Free City of Glory by Beverly Swerling Page B

streets of Manhattan, the smell of the countinghouse still on him. He’d been sitting in a cubby off the main room, hearing the clink of the coins—cash money he’d promised for Devrey scrip and cash money he’d delivered—watching through a crack in the door while the certificates mounted into a higher and higher pile on the clerk’s desk. At three he’d had to order the doors closed and the purchases stopped because he was out of ready money. Virtually beggared, if the truth be told. The thought made him howl with laughter. Beggared was he? With what had come in on the Canton Star ? Not quite. He laughed again, enjoying the looks of the curious passersby. They all knew who he was, every poxed resident of the city was talking about him this day. Sweet Jesus, but sometimes life was good.
    The midday storm had greatly lessened the day’s heat; now the sun was shining and there was a cool easterly breeze. It felt good, fine in fact, and hunger was making a pleasant anticipation in his belly. Still, Blakeman paused a few steps before Eugenie Fischer’s house.
    He looked across the road to the Common, dominated by the new City Hall, finished two years before. Marble on three sides only, and plain brownstone at the back. It was a plan put in place by small-minded men who could not imagine the city growing further north. But already the city extended well beyond City Hall, the population moving always deeper into the woods known as the Manhattan wilderness. These days New York City occupied the full three-mile stretch of the island’s narrow southern tip. As for what was coming…The grid laid out in 1811, before the war, showed all of Manhattan—the entire thirteen-mile length, by God!—divided by a dozen north-south avenues a hundred feet wide, and crisscrossed with a hundred fifty-five numbered streets, each sixty feet wide. The plan was for a city of uniform side-by-side lots and straight-
sided, cojoined, right-angled houses that would be cheap and easy to build. No fancy parks or sweeping vistas in the manner of European capitals. Workers were what New York City needed if she was to fulfill her destiny. Thousands of them; Christ, maybe tens of thousands. Seeing the city develop in just that fashion was one of Blakeman’s dreams. Today he’d brought it a little closer to reality.
    The thought made the sap rise in him. He strode to Eugenie’s front door.

    Eugenie Fisher had a table for two laid in the boudoir off her bedroom, and she served Blakeman herself from a makeshift sideboard set up in front of a fireplace not needed in summer. Because, she explained, “I thought you’d want more than the usual amount of privacy, dear Gornt.”
    “Mmm, yes.” Blakeman drank the soup she gave him without much attention. He was more interested in her than in the food, however hungry he’d thought himself when he arrived.
    Eugenie was aware of his brash gaze. Sometimes she stared back, but never for very long. And she never gave even the merest hint that she knew what he was thinking. Mostly, she made small talk, an amusing thing she’d read in the Federalist Evening Post, or the Democratic-Republican paper, the National Advocate. How her maid had been the first to bring Eugenie word that a ship was coming into harbor, only according to her it was a British man-o’-war coming to shell the city. Until finally, “Gornt, I can’t bear it. You’ve been here nearly twenty minutes and you still haven’t told me what happened with Bastard Devrey.”
    “Exactly what I planned to happen. I like your frock.” He leaned across the table and fingered the short, puffed sleeve that bared her arm. The fabric was white and thin and felt incredibly soft to his touch. A wide blue satin ribbon caught the gown below her breasts. The dress flowed free from there to her ankles; he could see she’d adopted the latest French fashion and wasn’t corseted. He’d heard that in Europe the women adopting this mode actually damped their