Forever (27 page)

61.

T
hey worked across the day into the night. Around seven, Mr. Par
tridge was joking about the contents of a marital document asking for a legal separation, and musing on the folly of man. Then from the street they heard a shout followed by an excited response. Someone ran past the front of the shop. They went out together, locking the shop door behind them, and turned the corner. There was a red glow in the sky above Fort George. The wind was now blowing hard off the harbor. The rising had begun.

They were hurrying now, Mr. Partridge huffing with his exertions but alert to his surroundings. Citizens were running toward the fort, and they heard the word “fire” over and over again: shouted, called, bellowed. They neared the fort and then there was a surge of people, and scattered redcoats, and the sound of bells ringing. Mr. Partridge went one way, Cormac another.

Great orange tongues of flame roared and twisted angrily against the inky sky. The air was grainy with the odor of burning wood. Firemen arrived with their two new engines, but the water came in useless dribbles. The fire roared and Cormac could see now that it was also consuming the mansion of the governor, beyond the burning ramparts. Redcoats watched with muskets pointed toward the fort but with nobody to shoot. Tongues of fire were aimed at the houses on lower Broadway, and the crowd backed away. Sparks scattered into the sky, and Cormac’s mind flashed on sparks from a lost forge scattering across the Irish sky, aspiring to be stars.

He cut into an alley behind the Lutheran church, trying to see the fort from the river side. The alley was piled high with barrels and crates, and reeked of garbage. Then two other people rushed into the alley. Cormac flattened himself against the wall and saw Quaco running, holding the hand of his wife. An African woman, hair piled high, struggling to run in long skirts, panting. Behind them were two redcoats. Quaco’s eyes were alarmed and furious. He saw Cormac. Started to say something. But pulled his wife’s hand and kept running. Cormac saw a redcoat drop to a knee and take aim. And he stepped away from the wall, placing himself between the aimed musket and the fleeing African couple.

An enraged British voice: What are. Who is. Stop now.

Then Cormac jerked at the barrels and they came tumbling down with a great bumping clatter, filling the width of the alley, and Cormac ran too.

He made a wide circle to the north, crossing Broadway, and found Mr. Partridge in the crowd.

“Where did you go?” he said. “I’ve been worried sick.”

“First I was looking for you. Then I wanted a better view.”

Mr. Partridge gestured toward the burning fort.

“This could be a right disaster.”

Buckets were being passed from man to man. A portly constable named Michaels burst into the crowd, announcing another fire to the east, on the near end of Pearl Street. He asked for help and men followed him away from the glow of the burning fort. Suddenly four ferocious detonations split the air and rocked the ground, one immediately followed by the next, as the ammunition in the fort exploded. Cormac was knocked to his back. Mr. Partridge hit the wall of a house and slid down to a sitting position. Behind them, splintered windowpanes fell upon the streets. Missiles of stone and broken timber hurtled through the air. Cormac got up and hauled Mr. Partridge to his feet. Women were screaming and men shouting, and everybody was running, including Cormac and Mr. Partridge. They ran directly into Peter Zenger. He was thin, harried, trembling with excitement.

“Is zis your boy, Partridge?” Zenger said, his reedy voice thick with a German accent.

“My man, sir.”

“Can he zet type?”

“Yes.”

“Can I borrow him tonight? I have a man out zick und—”

“It’s up to him.”

“I’d be glad to help, Mister Zenger.”

“Gut. Go to my zhop now. I’ll be along in a vile.”

All night, Cormac worked for Peter Zenger. His first newspaper job. Setting type for the
Weekly Journal
. Correcting Zenger’s mangled English copy. Writing two brief stories himself. The reports kept coming in, gathered by Zenger himself or delivered by citizens exploding with gossip and outrage. Reports of Irishmen laughing, Africans running away from the fires (for there were four fires now, including the fort and the mansion). Quaco and his wife were among those who ran, but Cormac wrote nothing about them. As the night went on and on, there were scarier reports: Some of the Irish and the Africans were seen with guns.
Did you see zem mit guns? No, but I heard—Zank you very much.
Cormac knew it was a rising, and he wanted to be part of it. But they had not asked him to join, had not assigned him a part to play. He set type. He absorbed information.

Around five in the morning, there was good news for the English, if bad for the rebels. The wind had shifted. It began blowing out toward the harbor, away from the houses of Broadway and the larger town. The third fire, nine blocks away from the fort, had destroyed a warehouse. The owner was dead. Rumor said that an African had caved in his head with a frying pan. Through the night, Zenger understood what was happening.

“Zey vant to burn New York to the ground!” he said. “It’s der Irishers und der blacks against der vites!”

Cormac forced himself not to laugh, and kept working without comment until all the forms were locked up. Zenger thanked him and paid him two shillings. His eyes were sore and bleary, but he did not go home. He walked through the ash-gritty air to Hughson’s. No lights were burning. He knocked at the back door. Nobody came to open it. He knocked again. An upstairs window opened a few inches.

