Chapter 5
For more than two centuries New York City had been spreading across the rocky island that had once been nibbled by glaciers and later had served as the fertile hunting grounds of clever Indian trappers, before the Dutch had come, and the British with their guns and liquor and lust for empire.
The city that Merry found was tame, dirty, and crowded.
Pigs wandered at will, munching on garbage and street dirt which the citizens diligently piled in the alleys to be hauled away twice a week by the Department of Scavengers.
Milch cows meandered between neat gabled houses, dining on the bark of the Lombardy poplars, planted with well-meaning innocence along the narrow walkways.
Within a brisk walk of the carpeted homes of the rich were the Five Points slums, where more than thirteen families might share a single privy.
Everything here seemed remarkable to Merry: the vast markets that fed so many, the sobering bulk of the prison, the libraries, the almshouse, the botanical garden.
There was not a street you could pass without seeing evidence of the city’s awesome complexity, where misery rubbed shoulders with grandeur in no more wonder than the pauper and the banker have when they pass each other on the pavement.
Today New York was celebrating Evacuation Day, commemorating that proud memory in the First War of Independence when the British had been forced to take their scrambled leave from the city before General Washington’s triumphal entry.
It was noon, and Merry’s gaze caught the gleam from a church tower as its great bell began to dance.
The voices of other bells joined in. From the Presbyterian Church, the Trinity, the Dutch Reformed, French Episcopal, and Baptist came brilliant thunder that laced the cool air between the hard claps of cannon salute.
In front of Merry the parade was retreating down the straight stretch of Broadway.
A unit of dragoons had been the last of the military that would pass them.
The workers came next, under bright printed banners that snapped in the shifting breeze.
The hat makers, the pewterers—and the blacksmith trade with a wonderful float that carried a working anvil and red fire, where three men stood forging an anchor, even as six horses pulled them along.
What a day it was, what a parade! Merry glanced to her side, at Sir Michael Granville, wondering how the tall British man could remain unruffled in the face of a patriotic display that commemorated a humiliating defeat for his own nation.
His expression was much as it might have been if he were watching the hunting dance of tribesmen in loin cloths and feathers—as if it were to him a colorful, primitive spectacle full of na?ve and pretty drama and simple symbolism.
He was too well-bred to have said anything to confirm her suspicions, but condescension has its own particular odor, detectable like a yard where goats have been, even if one walks through it with closed eyes and covered ears.
She hoped that soon she would be able to look at him without feeling at all intrigued.
It was Sir Michael who had brought Aunt April to New York.
Aunt April had never shown Merry the letter, but it happened that Sir Michael was a distant cousin to the Dowager Duchess of St. Cyr, one of the few of Aunt April’s correspondents who wrote back more often than once a decade.
On hearing that Sir Michael had obtained permission to visit the New World in the entourage of the British prisoner-of-war exchange agent, the duchess had encouraged him to convey her respects to Aunt April.
It was a compliment to the duchess’s influence that he had actually done so after his arrival in the United States.
Merry could imagine the missive he had addressed to her aunt, full of polite clichés and a vaguely expressed desire that they should meet.
It must have been an unlovely surprise for Sir Michael to find a letter from Aunt April in his return mail, promising to be in New York within the fortnight.
In the face of that it was hard to understand why he had received them with kindness. Instinct, based on no solid evidence, warned her that Sir Michael was not a man who routinely bothered himself with unrewarded kindnesses.
Passing them was a wide float that nested a press, the printers aboard working with quick economical movements to make broadsides.
Two youthful apprentices leaned off the back, tossing the fresh inked pages into greedy outstretched hands in the crowd.
Sir Michael caught one and handed it to Merry with a smile.
“A souvenir for you, Mistress Merry,” he said.
Mistress Merry, quite contrary, how does your garden grow.… It had been a favorite tease of the village children. Merry could barely hear it without wincing. She might have told him not to keep calling her that if she hadn’t been worried that the pain would be exposed in her voice.
