number, there were alarming reports from dockside merchants of night-roaming gangs of slaves who, perhaps continuing to fight old tribal feuds, attacked one another over perceived territories.
Matthew wondered, as he walked, if becoming cosmopolitan meant an eventual emulation of the sprawl, debasement, and utter calamity of London. The tales he’d heard of that pandemetro chilled his blood-everything from the twelve-year-old prostitutes to the freak-show circuses and the joy of the mob at the hangman’s theater. Possibly, with that latter revulsion, he was remembering how near Rachel Howarth had come to being burned alive in Fount Royal, and how the merry crowd would have howled as the ashes flew up. He wondered what would be the future of New York, in a hundred years. He wondered if fate and human nature decreed that every Bethlehem become in time a Bedlam.
As he crossed Wall Street before Trinity Church and the black iron fence around the church cemetery, he gave a glance at the trough in which he’d cleaned himself of his night’s misfortune. The Dutch fortress wall that had stood here, made of logs twelve feet tall, had been constructed to guard that avenue of attack from the British before the settlement changed hands some thirty-eight years ago. It occurred to Matthew that New York no longer faced an adversary from without, as barring severe epidemic or some unforeseen catastrophe the place was securely fixed. He thought that the next threat to the survival of this town might well come from within, and bear from the consequences of forgetting the perils of human greed.
On his left, also on Wall Street, was the yellow stone City Hall and the town gaol, before which a notorious pickpocket named Ebenezer Grooder was on public view, confined to the pillory. A basket of rotten apples lay within reach of any citizen who wished to apply further justice. Matthew continued south, entering the smoke-hazed realm of stables, warehouses, and blacksmitheries.
It was one of those establishments, whose affixed sign read simply Ross, Smith, that was the aim of his arrow. He went into the open barn door of the place, into the dim light where hammers rang on iron and orange flames seethed in the black-bricked forge. A thick-set young man with curly blond hair was at work on the bellows cord, making the fire flare and spit. Beyond him, the elder master Marco Ross and the second apprentice were hammering out the vital commodity of horseshoes on their respective anvils. The noise was a kind of rough music, as one hammerblow was pitched higher than the other. All the smiths wore leather aprons to protect their clothes from flying shards of red-hot metal, and the heat and strenuous activity already at this early hour made the men sweat through the backs of their shirts. Cart-wheels, plows, and other bits of farm implements were arranged in wait for inspection, showing that Master Ross was at no sorrow for work.
Matthew crossed over the bricked floor to stand near the young man at his bellows labor. He waited until finally John Five sensed him there and turned to look over his shoulder. Matthew nodded; John returned the nod, his cherubic face ruddy in the heat and his eyes pale blue beneath thick blond brows, and then he returned to what he was doing without a word, since speaking was useless so long as the hammers did the talking.
At last John knew Matthew would not be denied; Matthew saw it, in the slump of the younger man’s shoulders. That alone gave him an indication of how their meeting must go, but he had to pursue it. John Five ceased the bellows work, waved his arm in the air to get Master Ross to see, and then held up five fingers to ask for that much time. Master Ross gave a curt nod, with a stern glance at Matthew that said Some of us have work to do and laid in again on the hammer-and-tongs.
Outside, in the smoky sunlight, John Five wiped his sparkling forehead with a cloth and said, “How are you, Matthew?”
“Well, thank you. And you?”
“Well also.” John was not as tall as Matthew, but had the wide shoulders and thick forearms of a man born to command iron. He was four years Matthew’s junior, yet far from being a youth. In the King Street almshouse-then known as the Sainted John Home for Boys, before it was expanded to include two more buildings for orphaned girls and adult paupers-he had been the fifth John of thirty-six boys, thus his identity. John Five had one ear; the left had been hacked off. Across his chin was a deep scar that pulled the right corner of his mouth down into a perpetual sadness. John Five remembered a father and mother and a cabin in a wilderness clearing, perhaps an idealized memory. He recalled two infant siblings, both brothers he believed. He recalled the logs of a fort, and a man in a tricorn with goldleaf trimming talking to his father and showing him the shaft of a broken arrow. His memory could pull up the shrill sound of a woman screaming and blurred figures bursting through the window shutters and the door. He saw the glint of firelight on an upraised hatchet. Then the candle of his mind went out.
