Forever

65.

They waited in the dark with the ridge of forest at their backs and Kip’s Bay before them. Cormac moved among them, his own face as black as theirs, skin stained with ink. He nodded at Bantu, who was stocky and muscled and cradling a smoothbore musket.

“Maybe they don’t come,” Bantu said, speaking English with an Ashanti accent.

“They’ll come,” Cormac said.

“Good,” Bantu said. “I kill them and be happy.”

They squatted together for a while, listening for sounds, staring at the dull waters of the East River. All around them in the cool September night there were other soldiers, thousands of them, it was said, being very still, not smoking, all waiting. But here they only cared for one another: the black patrol. Six of them including Cormac, who had recruited them in the months before the beginning of the war. Here beside him was Bantu. Over to the right were Silver and Aaron, lean and black as night, deadly with short swords and long-bore rifles. Below him on the slope, screened by dense shrubs, were Big Michael and Carlito. Cormac went from man to man, whispering the words that had brought them there, the most important of which was “freedom.”

“We have to smash them here,” he whispered to Carlito. “After Brooklyn, we have to hurt them, let them know they will pay a terrible price.”

“Donde están?” Carlito said in Spanish that had been driven into him like nails on the sugar plantations of Cuba. “Where are they?”

“Out there,” Cormac said. “Brooklyn.”

The disaster in Brooklyn haunted all of them. Cormac hadn’t fought in Brooklyn; he could not leave Manhattan, even for a cause greater than himself. So while the armies faced each other on the fields of Brooklyn, the black patrol had moved through the lower city, setting small fires as diversions, hoping to panic the English, to draw redcoats away from the field of battle. Their work did Washington no good. The battle of Brooklyn was, by all reports, a rout. Soldiers broke and ran. Fifteen hundred Americans were killed, blown apart by artillery, shredded by rifle fire and bayonets, and more than two thousand captured. The redcoats swept the field, and Washington led the survivors down to the river and into boats to fight again on another day in Manhattan.

“We will beat them here,” Carlito said. “Then we go back to Brooklyn.”

“First we must beat them here, ’mano.”

Silver and Aaron dozed against the trunk of a giant oak tree, swords in hand, rifles on their laps. They smiled when they saw Cormac. All glanced at the river.

“They must be praying,” Silver said in Yoruba.

“Or toasting the King,” Cormac said.

Aaron smiled. “Foog the King.”

“And all his foogin’ court,” Silver said, and laughed.

Alone, alert to sounds in the forest and echoes from the river, Cormac closed his eyes and leaned back against a tree. They had been waiting now for two days for the force that Washington was certain would come to this cove along the river. He remembered the first time he saw Washington, bending under a lintel to enter a smoky room on Beaver Street, full of conspirators. He was even larger than Cormac had imagined from the descriptions of others; in every room he ever entered, Washington was the tallest man. Six-foot-four at least, with broad shoulders, the large ass of a horseman, huge hands, large booted feet. His skin was pockmarked. His cold blue eyes had an odd Oriental cast, the eyelids slanting upward. His nose was hawked, long, the taut skin rosy from the sun, the nostrils quivering as if trying to sniff out the person who would betray him, betray them all. While Cormac picked up that thought, asking himself: Which of them, in this room packed with men, was Mary Burton?

Now, remembering that first sight of Washington on the eve of the war, hearing again his laconic words about the coming struggle, the need for all of them to take arms and if necessary sacrifice their lives in order to be free, he wondered if Mary Burton was still alive. In those months in 1741, she had given her names to the inquisitors, adding new ones as she went along, and then had vanished. He had never heard from her again. She would now be fifty-one, ancient in these colonies of the young. Across the decades, as he had eased back into New York and returned to the print shop, he hoped he would find one morning a crudely written note from her, telling him she was alive, telling him about the child. He placed several blind advertisements in newspapers. Mary, please write, C. But immediately thought the effort was useless, since she could barely read and almost surely didn’t care about anyone in New York. There were no replies. She was gone. As Kongo was gone. As Quaco and his woman were gone.

And I am here, he thought, obeying the command to live by taking lives, killing strangers. He looked like the same seventeen-year-old who had learned the printing trade in a shop on Cortlandt Street. The same young man who had buried Mr. Partridge after the cholera took him in 1753, while he raved about the coming republic of America. The same young man who had sold the print shop to a competitor and gone to work at the John Street Theater to be instructed in the use of masks and dyes and the postures of disguise. In the mirror he was that same young man. The one who last saw Kongo in a cave in Inwood, and learned across the years that the words he spoke to Cormac there were true. He was alive and young while everyone else his age was old or dead.

“They come,” Bantu said.

They arrived at dawn in eighty-four six-oared longboats, each carrying a dozen men. The English wore red and the Hessians wore blue. The guns of the frigates roared. All around them, the earth exploded with fire and metal. Cormac heard a young voice screaming in the dark: “Oh, Ma, oh, Ma, help me, Ma.”

The black patrol waited, saving ball and shot. They could hear scrambling in the woods behind them, men panting. A bony farm boy came up from the river’s edge, his gun as useless as a reed, yelling, “Run, run, there’s thousands of them.” Bantu shot him and picked up his rifle.

The naval barrage was ferocious. Cormac didn’t need to tell the black patrol to lie flat, to use tree trunks as shields. Now trees were falling, splintered by cannon shot, and more young men were running past them in the dark.

“Don’t shoot them!” Cormac shouted. “Let them assemble in the rear!”

Now they saw four Hessians lumbering up the hill from the river’s edge. They waited. Then killed them all. Cormac felt nothing. They come to kill us, he thought, and so we kill them.

As the sun struggled to rise in Brooklyn, they could see Kip’s Bay more clearly, and the steady movement of empty longboats returning for more soldiers and packed longboats rowing toward the shore. To the left, Cormac glimpsed a long blur of scarlet. He gestured to Bantu, pointing to the rear, then went down and told the others. Big Michael didn’t want to retreat.

“I come to kill these bastards,” he said. “Let me kill them.”

“We will,” Cormac said. “Come.”

“Where we go, man?”

“The rock pile.”

They eased around in the darkness in a single file, glancing behind them at the blue-and-scarlet lines. The cannon kept exploding the earth and felling trees, and new troops of the Crown chose to pause until the fierce barrage had ended. The six men of the black patrol found their way to a cluster of jagged boulders at the crest of a hill. Now they could see the Americans in flight: farm boys and city lads, brave while marching, panicky in the face of cannon and bayonets. It was one thing to wave Common Sense on the streets or join the mob that toppled the statue of George III in the Bowling Green; it was another thing to face English guns. The young Americans dropped their ancient flintlocks and old fowling guns, their dragoon pistols and close-bore rifles. They abandoned a few pieces of cannon. They left tents for the invaders. They were in full flight.

“Don’t show yourselves!” Cormac told the others. “And don’t shoot our own lads. Hold as long as you can.”

They knew that the six of them would have to cover the retreat of thousands. Cormac thought: It’s absurd. The amateurs are running, and the professionals are coming. But we have to stop them, for at least an hour. And so they waited, huddled down, peering at the assembled scarlet-and-blue masses below them. Off to the left, smoke had begun to rise from a fire on the forest floor. Cormac thought: Good. That will give us some cover, a dark screen.

Then two columns began climbing the slope, about twenty yards apart.

“Wait,” Cormac said.

The climbing men were heavy with packs and rifles.

“Wait,” Cormac said.

A lanky Hessian paused, looked behind him, then squinted at the drifting smoke. He took a deep breath, said something to the men behind him, and resumed the climb.

“Wait,” Cormac whispered.

A fat, sweaty Englishman led his column into their view on the right. He mopped his brow with the sleeve of his free hand. In the other hand he held a rifle.

“Now,” Cormac said.

The air exploded as they poured fire on the troops below. Men fell like broken dolls, face forward or whipped to the side. A few knelt to fire and were knocked over. Cormac aimed at one Englishman but then saw his face explode from a shot by Big Michael.

“Gone down,” Big Michael exulted, starting to rise. “He gone down.”

