He cleared his throat, turned to Cormac. The money Cormac had offered was still lying on the lip of the platform made for the press.
“I had made one trip,” Mr. Partridge said. “Bringing printing supplies to Mister Bradford, and that journey convinced me. When I told her all about it, Esther shared the vision.” He turned uneasily on the edge of the platform. “Such a move would take money.” His eyes moved toward Cormac’s money for a moment. “So I was working then at two printing establishments, day and night and Sundays too. Saving money. Saving for a press and the passage and some money to begin again in America.” He exhaled strongly. “To save money, to save bloody money, we lived in a filthy slum. You don’t know London, do you, lad? Of course not. Well, the neighborhood was vile, criminal, evil. But the rent was low, which is why we were there, and my Esther somehow fortified our little piece of it while I worked, and we both saved. She was following my vision, my belief that one must sacrifice in the short run so as to have an amazing future.”
He stood up, touching the press, walking around it with a heavy tread.
“Well, one night I came home from Sorby the Printer’s, very late, after midnight. There were constables blocking the street. What’s this? Hello, what’s this? And they told me the cholera had taken the street, that it was quarantined. Nobody in, nobody out. No, but I live here, I said, my wife is here, I said, my children are here! Sorry, nobody in, nobody out. There were others like me, of course, those of us who worked in the watches of the night. And when we tried to push through, to see wives, children, they beat us with clubs and charged us with horses and arrested some of us. Starting with me.”
His hand involuntarily touched his head and he ruffled his graying hair.
“I woke up in an alley by the Thames, where I’d been tossed. My face was bloody, and my clothes too, and my shoulder wouldn’t work.” He made a grinding movement with his right shoulder. “And when I reached our street, long after dawn, with the rain falling, they were all dead. My Esther. The children. Along with twenty-seven others. All dead. Dead of bloody disease. Dead of bloody filth. Dead because of me.”
His eyes were brimming, but he didn’t cry. He sat down again, talking as much for himself as for Cormac.
“After I buried them, I took the America money and got drunk for seven months,” he said. “I spent it all. Every shilling. On rum and spirits. I slept in filthy rooms, praying for the cholera to take me too. I slept in alleys by the river. I was crawly with lice. I was as thin as a bird. I howled at easy ladies and their ponces, at constables and doctors. I raved outside Westminster. I was moved on, moved on, beaten, pummeled, laughed at, as I wandered in my frayed and filthy rags.”
He looked at Cormac in a steady way. The younger man was holding back his own tears.
“And then one morning, I woke up in a brickyard, huddled for warmth against the side of a kiln. I stared at the sky, and the clouds, and heard the whistle of some bird, defying the city: and got up. I was scabbed, hurt, scarred, broken. But I said then: enough. Just that word. Enough. And I stood up. I went to a shelter run by some upper-class ladies. I had a bath. I donned some old clothes that didn’t quite fit. And I said: Esther, I am sorry. My children, I am sorry. But now I will do something that will give this all some value. I’ll begin again. I will go to America. In your name.” A long pause. “And I’m here.”
Cormac embraced him.
“Well,” he said, “we have work to do.”
“Yes,” Mr. Partridge said. “Work.”
He took the coins now, hefting them, and walked to the doors and stared into the street.
“There are some dreadful people in the world,” he said, slipping the coins into his pocket, where they made a bulge. “They must be fought. They must be beaten back, caged, prevented from spreading their misery. Your Earl of Warren is one of them. There are many others.”
“And what can be done about them?”
“Plenty.”
“Such as?”
“Such as destroying them.”
He turned to the printing press.
“With that.”
50.
Mr. Partridge lived in a blur of movement. He set type, pulled proofs, handed them to Cormac to dry. He’d be gone for two hours and return with jobs: tax notices, wedding invitations, advertisements for shoes and medicines and coffee, for dance instruction and English tutoring and lessons in French. He printed anything and everything, except posters about escaped slaves.
Cormac had no time for Hughson’s, but even if he had a few rare empty hours, he stayed away. He thought: What can I tell her? How can I tell her that I have these other things I must do, that I’m searching for a man from Ireland? And yet he began to yearn for her. To hear her dirty mouth, to feel her rebellious spirit. One humid Sunday night in late August, he walked to Stone Street. He stood outside the back door in the darkness. Africans passed him in the dark, entering, departing, and a few nodded and went on. Then a familiar face appeared. Quaco.
“What you standin’ here for?” he said.
“Just getting the night air.”
“You a bad liar, mon.”
“I miss some people, I suppose.”
“What people?”
“You. Some of the others.”
“You mean that little girl Mary, ain’t that it?”
Cormac shook his head.
“Wait here.”
Quaco slipped inside the tavern. Cormac could hear water sloshing against pier heads, and sails flopping on the dark river, and somewhere the squeal of a lone pig. From inside, the music of a fiddle and the instruments of Africa were joining. He heard a muffled roar. Then the door cracked open, and Mary Burton stepped into the hot night air, closing the door behind her.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello, Mary,” he said.
“What is it ye want?”
“To be sayin’ I’m sorry, Mary. For going off so quick that morning. For not saying a proper good-bye. For not comin’ back to see you.”
“Feck off.”
She turned to go, and he grabbed her arm. In the dim light he could see her eyes glistening with anger and tears.
“Mary, listen, please listen. I’ve been workin’ eighteen hours a day, I’ve been grinding and hauling and pulling in the print shop on Cortlandt Street and…”
“Ah, you poor wee lad,” she said, voice heavy with sarcasm. He was holding her rough-skinned hand now, which was warm in his grip.
“And there’s more. I’m looking for a man, a man I’m sworn to find, a man I must kill. I have to find him. And if he’s not here in New York, then I must know that too.”
She said nothing.
“I don’t want you mixed up in any of this,” he said. “It’d not be fair to you, Mary, if I do what I must do and the constables came looking, or the bloody redcoats.”
She pulled her hand away and folded her arms across her breasts.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I think you just wanted to be up in me quim, and have your fun, and be done with it. I think you see me as some low, common trollop. You with your fancy accent from some fecking school somewhere, and your books, and your fecking poetry spoutin’. I think you look at me and think, She’s just another feckin’ slave. And one that can’t read or write and has only one thing to offer, and that’s between her legs.”