The Whiskey Rebels (5 page)

He had seemed beyond shocking, yet this shocked him. “Miss Claybrook—”

“Given our new familiarity, it would be better to call me Joan.”

“Miss Claybrook,” he repeated, “if I did not know better, I should think you had just arrived here from some distant island, or newly freed from captivity with the Indians. If I were not a man of honor, you would be placing yourself in grave danger.”

“Then I depend upon your being a man of honor. I do not suggest anything untoward, Andrew. Men court women with a great deal of regularity, and it is perfectly acceptable. It is possible that, once we spend some time together, we may discover that we do not like each other well enough, so that will be the end of it. I only propose we find out.”

“But this is not the way it is done. You are obviously a clever girl and know that.”

“What happened to the Revolution?” I asked.

He laughed. “Perhaps you have outsmarted me.”

“Oh, there is no
perhaps
about it, but I have no doubt you will have your revenge.”

He bowed. “You are too kind.”

“I am just kind enough.” I was thoroughly myself now. He and I were comfortable, and his beauty ceased to frighten me. It charmed me and thrilled me, but I began to feel at home in its presence. “The truth is, Andrew, that I hope someday to write a novel, and I thought it might provide for an interesting experience if I were to make bold with you.”

He blinked at me, like a sleepy cat. “You speak to me this way so you can turn our conversation into a novel? You do not really wish me to court you?”

“Oh, of course I do,” I said. “But my being so direct was, I admit, a sort of experimentation, for I require some experiences. I have had too few. Come, pray don’t be cross. I should not have spoken to you thus if I did not like you.”

“But what sort of novel?” It was not a question I had anticipated, and it delighted me.

“The one I like best is Mr. Fielding’s
Amelia.
”

“That’s a good one,” he said.

“You see? Already we are compatible. Not only do you read novels, which I’m told most men do not, or at least do not admit to, but your taste in novels is sound. Do you not think that courting me would be a good idea?”

“Miss Claybrook, I do not believe there is anything anyone could say that could possibly dissuade me from courting you.” With this he began to walk again upon the road, bringing his walking stick down more jauntily than before.

We spent some moments in comfortable silence. Then he said, “Would you be so good as to tell me about your novel?”

How like him, I thought—though I hardly knew him and had no business deciding what he was like or unlike—to get so quickly to the heart of it. “That’s precisely the difficulty. I haven’t a notion of what to write about.”

Andrew laughed.

Perhaps it was childish, but I felt wounded. “You think my difficulties amusing?”

“Not at all,” he said. “I only like the thoughtful way your brow wrinkles when you wrestle with them. But, pray, tell me why you have such trouble telling your story.”

Even as I had been studying his face, glorying in his handsomeness, it had not occurred to me that he would regard me the same way, and I felt myself blush. “If I am to write a novel, I wish for it to be an
American
novel, not a mere imitation of what is done in England. I don’t want to move Tom Jones or Clarissa Harlowe to New York and set them to running about with Indians or fur trappers. The book must be American in its essence, don’t you think?”

Again he stopped and stared at me. “You are a clever woman and, if I may say so, a true revolutionary. I believe the war would have been over three years ago had you sat in the Continental Congress.”

“You tease me,” I said.

He looked me in the eye so I could see his earnestness. “I do no such thing, I promise you. You, on your farm, in isolation, have understood more about the Revolution and the new country than half our politicians and generals. We cannot do things the old way but must make our own new way. Though, to be honest, I am not entirely certain what an American novel would look like.”

“English novels are almost always about property,” I said. “Estates miraculously inherited or diabolically stolen. There are marriages, of course, but these marriages, regardless of protestations of affection, are ever about land and estates, holdings and rents, not about love, not really. I don’t want to write a novel about property. Here, in America, property is abundant so it is held cheap. It is not what it is in England: precious and scarce and hard to retain.”

Andrew stroked his chin and then nodded, as though listening to a voice only he could hear. “The American novel, if it is to be honest, must be about money, not property. Money alone—base, unremarkable, corrupting money.”

The moment he spoke, I knew he was quite right. I would write a novel about money. The notion contained such power over me that it was as though we were already married, and I took his arm and pulled him toward me. His brilliant suggestion, I knew, would be important, but I could not yet know that it would change everything.

Ethan Saunders

C
ynthia Pearson had come to my home to ask for help. So many questions, so much confusion, and yet this fact stood out. This fact and one other—that it
had
been Cynthia I’d seen hurrying away from my house that morning. I was not a deluded fool dwelling pathetically on his past. The past, it seemed, was coming back for me.

I drained my whiskey and turned to Lavien. “Why were you following her?” I did not like the thought of someone so ready to slice off a man’s thumb slinking around in the dark after Cynthia Pearson.

His expression was calm and easy. “I have been looking for her husband, Jacob Pearson, but with no success.”

I remembered Jacob Pearson well. During the British occupation, I’d been in Philadelphia for nearly three months, attempting to infiltrate an enemy spy ring. Richard Fleet—my friend, my teacher, my fellow spy, the man who had recruited me into the business—had asked me to look after his daughter, then living in the city. He had not asked me to fall in love with her, granted, but these things often come unexpected.

During those months I’d met her future husband, Jacob Pearson, a successful dealer in properties, who managed to remain in the city, avoid the taint of royalism, and grow even more wealthy after the end of the war by snatching up properties from British sympathizers who were forced to flee. Pearson was perhaps five years older than I, not unattractive in person, and while he and I had never been friends, I had never had any reason to dislike the man. Not until circumstances forced me to flee Philadelphia, to leave Cynthia for her own happiness, and Pearson so successfully took my place.