Then Big Michael was dead. A ball tore open his chest, and he sagged and went down with one leg twisted under him. The black patrol kept firing, and saw the blue and scarlet uniforms turning to find cover. Cormac saw a beplumed officer and shot him between the shoulder blades. Then he turned to the others.

“Toward the smoke,” Cormac said.

They fired another volley and then ran, one at a time, squatting low, spaced apart, toward the screen of smoke, leaving Big Michael where he’d fallen. Bullets and balls whizzed around them and pinged off stone. Then they were in the smoke.

So were hundreds of the retreating Americans, coughing, gasping, climbing, falling, desperate to reach the crest of the hill and the plain beyond, all of them beaten without firing a shot. Cormac and Bantu, Silver and Aaron and Carlito aligned themselves in a picket, ten feet apart, and raised hands to break up the panic.

“Stop running!” Cormac shouted. “Stop or we’ll shoot you for desertion!”

One brawny blond-haired man lowered his rifle to shoot his way out. Carlito killed him.

“Hold this ground,” Cormac yelled at the deserters. “Face them and fight them!”

They ignored him and ran to the side or plunged back down the slope, hands in the air, to surrender. He heard shots crackling below and knew the Crown forces were killing those who wanted to surrender.

And then through the smoke and noise, they saw Washington. He was high on a sorrel horse, waving a sword in his right hand, his eyes ablaze, his mouth a tight slash.

“Are you soldiers or mice?” he shouted. “What do you call yourselves?”

He swung the sword at one fleeing man and missed, and then glanced at Cormac and the blacks and then peered down the slope at the advancing blue and red uniforms. He paused, and then started forward. Into the guns. It was as if he wanted to be shot down to end his shame.

Cormac grabbed the reins of Washington’s horse and wrenched with all his strength and turned the horse.

“Stop, you stupid bastard!” Cormac screamed.

“Unhand this horse!”

“We need you alive, God damn you,” Cormac said, and hauled the horse around and pointed him west. Bantu ran up and slapped the horse hard on the haunch, and away he went, carrying the general through the trees.

Silver and Aaron and Carlito stood laughing, bumping one another’s shoulders. Then they turned, backing up, and killed more men.

66.

In the vast camp in Harlem Heights, Cormac was escorted to Washington’s tent. Almost five thousand men were sprawled around the camp, cleaning guns under a dim moon, soothing horses, eating at campfires. A few were singing. Many were sleeping. Two lieutenants flanked Cormac as if he were a prisoner.

The general was seated in a camp chair, examining his gleaming fingernails. An empty chair faced him. His cocked hat was on a table, with gloves folded neatly on its crest, and the buttonholes of his frock coat were embroidered. The man took care about the way he dressed. Too much care, Cormac thought. Behind Washington was the famous six-and-a-half-foot-long cot that was carried with him everywhere. A coal fire burned in a stove. Maps were spread on a table, along with a few plates and a bottle of wine. He didn’t look up.

“You can leave, gentlemen,” he said to the officers. They stepped outside.

Washington turned over his large hands and looked at his knuckles.

“You’re the man who jerked my horse?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know that I’m the commanding officer of this army?” “Yes, sir.”

Washington stood up as if stabbed, the hands turning into fists, the eyes blazing.

“Why did you do such a goddamned thing?”

“To keep you from being killed, sir.”

“That’s for me to decide, God damn it. And how could you be sure I would die? How could you be sure that they would not run?”

“You’re one man, General. One ball could kill you. One of my men—”

“They can’t kill me!”

“They can kill anyone they can shoot, General.”

Washington snorted. He turned, flexing his hands, rolling his shoulders. He was breathing hard, struggling for control.

“What’s your name?”

“Cormac O’Connor.”

“Irish, of course.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Catholic?”

“No.”

He paused, breathing more normally now.

“How many men did you kill today?”

“Our patrol killed about thirty.”

“Your patrol? What patrol?”

“The black patrol, sir. There’s me and five blacks. One of them was killed today. We’d like to go in tomorrow, sir, and bring out his body.”

Now he was staring at Cormac.

“Are they all slaves?”

“They were, sir. They’re soldiers now. American soldiers.” “Have they been fed?”

“Yes, sir. They’re looking for ammunition now. They used all they had.”

“And they’re good soldiers?”

“You saw them. They didn’t run.”

He sat down again in his camp chair and offered the empty chair to Cormac.

“Why did they fight while so many ran?”

“They want to be free, General. That’s why they’re with us. That’s why they listened to me when I recruited them. That’s why they won’t disappear when times get hard. They want to be free, sir. Free.”

Washington looked at him for a long moment and there was something moving in his eyes that Cormac couldn’t identify.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” Washington said.

The cannon screamed through the night, exploding around them, scattering soldiers, collapsing tents. Cormac knew what was happening: The English and their hired Hessian soldiers wanted to smash the Americans here in Harlem Heights, splinter and ruin their five thousand troops, capture or kill Washington. If they could do that, the revolution would be over. They could all sing songs, get drunk, sleep with whores, and get ready to go home.

Washington that night would not let them do any of that. He was everywhere, sword in hand, his face filled with furies, shouting, commanding, calling on pride. “Your children will remember you for this night! Don’t fail them!” And, “Die on your knees, you crazy American bastards!” And, “Send them all to Hell, boys!”

And they held. They held the lines, Cormac and Bantu, Aaron and Silver and Carlito among them, pouring fire into the moving lines in the dense wooded hollow below the heights. Still the cannon roared, the balls tore through young bodies. An old man rose in fury, his white hair spiky against the dark sky, and cried: “Come and fight, you feckers! Come and die!” And then was smashed by a cannonball, knocked over into death like a bowling pin.

Cormac looked up and there was Washington on his horse, right above them.

“Their cannon are killing us!” he shouted. “Get your niggers and destroy the cannon.”

Cormac thought: They are not niggers, they’re Americans.

But Washington was gone, and there was no time for debate. Cormac and the black patrol slipped down the western side of the ridge, seeing the distant shimmer of the river, trying to estimate the location of the cannon from the arc of the balls. Then they saw the first scouts of an English flank, coming up the west side of the forest on a dirt road. Bantu gestured at a stone Dutch barn, its doors open, its animals gone. From its weed-sprouting walls, the path was a pale line under the moon. They hurried to the barn, spread themselves from the loft to the doors, waited, and then started killing soldiers. They shot the first two men who came up the rise, then the next three, then two more, all of them falling upon one another, forming a mound. All were redcoats. All kept coming as if they were toys, and the Americans kept firing and reloading and firing again, hands moving in a blur, fingers squeezing triggers. Redcoats fell to the forest floor.

Then the first cannonball tore through the roof of the barn, caroming wildly off the flagstone floor, and then another, and Cormac and the others slipped out the back and into the woods between the road and the river. Cormac thought: I killed the earl somewhere up here. Long ago. In another life.

They made a wide arc, moving the way wolves would move, drawn to the sound of the cannon. The moon did not penetrate the forest. Cormac strapped his rifle to his shoulder and drew the sword. So did the others. They did not need to explain to one another that here in the darkness they would fight silently. They came upon two Hessians, who turned in fear at the sight of four black faces. Too late. Bantu and Silver cut their throats.

Then they saw the clearing. Five cannon on wheels, a dozen redcoats loading balls, pouring powder. Cormac and the others hunkered low in the shrubs. They spread out, each charged with attacking the crew of one piece. Bantu was to shoot as many as possible while the others pounced with sword and knife. They watched as all five cannon were fired at once, the crews jamming fingers in their ears, some of them grinning. Then the Americans charged. Bantu had two rifles now, one lifted from a dead soldier, and he fired one, then the other, rolled on the ground to reload, and fired twice more. Three redcoats went down. Others turned in horror, reaching for rifles as their throats were slit. Cormac beheaded two men, then chopped another man’s arm at the shoulder.

They became a single creature made for killing. There was nothing else now. Just the killing. No fear, no choice, no thought. They stabbed and slashed and ripped. They chopped at necks. They drove swords through hearts. Few words were spoken as men grunted, or gagged on blood, or groaned, and then died.

