Chapter One

New York — Thursday, 2 to Saturday, 4 January 1783

The schooner lay at anchor in the East River with the flood running past her, and in the dark of her hold Darby told the hour by it.

He had told the hours that way since the Capes. By his head, two strakes below the deck beam, there was a seam where the oakum had worked loose, and at noon a thread of light came through it the width of a straw. At night there was no light at all, but there was the water. On the ebb it went past the planking with a long hiss, like a broom on a floor. On the flood it knocked. It had been knocking since a little after four, slower now, which meant slack water by eight; and at slack water, if they meant to move her, they would move her.

“They’ll open it today,” said Sam.

Sam said it every morning. He was nineteen, from the Annemessex, and had been taken out of a log canoe in Tangier Sound in the first week of December with a string of oysters still in his lap. He had talked from the Capes to Sandy Hook.

“Maybe,” said Darby.

“They’ll open it, and there’ll be an officer, and he’ll read it out. The King’s word. Every man that comes in. My uncle went in to it in ’seventy-five, off the Eastern Shore, and he’s a soldier now. Red coat. Musket of his own.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere.” Sam was not troubled by it. “He’s got the coat, though. My mother had it from a man that saw him.”

“Lord Dunmore’s gone home,” said Hagar, from the other side of the hogsheads. She had been taken off a landing on Hooper’s Island with a basket of washing, and since the Capes had spoken mostly to the boy who brought the water. “Gone home to England. Years ago. Whose word is it now, then?”

Sam had no answer to that, and was quiet for a while, which was a mercy.

Darby lay on the tobacco with Mr Galloway’s boat-cloak round him and listened to the flood ease. December had been the island: a shed of pine poles thatched with marsh grass at the south end of Tangier, where Kidd’s barges lay up between cruises. The barge that had hailed him had been one of Kidd’s, coming down from a fight in the Kedges with a man in her bows shot through the hip. They had put a lantern on him in the skiff, that night, an old man in a gentleman’s cloak alone in the middle of the Bay.

“Darby who?” the man in the stern had said.

“Darby.”

“Darby whose, then?”

“Darby.”

The man in the stern had laughed, a big tired laugh with powder in it. “Then you’re ours, Darby. Finders. We’ll find out whose when we sell you.”

The skiff they had kept. He had watched a boy from Deal Island cut KIDD into her transom with a sheath knife, in letters an inch high, very deep. There was nothing to say to a boy with a knife, so he had said nothing. He had only thought, standing on the marsh in the wind with his hands in the cloak: that’s three.

On St Thomas’s Day they had put him aboard this schooner, a Snow Hill bay-craft taken in the autumn, with Sam and Hagar and the plunder of a month, and sent her out round the Capes for New York. She was a good boat, badly handled. He had known it by the second day from the way she came up into the seas, and the way the men on deck swore at her for it.

The hatch came off at seven, a square of white sky with a man’s head in it.

“Water,” said Tull, and let the bucket down on its line.

Tull was the prize master, a Somerset County man who had lost a farm on the Manokin for being a King’s man. He spoke to them like stock he had not yet been paid for: not unkindly, and not as if they might answer.

Sam was up on the hogsheads before the bucket touched. “Is it today, mister? The officer?”

“What officer?”

“The King’s. To read it.”

Tull laughed. He had a short laugh, without much in it. “There’s no officer, boy. There’s the court. The Judge of the Admiralty sits Monday, after Twelfth Night.” He slapped the coaming. “He condemns her and all her lading. Tobacco, pork, the parlour clock, and you three. Lawful prize, taken from rebels under the Commodore’s commission. Then she’s sold, and you’re sold, and the Commodore has his share and I have mine.”

“The King’s word—”

“Is for them that come in. You didn’t come in. You were took.” Tull hauled the bucket up hand over hand and swung it clear. “There’s a difference, and the difference is forty pound a head in Kingston. Less the freight.”

Sam sat down on the tobacco.

