The Tory Widow (4 page)

From his twisted position, Cunningham responded by hawking a wad of sputum onto the captain's chest. This defiance earned him a cudgel to the head and a sharp kick to the ribs. Sears grabbed the man by his shock of greasy hair and bent his head back.

“Damn the King, I say!”

Dazed and coughing, Cunningham blinked at the blood trickling into his eye. “I say . . .” he panted, “. . . I say
God bless King George . . . God bless good King George,
ye bunch o' bung-buggered, cock-sucking rebel bastard boys . . .”

The sailors let loose with clubs and boots, unleashing a violent beating. Cunningham curled into a ball as vicious blows rained down upon him from every direction. The crowd surged forward with a roar.

Pistol fire. The dockworkers kicked and tore the packing crate apart and people crowded around to wrest a club from the debris. Throttled into the midst of this instant riot, Anne struggled to escape the press. Stretching on tiptoes, she craned her neck, searching for Jack Hampton. Her package squirted from her arms. She dropped to her knees to save the vicar's sermons from being ground into the green. Someone grabbed Anne hard by the upper arm and yanked her to her feet.

“C'mon . . . away from here!”

The young prostitute shoved Anne along, plowing a path through the incensed mob to where the pie peddler sat on his fat hind end. He'd slit the ticking on the remaining sack of feathers and with mad glee tossed chubby armfuls up into the darkening sky.

The whore took Anne by the hand and they ran—cutting across the Commons, through the Presbyterian churchyard, down a narrow alleyway—skittering to a stop on Williams Street, leaning back against a rough stone wall to catch a breath. A group of boys went dashing past, flinging a lit string of squibs to fizzle and pop at their feet. Startled, the two women clutched at each other, then giggled in relief.

“The world has gone mad for sure.” The prostitute laughed, plucking feathers from her hair. “It looks as if we're the ones what were tarred and feathered!”

Anne brushed at her skirt, thick with chicken feathers. “It's getting dark . . .”

“If you need me to, miss, if it would make you feel safer, I can walk along with you—or behind, if you like.”

Anne stopped grooming and held out a hand. “I'm Anne Merrick . . . Your name?”

“Patsy,” the girl answered, suddenly serious with a bob of the knee, barely grazing Anne's fingertips with her own. “Patsy Quinn, m'am.”

“Well, Patsy Quinn, you most likely saved me from a trampling, and I'm grateful to you. I appreciate your offer and all your kind assistance, but I need not trouble you any further. I can make my way from here.”

“Aye, then. A good evening to you, miss.”

“Good evening, Patsy.” Anne set off. Upon reaching the next corner, she looked back to see smiling Patsy Quinn in an animated conversation with a portly gentleman wearing an old-fashioned curly wig.

Back to business for me as well.
Anne marched a quickstep to her shop. She crossed her fingers, hoping Titus had not yet scattered the form composed for the vicar's sermon, or she would have to spend half the night resetting type by candlelight. She would pay a call on the vicar with fresh copies and the tale of her exploits with the mobocracy, and perhaps she might not lose his custom.

Up ahead, a gang of youths came running pell-mell from the narrow alleyway her shop shared with the baker. Anne rounded the corner and stopped dead in her tracks. Shards of plate glass were strewn over the dirt lane in front of her shop. She moved forward slowly.

Anne found every diamond-shaped pane on her shop-front windows broken. With the tip of her shoe, she toed the shattered bits mingled with scattered eggshells. She glanced up. Raw egg dripping from the shingle touting
Merrick's Press
plopped upon her shoulder. She reached for the door with a trembling hand. Across the faded oak, scrawled with bootblack in thick, angry letters:

 

CHAPTER TWO

THOMAS PAINE,
Common Sense

 

 

 

 

 

W
ITH the handle of an inkball gripped in each fist, Anne beat an even coat of ink onto the composed type—a crucial and exacting task. Poor coverage resulted in a faint impression. Too much ink filled in the letterforms. Either extreme produced illegible material, a costly waste of precious paper.

As one pressman beat, the second pulled. Titus fixed a sheet of paper to the points that held it in place and pulled the lever to move the heavy brass platen down, pressing the paper against the inked type. Today, Beater and Puller worked in lovely concert, producing perfectly executed folios. Later that evening, when the pages were good and dry, Anne and Sally would fold the folios into four-page pamphlets titled “A Friendly Address to all Reasonable Americans.”

Sally peeled the last sheet from the press and hung it to dry on the racks stretching along one wall. Titus tidied the press and cleaned the inked form, and Anne saw to the inkballs. After a hard day's use, her inkballs looked much like a pair of big black mushrooms. She pried the tacks free from around the wooden handles and removed the sheepskin covers and wool stuffing. She dropped the ink-soaked sheepskin into a bucket of stale urine, and used a wire brush to tease the stuffing smooth and fluffy for the next use.

Anne crinkled her nose and moved the acrid pissbucket into the far corner, hung her leather apron on a hook and sank exhausted onto her stool. As a young girl, she was always relegated to the tedious task of typesetting, but her father would often allow her to beat. Merrick ran an altogether different operation, and for years she was never allowed to wander from the dreary compositor's stick. Anne enjoyed working her press together with Titus and Sally. Knuckling the muscles at the small of her back, she viewed with no small pleasure the fruit of their labor—two hundred and fifty copies.

“Sally.” Anne fished in her pocket for some coin. “Run over to Bellamy's and buy us all a pie for our supper.”

Sally unwound the wide kerchief she'd used to protect and contain her ginger braids, and stuffed it in her pocket. “Might be today Bellamy has those lobster pies ye fancy so much, aye?”