One thing he remembered quite clearly-and this he told Matthew and some of the others, one night at the orphanage-was a thin rail of a man with black teeth, tipping a bottle to his mouth and telling him to Dance, dance, you little shit! Dance for our supper! And smile or I’ll carve one in that fuckin’ face!
John Five recalled dancing in a tavern, and seeing his small shadow thrown on the wall. The thin man took coins from the customers and put them in a brown pot. He remembered the man drunk and swearing on a nasty bed in a little room somewhere. He remembered crawling under the bed to sleep, and two other men breaking into the room and beating the drunk man to death with cudgels. And he remembered thinking, as the man’s brains flew upon the walls and the blood flowed over the floor, that he had never really liked to dance.
Soon after that, a travelling parson had brought the nine-year-old John to the orphanage and left him in the care of the demanding but fair-minded Headmaster Staunton, but when Staunton had left two years later to answer the call of a dream bidding him to take God’s salvation to the Indian tribes, the position had been filled by Eben Ausley, newly arrived with commission in hand from jolly old England.
Standing with John Five alongside Master Ross’ blacksmith shop, as the town began to speed itself into the rhythms of another day of trade and citizens passed by in their own currents of life like so many fish in the rivers, Matthew looked down at his shoes and measured his words carefully. “When we spoke last, you said you’d consider my request.” He looked up into the younger man’s eyes, which he could read like any book in his collection. Yet he had to go on. “Have you?”
“I have,” John answered.
“And?”
John gave a pained expression. He stared at the knuckles of his hands, which he closed into fists and began to work together as if fighting a private battle. And Matthew knew this was entirely true. Still, Matthew had to persist: “You and I both know what needs to be done.” There was no response, so Matthew plowed deeper. “He thinks he’s gotten away with everything. He thinks no one cares. Oh yes, I saw him last night. He crowed like a madman, about how I hadn’t gone to the magistrate because I have nothing. And you know the high constable is one of his gaming friends. So I have to have proof, John. I have to have someone who’ll speak up.”
“Someone,” John said, with just a trace of bitterness.
“Myles Newell and his wife moved to Boston,” Matthew reminded him. “He was willing, and close to it, but now that he’s gone it’s up to you.”
John remained silent, still pressing his fists together, his eyes shadowed.
“Nathan Spencer hanged himself last month,” Matthew said. “Twenty years old, and he still couldn’t put it to rest.”
“I know very well about Nathan. I was at the funeral too. And I’ve thought about him, many days. He used to come here and talk, just like you do. But tell me this, Matthew,” and here John Five peered into his friend’s face with eyes that were at once racked with anguish and as hot as the forge, “was it Nathan who couldn’t put it to rest…or was it you?”
“It was both of us,” Matthew said, truthfully.
John gave a quiet grunt and looked away again. “I’m sorry about Nathan. He was tryin’ very hard to move on. But you wouldn’t let him, would you?”
“I had no idea he was planning to kill himself.”
“Maybe he wasn’t, until you kept pesterin’ him. Did you ever think about that?”
In truth, Matthew had. It was something, though, that he’d forced away from himself; he couldn’t bear to admit to the shaving mirror that his pleadings with Nathan to make witness against Eben Ausley in front of Magistrate Powers and Chief Prosecutor James Bynes would result in a rope thrown over the rafters of the young man’s garret.
“Nathan wasn’t well,” John Five went on. “In the head. He was weak. You should have known that, you bein’ such the scholar.”
“I can’t bring him back, and neither can you,” Matthew said, with more spice than he’d meant; it sounded too much like the curt dismissal of responsibility. “We have to go on, from where we-”
