New York - The Novel

man giving work to a poor one. The last time the Masters had given Charlie work, it hadn’t been John, but a clerk who’d come to make the arrangements.
    They’d both married, John to the Quaker from Philadelphia, Charlie to the daughter of a carter. They both had families. John wouldn’t have known the names of Charlie’s children. But Charlie knew all about John’s.
    For the fact was, Charlie often thought of John. He’d often pass by Master’s handsome house. He knew what Mercy Master looked like, and her children. He picked up gossip about them in the taverns. A curiosity, which may have been a little morbid, made him do it. But John Master would have been surprised to know what a close watch Charlie White kept on his affairs.

    They sat down at a wooden table in the corner and nursed their drinks.
    “How’s your family, Charlie? You doing all right?”
    Charlie needed a shave, and his face was getting furrowed. Under the mess of his black hair, his eyes narrowed.
    “They’re well,” he admitted. “They say you’ve been doing well.”
    “I have, Charlie.” There was no point in denying it. “The war’s been good for a lot of people.”
    It was three years since John’s mother had died and his father Dirk had retired from business and gone to live on a little farm he’d bought north of Manhattan, up in Westchester County. He lived there very contentedly, looked after by a housekeeper. “You’re like an old Dutchman,” his son would tell him affectionately, “who’s retired to his bouwerie.” And though Dirk liked to be told about what was going on, it was John Master who was entirely in control of the family business now. And thanks to the war, business had been booming as never before.
    For the old rivalry between France and Britain had taken a new turn. If the two powers had been struggling since the previous century for controlof the subcontinent of India, the rich sugar trade in the West Indies, and the fur trade of the north, their conflicts in America had mostly been skirmishes, conducted with the aid of the Iroquois, on the upper Hudson or St. Lawrence rivers, far to the north of New York. Recently, however, both powers had tried to grab control of the Ohio Valley to the west, which joined France’s vast, Mississippi River territory of Louisiana to her holdings in the north. In 1754, a rather inexperienced young Virginian officer in the British Army, named George Washington, had made an incursion into the Ohio Valley, set up a small fort and promptly been kicked out of it by the French. In itself, the incident was minor. But back in London, it had caused the British government to come to a decision. It was time to drive their traditional enemy out of the North-East once and for all. They’d gone to war in earnest.
    “I should thank George Washington,” John Master would cheerfully say, “for making me a fortune.”
    War had meant privateering, and John Master had done well out of that. It was a high-risk business, but he’d figured it out. Most voyages made a loss; but the profits from the few captured were spectacular. By taking shares in about a dozen ships at a time, and averaging his risk, his profits had more than paid for the losses. In fact, he’d been able to double or triple his investment every year. It was a rich man’s game. But he could afford to play.
    The real benefit to New York, however, was the British Army. Before long, ten, twenty and soon twenty-five thousand redcoats had arrived from England to fight the French, together with a huge fleet and nearly fifteen thousand sailors. They came to New York and Boston.
    Armies and fleets need provisioning. Not only that: the officers wanted houses built, and services of every kind. In addition to his regular trade supplying the Caribbean, John Master was getting huge government contracts for grain, timber, cloth and rum; and so were most of the other merchants he knew. Modest craftsmen, swamped with demand, were upping their prices. True, some laboring men complained that off-duty soldiers were taking part-time jobs and stealing work from them. But by and large, laboring families like Charlie’s could get unheard-of wages. Most people in New York with anything to sell could say with feeling: “God bless the redcoats.”
    “I get a lot of building work,” said Charlie. “Can’t complain.”
    They talked of their families, and of old times, and they drank throughthe evening. And remembering his youth, it