Forever

38.

They smelled the land before they saw it. A rich, dark odor of sweet earth, coming at them through a misty rain. Then seabirds appeared, crying and screeing. Cormac was on deck, his hair and beard trimmed, his new brown suit and long blue coat fashioned by Mr. Partridge, who had refused his money. He had a new sling for the sword too, strapped down his back, clipped across his chest, the weapon in a flat leather sheath. When he donned the long coat, the sword could not be seen by any police inspectors who might peer in suspicion at the bearded face of someone named Martin O’Donovan. Even Mr. Partridge, with his high standards of craft, admired the handiwork of the crew member who had fashioned the sling, a dour saddle maker from Mayo. Mr. Partridge was now a smaller version of himself. Almost thirty pounds had melted away in the cauldron of his fever. Now his flesh hung off him as loosely as his clothes (which he insisted must wait to be tailored after a few weeks in New York). Under his smart beaver hat, his eyes were clear and bright with anticipation.

“Almost there, lad,” he said, inhaling deeply.

Then a dark line spread across the horizon, and there was a huge cheer and waving of hats. Haggard Irish faces peered up through open hatches, still barred from the deck by Mr. Clark. “Stay below!” he bellowed. “Stay below, you lot! Yiz’ll get kilt up here.” Mr. Partridge explained that because of tides and currents and prevailing winds they had come around in a wide arc to their destination. The land on the right was the Long Island. Dutch farmers were scattered over much of it, he said, along with their slaves. But all were intelligently huddled far from the sea with its summer hurricanes and fierce winter winds. All Cormac saw were long strands of beach, white in the rain, and thick forests so dark they seemed black. And then up ahead, rising from the sea, there was a small mountain. Like the small meshed mountain he had seen in the Irish fog on the day, long ago, when they had set out upon the ocean. The island where Mary Morrigan had waved good-bye.

“Staten Island,” Mr. Partridge said. “It’ll be to port as we turn into the Narrows.”

For a long moment, he was quiet on the bustling deck.

“Now remember all I told you, lad,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“We have much to do together.”

“We do.”

He had given Cormac the address on Stone Street of a place called Hughson’s, where he might rent a room while Mr. Partridge looked for a place for his print shop. He himself would be staying at the Black Horse Tavern. Run by friends. Booked long ago. Cormac should call on him once a day, that was the plan, and Mr. Partridge would tell him of his progress. He had given Cormac a crudely printed map of the town, along with a litany of dire warnings. Don’t let anyone carry your bag, or you’ll never see it again. (The fastest thieves in the world live here.) Don’t get drunk and lose control, or you’ll lose even your shoes. (Lock your door, button your coat, strap your hat, tie your laces.) Don’t sleep with any woman who offers her services (It’s a city of whores), or you’ll end up with a pox that will swell your tongue to the width of a plank. New York was a dangerous place, Mr. Partridge said. Full of thieves from many nations. (They speak seventeen different tongues, not counting the African languages.) The English were the worst. Lazy buggers. Rather steal than work. (As an Englishman, they fill me with shame.) There were hundreds of Englishmen transported to America for crimes committed in English cities. (They start by cutting their mothers’ throats and then go downhill.) And they weren’t even the worst.

“The most dangerous of the lot are the ones who now think they’re respectable,” he had said when they were a week away from America. “They go to church. They wear fine clothes. They use snuff. And they’d steal the eyeballs out of your head.”

He paused, staring at his journeyman’s hands.

“Still and all, they’ll give us much to print.”

And he laughed out loud.

They had agreed to work together in New York. Or rather, Cormac would work for him. As soon as Mr. Partridge found a place for his press and his shop, he would teach Cormac the printing trade. The prospect thrilled Cormac. He could always work as a blacksmith, but to learn to set type and print Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope and who knew what other great writers: that made his skin tingle and his blood rush. To be sure, he had a mission in New York, one he did not mention to the older man. But if the Earl of Warren was not there, or otherwise eluded him, then (Cormac thought) he could master a trade that would give his life a purpose.

Now the Fury moved steadily toward New York, passing the small mountain rising in Staten Island, and Cormac thought that he might never come this way again and so should remember the thrill of arrival. He might die in prison. He might be pursued into the blank interior. Indeed, in his pursuit of the earl, he might lose his own life. He might not even get past the pier, if someone recognized him. Some policeman or redcoat who knew that in Ireland he had killed a man. Or even two (for Cormac did not know the fate of the man who had crawled without a hand from the earl’s stable). If they had a list, an alert, a warrant, they’d be looking for a young man named Robert Carson. Not Cormac O’Connor. Not Martin O’Donovan. They could be looking for him without need of a name.

But as the new land surrounded him, as a new breeze ruffled his hair, as he swerved into this port in the New World, this New York, another feeling blossomed within him, nurtured by the frail, almost tender rain and the smell of American earth: a yearning to live beyond the end of his mission. In some odd way, he wanted to kill the earl in order to live on. To live with all blood obligations honored and all blood debts paid. To end one part of his life and begin another. Here, in Tir-na-Nog.

Such thoughts vanished among shouts and cheers, the creaking of timbers and the swishing of water against the hull, as they turned into the great harbor. That was Brooklyn to the right now (Mr. Partridge said), named for a town in Holland, covered with woods that climbed in a long slope to a ridge of hills. Its scattered houses faced the harbor, with plumes of smoke rising from chimneys like pennants. Small boats were tied along the Brooklyn shore, and fishing boats, in from sea and river, were aimed at wharves. A few figures moved on a morning wharf and one of them waved in welcome and the crew cheered and waved back. Sails flapped. Flags streamed in the breeze. Captain Thompson watched in melancholy silence as his ship moved steadily to Manhattan.

At last the emigrants were released to the freedom of the deck. Blinking and trembling. They were now a ghastly remnant of those who had embarked so hopefully from Galway: red-eyed and wretched, their hair matted and greasy, pallid skins grimy with thirteen weeks of filth and fever and death. All were silent. Tears streaked the grime on some women’s faces, but they could not even manage a sob. They gazed at Brooklyn as if it were the seacoast of the moon.

Manhattan grew larger and more clear. A fort at the tip. Four squat cannon aimed at the bay. Or at the Fury. Low houses behind the fort, and the steeple of a church, and away off to the north, ridged green forests. Small boats crossed before them. Sloops and skiffs. To the right the East River moved sluggishly between Manhattan and the Long Island, its marshy shore thick with masts. As they drew closer, the seabirds were braver, more aggressive, yipping and snarling around the masts. Cormac glimpsed scarlet uniforms near the fort and remembered them on the roads of Ireland. Along with the one British redcoat who had shown him the body of the dead girl after the Great Cold, his stricken face, his small lament for people who had died drinking piss.

Captain Thompson guided them into the East River. The Fury slowed, idled for a time, then turned with its stern toward what Mr. Partridge told him was Wallabout Bay. The seamen worked expertly, shouting curtly to one another, all engaged in the docking of the ship. Then they were pointed directly at the foot of Wall Street (although Cormac didn’t yet know its name, and Mr. Partridge, his guide to geography, had retreated to his cabin to retrieve his precious personal cargo). Creaking timbers. Seabirds. A billowing of sail. A collective holding of breath. They saw other ships tied up at timbered piers. And parts of the shoreline dwindling into mud.

Mr. Partridge returned. Directly before them on shore was a large, empty, tin-roofed shed. Beneath the roof, an elevated stage. A large, still-faceless crowd watching the Fury’s approach. “That tin-roofed building,” Mr. Partridge said, “is the Slave Market.” Cormac thought: This is where Kongo will be sold. This place. Kongo and his men. But not Tomora. She has escaped this disgusting stage.

They entered the slip. The crew worked at mooring the Fury. Now Cormac could read the signs on the three-story buildings behind the Slave Market. Coopers. Meat sellers and victualers. Cordwainers and fishmongers and shipping agents. A pyramid of empty barrels climbed to the left, and beside them stood great piles of wooden crates awaiting shipment. Black men moved among the whites on shore, dressed in the same coarse clothes. Lifting, hauling, watching the ship as it docked. Behind the Slave Market, Wall Street cut through row houses up a long slope, and in the distance was the steeple they’d glimpsed from the harbor.

Ropes were thrown. Knots tied to stanchions. Mr. Partridge and Cormac were there, lashed to the American shore. The Rev. Clifford was now on deck. He was dressed in black, his eyes dead, standing behind them as Captain Thompson offered the top-deck passengers his thanks and his apologies for the rigors of the journey. The captain wished them good luck and gestured toward the wide plank leading to the wharf. Clifford’s skin was dusty with seclusion, his eyes beyond all offers of luck or thanks. He went down the plank first, into the waiting crowd, in his salt-stained black suit, carrying his black bags and his black Bible. Mr. Partridge and Cormac in turn embraced the captain, shook hands with Mr. Clark, waved to the crew (which paid them little attention), and walked down to the land. There were no policemen or soldiers waiting with lists, and Cormac took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

Then, to Cormac, it was as if the land were tilting and shifting, and some in the crowd laughed as they wobbled and lurched and tried to turn sea legs into land legs. Mr. Partridge laughed back, and so did Cormac. Someone shouted, “Welcome to America!” They mumbled their thanks and drifted to the side of the crowd. “Carry your bag, sir?” came one voice. “Food and lodging, gentlemen?” said another. “A nice warm woman after a long cold voyage?” whispered a third with a knowing giggle. “Absolutely not,” said Mr. Partridge, speaking for the two of them, his face wearing an expression that said: We’re not idiots.

They were waiting at the quayside because Mr. Partridge couldn’t take possession of his printing press until all passengers had cleared the ship. He told Cormac to go on to Hughson’s on Stone Street and have a bath and breakfast. Cormac insisted on waiting with him. The older man went off to find help, while Cormac stood with his own bag on top of Mr. Partridge’s suitcase and his foot on top of both. The sword felt heavy in its hiding place between his shoulder blades. A few minutes later Partridge returned in the company of a stevedore with a large cart who promised to deliver the press to Van Zandt’s warehouse, three blocks south. But Mr. Partridge didn’t trust its safe portage without being with it every minute. They waited together, with the stevedore off to the side.

The rain was falling harder now, drumming on the peaked tin roof of the Slave Market. They found dry refuge under a lean-to used by the stevedores, and while Mr. Partridge went for a look at the warehouse, someone offered Cormac a cup of coffee. His first in America. He ignored the dark warnings of Mr. Partridge and accepted. It was thick, sweet, dark, delicious, and if it contained some drug, Cormac didn’t care. His bones began to warm.

Now the emigrants were tottering down the wide plank, looking like the risen crew of a death ship. A few of them were freemen, not prisoners of an indentured contract. They responded to a name shouted from the crowd—Here, Billy! Right here, Robert—and rushed to collapse into the arms of some relative. The rest were herded toward a brawny man in a leather vest who waited at the bottom of the plank, with an African holding an umbrella over his head. He was clearly a boss. Or the boss. Four men stood to the side, watching him the way lieutenants always look at a captain, the way the earl’s men had looked at him before the killing of Cormac’s father. They tensely gripped muskets, as if ready for battle—not for England or America or even themselves, but for the boss.

Each emigrant gave a name, and the burly man checked them off a list and pointed to a space in the rain to the left of the Slave Market where they must wait. The lieutenants took up positions at each corner of an imaginary square enclosing these indentured servants. The message was clear: If one of the Irish runs, he (or she) will be shot. Other men (in fancier clothes, with their own Africans holding umbrellas) began to bargain over their fate, pointing and choosing, and pinning small colored ribbons on the emigrants’ soaked clothes. These were badges that made each emigrant the property of specific American agents. Some would remain in New York. A few were sent to New England. Most were bound for South Carolina or Virginia to work with the African slaves. Now some of the indentured servants found their tongues. This woman needs to go with that man and not be separated from him (for they’d fallen in love in the purgatory of the crossing). Or that woman is carrying my child, for the love of God (in pleading Irish and clumsy English). Or I’ll not move a bloody inch until my child is fed!

A huge black man suddenly detached himself from a group of agents. He was about six-foot-two with muscles rippling under his denim vest. A leather whip was curled in his huge hand. Cormac heard some of the stevedores call his name. Quaco.

He stood alone in front of the unruly Irish. He didn’t say a word but simply glared, and they hushed. Cormac knew why. They were cowed, beaten, beyond humiliation, with the rain falling steadily on their heads and shoulders and hopes.

Then a man on horseback arrived at the edge of the crowd and leaped down. He tethered the horse to a rough-hewn post in front of a meat shop. Quaco looked hard at him. He was about forty, his gray hair pasted to his skull by the rain, his broad shoulders pushing from beneath a coarse mechanic’s shirt. His eyes were wide and frantic as he pushed through the crowd to the huddled emigrants. He was calling a name. Caroline Heaney? Caroline Heaney? Has any of yiz seen Caroline Heaney? Heads shook slowly, as if concealing a secret. Heaney? Caroline Heaney? He turned to the Fury, peered at wet faces, and then walked hard to the man under the umbrella, the man checking off names. Quaco eased around to the side, as the new arrival whispered to the man with the Irish list. He was given a negative shake of the head and a jerk of a hand in the direction of the ship. There Mr. Blifil stood alone at the foot of the gangplank, holding a sheaf of his own papers in one hand, an umbrella in the other. The man went to him. Caroline Heaney. Mr. Blifil flipped a few pages, paused, said something, and looked away. The man fell to the flagstones, writhing, weeping, cursing. His fists hammered at the earth. Oh, my God; God damn you: Oh, my Caroline, oh, my sweet Caroline, I never should have wrote you, oh, Caroline, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Some of the women broke past Quaco and bent over the man and held him and whispered to him (no doubt about the fate of Caroline and how she was now in Heaven, or the Otherworld), while the rain drummed harder on the roof of the Slave Market. Quaco did not intervene, even when an agent barked something at him and pointed at the disturbance of the grieving man. Quaco waited and watched until the grief ebbed and the man stood up and walked off to the place where his horse was tethered. Two English soldiers in rain-stained scarlet jackets were watching from their place in front of a cooper’s shop. One of them laughed. Cormac wished he could unsheathe his sword.

39.

At last nine Africans were brought up on deck, with Kongo in the lead, all that was left of the original thirteen men and one woman. For a few defiant minutes, they stood shoulder to shoulder in a line, facing the American shore. The place of the enemy. The place of their captors. Behind them, Captain Thompson slipped into his cabin, presumably to wash his hands. The Africans wore only breechclouts. Their bodies were thin but not frail, and in the rain their skin was as glossy as wet coal. Their hands and feet were shackled, the hands tightly, the feet more loosely. With gestures and scowls, the boss beckoned them forward, his lieutenants tensed, as if ready to drag them ashore. Quaco watched from a distance. Kongo obviously calculated the odds of escape, and they were too long. Then he led the way down the plank, walking with small hobbled steps, but somehow managing to look like a victor.

The Africans stood very still on the flagstones along the edge of the pier. The boss agent said something and pointed to the stage of the Slave Market. The slave with the umbrella translated for his boss. But Kongo didn’t move. Quaco watched more intently. The biggest of the private guards nudged Kongo sharply with the musket. Still Kongo refused to move. Then the guard hammered him on the back with the butt of the long gun. Kongo bent from the blow but did not go down.

Cormac rushed in.

“Wait,” he shouted. “Don’t do that!”

“And who are you?” the boss snarled, examining Cormac’s young face and new clothes.

“I know this man. He’s a good man and proud. Treat him well. Treat him like a man.”

“I’ll bust ’is fecking head, I will. If that suits you, sir.”

“And then what? Can a man with a broken head be sold?” One of the laughing English soldiers suddenly appeared, no longer laughing. His lip curled and he was annoyed by the rain that was soaking his scarlet coat to the color of old blood.

“What’s all this?”

“Nothing,” Cormac said, afraid now of an arrest, a request for papers. “Just trying to protect someone’s property.”

“Well, get on with it. We need no trouble here.”

With a shrug and a turn of the head, Cormac urged Kongo to go along. The African looked at Cormac with that familiar mixture of anger and suspicion, then glanced around at the crowd. Quaco was staring at both of them. He was detached from the Africans, charged only with controlling the Irish. But he nodded at Kongo. A moment of contact, with something else built into it: a promise, a hope for a better moment. Kongo took a deep breath and led the way to the stage of the market. Walking like a captured king.

Then Mr. Partridge returned from his tasks, his face wet, his eyes angry. From a distance, he had seen Cormac’s small intervention. He pulled his beaver hat lower on his brow.

“Are you mad?” he whispered, taking Cormac’s elbow and leading him away.

Cormac looked back at Kongo as he moved up the steps leading to the tin-roofed stage. He was branded, as they all were, as Tomora had been, with a flared cross on the shoulder blades. A consignment of merchandise.

“They could have arrested you, you young fool,” Mr. Partridge said.

“I suppose.”

“Suppose? Sup-pose? That’s their business. Their merchandise! They are shameless monsters, the lot of them. But that’s why they’re here. To peddle humans for money. Confronting them physically is foolish bravado.”

A clipped English voice started announcing the imminent auction. The words were tossed and fractured by the rain. Cormac saw nobody who resembled the Earl of Warren. But when he gazed at the gray turbulent sky, a lone raven was making wide, slow circles above the town of New York.

40.

Then it was all settled on the quay at the foot of Wall Street. The huge crate was safely stored in Van Zandt’s warehouse. Mr. Partridge shouldered his heavy bag, refused Cormac’s offer to carry it for him, grabbed two smaller satchels in each hand, and they set off together into the town.

They walked up the slope of Wall Street, heading west, and the crowds filled Cormac with a sense of the marvelous. Here were all the nations of the earth, their languages drifting through the soggy air, or cleaving passages between the nouns and verbs of English. He didn’t yet know French from German or Spanish from Dutch, but Mr. Partridge kept saying, Listen, listen to them, lad while telling him the names of the languages. The faces seemed to fit the words themselves, and their smooth or jarring rhythms: lean or fat, dark or fair. Cormac felt that he had entered the main street of Babel.

New York was an English town, of course, and had been one since 1673, the second time the English took it from the Dutch at gunpoint (Mr. Partridge said), the way they’d taken Ireland from the Irish. As they moved past the meat market, where great slabs of beef were loosely covered with burlap and tradesmen in blood-stained aprons shouted in London accents, the words on the walls were all in English. The signs above shops spoke English too. As did the quick, furtive men in rain-soaked coats and beaver hats calling to them from doorways: Room to let, sir? Place to stay? Good big meal after a long journey? A nice entertaining bit of fluff?

“Don’t talk to any of that lot,” Mr. Partridge said. “It wouldn’t suit you to get a clap the first day in America.”

He waved them away as if they were flies, and they passed through the lower part of Wall Street. Women revealed themselves among the milling crowds. Hatlesss women with rain-slick hair. Swaggering women and big-hipped women, coarse and fleshy women. And a few younger women flashing eyes at them, wearing paint on their faces. Cormac looked at one of them and she smiled in an available way. He averted his gaze (certain his face was flushed) and saw women pale as ghosts in upstairs windows, and women moving down the jammed side streets, stepping out of small houses made of yellow bricks, or backing out of shops. Their high-heeled shoes lifted the rims of their skirts above the mud.

Mr. Partridge grunted and paused, short of breath, but still refused Cormac’s offer to carry his heavy bag, with its books and papers and secrets. And while he paused, Cormac now noticed how many Africans there were in the streets. “They’re a fifth of the population, lad,” Mr. Partridge explained. “A fifth, out of eleven thousand souls.” Most of the Africans were young, like those on the ship and those who worked around the stage of the Slave Market, but some were older, shouting in good English, and a few were very old, squatting against walls, their hands open for alms. They were dressed like all the other workingmen, in rough muslin shirts, some with vests over the shirts, most with caps or hats because of the rain, all in heavy work boots. Two Africans maneuvered a load of cut lumber, removing it from a cart, while a horse shuddered and a white man gave orders in English. The Africans might have been a fifth of the people, but after you grew used to them (their like did not work in Belfast) they didn’t stand out; they seemed part of the hurly-burly of the street. Cormac wondered if Kongo would become just another one of them.

There were black women too. They didn’t resemble Tomora. Most were in the company of white women, carrying their bundles from the shops, or packages of meat from the market. The African women held umbrellas over the heads of their white mistresses, unless their hands were filled with packages, and then the white women gripped their own umbrellas, shifting to keep the packages dry. White or black, there were fewer women than men. At least on Wall Street. But the African women seemed more casual in their movements than the black men, as if they had settled for living out their lives here on this continent far from home. Cormac wondered what they were thinking on this jammed New York street, and in what language they dreamed.

As they walked, Mr. Partridge tried to fill Cormac with the lore of the place, but the younger man was too busy seeing it before him to listen to what it was. They stopped again, at the corner of Broad Street and Wall. Mr. Partridge leaned his bag on a stone marker, holding it in place with his body. He struggled for breath. That immense steeple up ahead, he told Cormac, is Trinity Church. It rises one hundred and seventy-five feet into the air. Cormac was astonished. This was the tallest structure he’d ever seen. Mr. Partridge didn’t see it as architecture, and hissed: “It’s just another attempt by the bloody Church of England to impose itself on people who’re not in the least bit interested.”

Across the street, that three-story building was the City Hall. “Look quickly,” he said. “It’s sure to get bigger and grander in the blink of an eye.” He told Cormac that the Dutch had governed themselves from a tavern, but the Crown, in its majesty, preferred arcaded bricks. “Security!” Mr. Partridge said. “Order!” He laughed. “That’s what they mean by God and King!” Gazing at the City Hall, Cormac remembered the plain weathered bricks of Belfast.

On their side of the street, a small crowd of men was gathered in the rain, cupping lit cigars or smoking clay pipes, talking in low tones, observing each new arrival at the City Hall. The arrivals were tall, well-dressed men with cold faces and the manners of command. A few emerged from horse-drawn carriages. Most arrived from side streets to the north. Cormac thought: If the Earl of Warren is in this town, he’s certain to come here.

“Look at those faces,” Mr. Partridge said. “Enough to make you a revolutionist.”

Then he sighed and so did Cormac. They were now too exhausted to do almost anything at all beyond finding the solace of a land-bound bed. They turned into Broad Street. Mr. Partridge paused at the entrance to the Black Horse, where he would stay until he found a shop for his press. They agreed to meet the next morning (after a good night’s sleep) and every day after that (if necessary), and then he pointed Cormac down the wide, crowded avenue toward Stone Street.

“And don’t eat anything sold in the street,” he shouted in farewell. “That’ll kill you faster than the voyage.”

41.

