For when the two judges saw it—though they were friends of Governor Cosby themselves—they threw the stooges out and started again. The new jury was not rigged. The trial would be honest. British fair play. New York might be a long way from London, but it was English, after all.

The whole colony was waiting with baited breath.

Not that it mattered. The defendant hadn’t a hope.

The third day of August, the year of Our Lord 1735. The British Empire was enjoying the Georgian age. For after Queen Anne, her equally Protestant kinsman, George of Hanover, had been asked to take the throne; and soon been followed by his son, a second George, who was ruler of the empire now. It was an age of confidence, and elegance, and reason.

The third day of August 1735: New York, on a hot and humid afternoon.

Seen from across the East River, it might have been a landscape by Vermeer. The long, low line of the distant wharfs, which still bore names like Beekman and Ten Eyck—the step-gabled rooftops, squat storehouses and sailing ships at anchor—made a peaceful picture in the watery silence. In the panorama’s center, Trinity Church’s graceful little steeple seemed to offer a pinprick to the sky.

In the streets, however, the scene was far from peaceful. Ten thousand people lived in New York now, and the place was growing bigger every year. Wall Street, on the line of the former ramparts, was only halfway up the waterfront. West of Broadway, orchards and neat Dutch gardens remained, but on the eastern side, the brick and wooden houses were tightly crammed together. Pedestrians had to thread between stoops and stalls, water barrels and swinging shutters, and dodge the wheels of the carts churning their way over the dirt or cobbled roadway to the noisy market.

But above all, for anyone in the streets, the wretchedness came from the fetid air. Horse droppings, cowpats, slops from the houses, and garbage and grime, dead cats and birds, excrement of every kind, lay strewn on the ground, waiting for the rain to wash it all away, or the sun to bake it to powder. And on a hot and steamy day, from this putrid mess, a soupy stench arose, fermented by the sun, creeping up wooden walls and fences, impregnating brick and mortar, choking every ventricle, stinging the eyes, rising to the roof gables.

This was the smell of summer in New York.

But by God it was British. A man gazing at it across the East River might be near the village of Brooklyn where Dutch was still spoken, but he was situated in Kings County nonetheless, and the next county upriver was Queens. Behind Manhattan island, he would see the mainland across the Hudson River. And for that territory, Charles II of England himself had chosen the name New Jersey.