City of Dreams by William Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

he had put troops in Harlem and at the Grand Battery and on all the beaches along the East River and in all the little dirt forts that he had built to control the city, the British began to move.
    Stuckey’s company spent a Friday night on duty in a new trench that cut across Bayard’s farm, about a quarter mile north of the Common. Then Stuckey allowed them to go home to sleep. Gil expected it would be the last night that they would sleep in their own beds for a long time. So he dropped onto the feathers under Sam Fraunces’s eaves and slept with the same sense of purpose that a miser banks his pennies.
    But just after dawn, he and Big Jake were awakened by a pounding on the door.
    Gil popped up first. “The tattoo! We missed the tattoo! It must be the attack!”
    Jake rolled over. “Hunh?”
    Gil leaped to his feet. “Get up. Get dressed. Or we’ll get lashed.”
    “It ain’t that,” said Fraunces through the door. “There’s a woman downstairs . . . says she’s a friend of yours.”
    “A friend?” said Gil.
    Big Jake popped up. “A woman?”
    L ORETTA WAS WAITING on the street. “Fraunces wouldn’t let me come up.”
    Gil turned to Big Jake. “You can go back to bed.”
    Big Jake gave them a wink. “You want the room for a bit?”
    “No,” said Loretta. “That ain’t what this is about.”
    So Big Jake shrugged and went shambling back up the stairs.
    Gil looked at the sharp shadows slanting over Broad Street. “It ain’t much more than six o’clock. I was on the line all night.”
    “If the big fight’s comin’, time to show you the house, the house with the gold guineas.”
    So Gil followed her through the deserted streets.
    She wore common clothes and loosed her hair, and he almost told her that she looked beautiful in the morning. But he already knew her answer: Any woman would look beautiful in the morning, if she was leading a man to a stash of gold. So Gil said nothing.
    They headed up Broad Street and turned onto Beaver, which was lined with gabled Dutch buildings that housed the merchants who traded the pelts that had given the street its name. But rebellion had put most of the trading houses out of business, so most of the stores were shuttered.
    Then they turned onto New Street, the first street that the British made after they took the city from the Dutch. At the lower end lived artisans, craftsmen, and mechanics, who did business on the first floors and kept families on the second. But the neighborhood changed as they headed toward the Presbyterian Church that sat on Wall Street and stared down New Street like the all-seeing eye of God. The dwellings grew larger, taller, newer .
    Halfway up the street they came to the intersection of Fluten Barrack, which cut from Broad Street over to Broadway.
    Loretta stopped on the corner, near an old man who had built a fire on the street and was stirring a large pot of coffee over the flame.
    “Mornin’, folks,” he said. “Care to buy some coffee?”
    “Coffee?” said Gil. “Where did you get coffee?”
    “Been savin’ it. Last coffee in New York, but the redcoats’ll be in our lap soon enough. So I’ll drink it now, and what I can’t drink I’ll sell. No tree bark nor ground-up shoe leather. Just fine roasted beans.”
    Gil pulled three copper pennies from his pocket.
    “That’ll do.” The old man snatched the coins, took a dipper from the side of the pot, and ladled out a measure of coffee.
    Gil had a sip. It was hot and bitter and tasted better in the early morning than rum at midnight. He offered the dipper to Loretta, but she ignored it because her eyes were fixed on a house across the street.
    “Old man,” she said. “There’s guards in front of that house.”
    “You mean John Blunt’s? The Tory? Colonel Silliman of Connecticut moved in there the other day. Colonel Gold Silliman. Some name, eh?”
    Gil stepped closer to Loretta and whispered, “That’s his actual name. Gold . And that’s as close as we’re