Broad Street was unpaved, widening out as it moved away from Wall Street, with a shimmer of harbor light at its distant end. It was filled with even more human beings than Wall Street. As the rain eased into a fine mist, dozens of motionless carts and wagons were engulfed by customers, shouting and bargaining with the peddlers. Many peddlers were women with coarse, thick, plain faces, selling eels and venison, oysters and fowl, limes from the Caribbean and vegetables from Brooklyn. Cormac’s stomach coiled with hunger. Two soldiers on horseback rode by at a trot, splashing gluey mud around them, and some of the women yelled insults at their scarlet backs. Then there was a great surge and shouts, and Cormac was pushed aside, and suddenly a giant sow thumped in among them in a whirl of mud and fury, followed by six piglets and a large man shouting in what Cormac learned later was Dutch, and more men coming behind him. It was the biggest pig Cormac had ever seen, and probably the smartest, for it dodged and slithered and ran, eluding the men. It would not easily become bacon. The women shouted and cursed the pursuing men, clearly rooting for the sow. Cormac looked up the sloping street from which the sow had charged and saw more pigs, calmer, burying their snouts in mounds of garbage while a few young boys watched over them. He was too hungry to watch the end of the pursuit race, but like the peddler women, he was surely on the side of the pigs.

His new clothes were soaked now, as he searched for Stone Street. No street was marked with a sign. Three Africans were coming up Broad Street, one after the other, with poles braced across their backs, carrying immense pails of fresh water.

“Excuse me,” Cormac said. “I’m looking for Stone Street.”

“Two block,” one of the black men said in a breathless voice. “Can’t miss.”

“Thank you,” Cormac said. The African nodded in a surprised way and they moved on. Cormac passed more shops, a bank, a tobacconist, a button maker, and more carts, and finally reached Stone Street. The cobblestoned street sloped down toward the wooden stockade walls of Fort George. On the ramparts, he could see the shiny peaked caps of soldiers, slashes of scarlet, the points of bayonets, and a British flag dripping and limp from the rain. It was as Mr. Partridge had described it to him, the place where the governor lived, the center of colonial power in the province, cut off from the people as if its inhabitants feared them. But it told Cormac that he was truly here. He had crossed the fierce Atlantic and was here in New York.

At the bottom of the street on the left stood an old Dutch brewery converted into a warehouse, and across the street was the tavern run by John Hughson.

The house was three stories high with sloping eaves and a chimney at the back. There was a careless quality to it. Dark blue paint was peeling on the front door, showing a coat of pale blue underneath. The window frames were crooked. One wall sagged, as if it had been built before the earth below it had settled. A half-dozen loose slates were askew on the roof. On each side of the doorstep, patches of earth made for flowers were slick and bald and muddy. Pausing there, facing the tarnished brass knocker, Cormac remembered the straight true lines of their house in Ireland and flowers bursting from spring earth. All now ash.

He knocked on the door. Waited a long while. Then knocked again.

The door was jerked open, and he was startled by the woman who stood before him. Sharp, beaked nose. A slash of mouth. Gray, suspicious, disappointed eyes. There was a hint of rouge on her cheeks and a silver stud glistening in each earlobe. Her hair was pulled straight back. Her bosom was large and pillowy.

“Is it a room you want?” she said.

“Aye.”

“Are you Irish?”

“Aye.”

“Are you Catholic?”

“No.”

“Three shillings a week, meals included. In advance. Do y’ have money?”

“Aye.”

“Come in,” she said, “and don’t be clompin’ them boots on our nice dry floors.”

They were in a tight hallway, with coat hooks on the wall, a bench, a chipped porcelain umbrella stand, stairs leading to the next floor, and a closed blue door at the rear of the hall. She turned her back on him, and he noticed that she had wide hips and was wearing a scent.

“Mary?” she called up the stairs. “Mary? Come down here, girl.” Then she turned to Cormac and scowled.

“Take off the boots,” she said, “and the socks too, if you’re wearing any.”

He sat on the bench, unlaced the boots, peeled off the socks. The odor of rain and feet and wet wool filled the tight hallway.

The stairs creaked, and he looked up and saw a young woman’s bare calves first, and then the rest of her: dark brown hair, sullen eyes, full lips, small waist. She was wearing a loose blue sweater over a white blouse and a long dark blue skirt. She inspected him in a chilly way.

“This is Mary Burton,” the older woman said to Cormac. “Your name is…?”

“O’Donovan,” Cormac said. “Martin O’Donovan. From Galway.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m Sarah Hughson. I run this place, with my husband, John.”

“Nice to meet you,” Cormac said.

“Mary, take Mr. O’Donovan to room three, would you, dearie?” the woman said in a flat voice.

“Yes’m.”

He lifted his shoes and socks in one hand and his bag in the other. At the sight of him, Mary Burton laughed out loud.

“Don’t you be laughin’ at a guest, y’ young flit!” Sarah said sharply.

“I don’t mind,” Cormac said. “I must look a right idiot.”

“It’s not for you to excuse her, young man,” Sarah said. “We live with rules here. The first rule is the three shillings is paid in advance.”

He dug the shillings from his pocket and handed them to her.

“Try to get some sleep,” she said. “You look fit for bein’ buried.”

“Aye,” he said, and followed Mary Burton up the stairs, eyes fixed on her bare calves. She led him to a small room under the eaves, furnished with a narrow cot and a battered bureau. A small window faced south to Fort George. He dropped the bag on the floor. There was a piss pot against the wall.

“Well, you’re certainly not from Galway,” she said. “Not with that accent. I’m from Galway, and I know. So I assume your name’s not Martin O’Donovan.”

“Are you a policeman in disguise?”

“Not in this bloody house,” she said, chuckling in a private, knowing way.

“Call me Martin anyway,” Cormac said.

“All right,” she said. “In this bloody town, nobody is who they say they are anyway.”

She stared out the rain-dripping window toward the harbor.

“Is there a way to get a bit of breakfast?”

“First take off your clothes,” she said.

He laughed. “Is this the way you welcome people to America?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t stand the feckin’ sight of that lovely feckin’ suit turning into a feckin’ coal bag.”

She stared at him. “And besides,” she said, “I want to know what it is you’ve got strapped to your back.”

He removed his jacket and hung it on the bedpost.

“It’s a sword,” Cormac said, unbuckling the straps across his chest and then holding the sword’s handle in its scabbard and showing her. There was a glitter of fascination in her eyes.

“A fecking sword it is,” she said. “I thought so.”

“Actually, it’s my father’s sword.”

“Was he thinkin’ of New York when he gave it to you?”

“No,” he said, and paused, as an image of his father’s corded arms scribbled through him, hammering the sword in his forge. “No, he was dead when it passed to my hands. He left it to me.”

She looked at him with another kind of disbelief. He sensed that there were few stories that Mary Burton truly believed.

“I see,” she said.

She lifted his jacket off the bedpost. A sour odor filled the room. Cormac was sure it was from him: sweat and rain and the stench of the ship.

“The trousers too.”

“Uh, I don’t know you that well, miss. I don’t—”

“I told you: The name’s Mary Burton. I owe the feckin’ Hughsons six more feckin’ years on me feckin’ indenture. Let me have the feckin’ trousers.”

“Why don’t you fetch me some breakfast and I’ll take them off while you’re gone.”

“Jaysus, another tightnutter from Ireland.”

She hustled out with the jacket, closing the door behind her. A key was slotted in the keyhole and Cormac turned it, locking the door. He was not really shy of Mary Burton seeing him naked, but he didn’t want her seeing the money belt. He stripped off the trousers, unbuckled the money belt, and shoved it under the mattress. He pulled off his long, soaked underwear and hung it with the trousers on the bedpost. Then he unlocked the door and eased under the coverlet, his hunger fighting with his exhaustion, and both in combat with images of Mary Burton’s body. Little squalls of rain spattered the windowpane. He smelled bacon frying. His body drowsed, but he remained awake, the sword on the floor, his hand on its hilt. Then Mary Burton returned with a tray. She laid it across his covered thighs: three fried eggs, slabs of greasy bacon, brown buttered bread, and a pot of tea.

“Sit up,” she said.

He did, leaning closer to her.

“Do you think I could have me a bath?” he said.

She snickered. “The rule is one bath a week. There’s seven feckin’ rooms in this hole, and your room doesn’t get its bath for two more feckin’ days. Don’t feckin’ complain to me. I don’t make the rules.”

He laughed. “How many times a day do you say ‘feck’?”

“As many as I feckin’ can.”

She paused at the door.

“I suppose you’d like me to join you?” she said.

”Well, I—”

She humphed in a dismissive way.

“Just leave the feckin’ tray outside the feckin’ door,” she said, picking up the rest of his clothes and closing the door hard.

He ate desperately, jamming the bread into his mouth, taking bacon in his fingers. Thinking: Mary Burton. Thinking: Who are you, girl? Thinking: Why do you talk worse than a sailor? Mary Morrigan moved in his mind, smelling of the forest, whispering the old tales. He saw the perfumed breast of Bridget Riley in the Earl of Warren’s bed. Then Tomora, gazing with her liquid black eyes from the blackness of her jail. Then the door opened again and Mary Burton came in, holding a steaming bowl of water. She placed it on the bureau.

“If you wait two days to feckin’ wash,” she said, “we’ll be dead of the stink.” She put a piece of gray muslin and a sliver of soap beside the bowl. “And don’t tell that bitch Sarah I took you some soap. She’ll add thruppence to the feckin’ account.”

With that, she was gone again. Cormac finished eating and then stood up naked, using the soap and the muslin cloth to wash his face and neck, armpits and balls and feet. He felt at once filled and purged, his stomach full, his flesh scoured. He then put the dirty dishes on the tray and laid them outside the door. The corridor was empty. He heard smothered female voices from below. Then male growls. He locked the door. He shoved his bag between bed and wall, with the small leather pouch inside containing his mother’s spiral earrings. He laid the sword under the thin mattress and strapped the money belt to the small of his back. Thirteen pounds. His mother’s spiral earrings. His father’s sword. They were all that he truly possessed, which was a lot more than most. All of them with him now in this room in America. The rain whipped the windowpanes, and he fell asleep.

42.

In the dark, Cormac heard the muffled sound of a fiddle and thought he was still on the ship. But nothing rocked or creaked, no seaborne timber cleaved water. He was in a room. On land. With dim light leaking through crooked shutters. He rubbed his eyes, and the room emerged dimly, in dark gray tones. He stretched, felt the sword through the mattress and the straps of the money belt digging into his flesh. He unbuckled the money belt and rubbed his skin. Then he sat up naked. And stepped into the chill, and felt for the candle and wooden matches on top of the bureau. He snapped a sulphur head with a thumbnail, lit the wick. Almost reluctantly, yellow light revealed the room. From beyond the door, the unseen fiddler played a melancholy tune.

His suit was not in the room. He cracked open the door and peered into the darkened hallway. The sound of the fiddle was louder now, but no less melancholy. And there was the suit, neatly hanging on a rough hanger hooked upon a wall peg opposite the door. He took it in behind him. Again, he washed his face and armpits with the chilly water and dried himself with the coarse, damp cloth, dressed quickly, buckling the money belt under his trousers, and went out, locking the door behind him and pocketing the key.

He followed the sound of the fiddle down two flights of stairs to the blue door in the back of the entrance hall. The melancholy tune ended, and the music shifted into an up-tempo reel, which was greeted by a loud, growling, masculine roar of approval.

He opened the door and stepped into another world: a lowceilinged, smoky room crowded with white men and Africans, some of them up and jigging madly to the music, the floor shaking, laughter pealing, some of the black men doing wild parodies of the white men’s dances. One white woman was dancing with two black men, laughing and taunting them. And from the side came Mary Burton, all rosy in the light of lanterns. She grabbed Cormac’s forearm.

“The feckin’ suit looks better now,” she said.

“It does. Thanks very much.” He smiled. “And thanks for the water and soap.”

“You must smell a lot better,” she said. “Can you jig?”

“No.”

“Well, try anyway.”

She jerked him into the center of the dancing men, her back straight, her arms rigidly hanging at her side, her breasts bouncing to the music and the movements. The room roared. Dance it, Marymouth. Do it, do it… She glowered at Cormac until he stepped in and tried to match her moves, feeling clumsy and oafish, his legs like lumber. Until one of the Africans shouted at him.

“Don’t think, boy. Move.”

And so he did, surrendering to the music, and the packed heat, and the smoke, and the open mouth of Mary Burton, her lips shifting as he stared, and the music pulsing, and her breasts pushing against the cotton blouse, and she was Mary Morrigan and she was Bridget Riley, and his head started seething and he felt himself hardening and her hand brushed his hardness while other dancers bumped against him, closing the tight space around Mary Burton, and she ran a tongue over her mouth in a teasing way. And then it was over. Everyone cheered. And then Mary Burton embraced him, pressing into him, pushing her small breasts hard against his chest.

“Ah, that was feckin’ grand,” she growled, suddenly turning and shoving her way through the crowd to the bar. He followed her. From the jumble of excited talk he kept hearing Marymouth, Mary-mouth, at once affectionate and charged with lust. She pushed an African aside and reached for a plate. The bar was covered with jugs and glasses and mugs, and platters of ham and venison and bleeding beef, potatoes, turnips, and cabbage, bread loaves and a butter tub, and a kind of porridge called sappaan. She heaped food on a plate. Behind the bar stood a tall, unsmiling, fleshy man with skin cratered by smallpox. His body was still, but his hands moved quickly: uncorking bottles, pouring drinks, gathering coins, and dropping them into the pockets of his greasy apron. His eyes were as soft in their own way as his body. But to be sure, Cormac thought, I’ve spent so many weeks with men made lean and hard by hunger that almost everybody else in the room looks soft.

“John,” Mary Burton said, “this is your new boarder, Mister O’Donovan, he says his name is.” Then to Cormac: “John Hughson. He owns this feckin’ dive.”

Hughson’s mouth smiled, but his eyes remained soft and disappointed.

“Welcome,” he said. “Have a drink, lad.”

He glanced at Mary Burton.

“Maybe you’ll be the one to land Miss Mouth,” he said, opening a bottle of porter.

“Oh, shush, John. Let the man eat.”

“That’s sixpence,” Hughson said, as Cormac fumbled for change. “You must be just in from the sea. You’ve got that ship hunger on you. Ah, well, you’re not alone. Some of ’em come in here ready to eat the bloody furniture.”

“The feckin’ furniture might taste better than some of your food, John,” Mary Burton said.

“Don’t give the lad a bad impression, wench.”

He turned to a foot-wide opening in the wall behind him, beyond which was the kitchen, and shouted something Cormac couldn’t hear under the sound of another kind of music. The fiddler bowed a few bars, and then the Africans joined him, using rattles and gourds and polished wooden bars that made a klawkklawk-klawk sound. Some chanted together and were answered by others. The voices were taunting, bragging, laughing, sharing the close, dense, happy air of the place to which they’d been taken at gunpoint. Cormac understood only one large thing: He was hearing Africa.

“Come on,” Mary Burton said, grabbing Cormac’s plate and pushing him along through the chanting crowd to a table near the far wall. Three black men were seated on a bench, drinking rum. In the corner, the white fiddler played in solitude, overwhelmed by the African rhythms but trying to play into and through them.

“Move over, you lot,” Mary Burton said to the three Africans, and they did, smiling and polite. “We’ve got us a new feckin’ inmate.”

Cormac had already seen one of them: Quaco, the tall man who had behaved well at the Wall Street quay that morning. He said nothing, but gave Cormac a look of recognition, perhaps remembering that he had tried to protect Kongo from the hard men. The others were named Sandy and Diamond. Sandy was Cormac’s age, the other two older. They were all dressed in clean shirts and rough trousers. Mary Burton turned her back to them and picked at some of the food on Cormac’s plate.

“Why do they call you Marymouth?”

“Because of my dirty feckin’ mouth. Or—no, that’s it.” She smiled in an almost proud way. “John Hughson says I’ve got the dirtiest feckin’ mouth in America.”

Cormac squeezed her hand.

“Well, there’s a lot worse things, I suppose.”

“Aye, like being a feckin’ slave,” she said. “They call us indentured servants, but that’s the fancy way to say it. The true feckin’ word is slave. Just like all these black fellas from Africa. There’s no bloody difference. I did two years up in Poughkeepsie with a fat feckin’ Dutchman that bought me from some feckin’ English poof. The Dutchman tried to get up into me, but I fought him off, and then his fat feckin’ wife was sure he was gettin’ me anyway, and she it was that had me sold again. John Hughson’s brother bought me for John, and I told John, You might own me, but you won’t have me body and don’t expect me to act like a feckin’ lady while I do the slave work.” She smiled. “Drives him feckin’ wicked, it does.”

She got up and went to the bar, and carried plates to another table, and sat down again with Cormac, talking and moving to the music, and then was up again. She was always in movement, cracking wise with customers, dancing variations on the jig with Africans, clearing plates, then sitting with Cormac again. Across the night she explained in bits and pieces this small part of the world into which he had arrived, turning for confirmation to Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond. “Isn’t that right, Quaco?” “Yes ma’am.” “Tell the man I’m not feckin’ lying, Sandy.” “Oh, you don’t lie, Miz Mary.” Among other things, Cormac learned that Hughson’s was one of only four taverns where blacks and whites mixed freely.

“There’s two hundred taverns and only four of them is like this. Isn’t that right, Diamond?”

“Right, Mary.”

The British authorities didn’t like it, Sandy said, but they took Hughson’s little bribes and left him alone. Mary laughed. “John says the English captain is really his partner.” Sunday was the slaves’ day off, and because there were so many of them, the white people tried hard to avoid direct confrontations. Yes, it was against the law to serve strong drink to a slave, but this was New York. Yes, it was against the law for slaves to assemble in groups larger than three, but this was New York. After dark, no slave could move through the city without a lantern and a pass from his master; the law meant little because this was New York.

“They’re not a bad lot, the Africans,” Mary Burton said. “I pity them, kidnapped by those English feckheads and brought to this feckin’ sewer.”

There were some free Africans, she said, most of them too old to work anymore, cast into the streets by their masters, who were then spared the task of feeding them. “They’re up in the Out Ward, just above the Common,” Mary Burton said. “They’ve got their own burial ground there. They won’t let them be buried with the feckin’ whites. That’s the bloody English for you. The Jews are in their own wee bit of turf too, along the Chatham Road. The bloody English, always on their own, even when they’re feckin’ dead.”

Cormac heard that first night from Mary, from Quaco (with nods and mutterings from Diamond and sad remarks from Sandy) what he would hear for many weeks to come. For the Africans, New York was getting worse, not better.

“They see too many of us now,” Quaco said quietly. “They needs us. But they don’t want us too.” A flash of something dangerous washed through his composed, intelligent face. “They fears us too,” he said, and started to say something else, and then cut himself off.

Quaco told Cormac that he was twenty-two and had been in New York since he was twelve, working most days in the meat market for Wallace the victualer. Now that he was older and taller and stronger, and showed a gift for African languages as well as English, he was often rented to the dockmaster when ships came in. There were so many languages among the Africans, but the ones he heard most were Ashanti and Yoruba, which was the language of his part of Africa.

“I try don’t to be mean,” he said. “Try don’t to hurt a man or woman. They be scared, them from the ships. They don’t know if they still in the world. I talks to them in Ibo or Yoruba or Ashanti, calm ’em down, tell ’em they be fed soon, get them clo’s to be warm. I gets milk to some chile his mother’s dead from the ship. Cawse, a man get crazy, want to kill somebody, I have to stop him. Man he runs, I catch him. But I helps more than I harms people.”

“Ain’t always be such a way,” said Diamond. “Ain’t all times you be down there helpin’, Quaco. Just proves: Africaman got to help his own self.”

“Don’t talk no foolish words, boy,” Quaco said in warning.

“They sure to be a day,” Diamond said, staring at his small hands, and his rum. “They sure to be a day. Our day.”

“Shut down, fool,” Quaco said, and playfully squeezed Diamond’s head and sipped his own porter. But as the night lengthened, and Mary Burton worked other tables, and Quaco’s tongue was loosened by drink, he told Cormac what it was like to be a slave in New York. Slaves couldn’t ever confront a master. If they did, they got the lash. Sometimes they got the lash for no reason. “Master don’t like the way you look at him, here come the lash. Master don’t like the cookin’? Here come the lash. Silverware missin’? The lash. Africaman can’t go to school to learn to read, ’cause they might read newspapers and see stories ’bout slaves who murder they masters. Or slave rebellions in Jamaica or Georgia.” Silence. “Like we don’t know,” Quaco said, shaking his head. “Like we don’t hear.”

Slaves couldn’t work as coopers or coachmen, they told Cormac (while the music pounded and the porter flowed), because the white coopers and white coachmen couldn’t compete with them for wages. “Nobody competes with us,” said Sandy, “ ’cause we get no wages, sir.” This in an English accent (he was born in New York, and then his mother died and his father was sold to a man in Canada while he was sold to a brickmaker). “They see us as mules, sir, or horses,” Sandy said, waving a thin hand. “Sell us, trade us, rent us.” Diamond murmured, “They sure to be a day.”

Mary Burton heard this fragment of talk and said, “Explain about the great God-fearin’ dog-feckin’ shite-eating Bible-thumpin’ piss-drinkin’ Christian churches!” The three Africans laughed and so did Cormac. “We can’t be Christians,” said Sandy, “because that would mean we had souls, sir. Mules don’t have souls, sir, horses don’t have souls—”

“And if you don’t have a feckin’ soul, then they can give yiz the feckin’ lash!” said Mary Burton.

Slaves couldn’t get married in any Christian church, so they had their own ceremonies.

“I marry my wife here in Hughson’s,” said Quaco, and for the first time, his eyes looked bitter in the yellow light of Hughson’s lanterns. “My wife, she work in the fort. Cookin’, cleanin’. They won’t let me see her on Sunday, won’t let me see her at night; she have to sneak out and go with me in the trees, like the white whores by the fort. My wife! And they own her!”

Mary Burton put a calming hand on Quaco’s forearm, sipped furtively from Cormac’s glass of porter, glancing through the crowd at the bar to be sure Hughson didn’t see her.

“In other words,” she said, turning to Cormac, “these poor buggers’re treated like we was treated in the feckin’ Old Country.” She shook her head. “They don’t even have a Catholic church here. Just like the Old Country. It’s against the feckin’ law. So if you’re a Catholic, keep your mouth shut, boy. It’s a Godawful feckin’ crime to be a Catholic priest, and if they find one, they’ll strip him and whip the feckin’ life out of him. God help you if you’re a Catholic African. That’s a double feckin’ crime.”

She was laughing bitterly through this discourse, and so were the Africans. Then she glanced at the bar and her mood suddenly altered. Sarah Hughson had come around from behind the bar and her swagger made clear that she was the real boss of the tavern. Quaco looked uneasy. Other Africans nodded politely to her, not wishing to trigger her wrath and find themselves barred from Hughson’s. The fiddler played a lament, full of Irish sadness, and Sarah came over to the table.

“Ach, it’s the mud man,” she said to Cormac, hands on hips. “You look much better than you did when you arrived. And whatever you do, don’t believe a word from Mary the Mouth.” She smiled, showing her crooked teeth. “Bring the new lad a drink, will you, Mary?”

