The Tory Widow (34 page)

“Better than rotting in a prison hulk, I guess,” Titus said.

“Here's to our poor brothers behind bars . . .” Tully took a deep slug from the bottle.

“Say, Tully, is the Cup and Quill still in business?” Jack asked.

“A-yup . . . reopened as the
Royal
Coffeehouse . . .”

“And crawlin' with bloodybacks it is,” Dodd added. “As much as I miss Sally's scones, I don't go near the place.”

“A-yup,” Tully agreed. “The widow's turned Tory again.”

“Naw.” Titus shook his head. “Mrs. Anne's only getting by in hard times.”

“Believe it, lads. A Tory-come-lately she is.” Dodd munched on a handful of almonds. “I've seen her strolling along Broad Way in her fancy dresses, face rouged, hanging on to her handsome dragoon's arm, batting her eyelashes, all a-giggle.”

“Fancy dresses?” Jack repeated.

“All a-giggle?” Titus snorted.

“Aye.” Dodd shagged his head up and down. “Ye wouldn't know her.”

Tully passed the port along. “The world's turned upside down, it is.”

Jack upended the bottle, gulping every last drop. Quiet for a few moments, tossing the empty bottle from one palm to the other, he jumped up a sudden, and hurled it against the rocks. The explosion of shattered glass echoed up and down the river, sending a great flock of snowy egrets and night herons croaking and flapping up into the sky.

Tully gave Jack a shove. “Are you bloody mad?”

“D'ye mean t' bring the bleedin' fleet down upon our heads?” Dodd hissed.

“C'mon—help us shove off,” Jack growled and marched off to the boat, taking his seat at the front of the pettiauger. Titus climbed into his seat by the tiller. The smugglers put their shoulders to the prow and sent the boat off into a river spangled with the light of countless stars.

Throwing every muscle in his body into propelling the boat forward, Jack dug the oars into the water to the beat of his heart pounding in his head, the cast-iron token hanging by a thong around his neck thumping to his chest with every motion forward and back. He thought he could feel steam rise from the top of his head.

“Dodd is an idiot,” Titus said.

Jack dropped the oars onto his lap, twirled around and snapped, “What about Tully?”

“You left her there for eight months.” Titus shrugged. “Mrs. Anne is doing what she must to survive, but she's no Tory.”

Jack heaved a sigh. “You're probably right—as usual.” He turned back to his oars. Still with the current, their pettiauger cruised south at a fast clip, hugging the coast. “Take the turn just beyond this bend, Titus . . .”

Titus pulled in his oars, and steered the boat up a wide marshy creek bordered by tall sedge grass, maneuvering the boat to travel up the center of the shallow waterway.

Jack pulled to a stop at the first sound of the pettiauger scraping along the muddy streambed, and he tugged off his boots and stockings. “I'll be right back.” Hopping over the side, he sloshed through knee-high water, and scrambled up the soft riverbank.

Running across the spongy ground, Jack cut across the marsh to the apple orchard, crawling in long, even rows up and over the crest of a low, rolling hill. He followed the third row over from the right, counting six trees up, and fell to his knees.

A soft breeze rustled through the tree leaves, and a cowbell clunked in the distance. Jack reached into a natural cleft at the base of the tree trunk and pulled out a small leather-wrapped bundle. Tucking it under his arm, he jogged back to the creek. Holding it above his head as he sloshed through the water, he put the delivery into Titus's hands, turned the boat around to face the river and pulled himself back into it. Titus unwrapped the package.

“Why do you bother? I suspect it's the same as always.” Jack pulled an oar from the lock, and used it to push off the creek bottom.

“Yep.” Titus affirmed. Within the leather wrapping he uncovered a ream of foolscap paper, wrapped in brown paper, bundled with a length of inch-wide grosgrain ribbon tied in a pert bow. As per usual, Titus pulled the bow loose and flipped through every page. “Nothing. The same as always. An awful lot of risk and bother—if you ask me—for us to pick up and deliver a stack of blank paper.”

Jack continued to pole the craft into deeper water. “No one's asking you.”

