City of Glory (65 page)

There was a muffled thump from somewhere straight ahead. He called again and was answered by a series of thumps. Joyful ran toward them as fast as he dared, aware that on this ship nothing could be counted on to be in good repair, including the deck below his feet. The padlock on the low door at the end of the narrow passage was an exception. He yanked at it, but it held. He pounded on the door. “Manon! Manon, are you in there?” More thumps. “Thank God! Be brave, my love. I’ll be straight back. I’ve got to find something to smash this lock.”

He had to climb back up the ladderway to the upper deck. As soon as he surfaced, he saw a man coming toward him, swinging a cutlass over his head. Joyful reached into his pocket and found only one tiny scalpel left, the one he used for the most delicate of surgical operations, with a blade no more than an inch long. He brought it out, then heard his name called. “Dr. Turner? Is that you?”

“It’s me, Danny. What are you doing here?”

“Dr. Andrew sent me to look for you. Young Will said he saw you climb out on the bowsprit. Dr. Turner’s tending the wounded and—”

No time to ask now who lived and who had died. “Miss Vionne’s below. I need something to smash a padlock.”

Parker turned to the locker beside the mizzenmast and pried it open with the cutlass he’d doubtless taken from a fallen pirate. The tools were mostly useless, rusted and rotten, except for one stone-headed hammer. Joyful seized it and raced back the way they’d come. The shipwright followed him. “Grab that lantern,” Joyful shouted, and Parker did, and this time the two men made their way along the lower passage in decent light. “Manon!” Joyful called. “Manon, I’m coming.”

Parker set down the lantern. He took the hammer from Joyful, gripped it with two hands, swung, and the padlock gave way. Joyful shouldered open the door and bent and went into the tiny cabin. “Manon, oh my God…”

She lay on the floor, bound and gagged. He dropped to his knees beside her and used the small scalpel to cut away the gag and the ropes. She was not alone. A few feet away lay Delight, and next to her a young black boy.

“I’m all right,” Manon said as soon as she could speak. “I’m fine, Joyful. I knew you’d come. Help her.”

Joyful knelt beside Delight and cut her free, then took off his coat and helped her into it. Neither of them said a word.

“She saved me,” Manon said. “If it wasn’t for her…”

“Thank you,” he said, “for more than I can say.”

Delight got shakily to her feet, and didn’t answer. Joyful tossed the little scalpel to Parker, who grabbed it in midair. “Free the boy.” Manon had gotten to her knees, and Joyful helped her up the rest of the way. The front of her gown was torn away, but other than that she looked unharmed. He put his good hand on one side of her face and his wretched glove—which had this night proved to be such a useful weapon—on the other, and leaned forward and kissed her.

“I knew you’d come,” she said again. “Right from the first, I knew you’d come.”

The boy was in much the worst shape. He’d been severely beaten with the cat; none of his wounds had been treated and some had already started to fester. “In God’s name…” Joyful murmured. Then, “What’s your name, lad?”

“They be whipping me so I say my name be Pompey and I be a runaway slave. But I not be Pompey, and all the beatings on the earth don’t make me be a slave. I be Joshua, Dr. Turner, as came to get you and bring you to Mother Zion.”

“This time it was my turn to come and get you,” Joyful said.

Joshua smiled, a wide grin despite cut lips and two missing teeth. “Yes sir, Dr. Turner. Yes sir.”

They went slowly back the way they’d come. Joyful had his arm around Manon’s waist. Delight walked ahead of them, her back straight, her head high. Above decks he saw both women take note of the bodies of Tintin and Gornt Blakeman.

Danny Parker led the way to the catwalk and the bowsprit that would get them back aboard
Lisbetta,
but Manon hung back. “Wait,” she murmured.

“Go ahead with Joshua and Miss Higgins, Danny,” Joyful called. “Miss Vionne and I will follow.” He saw the others safely crossed over to the sloop, then turned to Manon. “What is it?”

She nodded toward the body of Gornt Blakeman. “The stone. It is on his person.”