“And an old man,” said Darby. “What’s he fetch?”

Tull turned his head, as if a hogshead had asked him its price, and found it interesting.

“Less,” he said. “You’ve your teeth. That’s something. Somebody’ll want a waterman.”

“I know boats.”

“I’ll put it on the bill.” The hatch went back on. Through the seam by Darby’s head the thread of light came and went as men walked across the deck above, and then steadied.

They lay all that day at anchor and nobody moved her. Darby heard boats go by, and a bell somewhere ashore, and once, far off, a drum. Towards dark a man-of-war fired a gun, and the hogsheads shivered. Sam asked what it meant, and Hagar said it meant it was evening, which it did.

When the light had gone out of the seam, Darby said into the dark, “When they open that hatch at a wharf, don’t wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For anybody to read anything.”

Sam was a long time answering. “That’s running,” he said. “They hang you for running. Back home they whip you for it.”

“Back home they do,” said Darby, and let it lie.

Hagar spoke out of the dark on the other side of the hogsheads.

“I’ll not wait,” she said.

It was the most she had said since the Capes. Neither of the men answered her. After a while the flood began to knock again on the planking, and Sam went to sleep, and talked in it.

They moved her on the Friday, at the morning slack.

He knew they would, because the flood had eased at seven and nobody had come with the water. Instead there was shouting on deck, and Tull’s voice over it, and feet, and the windlass pawls going; and then the hatch came off and Tull’s head was in the square of sky, white with cold and anger.

“You,” he said. “The old one. You pull an oar?”

Darby got up off the tobacco. His knees told him about the passage, and he let them.

“I can pull one.”

“Up, then. I’ve two men drunk since New Year and one that’s no use sober. I want a line run to the slip before the ebb makes.”

He came up the ladder slowly, into a morning so cold it rang. The river was the colour of pewter, with cakes of ice turning in it at the edges. On the near side was the town. He had never seen a town like it. It went along the water as far as he could see each way, wharves and slips and warehouses, with masts in front of them as thick as reeds in a marsh, and a smell of fish and coal smoke and tar and a burning that was not wood. Right ahead of the schooner’s bow, at the head of a slip, stood an open market under a roof on posts, and the people in it were as many as a camp meeting.

“Fly Market,” said Tull, as if Darby had asked. “Get in the boat.”

The boat was the schooner’s own yawl, half full of water, with a sick boy of sixteen in the bow and a coil of warp in the stern sheets. Darby baled her with his hat, because there was nothing else, and took the oars. The boy paid out the warp, and watched him.

“You’ll not run, old man,” he said. It was not quite a question. “Mr Tull said watch you.”

“Where’d I run to?” said Darby. “I don’t know the place.”

The boy thought about this, and seemed to find it sound, and was sick over the side. Darby pulled her in along the face of the wharf in a dozen strokes, without hurry, and laid her alongside the stone so gently that the boy, who had been bracing himself for it, nearly went over the bow.

“Make it fast,” called Tull, from the schooner. “The post by the stair. And stand by it, old man. Tend it as she comes.”

Darby went up the slimed steps and took a turn round the post, and they hove her in on the windlass. He tended the warp as she came. He could not have done it badly if he had tried. The schooner came in to the head of the slip with her people shouting at one another about fenders, and Tull went aft to see to the stern line and turned his back.

Darby made the warp fast, two round turns and two half hitches, and stood up.

The market was behind him, and it was loud. It was a long shed open on every side, roofed on posts, with fish laid out on the trestles in the cold and oysters in tubs and geese hanging by their necks, and every trestle had a voice. Oysters! Fine Blue Points, sixpence the dozen! Shad! Jersey shad! A boy with a tray of corn-cakes was crying that they were hot, which they were not. A one-legged fiddler sat on a cask between the posts playing a reel that nobody was dancing to, and at the nearest trestle a red-coated sergeant was arguing with a fish-wife over a goose.

“Two shillings? For that? It died of old age.”