Mary Burton went to the bar, and Sarah sat down beside Cormac. Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond smiled in welcome but eased away, keeping a respectful distance.

“So what brings you to New York?”

“I want to be a printer.”

“A good trade,” she said. “But you might not find labor. The town’s full of illiterates. Starting with the people that run it.” She turned to Quaco. “How’s your wife, Quaco?”

He shrugged. “Reg’lar, Miz Hughson.”

“She’s still over in the fort?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Quaco said, seething again.

“A beautiful woman she is,” Sarah said to Cormac. “A bosom’d make most women weep in envy.” Then, to Quaco: “Better keep an eye out on her. Those soldier boys can’t be trusted.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mary Burton returned with a porter for Cormac and a small whiskey for Sarah Hughson. Sarah downed hers and got up. So did Quaco. His brow was knitted into a grid.

“Don’t you go anywhere, Quaco,” Sarah said.

“I go where I want,” he said, grunting.

“Don’t go to the fort.”

“I go where I want.”

“That’s nothing but trouble,” Sarah Hughson said. “She’s surely fast asleep.”

Sandy grabbed his arm to hold him back, but Quaco jerked his arm free and headed to the back door. Diamond and Sandy hurried after him (the music pounding now) and the three of them passed into the New York darkness.

“Jaysus feckin’ Christ,” Mary Burton said.

“I shouldn’t’ve mentioned his wife,” Sarah said.

“He thinks the governor and the feckin’ officers and all the men are getting it from his wife,” Mary Burton whispered to Cormac. “And he might be right about the governor.”

43.

Sarah moved quickly to the back door, and Mary sat down beside Cormac. She was weary now, her hair loose and tangled from the heat of the room and the long hours of the day. An African fiddler was playing his own instrument, plucking the strings in a percussive way instead of bowing them. The gourds and rattles were out. Africans drummed with fingernails on tabletops, while Mary Burton explained one other truth about the tavern (whispering, covering her mouth, looking at her glass). The Africans didn’t just come here for the drink and the freedom. They were there every night of the week because John Hughson was a fence.

“If you’re a slave,” she said, “the law is a feckin’ joke. And so most of them are thieves.”

After dark, she said, they came to Hughson’s with those things they had foraged. Things that could be turned into a form of payment for labor. Pieces of cheap silverware, bearing no engraved stamps. Stray tools. Casks of nails. Leather whips. Stolen liquor, meat, potatoes, and fruit. They stole while their masters were sleeping, or away on business, or assembled in the Christian churches, full of piety and breakfast. “It’s a way to keep some kind of feckin’ pride,” Mary Burton said. “There’s not too many ways to do that under the English flag.”

Hughson didn’t often give cash to the Africans. And it was not easy for an African to spend money, since he was not supposed to have any. What Hughson gave them was credit in his own tavern.

“I’d steal meself,” said Mary Burton, and laughed. “But I could hardly fence Hughson’s own things to Hughson himself.”

Her rebellion, what she did for pride, was a simpler matter. Hughson owned her but could not have her. “As simple as that.” He could not go between her legs or invite anyone else to do the same. “And that’s fine with Sarah.” In the end it was really Sarah’s place, not John’s. She it was who forced poor slow John to sell his house up in Westchester and come down to New York. She it was who had him rent the first small tavern, and then to lease this one, and then to spread the word that the blacks would be welcome. She it was who made certain that at least one white whore lived on the premises, and this year’s whore was Peggy, who arrived one snowy midnight from Newfoundland and never left.

“That’s Peggy there, Peggy the house whore,” Mary Burton said, and motioned toward a young woman across the room, red-haired, thick-breasted, broad-shouldered, and large. She was smiling and flirting in a mannered way. “A nice woman, in her way, but dumber than feckin’ whale shite.”

Peggy slept with the Africans too, if they had the money in cash.

“Sure, the English preachers give off lots of blather about how the blacks and the whites are meant to be separate,” Mary Burton said. “But there’s no holdin’ men from drink. And when there’s drink taken, their feckin’ rods always lead them to women. Every man in this place has offered me good money for a look at me quim. They’ve offered me everything except what they can’t feckin’ give me. Me freedom.”

The back door opened. Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond returned, herded inside by the shepherdess Sarah. She stood them drinks at the bar. The music was steady and full of rhythms Cormac had never heard before, like the beat of a heart. The back door opened again. “Here’s the African feckin’ Lucifer himself,” Mary Burton said. A large black man bent his head under the door frame. The room hushed, and even the fiddler stopped for a few beats. “That’s Caesar. The one I’m sure’s put a child in poor, dumb Peggy.” Sarah smiled in welcome. Hughson looked nervous. Peggy averted her eyes shyly and removed a hand from inside a black man’s shirt. Caesar moved slowly and theatrically, performing an image of latent violence. He smiled at Sarah in a thin way and then the talk resumed, muffled, murmurous.

“He’s a dangerous fecker,” Mary Burton whispered.

Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond reclaimed their seats. Quaco glanced across the room at Caesar, then looked down at Mary Burton.

“I think I’ll dance with you, Mary,” he said.

“You will not, Quaco. You’re a married man.” She laughed. “Besides, I’m working.”

She went off to retrieve glasses and plates (Quaco shrugging away the rebuff), and Cormac realized how thin her body was, and how long her neck. As she moved, her eyes assumed a distracted look, as if she were seeing something that was not in the room. In spite of her foul, bitter mouth, he thought she was beautiful. He noticed Caesar’s glance at her, and Hughson watching her too, and then Sarah identifying desire in Hughson’s eyes and turning to examine Mary Burton, as if wondering what her husband wanted from this thin, common Irish girl. Or knowing what he wanted but finding it hard to believe. Caesar’s back was to them now, but when Peggy eased beside him at the bar, his large ebony hand wandered casually to her buttocks and caressed them in a possessive way. A sign to all the others. Including the whites.

For while he was watching the Africans, Cormac’s attention had been diverted from the dozen white men in the place. They were scattered around the long, low room, six of them together in a bunch, others mixing with the Africans. At one point, two African women came in and joined two white men at a table. The women were tall, dressed in American clothes, with bonnets on their heads. One of them had neat scars on both cheeks, arranged in rows, and wore gold hoops in her ears. Tomora’s face moved in Cormac. Full lips. Liquid eyes. Lush body in a shroud on a windless sea.

“You’ve got lust in your face,” Mary Burton said, sliding down beside him. “Do you want one of them?”

“No,” Cormac lied.

“You can have either one for a few shillings,” she said. “Or both. God knows they need the money.”

The women were drinking rum paid for by the white men. One nodded at Caesar: the obvious ponce. “Whatever they get, he gets half,” Mary Burton said. “He’s got women in some of the other feckin’ taverns too.” Cormac noticed Quaco staring at the African women and mumbling in English to Diamond and Sandy. Cormac couldn’t hear everything he said, but he did hear words about his wife and the fort. The woman with the scars turned and looked at the blue door leading into the house and then at Sarah Hughson, who nodded her approval. “Here she goes,” Mary Burton said. “There’s one room on the top floor that’s always free.” The African woman whispered something to the white man, then went to the blue door. Quaco started getting up, as if to intercept her, but Diamond pulled him back. “Caesar cut your throat, Quaco,” he said. “Beside, the woman got two girl children she need to feed.” Indeed, Caesar was glowering at Quaco through the smoke and music. The scarred woman vanished. Within seconds, one of the two white men (paunchy, mustached) followed her.

“She’s feeding her children,” Mary Burton said. “Poor soul.”

She gazed blearily around the room, and Cormac asked her about the other whites. The six men bunched at one small table were soldiers from Fort George, all of them Irish. “Serving His fecking Majesty,” she said with contempt. “Shameless bastards.” The small, precise man at the other table was a dancing master named Holt, who claimed that the Africans were the greatest dancers he’d ever seen. “He won’t even dance with the likes of us,” she said. “But then, he doesn’t like women much.” When Holt bowed before the remaining African woman and took her hand to dance, even Quaco didn’t mind, and Caesar patiently sipped a drink. “The African men think Mister Holt wants to dance with them. In bed.”

With an African woman on the floor, the music shifted. African rhythms drowned the room. Holt the dancing master tried valiantly to adapt a minuet to the grinding music. The black woman (long-necked, large-breasted, hair piled above her brow) towered over the small white man and caricatured his steps. He smiled, knowing what she was doing, trying to be a good sport. She turned in one quick move and her right breast bumped against Holt’s face. The room exploded in applause. She turned the other way and did it again, with her left breast. That became her dance. Bumping the small white man’s face with her left breast and then her right breast, as he flushed and perspired. She moved in loose steps, her belly thrust forward, using her breasts like weapons. She stared down at Holt with an ambiguous smile. The blacks roared.

“Whip the man!” Quaco shouted, laughing now. “Whip him down, woman!”

“Do you want her?” Mary Burton whispered.

“I want you.”

She squeezed his thigh in a playful way and got up.

“I’m too old for you,” she said.

44.

In Cormac’s three weeks at Hughson’s, the routine was always the same. Breakfast at half-seven, eggs and rashers and buttered bread, along with coffee that looked (and tasted) like pitch. Dinner at half-five. A nap. A visit to the bar at night. A bath on Friday evening, poured from jugs into a sealed cask by Mary Burton. Each day, he’d pay a visit to Mr. Partridge at the Black Horse, to hear about his search for a shop or to join him in some new examination of a place for the press. The other hours were Cormac’s, and he used them to search for the Earl of Warren. He had learned that a man could walk all of the New York streets in a single day.

Most of the time he was on his own, wandering in the mornings down to the Battery, where four squat cannon were aimed at the harbor, fearful of the Pope’s imminent arrival on board a Spanish warship. Redcoats drilled in Fort George. Lone women gazed out to sea, where their men had gone but had never come back. The breeze at the island’s tip was heavy with salt, and he could see the green humps of New Jersey and Staten Island and boats in full sail passing through the Narrows. Not once did he see the earl.

But still he peered at faces, gazed at strangers, and walked. On some days, he wandered up Broadway, past Trinity, to the Common, where boys played games and old men sat on the grass smoking seegars or clay pipes, lost in themselves. If they’d been raised on Mars they could not be farther from home. Cormac felt disconnected from all of them. His own history was of no interest to those he passed. New York, he was learning, was a city of the present tense, an eternal now. Except for a few old Dutchmen, it was not a city of the past. Today ruled.

Tomorrow might be richer and fatter, the Christian evange-lists told them, but tomorrow also brought certain death, followed by the rewards of Heaven or the punishments of Hell. The various Christian rivers flowed through the streets of New York. Quakers quaking. Congregationalists congregating, Baptists baptizing, Dutch Reformers reforming; Episcopalians pissing on the lot. All asked for money to support the war against evil. Only the proud, haughty Anglicans of Trinity were not present on the street, since they were supported by taxpayer money and had no need to panhandle for God. All other messengers of the Lord were forced to pay taxes to support the Anglicans, just as they did in Ireland. All preachers were dressed in shades of black. From deep, fresh black to gray, faded, disappointed black. All used the same nouns: death, punishment, corruption, Hell, suffering, papist. All proclaimed that they were opposed to (or part of ) something called the Great Awakening, a religious revival spreading south from dark, witch-haunted New England. They spoke, as always, of a vengeful Puritanical God, a God of brutal whims and divine ego, quick to suffer insult and explode in wrath. Cormac thought of him as the God of bad temper. The Celtic gods would laugh him out of the room.

A few preachers were capable of surprise. One Welshman was a marvelous singer. One Cornishman had a sense of humor. One or two even agreed (under questioning) that black people might have souls. Such an admission didn’t lead in their logic to any utopian notion that the enslaved souls might be freed. Africans would have to await freedom and redemption after death, when God would sort them out in his Eternal Kingdom.

Most New Yorkers paid the preachers little heed; they were too busy rushing from one appointment to another, chasing the whims of Mammon. Blacks were not welcome among the small knots of fevered religiosos in the Common, but when each pulverizing sermon ended and the hat was passed, the few Indians who had paused to listen, dressed in wild combinations of buckskin and English jackets, usually broke into laughter. They simply could not be convinced that God was a dead carpenter. During any given lunch hour, there were more preachers than auditors, all demanding that New Yorkers be born again, give up their filthy corruptions, beg for forgiveness, endure punishment, dwell on the certainties of death and the afflictions of Hell. Although Cormac used them as cover, an excuse to stand around watching, he didn’t tarry with them very long. He was certain that the listeners would never include the Earl of Warren.

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.”

46.

And so it went as they wandered the town. Mr. Partridge didn’t always rant about cabbages and kings. He fed Cormac’s mind with geography and history, occasionally referring to a map of New York he’d bought in London. He knew exactly where they were on the maps of the world: at 73 degrees and 58 seconds west of the prime meridian, 40 degrees and 47 seconds north latitude, about halfway between the North Pole and the equator, and on a line with Madrid.

When he pointed across the East River at Brooklyn, he knew that the other island was 118 miles long. “That’s why they call it the long island,” he said. “Brilliant bit of naming, isn’t it?” The East River itself wasn’t a river at all; it was an estuary, with one side running north, the other side south, and a great dangerous place at the top of the estuary called Hell Gate. “Don’t ever try sailing it,” he said. “The water flows in from the Long Island Sound, through a narrow little channel. It tears apart every ship whose captain dares to confront it. Stay away. It’s a true gate to Hell.” And yet there was a simple reason for docking ships here on the East River, instead of the North River. The island protected them from the western winds.

“The winters are brutal here,” Mr. Partridge said, “and the summers are worse. Spring is very short because the water coming down the North River is still very cold. October is the best month, but the air is never dry—not even in October—because of the rivers and the blessed harbor. Still, it’s a perfect place to build a town, because of that harbor. Mark my words: New York will end up bigger than Boston and Philadelphia combined.”

This was not easy for Cormac to believe as they wandered through the low, cramped town. The town of shitting horses and rooting pigs. But Mr. Partridge loved it, and saw a city that Cormac didn’t see, the city that was coming. He pointed out the gabled rooftops and yellow-brick facades of the old Dutch houses, and the arrogant new Georgian houses of the English rich. The names of old families rolled from his lips: Roosevelts and Beekmans, Phillipses and Verplancks, De Peysters and De Lanceys, and, above all, Livingstons. The town was still too small for a district of the rich, as there was now in London, an area made fashionable or aristocratic through guns and money. The homes of the rich shared streets with taverns and shops and markets. “That can’t last,” Mr. Partridge said. “It never does. The rich build private fortresses. That’s part of their triumph.” The old Dutch town, he said, was huddled together, like a primitive castle, behind several pathetic wooden walls (meant to keep out marauding Indians, who no longer existed), and water came from a single well on Broadway because the Collect was too far out into the wilderness.

“Water is the big problem now,” he said, “and the town can’t grow until it’s solved. How? With aqueducts, the way the Romans solved their problem. The sooner the better. Have you ever smelled such stinking people? They use incense in the churches because the people in a crowd smell like they’ve been dead for nine days. And breakfast: How is it possible, without a major effort, to eat one’s eggs when the room smells like feet?”

Cormac started smelling feet everywhere. For two days, he could not eat eggs. Meanwhile, they looked at shops too small, and shops too large, shops that resembled prison cells, and shops made for rallies, and along the way, Mr. Partridge tried to explain the great New York political rivalry between the Livingstons and the De Lanceys. Cormac couldn’t follow its intricacies. He was too busy drinking in the variety of the town, its faces, its languages, its hand-lettered walls. Seeing it with the same joy—in spite of the stench—that filled Mr. Partridge.

“Look at all these signs, lad,” the older man said. “They’re going to feed the two of us!”

Posters adorned many walls, advertising dentists and writing teachers, elocutionists and dancing masters, goods freshly arrived from England or taken by some privateer. Shops sold cutlery, pewter, glassware, tobacco, watches, coffee, boots, trunks, tools. Sometimes their owners stood outside, shouting the virtues of their wares to those who could not read the signs. More often, posters did the shouting. Some offered rewards for runaway slaves, or runaway apprentices, or runaway indentured servants. Each of these was written in a mixture of surprise and rage. This trusted slave had stolen a horse. That Irish wench had absconded with clothing. This apprentice had lifted a master’s tools. Cormac thought the physical descriptions sounded like the Sunday customers at Hughson’s. Some probably were.

In the shops or on the streets, Cormac began seeing Africans who’d passed through Hughson’s, working as tinners and carpenters, butchers and handlers of horses, and they exchanged subtle nods of recognition. Cormac kept seeing them as runaways. Moving through the green forests to the north of the island. Heading for wilderness. And freedom. In his mind, he saw Kongo too. Wherever he was. Getting ready to run.

On days when Mr. Partridge was following his own trails, Cormac sometimes wandered down to the Slave Market at the foot of Wall Street, hoping for news of Kongo and the others. One morning he watched the landing of seventeen new Africans. Quaco was there, helping to keep them calm, but Cormac didn’t approach him. The Africans were sold at an average of fifty pounds each and then led away to a holding pen to wait for a ship that would carry them to Carolina. Forty-seven Irish men and women were also sold, their indentures assumed by speculators, and sent to separate cages. Then he saw the guard who had hit Kongo on the back with his rifle butt. He went over to him.

“Excuse me.”

“What is it?”

“Do you remember?” Cormac said. “Two weeks ago, I was here and you hit an African with a rifle butt and I asked you to stop.”

“Yes, you Oirish bastard. I remember you.”

“I want to apologize.”

“You do?”

“I know that you were just doing your work. But you see, we’d all just come off the ship after thirteen terrible weeks together and I was just—”

“Forget it.”

Cormac thought: He must know I’m feigning the apology, but he’s English. He accepts the formal hypocrisy; it always makes life easier.

“Let me ask you,” Cormac said. “Did you ever see those Africans again?”

The guard’s face tightened as he tried to recall.

“Well, I don’t know, we see a lot of them here. And they’re all blacker than fecking pitch. This is the season, before the winter. They—”

“The ones from that day, were they shipped off? To the Carolinas? Or Virginia?”

“Well, I believe—I think they were divided, actually. Most of them shipped, three or four bought here. Yes. I’m sure at least three of them stayed in New York. Including that surly bastard you were so anxious to protect.”

Kongo was somewhere in the city.

“Thanks, uh…”

Cormac offered his hand and the guard shook it.

“Adams. Francis Adams. From Liverpool.”

“You’re a long way from home.”

“Aren’t we all,” he said. “Aren’t we all.”

On his second Friday evening at Hughson’s, Cormac dined on ham and roasted potatoes at the bar, sipped a porter, and then passed through the blue door and climbed the stairs to his room. The door was unlocked. When he stepped inside, Mary Burton was pouring hot water into the tub. The curtains were drawn. She nodded a hello. He noticed that her features had softened in the muted yellow light of the lamp. The tub was almost full.

“Get in,” she said, “while it’s hot.”

“Thanks.”

She paused, looking at him.

“Tonight, I’ll join you,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”

“That’d be grand.”

Neither of them moved.

“I want you to take off me clothes,” she whispered. “And then squeeze the loneliness out of me.”

They made love in the hot, cleansing water and then again on the flat, open bed. She dressed and went down to work. In the nights that followed, they tried squeezing away loneliness on the floor and again on the bed and standing by the window in the darkness with the night sky of America spreading away to the south and west. They almost never spoke. They never once mentioned love. She never once said “feck.”

47.

On the Friday morning of his third week in New York, everything changed. Cormac was finishing breakfast in the quiet bar at Hughson’s, reading the New York Gazette. At separate tables, two commercial travelers did the same, preparing for the rigors of the day with bread, butter, and tea. The knocker banged, the front door opened. Cormac heard a few murmured words. Mary Burton appeared, mop in one hand, a sheet of paper in the other.

“It’s for you,” she said. Her blank stare told Cormac that she’d read the unsealed note. He took it from her and saw Mr. Partridge’s handwriting. PACK YOUR BAGS AND COME AT ONCE. I’VE FOUND A PLACE. P

Cormac thought: At last! At last, I can leave Hughson’s and be in my own small piece of New York, doing work, learning a trade. He glanced up, and Mary Burton’s eyes were drilling holes in his skull.

“So you’re leaving,” she said.

“Leaving here. But not leaving New York, Mary. I’ll be back.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I will,” Cormac said, waving the slip of paper. “But this is what I’ve been waiting for. You know that. I told you.”

“Oh, just go, without the feckin’ blather.”

“All right.”

He packed his things quickly and strapped the sword to his hip, letting it show. When he came down the stairs carrying his bag, Sarah Hughson blocked the front door. The blue door to the bar was closed, and Mary Burton was out of sight.

“You owe us ten shillings,” Sarah Hughson said.

“I do not,” Cormac said. “I paid for my room in advance. And I’m leaving two days early. You should be returning me—”

“You owe us ten shillings,” she repeated. “For the use of Mary Burton.”

The blue door opened, and Mary Burton burst in, gripping her mop.

“How feckin’ well dare you!” she shouted at Sarah.

“Stay out of this, girl.”

“I never missed a feckin’ minute of labor for you, Mrs. Hughson! I’ve been a perfect wee slave!”

“Shut up!” Sarah Hughson said.

“I will not.”

“This is my place, you dirty wee thing. I make the rules!”

John Hughson emerged from the bar, large and slow, holding the Gazette.

“What’s all this?”

Mary Burton whirled on him. “Your bloody wife wants to charge this boy for the use of me quim.”

Hughson laughed out loud, and Cormac smiled in relief.

“You’ve got some mouth on you, Mary,” Hughson said.

“He owes us, John,” Sarah insisted, her back splayed against the front door.

Hughson sighed and put a hand on Cormac’s shoulder.

“Run along now, lad,” he said, “before this gets worse.” Then to Sarah: “Get out of his way, Sarah.”

There was a kind of fed-up menace in his voice, and Sarah retreated from it, easing away from the door.

“You’re a bloody softhearted fool, John Hughson,” she said. She pushed past Cormac and Mary and John through the blue door into the bar, slamming it behind her.

“Thank you,” Cormac said to Hughson. “You’re a very sensible man.”

“No, I’m not. I’m just soft. Go. Please go.”

Cormac lifted his bag and opened the door to the New York morning. He turned to say good-bye, but Mary Burton was climbing the stairs.

48.

And so he entered the printing trade. Mr. Partridge had found an unused former stable on Cortlandt Street, over by the North River, a place so forlorn and anonymous that they had passed it at least three times on their walks without actually seeing it. When Cormac first walked through the chipped, flaked double doors, his heart sank. The space was dark and cobwebbed, reeking of ancient shit and rotting vegetable matter. The windows were so caked with grime that no light entered. He followed Mr. Partridge across the lumpy brown mat of the floor. High up in the back he saw the trace of a ladder rising to a second-floor loft. Behind them, the double doors on the Cortlandt Street side were immense, built for carriages, but so thick with crusted paint, dampness, and bad care that only one of them moved on its runners. A smaller door opened into the muddy backyard.

