City of Dreams (15 page)

Gil said, “Is there—”

Salomon just shook his head, wiped a bead of perspiration from his upper lip, and smiled at the officer who had come out to observe.

The two barrels rolled across the dock and onto the cart.

Salomon reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bottle of wine, which he handed to the officer. “
Auf widersehn, mein herr
.”

“
Reisling
.
Danke
,” said the officer.
“Auf widersehn.”

Salomon was silent as the cart rumbled down Nassau Street.

On this side of Broadway, life seemed to be returning to normal. Lamps flickered in windows. People hurried along, finished for the day with their business. The smells of suppertime floated in the air. But Gil could also smell the tension radiating off Salomon like sweat.

In the alley beside the house, Gil jumped down and went to light a lantern.

“No,” said Salomon. “No light.” Then he stepped into the back of the cart and rolled one of the barrels over to Gil. “Careful,” he said. Once it was down, they rolled it across the yard, into the kitchen, and Salomon asked for the cat’s paw. As Gil and Mother Ramsey watched, the Jew pried off the lid.

Mother Ramsey spoke first. “Holy Christ Almighty.”

“Holy Christ,” said Gil, then he looked at Salomon, “Moses, too.”

Salomon said to Gil, “I was not certain it would go this well. I did not want you to know what we were doing until it was done.”

A stench rose from the barrel, then a man rose from the stench. He was skinny, bearded, pallid, except for his eyes, which were both bruised black.

“Lieutenant McQueeney?” said Salomon.

The man looked from face to face, as shocked by his fate as Gil was by the sight of him. “Yes,” he said. “Lieutenant Robert McQueeney, Second Massachusetts Infantry.”

Salomon clapped him on the shoulder. “You must’ve thought you were bound for drowning, once they put you into that barrel.”

“I’ve been tortured,” said the lieutenant. “I thought I was condemned.”

While Mother Ramsey ladled out pea soup, Salomon explained: in his visits to the Provost, he had gotten to know several of the younger Hessians. He had given them small favors, sweetmeats, bottles of wine, cakes. He had told them of the wonders of America and promised that if the Americans won, any man would have the opportunity to rise as high as a European prince, even a man who had deserted an enemy army.

As Salomon talked, the Massachusetts lieutenant ate. He ate like a man who had been starved for weeks. He ate like a man who had never expected to eat again. Pea soup. Bread. More soup. Bread. A swallow of ale. Then another ladle of pea soup.

Salomon watched like a parent watching a child well fed. “I proceeded carefully with the Hessians, but now my caution bears its first fruit.”

“If they all eat like this one,” said Mother Ramsey, “it better bear more than fruit.”

Salomon chuckled. “If I can encourage Hessians to desert, I hurt the enemy. If I can encourage them to free American prisoners, I help the cause.”

By now, Gil Walker had lost his appetite. He took a sip of his ale, studied the bedraggled soldier, and asked Salomon, “Has my debt come due?”

“Consider Lieutenant McQueeney your first installment,” answered Salomon.

An hour later, McQueeney had shaved, bathed, and dressed in clean clothes.

Gil had wrapped a scarf around his face, but this would not look suspicious to British patrols, because it was a chilly night. The two pistols he carried beneath his coat were another matter. He prayed that he would not have to use them.

Gil’s job was to get McQueeney to a promontory of rock about eight miles up the Hudson shore, about two miles beyond the Woodward dock. A farmer named Dibble would be waiting in a rowboat to take him the four miles around the British lines.

There were British checkpoints on the Post Road and the Bloomingdale Road, at the line of abandoned American earthworks on Bayard’s Hill. And to the west, there was a checkpoint on the Greenwich Road. Slipping through the area between these was easy enough, and Gil soon had led the lieutenant into the tangle of cart paths and trails that he knew so well.

And for once, fearing the worst proved an empty exercise. Gil and McQueeney avoided every British patrol, a few feral dogs, and a skunk the size of a well-fed raccoon.

At midnight, they reached the promontory. A bell rang aboard the British man-of-war anchored in the river. The reflection of her stern lights danced in the dark water.

To summon Farmer Dibble, Gil was supposed to hoot like an owl. But he admitted that he was not sure of how to give a good hoot.

