The Whiskey Rebels Read online

  Without taking more than a cursory glance toward Dorland and his men, most of whom had pistols, I slipped the silver ball into my pocket and leaned down to see if Leonidas was hurt. He had been struck in the head with a pistol, and he bled, but not egregiously. He stirred now and rubbed the back of his head and then rose, slowly and deliberately, like a great monster rising from its lair.

  “Who struck me?” His voice was calm but full of quiet, coiled menace.

  “What, shall you return violence to a white man?” asked Dorland. “Consider yourself fortunate I did not shoot you on sight.”

  “Hold,” I said.

  “The time for holding is done,” said Dorland. “You’ll not have anyone to rescue you this time, Saunders. You are finished.”

  I did not want to be finished. I had Cynthia Pearson to protect, and I had, not quite at my fingertips, the prospect of redemption, of returning to the service of my country. I had the silver ball in my pocket, and I could not guess what mysteries it contained. I had important work before me, and I could no longer afford this game with Dorland. Once his rage and inept thirst for revenge had amused me, because I could pull upon his strings and he would dance. Now it stood in my way, cropping up when I would have quiet and calm. Leonidas had been hurt and might next time, were I to escape to find a next time, be killed. It was all this, and there was another thing. It was what Mrs. Lavien had said to me the night before, that I had become something shameful, but that each new day brought the promise of a new path. Her words reverberated now like a cold blade against my skin, making me awake, alert, terrified. It was for all these reasons, and perhaps others, that I turned to Dorland and said what I said.

  “I have wronged you and then ridiculed you for that wrong. I apologize, though I know an apology will offer you little satisfaction. Instead, I offer you what you have long wished for. I shall meet you in accordance with the code duello at the time and place of your choosing. Dorland, I accept your challenge.”

  “Well, now,” said one of his friends.

  “I never would have thought it,” said another, at almost the same time.

  Dorland, however, held up his hand in silence. “Do you mock me?”

  “Not anymore. I am done with that, and I won’t place my friends in danger any longer.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe you, Saunders, and if I did, it would still be too late. You had your chance for honor. Now it is time for an ignominious end.”

  “That is not your choice,” said Leonidas. “You must honor the code.”

  “I’ll not take lessons in honor from a nigger,” said Dorland.

  “Then take the lesson from me,” said one of his friends. “He has accepted your challenge. You cannot refuse to meet him on the field of honor.”

  “He has no honor,” said Dorland.

  “That doesn’t matter,” said another of his friends. “He has accepted your challenge.”

  “You must do it,” said the third.

  “One moment,” said Dorland. “You are supposed to be with me on this. Macalister, you swore you would aid me.”

  “Because he would not duel,” said the first man who had spoken. I recalled him kicking my side in the Helltown alley. “You asked me to be your second, and I agreed. Now he says he will duel, and you must agree.”

  Dorland’s plump face quivered. “But he is a veteran of the war. I would have no chance against him.”

  “You mean you will not duel?” asked Macalister.

  “Let us deal with him here and now,” said Dorland.

  And then the most astonishing thing happened. The one called Macalister walked away, and the others followed. Dorland called after them, but they did not look back. There had been four of them, and suddenly it was a dark alley, and Dorland stood alone with me and Leonidas.

  “Well,” I said. “This is what I believe is called a reversal.”

  Leonidas took a step closer to him, and Dorland ran fast and hard. I cannot even begin to guess when he noticed that no one ran after him.

  In the war, it often happened that messages of vital import would need to be carried through dangerous lines. Various methods could be employed to preserve the secrecy of the message. It could be written in code, it might be carried by an unassuming courier, it could be well hidden away. But what happens when the courier is captured, as must sometimes transpire? One method was to carry the message, written in a tiny hand upon a tiny piece of paper, housed within a little silver ball. If the courier was captured, he could swallow the ball and then, once free of the British (for he would have nothing else upon his person to incriminate him), could retrieve the ball at his own unpleasant leisure.

  That the people involved in this scheme, whatever it might be, used such methods frightened me. Whom did they fear? What must they communicate that required such secrecy?

