January–February 1780
After Asa left, the snow fell and fell.
Day and night. Night and day. Never stopping. The flurries of white constant.
Numbing.
By Christmas week, the drifts lay five feet deep, making tunnels of the streets and keeping everyone indoors, but even indoors we found no reprieve from the cold. The rivers froze the traffic of ships, but the ice hadn’t compacted enough for sleds to cross them with firewood. With no fuel to live or cook by, we had to turn to scavenging. One day, we warmed our hands by burning timber from old ships. The next, by burning fence pickets and barn siding. And we were the fortune ones. In some parts of the city, Maggie told us, people were even burning animal fat to stay warm.
But staying warm wasn’t our only challenge. The city’s storehouses were mere weeks from being emptied of food. With no victualing ships in sight, it appeared we’d soon freeze and starve. In such harsh conditions, even New York’s unstoppable social scene suffered. No one wanted to venture out. With the heart of the British army in the south, my intelligence gathering came to an abrupt halt.
“The hardest winter,” people began to call it. And we were nowhere near the end of it.
While Lucy and Aunt Nora spent the days darning stockings, shirts, and petticoats, I tucked Asa’s letter between the pages of a book and read it. A dozen times. A hundred. I read it till I knew the curves and loops of every letter. Till I’d memorized each sentence. Till I found myself whispering none but yours to myself at breakfast. At church. At dinner. In bed.
It was a phrase for dreaming. A phrase that opened a door just wide enough for my imagination to slip through and escape. After years of plunging into thick volumes by Milton, Voltaire, Andrews, and Pope, I found myself leaping into the sea and cutting through water, Mercy right beside me. Pacing over white sand as waves clear as glass washed over my bare feet.
My imagination grew stronger by the day, till it was as colorful as the world was colorless. I traveled to Versailles and had long garden walks with Marie Antoinette. I stepped into the pages of Evelina, bringing my friends along so they could meet her. I became a pirate as wicked as Edward Teach. A pickpocket more cunning than Jenny Diver.
I knew such flights of fancy were dangerous. I had a family and friends. I had Duncan. Nothing good could come of imagining other possibilities. But I couldn’t leave the house, nor could I spy. Nor could I ask Asa what he’d meant by none but yours.
So I allowed myself to dream.
“We are failing him,” Townsend told me one Wednesday in late January.
Him was General Washington. Code number 711, according to the sheet Anna Strong had passed to me. For the past weeks, I’d had nothing to report. Not a thing. Even Townsend’s information had slowed to a trickle, so we often found ourselves discussing what we already knew.
Indian tribes were fighting on both sides and trying to save their land, the fighting fiercest on the frontier. Blacks, too, were fighting on both sides, both as freemen and as slaves, but the British had been first to offer freedom in exchange for service, which swayed many. The French and Spanish navies were harassing everyone, from Europe to the sugar islands. Russia was toeing toward siding with the British, while the Dutch were edging toward the Americans.
“Our challenge now isn’t only in finding new information,” Townsend said after we finished going over old intelligence. “It’s in communicating it. There’s terrible inefficiency in how our correspondence travels. It goes through Long Island and then crosses the Sound into Connecticut before even beginning to head east.”
I had suspected as much. Townsend was from Long Island. Anna Strong and Abe Woodhull, the prickly man that day at Underhill’s whose surname I’d learned from the code sheet, were as well. The problem with going through Long Island was that General Washington’s army was wintering in Morristown, New Jersey—the opposite direction. “So instead of taking a straight path west, we’re going east, north, west, and then south to reach him?”
“Yes,” Townsend said. “And what good is our information if it arrives late?”
“As good as a year-old newspaper.”
Townsend sighed. “Precisely.”
When I returned home, I found Aunt Nora stacking an assortment of trunks and valises in the entry.
