ALL THE BUILDINGS
BETWEEN BROAD STREET AND THE NORTH RIVER …
SEVERAL WOMEN AND CHILDREN PERISHED IN THE FIRE;
THEIR SHRIEKS JOINED TO THE ROARING OF THE FLAMES,
THE CRASH OF FALLING HOUSES, AND THE WIDESPREAD
RUIN WHICH EVERYWHERE APPEARED, FORMED A SCENE
OF HORROR GREAT BEYOND DESCRIPTION, AND WHICH WAS
STILL HEIGHTENED BY THE DARKNESS OF THE NIGHT.
–NEW YORK MERCURY
NEWSPAPER

I awoke coughing so hard I near brought up my supper. When I finally caught my breath, I smelled the smoke and saw the light, bright as day, outside my window. I jumped from the bed and peered out.

It was not morning; it was an inferno.

Flames curled out of all the windows next door. The rooftop beyond that was a lake of fire. Every building in sight was burning. The air was filled with crackling and popping sounds, with shrieks and screams coming from the street below.

A hot gust of wind blew the curtains back and sent the
fire straight at me. Fiery shingles floated from the roof and caught in the branches of the tree outside my window, setting the bark ablaze. A burning leaf drifted to the sill. I quickly brushed it off, my hands quivering.

Get out!

Seized again by coughing, I fell to the ground where the smoke was not so heavy. I pulled my shoes toward me and quickly buckled them on, then took a deep breath, rose to my feet, grabbed Ruth's doll off my bed, and opened the door.

Smoke filled the hall, curling down from the ceiling along with fingers of fire.

Get out now!

I clattered down the stairs, screaming, “Fire! Fire!”

The door to Lady Seymour's bedchamber was just opening. As I went to pass by, she grabbed my arm.

“Quick, child,” she cried. “Help me!”

Her chamber was even brighter than the attic, but the windows were closed and the smoke thinner. She bent over an enormous trunk by the wall. “It contains my valuables.” She pulled at a handle. “Please, Isabel!”

I reached for the handle and tugged. The trunk did not move. “It's too heavy, ma'am. Leave it. The roof is afire.”

“No, wait.” She flung open the top. The trunk was filled with a silver tea set, a small portrait of a yellow-haired man, something wrapped in velvet cloth, dusty sacks, small wooden boxes, and packets of letters tied in a ribbon.

There was another crash outside and screams. I grabbed her arm. “We'll die if we stay!”

She pulled out the letters and two small boxes and thrust them at me along with the portrait. “Take these!”

I stuck the portrait and letters in my pocket, and balanced
Ruth's doll on top of the boxes in my arms. The room was so hot I thought the cornhusks might explode into flames.

Lady Seymour grabbed two of the sacks; the coins within clinked together as she rose to her feet, coughing. “Hurry!” she gasped.

The smoke in the hall was thicker than it had been moments before. We felt our way, one step at a time, to the staircase. I went down first, with the Lady behind me, her frail hand on my shoulder. My eyes watered. My lungs felt like they were pulling in the flames. I thought for a moment we were trapped; the thick haze tricked my mind and I knew not if we should proceed down or up. My ears filled with the crackle of burning wood.

“Help me!” Lady Seymour cried. Her hand vanished.

“Ma'am? Ma'am?” The smoke stopped up my throat. There was a thunderous crash overhead, a ceiling giving way or a piece of the roof collapsing.

The old woman had crumpled to the stairs. Is
she dead?
I put my hand on her chest. Her heartbeat was light and fast as bird's wings beating against a cage. I put my face close to hers and screamed, “Get up!”

She moaned once and tried to move her hand.

I pulled her arm. She moaned again, but I could not be gentle. I dropped the boxes and doll, draped her arm around me, and half fell down the rest of the stairs. Once on the ground floor, she tried to walk, but one of her legs was failing her. I opened the front door and dragged the two of us out to the street.

The air was aswirl with flame, soot, and burning shingles, each caught in a devilish whirlwind. The cries and screams of men and women mixed with the terror of the horses burning alive in locked stables. Windows exploded, beams
crashed, and trees split, their crowns ablaze like torches in the hand of a cruel giant. I felt the clothes on my back ready to ignite. The brand on my cheek scorched, as if the fire within me called to the fire in the air.

Move or die,
whispered the flames.

I dragged Lady Seymour north, then east, away from the course of the wind, which blew like a bellows and fanned the flames. British soldiers looted a burning house, running out with arms full of silver, and forks and spoons sticking out of their pockets. A dog ran by howling, its tail on fire. We passed a family, all in their nightclothes, throwing buckets of water against the wall of their house, as the fire chewed through the wood. A group of men had harnessed themselves to a fire wagon that held a large tank of water, but one of the wheels broke and it proved too heavy to drag.

One more block, and we could go no farther. Lady Seymour and me collapsed in a heap on the edge of a graveyard.

Time burned up while we lay there, caught in the sparks that flew overhead, swallowed by the noise of a city ablaze.

When I finally came to my senses, I sat up, coughed at length, and breathed in slow. It hurt, but it would not be the death of me. Lady Seymour still lay beside me, shaking her head from side to side in the dirt and muttering. I bent my ear close to hear.

“The bells, where are the bells?” she asked.

Had the fire ruined her mind? Why worry about bells?

