Forever (24 page)

After a while, Cormac went out the back door to piss against a wall. The snow was falling more heavily, whipped by a wind. Cormac finished. Then heard his name. Mary Burton was at a top-floor window, her hair wild, a shawl upon her shoulders and neck.

“Be careful of that lot inside,” she said. “They’re going to cause a lot of trouble.”

“How are you, Mary?”

“Still in prison.”

“It can’t last.”

“Wait there.”

In a few minutes, she arrived at his side, in the deep shadows beside the building. She was bundled against the cold. They embraced and he could feel the warmth coming from her body.

“You must be wary,” she said. “I’ve heard John Hughson talking to his brother, that thieving lecher from Poughkeepsie. And what he’s saying here is not what he’s sayin’ to his brother.”

“What is it they’re saying?”

“It depends on how much drink is taken,” she said. “Sometimes he brags that he’ll soon be king of New York, the ruler of all he surveys, so to speak. Then he’s to be a viceroy for the Spanish crown, with the Spanish fleet in the harbor to fight off the bloody English. Then he’s to search the whole town, while the British get organized, and take everything of value, ship it off to the south somewhere, to bloody Cuba or Mexico or some such, with him and his brother in the ship. Or he’ll make a separate peace with the British, betray everybody, have them all hanged or burned, and then get the British to make him a lord, for services rendered to the Crown, and become governor.”

“He sounds as if he doesn’t know what he wants to do.”

“Whatever the feck it is, it’ll be for to serve John Hughson, not the Africans or the Irish or anyone else, includin’ his wife.”

With that, she brushed his face with her lips and went to the back door and was gone. Through the falling snow Cormac could see a red smear of torches on the ramparts of the fort.

56.

F
or two days, Cormac searched for Kongo. He must be warned. They
all must be warned about the slippery secrets of John Hughson. Kongo seemed to have vanished. Finally he saw Quaco near the Slave Market and learned that Kongo had gone with his master to someplace in New Jersey. At night, Cormac tried to sort out the boxes in his type case, opening and shutting the drawers until he fell into sleep.

Then, early one Sunday morning, after another heavy snowfall, he saw Kongo in the yard behind the print shop. He was holding the reins of a horse. Cormac dressed and went out. Kongo explained that he’d been ordered north to pick up messages for his owner, Wilson the painter. He showed Cormac a signed pass allowing him to travel on horseback. Both men smiled.

“But I want to show you something,” Kongo said. “Come.” Cormac climbed on the horse’s back directly behind Kongo and began telling him what he had heard about John Hughson. He never mentioned Mary Burton, but he outlined all of Hughson’s possible ambitions.

“Thank you,” Kongo said.

“Don’t trust him,” Cormac said.

“We don’t.”

He waited a bit.

“He thinks he is using us, all of us,” Kongo said. “But we are using him.”

They rode north for hours, avoiding the few churchgoers out in the snow. That is, avoiding anyone who might be alarmed by an African and a white man sharing a horse. They went beyond those parts of the lower island that Cormac already knew. They rode beyond rocky promontories, frozen streams, open fields dotted with snug Dutch farmhouses with smoke rising from chimneys. Some land was cleared and fenced. Most remained wild. Kongo pulled his fur hat down over his face to hide his black skin. He said almost nothing, and never mentioned the rebellion or his reasons for keeping Cormac out of a three-man unit. He did nod in a conspiratorial way at a group of six Indians walking south, dressed in English clothes and heavy English boots. He pointed out two redcoats lounging outside a tavern, smoking seegars, and seeing them, he nudged the horse into dense forest, moving west across the spine of the island. The wind off the North River assaulted them, icy and hard.

They came to a small road cutting away to the west through the Bloomingdale properties, a section where virgin forests stood like walls protecting cleared land, now brilliant with snow. Kongo was cautious, alert. Animal tracks were cut all over the snow, but the animals were hidden. Kongo slowed the horse and moved into a hilly forest of dark evergreens. And then stopped and pointed. Off in the distance, on a cliff above the river, was the house of the Earl of Warren.

Cormac knew it belonged to the earl because from that distance it was an exact duplicate of the ruined house in Ireland. They moved closer, the horse snorting, steam billowing from his mouth. They saw black men off to the right taking their ease at the entrance to a stable. Just inside the stable doors was the cream-colored carriage. On the great porch of the house, facing inland, its back to the river, two white men moved back and forth on the steps. One held a musket. Over the main doorway there was an elaborate W emblazoned in gold leaf that glittered in the hard noon sun. They moved again, very quietly, maintaining a safe distance, and saw well-tramped paths through the snow from the front stairs to a kind of deck on the river side of the house. Three men were talking on the deck. Each had a musket. Cormac longed for his sword but saw that the earl had defended himself against any sort of direct assault. What had happened in Ireland would not happen here. Only a fool would charge this small fortress alone.