Cormac was appalled. But Mr. Partridge saw the place with other eyes, the same eyes that gazed at New York. Seeing it for what it could become, not for what it was.

“You see,” he gushed, “it must have been a stable—attached to the Dutch house next door. That’s why the ceiling’s so high, to make room for hay…. The rooms upstairs must have been added later,” he said, noting a ridge in the high wall where the stone of the ground-floor walls give way to gray planed pine. “The Dutchman next door must have got prosperous at something, become a patroon instead of a horse-handler, and sold the stable. Then…”

He jumped around, too excited and full of youthful joy to finish his thoughts, and together, without much ado, they began to prepare the space for the Monday arrival of the printing press.

“Those front windows,” he said. “We’ll have to scrape away the crusty dirt so a person can see in at us, see what we do, feel like entering. I’ll attack that problem, and you can…”

Cormac went to work scrubbing the flagstones: pulling stringy tufts of weed from the spaces between the stones, raking mushrooms from the narrow trenches where the stones had once abutted the walls (before the house had settled). He scattered beetles and worms from around the dead, ashen fireplace. He used wire brushes on the floor, removing years of impacted dirt and coats of ancient horseshit. His breath quickened when he saw the first blue gray quarried stone beneath the brown fibrous carpet, and he worked almost frantically to uncover each of its buried brothers. All day Friday, until the light was gone, he washed stones, his pouring sweat mixing with the precious water (carried in heavy buckets from the Tea Pump by the same black men he’d seen on Broad Street). In the center of the room, he discovered the rim of a blocked and rusted drain, packed with a cement formed of dirt and horse piss. He jammed a stick into it and moved nothing. Then he picked up his sword and cored out a passage, breaking open some unseen blockage underneath. Abruptly, the spilled water from his bucket flowed in a gurgling way into the unseen earth. He shouted in happiness—“The drain works!”—and Mr. Partridge turned from his glistening windowpanes and exulted at the sight.

“A bloody drain!” he shouted. “Without which no print shop can exist!”

Then Mr. Partridge vanished for a few hours, returning with bread and beef and water, and a large pink-faced Dutchman and two Africans, who carried in a pair of cots that he’d bought in the Dutchman’s shop behind Trinity. One cot was for Cormac, and they parked it beside the fireplace. The Africans carried the second cot up the ladder to the loft where Mr. Partridge would live, while the Dutchman, looking dubious, waited for his money.

After midnight Cormac took off his shoes and fell upon the cot. He thought for a while of the hard, taut body of Mary Burton and her small, hard breasts and rosy nipples. He thought: I must be done with her. I did not say a proper good-bye, and that was rude of me, but I must be done with her. I have things to do here that come first. Before a woman. Before anyone. Still, I had no intentions of hurting her, and I have. She gave me her body. She washed me and fed me and made me laugh. And I’ve put one more hurt upon her. Ah, Mary: I’ll try to make it up. I will. Then he eased into a dreamless sleep.

On Saturday morning, he was back again at the stones, scraping, washing, polishing with emery, until by early afternoon they were gleaming. Meanwhile, two Norwegian ship’s carpenters arrived, carrying planed lumber and leather sacks of hammers and tools. After discussing measurements and placement with Mr. Partridge, they went immediately to work building a platform upon which the press would stand. Rectangular, rising about a foot off the flagstones, with a base beneath it. Almost like an altar. The Norwegians spoke little English, and said very little in Norwegian. They simply worked. With care and speed, using spirit levels for adjustments, fitting each joint with uncanny precision and exactitude. Mr. Partridge had them add a door to the platform, to provide storage space beneath the press, and they designed it so that it was flush to the sides. No locks were needed. Simple hand pressure popped it open. The smell of fresh-cut lumber helped drive out the odor of shit and time. And after Mr. Partridge peeled away the last of the gray film that clouded the windows and polished them with soap and rags, bright bars of summer light streamed in upon the fresh boards and polished stones. Cormac and Mr. Partridge smiled in delight. So did the Norwegians.

The town was shut down on Sunday, but the Norwegians didn’t observe any religion except work. As Cormac and Mr. Partridge filled chinks in the stone walls with cement and erected rope lines from which paper could be hung by pegs, the Norwegians swiftly fashioned shelves for paper and ink and type, glancing at diagrams and old woodcuts for guidance. They adjusted the legs of an old table to make it balance on the uneven flag-stones. They used a wood plane on the back door until it opened and closed as if buttered. They placed a bookcase beside the fire-place. They grunted. They muttered in Norwegian. And in the scalding summer heat they worked and worked. They worked without shirts and then without trousers. They paused to smoke seegars. They took long drafts of water. And they worked.

By Monday morning, all was ready for the arrival of the press. At a few minutes after eight, it appeared on the back of a horse-drawn wagon from Van Zandt’s warehouse, still in its huge crate. Two black men eased the crate on rollers into the backyard, then opened it carefully with chisels, then snapped the wires and cables that had kept the press suspended in the crate during the long journey. On the floor of the crate beneath the press was a long smaller crate. “Type!” Mr. Partridge said. “Without type, we print nothing!” He asked the Africans to carry the box of type inside and lay it in a corner against the wall. Then they lifted the printing press itself, an African at either end, with Mr. Partridge on the left side and Cormac on the right. Hauling and muttering and gasping for breath, they carried it around to Cortlandt Street and in through the open double doors. A small crowd had gathered to stare at them, to observe the new tenants, the beginning of a new shop. They positioned the press on its fresh new altar, moving it and shifting it until it stood exactly where Mr. Partridge wanted it to be, with space on the platform to walk around it on all sides.

As they finished, one of the Africans looked at Cormac with recognition in his eyes. They moved together out the back door, where Cormac began collecting the remains of the crate to use as firewood.

“Hughson’s?” Cormac said.

“Yah.”

“I’ll not be there for a while.”

“Yah.”

“Can you do me a favor?”

He stared at the young white man.

“I’m looking for a man. An African. A… friend. His name is Kongo.”

He looked at Cormac in a blank way that said more than he intended; the name Kongo carried weight with him.

“If you see him, tell him Cor-mac is looking for him.”

“Yah,” he said, and walked off toward the waterfront.

Back inside, Mr. Partridge sat on the lip of the fireplace, staring at his wonderful machine. He wiped his sweat-blistered brow. Cormac sat beside him and gazed at the press. It looked to him like some strange, godlike giant insect. An immense grasshopper. Or a praying mantis. They stared at it together, then stood up, exhausted by heat and toil, and bolted the creature’s feet to the platform. When they were finished, Cormac felt like singing a hymn.

“By God,” Mr. Partridge whispered, shaking a fist, “we’ve done it, lad. We’re in business.”

Not quite.

That evening, as they sat on the edge of the platform eating fish and chips from a tavern in the light of candles, Mr. Partridge grew silent. His exuberance ebbed. His body slumped. It was as if the past three days had drained him of some invincible spark.

“Are you feeling all right, Mister Partridge?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“You… don’t seem all right.”

“Well…” He sighed. “The truth is, lad, I’m almost out of money. And we still need many things here…. Paper, above all. And ink, of course. And other things. This has been so bloody expensive. The storage fees at Van Zandt’s—”

Cormac unbuckled his money belt. Along with the paper money, there were eleven gold crowns left from those passed to him by his father. He pocketed one for himself and handed ten crowns to Mr. Partridge.

“Here,” Cormac said.

The older man looked embarrassed. He wouldn’t accept the money, and Cormac laid it upon the edge of the platform. He sat down with the heavy coins between them.

“No, absolutely not!” Mr. Partridge said. “You’re a boy, an apprentice—”

“I’m not a boy, Mr. Partridge. I’ve already killed a man.” He looked at Cormac with eyes wide and steady.

“You have?”

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe two.”

49.

He sketched his story for Mr. Partridge. He revealed his true name and told him everything he could remember about the Earl of Warren and what had happened in Ireland. He explained the oath of blood and tribe that had sent him here, to New York. He left out many details. But the words flowed from him like water breaking through a weir, and he felt his rage rising again as he told of the day his mother died and the day his father was murdered for a horse. While Cormac talked, the eyes of Mr. Partridge never left him. And when the young man finished, the older man stared at him for a long moment.

“How sad,” he said finally. “How infuriating. And how very sad.”

Cormac stared at his hands, which had already wielded a sword, and must wield one again (soon, he hoped, soon), relieved now that one lie had been removed between himself and Mr. Partridge: the lie of his name. Martin O’Donovan was, for the moment, dead. Cormac Samuel O’Connor was now living here on Cortlandt Street. He looked up from his hands. Mr. Partridge was staring out through the polished windows in the double doors to the unlit street.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Cormac said.

A pause.

“Not directly.”

In the confessional intimacy of the large warm room, Mr. Partridge began to speak.

“This was eleven years ago,” he said, his voice containing a kind of echo, enforced by the emptiness of the workshop. “In a terrible London winter. I was married then to my Esther. My beloved, thin, sweet Esther. We had four children. Robert. Michael. James. And the baby girl, Catherine. I was then certain that I wanted to move us all to America, to this new land, to a place far from kings and princes, dukes and earls, a place where the children could grow up strong and prosperous. A country that was new, where men and women could correct all the mistakes of the Old World.”

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.”

“Not true, Mary,” he said in a soothing way, pulling her close. “Not true.”

Her arms dropped, and he could feel her soften. She pressed her hard breasts against his chest. He wanted to take her down to the river edge. And then he heard a voice. The door cracking open. Sarah.

“Mary? Are you out there, Mary? Come in at once, the tables are filthy with plates!”

Mary kissed him and touched him and then hurried back into Hughson’s, where Africa drummed steadily on gourds and tabletops.

The weather turned. He saw his first October in New York: the harbor sparkling, the air crisp and bright. He met Mary Burton one Monday evening and they made love on the slopes above the Collect. That night he told her his true name. She was not surprised. Early one Sunday morning two weeks later, when the sky was just brightening in Brooklyn, they met at the Battery and held hands while seated on a large stone and she talked about how she’d like to go to a right school and learn to read, even if it meant putting up with the preachers at Trinity.

“Tell me I can do it,” she said, as the breeze shook leaves from the trees above them and a four-masted ship turned in the harbor, bound for the East River quays.

“Of course you can do it, Mary,” he said. “I’ll loan you a book for starting. Just march into Trinity and say, ‘I want to read this book.’ Just don’t say ‘feck’ when you ask.”

“Feck off,” she said, then turned her head and laughed at herself.

Cormac was working with Mr. Partridge one Saturday noon on fifty large copies of legal advisories when he glanced out the windows. Mary Burton was standing in a doorway, staring into the shop. The light was so hard and bright (Cormac thought) that she must have been unable to see through the glass. She waited, as people teemed around her. Then a horse-drawn wagon came by, loaded with crates of dry goods, and when it passed, she was gone. She was trying to send him a message. He was sure of that. But she could not write a simple note. That night, he went back to Hughson’s on Stone Street.

The bar was packed, every table filled, and Mary Burton was moving around in the blue tobacco fog, taking orders, grim. She didn’t see him come in. The fiddler was fatter and playing more joyfully. Sarah came to Cormac.

“Are you here with the ten shillin’s?” she said.

“I can leave now if you like, Mrs. Hughson.”

“No, we’ll take your money one way or another.”

He eased past her, trying to move among three large Africans who were joking at the bar. The sound of singing and clomping feet grew louder. Suddenly Mary Burton grabbed his hand.

“I must talk wit’ you,” she said. “Tuesday night, on the north end of the Common.”

She turned away, gathering empty glasses, forcing passage to the bar. John Hughson started filling the glasses. He didn’t notice Cormac. Against the far wall, British soldiers were on their feet, arms on shoulders, loudly singing a marching song, as if challenging the Irish to fight. Mary threw them an ugly look, then grabbed a half-dozen full glasses and whirled back into the stomping crowd. John Hughson saw Cormac now. His face was different, more furrowed with care and seriousness.

“You’re back,” he said.

“Aye—in want of a glass of porter.”

“But it’s not the porter, is it? It’s not the porter that’s pulled you back at all.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He leaned forward.

“It’s a priest you’re after, isn’t it, lad?”

Cormac laughed.

“A priest?”

“An R.C.,” he said.

“You mean a Catholic priest?”

“Aye.”

He was so serious that Cormac didn’t want to disappoint him. He shrugged. Although he was curious about the presence of a secret Catholic priest. After all, if such a person did exist, and the British found him, he’d be hanged.

“No, I’m not looking for a priest, Mister Hughson. I’m not really what people would call a religious man.”

Hughson looked unconvinced.

“It’s all right to tell me, lad. If I’ve guessed correctly.”

“You’ve guessed wrong, Mister Hughson. With all due respect, sir. All I want is a glass of porter.”

Hughson filled a fresh glass and placed it before him. Cormac laid a piece of eight on the bar.

“Well,” Hughson said, smiling, “if you do remember what you came for, let me know.”

Cormac gave Hughson his back, sipping his porter while watching the hollering and dancing, the drunken British soldiers, the Africans pouring sweat and shouting secret words in their own languages, while Mary Burton moved among them all. Her breasts rose and fell as she breathed. Her hips seemed to churn beneath her muslin skirt. Her eyes flirted. She has something to tell me, he thought; when will she tell?

Then he heard the back door open and turned to see the new arrivals.

There stood Kongo.

51.

Behind him were two other Africans, both larger than Kongo, but it was clear that he was in charge. He was wearing a high-collared blue jacket, a coarse pale-blue workshirt, clean baggy trousers, and scuffed boots. It was the first time Cormac had seen him without manacles. Without being obvious, his eyes took in the entire room, the black faces and white, the fiddler, the smoke and food, Hughson and Sarah and Mary Burton. And, of course, Cormac O’Connor.

In his glance he told Cormac that he knew him, all right, but he didn’t know whether Cormac wanted that known. His nod was almost imperceptible. There was a still, frozen moment, everyone in the room sensing the possibility of danger. The Africans froze. The soldiers froze. The music paused and the only sound was an icy breathing. It was as if they expected constables or redcoats to barge in behind Kongo and his men. Then Kongo stepped forward, the sense of danger eased, and he moved to the bar, next to where Cormac was sipping his porter. The music resumed with a relieved burst, along with the stomping of the dancers.

“Cor-mac,” he whispered.

“Kon-go.”

He tapped a balled fist to his heart and then to Cormac’s chest. His friends nodded. Other blacks watched. The whites tried to look casual. Cormac laid some pieces of eight on the bar.

“No,” Kongo said, his voice insistent. “No.”

He pointed subtly at an African seated against the wall. Quaco. He came over. They talked softly, heads against ears. Quaco then spoke to Cormac in English, his voice very low.

“Kongo says you gave him drink when he thirsted,” Quaco said. “Now he must give you water in return.”

“All right.”

Hughson looked annoyed because Kongo asked for water.

“How can I get rich if he drinks water—and you join him?”

“He’ll probably pay you for it.”

“Aye, and then tell all these other buggers what a cheap bastard I am.”

He drew three porters and filled two glasses from a water jug. Kongo took one glass, Cormac the other. The African lifted his glass as if in a toast, then drained it. Cormac did the same. Kongo said a word. Cormac repeated it, without knowing its meaning. He could feel Hughson watching them, and others too. Kongo handed mugs of porter to Quaco and his men, one of whom now seemed familiar to Cormac from the dark hold of the ship. They sipped. Kongo gazed around the room again.

“Where do you know him from?” Hughson said. “You serve in Parliament together?”

“No,” Cormac said. “We shipped together.”

Then another black man came over and bowed his head to Kongo, who squeezed his hand. Then another, and still one more. They all said words that Kongo accepted as if they were gifts. Quaco saw Cormac watching.

“They know he has come for them,” he said. “They have wait a long time.”

“They waited for him? How could they know he was on the Fury?”

“They just know he is to come. It is foretold.”

“Who is he?”

Quaco sipped his porter.

“Babalawo.”

A word Cormac didn’t know. An African word.

Babalawo.

52.

That Tuesday, Cormac waited for Mary Burton on a bench at the north end of the Common. She was more than an hour late, her eyes jittery, the ends of her hair unkempt and loose. She was carrying an Old Testament.

“Can you read me some of these words?” she said abruptly. “I’m stuck with this ‘begat.’ And someone begat someone who begat someone else, all of these begatters.”

“Who gave you this?”

“Nobody,” she said. “I stole it from one of the preachers. He was lyin’ on the ground, shakin’ and rollin’, looking like a mad dog, his eyes up in his head. So I lifted it and watched him rollin’ for a while, figuring he was more in want of a doctor than a book, and then I went off with it. The next day I took it to Trinity, and they didn’t want me, certain they were that I was a papist, but I said no, I was no papist, I was a fine Protestant from the Church of Ireland and wanted to worship God and the King of England, but I couldn’t do it ’less I learnt to read. So the preacher, fella name of Wrightson, he starts to read it, and that’s when I start hearing ‘begat’ until it was coming out of his arse.”

Cormac laughed. “Did you say ‘feck’ to him?”

“No, but I came close.”

“And he let you into the classes.”

“Aye, after paying a visit to the Hughsons, and shamin’ both of them. I get an hour each mornin’ now. I learnt the letters first, and then on to the fecking begatters….”

“It gets better,” Cormac said, holding the book, riffling its pages. “You’ll love the story of Joseph and his brothers and the coat of many colors.”

“Will you read it to me?” she said, taking the book back into her hands.

“No, I want you to read it to me.”

She was quiet then for a long while as they watched passing couples, and occasional teams of redcoats, and carriages carrying rich people to the houses down beyond Wall Street. She held the book in her hands as if it were made of gold.

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

He waited, suddenly afraid that she would inform him that she was going to beget their child.

“There’s something going on at Hughson’s,” she said. “The Africans and the Irish together. They’re talkin’ about a risin’. About strikin’ at the English. About killing people…”

She stared at the ground. A cool wind blew in from the North River.

“Stay away from them,” she said. “Stay away from Hughson’s. They’re all a-headin’ for the gallows.”

She turned to the hill above the Common, where dead leaves were swirling in the fresh river wind.

“Stay away,” she said. “Stay away.”

Kongo was working in the Fly Market, a few blocks south of the Slave Market. He was the property of a housepainter named Wilson. But Cormac was so busy that autumn that he didn’t see much of the man Quaco had called a babalawo. He was just pleased to know that Kongo was alive. He stayed away from Hughson’s and the rumors of revolt, hoping that Kongo was not involved but knowing that no rising could go forward without him. He did run into Kongo in the streets as the African carried a stepladder and paint jars to a job, wearing a canvas girdle round his waist, from which hung his brushes. If Wilson, his owner, was with him (thin, solemn, red-faced, lonesome), they exchanged only nods. If Kongo was alone, they embraced and talked, for Kongo was adding new English words every day.

“Don’t go Hughson’s,” he whispered during one chance encounter. “Danger thar.”

The warning didn’t surprise Cormac. Once a week now, he met Mary Burton in the fields and woods to the north of the Common, to listen to her faltering attempts to read (each week they were better), to make love in a desperate way among the leaves and the grass, until it grew too cold and they could be too easily observed among the skeletal black trees. Then they would simply talk, flattened against a tree, warming each other against winter, and sometimes she talked about what she wanted more than anything else.

“I want to walk out the door,” she said. “At any hour of the day or night, and without making up a lie or askin’ permission from no one, and just walk around the town. Without sayin’ I’m a-runnin’ an errand. Just free. Free. To be free to live with a free man, maybe you. To have him come in the door and put the rod to me, ’cause he loves me, and loves me juicy quim. No sneakin’ around. Just close the door and have it, on the floor, on a table, in a bed.” She turned her wounded eyes to him. “Do you see, Cormac? Do you see why I can’t do six more years at Hughson’s as a slave? I don’t want to have Sarah making me scrub sheets all sticky with spend or boarders’ drawers stained with shite. I don’t want to end up like poor Peggy, taking the Africans’ money to give them two minutes up me cunt.”

“Yes, I see.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“I want to have us in a bath again,” she said.

“As do I.”

“But not at Hughson’s,” she said in a cold voice. “They’re talking a lot of fecking trouble.”

53.

At home in the shop on Cortlandt Street, Cormac’s mind was jittery with warnings about the coming trouble. Something was surely in the air, some kind of trouble, as ominous as the warning of Mary Morrigan, and those issued long ago to the Hebrews, and Mr. Partridge began providing the American context. He was talking almost without cease about a new war and how it was wrecking the economy of New York. Britain was fighting Spain again, this time over Jenkins’s ear. Who was Jenkins? And why (Cormac asked) should anyone care about his ear? The story was splendid. The Spaniards had stopped a British ship in Spanish waters, one of those royal ships whose sole business was hijacking Spanish gold from the Americas. One of the English officers gave the Spanish captain some lip and they cut off his ear. War!

“But it’s hurting New York, lad!” he said. “You can see it everywhere around us!”

He reminded Cormac that the fort was emptying, the redcoats marching to the ships each day, bound for the West Indies and Florida to do battle with the Spaniards. That was why the waterfront was such a lonesome place these past weeks. Mr. Partridge insisted that the war wasn’t about poor Jenkins’s ear at all; it was about sugar, tobacco, and Florida.

“The English have Jamaica, and they want Cuba and Hispaniola and Florida so they can bring in another two hundred thousand slaves to make themselves even richer!” he shouted. “They can’t imagine the Spanish will come this far north. They are idiots!”

But as Mr. Partridge ranted, Cormac understood the warnings. The soldiers were going. Now was the time for revolt.

In the following days, the outrage of Mr. Partridge was mixed with a kind of joy. He sizzled with happiness. Together, they worked all one night making broadsides at their own expense, headlined “We will win!” All sorts of patriotic nonsense (as Mr. Partridge described it), expressing immense anger over the fate of Mr. Jenkins’s ear, using a medical engraving of an ear repeated fifty times as a border. He attacked the Spanish affront to justice and the law, and urged all the King’s loyal subjects to support the noble British war, wherever it might go. Mr. Partridge was merry as he set type. But he had motives other than patriotism.

“We’ll put the Partridge name here at the bottom,” he said, “and the address, and no matter what happens in bloody Barbados, or on the streets of Kingston, we shall win, lad.”

He was swiftly proven right. Cormac slapped the broadsides up on the blank walls of the town as soon as the ink was dry. By noon the next day, the name Partridge was clearly synonymous with patriot. And printing jobs flowed into the shop: wedding announcements and rallies for the troops, advertising for shoes and jewelry, special rates for travel to England and news of the arrival of a shipment of wool. The money flowed in too. Mr. Partridge put all the profits into the shop, buying supplies of paper and ink, adding cabinets and type racks. They were so busy, Cormac didn’t notice the winds howling from the northwest.

Only at night, when he was alone, did he imagine the revolt, did he add together the odd look from black man to black man, and from the Irish to the Irish. He heard again the warnings from Kongo and from Mary Burton. Only at night did he imagine what would happen if they all rose together.

