Then, on the second Sunday after his arrival, he saw a familiar face among the preachers on the Common. He was gaunt, his clothes dirty and crumpled, his boots muddy. He was holding the Old Testament. Mumbling to those who passed.
“She’s dead,” said the Rev. Clifford. “She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead….”
Cormac backed away in horror and slipped into a side street.
45.
Twice, Cormac pushed beyond the city’s northern border. He found his way to the Collect Pond and walked around its edges. The Collect was no small body of water. It was sixty feet deep, more spring-fed lake than simple pond. At dawn, men scraped its bottom for oysters. At dusk they trolled in rowboats for bass. It was the primary source of the city’s water. A creek emptied to the west of the pond, meandering down through the farmlands of Lispenard Meadows. Another creek emptied to the south, into the Little Collect and on to the East River. The creeks were sluggish and dark. Each day, cartmen hired by the city heaved unburned garbage into the pond. The shore was littered with broken bottles and battered pails, the gnawed cores of apples and the shells of oysters glittering in the mud. A hill rose abruptly at the southern edge, bald and craggy and vaguely sinister. On this hill (Cormac was told) the hangman plied his trade. After dark in its thickets, young men tried to enter the bodies of young girls. He heard (from a raving preacher) that many succeeded. From the peak of the hill, he could see the island rolling north into thick forests, sliced with the silver lines of streams. Beyond the northern shore of the pond, he smelled grass and rich, loamy earth and a sweetness that helped erase the growing odor of rot from the side of the Collect closest to the city.
He knew that he would never find the earl in the fields and forests above the town, but they pulled at him in some mysterious way, filling him with memories of Ireland. In turn, the emptiness of that forest, and the longings it provoked, drove him back to the streets of the city. Thinking of Ireland made him think of his father, and then he wanted to find the earl again. There were images he could not shed.
In the city, he was often in the company of Mr. Partridge, as he searched for a place where he could house his printing press, himself, and Cormac, his apprentice. Along the way, Cormac got to know him better, and liked him even more. Partridge had had very little formal education in England, since schools were generally closed to the children of farmers. “They thought if a farm lad could read and write, he’d leave for the city, and then who’d feed the rich?” he said one bright morning on Pearl Street. “Or the pigs, for that matter! And they were right, of course!” Pausing. “Stupid, but right, from their point of view.” But he’d found his way to the printing trade, apprenticing to a cranky man named Steele, and in the setting of type, and the printing of books, he had learned many things. On their New York walks, he spoke with passion about cloves, elephants, the best way to make paper, the translations of Alexander Pope, the many varieties of sugarcane, and the art of weaving carpets. He knew the history of garbage, and all about the making of aqueducts in ancient Rome, the development of graveyards, and the sexual habits of the Arawak Indians in the Caribbean at the moment of the arrival of the Europeans. He owned several copies of Don Quixote.
In short, he was as English as roast beef, but an Englishman open to the whole wide world. He was outraged by English cruelties in Ireland and Scotland. He hated kings. In his view, all kings were gangsters. Not just English kings, but kings in every country where they presumed to rule over ordinary people. Their pretensions to nobility made him laugh when he was in a benevolent and ironical mood, or slam walls and tabletops when he was soaring into high democratic rage. Nobody was better suited to being an American.
“How do they get away with it?” he said to Cormac as they walked down Broad Street one hot and sticky July afternoon. “How do they get armies to carry their stupid flags and march off to die? That’s the mystery. How do they get to sit on a throne in court, dressed in silks and lace and powdered wigs, and get intelligent men to kneel before them? In awe! In bloody supplication!” Such words would have been treasonous to most of His Majesty’s loyal subjects in New York. But Mr. Partridge was also a careful man. He only spoke his republican thoughts to Cormac when there was not another soul in earshot.
“Noble!” he said on another day, his voice lathered with sarcasm, the words flowing from him in paragraphs. “Aye, they are noble. Noble bastards, they are. How did it begin? And how will it end? I’ll tell you how. The story’s in the history books, if you know how to read them.” He gestured with his hands in the general direction of England, out beyond the Battery. “There were a few of these swine long ago, readier to kill than decent folk, their mouths full of a line of velvety tripe to turn the ears of the dumber sort. Tripe about Noble England, and the Noble King. All they needed was a handful who believed them, or saw a chance to get rich without work. Together, they stole from weaker people and then used the money to create armed theater. That’s what it was, lad. That’s what it is! Armed theater! Castles and music and fine robes and crowns and jewels—it’s all theater. Acting! Performing! And all of it made possible by the use of swords and muskets and cannon, and driven by jealousy and theft! First they rob the other dukes. Then, out of the stolen money, they give small rewards to the footpads and killers who are not so powerful, those minor actors who are not able to fill the air with flowery rubbish. Then they go on to robbery of the poor, stealing the fruits of their labor—for all kings are determined never to do an honest day’s work! They use the Christian message to convince the poor that they are not meant to be truly happy until they are dead and go on to Heaven. To see the Lord. Who is, of course, English, not Jewish. The farmer, the tradesman, all are willing victims. They bow down before the Great Actor, the King Himself, and work the soil and feed these bastards and then they die, and their sons turn to the same task, while not one of these so-called nobles ever turns a spade in the earth. The poor are robbed by rack rents and taxes. They pay tribute. They even pay for churches so the useless, lazy clergy can tell them how unworthy they are. The kings sneer at them for being fools, and with all that stolen money, they build armies and fleets and export their skills at robbery to the entire world! That’s how it all began, lad. A few cynical actors who fooled entire nations!”
“And how will it end?”
“If there’s a God in Heaven,” he said, “it will end at the gallows.”
He sighed.
“Any civilized man must be against homicide,” he said. “But regicide seems a most admirable crime.”