The Whiskey Rebels (3 page)

I stared at this man who stood still with his shoulders wide in a stance of readiness, a bound coil ready to spring. He was slight of build, evenly proportioned, but a little inclined to be short, and, even stranger, he was bearded. I could not be certain in the poor light, but I thought he might be dark of skin, a lascar-looking fellow.

Dorland shook his head at the scene before him, having no greater understanding than I. He set down his bayonet and backed away, his hands out to make clear he would offer no more tricks. “Let him go,” he said, looking at his friend writhing under the stranger’s boot.

Dorland, however, was now no longer in a position to negotiate. Without taking his foot off the chest of the fallen man, the stranger had lashed out and pulled Dorland to him, the way a frog pulls in an insect with its tongue. He pressed Dorland’s back tight to his chest with his left elbow, left hand gripping Dorland’s right hand. The stranger’s own right hand now held his knife to Dorland’s thumb.

“You’re going to feel a hot sting,” he said, “and then excruciating pain.”

He had done so much and so quickly, and I did not know him. I could only presume he truly meant to cut off Dorland’s thumb, and I could not allow it. Yes, Dorland was a fool, and yes, he had thought it a fitting thing to kill me, but he was hardly the first to think that. And I
had
done him harm. I’d injured him and then refused to meet him on the field of honor. Having his thumb cut off in a Helltown alley struck me as a bit more than he deserved, or, if not, then at least more than I wanted upon my conscience.

“Better to let him go,” I said to the bearded man.

“I think not,” the stranger said. “He’ll likely return to make another attempt.”

“I must insist you let him go,” I said, this time more strongly. “It’s my rescue. I’d like to think I have some say in it.”

The bearded man pushed Dorland away. He stumbled but did not fall.

Perhaps it was the darkness, but the stranger’s expression seemed to me coldly, even frighteningly, blank. He had not been out for blood before, and he was not disappointed now. He had judged mutilating Dorland the best course, and he would have pursued it had I not insisted otherwise. Now, with Dorland away, he released his foot from the friend’s chest and took several steps back from his victims, who were apparently not so badly hurt that they could not struggle to their feet. These were dandified gentlemen with no stomach for street brawling in the mud and rain. A little taste of violence and pain proved sufficient.

“There you have it,” I said. “You may flee.”

Dorland gazed upon me. “Saunders, don’t think our business concluded,” he said, apparently eager to prove the stranger’s point.

“You did not find this encounter decisive?” I asked, then vomited once more.

“You are repulsive.”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Ladies are known to find me charming.”

He took a step forward but one of his friends, the one who had been struck in the throat, held him back. Dorland grabbed his fallen weapon, and he and his friends hurried off.

Leonidas hopped down from his broken pedestal, sending out a splatter of cold mud, and placed an arm around me, for he sensed it was only with great difficulty that I remained on my feet. “Let’s get you dry and warm,” he said. “Then I’ll present this gentleman, and we shall all have a talk.”

I found the stranger’s coldness unnerving, but I knew a worthy fighter when I saw one, and I owed him my politeness. “I am in your debt,” I said to him.

The man grinned—the first sign I’d seen that he possessed anything like human feeling—and it was a wide, open, likable sort of grin, but also strangely false. It was not precisely insincere but rather had the air of being an afterthought, something he had to remember to do when interacting with human beings in such a way that involved no violence.

“Entirely my pleasure,” he said, and I did not doubt him.

With the stranger lagging behind, perhaps making certain our enemies attempted no late ambush, Leonidas led me limping back into the Lion and Bell. We took a table near the fire, attracting no little attention as we did so. My man shrugged off his greatcoat, hanging it to dry, and then his hat, revealing a round head of closely cut hair. Next he took his pistols and checked the powder. The sight of this big Negro examining firearms caused a few men to gaze upon us with apprehension. Philadelphia white men are more at ease around Negroes than those in southern climes, but the sight of a muscular and broad-backed African checking his pistols is never a comforting sight. No one dared say a word, though—in part because it is unwise to be rude to a large man with firearms, but also because there was something in Leonidas’s countenance that allayed suspicion. He was black as midnight but handsome as Oroonoko, possessed of a natural dignity, and if there was but one Negro in the country you wished to see with primed pistols, surely this was he.

“You did have weapons,” I said. “I thought you were posturing.”

His mouth twitched in the merest hint of a smile. “I should have hated to shoot a hole through my coat. ’Tis a fine bit of tailoring.”

“Why do you have pistols?” I demanded.

“I have to do something with my money, as I am not permitted to purchase my freedom.”

I often had no need of his services, and I let Leonidas hire himself out as a laborer down by the docks. He had saved enough to purchase his freedom at a fair price should I wish to permit it. It seemed to me an unnatural cruelty to ask a man, made a slave through no fault of his own, to have to pay for his freedom.

While I dried myself and let the pain wash over me and crystallize, Leonidas fetched for me more whiskey, for the events of the evening had created a void within me that wanted filling, and soon. He handed me a mug and sat down next to me.

All this time, the stranger stood by in a pantomime of anonymity. He shook off his coat by the fire. He patted his hat against his forearm. He rubbed his hands together.

“Again I thank you,” I said to him. “I never asked for it, but still—very kind.”

He nodded, and I had the distinct impression he grew weary of gratitude.

“You’re fortunate we arrived when we did,” Leonidas said. “You looked quite defeated.”

I met his eye. This notion that you cannot look into a man’s eye while dissimulating is, of course, an utter falseness. I could stare into the eyes of Jesus and tell him I was John the Baptist, and should the chance ever arrive to do so unlikely a thing, I meant to try it, just to see how it would go. “A few more minutes would have set things right. Still, I am always grateful for timely assistance.”