“It died of a sergeant looking at it. Two shillings, or go and eat your Hessians.”

There were black faces everywhere. Black porters with loads on their shoulders, black women behind the oyster tubs, a black boy sweeping the stones with a besom. Not one of them looked at the old man by the post. They were all going somewhere for somebody, and they had their loads to show it.

At the end of the nearest trestle there was a stack of fish baskets, empty, wet, stinking.

He coiled down the slack of the warp, because a line left lying is a line somebody falls over. Then he looked back once, at the schooner’s hatch, which was shut, and at the deck, where Tull had his back to him and was bawling at a man in the rigging. He thought of Sam, on the tobacco, waiting for an officer. He thought of Hagar, asking whose word it was now. He could do nothing for either of them by standing there, and he knew it, and it made no difference to how it felt.

He took the top basket off the stack and put it on his shoulder, and walked into the market.

He walked as he rowed. He went between the trestles at the pace of a man who has been told where to take a basket and has all morning to do it in; past the geese, past the fiddler, past the sergeant and the fish-wife, who had come down a penny; out at the far end into a lane that went up from the water between tall brick houses. Nobody called after him. At the top of the lane he heard, far behind, Tull’s voice, high and astonished, about a line; and then the noise of the market closed over it like water over a stone.

The lane came out into a broad street on a ridge, with the town falling away from it on both sides.

He stood at the corner with the basket on his shoulder. Up the street there was a stone church with soldiers walking in its yard. Down it was a fort with a flag. And across the street, going down towards the other river, there was nothing.

He had heard of the fire; every man on the water had. He had not understood what it meant. It meant a whole side of a town gone, down to the water and as far up as he could see: chimneys standing up out of it by themselves, black, like the stumps of a cut-over swamp, and between them cellar holes, and weeds through the brick, and the walls of a tall church with the sky for a roof.

But it was not empty. Somebody had stretched old sails over the cellar holes, tarred and patched, lashed down to the stumps of walls with spunyarn, and there were stovepipes coming out of the canvas, and washing hung between the chimneys, frozen stiff. There were children on the bricks. It was a town inside a town, and it had been built by people who knew rope.

He stood a moment too long at the corner. A carter swore at him to mind his back, uncle, and a porter going by with a sack of flour on his shoulder stopped beside him, a young man, very black, in a sailor’s jacket with the sleeves cut off.

“You lost, old man?”

“Looking.”

“For what?”

“Where they stay,” said Darby. “The ones that came in.”

The porter shifted the sack. He took in the basket, and the cloak under it, and the way Darby stood, and his face shut, and then opened again.

“Came in from where?”

“Down the Bay. Maryland.”

“Then you want over there.” The porter jerked his chin at the burnt ground. “Canvas Town, they call it. Go down to the water at the bottom, where the washing is, and ask the women. The women know everything. The men only know what the women tell them.” He hitched the sack higher. “Mind the Hessians. They’ll take your cloak for a joke and keep it for a blanket.”

He went off up the street with his flour, whistling.

Darby crossed over and went down into the burnt town, along paths trodden into the ash, and came out on the shore of the other river, which was full of ice. Here, under the bank, a dozen women were washing, with fires going under iron kettles and the steam going up off the tubs into the cold. Their arms were red to the elbow. One of them was beating a red coat on a board with a paddle, slow and hard.

“That’s a captain of the Forty-Second,” said the woman at the next tub, to nobody. “She’s been at him since breakfast.”

“He owes me for six shirts since Christmas,” said the woman with the paddle. “I’ll beat him till he pays.” She brought it down again, and the others laughed, and somebody further along began to sing a hymn with her arms in the suds, and two more took it up.

She was the one who looked up.

She looked at the basket first, and then at the cloak, and then at him. She was broad and not young, with a cloth tied round her head and a man’s coat over her gown with the sleeves rolled.

“You’re not from the market,” she said. “Nobody brings fish down here.”

“No.”

