City of Dreams (21 page)

And he imagined her arriving at the courthouse in Poughkeepsie to present her money: almost two hundred gold guineas, more than worth their weight in gold, a contribution to the faltering finances of a government that had no money.

He hoped that she had met up with an honest government trader—someone like Salomon—a man who would give her a fair price. He reckoned that by then a gold guinea coin would have been worth a hundred dollars, because by the end of the war, he had read that a gold guinea was worth a hundred and sixty-seven dollars. So if she had traded near two hundred guineas, she would have returned from Poughkeepsie with near twenty thousand dollars worth of New Emission Money.

But where was it? He would ask Nancy.

S
O HE WENT
back to Woodward Manor the following week but was met at the door by Erastus Daggett and two huge, barking mastiffs.

Daggett called for his wife, who came and pulled the dogs away, then he turned back to his visitor.

Gil removed his hat. “I’m—”

“I remember you,” said Daggett. “You was a damn suspicious one the other day, and you’re even more of it now. Don’t seem right, a man comin’ to an auction preview, then he don’t come back for the auction, but here he is nosin’ around a week later. Strikes me you’re up to no good, mister.”

“I’m lookin’ for Nancy Hooley, the maid.”

“She’s gone. Gone off to Nova Scotia with her mistress. And if you come sniffin’ around here again, I just might introduce you to my dogs.”

Gil could hear them growling.

Daggett said, “I let ’em tear a Tory informer to pieces one night. So—”

Gil backed off the porch, got on his horse, and left.

He could not believe that Nancy would have sailed away without a word. She had mentioned nothing of those plans to him. He could not find her in the city, though he asked after her in boardinghouses and taverns and walked the Burnt District looking for her among the prostitutes and trash pickers. His last link to Loretta was gone.

iii.

A man broken in health, in pocketbook, and finally in the heart may repair the places where life has broken him, or he may surrender to the broken things. Ambition may fade and mere comfort become his only goal.

A place to labor, a place to sleep, a full belly, a few friends . . . for a man who has lost everything, these are a currency of high value.

Simply surviving on the prison ships had taken a lifetime’s worth of resolve, and if there had been a wellspring from which Gil Walker might have renewed his soul, she was gone. So he consoled himself by breathing the free air of a new nation and by doing his job for Sam Fraunces, which meant playing a small role in a scene of high drama.

In November, the American army paraded down Broadway. A few nights later, fireworks lit the sky. A few weeks after that, George Washington prepared to leave New York and the army he had led for eight years. So he called his officers together in the Long Room of the Queen’s Head, now known as Fraunces Tavern.

Gil Walker poured the brandy with which Washington toasted, then he stood by, bottle at the ready, as one officer after another came up to Washington and spoke a quiet farewell. And as he refilled Washington’s glass, he saw tears in the general’s eyes.

Gil knew that he was living something that men would speak of a century hence.

B
UT
G
IL HIMSELF
never wept. As a boy he had learned that weeping was a sign of weakness, and showing weakness was no way for an orphan to survive in New York or for anyone to survive on a prison ship. Aboard the
Jersey
, men who wept at night were dead by daybreak.

Instead of weeping, Gil kept on.

He worked hard for his old friend. And sometimes he visited what was left of the Holy Ground and spent a few coins. And on occasion, he tried to talk with young women in the back pews at St. Paul’s, but he found that his eye patch put most of them off.

Then, about a year after his release, he felt ambition beginning to stir again, so he wrote to Haym Salomon in Philadelphia.

Salomon wrote back that, though he had invested much in the Revolution and received little in the way of profit, he was still hopeful for the new nation. He added that he was considering a return to New York. “Perhaps we can pool our strengths. Your miraculous constitution and my knowledge of money may yet help us turn a profit.” But between the lines of that letter was a sad truth. Salomon’s constitution had failed. He died of consumption in early 1785.

But Gil never stopped thinking about the New Emission Money, which paid 5 percent interest to the bearer. Nancy Hooley might have lied and kept it herself. Or it might still be hidden. Such thoughts kept Gil awake many a night.

