New York - The Novel

Master.
    “Course they’re starving,” said the custodian. And with the first trace of a change of expression since their conversation began, he actually smiled. “That’s because I don’t feed ’em.”
    “I think that man is sick,” Master said.
    “Sick? I hope he’s dying.”
    “You wish this man to die?”
    “Makes room for the next one.”
    “But are you not given money to feed these men?” Master demanded.
    “I am given money. They live or die as they please. Mostly die.”
    “How can you deal in such a manner, sir, with prisoners under your charge?”
    “These?” A look of disgust formed on the man’s face. “Vermin, I call them. Traitors that should’ve been hung.” The fellow nodded toward the city. “You think it’s any better over there?”
    “I wonder, sir, what your superiors would say about this,” Master said threateningly.
    “My superiors?” The man put his face very close to Master’s, so that the merchant could smell his stinking breath. “My superiors, sir, would say: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ Why don’t you go and askthem, sir, if you really want to know?” And with that he told Master to get off his ship.
    At the next hulk, a young officer poked his head over the side and informed Master, politely enough, that he could not come aboard because half the prisoners had yellow fever.
    At the third, however, he had more luck. The hulk itself appeared to be rotting away, but the tall, thin, hard-faced man who allowed him up was dressed as an officer, and responded to his inquiries precisely. Yes, he had a record of every prisoner who had been on the ship. Sam Flower had been one of them.
    “He died, sir, six months ago.”
    When asked where Flower was buried, the officer waved in the direction of the salt meadows. The bodies were tipped into trenches there and all around, he explained. There were so many of them, and besides, they were only criminals.
    Master said nothing. At least he had his information. Before leaving the vessel, however, he noticed signs that there had recently been a fire in the fo’c’sle. It clearly hadn’t spread far, and he couldn’t imagine the stern officer at his side letting such a thing get out of hand, but he thought to ask: “However would you get the prisoners off, if a fire were to take hold?”
    “I shouldn’t, sir.”
    “You’d let them get to the water, though, surely?”
    “No, sir. I’d batten down the hatches and let them burn. Those are my orders.”
    John Master returned to the city in a somber mood. In the first place, he was shocked that Englishmen, his fellow countrymen, could behave in such a way. The Patriots might or might not be legal prisoners of war, there was an honest legal quarrel over that—but whatever their status, what did it say of the humanity of his own government that they could treat these men in such a way? You may call a man a rebel, he thought, you may call him a criminal, you may say he should be hung—especially when he is a stranger and not your own son. But faced with farmers, small traders, honest laborers, decent men as the Patriots so clearly were, what kind of blindness, what prejudice or, God save us, what cruelty could induce the British authorities to lock them up in hulks and murder them like that?
    Of course, he told himself, he had not known such things were going on. The hulks were out of sight. True, Susan on her visits had told him ofPatriot newspapers that railed against the prisoners’ treatment. But these were gross exaggerations, he had assured her, stoutly denied by such men as his good friend General Howe.
    Yet had he ever gone into the city prisons, only a few hundred yards from his door? No, he had not. And as he considered this circumstance another, and most unpleasant, phrase began to echo in his mind: the words of the loathsome fellow on the first hulk. “You think it’s any better over there?”
    During the next week, he began to make his own discreet inquiries. He said nothing to Albion—it might put him in a difficult position—but there were plenty of people in the town from whom he could get information. A friendly chat with a prison guard; a conspiratorial word or two with an officer. Quietly and patiently, using all the skills at drawing people out that he’d mastered in the taverns of the town so long ago, he gradually found out all he wanted.
    The guard from the hulk was right: the city prisons were practically the same. Behind