  I dared not open the ball in public, but once Leonidas and I returned to my rooms I pried it open and looked at the tiny parchment inside. It read:

  W qcas tfca R. ozz cb eqvsrizs vsfs. Ies qcbhoqhe hc qcbtwfa voa eiegsqhe bc-hvwbu. Kwhvcih vwe wbhsftsfsbqs, PIE kwzz tozz pm aofqv.

  “It’s nonsense,” Leonidas said.

  “It’s a cipher,” I told him, “and a fairly simple one. This is quite clearly what is called a Caesar code, so named because it was allegedly invented by Julius Caesar himself. Each letter stands in place of another. If you can break one letter, you can usually break them all.”

  “How can you do it?” he asked.

  “It can always be done, merely by finding patterns common in writing,” I said. “Given time, a simple Caesar code can always be broken, which makes them of limited value. This one can be broken more easily than most, however. The people writing this code are not nearly so clever as they wish to think themselves, and they made a number of mistakes. There are, for example, a limited number of words in our language that consist of two letters that can be reversed to make another word. I am guessing on and no. And look at this: a word of a single letter. It must be A or I. And all these words end with two identical letters. It is likely that Z is an S or an L. Bring me a pen and paper. There you go. Also, they are foolish enough to use I as a discrete word, which gives me everything I need to break the code.”

  With pen, ink, and paper at my disposal, I began to set up my key, matching the words I believed I could crack with those I could not, substituting letters as I went. It was tedious work, and the whiskey made my vision waver, but I drank it all the same. Soon the puzzle pieces fit together, and I looked at the message. I could scarce believe what I saw, yet there it was.

  I come from D. All on schedule here. Use contacts to confirm Ham suspects nothing. Without his interference, BUS will fall by March.

  I stared at the note, hardly daring to comprehend it. Leonidas looked over my shoulder.

  “What is BUS?” he asked. “Who is D?”

  I had my suspicions about D—Duer?—though I was still too early in the game to say for certain. BUS, however, was another matter. It was the institution that was upon everyone’s minds, upon everyone’s lips. It was the thing that had elevated Hamilton to unimaginable power and made him, to some, an unspeakable demon. It was the thing that, it now seemed to me, for good or ill, defined our moment in time, much as the Revolution itself had defined the world half a generation ago: the Bank of the United States. What I held in my hands changed everything, for this was not a matter of a missing gentleman and a pushy Irishman. Cynthia was right. Whatever had happened to her husband had something to do with the bank, but it was a far more sinister something than I could have suspected. There was a plot at work, a genuine plot to destroy Hamilton’s bank. It was a plot to alter, for good or ill, the future of the American government.

  Joan Maycott

  Summer and Autumn 1789

  The half-face camp built that day proved but a poor shelter, yet shelter it was, and though we endured a few rain showers that rendered it near useless, it was, at most times, not so terrible. To
be sure, our difficulties were eased by the help of our new neighbors. Mr. Dalton developed a particular attachment to my husband that first night, and he proved to be a good friend. We learned that his companion, Mr. Jericho Richmond, was generally praised as one of the great marksmen in the region, and in that period of adjustment we would have starved had it not been for their regular gifts of game. Two or three times a week, as sunset approached, we would see the two of them enter our clearing, some great beast stretched over Mr. Richmond’s shoulders or, if too large, dragged in a cart. They brought us deer and bear and once a small panther, quite sleek in form and beautiful in its tan color.

  “Can panther be eaten?” I inquired, skeptically eyeing the felled beast.

  “Panther’s good,” answered Jericho Richmond, in his terse and soft-spoken manner.

  “What does it taste like?” I asked.

  Mr. Dalton considered this question. “Tastes a lot like rattlesnake.”

  I laughed aloud. “You cannot expect me to know what rattlesnake tastes like.”

  Dalton answered by strolling toward the thick growth of forest. Richmond stared at his back, and then, when Dalton was gone from view, Richmond stared at me. He seemed to have nothing to say, and yet his look held an accusation I did not understand. I attempted conversation—nothing of great complexity, for most of what I said involved speculation upon what Mr. Dalton might be doing—but Richmond would not speak to me. And so we stood there, Richmond as quiet and inscrutable as an Indian, I confused and not knowing how to excuse myself. So we remained until Dalton returned ten minutes later, the limp body of a rattlesnake dangling from one hand, its lifeless head peeking out from above his fist. He held it out to me.