Then it was over.

Cormac sat down hard on the thick leafy floor of the clearing. His hands were slippery with blood. It coated his sword and his clothes and his boots. He looked at the others. Silver leaned on a cannon, Bantu lay back against a tree. Aaron seemed dazed and drained, standing with short sword in hand, while Carlito draped a hand on his shoulders. All glistened with blood. They didn’t even look at the men they had slaughtered.

“We should take the heads,” Bantu said.

“Yah,” said Aaron.

Take the heads, Cormac told himself. The way the Irish always took the heads, the way the Fianna took the heads. Sever them. Hang them on poles. No. Don’t take the heads. Please don’t take the heads.

“They weigh too foogin’ much,” Silver said.

They laughed, and then went silent.

Now they could hear the trees riffling and sighing in the wind, and away off the crackle of rifle fire. A lot of rifle fire. But they still didn’t move. The air was thick with the odor of powder, of burning trees and smoldering leaves, of ripped-out guts, of leaking shit.

Finally Bantu stirred. Suddenly alert. He gripped his short sword, and turned to peer behind him into the darkness. The others tensed. He went on hands and knees, and then moved into some shrubbery. He came out grinning, holding a wolf cub.

“Yah!” he said. “Look.”

The cub was small and gray with a white face and yellow eyes. Bantu held it close, cradling it, and the animal began licking blood from his neck and face. Bantu smiled.

“American!” he said. “American!”

Each of them came to touch the cub, playing knobby fists against its small sharp teeth, stroking its fine new hair. Cormac felt a surge of emotion, as if he were again the boy on the fields of Ireland, with Bran barking beside him. They kept saying in the city that all the wolves were dead, and here was one of them, alive, separated, like every member of the black patrol, from the pack.

And then, as time stretched and compressed, an hour later or three minutes later, they heard another sound: a distant roar. They stood still, listening, hands clenching weapons. The roar was louder, coming to them through the trees and across boulders and above the bodies of the dead. Louder and louder. Louder than any sound he’d ever heard, punctuated by rifle shots.

It was the Americans.

A dozen of them, dressed in the uniforms of the Continental Army, bursting among them, seeing the dead redcoats and the four men with black faces. One shouted: “We’ve broken their lines! They’re running!”

And rushed past them, raising weapons, leaping into forest, crashing forward, shooting. Cormac realized that they were in the midst of the first victory of the Revolution.

But still the black patrol did not move. The wolf cub made a crying sound. Somewhere in the woods were other cubs, a mother, perhaps all of them dead, killed by fearful men.

“We go now,” Aaron said. “We fetch Big Michael.”

They moved toward Kip’s Bay through the morning. Along the way, they saw scattered corpses in Hessian blue or English scarlet, providing a harvest for flies and worms. At a small river, they entered the cold waters and scrubbed at the blood on their bodies and clothes, Bantu holding the cub over his head, its jaws now shut by gold braid torn from an English corpse.

A hard gray rain began falling. When they came to an abandoned farmhouse, they entered and bolted the doors behind them. The farmers must have been gone for only a few days, fleeing the war. Carlito started a fire in the hearth and they boiled potatoes and carrots and fried strips of bacon and slathered butter on hard bread. “Better it does not spoil,” Silver said, and smiled, his mouth full of wobbly wooden teeth. “Better we eat.” There were apples too, and grapes, and they ate quietly, peering out at the falling rain and the rolling forests. Bantu fed bread and bacon to the cub and put water in a dish for him to drink. With his back to a wall, staring at the fire, Cormac remembered his hunger in the arctic winter in Ireland, devouring cheese in a dairy, more hungry than he’d ever been before or since. He told the others to sleep while he stood the first watch. They would go for Big Michael in the dark.

They slept, the wolf cub curled into Bantu’s armpit, and Cormac surveyed the house. It was more than a house, he thought: It was a home. He and the others were sleeping within its walls, but it was not their home. Men like us, he thought, have no homes.

He entered the next room, where there were two hard, narrow beds covered with quilts. The closets held women’s clothes. Shifts and dresses for a large woman, broad-beamed, large-bosomed. The others were for a smaller, thinner woman. Mother and daughter, perhaps. Or sisters. Mother and cub.

The clothes and bodies and faces of women flooded through him as he moved on bare feet around the room and then back into the place where the men were sleeping. It was thirty-five years since he’d seen Bridget Riley sail out of New York, thirty-five years since he’d last looked upon the hard, confused face of Mary Burton. There had been many women since then. Which was to say, he’d had no women.

He knew enough about himself now to understand his habits of holding back, of refusing. He had read much poetry and a few novels, and had listened to many women, to their questions, to their tears. He knew that the combination of Bridget Riley and Mary Burton had put fear in his heart in the place where love demanded fearlessness. He knew that not all women were like those women of 1741, that no woman was exactly like any other woman. But their presence remained alive, full of the potential for betrayal, for illusion, for inexplicable loyalties. Bridget was loyal to the earl; Mary had been, in her way, loyal to Cormac. How could he think all women were alike?

And more important, there was this other thing, this gift granted to him in a cave in Inwood. There was no way, at first, to know if this was a dream, a wish born in his own brain. He could only know its truth by living. Now he knew it was true. He had continued to live while others died, he had remained young, in all obvious ways, while others withered and turned gray and walked Broadway in feeble, palsied steps. That affected him with women. How could he remain with one woman who would gaze at him and then gaze in the mirror? She would know he was different. She would know that he was beyond the normal cycles of a life.

Better to let each woman know that he was a passing fancy, that they could enjoy the pleasures of each other’s body, but that each could be alone in the morning. Many women welcomed such an understanding. Widows, the wives of seagoing men, women locked in loveless unions, older women whose children had gone off. They welcomed the excitement of aroused flesh. They welcomed whispered words. They welcomed the gift of a rose or a locket. As years passed, more of them thought he was a handsome young man, when he was actually older than any of them. All were excellent teachers, and he thought of some of them as if they were books he had taken down from shelves.

“There’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” they would say, and then do what he had done many times with women in his rented rooms. The town was filling up with strangers, with women who did not know one another, and were thus free of the intimacies of gossip. The village he’d come to as a boy was becoming a town and was certain to become a city. And in the anonymous crowds, all was possible.

Bantu stirred, without benefit of a clock. He would now take the watch. Cormac nodded and went into the bedroom, to lie down and inhale the odor of a woman’s body.

At some hour before midnight, they found Big Michael where he had fallen, facedown in the earth. Animals had gnawed the flesh on his neck and arms. Aaron started digging with a spade stolen from the farmhouse, and the others gazed toward Kip’s Bay, visible under the moon, with lanterns blazing on the English frigates and men still crossing to the shore in longboats. They must be quick. Silver took the spade, followed by Bantu and Cormac and Carlito. Grunting and digging, until the trench was deep enough to keep Big Michael from the paws of foraging animals. They lifted Big Michael’s body together, the wolf cub yipping and excited, and then lowered him gently. His bones would be part of this island, Cormac thought, for as long as there was an island.

Bantu spoke in Yoruba, consigning Big Michael to the care of the gods.

“We will see you in the Otherworld, O brother,” he said.

And then they started the long journey to the north, to meet with Washington’s triumphant army. They passed small groups of redcoats sullenly guarding campfires. They forded streams. They saw bodies of Americans and Englishmen and Hessians. They paused to rest, then began again. At last they saw the escarpment of Harlem Heights, outlined against the dawn.

It was empty. Washington’s army was gone.

“They’ve marched to White Plains,” an American scout told them. “The whole lot of them.”

“And will fight in White Plains?” Cormac said.

“I suppose. They don’t tell the likes of me such things. But I guess they’ll fight a bit, then cross the river. The English are now between us and White Plains, they came in the morning, so the only place for Washington to go is New Jersey….”

The black patrol was silent, staring at one another’s stunned faces. They’d been left behind. Abandoned. God damn it. Silver asked if there were any other boats that could take them across the river.

“Not that I know,” the scout said. “My orders are to go home in another day.”