“From where?”

“West River. In Maryland.”

“By water?”

“By water.”

She went on beating the coat. “Then you want the Sergeant,” she said. “Sergeant Quaco. The chimney with the red rag on it, up past the church. Tell him Margaret sent you.” She nodded at the basket. “And put that down somewhere. You’ll have the whole market down here after it.”

The chimney with the red rag stood at the top of a cellar hole beyond the burnt church. Somebody had roofed the cellar with a main course off a ship of some size, the bolt-rope still in it, and made a door of a hatch cover. Sitting on the step, cleaning a shovel with a stick, was a tall man of fifty in a short red coat gone the colour of brick dust, with one shoulder lower than the other.

He glanced up when Darby’s shadow came over him, and went on cleaning the shovel.

“Margaret sent me,” said Darby.

“She does.” The Sergeant knocked the ash off the shovel against the step. “Sit down, old man. Not there. There.”

Darby sat on a block of fallen stone. His knees were glad of it. He put the basket down at his feet, and the Sergeant considered it, and then him.

“Fly Market,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Off what?”

“A schooner. Prize. Kidd’s.”

“Kidd’s.” The Sergeant nodded slowly. “They bring them up for the court. Twice this winter. What day’s she condemned?”

“Monday, the man said.”

“How many in her?”

“Two more. A boy and a woman.”

The Sergeant put the shovel across his knees and watched the smoke going up out of the canvas roofs, and said nothing for a while. Darby waited. He had spent his life in rooms where white men talked, and had learned there that the man who waits hears the most. He found it was the same here.

“I’m going to ask you three questions,” said the Sergeant at last. “The same three the officers ask, at the Commandant’s, when they ask. I’d sooner you heard them from me first than from them. You can answer me or not. The first is your name.”

“Darby.”

“Darby what?”

“Darby.”

“All right.” He did not write it. There was nothing to write on. “The second. Whose are you?”

Darby looked at him. It was the question Phebe had told him they would ask, in the cabin on the Ridge, with the child breathing. It was the question the man in the barge had laughed at. He had thought, rowing out past the point, that he had his answer and would never need another.

“Darby,” he said.

“That’s your name. I asked whose.”

“That’s my answer to both.”

The Sergeant waited. Then he leaned forward and took a fold of the cloak between his finger and thumb, and felt the weight of it.

“That’s a gentleman’s cloak,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Whose?”

“Mr Galloway’s. Of West River.”

“Then—”

“The cloak’s his,” said Darby. “I’ll send it back when I’ve done with it.”

The Sergeant let go of the cloth. For the first time his face came near a laugh, and went away from it again.

“I’ll tell you why they ask it,” he said. “The General’s word is for the property of rebels. A man that runs from a rebel, they’ll not give him up. A man that runs from a King’s friend, they send him home again. I’ve seen it done. A loyal master comes in with his paper, and they hand the man over in the Commandant’s yard, and the master says thank you very kindly.” He turned the shovel over. “So when they ask whose, what they want to know is which. Your Mr Galloway. Is he for the Congress, or the King?”

Darby thought about it. He thought about it honestly, because it was a fair question, and because nobody had ever asked him what Mr Galloway was for.

“He’s a Quaker,” he said.

“That’s neither.”

“No. It’s not. He’ll not swear to anybody. He’ll not fight for anybody. He’ll not buy a soul and he’ll not free one.” Darby turned his hands over. “There was a man in a barge in the summer said he was a Tory. There’s a lieutenant on the river looks at him as if he was. I never heard him say it himself.”

“Then they’ll make him one or the other,” said the Sergeant, “if it comes to a hearing. Whichever does them most good.” He stood up, and the low shoulder went lower, and he leaned the shovel against the chimney. “Third question. When did you come in?”

“I came out the thirtieth of November. Off the West River, in my own boat. After dark.”

“Out’s not in.”

“They took me up after midnight. Kidd’s men. In the middle of the Bay.”