“Yes, what is it?”

“I need to talk to Mary.”

“Good luck.”

“Is she asleep?”

“No,” Sarah Hughson said. “She’s flown.”

And closed the window hard.

He stood there for a long moment, then moved toward the waterfront, hoping to come around far from the fire and make his way down Broadway to Cortlandt Street. He could see a boat moving north on the river, with masked men lying low on the deck, but there were no ships of the Spanish fleet. His mind filled with dark possibilities.

She’s flown.

She’s flown.

62.

W
hen he woke up, the city had changed forever. Until that night,
the well-fed, respectable whites had convinced themselves that slaves loved being slaves. That they were happy and secure and accepted their inferiority. The Africans and the Irish both knew they were nothing (or so the theory went) and therefore were happy to have food to eat and a roof above their humble, worthless heads. Now, on the morning after, the English knew better.

The fire was out at last, the king’s fort a settling, smoking pile of glistening charcoal. Only one wall of the governor’s mansion remained standing. Cormac moved through the crowd gazing at the ruins, hoping to see Mary Burton staring in satisfaction or anger. She wasn’t among the gathering audience. But as he moved, he heard the same words dripping from angry tongues: Africans, Irish, Catholics, traitors. There were more questions than answers. Is the Spanish fleet coming? Will New York be taken and the papists installed in Trinity? Will all the whites be murdered? Someone suggested in a reasonable way that an African laborer using solder on a pipe might have accidentally set off the blaze in Fort George. He was laughed at by some and lacerated with words by others.
You bloody fool, can’t you see what this is?
Even a few women shook fists at him, calling him a traitor to God, King, Anglicanism, and the white race. The man backed away and then drifted out of the crowd.

In the shop on Cortlandt Street, Mr. Partridge had other news: Two Africans were under arrest for stealing silverware. Caesar and Prince. They’d buried it under floorboards in Hughson’s Tavern on Stone Street. “A true pair of master criminals!” Mr. Partridge exclaimed. “And Hughson no better! Idiots! Fools!” And that discovery of the stolen goods led to a fresh theory, one with its own banal logic: The fire at the fort was set to cover the crime. That was all. “Not a revolt, but a burglary!” said Mr. Partridge. And it seemed certain that one of the thieves, Caesar, had fathered a child with a white woman. “It’s a fever out there, lad!” More seriously, he whispered, a much wider conspiracy was being exposed.

“They have an informer,” he said. “Some Irish wench. They’ve promised her money and freedom, and she can’t stop talking.”

Cormac’s stomach flopped.

Mary Burton.

Turned informer.

Talking her way to freedom.

That afternoon the reaction began. A grand jury was convened, complete (Mr. Partridge observed) with a Grand Inquisitor named Daniel Horsmanden. The eminent jurors now had a secret list of names. And the authorities vowed to quash this treasonous revolt as swiftly as possible. Working in the print shop, often alone, Cormac tried to absorb the rush of news. The Hughsons were arrested and swiftly condemned, with Mary Burton the chief witness against them. Hughson blubbered, said a man who’d been inside the jury room, while Sarah shouted her innocence. Three more fires broke out, and the hysteria increased. Within hours, Caesar and Prince were hanged on the ridge overlooking the Collect Pond, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves in the African cemetery on Duane Street. Cormac didn’t see this happen; the event was carried into the shop by Mr. Partridge. “Stay away from these insane crowds,” Mr. Partridge warned Cormac. “They’ll be searching every face for proof of allegiance.”

English flags blossomed on many buildings, some of them sewn together overnight, serving now as declarations of loyalty to the Crown. Another fire broke out. Then Hughson was hanged, sobbing, protesting, claiming his innocence, demanding a fair hearing. As soon as his neck was snapped by the rope, young Sandy was placed above the drop. He showed no emotion. His last word before death was “Freedom!” The authorities left the two corpses dangling for days, as a warning to Africans and Irishmen. Cormac came around two days later. Hughson’s body had turned black, while the African’s body had turned white. Some of the more fanatical citizens saw this as a dark omen.

Mary Burton was hidden away somewhere, protected by agents of the grand jury, but she must not have given them Cormac’s name. His proof of this theory was simple: Nobody came knocking on the print shop door at midnight. Cormac could not find Kongo, but he was sure he was alive because even the reaction didn’t stop the fires. Flames destroyed the sumptuous home of Captain Peter Warren, no relative of the earl but the brother-in-law of James De Lancey, who was the most powerful politician in town and chief justice of the New York colony. De Lancey was enraged and as a member of the grand jury swore brutal reprisals. “He’s making this personal now,” Mr. Partridge said, “and that means more deaths, more hangings.” Then Van Zandt’s warehouse erupted in flame. Cormac sensed Kongo’s plan: to create fear and uncertainty while the rebels waited for the arrival of the Spanish frigates.

