City of Glory (17 page)

His loupe was usually downstairs in the shop, but this morning it lay on the desk. He must have brought it up here the night before, but there was no sign of any jewels or of the soft square of velvet.

But that could be a good sign! She had frequently seen her father use the velvet spread-cloth to wrap jewels that had recently come into his possession but which were not yet to be put on display in the shop. On such occasions he would lock the gems in a small wooden case, then lock the case in the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk. Always. Papa was a great believer in the sacred quality of routine. And inevitably, when the chest and the drawer held something of value, the tiny keys that unlocked them were placed on a chain that Papa slipped over his head and wore beneath his shirtfront. At other times the keys were in the little depression at the back of the desk that was meant to hold an inkpot.

The two small silver keys winked up at her from their regular place, proving beyond doubt that nothing was wrapped in the velvet cloth, and nothing hidden away in the locked chest in the locked drawer. Manon’s disappointment was a physical thing, rising up to flush her face. But if he’d locked nothing away, where was the velvet square?

She heard a step on the stairs, picked up the chamois, and venting her frustration on the desktop, rubbed so energetically that she knocked one of the stacks of books to the floor. They fell with a loud clatter.

“Books are too valuable to be treated so, Manon.”

“I know, Papa. I am sorry.” She knelt down and began gathering up the leather-bound volumes. One had fallen open. Manon could see the French words engraved in gold on the spine.
Six Voyages…en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes
by Jean Baptiste Tavernier, a great gemologist and world traveler. Papa had often used it when teaching her about the history of precious stones. Published in Paris in 1679, it had been the prize of his father’s collection. “The Tavernier! Oh, I really am sorry, Papa.”

“I know,
ma petite.
Do not fuss. No harm has been done.” Manon had snatched up the Tavernier. Vionne knelt and picked up the other two volumes. When he did, Manon saw the square of dark blue velvet; so it had been in use to mark a place in
Six Voyages.
Without thinking, she had used a finger to hold the book open the way it fell. The heading of the page facing her was
Le Grand Mogul: le plus grand diamant dans tout le monde
—the Grand Mogul: largest diamond in all the world.

A Meadow Just Below Canal Street, 11
A.M.

Midmorning and the heat already fierce. Canton was hot as well, but in China, Thumbless Wu was a man of power and wealth who could command shade and fans, and cool scented baths. Whatever he wanted to eat appeared almost as soon as he thought of it. In this
diu ngoi gwok
city of the foreign ghosts, except for the bits of disgusting
gwai
food he found in the foul drainage gullies that ran through each street, he starved. Even the hole on the
diu suen
ship had been better. At least the
diu
Irish had brought him food some times. But no
fan.
No
fan.
Ahyee! How could he live without
fan
?

It did not seem possible he could sweat more or shake more or puke more, but Wu continued to do all three. Lying on his belly and retching into the grass on the edge of a field beyond the city streets, he would have wanted to die, except for what he saw ahead of him. A field of flowers, bright red and with their faces open to the sky. With such heat and sun they would soon drop their petals. The round pods left atop the stalk would burst with ripe seed. The man walking among the red flowers was obviously interested in the same calculation. Ahyee!
Ho wan.
Finally, good luck. All gods bear witness if he lied. Wasn’t this exactly what he had come to this barbarian land to find? The red flowers—poppies, in the
diu suen
speech of the
diu suen
foreign devils—poppies and an apothecary who knew how to make their seed into the black sticky stuff that produced white smoke. He knew this man was an apothecary; he had seen his shop. And now he had seen the red flowers. No
fan,
but he could not die now. Wu felt another wave of nausea rise in his throat and gave himself over to yet another bout of the shivering heaves that produced nothing, but he was smiling.

Chesapeake Bay,
Aboard the British Warship H.M.S. Griffin, 11
A.M.

“So, General, we are agreed?” The admiral leaned over the map spread across the wardroom table and rested his finger on the little village of Benedict in Maryland, on the nearby Patuxent River.

The general commanded a fighting force of forty-five hundred, but at the moment his troops were aboard twenty warships. It was the admiral’s job to get them to the place they could be best used, and he was the senior officer for this part of the operation. Nonetheless, the two men had conferred as equals since the previous month in Bermuda when they decided to sail for the Chesapeake. The area’s extensive shoreline and her large cities were without any fortification; the American secretary of war didn’t believe in fortifying cities. “There’s no barricade can match a bayonet,” he said often. The British general concurred, but only if one had a great many men to wield the weapons. The Americans did not. The entire Federal District and much of Maryland were a plum ripe for the picking. The immediate issue was where to land the troops.

The general studied the area the admiral’s tapping finger indicated. “Benedict? You’re quite sure?”

“We can take it easily. Our spies tell us there are supplies to be had, including plenty of horses, and it’s forty-five miles from their so-called capital city.”

“And Baltimore?”