“You're safe, ma'am,” I said, patting her hand.

She frowned. “Why don't the bells ring alarm?”

Her words were garbled, like she was talking underwater, but I finally understood. Every bell in every church steeple
should have been ringing loud and fiercesome. But they were all gone, melted and reformed into cannons.

I stood up. Over the rooftops I could see men pouring water on the flattish roof of St. Paul's, the buckets handed to them from a long line of people that stretched to a backyard pump. To the south, Trinity Church was not as lucky. Its tall steeple was a pyramid of fire, the flames licking the undersides of the clouds that scuttled above.

“What shall we do, ma'am?” I asked.

Her tears turned black as they rolled through the soot on her face. Her left arm and leg lay limp as if some cog within her had snapped. She did not make a sound.

'Twas up to me to make the decisions.

“Come.” I helped her to sit. “We need to make our way to safety.”

I stood to her left, draped the useless arm over my neck, and held her body tight to mine. In that manner, step by slow step, we staggered on. We passed countless people standing in the streets like statues, their toes bare on the stones, nightclothes blowing in the unnatural breeze, mouths agape. Carts rolled by carrying half-naked people, bleeding and dazed. A collection of charred bodies had been stacked on a corner, not fully covered by a blanket. A child's boot and stocking lay in the gutter, next to an overturned rain barrel.

Step by slow step we made our way to Wall Street, then down to the seventh house on the left. She was near insensible by the time we reached it. In truth, I pinched her as hard as I could. It roused her some, and she lifted her working leg. Thus we mounted the steps of the Lockton house and entered the front door.

OUR DISTRESSES WERE VERY GREAT INDEED BEFORE;
BUT THIS DISASTER HAS INCREASED THEM TENFOLD.
MANY HUNDREDS OF FAMILIES HAVE LOST THEIR ALL;
AND ARE REDUCED FROM A STATE OF AFFLUENCE TO
THE LOWEST EBB OF WANT AND WRETCHEDNESS–
DESTITUTE OF SHELTER, FOOD OR CLOTHING.
–NEW YORK MERCURY
NEWSPAPER

Near five hundred homes were destroyed that night, plus shops, churches, and stables. Thousands of people were homeless, without even a change of underclothes or clean stockings. Many did not eat meat for weeks on account of the death smell that poisoned the air. The job of finding bodies was so gruesome it caused grown men to scream out loud.

They buried the dead quickly.

Folks said the fire started in a low groggery near the Whitehall Slip. From there it burned uptown, pushed by a strong wind, devouring Bridge Street, Dock, Stone, Marketfield, and Beaver, then it ran up both sides of Broadway. Almost every building from Broadway to the edge of the North River was in ruins, all the way up to the
open field below King's College. They called it “the burned-over district.”

“God's judgment on the British,” whispered the Patriots.

“Rebel sabotage,” shouted the Loyalists.

Most figured the Americans wanted New York burned to the ground to leave the British without shelter. While the fires still raged, groups of soldiers searched for arsonists. One man, found with rosin and brimstone-tipped slivers of wood in his pocket, was tossed into a burning cobbler shop, another was quickly executed with a bayonet through the chest. Half a dozen people were hung while the fire still raged, one from the sign post of a tavern. Another was hung from his heels and had his throat slashed.

The day after the fire, they captured a schoolteacher, name of Nathan Hale, up island near the Dove Tavern. He admitted he was a spy but said he did not set the fire. There was no trial, nor proof of his guilt. They put a rope around his neck and hung him high.

Folks talked about a pretty speech he gave afore they kicked the stool away from his feet. He said he was sorry that he could die only one time for his country.

The lobsterbacks laughed at that.

I coughed up mouthfuls of soot for days. My eyes felt crusted with embers. No matter how much I rubbed them or rinsed them with clean water, they remained swole up, red, and hard to see out of. I was lucky. I was not killt nor burnt; I had not even twisted an ankle running from the flames.

All I lost in the confusion was Ruth's doll. All I had lost was everything.

My bees a'swarmed back into my brainpan. They hummed
loud so I need not ponder on the baby doll. The burned-over district looked like the inside of me. It was hard to tell where one stopped and the other started. I feared my wits had been melted by the flames, twisted and charred.

Doctor Dastuge came to examine Lady Seymour. The left side of her body had gone to sleep and would not wake. The doctor said it was an apoplexy brought on by the fire. He bled her twice and prescribed Maredant's Drops to cleanse her blood.

Master Lockton insisted his aunt should recover in the bedchamber he shared with his wife. Madam was not pleased with the arrangement but said nothing, for a change. She visited the ruins of the Seymour house daily, waiting for them to cool enough so that she could poke through the ash with a hoe, in search of coin or melted silver.

Lady Seymour called me to her bedside when she regained her senses. She tried to thank me, but the affliction pulled at her mouth and made it hard to figure her words. I gave her the portrait of the yellow-haired man and the letters that I had stuffed in my pocket as we fled. She studied them close with her good eye, then she sobbed and both her eyes overran with tears. Madam bade me leave the room.

By the third day after the fire, the Lockton house was packed tighter than a barrel of salt cod and smelled worse. We had been invaded again. Many of the rebel houses that were occupied by the British army had burned to the ground. Soldiers found themselves as homeless as regular folk, so their commanders ordered that anyone with an undamaged home share it with the men.