“Where is home?” Carlito asked.

“Westport.”

“So Washington is handing New York to the Crown?” Cormac said.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I know I go home tomorrow.”

Cormac looked south. The sun was seeping into the sky above Brooklyn.

“Let’s go,” he said to the others.

“Where?”

“New York,” he said.

Bantu took the braid from the muzzle of the wolf cub and walked him into the woods and set him free.

67.

They fought their own war now. They sawed through the beams of bridges at midnight, spilling carriages and caissons into streams. They broke into warehouses and killed guards and stole rifles and sent them on boats across the river to New Jersey. They spread posters on the walls of buildings, advising English soldiers to save their lives by going home. Most of all, they burned houses.

“They keep taking houses for their soldiers and their officers,” Cormac said. “We have to force them to sleep in the rain.”

He explained what had been done in 1741, and how the conspirators had waited a day for the wind. They must set up everything carefully, straw, paper, oil, kindling. So they did, with Bantu and Silver posing as water carriers, lamp oils suspended at each end of poles. Aaron was a carpenter, with papers stating that he was a freeman, manumitted by a dying owner (printed at night by Cormac in the shop of one of the Sons of Liberty). He went from door to door, offering his services, peering around storerooms and workshops. Carlito met with the Spanish slaves, learning the vulnerabilities of the homes and workplaces of their masters. Cormac marked maps. In the afternoons, one at a time, they wandered past the places where the fire pumps were stored and punctured the bottoms of water buckets and sliced holes in the hoses. At night, Cormac dreamed of fire and destruction.

The rest of life seemed almost normal. As the English officers arrived in New York, the Tories welcomed them, throwing elegant parties, hosting nights of song and loyalty at the John Street Theater. They called down God’s blessings on the Sovereign while clavichord music tinkled from the mansions near the Bowling Green. Tory mothers presented their daughters like offerings. Whores began ringing the fort. One or two at a time, and then in larger numbers, the Americans had been slipping away, some carrying their valuables to country places, others boarding ships for the South. Some were loyal to Washington. Others wanted to avoid what was certain to come to the streets of New York. The English did not interfere with their flight. They wanted the abandoned American homes.

Cormac, dressed as a mechanic, was watching part of this sad American exodus one evening on Broadway when a large redhaired man came up beside him. He was wearing a cape, his hands hidden.

“They’ll be back,” the red-haired man said. The accent Irish.

“Aye,” Cormac said.

“Don’t ye think?” the man said.

Cormac shrugged. It was impossible to know the sides that each man had chosen in this town; this Irishman could be just another English spy. “Where do you come from?” Cormac asked in Irish. The man seemed startled, and answered, “Armagh.” Another voyager from Ulster. They stood together, and as the last carriage passed on its way north, Cormac heard the sound of uilleann pipes. He was surprised. The sound was mournful, sad, angry, all at once, and seemed to come from the chest of the red-haired man from Armagh. Cormac stepped back and realized the man was playing his pipes under the cape, using his right elbow for power.

“Good day, sir,” Cormac said, and walked quickly away as the man gave voice through his pipes to the ghosts mixed with the higher-pitched howl of the banshee.

Then one night, as a hard wind blew toward the west, the fire began. Cormac set it off in the empty upstairs rooms of a tavern called the Fighting Cocks, down by the waterfront off Whitehall. The barroom was full of Hessians, singing in German, and Cormac left through a window. He moved languidly through the streets toward the East River, then cut north and back west toward the Common. When he turned, the sky was red. Bells replaced the tinkling of clavichords. Soldiers ran in a dozen directions and then backed away from the roaring flames. Water once more dribbled from hoses as small geysers arose from punctures. The buckets were like sieves. Horses whinnied and bucked and pounded at stable doors. There were screams and lamentations.

Cormac and the patrol moved separately north. Then, at the bottom of the Common, he stood very still and saw flames rising in the immense steeple of Trinity Church. The tallest building in New York. The symbol of English domination. The flames burned on the surface. They burned inside the church. The tongues of the fire were pointed toward New Jersey, blowing hard, and were jumping roof to roof all the way to Barclay Street, somehow missing St. Paul’s Chapel. But he could not stop himself from gazing at Trinity. That was not one of their targets. And now the flames were eating at it. The steeple wobbled, then gave off a noise like an immense complaint and fell straight down in a giant roar. The burning pinnacle of the steeple lay on its side in the graveyard, like a corpse. Screams of awe filled the air. He remembered the way, on an afternoon thirty-five years earlier, Diamond had been burned on the edge of this Common, and the way John Hughson’s corpse had turned black and Sandy’s turned white, and the way the Rev. Clifford had grasped at his crotch in a delirium of death.

It was time to go. He hurried to the hill above the Collect, where the Africans waited. The sky to the south was as bright now as at noon, and they could see tongues of flame rising from many houses below Wall Street.

“Let them sleep in snow,” Bantu said.

When the long night was over, 407 houses had been reduced to smoking rubble. Now it was the Tories’ turn to trudge north to their estates or to board ships for England. And the redcoats came down upon the Americans with all of their fury. Every young man was a suspect. Men with histories in the Sons of Liberty were arrested and questioned and executed by firing squads. Others were crammed into the Bridewell prison, built upon the grass of the Common. Six men were hanged from the ancient gibbets on the hill above the Collect. Others were rounded up and press-ganged into dousing water on the smoldering rubble of the 407 ruined houses. All events were canceled at the John Street Theater. There were no more tinkling dinner parties. Soldiers, hard Tories, and Americans settled in for a long occupation.

Cormac and the black patrol found shelter in the swamp beyond the Collect, in an old cabin shrouded by tangled vines and dense thickets. Each day, one of them would slip into the town, to find food, to pick up news and gather information about future targets. They learned that the English were making concessions to the Africans now. They didn’t call them concessions. They called them pledges. But the message was simple: If the Africans swore loyalty to the Crown, if they defended their masters, they would be freed at the end of the war.

“Do you believe them?” Cormac asked Bantu one cold night in the swamp.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You take freedom. Nobody give it to you.”

Silver said: “But some Africa people listen. They want to believe. You tell them, this is a trick. They say nothing. But they thinkin’ ’bout it, all sure.”

“They think Washington is finish,” Carlito said. “They think it be over soon, so they listen, they listen.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we keep fighting,” Bantu said.

On another early morning, after a night spent cutting ditches through a main road to harass coach traffic, Cormac asked them what they would do when they were free.

“Farm,” said Aaron. “With my woman, my children. Farm up in the island. Grow potato and yam. Have chickens to sell. Milk… Send my boys to school. And girls too, ef I have girls.”

“Open a shop down by Wall Street,” said Silver. “Make all kinds of leather stuff, belts and shoes and cases, all leather things. Live upstairs. Drink rum on Saturday night. Eat turkey on Sunday.”

Carlito said nothing. He shrugged as if the idea were too far in the remote future.

“Go home,” Bantu said. “Go find my family. See who lives, who died.”

He told about how he’d been captured with a net when he was fifteen by a search party from another tribe, how he was turned over to Arabs and herded in shackles to a fort on the coast, how English traders came to change cowrie shells and rum and guns for the Africans penned in the fort.

“I don’t want to kill people,” he said. “Just find my sisters, my boy brother, and say prayers for my father, and then bring them here, all the people that’s alive.”

None of them wanted to return forever to Africa. They didn’t want to live in a land where human beings were trapped like animals and then sold to others. Africa was a bitter memory. They wanted to live out their lives in America.

“This, my country,” Bantu said, digging hands into the loamy earth that made the floor of the shack. “This.”

One night, Cormac asked the men to vote for their leader. He had recruited them, but that didn’t make him their leader for all the days of their lives. In this army, this revolutionary army, they should choose. After all, they called themselves the black patrol and Cormac was white. The blacks should make the choice. They seemed surprised at this suggestion from Cormac, and asked for time to discuss it. He felt certain they would choose Bantu. Instead, after huddling together outside the shack for about ten minutes, they returned to face Cormac.