The lieutenant obliged with a perfect
hoot-hoot-hoo-hoo-hoo-hooot
.

A few moments later came an answering hoot.

McQueeney said to Gil, “You try.”

So Gil gave a
hoot-hoot-hoo-hoo-hoo-hooot
.

Then they heard the oarlocks clanking, followed by an angry voice. “You’re only s’posed to hoot once, goddamn ye. When I hoot back, just shut up and let me find you. Otherwise, the redcoats might.”

Gil recognized Farmer Dibble from the market. He was a round man with a round face who looked as if he might roll the rowboat over if he moved right or left.

“Come aboard, whichever of you is comin’,” he said. “And keep down.”

McQueeney shook Gil’s hand. “Thanks to you, sir, and to Haym Salomon, too.”

“Godspeed,” said Gil.

“Enough of that,” said Dibble. “Time to go. And tell the Jew that this here’s dangerous work. I’ll do it as long as I can, but there may come a night when I ain’t here. Then it’ll be on you, whatever your name is, to get your man to the American lines.”

A
N HOUR LATER
, Gil put a hand over the mouth of the sleeping Loretta Rogers.

Her eyes popped open. She screamed against the hand.

He whispered. “It’s me. It’s Gilbie.”

She stopped struggling and threw her arms around his neck. Gil felt her warmth and wanted to crawl into the bed with her. Instead, he gestured to the door.

Shortly, they were on a path that led away from the little outbuilding where Squire Woodward’s scullery girls slept. Loretta was wrapped in a blanket. And Gil’s arm around her warmed him as much as it did her.

“It’s dangerous for you to come here, Gil. There’s British officers here.”

“Every night?”

“Often enough. And sometimes, there’s dragoons or a night patrol in the barn, and sometimes they come sniffin’ around, lookin’ for bit of it from any girl they can find.”

They reached the spot where Gil and Big Jake had first seen Nancy Hooley. The river glittered in the starlight, more like a path than a barrier to the opposite shore.

“Is tonight the night?” she asked.

“Where’s the gold?” he asked.

“Hid good. Not far from here. When I figured out what you meant by the Lord seein’ and lovin’, I snuck back to the churchyard and done what I thought you wanted. And the whole time, I could hear Ezekiel tootlin’ right across the street. I kept waitin’ for the Leaner to find me and drag me back. But I’m never goin’ back.”

“You don’t have to,” said Gil. “Just keep the gold safe till we can do somethin’ good with it.”

“Helpin’ ourselves to get out of here is somethin’ good.”

“We’ll help ourselves, but . . .” He hesitated. He had been thinking hard on some things, and they bubbled up now. “We have to do somethin’ to help the cause.”

“The cause?”

He stood there, shivering . . . from the cold and from the sense that he was stepping ever deeper into the trouble he had tried to leave to others on Harlem Heights. “We have to make up for how we got that gold. It’s the only way to get the freedom we want.”

Loretta wrapped her arm around him. “Then we will. As soon as we cross the river.”

“That could be a spell. I give my parole. If I run off, it could go bad for Salomon, and he saved my life.”

She shivered. “So . . . we can’t run tonight?”

“We missed our chance for runnin’ on the night of the fire. When the rector—”

“’Twas the right thing to do.” She took his face in her hands. “And remember this, Gil Walker. No matter what folks say about two street rats like us, we’re good people. And good people does what’s right. So keep doin’ what you’re doin’, and I’ll wait.”

The steam from her breath sparkled in the starlight.

G
IL TOLD
L
ORETTA
to work as dutifully as always. And every night, she should go down to the bathing spot on the river and look for the signal.

If she found a rock in the knothole on a certain oak, she would know that he had passed with another escaped prisoner. She would then go back to the bunkhouse and lie awake until she heard his owl hoot. Then she would get up and go out to the privy, so that any of the girls awakened by her movement would think nothing more of it. Then she would sneak down to the riverbank.

If there were British dragoons in the barn, she and Gil would talk briefly. He would tell her the news of the city. She would tell him the gossip among the officers. If there were no redcoats about, she would lay her blanket on the riverbank. He would lay his coat over both of them, and they would make love.

Then they would talk of the future.