So once a month, under a full moon, he would travel up the island to what was now called Daggett Manor. And he would poke about near the riverbank—under rocks, in tree hollows, beneath the foundations of the now-vacant outbuildings—for places where Loretta might have hidden the other mahogany box. But he never tried the house, because he did not break into houses any longer, especially houses guarded by big dogs. And he did not think that knocking on the front door would get him anywhere, because the man who now fashioned himself as Squire Daggett did not appear to be one who would forget a face.

T
HOUGH THE FRAGILE
collection of American states was dead broke, New York burst back to life.

It began when Alexander Hamilton and a handful of friends started the Bank of New York and brought order to the chaos of dollars and pounds, paper money and specie, state money and Continentals flooding the city. Merchant ships sailed in again. Men conducted business in the coffeehouses once more. And the old trenches were filled and the earthworks smoothed and the Burnt District rebuilt. And Second Trinity Church rose from the ashes.

When Americans realized that the government they had created under the Articles of Confederation did not work, they ratified a new constitution, named New York as the capital, and inaugurated a president.

On a warm April morning in 1789, Gil Walker joined the crowd in front of City Hall, which had been gussied up and renamed Federal Hall, to watch George Washington take the oath of office. Gil had seen Washington weep. Now he saw him stand as a god in a simple brown suit of American cloth. When Washington said, “So help me, God,” the roar was so powerful it made the glass vibrate in the windows of Wall Street and echo down Broad Street all the way to the water. Then the church bells rang. And a moment later came a thunderous
feu de joie
from all the cannon on all the ships up and down both rivers.

America had traveled far, thought Gil, from the last time that a New York crowd had roared as loudly, on a July evening in 1776.

Now there was something called a Federal government. And Sam Fraunces, named chief steward to the president, had already sold his tavern to house most of it.

Within a few months, the departments of State, Treasury, and War had moved in. And Gil Walker, who saw to the physical care of the building, played unofficial steward to those who labored late in service to this new government.

So it was that on a fall night, as Gil was going up to bed, he noticed a light in the Treasury office. Thinking someone had left a lamp burning, he followed the light through the outer office to find Alexander Hamilton leaning over his desk, surrounded by books and ledgers that rose like ramparts around him.

Gil knocked and asked if His Honor would like anything. Hamilton requested a pot of strong coffee.

Fifteen minutes later, Gil returned with the coffee and ginger raisin cake and placed them on the table. Then he stepped back, waiting for some acknowledgment.

But Hamilton was hunched over his work, as if rooted to it by the tip of his quill.

Finally, Gil spoke: “There’s folks say coffee at night will keep you awake, sir.”

“That’s the idea.” Hamilton did not raise his head.

Gil listened to the scratching of the pen for a few moments. Then he took the coffee and poured. It gurgled into the cup and sent up a little cloud of steam. Then he stepped back and cleared his throat.

Hamilton finally looked up. “What? What is it?”

“Some coffee, sir . . . to keep you awake.”

“Very good. Thank you. Thank you and good night.” Hamilton turned again to the page.

“Sorry, sir. But I was just wonderin’ what it is you’re writin’—”

“It’s called
Report on Public Credit
, if you must know.”

And Gil felt something stir in his mind or his soul. He was not sure which. He said, “There was a time when I tried to learn about credit.”

“Did you, now?” Hamilton dipped his quill and kept his eyes on the paper.

“Credit, a man once told me”—Gil strained to remember the words exactly—“is a lender’s faith in his fellow man and a debtor’s faith in the future.”

Hamilton stopped writing, looked up, and said, “I like that.” Then he jotted it down on a piece of scrap paper. “Who was this wise man?”

“A Jew named Salomon.”

“Haym Salomon?” Hamilton set down the quill. “You
knew
him?”

“Yes, sir. He got me out of the Provost Jail . . . and I went to work for him.”

“Do I know
you
? Where did you serve?”

“With Stuckey’s company, then on the
Jersey
. Six and a half years.”

Hamilton stood and raised a lamp to Gil’s face. “You must have a powerful constitution to . . . I remember you now. You’re one of the Waterfront Boys.”

“You once saved us from a floggin’, but that was a long time ago, sir. And my constitution got used up survivin’. Otherwise, I might’ve made somethin’ of myself.”