“We all the leader,” Silver said. “You die, Bantu the leader. Bantu die, Aaron the leader. Aaron die, Carlito the leader. Carlito die—”

“Then we fucked,” Bantu said, and laughed. “Then some god the leader.”

They all laughed then and hugged one another. But Bantu slowly grew somber.

“We better die together,” he said.

For weeks, scavengers worked the mounds of ruined houses. Redcoats did the work for the first few weeks, finding pewter and scorched paintings and clothes for men and women and saddles and bottles of wine in cellars. All were taken to Fort George, where they could be awarded to friends, or passed through merchants to the empty slavers that were still heading for Africa. The later scavengers were Americans, including some loyal to the Crown, searching for remnants of their lives, or secret rebels looking for hunks of old iron, gnarled candelabra, anything that could be melted down to make ammunition. Sometimes at night, as scavengers worked the cold piles, they could hear the uilleann pipes, mournful and defiant.

The English authorities did not clear the site of the most destructive fire in the history of their colonies. They left the steeple of Trinity lying on its side. They did not replace the ruined houses. They left the rubble as a kind of monument. One that said, Here is what your Revolution brings you: destruction and rubble. Choose sides now.

The rich were gone, but the poor now gathered on the fringes of the ruined streets in tents made of old sailcloth, the place soon named Canvastown. They killed off the pigs and ate them. They stole apples and potatoes from abandoned farms and kept pots simmering on fires through the cold nights. On his forays into town, sometimes dressed as a peddler, sometimes hobbled by age, Cormac saw that the town was filling with predators. Sharpers from London bargained for goods that could be sold in Jamaica or Charleston or even back in England. Slavers offered good prices for Swedish ingots, chintz, Italian glass, brass kettles, knives and axes and guns. There was no money in Africa, other than cowrie shells; things were the currency of slavery. Men and women from Canvastown stole to supply the market, while the better-off families, their fortunes shrinking, sold off their own small treasures to the slavers, who could turn things into purchased humans.

The gray weather added to the sullen sense of corruption. Snow fell, blanketing the town, then melted, turned black, then fell again. The tents of Canvastown sagged under the weight of snow, and sometimes collapsed, and people were found frozen on the streets. Lone chimneys rose toward Heaven from the white mounds of the ruined town like the masts of ghost ships.

They received news in whispered conversations, in messages delivered by old men and Africans and a few women. Washington was losing every battle, off in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania, but he was not defeated. As long as he remained alive, the Revolution lived. The English were working hard to control Manhattan, which was the headquarters of the entire enterprise. They were mapping the island. In the spring, when the frost went out of the trees, they would begin clearing the island of its ambush lanes. The Americans continued refining their own operations. They had a system of couriers now, taking information to Washington’s small and battered army. They exercised their own rough justice against informers. A dirk in the heart. A rope tied around a neck.

The black patrol destroyed seventeen bridges. It fired two more warehouses. One night, Bantu and Aaron waited patiently in the darkness on South Street and killed a London slave merchant who was to leave at dawn for Newport. Bantu placed a cowrie shell in the dead man’s mouth.

They moved when instinct told them to move. One night, while Cormac and Bantu, Aaron and Silver packed their things for a shift to a new place, the English arrived, passing through the tangled paths of the swamp as if they had a map. A soldier from Leeds cut Carlito’s throat where he stood watch. Then an officer bellowed at the shack.

“Hallo, in there,” he said. “We know you’re there, and it’s best you surrender.”

Bantu snuffed the candle with his fingers. They listened tensely to the officer’s voice.

“You’re to walk out with your hands above your heads. You are to lie facedown on the ground. Any sign of a weapon will be a sign of hostility, and you’ll be killed.”

Cormac and Bantu glanced at each other, Aaron and Silver inhaled and then sighed.

Then they rushed out the door, firing guns, Cormac wielding the sword. The redcoats were surprised. Two fell dead. Then another, and the black patrol drove a wedge into their line. For a long moment, men screamed and cursed and shouted. Jesus Christ, Cormac thought, there must be a hundred of them. He slashed and swung and pivoted and slashed again. Men cried in pain.

He saw Bantu’s chest explode. He saw the front of Aaron’s face vanish. He turned for Silver, and then his own head exploded in high white pain. His face fell into the wet earth. He could hear the howl of a wolf. Then he was gone.

68.

He woke up in a windowless cell in the Bridewell prison. Packed tightly with other men, who told him that almost eight hundred of them were now jailed on three floors. His head was splitting with pain, the back of his skull soft to his touch. The sword, he thought. They have my father’s sword. He wanted to cry for its loss but didn’t. He told himself: You will live through this. He told himself: Someday you will find the sword again. Now, he told himself, you must live.

He gazed around at faces filthy and faces haggard, then sat very still with his back against the rough wall. Oh, Bantu, you American warrior. Oh, Silver. Oh, Aaron. I will see you in the Other-world. Carlito: If you have escaped, I will see you in New York.

He began to examine his cage, taught by some of the others. The Bridewell stood beside the four-story poorhouse, which was flanked on its other side by the old town jail. All windows were barred but were open to the cold. Down below street level was a basement used as a dungeon for torture or executions. But men died on all the other floors of the Bridewell, stinking of shit and sickness, hunger and fever and British corruption. Smallpox took many of them, and cholera too (for nobody there was allowed to wash), and many starved. The rations were meager, bits of gristly pork, pieces of biscuit, some rice, peas, butter, a day’s normal food stretched over three, and some days no food at all. There were no blacks in this jail; they were being kept in a place called the Old Sugar Factory. But Cormac saw men laid here upon the floor at night, crushed against one another, trying to keep warm; and in the morning they counted the corpses, always one, but sometimes two or three, which were hauled away and dumped in the Negroes Burial Ground, four or five to a single grave, a burial intended to be an insult. And Cormac thought: Mr. Partridge, in his own sad grave, has plenty of republican company now.

Cormac was always hungry, always mildly sick, but while others died, he lived on. Month after punishing month. And thought himself lucky. At least they had not moved him beyond Manhattan to the prison ships in Wallabout Bay, for he would surely have died before being slammed in the fetid holds. I must stay here, he thought, stay in this Manhattan, this piece of the world defined for me by Kongo when he passed me the gift. Manhattan is my jail.

And in the jail, time was suspended. There were no calendars, no newspapers, as days turned into weeks and then into months. Men scratched lines into the walls with nails, trying to keep count, but lost the sums to fever and injury. They asked new arrivals what month it was, what day, what year.

The Bridewell was soon called by the prisoners the Bribewell. Every guard was corrupt. Everything forbidden was available for a price, except weapons. The guards looked the other way when relatives smuggled food, tobacco, or cash to prisoners. They knew the contraband was the currency of the prison, which was to say it helped them to earn a living. But Cormac had no relatives. And all his friends were dead.

On the western side of Broadway, trailing away to the Hudson, there were rows of shabby two-story houses, and from a few high windows of the Bridewell, the prisoners could see the Holy Ground, where the whores worked at their bitter trade. One chubby woman would emerge at dusk and fondle her naked breasts and place a hand between her chubby thighs while dying men masturbated in their cells; it was a whore’s version of charity. Or of a sweet American solidarity. Cormac too longed for a woman, and then erased that possibility with images of the dead and the dying. Of Bantu caressing a cub. Of Aaron longing for a home.

The whores’ numbers were swollen by the arrival of two thousand Liverpool women sent to provide comfort to the British soldiery. They were housed in the older homes of Tories who had fled. But Cormac knew, from watching, from words spoken by agents before his capture, from other prisoners, that the whores were, in fact, neutral. They serviced English soldiers and secret American patriots, gathering money for themselves and intelligence for both sides. Whores, Cormac knew, were always citizens of the country of money. But even in the Bridewell, with his skin scabbed by sores, his bones protruding from his eroded flesh, his hair crawling with lice, he soon discovered that he could not escape his past.

One morning a new prisoner passed him a sheet from a smuggled newspaper, and Cormac began to read every line. If there was a report about the war, it must have been on another page. On this page, there were items about shipping, and a disease without a name that was infecting North African ports, and then some social notes. Down at the bottom of the social notes, a name caught his eyes.

