City of Dreams (16 page)

“Kill him,” said Dolliver, “or he’ll turn in the Jew.”

Morison managed to smile. “I stopped at Woodward’s, ’fore I come here.”

“You what?” Gil crouched closer. “How did you—”

Morison tapped his forehead. “I may be slow, but I remembered what you said to your whore the night of the fire. . . . Now I got you.”

“What did you do at Woodward’s?” asked Gil.

Morison groaned and his eyes fluttered.

Dolliver smashed his club down onto Morison’s forehead.

Gil jumped back, more shocked by that than by the ambush. “Are you insane?”

“Time to go.”

“Then go,” said Gil.

“We’re both goin’,” answered Dolliver. “I’m bleedin’ like Jesus. My shoe’s fillin’ with blood. And I don’t know one damn bit about that dark water out there. You’re rowin’ me to Fort Washington.”

But Gil had to get back to back to Woodward’s to find out what this redcoat corporal had done: Exposed Loretta? Found the gold?

Dolliver fished some coins from Morison’s pockets and took another small pistol from his belt.

“No gold guineas, are there?” asked Gil.

“Nope. Just another redcoat carryin’ shillings. Now let’s go.”

Gil said, “My job is to take you this far.”

The Rhode Islander raised Morison’s pistol. “Your job is whatever I say it is. Now we can go easy, Gil Walker, or we can go hard, but we’re goin’.”

A
N HOUR LATER
, Gil could see torchlights outlining the ramparts some two hundred feet above the river. The foliage had dropped, so the earthen fort hulked in the moonlight like a wounded beast.

The bank here was nothing but a steep hill approached by a narrow path of switchbacks. And somewhere in the dark, sentries were protecting it.

Gil shipped oars and tried to decide what to do.

The current grabbed the boat and began to push it downstream, and he had worked too hard to get here, so he decided to give out with an owl hoot.

A voice came from the bank. “Virginia!”

Gil knew that was the password for the night. He was supposed to know the countersign. If he didn’t, the guards were free to open fire. Gil hoped that the pickets might have been expecting Dibble’s rowboat, so he said, “Dibble is dead! I—”

The response was a blast of musket fire from the bank.

He saw the flash, then he saw nothing.

G
IL
W
ALKER AWOKE
to piercing pain and blackness.

He tried to open his eyes, cried out, and fell back into a stupor.

Later he awoke again and saw moving lights, torchlights, but only on one side. The pain was not as bad. He hardly felt it at all.

He groaned and brought a hand to the bandage covering his eyes, but another hand took his wrist.

Then he heard a familiar voice: “Gil, Gilbie boy.”

The Bookworm?

“Just lie still. They’ve given you laudanum. They say it makes you feel—”

“Like floating,” mumbled Gil.

And he floated. Time passed. Daylight burned through the fabric and the burning pain burned again into the left side of his face. He groaned.

He heard the Bookworm: “Can’t you do something for him?”

Another voice: “We’ve given him all the laudanum we can. We’re runnin’ out.”

And a third voice: “Serves him right for desertin’.”

Then the bandage was off and he was looking into the eye of Captain Bull Stuckey. “As soon as you can shoulder a musket, you’ll be in the line.”

Gil brought his hand to the left side of his face. “My . . . my eye.”

“I’ll give you one of my patches,” said Stuckey, then he was gone.

But Augustus the Bookworm stayed close.

“What happened?” asked Gil.

“Musket ball caught you on the corner of the cheek. Played hell with your eye. It’s . . . it’s ugly, Gilbie boy, but another half an inch and it would’ve blown your head off. Killed that Rhode Islander as it was.”

And soon, it was night again. The dark of November had come, so each day promised nothing but a quicker trip back to blackness.

At least the dark lessened Gil’s pain.

So did his friend. The Bookworm saw that Gil got soup when there was any, and fresh water when it was fetched up from the river. And each night, he helped Gil to bathe the ruined left side of his face in cool, wet cloths.