From the first day after the fire at the fort, the constables and redcoats started rounding up the Africans and the Irish and packing them into the new Bridewell prison. After three days, it was bursting. An abandoned warehouse on Water Street was seized by the army and used for more prisoners. Then several run-down private houses were filled with Africans. Shopkeepers complained that they could not operate their businesses because so many slaves and Irishmen had been imprisoned. De Lancey snarled, “You’ll have no businesses at all if we don’t smash this rabble now.”

A few men were released because, as Mr. Partridge explained, they were not on Mary’s lists. But many prisoners were threatened and beaten, and dozens were tortured. “If you torture a man badly enough,” Mr. Partridge said, “he’ll say whatever is necessary to stop the torture, even if it means lying.” Mr. Partridge refused to allow Cormac to go out on the streets—“Every young Irishman is a suspect”—and now delivered his work himself, shuffling along, trying to look old. Cormac slept with the sword in his hands.

But they didn’t come for him. Mary Burton, the great accuser, was also his guardian. He tried to imagine her at that moment, and how she felt after giving names, and what she thought about before sleep came. Was she truly carrying a child? Was it his child? Had she arranged with the grand jury to be allowed to vanish, with a new name and new papers and some money to give her a start? Did she understand that now she would never be free? Dark avengers would track her down. If she had a child, its name would be stained by her betrayal. Perhaps she didn’t care. Perhaps she wanted to die. Perhaps she was not with child at all. Perhaps she simply wanted to erase every humiliation she had ever endured. Perhaps. Mary Burton was a perhaps.

On a Friday in April, Quaco’s friend Diamond was led to a spot of ground on the Common, sentenced to die for starting the fire at the fort. Cormac insisted to Mr. Partridge that he must be there, saying, “I know this man,” and Mr. Partridge argued, cautioned, sighed, and wished him Godspeed. The Grand Inquisitor had made his ruling: Fire must be repaid with fire. Almost every white person in town came to watch this burning at the stake, except the haughty merchants and the grand jurors who had passed the sentence. And in the crowd, Cormac saw a familiar face, now hollow-eyed, grizzled, filthy, his clothes grafted together from various shades and textures of black. The Rev. Clifford.

“The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away,” he chanted in a singsong voice. “What comes, goes. What goes, comes. All ends in death and fire. All ends in the flames of Hell. All sinners must burn… and we are all sinners.”

Cormac eased away from him, as if he carried some terrible contamination. So did others in the crowd. Cormac stared at the scene, trying to record every detail without being seen to write notes. A rough, freshly skinned post had been driven into the earth, with a pile of dry kindling and split logs at its foot. A man wearing a hood and a black woolen suit watched patiently while a clean-shaven clergyman in black read from a Bible. He was a more grave, more solemn echo of the Rev. Clifford, clean, clear-eyed, well-dressed, but delivering a more hopeful version of the same message. We are all sinners. Repent, all of ye, repent.

But on this late morning, his last on earth, Diamond was impenitent. He walked to the stake with his head high, his face composed, and a look of contempt in his eyes. Some turned away from his scalding look as he was tied to the post. Others cheered when the hooded man ignited the kindling.
“Off to hell, you savage!”
a plummy voice bellowed, while others laughed. Cormac saw the Rev. Clifford speaking directly to the sky, his words lost in the general chatter.

But then there was silence, even from the Rev. Clifford, as the flames gathered strength, and Diamond writhed and his mouth opened against his will and they could smell a sickening odor and the flames rose around the African’s head. Then Diamond screamed. He screamed and he screamed and he screamed. A woman fainted. And the screaming went on. The flames crackled and sparked and roared. And finally Diamond was burned into silence. His smoking body didn’t move. The flames kept burning, poisoning the air with the odor of ruined flesh. Some black flakes of his charred skin floated above the pyre.

And then the Rev. Clifford began to laugh. A wild, high-pitched cackle of a laugh. Laced with pleasure. With satisfaction. With death. A heavyset man shoved him rudely, as if to force him into solemnity, but Clifford fell to his knees, laughing and laughing, and rolled to his side and drew up his legs and plunged his clenched hands between his thighs until the laughter turned to tears.

Cormac felt nauseated. At what was done to Diamond. At the sight of the Rev. Clifford. He turned away, fighting off a surge of vomit. He needed clean air and there was no clean air. Others trudged away in silence, stained by the odor of burning human flesh and burning human fat and burning human blood. But as he walked south toward Cortlandt Street, Cormac noticed that some men had not had enough. Their nostrils flared, their eyes glittered, they formed angry clusters on the Common and shouted for more hangings, more burnings, more death. That night, they gathered together as the first of the mobs.