“Took you,” said the Sergeant. “Then you didn’t come in. You were brought. That’s the court’s word, and it’s the word they’ll use on you, and it’s worth money to somebody.” He was quiet a moment. “When did you come in, Darby? On your own feet?”

Darby thought of the slimed steps at the head of the slip, and the post, and the warp made fast with two round turns and two half hitches.

“This morning,” he said. “Half after seven. With a basket.”

“That’s a day,” said the Sergeant. “Hold on to it. You may want it.” He pushed the hatch cover open with his foot, and warm air came out of the cellar, and the smell of smoke and boiled meal. “There’s room at the back. Four Virginians and a man from Norfolk who snores. There’s work, if you’ll carry. They pay in coppers and bread, and you’ll be glad of both.”

“I’ll carry.”

“I know you will.” He held the door. “Leave the basket. Margaret’ll take it back. She knows the woman.”

It was dark inside, and warm, and full of men’s voices that stopped when he came down the three steps. Five men sat round the old hearth on boxes, cracking hickory nuts with a flat-iron.

“Who’s that, Sergeant?”

“Darby,” said the Sergeant. “From the West River. He’s come off a prize at the Fly Market with a fish basket.”

There was a silence while they took that in. Then one of them began to laugh, and then all of them, and the one with the flat-iron held out a handful of nuts.

“With a basket,” he said. “Lord. Sit down, Darby. Sit down by the fire. You’ll be the man with the basket now till you die.”

“There’s worse,” said Darby, and sat.

He carried on the Saturday, from first light.

The man from Norfolk talked from the cellar to the lot, and all the morning on the lot, about Lord Dunmore’s ships in ’seventy-six, and the fever on them, and how he had been on a tender in the Elizabeth River and seen the Governor himself come on deck in a nightcap.

“Red,” he said. “With a tassel. Like a Turk.”

“You’ve told us,” said one of the Virginians, heaving brick.

“I’ve not told him.” The man from Norfolk turned to Darby, with a hod on his shoulder and the tassel in his eyes. “Red. A tassel this long.”

“I believe you,” said Darby, and went on loading, and the Virginians laughed at the man from Norfolk, who was offended, and said so, until noon.

There were eleven of them on the cart, with the Sergeant walking beside the horse, and they took brick and ash off a burnt lot and tipped it at the river to make ground. A man loaded what he could lift and no more, and nobody remarked on it, because the Sergeant had a way of looking at a man who remarked on things.

At noon there was bread, and a can of something hot that had been beef at one time. The Sergeant sat down on the tail of the cart beside him to eat his.

“Your schooner’s been along the slips,” he said. “This morning. The prize master and a constable, asking at every stall in the Fly Market. An old negro, they said, about sixty, very quiet, in a gentleman’s boat-cloak. Drab, with a cape.”

Darby ate his bread.

“There’s two dollars on you,” said the Sergeant. “Not much. It’ll go up after Monday, when you’re the court’s.”

“Then the cloak stays in the cellar,” said Darby. “By day.”

“And the basket?”

“Margaret’s got the basket.”

The Sergeant looked at him sideways, and this time the laugh got as far as his mouth. “You’ve done this before,” he said.

“No,” said Darby. “I’ve watched it done. Sixty years.” He finished the bread. “A man that wants to be let alone carries something, and walks slow, and wears what everybody wears. It’s not hard. It’s only that most of them run.”

At three it began to snow, small and dry, and the Sergeant took them off the lot and sent them home.

Darby went down to the shore, because his hands were raw and the tubs were hot.

Margaret was at her board. He did not ask if he could help. He took the yoke and the two buckets from beside her kettle and went down to the hole in the ice and filled them, and poured them in her copper, and went again. When he came back the second time she had a stool out for him by the fire.

“Sit,” she said. “Quaco told me. Kidd’s.”

“Yes.”

“And you walked off at the Fly Market with a fish basket.” She wrung the shirt between her two red fists. “They’re telling it all over the lots.”

