The Philadelphia Girl

1741

THE BOY MOVED cautiously. A May evening. Late shadows were falling, and nothing was safe. Not a street, not a house. If only he had known what was going on when he arrived, he might have acted differently. But he’d only found out an hour ago, when a slave in the tavern had explained: “Ain’t nowhere safe for a nigger in New York. Not now. You take care.”

He was fifteen years old, and the way things were going, this would be the worst year of his life.

Things had been bad when he was ten. That was the year his father had died, and his mother had taken up with another man and left, together with his brothers and sisters. He wasn’t even sure where they were now. He’d stayed behind with his grandfather in New York, where the old man ran a tavern frequented by sailors. He and his grandfather had understood each other. They both loved the harbor, and the ships, and everything to do with the sea. Maybe fate had been the guiding hand at his birth, when his parents had given him the same name as the old man: Hudson.

But fate had been cruel this year. The winter had been colder than anyone could remember. The harbor was frozen solid. On the last day of January, a young fellow arrived at the tavern after skating down the frozen river from a village seventy miles to the north, for a wager. Everyone in the tavern had bought him a drink. That had been a cheerful day; but it was the only one. The weather had grown even colder after that. Food had become scarce. His grandfather had fallen sick.

Then his grandfather had died, and left him all alone in the world. There’d been no big family funeral. People were being buried quietly that winter. A few of the neighbors and the patrons of the tavern came to mourn. Then he’d had to decide what to do.

That choice, at least, had been easy. His grandfather had talked to him about it before he died. It was no use trying to run a tavern at his age. And he knew what he wanted, anyway.

“You want to go away to sea?” the old man had said with a sigh. “Well, I reckon I wanted the same thing at your age.” And he’d given the boy the names of two sea captains. “They know me. Jus’ you tell them who you are, and they’ll look after you.”

That was where he’d made his mistake. Been too impatient. It hadn’t taken long to dispose of the tavern, for the premises was only rented. And there was nothing else to hold him in the city. So as soon as the weather turned at the start of March, he’d wanted to be off. His grandfather had kept his modest savings and a few items of value in a small chest. Hudson had taken the chest and left it for safe keeping with his grandfather’s best friend, a baker who lived near the tavern. Then he was free.