“This is the place you were looking for?” Kongo said.

“This is the place.”

“Good. We come back.”

57.

F
or months, the earl had existed for the young man as a kind of
ghost, a specter made of anger and memory, and now he was everywhere. Cormac saw the earl walking through the empty square of the Slave Market, glancing at the vacant piers and surely cursing the War of Jenkins’s Ear. He saw him on another day leaving the expensive shop of Edwards the bootmaker, the usual fence of bodyguards behind him, to be engulfed swiftly by the Pearl Street crowd. His body was thicker, face fleshier, but he was the same man who had traveled the wet roads of Ireland.

The following afternoon, he passed the earl in a crowd near Hanover Square. The earl glanced at Cormac’s bearded face but saw nothing. He was comforted by the simple fact that the earl was in New York. Perhaps he had been away while his fine new mansion was being built. The Carolinas. Distant Georgia. Boston or Philadelphia, those larger, grander towns. But here he was. Cormac thought about carrying his sword, to hurl himself at the earl when next he saw him. But he discarded such a plan as foolish. He would be hanged in an hour and never find out what happened to the other stories unfolding in his life. The story of Mary Burton. The story of Kongo and John Hughson and the whispers of revolt. No, he must wait until the moment was right.

A week later, while making an evening delivery of posters, Cormac saw the earl again, entering one of the storehouses on Beaver Street, leaving his bodyguards at the door. Cormac dawdled, brushing dust from his coat, ambling toward the river. Other men arrived, alone or in pairs. Not a woman among them. No wife. No mistress. They walked in with masculine swagger. They didn’t come out. A frail snow was falling on the town.

An hour later, behind the locked front door of the print shop, Cormac related news of his sightings to Mr. Partridge. His hands were busy cleaning punches and sorting type, but his mind was jumbled. Mr. Partridge urged the young man to be careful, to avoid being obvious. ���This earl… such men have power,” he said. “The power of money, of a willingness to hurt others. Which means they have the ability to do great harm. Once they get power, they’ll do anything to preserve it. Watch yourself, lad.” He seemed exhausted. “Whatever you do, no matter how strong the motive, do nothing rash.”

Mr. Partridge retired early, hauling his weary bones to the second floor. Cormac removed his shoes, hearing boards squeaking above his head for a while, and then silence. As he lay down to sleep, glancing out at the falling snow, his head was swimming with words he was learning from Mr. Partridge, including the word
republic,
and what Niccolò Machiavelli had written about it two hundred years earlier. Then he heard a soft knock on the back door. Could he have been spotted by the earl? Seen as a threat? Followed to the shop? No, such men would knock much harder, if they knocked at all. He took a candle in one hand and the sword in the other and opened the door an inch.

Mary Burton stood there, shivering in the cold. Snow had gathered on the shawl she wore over her head.

“I’ve come to warn you, Cormac,” she said.

He blew out the candle. “Of what?”

“It’s about to happen.”

“Come in.”

She shook the snow off her shawl and sat on the edge of the fireplace while Cormac planted himself on a stool. In strings of nervous whispers, leaning forward with her hands clenched, she told him what she knew: The rising would begin on Saint Patrick’s Night. Five days hence. The fort would be set afire, Quaco’s wife liberated, the armory looted of guns, which would then be dispersed to the rebels. Others would rob the major shops and haul away all valuables and weapons from private homes. There was a list of good masters and bad. The loot would be taken to the brewery building at the foot of Stone Street. Then John Hughson’s brother would cart everything away in a sloop to exchange it upstate for more guns. While the fort was burning, certain whites would be attacked and, if necessary, killed. All bad masters. All arrogant whites, including women. Many buildings would be torched. And the Spanish fleet would then sweep into the town.

“We’ve got to leave this place,” she said. “It will be like the fires of Hell.”

“What are you saying, Mary?”

“I’m sayin’ we’ve got to run, you an’ me. I’m sayin’ that if you love me, we’ve got to pack a bag and be gone. To Philadelphia, or the bloody west, to somewhere. Maybe we could find a way to Ireland. Get out of this place, some way. We’ve got to feckin’ go….”

Her eyes were frantic and afraid.

“I can’t do that, Mary.”

She went very still then, her eyes slivering with ice.

“You can’t
do
that?”