LADY WARREN SAILS

It said:

Lady Warren of Carrickfergus has sailed for Charleston on the Intrepid. She was in New York visiting her son, who is serving with the Crown forces. From Charleston, she will return to her estate in Ireland.

Lady Warren of Carrickfergus.

Bridget Riley.

Visiting her son.

It never ends, Cormac thought.

It never fecking ends.

The commander of the Bridewell was a major named William Cunningham. The older prisoners included a victualer named Anderson, who knew how Cunningham worked.

“He pockets half the money allowed for food and sends it home by courier,” Anderson said. “He doesn’t give a fiddler’s feck if we starve to death on half rations, and they are starvin’ right now on them ships in the Wallabout. He wants the war to last forever, so he can bank enough to join the gentry.”

Cunningham didn’t come often to see the victims of his corruption. But eight months into Cormac’s stay in the Bridewell, he looked up to see Cunningham’s new second-in-command. He was walking beyond the bars down a safe corridor beside Cunningham.

The son of the Earl of Warren and Bridget Riley. His hair was lighter, with highlights of red, but otherwise he could have been a twin of the earl in that year when he stepped from the black coach to look upon the broken body of Rebecca Carson lying in the mud.

69.

They called him Tony Warren. He worked under Cunningham, but in all the small ways, Cunningham deferred to his noble blood. Together, they helped men die. The prisoners died of typhus. Died of floggings. Died of hunger. Died of tuberculosis. Died of cholera. Died because William Cunningham, the provost marshal, stole half the ration money while Tony Warren shrugged and cocked an eyebrow and chuckled.

All the prisoners knew the system and how it worked. They heard from new arrivals how Cunningham’s men starved and flogged and tortured the prisoners on the ships across the river on the Brooklyn side, over in Wallabout Bay. Eleven thousand of them were packed in those ships that never sailed. The soldiers tossed the bodies into the tides or shoved them into the mudflats, where the shrouds soon rotted and American bones could be seen at low tide. His men tortured the Africans who paid for their revolt in the Old Sugar Factory. In the Bridewell, Cunningham executed those he thought were Obnoxious Persons and those who were Cormac’s old comrades in the Sons of Liberty, their activities revealed by men who took the King’s shilling. A man could die for refusing to bow or defer to some red-coated dandy. A man could die for reading Thomas Paine or the secret newspapers of the Revolution. Trials were not necessary. Suspicion was enough. The killing took place at night, against the walls of the army barracks, all doors ordered shut in the neighboring houses of the Holy Ground, all windows sealed, all lights extinguished, and the prisoners were brought, blindfolded and gagged, and walked up the steps of the scaffold. The rope was attached. And then they were dropped into permanent darkness.

Cormac vowed to remember the names of the dead: Guinness and Sterling, Hewitt and Roberts, Arundel and Dubois, Frankie Hannigan and Sammy Payne. Good men and true, he thought, even with (or because of) the flesh hanging loose and gray on their brave bones, wrapped in flea-ridden blankets, and to the end refusing everything: refusing collaboration, refusing deferential manners, refusing to bow to any king. On the night of the Fourth of July in 1780, the prisoners roared defiance in the Bridewell, and sang the liberty songs, and cursed the King. Cunningham came himself that night, with Tony Warren behind him, their faces dark with fury, their leather boots clacking on the stone floors. They chose the men they wanted, Guinness and Sterling, Hewitt and Roberts, Arundel and Dubois among them, and then called on the services of Bloodstone, the army blacksmith. He was carrying a twenty-pound hammer. They laid each man flat upon the floor for all to see and then Bloodstone smashed their knees and elbows. They screamed and screamed and screamed.

“Fecking rabble,” Warren said, as he followed Cunningham out of the row of cells.

And as he whirled, his coat opened, and Cormac saw that he was wearing the sword. Saw the spirals etched in steel. Thinking: My father’s sword. Telling himself: I must get out of the Bridewell. I must find Tony Warren on the streets of New York. I must get to the end of the line. I must return my father’s sword to the blood of his blood.

Whores were the agents of salvation.

One of them was named Kitty Nevins: red-haired, full-breasted, with the guts (Cormac thought) of nine burglars. She devised the code and smuggled it into the prison and then chalked the first coded messages on slate that they could read from the cell windows. She it was, with two of her sisters in the life, who seduced the guards with perfumed flesh and smuggled in the guns. Who had horses waiting. Who waited in the hammering midnight rain while the prisoners used keys wrenched from drained guards and then smashed and threatened their way out, unlocking as many cells as possible. Suddenly more than twenty of the prisoners were running free, mad and desperate, filthy as sewers, manacled and bony. Cormac was with them, running into Broadway, a pistol in his waistband, a musket in a manacled hand. Hobbled, weak, fierce with life. In the break for the street, the shooting started. Cormac shot two redcoats, one with the pistol, the second with the musket. He dropped the musket, jammed the pistol in his waistband, lunged for one horse-drawn carriage, and fell short into mud, and watched the carriage gallop toward the North River. Heard shouts. Curses. More gunfire. And ran north through the black rain.

Then saw torches ahead. Veered left. More torches.

And then from the ebony darkness he heard the whinny of a horse. Familiar. A song. And here he came, black as the night, there when Cormac needed him.

Thunder.

They galloped together into the blind watches of the night. Moved like ghosts through blank spaces, across creeks and streams, heading to what was left of the Manhattan wild. Cormac gripping Thunder’s mane with manacled hands. As the rain pounded down, making a great drumming, ceaseless sound on the trees, obliterating all voices and the sound of gunfire and even the pounding of Cormac’s heart.

Until Thunder slowed, then stopped, then shook, as if telling Cormac to slide off here. He did. And could see a low, dark house, and some shacks beyond, and hear the lowing of cattle and the shuddering of other horses. Thunder galloped into the darkness. Cormac felt boneless from fatigue and could see nothing clearly through the curtains of rain. He bent forward, gripped his knees, breathing deeply and freely, gulping air as if it were food, then stood up and lifted his face to the cleansing rain. He whispered, in Irish: “Wash away the filth, please.” He whispered, in English: “Heal the rawness where the manacles bit my flesh.” He begged, in French: “Wash away typhus and cholera and fleas. Please.” He asked in Yoruba: “Save me.”

Then an arm gripped his neck, and he felt the tip of a knife against his back. “Who are you?” a deep voice growled.

Cormac said his true name. It was too late and too dark for deception.

The arm relaxed, and he was spun around. And there, soaked and grizzled, white hairs driving like tacks from inside his black cheeks, was Quaco.

“God damn,” he said, “if it ain’t you for true, Mister Cormac.”

Quaco saved him. He snapped the manacles with wire cutters, and his wife, now white-haired, fed Cormac lentil soup and meat and bread. He handed Cormac a blanket and fresh clothes and a bowl of warm water, and then shredded the prison clothes and fed them, piece by piece, into the fire. Roger, the oldest son, then opened a trapdoor leading by ladder to a room chopped out of stone beneath the house. Actually two rooms. The first room was loaded with coal and firewood. The second room was behind a door covered with thin layers of stone. A secret room with a bed, several muskets, trunks, a sacred African drum, and jugs of water. Refuge.

On the first night Cormac slept for many hours. He woke to the sound of heavy boots on the floor. Heard indistinct British voices. The trapdoor opened, and a grunting man came down the ladder and was very still. Cormac held his breath. The man saw only coal and firewood and then climbed the ladder and left as Cormac exhaled. He did not come upstairs until it was dark.

“You not the first Irisher been down there,” Quaco said, laughing. “Passed a few of you along, sure enough.”

Quaco’s four sons moved in and out, curious about this latest white man, and wary too. They lived in an area of free blacks, with Quaco carrying faked papers dating his own freedom to 1738, before the revolt. He and Cormac talked about the night when Cormac helped Quaco to escape with his wife, telling the story more for the sons than for each other. They talked into the night about those who were burned and hanged and mutilated, and those who disappeared and what might have happened to all the inquisitors and the mysterious fate of poor Mary Burton. They laughed. They mourned. One night, in the second week, Quaco looked at Cormac in an inquisitive way.