Titus retied the ribbon, rewrapped the ream in its leather cover, stuffed the bundle into his gunnysack and took up the tiller.

The pettiauger accomplished the wide turn north up the East River. Titus hoisted their sail, and they skimmed along on the wind. Jack straddled the cross-thwart and laid back on it, taking a moment to catch a breath and watch the constellations roll by. Groping inside his shirtfront, he found the favor Anne had given him, and draped the lace-edged linen over his face. The vestiges of lavender combined with the sweat from her soft breasts to send Jack to a place where he lay in the dark curled against Anne's back, his nose buried in her hair . . .

. . . Her handsome dragoon
. Jack jerked to a sit. Crumpling the hanky into a tight wad in his fist, he pounded the side of his leg. That's what Dodd had said.
Her
handsome dragoon.

“I've been thinking, Titus—after we deliver this cargo, I'm going into the city to fetch Anne . . .”

“I don't know, Jack,” Titus pondered. “You heard what Tully and Dodd had to say about the provost—I think it's still too dangerous for you to go there . . .”

“No, Titus . . .” Jack stuffed the crumpled handkerchief back inside his shirt. “It's too dangerous to leave her there.”

 

 

ENCAPSULATED within a small sphere of candlelight illuminating his desktop, William Cunningham hunched over in shirtsleeves, sharp shoulders pinched up to his ears, scratching his pen across a sheet of foolscap with a precise hand.

The thick bayberry candle sputtered, and the annoying flicker bounced in the corner of his eye. The provost marshall set his quill down and poked with a ragged fingernail to raise the slumping wick foundering in a pool of melted wax. Burning bayberry helped to mitigate the malignant odor endemic to the Provost Prison, but it made for poor light—not as bright or lasting as a whale oil lamp for doing book work after dark.

Cunningham scrubbed the stubbly hair on the back of his head, took a long drink from the bottle of rum and eyed the sum total at the bottom of the second column on the page. He was required to submit a weekly report to General Howe, an accounting of the prisoners under his charge, and he was always prompt in delivering it first thing Friday mornings.

Rations and supplies for the prisoners were allocated based on Cunningham's “meticulous” figures. He traced a finger along the list of prisons under his purview. Most of the rebel soldiers captured on Long Island and in the taking of Manhattan were held in makeshift prisons—three sugarhouses, four dissenter churches and King's College. The only facilities designed and built as jails—New Bridewell and the Provost Prison, where he kept his quarters—housed officers, some enlisted men, common criminals and anyone suspected of treason. He had recently shifted several hundred landmen to the three prison hulks moored on Wallabout Bay, originally intended for the incarceration of smugglers and seamen from captured privateers.

“Waterborne rebel scum,” he muttered, sucking another gulp from his bottle.

Under the second column headed
Living
, the provost claimed a total of 3,896 prisoners. The column headed
Arrivals
totaled eighty-six. He studied the empty column headed
Mortality
for a moment, fingering the bumpy scar curving from the nape of his neck to just above his left temple.

He always kept a very accurate count of new arrivals—but there was no wringing of hands over the death count. The provost picked up his quill and filled in the blank spaces with a series of arbitrary numbers off the top of his head, totaling twenty-two.

Cunningham smirked, leaning back in his chair. Twenty-two dead—plausible, but not alarming—that was the kind of paper and ink mortality number he aimed for. Lacing fingers, he stretched his long arms over his head, eliciting a satisfying crackle from his knuckles. He had no idea how many prisoners had died over the course of the week, and neither did he care.

The standard allotment provided by the Crown for the keeping of prisoners was calculated at two pounds each of hardtack and pork per prisoner, per week. He scribbled some figures on a scrap of rough paper and smiled. Taking into account the bribes necessary in order to accommodate the sale, plus the ever-inflating market prices, he and Loring, the commissary, stood to share at minimum a tidy two-hundred-pound profit by selling off half of the next week's rations. He was very pleased.

Cunningham drew the watch from the pocket on his weskit and checked the hour—half past eleven. “Sergeant O'Keefe!” he shouted. “
O'Keefe!
Get in here now, you fuckin' miserable bog trotter!”