W
ITHIN A WEEK
, Gil could shoulder a weapon. So Stuckey gave him that eye patch and put him in a trench a few hundred yards in front of the dirt walls.

By now, the British had left off chasing Washington and were turning their attention to this fort, the last American outpost on Manhattan Island.

On the morning of November 14, Gil was in his trench when the British and Hessians began their attack. By afternoon, the enemy had taken every defensive position outside the earthworks and driven almost three thousand Americans back into a fort meant to hold a third of that number.

Gil Walker and the Bookworm stood shoulder to shoulder in the mass of men and smelled fear and saw fear, even in the eye of Bull Stuckey, because once the British brought up their fieldpieces and began to lob cannonballs into that mob, Fort Washington would become a slaughter pen.

Instead, the Americans surrendered.

B
Y DAWN THE
next day, a great scar of homespun and hats, of brown breeches and tan hunting shirts, of tattered coats and worn shoes, cut across the cold November fields and slashed down the Bloomingdale Road.

Twenty-eight hundred prisoners marched to the slow, thumping cadence of the British drums. If there had been music, it would have been a dirge, because these men were going to the prisons, and once the prisons were full, to the prison ships.

Gil and the Bookworm went together, near the middle of the two-mile-long column. They positioned themselves on the right side of the line, in the hopes that the girls would show themselves at Woodward Manor.

“It takes two hours for the column to pass a single point,” said the Bookworm. “It’ll be hard for the girls to stay outside that long.”

“Maybe so, but when you see them, don’t go runnin’. It’ll only make things harder for them, especially if the squire is watchin’.”

Up ahead, they saw the cupola atop the Woodward house and the winter-bare arms of the great oak that grew before it. And there were the girls, wrapped in shawls, leaning against the trunk of the tree, as if trying not to attract the attention of the British guards.

Loretta’s shawl was green, Nancy’s was gray. As soon as the girls saw Gil and the Bookworm, they cried out their names and began to walk along beside the column, though they were separated by a split-rail fence.

And the Bookworm couldn’t control himself. He stopped and tried to step out of the ranks to go to Nancy.

But one of the Hessians growled and poked him with a bayonet.

And Gil pulled him back into line.

It was then that Loretta must have seen Gil’s face, the eye patch, the raw, bruised flesh that seemed to be oozing out from under it. She gasped and cried, “Oh, Gil—”

“Don’t worry, miss,” he said over his shoulder. “Just a scratch. It’ll be fine, miss.”

And she seemed to understand, because even though she and Nancy kept walking on the other side of the fence, her voice took on a more formal tone. “I shall pray for you, sir. And I shall pray that you keep your faith. We ladies will never forget you.”

“Never,” cried Nancy.

Finally, a Hessian guard stopped the girls with the tip of his bayonet.

The Bookworm said, “Good-bye, ladies. Good-bye and thank you for your good words.”

Gil allowed himself a last lingering look over his shoulder at Loretta. He wanted to say that he loved her, that he would survive for as long as it took, that he would come riding in under the oak branches one fine day and take her away to the life that they dreamed of. But all he could say was, “Do somethin’ good with your gifts, miss. Do somethin’ good for your country.”

“I will,” she answered. “The Lord seeth all and loveth all! So don’t despair!”

“Despair? No, ma’am. That would be a sin against the gift of life that God give us!” And Gil Walker felt the tears sting bitterly in his ruined eye.

FIVE

Tuesday Midday

P
ETER AND
E
VANGELINE CAME UP
out of the subway at Broadway and Seventy-ninth at about eleven thirty.

After St. Paul’s, they had gone to Delancey’s, but no Delancey. Not in his store on Book Row, not answering his cell.

So they had come back uptown, because the New-York Historical Society was in Evangeline’s neighborhood, and Peter was planning to pay a visit, once he heard from Fitzpatrick. Besides, computer research was a lot easier on a laptop than an iPhone. And it was plain that they were onto something.

