His voice pierced the night but the night swallowed it up and gave nothing back.
The red lamp at sea was gone, and did not return. Hooper looked toward Manhattan’s woods. That lamp, also, was a goner. Whatever had been said, it was not to be repeated. Hooper chewed his bottom lip and waved the torch about, throwing sparks. “Seen ya good, ya traitorous bag a’ crooked bones!” he yelled. He didn’t expect to be heard at this distance, but it felt good to unload. Then the idea of loading came to him. If what he thought was about to happen, and all the Dutchmen in their ships were about to sail right into the harbor with cannons and cutlasses ready to crash and carve, then he had to do his duty and warn the citizens. He scurried down the tower’s steps again, torch gripped in hand, and near the bottom almost tripped and put paid to not only his heroic plan but to the way his head sat atop his neck.
Hooper stopped at his cabin to hurriedly open a wooden box for a small bag of gunpowder—about two thimbles full, enough to make a sizeable noise—and a six-inch piece of fuse. He took a knife to slit the bag. Then he went on to the cannon and, hands shaking, placed the torch in a metal holder put there specifically for the purpose. Muttering and fretting to himself about the future of New York if the Dutch got hold of it and threw every British citizen man woman and child into the brigs of their boats, Hooper put the fuse into the cannon’s vent hole. How much had he been told to leave showing to carry the fire? he asked himself. He couldn’t remember. He just had the memory of a mouth moving in a pallid face under a tricorn hat, and himself thinking about getting some fishing done while he was out here.
There was no ball to be loaded; this was for noise only. Hooper looked back over his shoulder at the nocturnal sea. Did he sense the motion of a hundred ships closing upon the bay? Did he hear the flap of flags and rattle of chains as guns were readied? But there were no lights visible, not a single one. Oh, those Dutchmen! Hooper thought. They were devils of the dark!
He turned to his task once more with frantic purpose. He had to pee but had no time, so let it run in his breeches. It was the least a hero could do. He knifed open the bag of gunpowder, poured the powder into the cannon’s barrel and then remembered to use the ramrod like the moving mouth under the tricorn had told him. He packed the powder with a hard shove and then stood for a moment trying to recall if he was supposed to flame a match to fire the fuse or use the torch. He pushed the fuse down good and short so the wind couldn’t whip it out. One more backward glance to make sure the Dutch armada wasn’t gliding past Oyster Island, and then Hooper put the torch’s flame to the cannon’s fuse.
It sparked, hissed, and the fire began to travel. Hooper stepped back a few paces, as he’d been told. The fuse burned down. When it disappeared into the vent hole there was a sizzling sound like bacon in a frypan, followed by a weak little pop and a puff of smoke that floated away as delicately as a lady’s lace handkerchief.
“Well, that ain’t right!” Hooper moaned. “Jazus save me, I’ve pulled a boner!”
He peered into the vent hole. There was no spark visible. Either the fuse had gone out or the powder was bad. He went to the cannon’s business end and put his face to the muzzle. He could smell a smouldering, but where was the flame? “Damn me!” he hollered, as the thought of his heroism at this time of New York’s need turned to ashes around his soggy boots.
A scant three seconds after Hooper pulled his face away from the cannon, there was a gout of fire from the vent hole and the gun went off.
The blast of smoke itself almost knocked him crazy. The noise slapped his ears deaf. He staggered back, gasping like a hooked grouper, and fell on his butt. Dazed, he saw blue fire and sparks whirling up from the cannon toward heaven, and then he saw something else that nearly made every sprout of wild hair jump from his head.
Something exploded across the bay in town. A building, looked to be down toward Dock Street. Hooper couldn’t hear the noise, but he saw the red fire leap up. Whatever it was, it was burning hot with a white center. Pieces of roof came down. Parts of the building were still flying upward like fiery bats.
“Oh no,” Hooper whispered, though he couldn’t hear it. “Oh no, oh no!” His first thought was that he’d forgotten and put a ball in the cannon and blown something up himself, but then he remembered there was no ball in the cannon, and how in the name of bleedin’ Jazus could somebody forget about that?
No, it had to be the Dutch. They had just fired on New York, and the war had begun.
He scrambled up. It was time to vacate these premises. Still there was no sign of the warships, no battle lamps or cannon flame. He didn’t care. He ran to his rowboat, which was still up on the rocks. As he pushed it off and got in he realized something else very strange.
The three small mackerel and the nice-sized striper in the bucket?
They were gone.
It was the ghost, Hooper thought. The phantom that walked out here. It was why he’d been given this job, because nobody else wanted it. The last watchman had left the island the night his overcoat had been stolen from a post next to the outhouse. Whoever had the watchman’s job, they weren’t alone. Hooper had never seen evidence of the phantom before, but here it was.
“Christian of ye to leave the damn bucket!” he shouted toward any listening ears, though his own were still fried and sizzling.
He was quits with this Godforsaken place. He took the oars and put his wiry muscles to the labor, and with hammering heart and fearful soul and wild smoke-scorched hair old Hooper Gillespie rowed for Manhattan, with red flames before him and the dark sea at his back.
Two
AS a crab scuttled amid rocks in the liquid dark, so Matthew Corbett danced across the plank floor of Sally Almond’s tavern by golden candlelight. Perhaps he was not as ungainly as the crab, and perhaps he did comport a certain amount of grace and style, yet there was definitely room for improvement in his technique. In its largest room the tavern’s tables and chairs had been pushed back and space arranged for a right fair gathering. A fire crackled in the brick hearth to warm the air, though the heat of energy filled the place. Two fiddlers played, a squeezeboxer squeezed, and a drummer rattled his bones at a merry pace. The stately gray-haired figure of Sally Almond herself had joined the festivity, clapping her hands to the bounding beat.
Round and round went the swirl of dancers, among them the blacksmithing apprentice and Matthew’s friend John Five and his bride Constance, the potter Hiram Stokely and his wife Patience, the Munthunk brothers Darwin and Davy and their corpulent but surprisingly light-footed Mother Munthunk, Dr. Artemis Vanderbrocken who at seventy-six was content to mostly sip the spiced punch and enjoy the music, Felix Sudbury the owner of the Trot Then Gallop tavern, the printmaster Marmaduke Grigsby, Madam Kenneday the baker, another of Matthew’s good friends Effrem Owles the tailor’s son, and Jonathan Paradine the undertaker who was thin and pale and seemed to slink from place to place on the floor rather than actually dance. His ladyfriend, a newly-arrived widow by the name of Dorcas Rochester, was equally thin and pale and slinked just the same as her beau, so the couple seemed to all to be well-matched.