This admirably handy edifice was owned by one Madame Terese Lucia DeCose. Madame was a French dressmaker who had arrived ten years before from the banks of the Seine, armed only with a long needle and some sharp ideas of fashion. Like many immigrants, she saw America as a ripe opportunity for advancement and a fresh start. With only occasional backsliding into her old profession — in Paris, Madame DeCose was what was known as a courtesan — she had achieved her American dream. Her shop was patronized by a small but moneyed group of New York women, a handful of whom happened to be there this afternoon to listen to Madame discourse on the latest trends in brocades.
Jake saluted them most politely as he dashed through the front room with its displays. Faced with a choice at the end of the hall, he went left into a room that happened to have a window opening onto an alley. It also had a patron in a very advanced stage of undress, as she was getting ready for a fitting of new stays and gown.
Under normal circumstances, Jake would have found some way to console her exposed embarrassment at being found naked. The face that she was only nineteen, of extremely graceful shape and with very fair — and natural — blond hair would have made it a most difficult chore, but Jake would have born this penance somehow, managing a cheerful, brave face.
But these were not normal circumstances, and Jake had to leave this delicate task to the British, following hard behind. The woman’s screams had the effect of not only directing the soldiers to Jake’s escape route, but hurrying them along. He was barely out the window when they burst through the door. One of the men fired a gun, and its bullet whizzed past them as he fled up the alley.
An alley closed off on one end by the approaching cavalry, and on the other by a brick wall.
The wall belonged to an older building, which had suffered much from the elements; with a leap, Jake found a good enough handhold to boost himself to a second floor ledge, and from there to the roof. This was nearly fatal; he slipped on the tiling and nearly tumbled back to the ground. Momentum, fortunately, had given him just enough impetus to move in a diagonal across the roof, and Jake managed to fall against a chimney and propel himself in a ricochet straight onto a gable of an adjoining building.
The crash rattled his teeth and not a few of his bones, but his unexpected course — and the damsel in distress — had thrown off the pursuit. Jake now had a small space to escape in. Without waiting to catch his breath he scrambled up the roof and over the side, sliding toward the corner, where, he hoped to find a rain spout that would provide a handhold to climb down. His luck was with him and he began to rapidly descend — only to run out of spout considerably short of the ground. He had to jump nearly twenty feet.
At first it was not obvious that the sharp pain in his knee was anything other than a temporary complaint. Jake hobbled a few steps toward the road, more concerned about the sounds of redcoats rallying than the grinding of his leg bones together. In fact, when he met a wagon at the end of the alley, he didn’t even brother pausing before levering himself over it.
He did more than pause on the other side, however — he collapsed in a heap as his leg gave way. It was only with the greatest exertion of energy — and a few close musket balls — that Jake managed to stand and pull himself aboard a horse tied to a nearby post. He yanked the leather stays loose and the animal obliged his deepest wishes by fleeing up the street.
— Chapter Thirty-two Wherein, Jake’s injuries are discovered to be acute, and van Clynne concludes his negotiations.
N ew Yorkers are a funny lot. They have no greater or lesser esteem for the rule of law than citizens elsewhere; they are not, as one writer (undoubtedly a Tory) has charged, “a sorry class of criminals intent on knifing as many of their fellows as they meet before bedtime.” But they are a particularly focused people, and when on a mission connected with business, can be quite single-minded about achieving it. Thus, they tend to ignore things that, in retrospect, strike outsiders as impossible to ignore.
The shouts of the redcoats chasing Jake, for instance. No vast flood of citizens came to the soldier’s assistance, no vigilante Tories sprung up to seize Jake’s horse and hand him over to the authorities. The soldiers were naturally disappointed. But this was the entire experience of the British in the New World. They felt that all they would have to do was show up, shout a bit, and the Revolutionaries would be nabbed before they could turn the corner down William Street.
Such was the gist of Howe’s complaints that very moment aboard ship in the harbor. He was quite unaware of what was going on in the city, of course, but he would not have been too terribly surprised.
Van Clynne was quite aware that he had stretched out his visit considerably longer than necessary, and notwithstanding the difficulty of his return across the water, was now anxious to leave. But his mention of Canada had provoked the general into telling the sad tale of his brother George’s death at Ticonderoga during the French and Indian War. He seemed almost on the verge of becoming weepy. This was no way for a general of Howe’s station to act; the entire scene was becoming unseemly.
“ Buck up, man, buck up,” said van Clynne. Much to his surprise, and the general’s, he slapped Howe across the face.
This brought Howe to his senses, not necessarily as wise thing to do.
“ I could have you tied to the anchor and dragged across the harbor for that.”
“ I was only trying to say, Sir William, that you are forgetting your assets.”
“ I’m not forgetting anything, you fool. I command the entire British Army! What do you command?”
“ Myself, occasionally.” Brave words, though van Clynne was trembling inside. Nonetheless, he had learned long ago in business negotiations that, once you have someone’s attention, you must proceed quickly or risk failure. “This bullet contains a message from General Burgoyne. I was instructed to deliver it personally to you, General. Here it is, and now I will be on my way.”
“ You will stay a moment,” said the general in a voice that did not invite disobedience. How called to one of his guards to supply a pocketknife; the silver bullet was soon opened and its message unfolded.
“ What does he mean, telling me not to come north? Who does he think he is, giving me an order? Not needed, indeed. We’ll see about that.”
As long as he was on the horse, Jake’s leg only hurt. Pain was not exactly a stranger to the patriot, and he was as bothered by it as most of us are annoyed by a mosquito bite.
The great crowd of traffic he rode into had the advantage of slowing the British, but it also slowed him, and when Jake and his horse approached the end of Spring Street, he saw that his way was blocked off by a set of wagons. Unable to urge the strange horse through, Jake decided he would do better on foot. He theorized that he would be able to slip into the crowd unnoticed, and thence find a place to hide. But airy theory came to earth with a sharp rip from ankle to knee as soon as he hit the ground — his leg was more damaged than he thought.
Jake’s blood ran from his head, and as he stumbled forward through the crowd what little balance he had was lost. He bashed into the side of a farmer’s small wagon, ricocheted into two or three people, then landed in the dirt. With a great exertion of will and muscle, he flailed forward, crawling and groping, but got no farther than a sturgeon might if plucked from the nearby river.
He was still crawling when he came head first into a large leather boot. Grasping on the leg to boost himself up, he felt himself lifted by a pair of hands from behind. Too late he realized that the hands were attached to a body clad in red.