In the frigid winter nights, when Stone Street seemed an immense distance from Cortlandt Street and it was impossible to meet Mary Burton out of doors, Cormac began to draw again. He used the reverse side of overinked proofs, odd scraps of board, diluted printer’s ink, and reed pens. He made drawings of Mr. Partridge, of people he saw in the streets, of soldiers in uniform, of the fort, of certain houses, and of Mary Burton: all from memory. Mr. Partridge was delighted.

“You’ve a gift, lad,” he said one night, examining a drawing of his own marvelous head. “You captured something there, the mouth, a kind of sadness. Very good. Very good.”

He tacked the drawing to a beam. Others would follow, although Cormac kept his drawing of Mary Burton in a private folio fashioned from thick brown board and tied with cord. Cormac was now so deep into the world of the print shop that other things receded. The images of bloody revolt were threaded in a minor way through his days, but for all the whispered warnings, nothing, after all, had happened. Perhaps it was the drink talking in the smoke of Hughson’s. He also brooded in a confused way about Mary Burton. What was it he truly felt for her? Was it simply lust? Or was it something more like that immense word love? That word issued from many people’s lips, from preachers to whores, and he read it in even more books. But what did it mean, really? He wanted Mary Burton to be happy, but that wasn’t love as described in the poems, some rapture that carried you into realms of bliss. And was he leading her somewhere that she could not go? Into reading and trying to find the education that had eluded her in Ireland and in her American servitude? He hoped she was not imagining a future with him. For he had no true vision of that future, or whether he would live long enough to have one.

The reason for this uncertainty was the power of the past. And his duty to old vows, to the tribe, to the rules, to the memories of his father and mother. The truth, however, was that he was thinking less about the Earl of Warren now too. Sometimes three or four days passed and the earl never forced himself into Cormac’s mind. But then he would see months-old newspapers from London in the print shop and begin scanning them for the earl’s name, to see if he had appeared at some event in London or Paris, or in dispatches from other parts of the colonies from Canada to Kingston. Always in vain. In the newspapers, the earl did not exist. Then Cormac would lie awake in the dark, picturing the earl as he must look now: perhaps bearded, as was Cormac; perhaps dressed in common clothes; perhaps lolling in the slave markets of Charleston or Savannah. He imagined himself wandering the continent on an endless search. And then thought it would be better to stay where he was. If the earl was in America, eventually he would come to New York. Better to work, better to learn the craft of the printer, better to prepare for a future, even if that future would be denied him in a moment of violence.

On some nights, he wondered exactly what Quaco meant when he called Kongo a babalawo. One slow day, he asked Mr. Partridge about the word, and the older man riffled through a fat volume, then shrugged. “It’s not in the dictionary,” he said, “but it could mean a shaman, you know, a kind of witch doctor. The parish priest, so to speak, in a tribe.” He pondered this. “Though a shaman—if that’s what it means—is also a kind of magician. So maybe your friend Kongo is an African Merlin.”

For Cormac, this image was exciting: Kongo in Camelot, searching for a black grail. He tried to draw the image but gave up in disgust and tossed the paper into the fireplace. The truth was that all images, including the possibility of riot and fire, were always erased by work. The printing life consumed them. All their type was set by hand, and Cormac was amazed at how swiftly Mr. Partridge laid out the metal letters, since all of them were in reverse. Cormac’s first job was inking the type, using wool-packed sheepskin balls with hickory handles. The fresh ink was laid on a slab beside the press. At first, Mr. Partridge did the crucial final task of pressing down on the lever, throwing his weight joyfully into the task of pulling an impression off the inked type. Then he acknowledged that Cormac was physically stronger than he was, and Cormac, within a week, got their rate up to two hundred pulls an hour. While doing this work, Cormac felt himself become part of the machine, his mind counting the sheets while the words of the posters came to vivid life: war, sale, arrival, ship, brass, shoes, instruction, now.

Sometimes Mr. Partridge delivered an aria on the beauties of type. “We’re a Caslon shop,” he said. “Look at the beauty of that T,” he said, “the elegance of that flick of a serif!” The names of fonts rolled from him like liturgy: Roman and italic and boldface, caps that were swashed and caps that were sloped. Picas and points and em quads, and the beauty of white space. Caslon wasn’t the only great type. There were other glorious typefaces, he said, his voice swelling, their names coming from him like the names of artists or generals: Bembo and Petrarca, Palatino and Griffo, Fraber and Garamond. But above all of them, close to God, was Caslon.

“Look at those letters, lad, and listen to them! Can you hear them singing? Look at those lines and those curves, and then close your eyes, and what you hear is William Caslon singing!”

Sometimes, in mid-aria, he vanished into the frozen morning, bouncing up the three steps into the street, off to do business. And Cormac worked on, cleaning and oiling the press, using stone slabs to flatten wet paper, hanging samples on the unpainted pine-board walls, cleaning the pieces of type and placing each in one of the 152 compartments of their cases. Sometimes he set type himself, slower than Mr. Partridge but loving the order and beauty of a page. Or he cleaned ink balls. Or trimmed sheets. Ink rimmed his fingernails, resisting soap and brush. He washed his hands in the same sink where he cleaned the punches. There was no running water (not there and not anywhere in New York), just two buckets, soap, and the coarse cloths he used for cleaning type. After his daily ablutions, Cormac would heave the inky water into the backyard, a blackening rectangle of frozen mud where nothing grew.

In the afternoons, Mr. Partridge returned, bursting with news and gossip and jobs for the shop. Terrible fighting in Jamaica. Dreadful cold, the worst winter in New York memory. A shortage of cordwood. Trees like iron, blunting the woodsmen’s axes. Water frozen in the Collect. Dutchmen skating. Taverns empty. Only two ships on the waterfront. A Mrs. Robbins left her husband for a notary and they’ve sailed for England while Mr. Robbins has become a sot. More soldiers departing.

Finally the night arrived. Sometimes Mr. Partridge carried home a joint or a rib, and cooked it on an upstairs stove (for he wanted no grease anywhere near his precious stores of paper). They dined together, and at such times he was calmer, and often spoke obliquely about subjects that never appeared in a newspaper. As he did one night a few days from Christmas.

“There’s something happening in the town, and I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. “Not just poor sales in the shops. Something else. An unease…”

The cold got colder and didn’t relent. For Cormac, it was as if the Irish storm that killed so many people and crops and horses had made its way across the Atlantic. The North River was frozen solid all the way to Poughkeepsie, almost eighty miles distant. He worked in heavy clothes and slept in his overcoat and remembered the tale of Joseph and his brothers. Sometimes he saw himself huddling in the house with his father and Bran and Thunder, all of them together, refusing to give in to weather or fate. Thinking: Only one winter ago, but so long ago too. Would they both survive better if he and Mary Burton could huddle together through the frigid American nights? If he returned to his room on Stone Street, would that become more possible? But it couldn’t happen. The Hughsons would never allow her out at night, for she might end up on a runaway poster on the city’s walls. And he had no money now to pay for a room.

But in some way, the brutal New York cold and his memories of Ireland combined to revive his own search for the man who had brought him here. If the earl’s own horses had survived the Irish winter better, surely he wouldn’t have gone hunting for the horses of strangers. He could have stood on the pier and juggled while Africans eased out to sea in the wooden dungeons of the slave ships. The arctic wind had changed the earl’s life too.

In Cormac’s free time, or when running errands or delivering printing jobs, he looked with renewed passion for the Earl of Warren. Snow fell through one long night. Then fell again two days later. The piles of snow and hillocks of black ice made walking difficult, and if there were fewer people on the streets, they were revealed in greater clarity. But he felt more often now that he’d made some terrible mistake in coming to New York. He began to think that he had followed the earl to a place where he had not gone.

And then, on the day before Christmas, after dropping some printed notices at the Lutheran Church, which stood then a block south of Trinity, he turned into Wall Street and there he was.

The earl.

Getting into a cream-colored carriage in front of City Hall. Cormac’s heart jumped. His chapped hands begin to sweat in the cold. The carriage started moving east toward the waterfront. Cormac thought: Is he leaving on a ship? In this cold? No, the river is frozen, with great slabs of ice crunching against one another and bending the pilings, and it’s almost Christmas. No ship will sail.

He went after the cream-colored carriage, walking cautiously at first through the most crowded, snow-packed blocks (for business had not paused yet to celebrate the birth of Christ). He steadied his pace, afraid of attracting attention, wishing he had the sword. Thinking: I could catch him and kill him. But not without a sword. Thinking: I must know where he goes. Must know where he lives.

And then the carriage picked up speed. Cormac hurried, skipping faster, shoving aside small knots of men, sliding on glossy sheets of ice, thumping through crusted snow. The carriage turned left into Water Street, heading north, and Cormac began to run. He fell once, then again.

The carriage was too fast. It didn’t pause at any of the wharves, and rolled north. Cormac watched it vanish over the ridge and the frozen stream that spilled from the Common.

He stood there, his heart skipping beats, gasping for frigid air. His elbow ached from a fall. He bent it and gazed at the blank white haze to the north.

Thinking: He’s here.

The earl is here.

54.

Early Christmas morning, while the sky remained blue with night, Cormac rose early, dressed warmly, and hurried down to the Fly Market to find Kongo. The streets were icy, snow-packed, and empty. Windows were rimed with ice. He found Kongo in the backyard of Guilfoyle the builder, where he and Quaco were feeding a fire with scrap wood. Both wore fur hats, cloth gloves, and heavy coats, and reminded him of the Celts in their hidden grove. Quaco bid Cormac good morning, uttered an ironical “Merry Christmas,” and smiled as they shook hands.

“How is it you’re not in the big church with all the other wonderful Christians?” Quaco said.

“I’d rather be here,” Cormac said. “I need to talk to… the babalawo.”

He gestured for Kongo to step aside and speak to him alone. Kongo excused himself to Quaco and walked with Cormac to the dark side of a shed.

“Yes?” he said.

“I need your help.”

“What for?” he said, his accent slightly Irish.

“I have to find a man named the Earl of Warren,” he said. “Last year in Ireland, he caused my father to be shot dead, and in our tribe, the son must avenge the father.”

“In my tribe too.”

“I came here to find him,” Cormac said. “That’s why I was on the Fury. I’ve looked for him for many months, and yesterday, at last, I saw him. On the street. He went north in a coach, but I couldn’t follow in the snow and ice.”

“You want him dead?”

“Yes, but I’m the only one who can do it. I’ve already killed one of his men, and perhaps a second, whose hand I chopped off. It’s my responsibility, Kongo. But I hope that, somehow, you and your friends can find him for me.”

He showed Kongo a folded drawing he’d made of the earl, and the African peered at it, his brow tightening. Perhaps Kongo could spread the word among the Africans (Cormac said), to look for the cream-colored carriage and the Englishman who looked like the man in the sketch. The diamond tooth, Cormac said, pointing, and then pulling a face to show his own bicuspid. The tooth. If they find him, he said, tell me. I’ll do the rest. He reminded Kongo that the earl had made much of his fortune in the slave trade. The African glanced again at the drawing and slipped it inside his coat.

“I’ll look,” he said. “If he on this island, we find him.” Cormac hugged him, then smiled and stepped back.

“Your English is much better.”

Kongo shrugged. “I have no, uh, choice, yes? To eat, I must speak.”

But Cormac thought: His English is now too good to have been merely lifted in passing. He has been studying. Or receiving help more mysterious than studying. Babalawo. He wanted to ask Kongo more. Instead, Kongo explained that for the next week Wilson the painter had rented him out to Guilfoyle the builder. Right here. This building. No work today. No work on Christmas. But he shook his head at the shame of being as rentable as a dray horse. Then, after a long silence (one that silenced Cormac’s questions too), he took the young man’s elbow and walked him toward the shore.

“There is something… coming?” he said. “Yes, the word is ‘coming.’ To come.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there is something big to happen, as soon as winter ends.”

“What kind of something?”

“I let you know,” he said. “It’s about us. The Africans and the Irish. And the fleets of Spain.”

He glanced at the wan winter sun rising slowly across the river in Brooklyn.

“Say nothing,” he said. “Ask nothing.” He gestured toward the sun. “But know that… the gods know. The gods say yes.”

He turned and hurried back to Quaco and the fire. Cormac thought: I’ll have to wait to ask the meaning of the word babalawo.

55.

Something big was indeed happening. Part of it Cormac saw. Part of it was told to him. But all the bits and pieces, the muted warnings, the whispered gossip came to the same thing: a rising. In the first weeks of 1741, the town was almost empty of redcoats, their main force now down in the Indies, defending the sanctity of Jenkins’s ear. In their absence, New York Africans and New York Irishmen were meeting in Hughson’s tavern to talk about guns and death and freedom.

“You’re very… distracted these past days, Cormac,” said Mr. Partridge one afternoon. He looked at Cormac in a worried way. “Are you homesick?”

Cormac smiled. “Sometimes.”

“What is it that you miss?”

“Oh, just…”

He paused in the process of pulling sheets for a wine seller.

“Small things, I s’pose,” he said. “The house we had, made by my father’s hands and the help of his friends. The wet grass on a summer morning. We had a dog named Bran and a horse named Thunder. I miss them. I miss my mother telling stories. I miss my father in all ways. I miss the woods and the fields and the hearth in the house….”

Mr. Partridge stared at him.

“Well, all of us here feel the same things, in one way or another,” he said. “I feel them and the soldiers feel them and the Africans too.”

“I know that.”

“It’s why some go back,” Mr. Partridge said. “They can’t bear it. We’re like colonists on the bloody moon. And yet…” He sighed. “And yet, we might have something in our hands that’s not been seen in hundreds of years, maybe never, lad. For the King and his hired hands can’t forever impose their will on us here, can they? Not with an ocean between them and us. We might have the chance to build a country. Not a colony. A country! Imagine that! And not just a country, a republic!”

Cormac realized that Mr. Partridge saw a blankness in his face. A republic? What was a republic?

“You must read Machiavelli!” Mr. Partridge said. “I think I have a copy upstairs, and if not, I’ll find one. Not The Prince. That’s the book Machiavelli wrote to get a job, full of blatherskite. No, you must read the Discourses on Livy! Best argument ever made for a republic. Old Machiavelli knew you couldn’t have a country—or an army—or collect taxes—unless the people gave their consent. That meant, no kings!”

He had begun to sweat, and tamped his brow with the clean side of a printer’s rag. Then turned again to Cormac.

“There’s another reason for your… preoccupation, isn’t there, lad?”

“Well, I don’t know…”

“What’s her name?”

Cormac feigned a grin, the response that he thought Mr. Partridge expected. He didn’t answer.

“I suspected so,” Mr. Partridge said. He smiled in a dubious way and turned to the press. “Well, let’s get on with it….”

In the solitude of the night, Cormac tried to sort out the separate boxes of his life. He told himself that he must arrange them as if his mind were a type case. The largest letters were in the top drawer: they spelled out the name of the earl, and his presence in New York, and Cormac’s hope that Kongo’s men would find him. His Irish vows were in that box, and the rules of his tribe, and there were mornings when he awoke on Cortlandt Street and thought he was still five years old in Ireland, about to run barefoot on wet grass.

In the drawer below was Mary Burton. She scared him in some ways, because she lived most completely in the future, in some glorious place where she was free. At the same time, she threatened his own freedom. He wanted a woman’s body, a woman’s voice, a woman’s voice in the dark. But he could not yet imagine a life with children, in a house where he would live and die, far from home. He couldn’t imagine building a hearth that would put a soul into a house shared with Mary Burton. Not now. Not yet. He could imagine no future until he had rid himself of the pursuit of the earl.

And he felt too the thrilling pressure of the conspiracy that was building in the town. He wanted Mary Burton to be free. But he wanted Kongo to be free too, and Quaco, and Quaco’s wife, serving in the fort, and all the others: Diamond and Sandy and even the wretched Caesar, and the child of his making that would soon burst from poor Peggy. They should be free. How could he even imagine putting a child into a world where men owned other men? How could he do that and be his father’s son?

And so he volunteered his name to the conspiracy. He didn’t tell this to Mary Burton, but offered himself to Kongo, who was the leader. They met briefly one Sunday morning, and Kongo accepted him, with a dubious look in his eyes. “You help with words,” he said. “With printed words. Not with gun or torch.”

Cormac learned that Kongo had found instant allies in six Spanish blacks. The young man knew their story. They were free men under the flag of Spain, working for pay on a ship captured by an English privateer named John Lush. An apt name, said Mr. Partridge, for a man who’d been seen staggering around the taverns of New York, spending his stolen Spanish pieces of eight. “He’s a terrible fellow,” Mr. Partridge said, leaning over his trays of Caslon. “The world would be better rid of him.” Lush had plenty of other money, he explained, because the English crown insisted that anyone black was automatically a slave, a thing to be sold. It didn’t matter if they’d already been freed of their bondage by other nations; if captured, they were slaves. Lush could sell them as if they were captured horses. “Human merchandise!” Mr. Partridge roared. The six captured Spanish seamen were taken to New York, protesting in vain that they were not slaves, they were prisoners of war, men who had long since earned their freedom. The British sneered. “The laws of Spain,” Partridge said, “don’t apply to Englishmen with guns.” The black Spaniards were sold at the market at the foot of Wall Street. Mr. Partridge knew this. But so did Quaco.

“Quaco helped me know them,” Kongo said. “They will be of great help.”

Cormac didn’t mention the contact between Kongo and the Spanish blacks to Mr. Partridge, who would have understood that the Spanish blacks could serve as messengers to the fleets of Spain. Any Englishman involved in such a conspiracy could be hanged for treason. The Africans were not Englishmen, and in his heart, neither was Cormac, in spite of the English flags that billowed over Belfast. He would take his own risks. But he didn’t want to draw Mr. Partridge into the conspiracy. What Mr. Partridge did not know would protect him if the conspiracy failed.

But as he passed brief outings in Hughson’s, whispering with Mary Burton, wary of spies among the Africans and redcoats, and as he wandered in his free time down by the markets, Cormac understood that the Spanish blacks were to play a major part in the larger plan. Their leader was named Juan Alvarado. Lean, intelligent, with greenish highlights in his angry eyes. He was fluent in Spanish and could read and write that language, but he spoke Yoruba to Kongo. Cormac had heard them talking, sensed the hardness behind the words, even though he did not know their exact meaning.

He also learned that the arrival of Kongo had made the Africans believe that a rising could be victorious. Quaco told him all of this, a revelation confirmed by the attitudes of the other Africans. Now Cormac finally understood the meaning of babalawo.

“Prince of spirits,” Quaco said one freezing Sunday morning near the Fly Market. “Kongo have magic. White magic and black magic. He speak to gods and they speak through him. They give him gift of tongues too, so he can speak many African language, and now English.”

After a few weeks with Juan Alvarado, Kongo spoke Spanish too.

“Kongo can lead us all to freedom,” Quaco said. “My people. You people, Irish people. Not alone. Kongo can no say magic words and English go away. Men have to do that. And men can no win if bad people too big. Men need help.” He paused, glancing around the empty streets. “That why we try to reach the Spaniards,” Quaco went on. “With English, you need big guns.”

In one quick meeting on the street, Kongo told Cormac almost nothing, as if trying to keep Cormac out of the conspiracy.

“Wait,” he said. “You have your own task. The man who killed your father.”

But the plan was emerging. If the African and Irish rebels could wound the English forces in New York, if they could seize arms, if they could panic the civilian population, then Spain could take the city with a handful of ships. Timing was everything. And it was not just talk. One Saturday night, a Spanish-speaking slave named Morales disappeared. His name appeared Monday morning on a poster offering a reward. But the gossip of revolt provided a motive: Morales was already heading south, to find the Spanish in Savannah or Florida.

For Cormac, the conspiracy was like a novel read in glimpses, with many chapters missing. The falling snow provided the continuity. And one February night he went to Hughson’s at the invitation of Quaco. Irishmen and Africans arrived with snow melting on their hats and shoulders, their faces glistening as they stamped their feet and accepted hot tea or strong coffee. On this night, at Kongo’s order, there would be neither porter nor strong liquor. Mary Burton, Sarah Hughson, and Peggy were absent, and off-duty soldiers were kept out by the posting of a sign that said “Private Party.” In the street, lounging in doorways out of the snow, lone men watched for redcoats or constables. Finally Hughson tapped a spoon on the side of a metal tankard and the room hushed.

“Hear ye, hear ye,” Hughson said, and laughed in an ironical way. Cormac was deep in the crowd. Kongo stood before the blue door, while Alvarado lolled with folded arms against the back door. Quaco was at the bar, his face tense. There was an odd glint in Hughson’s eyes. Cormac noted that his face trembled, as if he were trying to decide which mask to wear.

“We’ve met here often as friends,” he said. “Tonight, we meet as allies. All here share a common condition: the lack of freedom. Many of you are slaves. Many are indentured servants. You are both—Irish and African—the property of others. That situation has become intolerable. Sinful. Criminal. We believe it’s time to do something about it.”

“Like what?” someone shouted. Cormac thought: Like freeing Mary Burton.

“This is neither the time nor the place to discuss details,” Hughson said. “The bloody British are masters of bribery, of informing, of spies. Some here might indeed be spies, and they have our warning: Betray us and you will be sorry.” Cormac glanced at Kongo. His face was skeptical, as if he too sensed that Hughson might be a prince of horseshit. “But the worry is real,” Hughson went on. “And so before we proceed, there must first be a swearing. An oath, binding us all to silence.”

“Good,” came a shout, and a murmured chorus of approval.

Hughson continued, “If any of yiz can’t swear such an oath, please leave now.”

Nobody moved. Cormac’s flesh tingled.

“Then, gentlemen, the oath.”

He cleared a space on the hard earthen floor, gesturing for men to move backward. Then, with a long-bladed knife, he cut a wide circle into the packed dirt. The men closest to the circle placed feet inside the line, then grasped hands, pushing deeper inside, while Hughson extended the border to make room for others. Cormac hesitated, thinking: What am I about to do? My only oath was sworn above the body of my father….

But he shared the feelings of these men, African and Irish, even if he felt no confidence about Hughson. He loved that thrilling word freedom. And he felt too that in some small way he was being admitted to the secret world of men. This was an American version of the men bound together in the Sacred Grove of Ireland.

He grasped the hands of a Spanish black named Torres and the young African named Sandy. He saw Quaco, his head bowed, holding the hands of two other Africans. Three men watched the full group: Kongo, Hughson, and Alvarado.

Hughson bowed his head and began speaking in a solemn voice, the others echoing his phrases.

“We swear (we swear) to hold secret (to hold secret) all that is spoken of here (all that is spoken of here) and to maintain (and to maintain) our faith in each other (our faith in each other) under punishment in Heaven or Hell (under punishment in Heaven or Hell) or here on the earth (or here on the earth), so help me God (so help me God).”