“I’m obliged in other ways, Mary. To this shop and Mr. Partridge. And to something else, something that goes back to the old country.”

“You’re
obliged?
” Her voice was now a knife blade. “You’re fecking
obliged?
”

“Aye.”

“And are you not obliged to me?”

He looked at her hardening face, her disheveled hair, thinking: Am I? She saw the question on his face.

“You low bastard,” she said.

She stood up, looking around the darkened shop. A lone horse and rider trotted by in the night. The snow fell steadily.

“I’ll be goin’ then,” she said. “What happens to you will be none of my business.” There was bitterness in her voice now. “I have to fecking laugh. I actually thought you loved me. What a fecking fool I was.”

She jerked open the door.

“Don’t be looking for me in Hughson’s,” she said. “For I’ll be gone. With me child.”

She closed the door softly and hurried into the snow. Cormac grabbed a coat to go after her, but she was gone.

He stood there, his body trembling, but not from the cold. She says she’s carrying a child. Her child. But my child too. This is a girl, only sixteen, who sleeps with no men save me. A hard girl, lean and stringy and tough, but a decent girl too. And now she is enraged. She is enraged at being an indenture, a slave, caged in a city she didn’t choose. She is enraged at me. And in her rage, she might become what everyone in the Irish tribe hated above all living creatures: an informer. Able with words to create peril and havoc, flame and death. Like Samson toppling the temple upon himself. If she can’t have freedom, if she can’t have me, then feck it, bring everything down. Create ruins. Hurt everyone in sight. If Mary Burton went to the fort and told the English what she knew, Kongo and Quaco and all the Africans would be in danger of death. So would John Hughson. And so would he, whether called O’Donovan or Carson or Cormac Samuel O’Connor.

He should warn Kongo, tell him of the danger, explain his own stupidity, and take responsibility, no matter what the consequences. But if he did run through the snow and find Kongo, the Africans would almost certainly cut the throat of Mary Burton and slide her into the river. Before morning. They had too much to lose and would easily sacrifice one life to free hundreds. But (Cormac thought) if Mary Burton vanishes, so will my child. If there is a child. If she hasn’t built a lie to trap me. To make me flee with her across the North River and into New Jersey and keep going until they found a place where she would be free. Some lost, hidden grove in the back of beyond.

He glimpsed himself in a wall mirror and hurled unspoken accusations: How could you have done this? How could you have been so weak? Why didn’t you see the trouble coming? Why after sliding into that water with her didn’t you simply go away? Why did you keep going back? Again and again. Drawn to the softness within her hardness. His answers to his own questions were shapeless. Nouns without verbs. Lust. Desire. Connection. Weakness.

And then he felt a great pity for Mary Burton, seeing her moving tearfully through the snow, slapped down by his words, infuriated by his coldness, a victim in some way of that Irish story, the story of his father, the story he could not tell her. He addressed explanations to her, ones he should have made, and still might make this snowy night. You see, he told the absent Mary Burton, there’s something I must do first. Something that comes before my own life and your life and the life of any unborn child. Something I must do, because if I don’t do it, if I don’t first avenge the murder of my father, I can never be free. My vow comes before Kongo too, and before the rising. It comes before everything.

Then, just past the door, he could see a lean, coarse-skinned man peering through the glass. He wore a crumpled suit, a scarf, a wool hat. Little puffs of steam pushed from his nose. He gestured to be admitted. As if relieved to be free of his anguish, Cormac unlatched the door.

“I need a broadside,” he said. Clipped English accent, accustomed to giving orders. “Quickly.”

“We’re closed, sir.”

“Is your master here?”

“Asleep, sir.”

The man exhaled in an exasperated way.

“Make an exception. This is for a ship arriving in a week’s time. We need two hundred posters no later than Saint Patrick’s Day. We intend to fill the hoardings of the town. First ship in—”

He fumbled in his jacket for a sheet bearing the copy, explaining that the bark was named the
Valiant,
carrying a consignment of raw sugar, rum, and thirty-six seasoned slaves. The first ship in two and a half months, since this bloody war over a bloody ear got serious. Politely, Cormac tried to explain that the Partridge shop didn’t do slaving business, but they could handle the sugar and the rum.

“Well, in that case… I’ll have to discuss it with the earl.”

Cormac’s heart skipped several beats. “Which earl is that, sir?”

“The Earl of Warren, young man. That’s why I’ve arrived so late. He lives way up in the bloody Bloomingdale.”

“I see. In that case, sir, I’m certain we can make an exception.”

The man smiled, showing crooked teeth, and handed Cormac the sheet of paper.