His deputy came bumbling from quarters across the hall, in shirttails and stockinged feet. The barrel-chested Irishman misjudged the doorway, and though his protruding belly absorbed the brunt of the collision, he still managed to give his forehead a good knock against the jamb.

“It's the likes of you what give us Irish a black name—drunken sot!”

“Not drunk . . .” Michael O'Keefe wavered on his feet, greasy hair swaying in limp hanks about his face. He belched. “Just fell asleep is all.”

“Drunken
lying
bastard—look at you—standing there with a face the color of the devil's nutbag . . .” Cunningham stood and leaned over his desk, the nostrils on his sharp nose flaring in disgust. “
Feh!
You're wearing sick all over your shirt . . .”

The deputy smeared a thumb over the suspicious substance, and shrugged.

The provost shook his head and fell back into his chair. “I want you to go and fetch a few necks to stretch, from”—he referred to his list—“Van Cortlandt's Sugar House.”

“What time is it?” O'Keefe ground the heel of his palm into his eye. “Ye know we get complaints from the neighbor women when we scragg 'em this late.”

“Never mind the time . . .” Cunningham's Adam's apple jerked up and down the shaft of his neck, as if he had swallowed a thing yet alive. “I am of a mind to see some rebels dangle and dance.”

“Aye . . . awright . . .” O'Keefe raked his hair back. “Where's Richmond?”

Cunningham pushed the candledish to the far left edge of the desk, sending light to shine on Richmond sitting in a chair. Staring with watery eyes, mouth slightly agape, his hands lay loose, palms up in his lap. The half-caste slave was dressed in baggy tow trousers and shirt, his waist-length hair twisted by neglect into a dozen snakelike locks, almost as thick as the hangman's rope he liked to wear draped over his shoulder.

“Jaysus!” O'Keefe startled. “Bloody unnerving—him sittin' there in the dark like that.” The sergeant's eye darted to the bottle on the provost's desk. Sweeping a furry tongue over fleshy lips, he asked, “How about givin' yer fellow countryman a scoof—a little hair of the dog, eh?”

“How about I give you a big boot up your arse?” Cunningham growled, and waved him off. “Get going. I'll finish up here and meet you at the gallows behind Bridewell.”

O'Keefe herded Richmond toward the door and Cunningham snatched up his quill and called after them, “Put each to the test—I don't want any stoic bastards on my gallows, aye?”

“Aye . . .” The sergeant dragged Richmond along by the sleeve. “We know full well how ye like 'em.”

The provost double-checked his tallies and scrawled a signature across the bottom of his report. He dusted the whole document with a sprinkle from his pounce pot, and set it aside. Propping his boots on the desktop, he upended the bottle of rum, gulping and swallowing until his eyes watered and his throat stung, sucking the bottle dry of every drop.

Leaning over in his chair, he set the bottle on its side, and sent it rolling with a gentle push. Like faraway thunder, the bottle rumbled over the seams and knots in the floorboards, ending its long, slow roll with a dead thunk against the wall. Cunningham closed his eyes and fingered the smooth patch of scar tissue above his right ear, lips hardly moving, his whisper barely audible.

“Repay in kind . . . and then some.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THOMAS PAINE,
Common Sense

 

 

 

 

 

S
TARTING with a knot at the top, Sally looped the cording from eyelet to eyelet, tugging up the slack, and lacing Anne into her stays with a firm double bow at the small of her waist.

“Now where's our bum roll gone to?” Hands to hips, she glanced around the room.

Though it was the larger of the two garret rooms, her mistress's bedchamber was overcrowded with furnishings, and so it seemed much smaller than Sally's spartan quarters. She cast about for the errant roll, rifling through the mayhem of petticoats, kerchiefs, stockings and ribbons strewn over the servant-sized bed pushed into the corner.

“There it is, Sal.” Anne pointed to the floor near the Dutch stove where Bandit lay, tongue lolling, his head resting comfortably on the moon-shaped pillow.