“When does it start?” she asked him one warm night some two weeks after his first visit. “This future of ours?”

“Salomon says they trust us now, so they may release us from our parole, so we can come and go as we please. Then he’ll send me on a scavenge into the countryside, and if I don’t come back, he’ll blame highwaymen. I can disappear, if I want.”

“Do you? Do you
want
?”

“I can’t quit yet, not with Salomon riskin’ everything to help prisoners escape, and the prisoners so all-fired ready to get into the fight again.”

His voice trailed off, and he rested his face against her breast.

She stroked his hair. “Like I said once before, we got choices in this life, Gilbie. We made ours. Gold don’t wear out. The longer we keep it, the more valuable it gets.”

v.

Two weeks later, Gil Walker led another escapee across the orchards north of the city. With each journey, he had learned a bit more about how to time the British patrols, how to wait till the right moment to rush over open ground in the moonlight, and how to keep his latest charge moving northward until they arrived at the rocky promontory on the river.

This one was a Rhode Islander named Eph Dolliver, tall and wiry and without much to say. He had been so weak that he had spent three nights in Salomon’s cellar while Mother Ramsey fed him. Then he said that he was ready to get back to fightin’. He even asked Gil for one of the pistols. And along the path west of the Bloomingdale Road, he picked up a heavy branch. He said it would make a good club.

When they passed Woodward’s dock, Gil put the rock in the knothole.

From what he could see, there were no soldiers around the manor house that night. The British army had moved north to get behind Washington. But Washington had escaped again. So the two armies were now stumbling about Westchester County. The only American troops on the island were the twenty-eight hundred who garrisoned Fort Washington, an earthwork on a bluff overlooking the Hudson.

That was where Farmer Dibble would be taking Dolliver.

Once Gil got to the promontory, he gave an owl hoot.

Out on the British man-of-war, the midnight bell rang.

Gil waited. He could hear music—a squeezebox—coming from the ship. After a few minutes, he hooted again.

Then he heard the splash of oars. But when Dibble did not hoot back or start complaining, Gil put his hand on his pistol and pulled back the hammer.

At the sound, Eph Dolliver cocked the pistol Gil had given him.

There was a sliver of moon, so Gil could see the rowboat coming in, but the man in the thwart was not round enough to be Dibble.

Then Gil heard movement on the rock above him and a familiar voice somewhere behind him. “I been watchin’ you for a while, Yank. Now I got you dead to rights.”

Corporal Morison
.

At the same moment, a second man rose from the rowboat and a musket cocked on the rock above. Four against two, a nice ambush.

But Eph Dolliver had the right instinct. He went for the one above, the one silhouetted by the moonlight.

The prime in his pistol gave a little pop, then blew a ball upward, then the soldier was falling and his musket was clattering down with him.

In an instant, a string of muzzle flashes caught bursts of motion in the dark.

A soldier was rising to fire from the boat.

Gil was spinning and firing toward the flash of Morison’s pistol.

Dolliver was raising his club as a soldier charged from the boat with his bayonet.

Gil was on his knees, grabbing for the musket dropped from above.

The soldier at the oars was firing a pistol.

Dolliver was parrying the bayonet of the charging soldier.

Gil was firing the musket at the soldier in the boat.

Dolliver was slamming his club off the head of the charging soldier.

And then the flashing stopped. The gunfire echoed out across the river.

Gil crouched in the darkness, and looked at the shadows and shapes around him.

Dolliver was standing with the club cocked.

The four British soldiers were all down and motionless.

Then Dolliver slammed the club viciously onto the head of the one who had come at him with the bayonet. The head crunched like a melon.

“Stop it.” Gil’s knees began to wobble, but he willed himself to rise.

“He won’t stick anyone else with that thing,” said Dolliver.

“Did he stick you?”

“No. But I took a ball in my leg meat.”

Then Morison groaned.

Gil went over and poked him with the bayonet.

A dark stain had begun to spread across Morison’s midsection.

Gil knelt next to him.

“I been watchin’ you, Yank,” said Morison, “watchin’ since a publican told me you’d been askin’ about me and some gold guinea coins. Gold guineas? says I. What’s . . . what’s this, then? I done some askin’ and some thinkin’ and—” He groaned and curled up around the pain in his belly.