Kongo stepped into the center of the circle (with Cormac seeing him now as a prince of spirits) and spoke the oath in Yoruba, and the blacks responded. Alvarado did it in Spanish, and his men answered. There was a small cheer. Then Kongo assumed command of the room. He spoke in English and Yoruba, choosing words in a careful, direct way, and made the case for revolt. “Men are not horses,” he said in English. “Men have souls.” Now Cormac saw uncertainty in Hughson’s eyes. If he thought of himself an hour earlier as the leader of the revolt, that role had now been lost to Kongo. He did not look happy as Kongo used his fingers to enumerate his points. He separated the men into units of three. He reiterated the need for secrecy. Near the end, repeating this in Yoruba, he pulled one long finger across his throat, and about half the Africans laughed. Then he stepped out of the circle.

Hughson stepped forward, trying to assert again his own role. Cormac felt oddly isolated. Kongo had not assigned him to a three-man unit.

“As far as you Irish are concerned, the word is wait,” Hughson said. “Wait for word from us, from the high command. We’ll be in touch as the hour draws near. We’ll know our roles, what must be done. I’ll coordinate with the Africans. But the purpose is clear: to end these intolerable conditions.” Then he smiled. “As for now, gentlemen, the bar is open.”

A murmur. Scattered calls of “Hear, hear.” A pushing toward the bar. Some faces were flushed, as if the saying were as good as the doing. Kongo nodded at Cormac, placed fingers to his mouth, indicating they would speak later, and then went with his men out the back door into the falling snow.

Then Sarah came in from the kitchen, and the talk became politer, more guarded, less flushed with the possibility of rebellion. She laid plates on the bar piled with herrings, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs. Peggy showed up too, bursting with Caesar’s child. Cormac realized that Caesar had not been part of the group of oath-takers. And Mary Burton was nowhere in sight.

After a while, Cormac went out the back door to piss against a wall. The snow was falling more heavily, whipped by a wind. Cormac finished. Then heard his name. Mary Burton was at a top-floor window, her hair wild, a shawl upon her shoulders and neck.

“Be careful of that lot inside,” she said. “They’re going to cause a lot of trouble.”

“How are you, Mary?”

“Still in prison.”

“It can’t last.”

“Wait there.”

In a few minutes, she arrived at his side, in the deep shadows beside the building. She was bundled against the cold. They embraced and he could feel the warmth coming from her body.

“You must be wary,” she said. “I’ve heard John Hughson talking to his brother, that thieving lecher from Poughkeepsie. And what he’s saying here is not what he’s sayin’ to his brother.”

“What is it they’re saying?”

“It depends on how much drink is taken,” she said. “Sometimes he brags that he’ll soon be king of New York, the ruler of all he surveys, so to speak. Then he’s to be a viceroy for the Spanish crown, with the Spanish fleet in the harbor to fight off the bloody English. Then he’s to search the whole town, while the British get organized, and take everything of value, ship it off to the south somewhere, to bloody Cuba or Mexico or some such, with him and his brother in the ship. Or he’ll make a separate peace with the British, betray everybody, have them all hanged or burned, and then get the British to make him a lord, for services rendered to the Crown, and become governor.”

“He sounds as if he doesn’t know what he wants to do.”

“Whatever the feck it is, it’ll be for to serve John Hughson, not the Africans or the Irish or anyone else, includin’ his wife.”

With that, she brushed his face with her lips and went to the back door and was gone. Through the falling snow Cormac could see a red smear of torches on the ramparts of the fort.

56.

For two days, Cormac searched for Kongo. He must be warned. They all must be warned about the slippery secrets of John Hughson. Kongo seemed to have vanished. Finally he saw Quaco near the Slave Market and learned that Kongo had gone with his master to someplace in New Jersey. At night, Cormac tried to sort out the boxes in his type case, opening and shutting the drawers until he fell into sleep.

Then, early one Sunday morning, after another heavy snowfall, he saw Kongo in the yard behind the print shop. He was holding the reins of a horse. Cormac dressed and went out. Kongo explained that he’d been ordered north to pick up messages for his owner, Wilson the painter. He showed Cormac a signed pass allowing him to travel on horseback. Both men smiled.

“But I want to show you something,” Kongo said. “Come.” Cormac climbed on the horse’s back directly behind Kongo and began telling him what he had heard about John Hughson. He never mentioned Mary Burton, but he outlined all of Hughson’s possible ambitions.

“Thank you,” Kongo said.

“Don’t trust him,” Cormac said.

“We don’t.”

He waited a bit.

“He thinks he is using us, all of us,” Kongo said. “But we are using him.”

They rode north for hours, avoiding the few churchgoers out in the snow. That is, avoiding anyone who might be alarmed by an African and a white man sharing a horse. They went beyond those parts of the lower island that Cormac already knew. They rode beyond rocky promontories, frozen streams, open fields dotted with snug Dutch farmhouses with smoke rising from chimneys. Some land was cleared and fenced. Most remained wild. Kongo pulled his fur hat down over his face to hide his black skin. He said almost nothing, and never mentioned the rebellion or his reasons for keeping Cormac out of a three-man unit. He did nod in a conspiratorial way at a group of six Indians walking south, dressed in English clothes and heavy English boots. He pointed out two redcoats lounging outside a tavern, smoking seegars, and seeing them, he nudged the horse into dense forest, moving west across the spine of the island. The wind off the North River assaulted them, icy and hard.

They came to a small road cutting away to the west through the Bloomingdale properties, a section where virgin forests stood like walls protecting cleared land, now brilliant with snow. Kongo was cautious, alert. Animal tracks were cut all over the snow, but the animals were hidden. Kongo slowed the horse and moved into a hilly forest of dark evergreens. And then stopped and pointed. Off in the distance, on a cliff above the river, was the house of the Earl of Warren.

Cormac knew it belonged to the earl because from that distance it was an exact duplicate of the ruined house in Ireland. They moved closer, the horse snorting, steam billowing from his mouth. They saw black men off to the right taking their ease at the entrance to a stable. Just inside the stable doors was the cream-colored carriage. On the great porch of the house, facing inland, its back to the river, two white men moved back and forth on the steps. One held a musket. Over the main doorway there was an elaborate W emblazoned in gold leaf that glittered in the hard noon sun. They moved again, very quietly, maintaining a safe distance, and saw well-tramped paths through the snow from the front stairs to a kind of deck on the river side of the house. Three men were talking on the deck. Each had a musket. Cormac longed for his sword but saw that the earl had defended himself against any sort of direct assault. What had happened in Ireland would not happen here. Only a fool would charge this small fortress alone.

“This is the place you were looking for?” Kongo said.

“This is the place.”

“Good. We come back.”

57.

For months, the earl had existed for the young man as a kind of ghost, a specter made of anger and memory, and now he was everywhere. Cormac saw the earl walking through the empty square of the Slave Market, glancing at the vacant piers and surely cursing the War of Jenkins’s Ear. He saw him on another day leaving the expensive shop of Edwards the bootmaker, the usual fence of bodyguards behind him, to be engulfed swiftly by the Pearl Street crowd. His body was thicker, face fleshier, but he was the same man who had traveled the wet roads of Ireland.

The following afternoon, he passed the earl in a crowd near Hanover Square. The earl glanced at Cormac’s bearded face but saw nothing. He was comforted by the simple fact that the earl was in New York. Perhaps he had been away while his fine new mansion was being built. The Carolinas. Distant Georgia. Boston or Philadelphia, those larger, grander towns. But here he was. Cormac thought about carrying his sword, to hurl himself at the earl when next he saw him. But he discarded such a plan as foolish. He would be hanged in an hour and never find out what happened to the other stories unfolding in his life. The story of Mary Burton. The story of Kongo and John Hughson and the whispers of revolt. No, he must wait until the moment was right.

A week later, while making an evening delivery of posters, Cormac saw the earl again, entering one of the storehouses on Beaver Street, leaving his bodyguards at the door. Cormac dawdled, brushing dust from his coat, ambling toward the river. Other men arrived, alone or in pairs. Not a woman among them. No wife. No mistress. They walked in with masculine swagger. They didn’t come out. A frail snow was falling on the town.

An hour later, behind the locked front door of the print shop, Cormac related news of his sightings to Mr. Partridge. His hands were busy cleaning punches and sorting type, but his mind was jumbled. Mr. Partridge urged the young man to be careful, to avoid being obvious. ���This earl… such men have power,” he said. “The power of money, of a willingness to hurt others. Which means they have the ability to do great harm. Once they get power, they’ll do anything to preserve it. Watch yourself, lad.” He seemed exhausted. “Whatever you do, no matter how strong the motive, do nothing rash.”

Mr. Partridge retired early, hauling his weary bones to the second floor. Cormac removed his shoes, hearing boards squeaking above his head for a while, and then silence. As he lay down to sleep, glancing out at the falling snow, his head was swimming with words he was learning from Mr. Partridge, including the word republic, and what Niccolò Machiavelli had written about it two hundred years earlier. Then he heard a soft knock on the back door. Could he have been spotted by the earl? Seen as a threat? Followed to the shop? No, such men would knock much harder, if they knocked at all. He took a candle in one hand and the sword in the other and opened the door an inch.

Mary Burton stood there, shivering in the cold. Snow had gathered on the shawl she wore over her head.

“I’ve come to warn you, Cormac,” she said.

He blew out the candle. “Of what?”

“It’s about to happen.”

“Come in.”

She shook the snow off her shawl and sat on the edge of the fireplace while Cormac planted himself on a stool. In strings of nervous whispers, leaning forward with her hands clenched, she told him what she knew: The rising would begin on Saint Patrick’s Night. Five days hence. The fort would be set afire, Quaco’s wife liberated, the armory looted of guns, which would then be dispersed to the rebels. Others would rob the major shops and haul away all valuables and weapons from private homes. There was a list of good masters and bad. The loot would be taken to the brewery building at the foot of Stone Street. Then John Hughson’s brother would cart everything away in a sloop to exchange it upstate for more guns. While the fort was burning, certain whites would be attacked and, if necessary, killed. All bad masters. All arrogant whites, including women. Many buildings would be torched. And the Spanish fleet would then sweep into the town.

“We’ve got to leave this place,” she said. “It will be like the fires of Hell.”

“What are you saying, Mary?”

“I’m sayin’ we’ve got to run, you an’ me. I’m sayin’ that if you love me, we’ve got to pack a bag and be gone. To Philadelphia, or the bloody west, to somewhere. Maybe we could find a way to Ireland. Get out of this place, some way. We’ve got to feckin’ go….”

Her eyes were frantic and afraid.

“I can’t do that, Mary.”

She went very still then, her eyes slivering with ice.

“You can’t do that?”

“I’m obliged in other ways, Mary. To this shop and Mr. Partridge. And to something else, something that goes back to the old country.”

“You’re obliged?” Her voice was now a knife blade. “You’re fecking obliged?”

“Aye.”

“And are you not obliged to me?”

He looked at her hardening face, her disheveled hair, thinking: Am I? She saw the question on his face.

“You low bastard,” she said.

She stood up, looking around the darkened shop. A lone horse and rider trotted by in the night. The snow fell steadily.

“I’ll be goin’ then,” she said. “What happens to you will be none of my business.” There was bitterness in her voice now. “I have to fecking laugh. I actually thought you loved me. What a fecking fool I was.”

She jerked open the door.

“Don’t be looking for me in Hughson’s,” she said. “For I’ll be gone. With me child.”

She closed the door softly and hurried into the snow. Cormac grabbed a coat to go after her, but she was gone.

He stood there, his body trembling, but not from the cold. She says she’s carrying a child. Her child. But my child too. This is a girl, only sixteen, who sleeps with no men save me. A hard girl, lean and stringy and tough, but a decent girl too. And now she is enraged. She is enraged at being an indenture, a slave, caged in a city she didn’t choose. She is enraged at me. And in her rage, she might become what everyone in the Irish tribe hated above all living creatures: an informer. Able with words to create peril and havoc, flame and death. Like Samson toppling the temple upon himself. If she can’t have freedom, if she can’t have me, then feck it, bring everything down. Create ruins. Hurt everyone in sight. If Mary Burton went to the fort and told the English what she knew, Kongo and Quaco and all the Africans would be in danger of death. So would John Hughson. And so would he, whether called O’Donovan or Carson or Cormac Samuel O’Connor.

He should warn Kongo, tell him of the danger, explain his own stupidity, and take responsibility, no matter what the consequences. But if he did run through the snow and find Kongo, the Africans would almost certainly cut the throat of Mary Burton and slide her into the river. Before morning. They had too much to lose and would easily sacrifice one life to free hundreds. But (Cormac thought) if Mary Burton vanishes, so will my child. If there is a child. If she hasn’t built a lie to trap me. To make me flee with her across the North River and into New Jersey and keep going until they found a place where she would be free. Some lost, hidden grove in the back of beyond.

He glimpsed himself in a wall mirror and hurled unspoken accusations: How could you have done this? How could you have been so weak? Why didn’t you see the trouble coming? Why after sliding into that water with her didn’t you simply go away? Why did you keep going back? Again and again. Drawn to the softness within her hardness. His answers to his own questions were shapeless. Nouns without verbs. Lust. Desire. Connection. Weakness.

And then he felt a great pity for Mary Burton, seeing her moving tearfully through the snow, slapped down by his words, infuriated by his coldness, a victim in some way of that Irish story, the story of his father, the story he could not tell her. He addressed explanations to her, ones he should have made, and still might make this snowy night. You see, he told the absent Mary Burton, there’s something I must do first. Something that comes before my own life and your life and the life of any unborn child. Something I must do, because if I don’t do it, if I don’t first avenge the murder of my father, I can never be free. My vow comes before Kongo too, and before the rising. It comes before everything.

Then, just past the door, he could see a lean, coarse-skinned man peering through the glass. He wore a crumpled suit, a scarf, a wool hat. Little puffs of steam pushed from his nose. He gestured to be admitted. As if relieved to be free of his anguish, Cormac unlatched the door.

“I need a broadside,” he said. Clipped English accent, accustomed to giving orders. “Quickly.”

“We’re closed, sir.”

“Is your master here?”

“Asleep, sir.”

The man exhaled in an exasperated way.

“Make an exception. This is for a ship arriving in a week’s time. We need two hundred posters no later than Saint Patrick’s Day. We intend to fill the hoardings of the town. First ship in—”

He fumbled in his jacket for a sheet bearing the copy, explaining that the bark was named the Valiant, carrying a consignment of raw sugar, rum, and thirty-six seasoned slaves. The first ship in two and a half months, since this bloody war over a bloody ear got serious. Politely, Cormac tried to explain that the Partridge shop didn’t do slaving business, but they could handle the sugar and the rum.

“Well, in that case… I’ll have to discuss it with the earl.”

Cormac’s heart skipped several beats. “Which earl is that, sir?”

“The Earl of Warren, young man. That’s why I’ve arrived so late. He lives way up in the bloody Bloomingdale.”

“I see. In that case, sir, I’m certain we can make an exception.”

The man smiled, showing crooked teeth, and handed Cormac the sheet of paper.

“Wonderful, wonderful. You can deliver them, of course? Here are the words, in the earl’s own hand. And—”

“I’ll need directions, of course.”

“Of course.”

They briefly discussed price and paper size and type fonts, then the directions to the earl’s mansion, and off the man went.

Cormac stared for a long while at the earl’s cursive writing. In the street, the snow was turning to a cold rain. He dressed in warm clothes and slipped into the night. He moved through the rain-pelted streets all the way to Hughson’s. Slivers of light leaked from the back door, and music strummed in a muted way. He went in and ordered a porter from John Hughson.

“Bloody wet night,” Hughson said. Then leaned forward and whispered: “Meeting tomorrow night.”

“I won’t be here,” Cormac said, glancing around the crowded room, searching for Mary Burton, who wasn’t there. Nor was Kongo or Quaco, Sandy or Diamond. “The master wants me to go to New Rochelle.”

“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.

Now Cormac was driven only by the quest for the earl. He removed the long coat, and the sling for the sword, and dropped both on the bottom of the boat. He held the sword, feeling its weight and power. Then jammed it into his belt and waded ashore. Kongo said nothing. There was a plan. Now Cormac must make it work.

He knew the house from another sketch, made by Kongo’s man in the stable. And as he moved through dense woods, approaching the southern side of the house, Cormac saw the huge oak tree, its branches leading toward a second-floor balcony. He began to climb the trunk, but his shoes were wet from the riverbank. He removed them and gained traction with his bare feet, rising on the trunk into the branches. Through the sparse leaves of the tree, he saw an armed man dozing on the deck behind the first floor, and the line of the railing leading down to the river. He climbed higher. Lantern light burned beyond the doors of the second-floor balcony. That was the goal. The earl’s study.

Cormac paused, now feeling oddly calm, gathering strength, and then crawled out upon the thick oak limb leading to the balcony. The limb held his weight well but was three feet short of the balcony. He must leap. Silently. And grab the rail. Hoping that nobody saw him. Hoping he didn’t fall twenty feet to the ground. He looked down. A wide path of gray gravel surrounded the house. He saw nobody on patrol. Inside the room, a shadow moved. Bulky and male. The earl was home.

Cormac stood now, legs bent, on the thinnest end of the tree limb, balanced precariously, about to leap, when he heard footsteps below on the gravel. A man walked around the corner. A face familiar from the earl’s company in town. He carried a musket and whistled in the dark. If he looks up (Cormac thought), I’m dead.

He gripped the branch above him for balance. He stopped breathing. He held himself as still as the tree itself. The man below continued walking around to the deck in back, his whistling fading away.

Cormac thought: Now.

I must go now.

And he did.

He leaped. Fell short. Grasped the balcony railing. Held hard, his naked feet splaying for traction but finding only air. He saw himself falling. Imagined being impaled on his own sword. Imagined the earl opening the door, pistol in hand.

Silence.

Then he swung himself, his body twisting, and felt one bare foot catching the lip of the balcony. Now, he thought. I can do it now. He heaved, holding his breath, and then he was up, weightless, safe. He stepped over the rail and inhaled deeply. Once, twice, three times. Exhaling as silently as possible. Hoping there was no dog.

Cormac looked in at the room. The earl was at a desk with curved legs made of polished wood. French, like the goods sold on Hanover Square. Empty bookshelves rose behind him. There was a door in the wall past the desk. Closed, with a key in the lock. There was a pistol on the desk beside his ink pot. And he could see the three porcelain balls, red, white, and blue, that the earl had used to entertain his men outside a building in Belfast. He was wearing a white ruffled shirt, open at the neck, and his coat was folded carelessly on the desk where he’d dropped it. His brow was furrowed. The posters were stacked to the side of his writing space. He finished writing, blotted the paper, began addressing an envelope. Some vagrant thought passed through him and he smiled. Cormac turned the door handle gently. And stepped inside with his sword drawn. He moved quickly to the desk.

The earl looked up with alarmed eyes and reached for the pistol. Cormac placed the blade of the sword across his wrist, took the pistol and shoved it in his own belt.

“What is this?” the earl said.

“I’m the past, sir.”

“You’re a lunatic is what you are.”

“Perhaps.”

“There’s no gold here, no specie, nothing for you to peddle in town. I have a dozen men guarding this house. I—”

“I don’t want gold,” Cormac said. “I want an explanation.”

The earl chuckled in a dry-mouthed way, the diamond flashing in his mouth. Cormac saw a woman’s portrait on the wall behind the earl. Dark hair, long, aristocratic neck, rosy skin.

“An explanation of what? The laws of gravity? The Magna Carta?”

“I want to know why you killed my father.”

Now the earl studied Cormac’s bearded face in the muted light. Searching time, searching memory. He glanced at a wall clock, then at the door, and smiled in a nervous way.

“I’ll tell you what killed my own father,” he said, his voice suddenly blithe and light. “Whiskey. Or whiskey and rum and too much wine. Don’t let anyone tell you that the gout can’t kill a man. You could have asked my mother.” He gestured at the portrait. “She died of him, of living with him, suffering with him.” He shook his head. “Sad. I never did get to know either of them.”

He reached for the three balls and stood up and slowly began juggling them. “I was raised by… an uncle,” he said, spitting the words through jaws tightening in concentration. “He was a wonderful… man… who had been orphaned himself… and went off with a troupe of buskers instead of going… to school…. He taught me how—to do this.”

The balls moved more swiftly now, and Cormac thought: I’ve come to kill you, you idiot, and you’re making an entertainment. He felt a twinge of sympathy, imagining the earl when he was twelve. “I loved… that man,” the earl said. “Loved… him.” And Cormac told himself: Stop! Remember the day! Remember the diamond glinting in the light, the dead eyes, the man urging Patch forward. Remember the shot, and the shouts that followed: Finish him off! Sweat blistered the older man’s brow. His mouth tightened in concentration.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Cormac said. “Try to remember, please. It was a bit more than a year ago. On a road in Ireland. You and your men stopped an Irishman and told him to surrender his horse. He refused. And you killed him.”

Now the earl understood. The balls slowed in the air, and one at a time he snatched them into his right hand. He gazed at Cormac, as if considering using them as weapons, then laid them on the desk beside the posters.

“You’re talking about that fool. Patch.”

“No: You made it happen, sir. I was there.”

“The man refused to obey a law.”

“A law that didn’t apply to him. My father wasn’t Catholic.”

“He was Irish, wasn’t he?”

“But not Catholic.”

“Yes, but—”

A feathery sound on the balcony. And now Kongo was there, eyes alert, silent in Indian moccasins. Carrying a canvas shroud. The earl’s eyes widened and he backed up under his mother’s portrait, hunching like a small boy trapped.

“Do you recognize this African, sir?” Cormac said.

“I don’t know any Africans, except those who work on the grounds here.”

“You should meet this one. Your company kidnapped him and brought him here in manacles.”

The earl began speaking more quickly, the words bunching. “You’re talking outofa profound stupidity. Forwhat you’ve already-done, you’llsurelyhang, unless I plead for your wretched life!”

Thank you, Cormac thought. I was beginning to pity you, and you’ve shown me your true face. Thank you. Thank you. The earl saw Kongo spreading the shroud upon the carpeted floor, as if preparing a ceremony. “Sit down,” Cormac said, pointing at the earl with the sword. The earl obeyed, searching for a posture, for an attitude that might save him, then sagging into the chair. Cormac placed a bare foot upon the earl’s polished desk and leaned closer, the sword a thrust away from his ruffled chest. For the first time, the earl had doom in his eyes. He glanced at the door as if expecting rescue, but there was no sound from the hallway. Kongo picked up the sign, eased around to the door, and listened. He shook his head. No sound. Not even breathing. Cormac took his foot off the desk and came around closer to the earl. Kongo approached a second door, leading to what they knew from the house map was a bedroom.

“What do you want?” the earl whispered. “What in God’s name do you want?”

“I want you to take that pen and a sheet of paper and confess that you had my father killed for a horse.”

“Of course,” the earl said. “Gladly.”