“You ain’t aged but a day,” he said.

“I don’t feel the way I look.”

“I ain’t even goneta ask how come.”

“Good.”

“But you was close to Kongo.”

“Yes.”

“The babalawo.”

“Very close.”

Quaco didn’t go beyond this, and Cormac just stared at the fire. Then they talked about the Revolution, and the future.

“I keep dreamin’ of home,” Quaco said on another night. “I keep dreamin’ of the village where I was a boy. I keep wantin’ to go home.”

“Maybe you can.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

But he didn’t seem to believe it. And he had little faith in the Revolution.

“You notice somethin’?” he asked one night. “The English, they promisin’ freedom to their slaves, after everything’s finished. But the Americans? They ain’t promisin’ nothin’.”

Cormac said to himself, You’re right, Quaco. You’re right.

When the snows melted, Cormac found work as a blacksmith with a man named Tingle, whose love of metals had driven him into the madness of alchemy. His forge in a dark forest glen was empty when Cormac arrived, calling himself Alfred Defoe and faking a Liverpool accent. Tingle was locked in a windowless shack trying to turn lead into gold and muttering about the philosopher’s stone. He said very little while Cormac built a new fire in the forge and took over the blacksmithing and moved from Quaco’s cellar to a heatless room above the barn. Each week, more British soldiers moved north carrying axes and saws to attack the forests. On a few summer days, Cormac serviced Tingle’s gaunt, forlorn, and childless wife, Juliet.

“Thank you,” she would say, “and you know that I would not do this if my husband wasn’t mad.”

Tingle didn’t seem to know that his wife offered herself to Cormac in the woods while he was chanting cabalistic numbers in his locked shack. But if he did know, he didn’t care. Their couplings were always in late afternoon, after the horses were shod or the scythes repaired. At night, Cormac was always moving, his face sometimes stained black with berry juice, visiting the scattered Africans. He made speeches in Yoruba and English, trying to persuade the Africans and their American children that their best hope for freedom lay with the Revolution. This was not easy. The Africans heard the news too, and it seemed almost certain that the military power of the professional British Army would defeat the amateurs commanded by Washington.

“If the British wanted to free you, they would do it right now,” Cormac would say. “They were the people who enslaved you. How can you trust the word of slavemasters?”

About a dozen Africans and their children believed Cormac. Most important was Quaco’s son Roger, now almost thirty years old, intelligent, literate, careful. He put together a new version of the black patrol and made certain that Cormac was a member, but not the leader. Together, they set fires. They stole ammunition. They released rats into food warehouses.

At the same time, disguised as a lame peddler or a hunched old man and even once as an Indian, Cormac tracked the movements of young Tony Warren. The son of the earl moved from barracks to confiscated house and back to the barracks, to the reopened John Street Theater to the whorehouses of the Holy Ground. He had the sword. Cormac wanted it back.

70.

In his pursuit of Tony Warren, Cormac moved alone. This was a private affair, after all, not the business of the Revolution. So he walked through the dark, sour, occupied city like a ghost. The gaunt skeletons of the lower town, with their cold chimneys and formless mounds, looked at midnight like a zone in the Christian purgatory: black, glistening, a place where lost men moved with the rats. On moon-bright nights, all was as clear as a drawing. Cormac seldom went out without clouds to smother the moon.

Then, almost a year after his escape from the Bridewell, he picked up the trail. Warren now lived in a house on Beaver Street. A house taken from Americans and shared with three other officers. But the Englishman was never alone there, and a redcoat stood on permanent guard at the door. There were rumors (brought to Cormac by Roger and Quaco, and whispered by another in a grog shop) that young Warren was building a new house on his father’s land, high in the Bloomingdale. That he had a young family in England. That he planned to settle in New York, once the rebels were destroyed. All rumors. All noted. Cormac knew he could not go to the Bloomingdale in hopes of somehow repeating what he and Kongo had done in 1741. There were soldiers all over the area now, making a show of their presence so that Washington would not be tempted to make a sudden assault on Manhattan, thinking he could cut it in half. If the soldiers felt safe in the denuded upper island, so, surely, did Tony Warren.

During his walks through the lower town, Cormac saw Tony Warren four times, but he was never alone. The city remained ruled by martial law, but it was more relaxed now, as social life returned. Cormac could even hear the music of string quartets drifting from a few of the mansions. The English had created routine to make their duty both safe and pleasant, and a guard on the doorsteps of officers’ quarters was part of that routine.

Then, one rain-drowned night, easing out of Canvastown into Cortlandt Street, Cormac started toward Broadway. Across the street, Warren stepped out of a bordello. He was alone. He began walking toward his billet on Beaver Street, ignoring the rain, taking small, precise steps, like a man who had sipped too much wine. Cormac moved past him, then turned and placed himself in front of the man. Warren was suddenly tense. He squinted at Cormac and drew his sword. The sword.

“Clear the way,” he said in a slurry voice.

“Sorry,” Cormac said. “I can’t do that.”

“I’m ordering you to do that.”

“I respectfully decline the order, Mister Warren.”

Warren’s eyes widened.

“What is this? Who are you and what do you want?”

“I want that sword,” Cormac said. “It belonged to my father.” Warren squinted, his face puzzled, and raised the sword. Cormac took a dirk from his belt.

“This is my sword,” Warren said. “I paid for it. I own it. And if you don’t leave, you’ll taste it quick.”

He smiled then in a cold way and stepped forward.

“I want that sword,” Cormac said.

Warren took another step, put his weight on his left foot, and swung. Cormac stepped inside the arc and deflected the sword with the dirk. Warren smiled, shifted to another angle, grunted, and swung the sword in a wider arc. Cormac backed away almost daintily. A third swing knocked the dirk from Cormac’s hand. Then Warren charged, lifted the sword to finish the fight, and Cormac stepped inside the arc of his swing, grabbed Warren’s right arm, and spun him, slamming him against a wall. Before Warren could again cock the sword, Cormac grabbed his sword hand in both of his own and drove his thumbs into the cleft between his first and second knuckles. Drove them with splitting force. Until Warren made a whimpering sound, dropped the sword.

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

“Perhaps.”

Cormac picked up the dirk, then started for the sword. Warren jerked a pistol from inside his coat. Cormac didn’t wait. He rushed Warren, pushed the gun hand aside, and drove the knife into his chest.

Warren’s eyes widened. His lips moved, but no words emerged. The rain pelted him. Then an arm jerked and a leg moved and he fell to his side on the wet street with the knife handle jutting from his heart.

Cormac picked up the sword and walked quickly into the rainy wilderness of burned houses.

Something went out of Cormac after he killed Tony Warren and recovered the sword. He could feel it in his bones, and in the odd lack of feeling about killing another man, another Warren. It was something he was bound to do, by the terms of an old contract. And Tony Warren was a mean man. The earl without the smile or the juggling. But he felt no satisfaction. The earl sometimes appeared in his dreams, floating in black rivers, but there was no trace of his son. It was as if he had never existed. Or that the killing on Beaver Street had been an affair between two strangers.

There was, of course, no notice of the death in the newspapers; the censors would not permit such dreadful news. So Cormac didn’t know where Tony Warren had been buried, and whether his mother would come to visit his grave. He had killed him. That was that. Now he’d go back to the war. Except that in New York, there was no war. The war was elsewhere. Upstate. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey and in the South. Cormac continued gathering bits and pieces of intelligence and passing them to couriers. He continued walking the streets of the sullen town, looking for vulnerabilities, for targets. He worked with the Africans on small acts of sabotage and carried his sword with him, strapped again across his back. But after Tony Warren, he never killed another British soldier.

“You lost something, Cormac,” said Quaco one evening.

“I did,” said Cormac. “And I don’t know what it is.”

