“Now your father has bought your freedom,” I told my son. I don’t know if it was right or wrong, but that purchase meant a lot to me.

That was two years ago. I am sixty years of age now, which is older than many men live, and far older than most slaves. Recently, my health has not been so good, but I think I have some time remaining to me yet, and my business thrives. My son Hudson has a little inn just above Wall Street, and he does well. I know he would rather go to sea, but he stays here to please me; and he has a wife and a little son now, so maybe they will keep him here. Each year, we go to Miss Clara’s house for the birthday of young Dirk, and I see him put on the wampum belt.

The Boston Girl

1735

THE TRIAL WOULD begin tomorrow. The jury had been rigged by the governor. Handpicked stooges of his own. Conviction guaranteed. The first jury, that is.

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.