“Wonderful, wonderful. You can deliver them, of course? Here are the words, in the earl’s own hand. And—”

“I’ll need directions, of course.”

“Of course.”

They briefly discussed price and paper size and type fonts, then the directions to the earl’s mansion, and off the man went.

Cormac stared for a long while at the earl’s cursive writing. In the street, the snow was turning to a cold rain. He dressed in warm clothes and slipped into the night. He moved through the rain-pelted streets all the way to Hughson’s. Slivers of light leaked from the back door, and music strummed in a muted way. He went in and ordered a porter from John Hughson.

“Bloody wet night,” Hughson said. Then leaned forward and whispered: “Meeting tomorrow night.”

“I won’t be here,” Cormac said, glancing around the crowded room, searching for Mary Burton, who wasn’t there. Nor was Kongo or Quaco, Sandy or Diamond. “The master wants me to go to New Rochelle.”

“It’s important,” Hughson said. “Do we have your vote?”

“Whatever Kongo says.”

Then he saw Mary Burton coming in the blue door from the house, her eyes swollen, her mouth loose. She gathered empty glasses from a table. Then came toward the bar, muscles taut in her jaw. Cormac stepped aside, his back to Hughson, and whispered in her ear.

“Give me three days, Mary. I’ve business to clear up. Then we can talk.”

“Feck off.”

“Please,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be so cold back at the shop. I was just, well, shocked.” A pause. “And I’ve been thinking….”

She was listening but wouldn’t look at him. She ordered three porters and a rum flip from Hughson.

“Just, for God’s sake, don’t do anything rash,” he said.

She struggled for control.

“Three days…”

“Go away, Cormac,” she said. “For three days or three hundred.” She turned and plunged into the noise of the room, where three redcoats were singing songs about the King in one corner and six Africans were trying to push rhythm behind the tune.

Mr. Partridge was hesitant about breaking the rule against advertising for slaves. And he knew Cormac’s story. He knew the young man had carried a sword from Ireland to kill the Earl of Warren.

“I suppose you think the posters will gain you access to his house?” he said.

“Aye.”

“And then you’ll lop off his head.”

The way he said this made Cormac laugh. Partridge smiled too.

“I suppose—”

“You don’t
suppose
. That’s what you want to
do
.”

Cormac’s voice went cold. “I have no choice.”

Mr. Partridge looked at him for a long moment.

“I suppose you don’t.”

He gazed at the copy and then walked to the type tray.

“He should be killed just for what he does to the English language.”

They both laughed.

“But if you must do this dreadful thing,” Partridge said, “you must be smart. If you go directly to the house and send the wretch to perdition, they’ll have you with the hangman three days later. And I’ll lose the best apprentice I ever had—and the primary investor in this shop. So please: Use your head for something other than parking your hat.”

Cormac thought: He’s right.

That night, after most of the type was set (for there were two jobs even more urgent), Cormac wandered the town for an hour, the weather chilly but no longer wet or arctic cold. Near the Common, he gazed at the town’s two fire engines: side-stroked, goose-necked tub machines, with pump handles and foot treadles. If more than one blaze started at the same time, the town could burn to rubble. He’d seen the volunteers at one small fire, wearing old leather helmets slung low on the back of the neck to protect hair and skin, designed to be whipped around to cover the face. Remembering their foolish looks and clumsy efforts, he understood why the conspirators might believe in triumph. And yet he felt he could not join the rebellion without first killing the earl. Thinking: That’s why I’m here. That must happen first.

Either way, if the rebellion then succeeded or if it failed in a chaos of gunpowder and death, he could escape with Mary Burton. He could lead her across the river. He could try to find some refuge for both of them, and let all notions of permanence wait for the future. As he tried to imagine the future, he strolled through dark streets past the fort, where three prostitutes laughed together in the shadows. Zenger’s
Journal
called them “courtezans,” but there was nothing courtly about them. In daylight, their flesh was coarse, teeth missing. Better to work their sad trade in the dark. They called to Cormac, offering various services. He strolled on, ignoring them, looking at the high walls of the fort, thinking: This can’t work. New York could be taken without firing a shot; the English, after all, had taken it twice; but only if many-masted ships were in the harbor, loaded with cannon and soldiers. In New York, fear was more powerful than loyalty. But you created fear only with a show of force. The tutorials from Mr. Partridge were alive in his head. Wasn’t the older man right? The English were accustomed to cheap victories in their endless search for loot. But (thinking then in the face of the harbor wind) the Africans and the Irish of New York shared one terrible fact: In their own lands, they were defeated. Thinking: That’s why they’re here. Thinking: Defeat is a habit too.