New York - The Novel

house of her own in Mount Street, Mayfair, where she and James will live. As you may surmise, she is a few years older than James, but besides her wealth and many fine connections, she is generally accounted a beauty.
    I will not say that I am without reservations in this matter, nor did I promote it—I understand James first met the lady at the house of Lord Riverdale—but most of London would certainly say that your son had made a brilliant match.
    John Master put the letter down. It was some time before he could bring himself to show it to Mercy.
    1773
    No one could remember a worse winter. The East River was frozen solid. But it wasn’t just the awful fact of the cold. It was the misery that went with it. And the deaths. Darkness was falling, but Charlie White was nearly home. His hat was pulled down, his scarf was wrapped round his face. He’d driven his cart across the frozen river to Brooklyn to buy a hundredweight of flour from a Dutch farmer he was friendly with. At least his family would have bread for a while.
    Sometimes in the last couple of years Charlie had felt angry, sometimes just discouraged. If his personal feelings against John Master were as keen as ever, they were mixed with an outrage and a grief that was more general.
    He knew the troubles of the poor, because his family often suffered them. And it seemed to him that there must be a better way in which the world could be arranged. Surely with a vast, fertile continent stretching westward, southward and northward, it could not be right that working folk in New York were starving. It could not be right that rich men like Master, backed by the British Church and British arms, could profit hugely when ordinary folk could not find work. Something must be wrong. Something needed to change.
    Surely, if free men like himself were running the city, instead of therich, and if their elected representatives ruled the land, instead of royal governors who cared nothing for the wishes of the colonists, then life would have to get better.
    The protests against the Stamp Act had worked. The new prime minister, Lord North, had removed Townshend’s taxes—except, just to save his face, the tax on tea. And that was just the moment, in Charlie’s opinion, for the Sons of Liberty to continue the fight. But influenced by the old guard like John Master, the city authorities had turned against them. The statue of King George had been set up on Bowling Green. Everyone said, “God save the king.” There was a tough new English governor called Tryon now, and more British troops under General Gage. It was back to business as usual. Why, Montayne had even told the Liberty Boys not to meet in his tavern any more.
    Well, to hell with Montayne. The boys had got their own meeting place now. Hampden Hall they called it, after the hero who’d stood up to the tyrant Charles I in the English Parliament. As for John Master and his crowd, and Tryon, and General Gage—let them remember what happened to King Charles. It might be quiet on the streets, but Sears and the Sons of Liberty had a large faction in the Assembly, now, who listened to them. “Change will come,” Charlie would say grimly to his friends, over a drink in the tavern. “And when it does …”
    Not this winter, though. Last year, there had been a collapse of credit in London. Soon all the colonies were suffering—and that was before this terrible winter hit. The poorest were starving. The city authorities were doing their best to feed them, but it was hard to keep pace.
    Charlie had just got to the southern end of the Common, where it met Broadway, when he saw the woman and her daughter coming out of the dingy old Poor House.
    The woman paused for a moment, glancing anxiously up at the darkening sky. By the look of it, she’d been in the Poor House longer than she realized, and the darkness had taken her by surprise. Then she took off her shawl and wrapped it round her daughter, for the wind was starting to bite.
    The street was nearly empty. He drew level. She looked up.
    “Are you going down Broadway?” She had no idea who he was. He didn’t answer. “Would you take us down Broadway? I’d be glad to pay. With my daughter, here …”
    She was right, of course. In the last few months, with the times beingso hard, the streets had become unsafe. Women he knew had taken to selling their bodies for extra cash. He knew men who’d been robbed. The woman and her daughter shouldn’t be walking home