“You were in the rearguard on the retreat from New York. One of the Boys took a bullet, didn’t he?”

“Rooster Ramsey.”

“Yes. I remember. A cocky fellow. . . . The stand you lads made that day . . . it helped me escape with my two fieldpieces. Come December, I used those guns to hold off the British on the Raritan and cover Washington’s retreat. So you could say that your friend’s sacrifice saved the army. Take comfort in that, at least.”

Gil had heard stories of Hamilton. Men said that when he smiled at you and asked a question, he made you feel as if he truly meant the warmth and truly cared about your answer. In that moment, it seemed to be so.

“Tell me,” Hamilton went on, “how’s—what
was
his name?—my old friend from King’s College. Augustus, Augustus the Bookworm?”

“I’m afraid he—”

“He didn’t make it?” said Hamilton.

“None of them did, sir, ’cept me. We joined on a whim, but we showed what courage we could. We done our best.” And Gil Walker began to cry. In all his life, he had never cried for any of them. He had tried instead, when he lived the horrors and when he thought about them, to harden himself. Why his emotion burst forth at that moment was something he could not understand.

Hamilton slid his chair out and told Gil to sit. Then he took the cup of coffee and put it into Gil’s hand. Then he slipped a bottle of brandy from the drawer and poured a generous shot into the mug.

“The secretary of the Treasury fills my cup.” Gil dragged a sleeve across his nose. “Life still has its wonders.”

“You’re a veteran. You’ve earned it. And if you’ve held onto your pay certificates, I intend to see that you’re recompensed in full.”

Gil took a sip and felt the warmth of coffee and brandy both. “Not my pay certificates I’m worryin’ about, sir.”

“Did you sell them for pennies on the dollar, like so many other soldiers?”

“Not exactly. Mine’s a long story, and seein’ as you’re busy with figurin’ out the finances of the country and all. . . .”

But Hamilton insisted he had the time.

So Gil Walker, in the quiet of that warm room on the second floor of Fraunces’s Tavern, decided to tell the story. He reached into his shirt and took off the crown finial that he wore on a leather lanyard around his neck. “This is where it begins.”

The fire crackled on the grate. The oil in the lamps silently turned to light and smoke. And the two men drank more brandy.

When Gil was done, he drained his cup and stood. “A long story, sir. As I said.”

Hamilton picked up the finial and turned it over in his ink-stained hand. “Why did you want to tell me all this?”

“Well . . . just seein’ you up to your elbows in the business of money . . . it reminded me of the things I tried to learn from Mr. Salomon, back when I dreamed big dreams, back when my friends and me were the top men in town. I dreamed of understandin’ credit and debt and how to make them work.”

“I’ve dreamed of putting my understanding into action.” Hamilton gestured to the sheets on his desk. “I’d convince Congress that a national debt can be a national blessing. As Salomon said, it reflects our belief in ourselves and our faith in the future.”

Gil stood for a moment more, then said, “Thank you, sir. Thank you for listenin’.” He took the finial and turned to leave.

“Do you still have your dreams, Gil Walker?”

“It’s been a long time since I dreamed much of anything.”

“Since you learned that your Loretta had died?”

“I loved her sure enough, and she loved me.” Gil shrugged. “We came from hard times, hard places, but we tried to do our best with the gold—”

“Once you’d stolen it, that is,” said Hamilton with no hint of disapproval.

“Ill-gotten gains, yes, sir. But I’d feel better about stealin’ it if I thought that it helped America. So I’d love to know for certain if she really swapped it for New Emission Money.”

“That may be a question I can answer.” Hamilton took the lamp and went over to a huge ledger on a stand in the corner. “You say her last name was Rogers?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And she conducted her transaction in Poughkeepsie?”

“As I understand, sir.”

Hamilton flipped through several pages, back and forth, until he found it. “Aha. Here. Come over here.”

As Gil looked over his shoulder, Hamilton explained that some of the states had left master lists of their large sales. Each New York bill had been numbered and duly entered. And there—he jabbed a finger—was the name Loretta Rogers. “Twenty thousand dollars. Two hundred bills issued in hundred-dollar denominations, numbered from 2510 to 2709.