The thought of flaky pastry filled with steaming chunks of lobster meat in cream and butter caused Anne to slip Sally another coin. “It's been a long, hard day—two pies each.”

“None for me, Mrs. Anne,” Titus announced as he slipped his bib apron over his head, its ink-stained cowhide a shade darker than his smiling brown face. “Supper and darts with my mates at the tavern tonight,” he explained, squeezing his big arms into a heavy overcoat. He fit a cocked hat trimmed with fancy gold braid over wooly black hair.

Titus Gilmore had come to Merrick's twenty years before—a sturdy twelve-year-old purchased at the slave market on Wall Street. In a deathbed fit of conscience, no doubt spurred by selfish concern for the state of his immortal soul, Peter Merrick had set Titus free.

Anne had endured seven years under Merrick 's roof as an uneasy slaveholder, and Titus's change in status soothed her conscience immeasurably. Titus moved into a room above Fraunces Tavern, his favorite haunt down the street. He worked for a generous wage on the days Anne needed him, but otherwise he was free to accept opportunities from other print shops. An accomplished journeyman, skilled dartsman and shrewd gambler, Titus had no problem augmenting the erratic income earned at Merrick 's.

“I'm off!” Sally whisked her crimson wool cloak about her shoulders, popped hands through the vertical slits and took up her market basket. Anne bade Titus good evening and he followed Sally out the door.

Fading daylight angled in through the windows over her compositor's table. Anne usually bemoaned the coming of winter, for the shorter days offered little quality light by which to work type. In truth, lately it did not matter, as she had little business to occupy her press. She looked down at the form Titus had left on her table—row upon row of lead type set square and tight within the frame, the title bracketed with fancy ornaments—

 

Anne could not recall when she'd learned to read backward, but it seemed as though she had always been able to do so. She and her brother, David, likened the ability to knowing a secret language. Sometimes, though, when she worked quickly, the set type became so much gibberish—where she almost didn't recognize the words and phrases.

These words—this title—she saw very clearly.
A Friendly Address to all Reasonable Americans.
Anne heaved a sigh. It seemed so harmless, so . . .
friendly
. As she'd composed the text, she'd tried hard to convince herself that printing this pamphlet was no more dangerous than reprinting one of the vicar's sermons. But when she proofed the first galley, she did so with her heart in her throat. There was no doubt this windfall job—which she'd needed so desperately and accepted so gratefully from Mr. Rivington—was a virulent Loyalist treatise. Upon its first printing weeks before, its author barely managed to elude a murderous mob and flee the city with his parts attached. Anne eyed the sheets drying on the racks. It would behoove her to get this material folded, wrapped and delivered with speed.

Anne marched over to the fireplace, stirred the embers and tossed in another log. She went back to the form, loosened the quoins and began to sort the letters back into the thin, flat cases where she stored her fonts. Capital letters, numbers and ornaments were sorted into the individual compartments of the upper case. The lower case housed the rest of the letters, including punctuation. The leading—smooth lead slugs used to separate lines of type—those she kept apart in a different container.

With a sensitivity developed over the years, Anne was able to identify most of the letters by touch, and with practiced ease she dismantled the form, running fingertips along the sentences, plucking up the bits of lead as she was taught—first the As, and then the Bs, and so on—careful to mind her p's and q's. The metal bits tinked funny little tunes as she dropped them into their compartments.

All type foundries were located in Europe, and for colonial printers, fonts were never cheap or easy to come by. Anne was lucky in that Merrick would have nothing but the finest Dutch-made Caslon for his presses. It was one of few traits she admired in him.

With the advent of open armed rebellion, trade vessels laden with British manufacture had ceased coming to port, and New York's merchants and tradesmen were beginning to feel the pinch. The lack of ready-made ink from England was an easy work-around for Anne. She had experience mixing varnish and lampblack from her years in her father's shop, so she simply returned to the habit of using home-brewed ink.

But paper—paper posed a considerable problem. Colonial paper mills were few and far between, and the paper manufactured in them was at best suited for newspapers, pamphlets and broadsides. The finest American mill did not come near to producing a grade that could compare with English and Dutch made bond. One was more likely to find a basin of holy water in hell than find a ream of quality paper for purchase in New York City.

With good paper so hard to come by, Anne could not replenish her blank form stock—deeds, wills, bills of sale, bills of lading and the like—the mainstays of her stationery business. Merrick 's Stationery was reduced to selling homemade ink, quills and the slow-moving inventory of expensive imported books left over from better days.

Tory Take CARE
—the angry warning Anne had scrubbed from her door with a stiff bristle brush became watchwords engraved into her brain—a reminder to pay heed to the goings-on in the world around her. Anne determined she must be ever supple and shift to and fro with the winds of the political clime in order to protect her property and livelihood.

The day after witnessing the tar and feathering on the Commons, she had Titus dismantle the better press and store it away in the closet beneath the stair. The second-best press and compositing tables were relocated to the far back end of the shop. The stationery counter and bookcases were moved center, perpendicular to the large hearth, serving to divide the long, beam-ceilinged space in two. Titus banged together a pair of trestle tables and accompanying benches and installed the new furnishings at the front end of the shop. Anne repainted her shingle with the image of a steaming cup framed by a curving quill pen, circled with the words MERRICK'S COFFEEHOUSE STATIONERY & PRESS.

Putting a copy of
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy
to good use, Sally found she had quite a knack in the kitchen. Tuesdays through Saturdays, Sally and Anne offered light fare for a fair price at the sign of the Cup and Quill—the best coffee, scones, cakes, custards and puddings in the neighborhood. Good word spread, and in three months alone Anne realized enough profit to consider replacing the glass in her boarded-up windows.