Sweet Christ! He should have thought of that. No way on earth Blakeman would have left the city without the Great Mogul.

“Look in his breeches,” Manon called softly as she watched him cross the deck, “between his legs.”

Joyful knelt beside Blakeman. The diamond was in a small black-leather box, tied tight around his thigh and nestled in his crotch. Joyful cut it free, wondering how Manon knew it was there, then decided he’d rather not have an answer to the question. “Here,” he said when he returned to her. “You’re the one who best understands what this is. Keep it safe.”

Aboard the
Lisbetta,
Andrew tended the wounded, only one long slash down the front of his cutaway to indicate he’d had a share in the fighting of this night. That, and his thumping heart. Nearly forty years past he and Sam Devrey had drawn straws to see who would go to war and who would stay in New York and spy. Andrew had drawn the short straw. He’d always had some regret about missing the action, if not the danger.

He’d been considerably luckier than his patients: two of the tars and Finbar O’Toole. One of the sailors had a wicked bone-deep cut along one thigh that might cause him to lose the leg, but the bleeding could be stopped now and a decision to amputate made later. The other had lost an ear and required that the wound be stanched and sewn. As for the Irishman, Joyful’s old friend, his belly had been slit open. Andrew had done what he could, but it was just a matter of time.

Joyful came up behind his cousin. Andrew didn’t look up from the wound he was closing. “You found her?”

“Yes. Unharmed, thank God. I’d not have been able to do it without you. Without all of you.”

“No,” Andrew said, no emotion in his voice, “you would not. Meanwhile, four pirates and three of the sailors are dead.”

“Tintin and Blakeman as well,” Joyful said. “I killed them both. With scalpels.”

“Think of it as cutting away a cancer,” Andrew said brusquely. “Young Jesse Edwards is dead as well.”

Joyful looked over to where Will Farrell sat beside the body of his friend. “I know.”

“And Captain O’Toole…” Andrew let the sentence trail away. No point in mouthing a lot of platitudes about the nature of war and the price of freedom. “Back there,” he said.

Joyful went and knelt beside the Irishman, taking his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I knew you’d have to come if I said it was because you owed my father. I had no right.”

“Every right,” O’Toole said. “That was part o’ your legacy as well.” O’Toole’s voice rasped and his breathing was shallow, but the words were clear. “Grand it was. A grand way to go. Better’n an argument over a mahjong tile or a roll o’ the dice. Captain o’ a fine ship and done a fine thing for the nation. A proud thing.” His eyes fluttered closed, and Joyful stayed beside the Irishman, as he drew one breath, then another, and then no breath at all. Across from them, still wearing only Joyful’s ripped and filthy cutaway, Delight Higgins was walking up and down the length of the sloop’s deck, inspecting the faces of the dead.

She was looking for the whistler, the one who had come with the mantua maker to the Dancing Knave and forced her to climb down the ladder to where Tintin waited to take her captive. He was the only one of the pirates who had not raped her. Maybe he was dead and his body had fallen into the sea, or maybe he’d been killed aboard
Le Carcajou.
She’d probably never know. When she reached the end of the row of bodies, she turned and walked back, pausing beside each dead pirate long enough to spit into his face.

They set sail with Danny Parker at the helm and the two tars manning abbreviated sails.

When they came out of Wallabout Bay into the river, Danny headed
Lisbetta
into the wind long enough to put the bodies of the dead over the side. All except Jesse. “Hannah will want to bury him,” Joyful said after he and Will conferred. “We’ve decided to take him home.”

Finbar O’Toole was a different matter. Finbar would have wanted his last resting place to be the sea. They let him go after Andrew said the prayers for his soul, because Joyful was too choked to do so.

Delight waited until the end of the spare, brief service, then went to where Joyful stood beside the ship’s railing, looking into the water that had claimed the body of his friend. “I know you didn’t come for me, but thank you.”

“I would have come for you. Even if Manon were not—I’ll never forget you, Delight.”

“Not likely,” she said, keeping her voice light, pretending the ache of her heart wasn’t a thousand times worse than that caused by her bruised body. “Your four percent of the Knave will serve to keep me in mind.”

