“It’s important,” Hughson said. “Do we have your vote?”
“Whatever Kongo says.”
Then he saw Mary Burton coming in the blue door from the house, her eyes swollen, her mouth loose. She gathered empty glasses from a table. Then came toward the bar, muscles taut in her jaw. Cormac stepped aside, his back to Hughson, and whispered in her ear.
“Give me three days, Mary. I’ve business to clear up. Then we can talk.”
“Feck off.”
“Please,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be so cold back at the shop. I was just, well, shocked.” A pause. “And I’ve been thinking….”
She was listening but wouldn’t look at him. She ordered three porters and a rum flip from Hughson.
“Just, for God’s sake, don’t do anything rash,” he said.
She struggled for control.
“Three days…”
“Go away, Cormac,” she said. “For three days or three hundred.” She turned and plunged into the noise of the room, where three redcoats were singing songs about the King in one corner and six Africans were trying to push rhythm behind the tune.
Mr. Partridge was hesitant about breaking the rule against advertising for slaves. And he knew Cormac’s story. He knew the young man had carried a sword from Ireland to kill the Earl of Warren.
“I suppose you think the posters will gain you access to his house?” he said.
“Aye.”
“And then you’ll lop off his head.”
The way he said this made Cormac laugh. Partridge smiled too.
“I suppose—”
“You don’t suppose. That’s what you want to do.”
Cormac’s voice went cold. “I have no choice.”
Mr. Partridge looked at him for a long moment.
“I suppose you don’t.”
He gazed at the copy and then walked to the type tray.
“He should be killed just for what he does to the English language.”
They both laughed.
“But if you must do this dreadful thing,” Partridge said, “you must be smart. If you go directly to the house and send the wretch to perdition, they’ll have you with the hangman three days later. And I’ll lose the best apprentice I ever had—and the primary investor in this shop. So please: Use your head for something other than parking your hat.”
Cormac thought: He’s right.
That night, after most of the type was set (for there were two jobs even more urgent), Cormac wandered the town for an hour, the weather chilly but no longer wet or arctic cold. Near the Common, he gazed at the town’s two fire engines: side-stroked, goose-necked tub machines, with pump handles and foot treadles. If more than one blaze started at the same time, the town could burn to rubble. He’d seen the volunteers at one small fire, wearing old leather helmets slung low on the back of the neck to protect hair and skin, designed to be whipped around to cover the face. Remembering their foolish looks and clumsy efforts, he understood why the conspirators might believe in triumph. And yet he felt he could not join the rebellion without first killing the earl. Thinking: That’s why I’m here. That must happen first.
Either way, if the rebellion then succeeded or if it failed in a chaos of gunpowder and death, he could escape with Mary Burton. He could lead her across the river. He could try to find some refuge for both of them, and let all notions of permanence wait for the future. As he tried to imagine the future, he strolled through dark streets past the fort, where three prostitutes laughed together in the shadows. Zenger’s Journal called them “courtezans,” but there was nothing courtly about them. In daylight, their flesh was coarse, teeth missing. Better to work their sad trade in the dark. They called to Cormac, offering various services. He strolled on, ignoring them, looking at the high walls of the fort, thinking: This can’t work. New York could be taken without firing a shot; the English, after all, had taken it twice; but only if many-masted ships were in the harbor, loaded with cannon and soldiers. In New York, fear was more powerful than loyalty. But you created fear only with a show of force. The tutorials from Mr. Partridge were alive in his head. Wasn’t the older man right? The English were accustomed to cheap victories in their endless search for loot. But (thinking then in the face of the harbor wind) the Africans and the Irish of New York shared one terrible fact: In their own lands, they were defeated. Thinking: That’s why they’re here. Thinking: Defeat is a habit too.
He circled around through dark streets, where gorged pigs slept in doorways and dogs barked and rats slithered toward garbage. He turned through unlit streets toward Cortlandt Street, planning to enter the shop through the alley. A hand gripped his biceps in the blackness. Like a vise.
“Cor-mac.”
Kongo pulled him close. Cormac could see his eyes and teeth, smell Africa and the sea and hard work rising together from his skin.
“Come with me.”
He released his grip and began to walk, making no sound as he moved. They headed toward the North River. Streets vanished in rising mist, the river water now colder than the air. At the river’s edge, Kongo paused, as if waiting for a scent. Finally he relaxed.
“You need to kill that man?”
“Yes.”
“Before the big trouble?”
“I hope. And I now have a way in, to his big house.”
He explained about the proofs of the posters.
“Good,” Kongo said. “My friends, they have watch the house. And we have a man in the stable, he is with us.”
Cormac felt his blood streaming through his arms and legs.
“Here is what we do,” Kongo said.
58.
Quaco waited on the driveway in a borrowed phaeton while Cormac stood at the door of the mansion. The late-afternoon light was rosy, the wind soft. Three armed men watched him as he waited for payment for the posters. Cormac remarked on the end of winter and the beauty of the house. The men grunted. Cormac hoped they would not search him, for his long coat covered the sword. And nothing could cover the beating of his heart. The door opened. The lean man with the coarse skin, now dressed in the more formal clothes of a butler, handed him an envelope. Payment for the posters.
“The master says good work indeed,” he muttered. “And there’s a bit extra for delivery.”
Cormac thanked him and turned away, glancing at the stable, where three of the earl’s Africans were watching and smoking. He climbed back in the phaeton, and Quaco flicked a whip. They trotted back down the road to the south. When they were out of sight, Cormac thanked Quaco, asked him to hold the envelope until he saw him next, and dropped into the forest. He moved toward the river, along the Indian trail marked by Kongo on a rough map. The trail wandered past mounds of ancient oyster shells to another path that zigzagged down the cliff to the river’s edge. He waited in the shrubbery until the sun slipped down behind New Jersey and the sky turned mauve. He searched for the large boulder from Kongo’s map. Saw it twenty feet down the muddy river edge. On the near side of the huge rock, out of sight of the earl’s house, was Kongo’s boat. He was poised at the oars.
“Good,” he whispered as Cormac climbed in. The African began rowing back upriver, until they saw the glow of the earl’s house against the darkening sky. Cormac could make out the earl’s dock, and the stairs leading up the cliff, and then the house itself, the balconied facade facing south, rosy near the roof from the final light of the vanishing sun. The March wind turned colder.
“Until later,” Cormac said. Kongo tapped his shoulder with a fist.