The Whiskey Rebels (57 page)

I had traveled no more than a block or two from the tavern when I felt that the same shadow had been lurking behind me too long. During the war I had many times been in Philadelphia or New York or other occupied regions, and I was always alert to being followed. It is not a skill one forgets. Thus I sped up, and, feeling that my pursuer must also be speeding, I immediately turned around and headed back.

In doing so, I nearly collided with a tall and decomposing wreck of a man.

“Why,” I said, “’tis Isaac Whippo. Fancy seeing you here. I did not know this was the best part of town to pursue boy buggery.” Why I had taken such a strong dislike to the man eluded me, but I had, and that was enough for now. Perhaps it was because of his absurdly sinister appearance, perhaps because I felt I could treat him badly and get away with it.

Duer’s strange man glared at me but said nothing.

“You may tell Duer that if he wishes to know what I am about, he need only ask. He need not send a cadaver to come spying after me; it is something I don’t like.”

“And I don’t like you,” he said.

“Don’t say so, my good pudendum. Bit of a term of affection in Philadelphia. Strange place, that, but still. As I rather like you, I must shout it to the world.” I then raised my hands and called out to all who passed, “This man is my very dear pudendum!”

Big men, small men, great men, and disentombed men—there is no great difference. Most enter into situations thinking they will have to face this conflict or that. It has ever been my experience that if you present an alternative completely foreign to their expectations, it will end the encounter entirely. So it was with my friend Mr. Whippo. He skulked away like the mummified thing he was.

A
fter being followed by Mr. Whippo, I thought it best to disappear from the street for a short period of time. I therefore chose to divert myself with a visit to Dr. King’s celebrated exhibit on Wall Street to view his living menagerie of creatures. It turned out to be a cramped house of the most unspeakable odor, full of small cages in which raged a variety of unhappy creatures, including a pair of sloths, a pair of porcupines, monkeys of all descriptions, and even a male and female of the species known as orangutans. These were very tall, hairy creatures of a ginger color with uncannily long arms and lugubrious faces. Dr. King himself, making a proprietary pass through the exhibition hall, informed me that these creatures were every bit as intelligent as Negroes, but all my efforts at communication failed, and I ultimately decided his conclusions were overly optimistic.

Once it grew dark, I returned to Fraunces Tavern and sent one of the serving boys upstairs to find Leonidas. He had, he told me, been there for several hours but knew not where to find me, so he had chosen simply to wait. His visit to the Duer mansion had proved to be of little value. He had spoken to the serving staff once again and found them eager to gossip about their master, but in the end they had little to say that we did not already know. The six agents in Duer’s employ were to gather at his house for a meeting at eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, and from there they would proceed to Corre’s Hotel, where the Million Bank’s initial stock would be sold.

As he spoke I sensed a presence nearby, someone listening to our conversation. When I looked up I beheld Philip Freneau, who approached our table looking very pleased with himself. He sat down and stretched his legs out before him comfortably. “You asked if I could find Jacob Pearson,” he said. “It turns out that I can. You are impressed, I can tell. Of course, I have no intention of telling you where he is, but I thought you might be interested to learn that
he
now knows where
you
are.”

I said nothing. Leonidas leaned forward, his face only inches away from Freneau. “Are you implying that you are attempting to make certain some harm befalls Captain Saunders?”

He shrugged, apparently quite unafraid of Leonidas. I do not know I would have been so unafraid had he leaned in that way toward me, but Freneau merely smiled. “Oh, no. I am not a violent man and would never promote violence in others. I merely thought you might wish to know that Jacob Pearson appeared, to my eyes at any rate, quite agitated to learn of your presence.”

“What do you want, Freneau?” I asked. “I thought our business was done.”

“And it would have been done had you dealt with me honestly, but it seems that’s not your way, is it, Captain Saunders? Perhaps it is simply not the Hamilton way. I should even have been content to lick my wounds had you only dealt with me as dishonestly as I had at first thought, but when I returned home, I found you had been far more treacherous than I had suspected. You stole documents from my bag, and I would like them returned.”

“Stole from your bag?” I asked. “Good Lord, am I now a thief?”

“You stole them, and I want them back, and if you don’t return them to me you shall be very sorry, sir. I have given you but a hint of the harm I can do you.”

Leonidas poured himself a glass of wine. He was, of course, usually abstemious in his habits, but he knew well enough how to affect a cool demeanor to menacing effect. “Mr. Freneau, please take my advice,” Leonidas said. Even I found his calm unnerving. “Stand up and leave. We have nothing of yours and nothing you want. If Captain Saunders feels threatened, he will call upon me to protect him. You do not want that.”

Freneau’s face did seem to blanch, but he held his ground admirably, I had to admit. “Captain Saunders, I can do you genuine harm, and I don’t mean revealing your whereabouts to a man who hates you already. I can harm you in ways you would not care to think of, as regards your friend and slave. You know of what I speak. Now, return to me the documents you stole, and we shall forget this conversation ever took place.”

Could he know about my liberating Leonidas? I’d told no one, but I was not so naïve as to believe that such information, like all information, could not be bought and sold, if only someone recognized its value. I felt suddenly frightened. The issue at hand was of an act of generosity I had performed, but I understood full well how Leonidas, if the news was presented in a biased manner, might misunderstand my actions.

Seeming to understand my thoughts, Freneau smiled at me. “It is amazing how a man might visit an attorney and not trouble to learn he is a Jeffersonian in inclination.”

“Whatever he tells you,” I said to Leonidas, “is misleading at best. He cannot have all the facts, so let him speak, and we shall sort it out when the rascal leaves us be.” I attempted to sound confident, but I could not hide from myself the feeling of rapid descent from a precipice.