“It’s not just that.”

“I know. Joyful…”

“Yes.”

“I’m the one who told Gornt Blakeman about you and Manon. I’d seen you with her in the Fly Market. The vegetable seller told me Manon’s name and I told Blakeman. Because I was so angry.”

“I’m sorry, Delight. I…It’s just not possible to control whom you love.”

“It wasn’t simply because you love her and you don’t love me.”

“I love her differently from how I love you,” he amended.

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. All this time, you never recognized me. ‘Dearie my soul, Miss Clare…’” She waited, but there was still no light of recognition in his face. “Laniah, Joyful. The little slave girl who worked for your sister and worshiped you from afar. That first night, when you appeared in Barnaby Carter’s shay, it was as if you’d materialized from my dreams. But despite everything that happened between us, no matter how often you looked at me, you never saw Laniah.”

He stared at her, trying to see the skinny little girl instead of the beautiful woman in front of him. “You and Molly weren’t killed? You ran away?”

Manon stood across from them, watching. Delight lowered her voice so only Joyful could hear. “Dearie my soul, Mr. Joyful, that surely do be what Laniah be telling. That be exactly how it was and how it do be. Miss Molly, she be in Nova Scotia. And Laniah, she be right here.”

“My God, Delight, why did you never tell me?”

She looked out at the water rippling along the sloop’s hull, fading into stillness after they passed. “I wanted you to see for yourself. I wanted not to be so different from what I had been. Laniah was a person too, Joyful.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. You changed so, it never occurred to me.”

“Never mind, it’s no longer important. But what is important is that Blakeman never finished what he started with your Manon.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Still,” Delight said. “It’s better.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Go on.” Delight nodded toward Manon. “She’s waiting for you.”

“Delight…”

“Go on,” she said again, and Joyful left her where she stood and went to join Manon.

They’d reached the Inner Harbor by then, heading for the river. Delight turned and looked back the way they’d come. A tune floated out across the water. At least she thought it did.
He played in time and he played in tune, but he wouldn’t play nothin’ but “Old Zip Coon.”

Saturday, August 27, 1814

Chapter Twenty-six

The Manhattan Woods,
Soon After Midnight

H
ANNAH WON’T BE SLEEPING,”
Will said. “Not with it so late and neither of us back from town.”

He was right. When Joyful trotted his horse out of the woods and into the clearing, he could see Hannah there in the glittering blue-gray starlight, sitting on the bench beneath the chestnut tree. “I’m glad you brought him home,” she said when she stood up and came to meet them. “That was the right thing.”

He should have guessed. All the way from Maiden Lane he had been pondering how to tell Holy Hannah of Jesse’s death. It was not, of course, necessary. She knew. “Felt it, I did,” she said in a voice that had finished with grieving.

Jesse’s body lay across the horse’s neck, with Will sitting behind him, keeping his dead friend steady. Joyful sat behind, them, the need to keep hold of the reins giving him an excuse to have his arms around both boys. Hannah reached up and put her finger on the bullet wound in the center of Jesse’s forehead. “I was sitting right here wondering where my two lads had got themselves to, and I knew the minute that danged bullet got my one-winged pigeon. He was acting truly brave, was Jesse. He’d o’ wanted to go like that, acting brave.”

“Enormously brave.” Joyful said. “He stopped the bullet meant for me.”

“He’d be right pleased with that,” she said. “Give him here, Will. We can bury him out behind the cabin tomorrow, under them sycamore trees he liked. Don’t seem there’d be any place he’d rest better, seein’ as he had no family, and no proper religion so far as we know.”

Will allowed his friend’s body to slide free into Hannah’s arms. He and Joyful dismounted and tried to help her, but Hannah insisted on carrying the body into the cabin by herself, and didn’t let him go until she put him down on the pile of rags that had been his bed since he came to stay with them. “Only nine days since you brought him home, Will. Him and that big fat kidney from Henry Astor’s private store. You did a real good deed bringing him here. A
mitzvah.
You can be happy about that.”