New York - The Novel

British. Frank wasn’t very interested in history, but he’d enjoyed seeing the geometric lines of the old stone walls and the gun emplacements.
    This time, after coming up the Hudson as far as Albany, Frank and his father had headed west. First they’d taken a coach along the old turnpike road across the northern lip of the Catskills to Syracuse, then along the top of the long, thin Finger Lakes, past Seneca and Geneva, and after that, all the way across to Batavia and finally Buffalo. It had taken many days.
    Frank reckoned he knew why his father had brought him. Of course, he was the only boy in the family, but it wasn’t only that. He liked to know how things worked. At home, he enjoyed it when his father tookhim onto the steamboats and let him inspect their furnaces and the pistons. “It’s the same principle as the big steam-powered cotton gins they have in England,” Weston had explained. “The plantations we finance in the South mostly produce raw cotton, which we ship across the ocean to those gins.” Sometimes Frank would go down to the waterside to watch the men packing the cargoes of ice, so that it would stay frozen all the way down to the kitchens of the big houses in tropical Martinique. When the workmen had installed gas lighting in their house that spring, he’d watched every inch of piping as it went in.
    So it was only natural, he supposed, that his father should have chosen him of all his children to accompany him now, to witness the opening of the huge engineering project in the North.

    Weston Master took a draw on his cigar. The path was like a tunnel, but a short way ahead there was an arch of bright sky, where the trees ended. He glanced down at his son and smiled to himself. He was glad to have Frank with him. It was good for a boy to spend time alone with his father. And besides, there were some particular things he wanted to share with his son on this journey.
    More than thirty years had passed since the unexpected death of his own father in England. The letter, which had come from old Mr. Albion, who had gone to some trouble to discover all the details of the affair, explained that he had been set upon by ruffians in the city, probably intent only upon theft. James Master had put up such a fight, though, that one of the fellows had struck him a terrible blow with a cudgel, from which he had not recovered. The news had not only come as a great shock to Weston, it had also set the seal on a prejudice that remained with him for the rest of his life. All through his New York childhood, for reasons he never quite understood, England had seemed to claim the mother who was missing from his home. It was the war with England, also, which kept his father away, and made the other boys at school call his father a traitor. And these wounds had only partly healed when this news came that, like some ancient god who can never be satisfied, England had taken his father’s life as well. Even though he was a rational young man at Harvard when it happened, it was not so surprising that a primitive sense of aversion to England and all things English had settled in his soul.
    As time passed, the scope of this aversion grew wider. While he was at Harvard, at the time of the French Revolution, it had seemed to Weston that perhaps in that country, inspired by the example of America, a new European freedom might be dawning. But as the liberal constitution for which Lafayette and his friends had hoped gave way first to the bloodbath of the Terror, and then to Napoleon’s empire, Weston had concluded that the freedoms of the New World might never be possible in the Old. Europe was too mired in ancient hatreds and rivalries between nations. The whole Continent, in Weston’s imagination, was a dangerous place, and he wanted as little to do with it as possible.
    He was in excellent company. Hadn’t Washington, in his farewell address, warned the new American nation to avoid foreign entanglements? Jefferson, that standard-bearer of the European Enlightenment, and former resident of Paris, had likewise declared that America should stick to honest friendship with all nations, but entangling alliances with none. Madison agreed. Even John Quincy Adams, the great diplomat, who’d lived in countries from Russia to Portugal, said the same. Europe was trouble.
    Proof of their wisdom had come a dozen years ago, when Britain and Napoleon’s empire were locked in their great struggle and the United States, bound to