Nerves twitched in his face, which was runny with calculation. He picked up a goose quill, pulled a sheet of paper closer, dipped for ink, and began to write. He finished. Signed it with a flourish. Cormac leaned forward to lift it from the desk, and the earl lunged for the pistol. He gripped the barrel, then forced open the lock, prepared to shoot. Cormac slammed the flat of the sword across his brow, and his grip loosened. Cormac pried the gun loose of the earl’s grip and tossed it to Kongo.

“That was stupid,” Cormac said.

“I’m sorry,” the earl said in a beaten voice. A thin line of blood lay open on his brow.

“No, you’re not.”

“Go ahead and shoot me,” the earl said. “But remember: one shot from that gun and I’ll have ten men in this room.”

“Yes, and they’ll find you with a hole in your head.”

The earl’s eyes were now brimming, moving to the ceiling, to the doors, to the portrait, and back to Cormac.

“Please, just leave,” he said, while Cormac read the note. “I won’t pursue this if you just leave now. Here, I’ll give you some money.” He played with a key in a locked desk drawer. “Not enough for the terrible thing that happened to your father. But—”

“Nothing changes with you, ever,” Cormac said. “You tried to pay for my mother’s death too. Do you remember that? She died under the wheels of your coach. In the mud.”

The earl looked doomed. He opened the drawer as if fumbling for money, mumbling broken words, sweating harder, and then there was another pistol in his hand.

Cormac rammed the sword into his heart.

The earl’s surprised eyes opened wider, and so did his mouth. Cormac jerked the sword free, blood spread across the ruffled shirt, and the earl’s face hit hard upon the desk. Jesus God, Cormac thought: I’ve done it. I’ve done what I came to America to do. I’ve completed the terms of the vow. Jesus God: I’m free.

Then Kongo touched his arm. “Quick,” he said. “We go.” Together, they laid the earl’s body in the shroud (his face whitening, his eyes wide). The blood was flowing now, slopping on Cormac’s hands, puddling and staining the shroud. They closed the open end around his head, tied the lumpy bundle with ropes, and lifted it together. “Quick,” Kongo said again. Cormac could feel the leaking blood as it sloshed within the shroud. He and Kongo moved its dead weight to the outside stairs that would take them to the deck and the river. Cormac heard himself panting, and for an instant he saw images of shrouded bodies on greased planks falling into the sea.

From the distance, he heard muffled shouts. As in Kongo’s plan, a fire had begun in the barn. To distract the earl’s men. To cover their flight. “Quick,” Kongo said. “Quick.” Cormac turned for a final look at the earl’s study, at the desk, the posters, the juggler’s polished balls: and saw the room’s second door open.

A woman stood there, horror on her face.

She was big with child.

Bridget Riley.

All the way here from across an ocean, from the damp earth of Ireland, from the smoke of a lost, gutted mansion: Bridget Riley herself. Cormac stepped toward her and she backed up. Kongo had his back to the doors, listening to the muffled sounds of alarm. He raised the pistol and aimed it at her. “No,” Cormac said. “Don’t kill her.” Kongo’s eyes were cold and impatient. Bridget took in the bloody sword, the pistol, the lumpy shroud, and understood what had happened.

“Don’t scream, Bridget,” Cormac said.

“Who are you?” she said, a trill of terror in her throat.

“You know me. We rode together through Ireland. And here you are, Bridget, still the earl’s whore, living in another Big House.”

“Good God,” she whispered.

“And now carrying the earl’s bastard,” Cormac said.

The noise from outside smothered her sudden wracked and hopeless weeping. Horses were whinnying. Men shouted. A distant bell was ringing.

“Don’t kill me.”

He could hear Mary Burton, another soul far from home, pleading in the same way: to him, or to Kongo, or to others who had the power to let her live or make her die. For a fraction of a moment, Mary and Bridget merged, their faces, bodies, masks, wombs. As if they were sisters. His contempt for Bridget, for the earl’s whore, for the woman who had told him her sorrowful story in Ireland, smashed against his pity. Pity for her. For the child she carried. Then he thought: If she’s carrying the earl’s child, I must kill it, and her too. To make certain that I’ve gone to the end of the line. But suppose it was a girl child? Suppose…

Kongo could no longer wait. He untied one of the cords in the shroud, went to Bridget Riley, grabbed her blouse, pulled it up over her head, exposing a laced garment covering her swelling breasts. He tied the blouse like a hood, the rope tight around her eyes. Then he stepped to the side and punched her hard. She fell without a word.

“Quick,” he said.

59.

In the black river, the skiff was pulled by the current. The earl’s body lay on the bottom of the boat, tied into its shroud, which was now heavy with rocks. Kongo stood guard at the stern, armed with the pistol and an ax, his eyes searching the river. They were passing the palisades that thrust up from the New Jersey shore. Cormac rowed desperately, trying to move them out of the grip of the current, closer to the Manhattan side, to a place of escape, but the skiff was being pulled by the black water toward the open harbor. Upriver, coming fast, they could see the bob and flicker of lights. A boat, with at least two lanterns. Coming after them. The earl’s men.

This was not in Kongo’s plan. There was no time to feel what he’d done, taking one life, sparing two. Sparing Bridget. Sparing a child. Almost surely the earl’s child. Did it matter? It might. The tribe ordered pursuit “to the end of the line.” Where was the end of the earl’s line? Not now, Cormac thought. No time to think. Time only to row, adding my own feeble power to the force of the river.

Until Kongo told him to stop rowing. Then he grabbed the upper part of the wrapped shroud and Cormac the bottom. The boat wobbled as they heaved. And the shroud sank into the black waters.

Upriver, the light was now larger. Yellow lantern light. The lamp of vengeance and punishment. Coming so fast that it must have five or six men rowing together.

Kongo glanced around, and then gripped the ax.

“We swim,” he said.

Cormac remembered swimming in rock pools in Ireland, in wide streams over hot summers, but he was afraid of the northern waters of the river. I can’t die. Not now, when I’m free.

But Kongo left no room for argument. He smashed at the keel with the ax. Sharp splitting sounds. Water erupted from one hole like a geyser. Followed by another, and a third. The boat slowed, the black water rose, and they were in the river.

The winter river shocked Cormac. He felt absolutely alone now, sinking and sinking, water filling nose and mouth, as he plunged into a black, shapeless, bone-freezing world. The sword was hooked into the back of his belt and seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He beat hard with his hands and arms and kicked with his legs, but he seemed not to move. And then he started rising. He saw the smeared roof of the sky. He felt his long coat swollen with water, the sword digging into his flesh. He tried to wriggle an arm free of the coat, but water filled his nose and mouth. He now felt nothing in his hands. Or his feet. Down he plunged, down and down, ripped by the current. Thinking: I am dead. Thinking: I now join the earl. Thinking: I have done what I came to do. But now I die. Far from home. Thinking: Revenge drowns.

Then he felt a bumping beneath him.

A roundness.

Cold and sleek and bumping him, pushing him up and up and up, forcing him away from the dark, drowned river bottom. It was as if he were being pushed by some enormous fish. Some round, cold-fleshed dolphin lost in the icy north. Up. And up.

Until he burst free and saw the sky.

He gasped as air and life flowed back into him. Went under again. Then was bumped. Almost gently now. Like a series of cold caresses.

He surrendered to the creature.

And then the world swirled and the watery sky was full of black clouds and the cold gauzy moon and the bumping caresses turned him, shoved him, moved him into endless blackness.

He awoke to a cold pink dawn, lying in sand and scrubby weeds. A pale moon lingered in the sky. He ached in every joint and felt a throbbing pain in his back. He sat up. Felt a pressure. The sword. I still have the sword. The pain ceased as he stood on aching legs. Then the river and his fear erupted from him in bile and vomit. Finally, after another five minutes, he felt empty of everything. He stood with his head bowed, vacant, boneless, exhausted, freezing, and whispered hoarsely, “I’m alive.”

Seabirds cried and screeched above him, as if angered by his intrusion, circling, diving, swooping, but not attacking. Across the harbor, he could see the island of Manhattan and knew he was on the wild empty shore of New Jersey. Pushed here. Bumped here. Saved. When he looked again at the seabirds he saw among them one that was black and knew that it was a raven.

60.

When Cormac arrived that afternoon, after the ferry ride to the Manhattan dock, still barefoot in his soggy coat, Mr. Partridge looked relieved. Cormac didn’t show him the blurred, water-swollen letter signed by the earl.

“Have you been swimming?”

“Yes.”

“They say it’s good for the health.”

“It’s better in August.”

“Well, have a sleep, and we’ll work tonight.”

He surely must have suspected something terrible (Cormac thought), but he didn’t ask another question. Cormac removed his coat and trousers, brushed away the mud and nettles, hung them on a peg, then hid the earl’s letter and the sword. He fell into an aching, dreamless sleep.

When he awoke, Mr. Partridge was setting type by lantern light. He mentioned casually that an African had delivered the money for the posters.

“And by the way,” he said, “happy Saint Patrick’s Day.”

The night of the rising.

The date that had fueled Kongo’s urgency.

Cormac listened for street sounds but heard no clamor or alarm. He opened the door, and the night was very still, without wind. Of course. That was it: the wind. Or the lack of it. They had spoken about the need for wind before firing the fort. On this night, there was no wind. He closed the door, feeling reprieved.

“Expecting someone?” Mr. Partridge said.

“No, just a breath of air is what I needed.”

Mr. Partridge was silent for a while, type clicking in his swift hands. Cormac could hear his shallow breathing. Finally the older man spoke, in a grave voice.

“You’ve killed him, haven’t you?”

“Aye.”

He sighed. “And now what will you do?”

“I’ll finish learning my trade.”

Mr. Partridge looked at Cormac carefully, then handed him a sheet of foolscap.

“You can set this. I’ve work to do up above.”

“Good night, Mr. Partridge.”

And up he went on the ladder. No judgments. No expressions of a regret he did not feel. Cormac set type that night until he could no longer see.

When Cormac lay down to sleep at last, he was filled again with the events that had brought him there. He still felt almost nothing. It was as if the black river waters had purged remorse, and guilt, and even conscience. He hoped he would not be traced and arrested for murder most foul. He hoped Mr. Partridge was not drawn into any of it. And he feared Bridget Riley. As she must fear him. She was the only witness. She could call the constables, tell them about Cormac, and about Kongo, and that could be the end of them.

But he did not think she would give names or descriptions. If she had married the earl, then she was the widow. That possibility must have drawn her to America. To assail the earl with guilt, or threats of exposure, to force him to marry her in some chapel, anywhere from Boston to Charlotte. That would be her triumph. She’d been sold for oats and corn, and now she’d be a lady. She could make him juggle before admitting him to her bed. There must have been some risk: The earl could have had her killed. But perhaps there was something else. Perhaps he loved her. Perhaps he sent for her. Perhaps he felt an aching loneliness on the shore of this empty continent, this outpost on the moon.

Either way, she might choose silence. If she was truly married, or could persuade others that she was, she would now own everything that the earl had owned when mysterious robbers broke in and committed murder. She would own the property in New York and the property in Carrickfergus. She would own his shares in the trading company. Better to vanish. Go home to Ireland or England instead of standing as witness in a trial that would make her name known from here to London and certainly provoke scrutiny.

He got out of bed and found a newspaper to see what ships might be sailing on the morrow. The war had cut the number to two, when there would normally be ten. But neither ship was bound to cross the Atlantic. One was going to Charleston. The other to Nova Scotia. Cormac thought: It must be the war with Spain. But if Bridget Riley couldn’t leave, performing her grief for a small audience, then why would she not talk? The constables might suspect that she had a hand in the killing. Particularly if she had married the earl, if there was a certificate, a will. After all, the constables were faced with a mystery. There was much blood in the earl’s study, but why was there no body? What mere thief would steal a body? If they suspected Bridget Riley, she would surely save her own skin. She would describe the African and the Irishman. Cormac’s breath quickened in fear. And then another face appeared in his jangled reverie, another woman who might be carrying a child. Where was Mary Burton? What was she doing with her rage? What could be brewing through this long night that would come for him in the day?

And then at last he slept.

In the morning, the wind was making flags curl and pushing dust and paper down Cortlandt Street. A gathering wind. A wind certain to stiffen. And when he moved through the streets to deliver posters to Jameson the vintner, he felt a strangeness in the air. He searched for Kongo on the waterfront but didn’t see him, didn’t see Quaco either, or any of the other Africans he knew, and didn’t even know if Kongo still lived. He wanted to go to Hughson’s, to try one final time to get them to call off the rising. And to speak with Mary Burton. But he was afraid that if he spoke too strongly they would turn on him, accuse him of weakness, leave him out of the struggle that he wanted now to join. Mary Burton might hear his words the wrong way and turn on all of them in her bitter anger. And another form of strangeness gripped him. There were no alarms over the death of the earl, no posters, nothing in the day’s edition of Peter Zenger’s newspaper. It was as if nothing at all had happened. He thought about writing a crude letter to Bridget Riley, addressed to Lady Warren, demanding a cash payment for delivery of her late husband’s body. Write it with his left hand. To explain somehow to the constables the mystery of the vanished body. But that might only lead to a harder hunt, with rewards and informers….

And besides, the tension in the streets told Cormac another story. Something was coming that was much larger than the Earl of Warren.

Around three o’clock he hurried down to the waterfront to look for Kongo. He lolled behind the empty Slave Market, trying to look casual, and watched the two ships that would depart at four. The Carolina and the Arcadia. All cargo had been loaded, and the stevedores on the piers were smoking and laughing, waiting for the ships to sail. A few passengers appeared on the deck of each ship, but the flags showed the stiffening of the wind, blowing north from the harbor. Most passengers were in cabins or the cheap bunks belowdecks. Captains and company men chatted, examined documents, smoked seegars. Cormac stretched, as if tired after a hard day of work, gazed into the windows of a ship chandler, hoping for the sight of Kongo. One lonely redcoat leaned against the side of the deserted Slave Market, huddling out of the wind.

Then a black unmarked coach, with trunks lashed to its roof, galloped up in front of the Carolina. An African in livery, his face familiar from the earl’s stable, leaped down, called to some stevedores for help in unloading the trunks. He opened the door and offered a hand to Bridget Riley.

She gazed around, near and far, her face still marked by fear, and then saw Cormac.

She stopped. The African followed her gaze. It was too late for Cormac to back away. Bridget’s head turned toward the lone redcoat. Cormac thought: I must want to be caught, to be hanged for the death of the earl. Then the African whispered to Bridget Riley, and she threw Cormac a chilling glance and turned to board the ship.

The gangplank was raised an instant after she stepped on deck. She turned one final time, looking directly at Cormac, and then vanished into a cabin on the poop. The Carolina eased into the river, bound for Charleston. Officers barked orders. Seamen scrambled in rigging. The African watched for a while, then turned and walked toward Cormac, taking his hat from his graying head. Cormac glanced at the redcoat, saw him stretching his arms over his bored head, and moved to meet the African.

“She ask me to tell you some words,” the man said.

“Yes?”

“She ask me to tell you: Thank you very much.”

He glanced out at the departing ship, and then at some flags on the rooftops of warehouses. “She tell the constables someone hit her,” he said, “and she saw nothing that happen to her husband.”

“Much obliged,” Cormac said.

The African looked at Cormac now. “Tell Kongo,” he said. “We are with him.”

He moved to the carriage, climbed to his seat, and flicked his whip as if punctuating his brief conversation, and the horses started off, heading north.

61.

They worked across the day into the night. Around seven, Mr. Partridge was joking about the contents of a marital document asking for a legal separation, and musing on the folly of man. Then from the street they heard a shout followed by an excited response. Someone ran past the front of the shop. They went out together, locking the shop door behind them, and turned the corner. There was a red glow in the sky above Fort George. The wind was now blowing hard off the harbor. The rising had begun.

They were hurrying now, Mr. Partridge huffing with his exertions but alert to his surroundings. Citizens were running toward the fort, and they heard the word “fire” over and over again: shouted, called, bellowed. They neared the fort and then there was a surge of people, and scattered redcoats, and the sound of bells ringing. Mr. Partridge went one way, Cormac another.

Great orange tongues of flame roared and twisted angrily against the inky sky. The air was grainy with the odor of burning wood. Firemen arrived with their two new engines, but the water came in useless dribbles. The fire roared and Cormac could see now that it was also consuming the mansion of the governor, beyond the burning ramparts. Redcoats watched with muskets pointed toward the fort but with nobody to shoot. Tongues of fire were aimed at the houses on lower Broadway, and the crowd backed away. Sparks scattered into the sky, and Cormac’s mind flashed on sparks from a lost forge scattering across the Irish sky, aspiring to be stars.

He cut into an alley behind the Lutheran church, trying to see the fort from the river side. The alley was piled high with barrels and crates, and reeked of garbage. Then two other people rushed into the alley. Cormac flattened himself against the wall and saw Quaco running, holding the hand of his wife. An African woman, hair piled high, struggling to run in long skirts, panting. Behind them were two redcoats. Quaco’s eyes were alarmed and furious. He saw Cormac. Started to say something. But pulled his wife’s hand and kept running. Cormac saw a redcoat drop to a knee and take aim. And he stepped away from the wall, placing himself between the aimed musket and the fleeing African couple.

An enraged British voice: What are. Who is. Stop now.

Then Cormac jerked at the barrels and they came tumbling down with a great bumping clatter, filling the width of the alley, and Cormac ran too.

He made a wide circle to the north, crossing Broadway, and found Mr. Partridge in the crowd.

“Where did you go?” he said. “I’ve been worried sick.”

“First I was looking for you. Then I wanted a better view.”

Mr. Partridge gestured toward the burning fort.

“This could be a right disaster.”

Buckets were being passed from man to man. A portly constable named Michaels burst into the crowd, announcing another fire to the east, on the near end of Pearl Street. He asked for help and men followed him away from the glow of the burning fort. Suddenly four ferocious detonations split the air and rocked the ground, one immediately followed by the next, as the ammunition in the fort exploded. Cormac was knocked to his back. Mr. Partridge hit the wall of a house and slid down to a sitting position. Behind them, splintered windowpanes fell upon the streets. Missiles of stone and broken timber hurtled through the air. Cormac got up and hauled Mr. Partridge to his feet. Women were screaming and men shouting, and everybody was running, including Cormac and Mr. Partridge. They ran directly into Peter Zenger. He was thin, harried, trembling with excitement.

“Is zis your boy, Partridge?” Zenger said, his reedy voice thick with a German accent.

“My man, sir.”

“Can he zet type?”

“Yes.”

“Can I borrow him tonight? I have a man out zick und—”

“It’s up to him.”

“I’d be glad to help, Mister Zenger.”

“Gut. Go to my zhop now. I’ll be along in a vile.”

All night, Cormac worked for Peter Zenger. His first newspaper job. Setting type for the Weekly Journal. Correcting Zenger’s mangled English copy. Writing two brief stories himself. The reports kept coming in, gathered by Zenger himself or delivered by citizens exploding with gossip and outrage. Reports of Irishmen laughing, Africans running away from the fires (for there were four fires now, including the fort and the mansion). Quaco and his wife were among those who ran, but Cormac wrote nothing about them. As the night went on and on, there were scarier reports: Some of the Irish and the Africans were seen with guns. Did you see zem mit guns? No, but I heard—Zank you very much. Cormac knew it was a rising, and he wanted to be part of it. But they had not asked him to join, had not assigned him a part to play. He set type. He absorbed information.

Around five in the morning, there was good news for the English, if bad for the rebels. The wind had shifted. It began blowing out toward the harbor, away from the houses of Broadway and the larger town. The third fire, nine blocks away from the fort, had destroyed a warehouse. The owner was dead. Rumor said that an African had caved in his head with a frying pan. Through the night, Zenger understood what was happening.

“Zey vant to burn New York to the ground!” he said. “It’s der Irishers und der blacks against der vites!”

Cormac forced himself not to laugh, and kept working without comment until all the forms were locked up. Zenger thanked him and paid him two shillings. His eyes were sore and bleary, but he did not go home. He walked through the ash-gritty air to Hughson’s. No lights were burning. He knocked at the back door. Nobody came to open it. He knocked again. An upstairs window opened a few inches.

“Yes, what is it?”

“I need to talk to Mary.”

“Good luck.”

“Is she asleep?”

“No,” Sarah Hughson said. “She’s flown.”

And closed the window hard.

He stood there for a long moment, then moved toward the waterfront, hoping to come around far from the fire and make his way down Broadway to Cortlandt Street. He could see a boat moving north on the river, with masked men lying low on the deck, but there were no ships of the Spanish fleet. His mind filled with dark possibilities.

She’s flown.

She’s flown.

62.

When he woke up, the city had changed forever. Until that night, the well-fed, respectable whites had convinced themselves that slaves loved being slaves. That they were happy and secure and accepted their inferiority. The Africans and the Irish both knew they were nothing (or so the theory went) and therefore were happy to have food to eat and a roof above their humble, worthless heads. Now, on the morning after, the English knew better.

The fire was out at last, the king’s fort a settling, smoking pile of glistening charcoal. Only one wall of the governor’s mansion remained standing. Cormac moved through the crowd gazing at the ruins, hoping to see Mary Burton staring in satisfaction or anger. She wasn’t among the gathering audience. But as he moved, he heard the same words dripping from angry tongues: Africans, Irish, Catholics, traitors. There were more questions than answers. Is the Spanish fleet coming? Will New York be taken and the papists installed in Trinity? Will all the whites be murdered? Someone suggested in a reasonable way that an African laborer using solder on a pipe might have accidentally set off the blaze in Fort George. He was laughed at by some and lacerated with words by others. You bloody fool, can’t you see what this is? Even a few women shook fists at him, calling him a traitor to God, King, Anglicanism, and the white race. The man backed away and then drifted out of the crowd.

In the shop on Cortlandt Street, Mr. Partridge had other news: Two Africans were under arrest for stealing silverware. Caesar and Prince. They’d buried it under floorboards in Hughson’s Tavern on Stone Street. “A true pair of master criminals!” Mr. Partridge exclaimed. “And Hughson no better! Idiots! Fools!” And that discovery of the stolen goods led to a fresh theory, one with its own banal logic: The fire at the fort was set to cover the crime. That was all. “Not a revolt, but a burglary!” said Mr. Partridge. And it seemed certain that one of the thieves, Caesar, had fathered a child with a white woman. “It’s a fever out there, lad!” More seriously, he whispered, a much wider conspiracy was being exposed.

“They have an informer,” he said. “Some Irish wench. They’ve promised her money and freedom, and she can’t stop talking.”

Cormac’s stomach flopped.

Mary Burton.

Turned informer.

Talking her way to freedom.