But whenever he rose from that subway, Peter could think of only one thing: “Zabar’s.”

“Zabar’s?” Evangeline started down Seventy-ninth. “You’ve just been tailed by a guy named Boris—”

“Or Mary—”

“On the uptown number 4. You’ve gone to a bookstore that’s always open and it’s closed—”

“Maybe Delancey took the day off.”

“And some guy you never heard of has asked you to help save America. And all you can think of is food?”

“Food from Zabar’s.” He took her by the elbow and turned her up Broadway, toward the gourmet supermarket at Eightieth.
NEW YORK IS ZABAR’S . . . AND ZABAR’S IS NEW YORK. SINCE 1934
. It said so on the sign. “How about a Zabar’s kosher salami and a nice cheese, like a Drunken Goat, maybe?”

“I have one at home.”

“Drunken Goat? You like Drunken Goat?”

“I’ve dated enough of them. I’ve also visited the Spanish village where they make it. I’ve even written about it.”

“So let’s get a baguette and a salami to go with it.”

“Only if you admit there’s nothing like Zabar’s in Boston.”

“Sure. I’ll admit that.”

“And if you admit that”—the light turned and Evangeline started across Broadway—“you’ll admit that we should live here instead of there.”

“Fight fair, Evangeline. Don’t start when I’m hungry.”

“But you can run a business—or save America—just as easily from New York as you can from Boston. And you love this neighborhood.”

“Love is a strong word,” said Peter, “but—”

It was one of those sparkling spring days that made every building look as if it had been powerwashed and squeegeed. They’d practically invented the luxury apartment house around here, so even at the edge of a low-rise block with a CVS and a Best Buy, with the traffic thrumming the New York baseline that played day and night, with hundreds of people hurrying along, all of them doing the most important thing in the world (at least in their own minds), you could still lift your eyes toward the beautiful detailing of the Ansonia or feel the magnificent bulk of William Astor’s Apthorp and know that you were part of the parade that had been rolling since the Dutch made a deal with the Indians and started cutting in
De Heere Straet
.

“Okay,” said Evangeline. “So you
like
the neighborhood.”

“And there are some things I like a lot.”

“Like what?”

“Zabar’s, the museums, the Historical Society, the history.”

“I thought all the history was downtown.”

“There’s history all along Broadway. Up here, it used to be called the Bloomingdale Road. It ran through fields, forest patches, and orchards, until it just petered out a few miles north of here. Woodward Manor was right about where Zabar’s is today. It was one of the big estates.”

Sometimes she thought Peter had a pair of extra lenses in his sunglasses and whenever he wanted, he could flip them down like polarizing filters to remove the modern world, so that he could see the shadows of the past as if it were still unfolding.

“If you were here in November of 1776,” he said, “you would have seen three thousand Americans marching to the prison ships after Fort Washington fell. And most of them would die. Three times as many men died in the prison ships as on the battlefields. Something like eleven thousand.”

“No Zabar’s back then,” she said.

“Just disease, exposure, and starvation.”

The faux siding on Zabar’s was supposed to make it look like a European food emporium. But the siding was the only phony part of this place. They stepped inside, inhaled a symphony of aromas—coffee, cheeses, pickles, salamis, fruits, pastries, chocolates, bread. And they forgot about the Continental Army and the prison ships.

Then Peter’s iPhone vibrated. Another text message:

Have you considered my invitation? Avid Austin

I
T WAS A
short walk to Evangeline’s building.

At the desk, they asked Jackie if there had been any visitors or messages.

“Nope. Nothin’. Nobody.” Jackie glanced at the bag. “You been to Zabar’s, eh?”

Peter held up the bag.

Jackie grinned. “A loaf of bread, a Zabar’s salami, and thee.”

“Thou,” said Evangeline.

“Pah.” Jackie looked at Peter, “A broken-down old pug don’t just quote
The Rubaiyatt of Omar Khayyam
. He
paraphrases
it. And
she
corrects him.”