Glancing at the paper, she saw that it was an ode about the Battle of Fort George last May, between her nation and his.
No matter that his purpose here was peaceful.
He was still her enemy. It was incredible that they hadn’t discussed it, not once, although she’d been in New York a week.
Aunt April had always been there, fawning and frightened, until this morning, when she had stayed in her rooms, avoiding happily the noisy, shoving crowds.
Mostly Aunt April had talked to him about England: gossip, much of it, and the rest politics, the arts, fashion, and the latest books.
They had talked of New York too, which ironically he knew much better than Merry, because he had been here often before the war.
He had many friends here, and she met them at dinner at the mansion of the Austrian trade commissioner, where Sir Michael was staying and where he had somehow gotten an invitation for Merry and her aunt to stay as well.
Folding the paper in half, Merry considered Sir Michael’s face, where deep half-circle lids lay open over green irises with spokes of silver.
His nose was a nice shape, even if the bridge was rather high, and the spare line of his mouth bent stiffly at the corners when he smiled, producing a pair of shallow and not unattractive dimples.
Scissored brown hair barely slit with gray curled forward stylishly over his ears.
Carl, of course, was going to be furious with Aunt April when he heard about all this.
“What is war,” said Carl’s sister abruptly, scraping tight the paper’s crease between her gloved thumb and forefinger, “if we can stand together like this and watch a parade?”
The green-silver eyes glanced thoughtfully at the crowd around them. “They don’t seem to mind if we stand here together,” he said.
Obviously not. It was the kind of thing she had discovered he was likely to say: a slightly preposterous half gambit that shook her unsteady poise with aggravating efficiency.
Around them on the pavement the many gay, anonymous celebrants moved, swarming and shouting and turning in a crisp sigh of early spring garments, freshly brushed for the day, just-turned white collars on the little boys and flat new ribbons for the girls.
Even if the restless crowd could have identified Sir Michael as British, the men and women of New York, intelligent patriots that they were, had a far greater hatred for their own Madisonian government, which had declared this costly, tiresome war that was destroying the economy of their city.
Damn the British Navy, which had blockaded their port; but damn, damn those idiots in Washington who had struck Britannia on her stuffy cheek and brought this clumsy war down upon the hapless American merchants.
“My point stands,” said Merry and was grateful it came out sounding less feeble than she knew it was.
Granville lifted his hand, where wide dark knuckles rode from the black, tight-fitting sleeve of his coat. He was, by far, the most elegantly dressed man Merry had ever met, certainly not excepting those in her family.
“Do you see that pedestal?” he asked her, pointing into the bowling green before them, to where a wide slab of marble lay beside a marshal, whose job it was to chastise anyone who stepped on the grass here, or harassed the spindly, long-suffering trees.
“There was a statue of King George III on it, torn down in 1776 and melted into shot. It might have been one of those pieces that killed my uncle, fighting here a year later. He left four children below the age of seven, one of them blind.” There was a short silence while she looked away from him.
Then he said, “Merry, it goes back and forth. Will it really help if we blame each other?”
Will it really help if we blame each other? As Merry stood wondering if there was something wrong with his logic or her own, Sir Michael looked down at her, his eyes still in complex, mature calm, and said, “Anyway, we’ll have enough time to work it out, won’t we, on the way to England?”
It was a ridiculous error. Merry stared up at him with a start. “I’m not going to England.”
Correcting her with the censureless care one might use with a child who has spoken a faulty lesson, Granville said, “You are. The day after tomorrow on the Guinevere, with your aunt. It’s all right.
You can trust me. Your aunt and I have talked about it, and I understand why she doesn’t want it to become known. ”
And then he smiled at her as though he had not with a single sentence blown the sane structure of her life into slithering fragments.
A few moments had passed, blank and ugly, before Merry could organize her blood-stripped muscles into activity and begin to walk backward from the well-mannered face with its features slowly realigning themselves into compassion and concern.
“Merry? Dear God. What have I said? Can it be—could it really be that you didn’t know?”