“Why are you looking for him?” I asked Lavien.

“So I might speak to him,” he answered, holding my gaze a moment longer than he needed to, as if daring me to treat his answer as anything other than illuminating.

“Speak to him about what, Mr. Lavien?”

“Speak to him about things that do not concern you, Captain Saunders.”

“Once you start slinking about in the shadows, following people who come to visit me, it becomes my business, does it not?”

“No.”

I cleared my throat. “Well, you’ve quite thoroughly demonstrated your inscrutability, and now I know that if there is to be give-and-take between us, you wish to maintain always the upper hand, but you
are
going to tell me more of what you know, so let us not pretend otherwise. You came to find me, sir, and if you came to find me, it is because you want something from me, and since you shall not get it without telling me more, we might as well move forward to that part of the conversation.”

A faint smile crossed his lips. “For a beaten drunkard, you know your craft.”

I liked him for saying so. “Now, you work for Hamilton, and you want Pearson, and Cynthia Pearson herself is looking for me. Tell me what I need to know.”

“I can’t and won’t tell you why I want him. I have taken an oath of silence to reveal what I learn to none but Secretary Hamilton or the President, and I’ll not break that oath. I can tell you that the man is missing, and has been for several days. I believe that is why his wife wishes to speak with you. She knew you from the war, I believe.”

“Her father and I worked together. He was my friend.”

“I see,” he said, evidently seeing a great deal. He was no fool, this Lavien.

“You’ve already spoken to Mrs. Pearson, I imagine.”

“Of course,” Lavien answered. “She was kind enough to grant me an interview, but she claimed total ignorance of her husband’s whereabouts.”

“Did you believe her?” asked Leonidas. He and I had been together a long time. He knew what to ask.

Lavien nodded. “I did. Mrs. Pearson did not at all strike me as a woman dissembling, only as a woman uneasy. A woman whose husband is missing may very well display concern, but she struck me as agitated. I believe there were things upon her mind she did not speak of, but I doubt if she lied about knowing where to find Mr. Pearson.”

“So you followed her to my home tonight. Then what happened?”

“After she was admitted, she emerged a few minutes later in the company of Leonidas. She proceeded to return to her carriage, so I inquired of Leonidas the nature of her business.”

“And you told him?” I asked Leonidas.

“He serves the government,” he answered. “I saw no reason to withhold what was said, especially since he already knew many of the particulars. Mr. Lavien asked if he might accompany me to find you.”

“It was my hope,” said Lavien, “that, in your company, Mrs. Pearson might be more forthcoming and say things she had withheld from me.”

I took a moment to consider everything he said and to make myself comfortable with these surprises. Then I asked an obvious question. “Why does Cynthia believe herself and her children in danger?”

“That I cannot say,” Leonidas answered.

I pushed myself to my feet. Pain exploded within my head, and I had to grasp the side of the table to keep from falling over, but I steadied myself, and the worst of it soon passed. “Time to find out,” I said to Leonidas.

“May I join you?” asked Lavien.

“And what if I should say no?”

Lavien’s mouth twitched. “Better not to explore that possibility.”

I looked at him, prepared to let him know that his company was provisional, and if I did not like what he did or said, I should banish him at once. I said nothing, however, because I’d witnessed him in a flash of lightning, in the blink of an eye, overcome and disable three men. If he wished to join me against my will, I had no notion of how I might stop him.

B
y the time we left, the rain had mostly abated and we walked through the muddy ruins of Helltown. The walk did me good, set my blood to flowing, worked the pain out of my system. I’ve never been particularly good at fighting, it being a rough sort of work best left to rough men, and I’d learned long ago how to handle a beating with equanimity. Also, I had more important things to consider. Cynthia was in some sort of trouble, and she came to me. I’d only been in Philadelphia for four months, following my flight from Baltimore and a misunderstanding involving a cousin or niece or some such. Cynthia somehow knew I now lived here, and in her time of trouble she’d turned to me. No pain could compete with my curiosity, my buoyant and irrational enthusiasm at the thought of having, once more, some contact with her. I was not so ready to disregard reason as to believe that somehow, against hope and propriety, we might be together. I only wanted to see her, to hear her, to have her near.

As we moved, silent and huddled in the cold, toward the center of the city, the landscape metamorphosed from an outlying camp of poverty and debauchery to the height of American propriety. The streets, as if changed by magic, were all at once bricked, with lamps lit on walkways and watch houses occupied. The homes were no longer makeshift affairs, serviceable and expedient huts of castaway wood and thatch, but Philadelphia redbrick, stately and handsome, with stone fences that hid clever little gardens.

Jacob Pearson’s house, at the corner of Third and Shippen, was one of these. It was no great monument to American wealth like the Bingham house, or like the Morris mansion where the President resided, but it was a large and stately home of three stories, surrounded by denuded apple and—appropriately—pear trees, shrubs, bushes, and plots set aside for flower gardens when the weather turned warm. Pearson’s home was made of the same redbrick as the house where I rented, yet here was wealth on an order I could never hope to attain. Looking upon this fine building, could I wonder why Cynthia had married him?

During our walk, I’d heard the church bells strike ten, but Pearson’s home was bright with lit candles, and from the outside it looked a hub of activity. The rain, light though it had become, undid my time before the fire, and we were quite wet by the time the three of us approached. I stood upon the porch and contemplated the knocker. There was, I understood, no way to prepare myself for what must happen next, no way to make myself ready. There was nothing to it but to move forward. I wished I could face Cynthia in a clean suit, unbloodied and neatly ordered, but it was not to be. She thought herself in danger, and I would not ask her to wait while I made myself fit for presentation.