“Make haste, Emmie,” she said, shutting the door behind me to keep out the swirling flurries. “We’re moving to Judge Latimer’s. There’s plenty of room for us all, and he’s gotten hold of two cords of firewood, Lord knows how. Lucy and your uncle have already gone ahead. The judge’s carriage will be back for us any moment.”
I headed up to my room, uneasiness settling in my stomach. I hadn’t seen the judge in weeks—not since the sleigh ride—and I wasn’t eager to face such a blatant reminder of Asa.
Maggie was almost finished packing my things. My shifts, gowns, stays, and shoes all lay in neat, colorful bundles inside the valise on my bed.
“How will you keep warm?” I asked her. She and Malcolm would stay behind to care for the house and deter looters.
“We’ll find a way.”
I scooped eleven shillings from my purse. “Here…maybe this will help?”
She looked up from the valise. “We’ll manage. But thank you.” Her eyes grew thoughtful as they held on me. I waited, sensing she had more to say. “I was young once, too,” she said, after a moment. “I broke a few hearts in my time. I do understand youthful abandon.”
Youthful abandon?
Then it dawned on me. This was about that morning she’d discovered Malcolm and me. Her words were an olive branch. I offered one back. “I’ve never been a mother, Maggie. But I do understand the strength of a mother’s love. I still feel my mother is with me.”
She smiled. “It pleases me to hear you say that. I know you lost her too soon.” Her smile faded away. “I pray for you, Miss Em. Every night, I pray you find your place.” She snapped the valise shut.
“I have a place. It’s here,” I replied. But by the time I said it, she was no longer in the room.
Half an hour later, I stepped into the judge’s grand home on Golden Hill. A fire blazed in the parlor, roaring with heat. We made for it immediately, too cold to suffer through proper greetings.
“You are kind to take us in, Judge,” said Aunt Nora.
“My pleasure, of course,” he replied. “And at a most timely juncture, as it happens. Dr. Holdridge is upstairs ministering to my nephew. I’m afraid Asa is unwell.”
“Asa?” I looked up from the flames. “But he left New York.”
Judge Latimer fixed a long gaze on me, filled with the unspoken. “He tried to go. He made several attempts to sail out of the harbor, but the ice prevented him. He’d planned to go overland to Boston this week, but then…this.”
This.
This changed everything.
Suddenly, I couldn’t catch my breath.
As Aunt Nora and Lucy saw to the unloading of our baggage, the judge stepped close and bowed his head to mine. “Miss Coates, my nephew has never said a word that would lead me to think he’d want you with him at this time, but—” One hand came to his mouth, his long fingers fluttering, then fell away. “He is very ill, Miss Coates. Very. And it would mean everything to me if you would go to him. I fear you may not have another chance.”
I flew upstairs like I’d grown wings.
Instinct took me right to Asa’s bedroom. He lay in bed, his eyes closed. His cheeks were bright crimson with fever—but the rest of him was so pale, so bloodless, he looked like he’d been dusted with chalk. His body trembled weakly. He looked like a young hero under some sort of evil spell. Like death had chosen him.
I felt myself swoon, old memories rushing back. “How is he?” I asked.
Uncle Henry looked up from a chair by Asa’s bedside. “Better not answered,” he replied evenly. “Morning may tell us more.”
I stood, trying to understand what that meant. Trying to make it mean something different. Then I brought a chair from the corner of the room and sat beside Uncle Henry.
“Dear Emmie,” he said, smiling. “There’s no need to keep me company. This is what I do.”
“Thank you, Uncle, but I’ll stay.” Nothing was going to make me leave. Nothing. I’d seen Asa at the brink before. This time, I wouldn’t leave his side. “Is there anything I can do, Uncle? Can I—”
“Francisca,” Asa breathed. His eyes opened—barely. “Est-ce vous, Comet?”
“Pay no mind to anything he says,” Uncle Henry said. “ ’Tis from the fever. The delirium is setting in.”
It wasn’t delirium—it was the truth.
Asa had always seen me.