That afternoon the reaction began. A grand jury was convened, complete (Mr. Partridge observed) with a Grand Inquisitor named Daniel Horsmanden. The eminent jurors now had a secret list of names. And the authorities vowed to quash this treasonous revolt as swiftly as possible. Working in the print shop, often alone, Cormac tried to absorb the rush of news. The Hughsons were arrested and swiftly condemned, with Mary Burton the chief witness against them. Hughson blubbered, said a man who’d been inside the jury room, while Sarah shouted her innocence. Three more fires broke out, and the hysteria increased. Within hours, Caesar and Prince were hanged on the ridge overlooking the Collect Pond, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves in the African cemetery on Duane Street. Cormac didn’t see this happen; the event was carried into the shop by Mr. Partridge. “Stay away from these insane crowds,” Mr. Partridge warned Cormac. “They’ll be searching every face for proof of allegiance.”

English flags blossomed on many buildings, some of them sewn together overnight, serving now as declarations of loyalty to the Crown. Another fire broke out. Then Hughson was hanged, sobbing, protesting, claiming his innocence, demanding a fair hearing. As soon as his neck was snapped by the rope, young Sandy was placed above the drop. He showed no emotion. His last word before death was “Freedom!” The authorities left the two corpses dangling for days, as a warning to Africans and Irishmen. Cormac came around two days later. Hughson’s body had turned black, while the African’s body had turned white. Some of the more fanatical citizens saw this as a dark omen.

Mary Burton was hidden away somewhere, protected by agents of the grand jury, but she must not have given them Cormac’s name. His proof of this theory was simple: Nobody came knocking on the print shop door at midnight. Cormac could not find Kongo, but he was sure he was alive because even the reaction didn’t stop the fires. Flames destroyed the sumptuous home of Captain Peter Warren, no relative of the earl but the brother-in-law of James De Lancey, who was the most powerful politician in town and chief justice of the New York colony. De Lancey was enraged and as a member of the grand jury swore brutal reprisals. “He’s making this personal now,” Mr. Partridge said, “and that means more deaths, more hangings.” Then Van Zandt’s warehouse erupted in flame. Cormac sensed Kongo’s plan: to create fear and uncertainty while the rebels waited for the arrival of the Spanish frigates.

From the first day after the fire at the fort, the constables and redcoats started rounding up the Africans and the Irish and packing them into the new Bridewell prison. After three days, it was bursting. An abandoned warehouse on Water Street was seized by the army and used for more prisoners. Then several run-down private houses were filled with Africans. Shopkeepers complained that they could not operate their businesses because so many slaves and Irishmen had been imprisoned. De Lancey snarled, “You’ll have no businesses at all if we don’t smash this rabble now.”

A few men were released because, as Mr. Partridge explained, they were not on Mary’s lists. But many prisoners were threatened and beaten, and dozens were tortured. “If you torture a man badly enough,” Mr. Partridge said, “he’ll say whatever is necessary to stop the torture, even if it means lying.” Mr. Partridge refused to allow Cormac to go out on the streets—“Every young Irishman is a suspect”—and now delivered his work himself, shuffling along, trying to look old. Cormac slept with the sword in his hands.

But they didn’t come for him. Mary Burton, the great accuser, was also his guardian. He tried to imagine her at that moment, and how she felt after giving names, and what she thought about before sleep came. Was she truly carrying a child? Was it his child? Had she arranged with the grand jury to be allowed to vanish, with a new name and new papers and some money to give her a start? Did she understand that now she would never be free? Dark avengers would track her down. If she had a child, its name would be stained by her betrayal. Perhaps she didn’t care. Perhaps she wanted to die. Perhaps she was not with child at all. Perhaps she simply wanted to erase every humiliation she had ever endured. Perhaps. Mary Burton was a perhaps.

On a Friday in April, Quaco’s friend Diamond was led to a spot of ground on the Common, sentenced to die for starting the fire at the fort. Cormac insisted to Mr. Partridge that he must be there, saying, “I know this man,” and Mr. Partridge argued, cautioned, sighed, and wished him Godspeed. The Grand Inquisitor had made his ruling: Fire must be repaid with fire. Almost every white person in town came to watch this burning at the stake, except the haughty merchants and the grand jurors who had passed the sentence. And in the crowd, Cormac saw a familiar face, now hollow-eyed, grizzled, filthy, his clothes grafted together from various shades and textures of black. The Rev. Clifford.

“The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away,” he chanted in a singsong voice. “What comes, goes. What goes, comes. All ends in death and fire. All ends in the flames of Hell. All sinners must burn… and we are all sinners.”

Cormac eased away from him, as if he carried some terrible contamination. So did others in the crowd. Cormac stared at the scene, trying to record every detail without being seen to write notes. A rough, freshly skinned post had been driven into the earth, with a pile of dry kindling and split logs at its foot. A man wearing a hood and a black woolen suit watched patiently while a clean-shaven clergyman in black read from a Bible. He was a more grave, more solemn echo of the Rev. Clifford, clean, clear-eyed, well-dressed, but delivering a more hopeful version of the same message. We are all sinners. Repent, all of ye, repent.

But on this late morning, his last on earth, Diamond was impenitent. He walked to the stake with his head high, his face composed, and a look of contempt in his eyes. Some turned away from his scalding look as he was tied to the post. Others cheered when the hooded man ignited the kindling. “Off to hell, you savage!” a plummy voice bellowed, while others laughed. Cormac saw the Rev. Clifford speaking directly to the sky, his words lost in the general chatter.

But then there was silence, even from the Rev. Clifford, as the flames gathered strength, and Diamond writhed and his mouth opened against his will and they could smell a sickening odor and the flames rose around the African’s head. Then Diamond screamed. He screamed and he screamed and he screamed. A woman fainted. And the screaming went on. The flames crackled and sparked and roared. And finally Diamond was burned into silence. His smoking body didn’t move. The flames kept burning, poisoning the air with the odor of ruined flesh. Some black flakes of his charred skin floated above the pyre.

And then the Rev. Clifford began to laugh. A wild, high-pitched cackle of a laugh. Laced with pleasure. With satisfaction. With death. A heavyset man shoved him rudely, as if to force him into solemnity, but Clifford fell to his knees, laughing and laughing, and rolled to his side and drew up his legs and plunged his clenched hands between his thighs until the laughter turned to tears.

Cormac felt nauseated. At what was done to Diamond. At the sight of the Rev. Clifford. He turned away, fighting off a surge of vomit. He needed clean air and there was no clean air. Others trudged away in silence, stained by the odor of burning human flesh and burning human fat and burning human blood. But as he walked south toward Cortlandt Street, Cormac noticed that some men had not had enough. Their nostrils flared, their eyes glittered, they formed angry clusters on the Common and shouted for more hangings, more burnings, more death. That night, they gathered together as the first of the mobs.

63.

Mr. Partridge was alarmed, for he had been moving among the fearful men who ran the town and were prepared to unleash the mobs. “You’re in mortal danger, lad,” he whispered. “They want every African, except the ones they own. They want every Irishman.” Cormac offered to leave, to keep Mr. Partridge out of danger. He could go to Boston or Philadelphia, or find refuge for a while in the northern forests. When this had settled down, he could return. Mr. Partridge shook his head in a vehement no.

“It might come to that, and soon,” he said, “but we’ve got work to do first.”

Together they began packing the best books and most important documents. His precious books made by William Caslon. Swift and Pope, a copy of Don Quixote in Spanish, books by Plato and Machiavelli on forming republics, sheaves of slave trading invoices. “These must be saved first,” he said. “We must hide them, in case the mobs come here.” Some went into a wide worn leather bag. He opened the storage space beneath the printing press and shoved the bag into the darkness. “Let me think about where they’ll be safe for a year or two.”

As they packed, mobs were sweeping the town. For three nights, Cormac searched for Kongo and saw white mobs beating blacks with clubs or kicking them into meat. One African, accused of stealing, had both hands chopped off at the wrist without charges being presented to the grand jury. An African woman suspected of sympathy for the rebels had her clothes torn from her body on Beaver Street and was tossed from man to man until she was sent raving through the streets, naked and alone and wailing. The decent whites closed their shutters and locked their doors: seeing nothing, hearing nothing. Cormac saw that the white men in the mobs were crazy now: muscles and faces distorted, tendons stretched like cables in their necks, hair wild. They were armed with pistols, muskets, and certainty. All of them were drinking something: rum, gin, whiskey. “Instant courage,” Mr. Partridge sneered. “To keep the shite from their trousers.” At night, their torches lurched through the streets, and there weren’t enough redcoats to control them. They shouted back and forth, one mob to another, claiming the right to certain streets, reporting on their quarries, their instant trials, instant judgments, and instant punishments. “One Irishman tarred and feathered, one nigger with his balls cut off!” When a black man was spotted, they roared like valiant warriors, although there were four of them for each black man, and they ran in pursuit like hounds after a fox.

That Saturday night, the mobs were larger, moving everywhere in their purging fury, and searching homes and shops and workplaces. Cormac suggested to Mr. Partridge that they rent a horse and move books and documents somewhere north, out of the city, to hide them, wait a few weeks, and then return when the mobs had gone quiet.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “I’ll go for a horse.”

Off he went, and then Cormac heard a mob coming down Cortlandt Street, and looked out and saw Kongo. Stones and bottles were smashing around him. He saw Cormac but kept running. Cormac grabbed the sword and stepped outside as the mob rushed by the shop.

Kongo was down, his skull bloodied. He was bent into a small target, hands covering his head, while the whites kicked at him, cursed him, jammed the blunt ends of poles into his ribs, trying to get at his balls. They were screaming fecking cannibal and goddamned savage and black bastard.

Cormac broke through, holding the sword.

“Enough,” he said. “Let him be. If you kill him, you’ll all be charged with murder. I’ll make certain of that.”

They backed up, wary of the sword, scrutinizing Cormac’s bearded face. One jittery-eyed man with glossy black hair shoved a hand inside his coat.

“You Oirish bastard,” he said. “You’re one of them, ain’t you?”

Another rushed from the side holding a club, and when he raised it Cormac knocked him down with a punch. Then they started poking at him with the poles and bats. Cormac ducked and bobbed, and glimpsed Kongo’s eyes in the light of a torch, angry and cold, in a sitting position now, thinking of what could be done. One man lunged with a pole and Cormac cut it in half. Another made a thrust with his own crude lance and Cormac sliced it clean an inch from the man’s hand. Then Michaels, the old constable, pushed through the crazed men, his lantern held high.

Not another kick, you lot. Away with ye.

His severe tone was enough to stop them. Cormac stood back a few feet, the sword hanging loose behind him, out of sight. The whites consoled themselves with a simple fact: They’d captured an African. The constable told four of them to remain, to help him bring Kongo to a holding pen, and the rest turned and went off toward the waterfront, chanting words Cormac couldn’t fully hear, brave as any mob. The constable reached down, bringing thick twine from a pocket, and lashed Kongo’s hands behind his back. Kongo stood up. He said something in Yoruba, and the constable clubbed him across the brow.

“He was thanking you, Mr. Michaels,” Cormac said.

“For what? I wish they’d killed him.”

Kongo was bleeding from a deep gash in the back of his head and from a rip above his right brow. The sight of blood encouraged one of the four men. He stepped forward and kicked Kongo in the groin. And then smiled as Kongo doubled over, refusing to utter a sound.

“You must have balls of iron, nigger.”

Kongo spat some blood.

“Let’s try it again,” the man said.

Cormac stepped forward, now holding the sword for all to see. They looked at him in amazement. Michaels paused. Kongo stared.

“Release him,” Cormac said.

Nobody moved.

“I said, let him go.”

“You’ll be hanged for this,” the constable said.

“Perhaps. But you’ll be dead.”

The constable looked anxious. Then one of the whites rushed from the left side, a club raised high. Cormac cut the club in half and then smashed the man’s face with the wolf-bone handle of the sword. But he didn’t see the man on the right. The man who fired the pistol. The sound was very loud. Pain cut through Cormac’s left shoulder. Above the heart. He thought: I’ve been shot in the back. Cormac turned, bleeding from chest and back. He pivoted. Swung the sword down, cut into a meaty thigh, and a fat man holding a pistol fell in a gush of blood and high-pitched wailing. The pistol clattered on cobblestones. Another man drew a sword. Cormac wobbled, losing blood front and back, a red film falling across his eyes, but even a feeble swing severed the swordsman’s hand from its wrist. The man yelped in shock, gripping his forearm, fell to one knee, rose in panic. The constable ran after him, and so did the others. They only wanted to fight if they were winning.

Cormac sliced through Kongo’s ropes. The walls of shuttered houses seemed to bend forward, then back, tottering like drunks. He saw three moons in the sky. From the distance, he heard an unseen chanting mob. The voices getting louder. Thinking: Get the bag of documents. Thinking: Get the horse. As he heard shouts for blood and death.

And then he was on a horse. Lashed to Kongo. His blood seeping: into Kongo’s body. As Kongo’s blood seeped: into his own. He felt the sword lashed to his bleeding back. There was a worn saddlebag behind him. Slippery with blood. He was up on a great horse. Under a red moon. The horse knew the way. This sleek black horse. A horse called Thunder.

They galloped through farms and forests.

64.

He was a long way away, drifting in silent seas. The air was wet. But the wetness had no form, no edge, no shore. He went out and returned, went farther, soaring through wet, empty galaxies, and returned through watery voids where all was the color of emeralds. And then went out again on the dark, cold tides. He had no body. No bones or flesh and no warming blood. He saw nothing but the emerald water, and dreamed no dreams, and longed for nothing. He did not want food or flesh, and no part of him moved, and yet he was moved through the silent seas.

And then came awake on a bed of hay and thatch on the floor of a cave with a high granite roof. Pain gave him back his body. He was pierced in back and chest, and when he tried to rise it was as if a spear were lodged in his flesh. His mouth felt as if he had eaten sand. The wetness had been replaced by the parched, coarse touch of his tongue upon the roof of his mouth. I’m so dry (Cormac thought) that my blood must all have drained away.

He moved his fingers against one another and then into the sandy earth upon which he lay. His fingers felt swollen, as if his hands were made of thumbs, but they could touch and feel. His eyes moved from roof to side. He saw the worn leather satchel of Mr. Partridge a dozen feet away. He saw his sword lying upon a thatch mat that made it seem almost sacramental. He tried again to rise, but his body refused the command. He could smell a fire burning somewhere, but his teeth clacked against one another in the cold.

Then he heard footsteps, bare feet on sandy earth.

And from some dark place, Kongo appeared above him. He was wearing a white robe. White horizontal bars were painted on his cheeks. He squatted and took Cormac’s hand and stared into his eyes.

“Good,” he said.

“Hello, Kongo,” Cormac said, thinking: My voice is coming across a very long distance.

The African smiled without showing teeth.

“W-where are we?” Cormac said, his teeth still fluttery with cold. “You’ve been dead for nine days,” Kongo said in Yoruba. Cormac thought: He speaks Yoruba to me and I understand each word.

Kongo went somewhere out of Cormac’s vision and returned with a cup.

“Drink,” Kongo said. “All of it.”

The African held the cup to Cormac’s mouth, and he sipped a cold, bitter liquid. Cleansing. Cooling. It seemed to flow through all of his body, and although he could not yet move without pain, his senses were returning. One thing he sensed was the presence of someone else in the cave. When he finished the drink his mouth tasted of lime. The juice of emerald fruit. He tried again to sit up, rose a few inches, and saw a brown gullied scab above his heart. His back felt tightened by another scab. He turned to his side, and pain surged through him, making him gasp.

“Lie back,” Kongo ordered.

Cormac asked again where they were, and in an almost diffident way Kongo told him they were in a cave at the very top of the island of Manhattan. In a wild place. Just below the smaller river that cut across the top of the island. The trees were very tall and there were wolves in the forest. As he spoke, Cormac heard breathing from somewhere else in the cave.

“Will you bury me here?” Cormac asked, trying weakly to grin.

“You will not die. Not here. Not yet. Not for a very long time.”

Then a figure emerged from the darkness behind Kongo. Tall in her flowing white cotton gown. Her face as beautiful as Cormac remembered.

“Hello, Tomora,” he said in Yoruba.

She gave him a pitying smile in reply but said no words. Kongo moved out of the way. Tomora stretched out her brown arms, the sleeves of the gown falling aside. She closed her eyes and began to chant in Yoruba. Cormac knew that she was offering a prayer. To the wind god and the moon god, the river god and the forest god. Kongo bowed his head, closed his eyes, and responded to each call with a blurted word that meant “So be it.” She prayed to all the inhabitants of the Otherworld. She begged them to reject Cormac. She implored them to keep him here on earth. She urged them to heal the young man. To give him life.

“Here is a man who did not abandon me,” she said.

“A man who did not abandon any of us,” Kongo replied.

“Here is a man who gave his life to save another, one of us.”

“Gave his life for another, O mighty gods. I am the one.”

“Here is a man destined for more time on the earth.”

“This earth, this island.”

“We must reward him.”

“Reward him, O mighty gods of wind and moon, of rivers and forests. Give him life.”

Then they bowed their heads in silence, standing together at the feet of Cormac. Tomora turned to Kongo.

“Go,” she ordered. And he padded on bare feet into the darkness.

Tomora knelt beside Cormac’s head, her legs tucked under her. He could smell musk and forest, rain and the sea.

“O gods of earth and sky, heal him,” she whispered in Yoruba. “O gods of wind and rain and sun, give him life. Give him this place between rivers. Let wind and rain and sun fall forever upon his face.”

Then she ran her tongue over the scabs on his chest, licking their pebbly brown surface. She lifted him with strong hands and ran her tongue over his scabbed back. He felt his flesh shudder and curl like a flower at sunrise.

“Give him the gift,” she whispered, eyes tightly shut. “The reward of the just. The long-lasting gift of women and meadows and water. Give him your eternal gift and do not make it a curse.”

Then she was silent. Her eyes opened, liquid and dark. She kissed Cormac on the lips, and he felt her warm breath mingling with his own. She pressed her fingertips to each of his temples and then kissed each of his eyes until they closed into sleep.

When he woke, Tomora was gone and Kongo was dressed in the clothes of the American world.

“I must go soon,” the African said.

“Wait. Not yet.”

Cormac sat up without pain. His scabs were gone, the skin of his chest marked only by a thin white line. He was naked.

“How long have I been here?” he asked in Yoruba.

“In your time, almost three weeks, including the nine days when you were dead.”

“I understand your language.”

“Of course,” Kongo said, smiling. “My blood is mixed with yours and yours with mine. We always say that words are a kind of blood.”

Cormac began to say that he had dreamed a long strange dream.

“That wasn’t a dream. Tomora was here.”

Cormac stared at Kongo’s face as the African seemed to search for precise words.

“She gave you a gift,” he said at last. “A rare gift. More precious than diamonds.” He paused. “You must take it.”

And then, in careful language, turning his head to gaze at the walls of the cave, he explained.

The gift was life.

Long life.

Perhaps eternal life.

“You can live as long as the world lives,” he said. “When the gods are finished with the world, when they decide that they have seen enough, then all will die, and you with them. But even then…”

He waved a hand as Cormac rose, his joints stiff, hunger gnawing at him.

“You must understand,” Kongo said, his voice now solemn. “Even the gift of life has its terms. Its rules.”

Cormac lifted a blanket, covered himself against the chill.

“Otherwise,” Kongo said, “a man would be a god. Only gods have no limits.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t. Not yet, for you are a boy, too young. But you will. You will learn.”

“And how old are you, Kongo?”

He shrugged. “Old.”

Then he laid out the rules, the terms, the limits.

“Your life,” he said, “will be lived here, on this granite island, this Manhattan. If you leave, if you cross the waters, you will die, and be forever barred from entering the Otherworld.” He paused, letting Cormac absorb the words. “Choosing to leave would be choosing to kill yourself, and that would keep you from crossing over to the true place. The place where your father waits, your mother, the people you will love.”

Cormac thought: The Otherworld is always the Otherworld, no matter who tells of its existence. And in Africa or Ireland, suicide bars the way.

“You can be shot or stabbed, your bones can be broken, your blood can flow, you can sicken with disease and suffer its agonies. Life will not free you from pain. But you will not die.”

He was speaking without emotion, while Cormac listened. “But in order to live,” Kongo said, “you must truly live. You cannot simply exist, Cor-mac, like a cow or a tree. You must live.”

“I don’t know what that means. To truly live.”

Kongo paused again, his eyes wandering to the walls of the cave, to the blackness at the far end.

“To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day.”

He stared at his hands.

“To love women. To pleasure them. To make them laugh. To be foolish for them. To protect them. To respect them. To listen to them.” He paused. “They are the lifegivers. To live is to love them….”

He picked up some doubt in Cormac’s eyes, a kind of smiling uncertainty.

“You will see,” he said. “The proof will be in your living.”

Cormac hesitated, intimidated by Kongo’s seriousness.

“There are only two ways to find release,” he said, and sighed.

“How?”

He closed his eyes and his brow tightened, as if he were receiving a message.

“I told you the first. If you leave this island, then you will die, and be forever banished from the Otherworld.” He smiled in a thin way. “But someday, if you choose, there can be an end, after all your living.”

He folded his arms across his chest, gazed at the walls of the cave.

“You will meet a dark-skinned woman,” he said. “Her body will be adorned with spirals. You will love her. She will love you. You will lie down with her here, in this place, you will enter her in this deep part of the granite island, and then, only then, if you wish, will you be able to pass to the Otherworld.”

A dark-skinned woman marked by spirals. So said the babalawo. The prince of spirits. The shaman. He gestured to a pile of Cormac’s clothes, dry and clean of blood. Cormac began to dress. Remembering their flight from death, the mingled blood, the sensation of riding Thunder through the night.

“The great horse is gone,” Kongo said, as if reading the younger man’s mind. “I sent him back. Now you must go on foot. As must I.”

“We can go together, Kongo.”

“No, I must go home now. There’s a ship that will take me to Africa. Leaving from Boston, and I must go there. A privateer.” He smiled. “It’s all arranged. In this country, money makes everything possible.”

Cormac said, trying to sound casual, “What is happening in the city?”

Kongo breathed deeply.

“The rebellion is crushed. The Spaniards didn’t come to the harbor. The English burned or hanged eighteen Africans and four Irish. They enjoy killing when they think their God has given a blessing…. But it was not a failure, just a defeat.” He said this in a tone edged with doubt but empty of bitterness. “It will live in the minds of all who saw it, and victory will come later.” He stared directly at Cormac. “Here. In all places.”

“Was Mary Burton the informer?”

“Yes.” He sighed. “The major one, but not the only one.”

“Where is she?”

“Gone. But she is being tracked.”

“Don’t kill her,” Cormac said.

Kongo shook his head as if the trackers had no choice.

“She wanted to be free,” Cormac said. “Like you and all your people. She might be carrying a child and wanted the child to be free too.”

“Yah, and she caused much death.”

With that, he embraced Cormac and kissed his brow. “Remember: To live—you must live,” he said. “I will see you again. That I promise.”

He turned and walked quickly into the darkness, to follow the forest trails to the sea trails that would take him home.