The general was still of two minds about which city to attack first. The admiral was not, but that would be the next engagement. He was a methodical man who preferred to settle one encounter at a time. “Baltimore remains a possibility, General. There’s another road from Benedict leads directly there. And we’ve sympathizers among the Marylanders who will be happy to provide guides.”

“Very well. Benedict it is. And either Baltimore or Washington to be their Waterloo.”

The admiral smiled. “Perhaps not quite of such import, General.”

“Perhaps not. But it will finish the job.” Wellington had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo; now only the defiant Americans stood between Britain and the world dominance that was her divine destiny.

An orderly was summoned. Three days’ rations were to be cooked aboard and distributed—three pounds of pork and seven and a half pounds of bread per soldier. “I trust it will be enough,” the general said after the man left. “As long as this Benedict is as easy a target as you say.”

The admiral smiled. “Not to worry. I’m told President Madison’s wife Dolley sets a fine table at the Executive Mansion.”

New York City, Noon.

“He won’t have me.” Jesse Edwards shuffled along Broad Street, ignoring the storerooms and shops that had once belonged to the wealthiest of the Dutch burghers who founded the town and called it Nieuw Amsterdam. There was a hard lump of something in the boy’s path, and he kicked it ahead of him while trying to resist Holy Hannah’s forward tug on his left arm. “He’ll take one look at this,” he jerked his head in the direction of the stump of his right arm, “and say no thank ye, I’ll not be needing any freaks.”

“The Holy One, blessed be He, helps those as help themselves. Proverbs. Look at all these places.” Hannah gestured to indicate the countinghouses either side of the wide street. “When I was a girl, they was businesses below and rich men’s dwellings above. Now rich men live as far away from the stink of their money as they can manage, and there’s so much business in the town, nearly every inch of Broad Street is taken up with it. Course he’ll have you, Jesse. Why not, when it’s Holy Hannah’s idea?”

“You mean he’ll be feared you’ll put a curse on him otherwise?”

“Never! Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Book o’ Deuteronomy. Holy Hannah don’t curse folks. All she does is sometimes make a suggestion as to what might please the Holy One, blessed be his name.”

Broad Street had been an early Dutch canal, dug to let ships come inland from the East River and offload into the yellow-brick warehouses that fronted either bank. The rich burghers who lived above the warehouses used the canal as a sewer, counting on the tide to flush it clean twice a day. As it turned out, the Dutch were more industrious than nature and the tide could not cope. Eventually, the burghers and
huisvrouwen
found themselves living beside a stinking ditch so disgusting they had no choice but to pave it over and create what was then the widest street in Nieuw Amsterdam. Hannah pulled her charge along Broad and Dock, narrow and twisting side streets, and hurried him along to Hanover Square. “That’s the place right over there. Quite a few like it these days, but when I was a girl Devrey’s was the only shop of its kind.”

The gold-lettered sign said
DEVREY’S PHARMACY, FINE PERSONALS
. It hung at right angles to a door set in a small house built catty-corner to the road, below an overhanging eave that protected the entrance from the weather. How many times had Hannah gone through that door? Too many to count. Mama used to buy her Number Seven Cologne from Devrey’s. Once the fine ladies of the town again had money to spend after the Revolution, Devrey’s new cologne attracted a goodly share of it. The pharmacy also sold face powder and wig powder and scented soap. Lord Almighty, what was the point o’ thinking on any o’ that now? “Come along, lad. Leave that kick-about bit o’ rubbish you’ve trailed all the way here and come inside.”

A bell tinkled when they pushed the door open, just as it had when she was young. The pharmacy smelled exactly the same, sweet and bitter in equal parts. Straight ahead, on the shelves behind the counter, were the tall glass jugs and ewers containing the many colored elixirs that Clare Devrey had simpled into being with the mysterious skills it was said she’d learned from her Irish mother, Roisin.

The short, broad man standing behind the wooden counter in front of the apothecary bottles was Clare’s son. Thirty-some. Ten years younger than Hannah, but she remembered seeing him as a child, skating on the Collect Pond in winter and flying kites on the Common in autumn. You’re a foolish old woman, Hannah. Oh that today you would listen to my voice. Psalm of David. Today, not yesterday and not tomorrow. “Good day to you, Jonathan. I’ve brought you a message. And a messenger.”

Jonathan Devrey stood exactly where he’d been when she opened the door. Good God, Holy Hannah with her flyaway white hair and her shapeless rags and those blue eyes that seemed to stare straight through a man. What could she want with him? “What message is that?” His voice spiraled up into a squeak. “I didn’t ask for any message.” All the town knew Holy Hannah had the gift of prophecy. But what had that to do with him? Except to bury his parents who died together in 1805 when the sleigh they were in overturned and dropped them into the freezing waters of Hudson’s River, he’d not been in a church since he was a boy. Besides, Hannah Simson was a Hebrew. What business could any Jew god have with him?