Leonidas stood again and looked at Freneau. “You have nothing to say to interest me.”

“Oh, you will want to hear this,” Freneau assured him.

“No, I won’t. Go,” Leonidas said.

I smiled at Freneau, seeing I had defeated him. Leonidas’s loyalty would win out over any trivial detail.

Freneau stood. “Very well.” He replaced his hat. “I see I am beaten.” He began to walk off but stopped short. “You must know you are a free man, Leonidas, and have been for weeks. Saunders took the trouble to free you, but he did not take the trouble to mention it?” He turned quickly, as if afraid of some punishment leaping out at him, and departed our company.

Leonidas and I watched him go, carefully avoiding each other’s gaze. It seemed to me impossible, given the momentousness of what was just said, that the others in the taproom paid us no mind, yet no eyes fell upon us, and our crisis came without notice. Men gathered in their clusters and drank and spoke and laughed. Life continued all around us, and yet it seemed we were upon a stage, a great light flooding down on us.

At last I turned to look at Leonidas, whose dark eyes were narrow and bloodshot and intense. “Do not say anything else,” he warned.

I leaned back in my seat. “Do make yourself easy, Leonidas. I had hoped to make this a surprise when our task was completed, but I see I must tell you now in order to avoid any resentment. A greater sense of ceremony would have been welcome, but now this will have to do. Yes, I made arrangements with a lawyer. Congratulations, sir, you are a free man.” I raised my glass to toast him.

It was a bittersweet moment, for I hated to let him go, but his freedom was long overdue. I hoped he would, in turn, look upon me in friendship and gratitude. This was not, I told myself, the end of my connection with Leonidas.

Yet the look on his face remained dark, harsh, unforgiving. He glowered and his breathing had quickened, and I understood something had happened, something terrible and unstoppable. “I have been a free man for weeks, and you did not tell me?”

“Well, I meant to, but then this business with Cynthia arose, and I could not spare you. I thought it best to postpone.”

He sucked in air as though he’d been slapped. “You did not trust me to continue to help you of my own accord?”

I stammered like a man explaining away a whore to his wife. “Of course I trusted you, but it hardly seemed necessary to make any big announcements when we had so much with which to concern ourselves. A month or two could hardly make a difference.”

“You had no right to hold a free man in servitude.”

“I think you are taking this out of context,” I said. “You were only free because I freed you. It’s not as though I captured you in the African jungle.”

“It doesn’t matter how I was freed. I was free and you continued to hold me,” he said, rising to his feet. “It is unforgivable.”

“No, no, no, you are focusing on the wrong things. I have reformed, Leonidas. I have freed you. I understand that this is a confusing moment, but you will sort it out. Sit. Have a drink. Let us talk about your plans.”

He remained quiet, in a pose of consideration. His face returned to its more customary sable, and his eyes returned to their traditional oval shape. He blinked at me a few times. Then he said, “I am going upstairs to collect my things, and then I am leaving.”

“What?” Now I stood. “You cannot leave me now. I am in the thick of it. You said I ought to have trusted that you would remain by my side, and now you threaten me with leaving.”

“I make no threats but a pronouncement. I cannot remain with a man who would use me so. Had you told me before, I would stay, but you did not. Goodbye, Ethan.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but he had already turned and I would not demean myself by calling after him like a jilted lover. Instead I sat and poured myself some of Duer’s wine. I sat and waited. I watched as he descended the stairs once more, and I watched as he turned to the door without once looking back toward me. I watched as he walked out into the cold New York night, leaving me entirely alone on the eve of crisis.

Joan Maycott

January 1792

I
’d thought to go alone and might well have done so. It was not that I did not trust the man I was to meet. In this whole affair, he seemed to me among the most honorable, perhaps curiously so. It was not a question of fear but one of power. Would it make me seem more powerful, I wondered, to go alone and thus show him how secure I felt, or to bring a man with me and show him I had more men in my orbit than he had seen? In the end, I chose the latter. The time had not yet come—if it
were
to come—to let him know how few we were. It hardly mattered, for we had achieved much and would, I believed, achieve all. The smallness of our numbers made us adaptable and agile, but to an outsider it might make us appear weak.

In earlier meetings, he had met Dalton and Richmond, so I brought with me Mr. Skye, who accepted the assignment with solemnity. Now it was dark, and we sat in our hired coach—I’d had Skye hire the plainest one he could find—on the side of a quiet street in an indifferent neighborhood. It was modest, but not poor, and by no means unruly. It was one of those parts of town where men labored hard for their few dollars and held to their homes with pride.

It was not yet nine, the hour of our meeting, and Skye and I sat in the dark. He sat perhaps closer to me than he ought to have, and I could smell the scent of him: leather and tobacco and the sweet hint of whiskey that clung to them all, all the whiskey rebels.

“What are his loyalties?” Skye asked, after a long silence. He spoke quietly, almost a whisper, though I did not think such discretion was necessary. I did not think he believed the question necessary either. He spoke so as to have something to say.

“Right now I think he’s loyal to himself,” I said, “which means as long as we continue to pay him, he will serve us. We have to be careful, however, not to push him too far or make him fear that anything he does will hurt someone he cares about. I suspect no amount of money will make him do harm.”

“No, of course not, else you would not have recruited him. His limitations are why you trust him.”

I laughed. “You are wise.”

“And you are impressive. More impressive than I can say.” I felt him take my hand. “Joan,” he said, “so much has happened—to both of us—and I would never imagine that you could put your grief for Andrew aside. Yet you are alive, a vibrant woman, and I should be a strange sort of man were I not moved by your courage and leadership—and, yes, beauty.”