“It’s only a basket.”

“It’s the best thing anybody’s heard since Christmas.” She spoke over the steam. “You’ve people? Back there?”

“A sister. Bett. Best hand with a cow on the West River. A grandson at the landing, Cato, that turns the timber for me.” He held his hands to the fire.

“Nobody else?”

“Nobody that’s mine to tell.”

She let it go, as the women on the Ridge did. She shook out the shirt and laid it over the line, where it began to stiffen at once in the cold. Beside her board, on a nail driven into a charred beam, there hung a small tin box, the kind tea comes in. She saw him look at it.

“That’s the General’s word,” she said. “In there.”

“You read?”

“No. Quaco reads. He had it off a printed paper in ’seventy-nine, up at Philipsburgh, where the army lay that summer. The front of it’s about buying the ones taken in arms, and I don’t keep that. The middle he made me learn.” She dipped her hands in the copper and took them out again. “Against the day somebody tells me it’s not so. He says they will. He says a word’s no good unless somebody has it exact.”

“Say it,” said Darby.

She wiped her arms on her apron and stood straight at the board, like a child at a lesson, and said it to the river and the ice. She went slowly. Twice she stopped and went back a few words to get a run at it.

“I do most strictly forbid any person to sell or claim right over any negro, the property of a rebel, who may take refuge with any part of this army. And I do promise to every negro who shall desert the rebel standard, full security to follow within these lines any occupation which he shall think proper.” She drew breath. “Given at head quarters, Philipsburgh, the thirtieth day of June, seventeen hundred and seventy-nine. And his name. H. Clinton.”

The snow came down between them into the copper and went out.

“Again,” said Darby. “Where it says whose.”

“It doesn’t say whose.”

“It says the property of a rebel.”

She said that part again, slowly, for him. Then she said, without being asked, “Desert the rebel standard. That’s what Quaco minds most. Not came in. Desert. He says that’s a thing a man does himself. Nobody can do it for him, and nobody can do it to him.”

“And within these lines.”

“From Kingsbridge down. And the island across, and Staten, and the Hook over the way.” She pointed with her chin at the far shore, white now. “That’s the lines. The General’s gone home. Sir Guy has it now. Sir Guy hasn’t unsaid it.” She went back to her board. “Nobody’s unsaid it yet.”

He sat by her fire till the light went, and carried her water, and said nothing more about it.

Quaco was at the cellar door when he came up through the ruins, smoking a short pipe in the dusk with the hatch cover propped behind him.

“The court,” said Darby. “Where does it sit?”

The Sergeant took the pipe out of his mouth. “Why?”

“The boy and the woman. Monday.”

“You can’t take them off a prize. Nor can I. Nor can the whole Pioneers’ mess, if it went down there with shovels.”

“I know it.” Darby stood in the snow with his hands in his sleeves. “I left them. I’d like to see where they go. That’s all. There’s men on the wharves know where every ship’s bound. I’d like to know which.”

Quaco smoked for some time in the last of the light.

“The City Hall,” he said at last. “At the top of Wall Street. Monday, after ten. You’ll stand outside with the rest.” He put the pipe back. “And you’ll leave that cloak in the cellar.”

“I said I would.”

“You did.” He moved aside from the door. “I’m getting used to you saying a thing once.”

That night there was a child crying in the next cellar. He lay at the back of the Sergeant’s under Mr Galloway’s cloak, with the man from Norfolk snoring, and listened to its mother through the canvas hushing it, and saying its name over and over, low, to settle it. It was a short name. It was not the one he carried, and he was glad of that, and ashamed of being glad, and lay there with both.

He had two dates now. He said them over in the dark, the General’s and his own: the thirtieth of June, in ’seventy-nine, at a place called Philipsburgh; the thirtieth of November, after midnight, in the middle of the Bay. He said them until he had them by heart, as Margaret had hers.

The other he kept. He had it already, and it was not his to say.