Leonidas turned to the stranger. “May I present to you Mr. Kyler Lavien.”

“Lavien,” I said. “What sort of name is that? Are you a Frenchman?”

The stranger met my gaze with something hard and unflinching. “I am a Jew.”

I suppose he might have been prepared for some unkind words, but he would not get them from me. I have nothing against Jews. I have nothing for them, of course, but nothing against them, nothing against anyone—not Papists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Mennonites, Moravians, Millenarians, or Mohammedans. I have nothing against members of any religion—except Quakers, whom I despise, with all their sanctimonious peace-mongering and property-owning and
thee
s and
thou
s.

“And what is your business with me?” I asked him.

“That is rather the question, isn’t it?” said Leonidas. He looked pointedly at Lavien when he spoke, and I felt very much a stranger to events in which I ought to have been central.

Lavien cleared his throat. “I was outside your boardinghouse when this good fellow left in search of you, because in the capacity of my work I followed someone to your rooms.”

“Whom did you follow, and what is your work?” I said. “My head is too hurt for circuitous answers. Say what you mean, sir.”

“I am employed in the service of your old acquaintance, Colonel Alexander Hamilton. I serve him now in his capacity as Secretary of the Department of the Treasury.”

Despite my pain and drunkenness and general confusion, I felt my senses sharpening. I had suffered a decade of ignominy because of Hamilton, and now here was his man to save me from a vengeful husband. It made no sense.

“What does Hamilton want with me?” I asked.

“That is the wrong question,” said Leonidas. “Ask him whom he followed to your house.”

“Enough of this nonsense,” I said. “Tell me what you do not say.”

“In the capacity of serving the Treasury Department,” said Lavien, “I followed to your home a lady who wished to deliver you a message.”

“What of it? Ladies like to send me messages. I am a good correspondent.”

“This lady,” said Lavien, “I believe is known to you, though you have not spoken with her in many years. Her name is Mrs. Cynthia Pearson.”

All pain, all confusion and disorder, were gone, and I saw the world before me in sharp detail—fine angles and defined colors. Cynthia Pearson, whom I had once intended to marry, the daughter of Fleet—my dead and much-abused friend—betrayed, as I had been, by Hamilton himself. I had not spoken to her in ten years. I had seen her, yes, glimpses upon the street, but never spoke. She had married another man, married for wealth, I believed, and our paths were forever diverged. Or so I thought, for Leonidas and this stranger now told me that this very evening she had come to my house.

“Why?” I spoke to Leonidas, forming my words slowly and methodically, as though being careful with my question might help him produce a more lucid response. “For what reason did she come to see me?”

Leonidas met my gaze and matched my tone. He had been with me almost as long as I had been apart from Cynthia, and he understood the importance of this question. He understood what this must mean to me. “It has something to do with her husband.”

I shook my head. Never had I believed that Cynthia Pearson even knew I lived in Philadelphia, and now she had come to my home, at night, to speak to me of her husband.

Seeing the confusion upon my face, Leonidas took a deep breath. “She believes her husband, possibly herself and her children, to be in some danger. She came to see you tonight, Ethan, to beg for your help.”

Joan Maycott

Summer 1781

I
wanted to produce one sort of story, and I found myself producing one entirely different. Much of what transpired was born directly from my own decisions, my own actions. If I had not been what is called willful in women (it is called energetic or ambitious in men), my life might have unfolded quite differently. When we make decisions that lead us down a difficult path, it is easy to imagine the untaken course as peaceful and perfect, but those neglected choices may have been as bad or worse. I must feel regret, yes, but it does not follow that I must feel remorse.

I shall therefore tell my story and explain how I came to be an enemy to this country and the men who rule her. I do so with the full expectation that even if these words are read, they will find few sympathizers. I will be called a base and treacherous woman, diabolical in my unnatural resistance to the paternity of nation. Even so, there will always be those who have lived through what I have, similar or worse—for I know there is worse—and they will understand. It is small compensation, but there is no other for me.

I was born under the name of Joan Claybrook, and I lived on lands near the town of Albany in New York. My mother was one of six children from a poor family, and my father had come to this country from Scotland an indentured servant, so they set out upon the adventure of life with few advantages. But they struggled, and land was cheap, and by the time of my birth they were possessed of a moiety of property upon which they farmed wheat and barley and raised some cattle, occasionally pigs, and always a prodigious number of fowl. We would never have, and never aspired to, true wealth, but my family had reached a state in which we had no fear of starvation, and, at least before the war, we managed to save more each year than we spent.

I had one older brother and two younger, and, the family being well situated—quite overstocked, really—with heirs and farm hands, my parents, and my brothers too, were most indulgent of my whims. I was disinclined to farmwork and, as the only girl child, found my family tolerant—unwisely tolerant, some would say—of my wishes. It was not that I did not have responsibilities. By my estimate, I had far too many, but they only asked of me what they could not do without. I tended the chickens and collected their eggs. I kept them fed and cleaned their coop. I did a bit of spinning and sewing. Beyond that, I read.

It is to be expected, I suppose, that simple folk such as my parents, who grew up with little more than their letters, who had neither time nor money for reading, would have discouraged these pursuits. Perhaps they ought to have, but they were kind people and they found my love of books and reading charming—perhaps as Dr. Johnson found charming the dog that walked upon its hindquarters. They bought for me what they could and cultivated friendships with people of means in Albany, people who would be willing to lend me books of history and natural philosophy and political economy. I hardly cared what it was, so long as it imparted knowledge. I would sit outside on fair days, by the fire in foul, and I would forget there was a far smaller world around me.