The news came about Yorktown and the end of the war, and Cormac celebrated with Quaco and his wife and three of their children. There was little talk of the future. “We see what they do,” Quaco said, “not what they say.” The peace conference was held in Paris, lasting for months while Washington sheltered with his army up the Hudson in Windsor Forest. The war was finally settled, the treaty signed, a date set for the departure of the British armies. Cormac wandered among exuberant Americans who gathered around the Common, and greeted the few men he still knew from the Bridewell, as they were released a dozen at a time. Nobody talked about the Africans, and he saw them in small, cautious clusters, quiet in the celebrations, watching, pondering.

Now the Tories were leaving by the many thousands, boarding boats for Canada and England, carrying with them huge trunks and crates of goods and their slaves. On the ships, many of the Africans were smiling. They were going, they truly believed, to freedom.

A few Tories wept as they left the town they had come to love too well. Many turned sullen and withdrawn. Families from Canvastown began moving into the abandoned Tory houses, chopping furniture into pieces to make fires under the carved mantels. Bands of small boys threw stones and horseshit at redcoats and were smashed with rifle butts or chased down alleys. But the commander didn’t respond with great force; to avoid clashes, he ordered the redcoats confined to their barracks. The rented Hessians had been gone since Yorktown. Now English officers were forced out of the houses they had taken from Americans, and Cormac watched as officers loaded wagons outside the house on Beaver Street where Tony Warren had lived his last days. He felt no sense of victory.

In late summer, many Americans who had supported the Revolution began to return, to see what was left of their lives. They filled the taverns. They sampled the Shakespeare at the John Street Theater. They combed the flea markets in search of their stolen furniture, the portraits of their Dutch and English ancestors, engravings made of their now-ruined houses. Most of their businesses had been destroyed by fire, but they began to sketch out plans for what would rise from the ashes. They would drain the swamps and level the hills. They would build stone buildings. They would dig deep wells for water. Cormac asked some of them what they wanted in a constitution. They had clear ideas about individual liberties. With one major exception. Slavery would continue. “It must,” one of them said, “or we’ll have no country.”

They began searching for their own slaves, forming small posses of armed men to gather them as if they were stray horses. Many Africans fled into what was left of the woods above the town. Cormac and Quaco assembled a dozen armed Africans, divided into groups of four, all wearing the badges of the Revolution. They followed the slave-gathering posses, placed themselves between the Americans and their African quarries, and liberated them at gunpoint. But the Americans were relentless. They placed bounties on their former slaves, posted their names on the town’s walls. In one encounter, two of the bounty hunters were killed by Quaco’s sons. One enraged American pursued a slave in a longboat to one of the ships anchored in the East River. Cormac watched from the shore as the blacks rowed hard in a longboat of their own, came alongside the American boat, fought briefly, and then tipped the Americans into the river.

On many nights, Cormac went sleepless with rage.

71.

On Evacuation Day, the victorious army of George Washington came into New York through McGowan’s Pass. They moved down the east side of the island, and Cormac, Quaco, and the others joined the ragged troops near the grave of Big Michael in Kip’s Bay. At the head of the long line of soldiers, Washington sat high on a pale gray horse, shoulders squared, head held as erect as a Roman statue, his uniform pressed and clean and sparkling. Other officers trailed behind him on horseback and his soldiers came on foot. Their uniforms were tattered and patched, their shoes held together with rope. Some of the men limped along, swinging on crude crutches. Some wore bandages across foreheads. Some were hunched and weary. All carried rifles. There was a small band of musicians, but no music. Hundreds of people came out to see them, most of them women and children, some of them cheering, many just peering at this rabble in arms, as a British general had called them. The children tagged along with the soldiers. The grown women stared with arms folded across chests, as if wondering what would happen on the morrow.

Cormac said good-bye to Quaco and slowly moved toward the head of the long column as it entered the Bowery. Then they all stopped. Washington dismounted, ran a fond hand on his horse’s brow, and walked into the Bull’s Head Tavern at Bayard and Pump. Here they would wait until the last English soldier had boarded the last English ship and moved out toward the Narrows. The general turned to his army and waved. He did not smile. The soldiers cheered him, and cheered themselves too. A cool November wind blew from the east.

“General Washington!” Cormac shouted from the crowd at the foot of the tavern’s wooden deck.

The general turned, smiled slightly, showing his caried yellow teeth. His nose was puffier, his hair whiter. He looked straight at Cormac.

“I’m the man who saved your life at Kip’s Bay!” Washington squinted. Two guards flanked him, bayonets at the ready. The general seemed to be searching his memory for one dangerous night out of two thousand. Then he nodded.

“Of course…. Do come in.”

He waited for Cormac to join him and then led the way into the crowded tavern. Everybody hushed. Washington was taken to a small table against the far wall. The air smelled of beer and sweat. They sat down while attendants created a small human fence around them. His officers remained standing against the wall to his right.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” Washington said.

“And I’m glad to see you too, sir.”

A fat man brought a pitcher of water and two glasses. Washington poured. The exhaustion seeped from him like fog.

“You grabbed the bridle of my horse,” he said.

“I did. Cormac O’Connor is my name.”

“You slapped the haunch and sent me flying.”

“That actually was done by a man named Bantu, one of the Africans.”

“A brazen lot,” Washington said, an amused smile on his mouth. “But you have my thanks.”

“We needed you alive, General.”

“Not everyone agreed with you—including some of my officers.”

“The men knew,” Cormac said. “Including my fellow soldiers.” Washington sipped the cold water. “You were commanding coloreds, if my memory serves me.”

“I served with five African soldiers, sir. We were irregulars. There was no commander.”

Washington’s nostrils widened and twitched, the old hunter detecting hostility.

“And where are those soldiers now, Mister O’Connor?”

“Dead, sir.”

Cormac quickly told him about the deaths of Big Michael and Bantu, of Aaron, Silver, and Carlito. He mentioned the great fire, and the Bridewell, and the escape, and the long campaign within the city.

“God…”

“But those soldiers had children, sir, three of them had children. They had wives. They talked sometimes about the future. About going to free schools. About working their own farms as free men, about opening shops…”

Washington drummed the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop. His mouth tightened.

“Yes?” he said, as if knowing what was coming.

“I hope, sir, that you will do all in your power to honor the promises made by our Revolution.” Hating the self-righteousness of his own words. “I told my men of those promises. I read them the Declaration of Independence, one that you read to us here in 1776.” Appealing now to Washington’s vanity. “They fought for those words, for ‘inalienable rights,�� for ‘all men are created equal…’ And right now, General, Americans are roaming New York, chasing their former slaves as if they were dogs gone astray….”

Washington sighed.

“All of that will be debated, I assure you,” he said. “But not in a tavern.”

He took a longer sip of the water. Cormac leaned forward, his anger rising.

“Debate will not be enough, sir,” Cormac said. “There can be only one decision. Slavery must end. Or all those men will have died for a lie.”

Washington was now annoyed. He was waiting for a ceremony of triumph, waiting to mount his horse and ride majestically into New York. He was waiting for the British flags to be lowered and the American flags raised. He was waiting for a moment of immortality.

“For now, all of that is in the future, Mister O’Connor.”

“This is the future, General Washington.”

The general stood up, his chair scraping on flagstones. He offered a hand to be shaken. Cormac gripped his large hand but didn’t shake it.

“If you don’t give the slaves their freedom,” he said, “this country will die in its crib.”

“Thank you,” Washington said in an icy way, withdrawing his hand and motioning with his head to his officers. “I have much to do now.”

Washington turned his back and moved to his waiting men. The guards stepped between him and Cormac. He had been dismissed. Cormac turned and walked through the crowded tavern into the American morning, hoping he’d live long enough to heal his aching heart.

He wandered alone to South Street to watch the last British ship leave. There were American flags waving now on some buildings, looking tentative and modest. Many Americans were moving toward the river and the Battery, some joking and laughing, others solemn. There were no Africans among them.

Around noon, they saw the ship easing from its pier above Wall Street, its decks crowded, its flags and pennants waving as if in triumph. Cormac could not read the name of the ship as it floated slowly downriver and he felt nothing. The crowd cheered and blew whistles and small horns, and then grew quiet and started moving toward Broadway to wait for the procession of Washington.