  “Roast it on the fire. Don’t boil it. Boiling’s too tough.” He winked at me as I, with some effort, reached out and took the thing from him. Later, when I examined it, I found it had not a scratch upon it, and that, for all I could tell, Mr. Dalton had reached out, grabbed it by the neck, and strangled it. Not precisely Hercules in his crib, but near enough to astonish me.

  Richmond said nothing during this exchange, but he shook his head once in a way that made me feel as though I had walked into a disagreement between the two of them.

  Dalton was equally useful in selling us supplies that we required, including seed for our first crops and ropes for land clearing, giving us a pup to be raised as a hunting dog and, most useful, an old work horse whom he called Bemis. I later learned that the beast had been named after the skirmish at Bemis Heights, the pivotal encounter of the battle at Saratoga, in which both Mr. Dalton and Mr. Richmond had served under Colonel Daniel Morgan. Mr. Dalton told us that Mr. Richmond was the marksman who dispatched the British general Simon Fraser, a shot that changed the course of the battle and thus of the war itself, given the victory’s influence on France’s entry into the conflict. It was something I loved about my country. In a war with countless turning points, one never needed to look far to find the men who had worked the levers upon which all depended.

  With the occasional assistance of our new friends, Andrew managed to fell eighty trees within three weeks, and so the call went out that there was to be a cabin raising. I had thought our camp building had been a significant gathering, but a cabin raising turned out to be an event of an entirely different order. Mr. Dalton had it put about that he wished everyone to help, and as a prominent distiller of whiskey for the region and an employer of more than ten men—his whiskey boys, who traded his wares—his wishes were always obeyed. From as far away as twenty-five miles, dozens of men arrived for what was to be a four-day frenzy of work and merriment. When it was completed, we had a home and we had friends. The house was rough, and so were the people, but life seemed much easier than it had at first.

  Through Andrew’s skill and industry, and with the aid of our new friends, we managed to improve upon our uncouth cabin week by week. Though there was much to do outside the house, Andrew found time to construct for us a bed, a dinner table with chairs, and a tolerably comfortable rocker, and to set to work on a wood floor, though this would be a long and ongoing project. He could make simple household furnishings quickly, so he was soon trading for other necessities: blankets, plates and cups, and even a tablecloth and some rough flaxen napkins. These were difficult times but sweet ones. Never had Andrew and I spent so much time together alone, without visitor or distraction, and we delighted in taking refuge in each other, a soft relief to our hard surroundings. The world was only unfamiliar challenge, but in our cabin we could find familiar delight.

  Those early weeks now seem a blur to me as, with the warmth of spring turning to the heat of summer, we spent our days engaged in little more than the business of surviving—or, perhaps more accurately, attempting to understand how we were to survive. Andrew cleared land—backbreaking labor which I feared might be the death of him and his horse. Even with all his strength poured into the work, it yet confounded him, as he pulled saplings from the ground and chopped to the stump a near forest of oaks and birches and sycamores. They gave up their earth grudgingly, and Andrew would return from a day’s work covered in dirt, his hands caked with blood. I would gaze out upon the land and be unable to see what his efforts had yielded.

  Yield it did, though, and at last enough land was cleared for a small planting. I would spend my mornings tending to corn and vegetables in the hopes that enough would grow for us to have some food in the fall. Many in the West planted Indian style, sowing the seeds upon the earth in a formless scatter and hoping a sufficient number took, but Andrew and I were more methodical, tilling the earth, planting in rows, giving each stalk room to breathe and grow.

  The purchase of an old spinning wheel—it required significant repair at Andrew’s clever hands—allowed me to spin flax, and my needle was often busy in repairing our clothing and making new from the cured skins of Andrew’s hunts. Only a few months in the West, and with his beard, hardened muscles, sun-reddened skin, and buckskin clothes, my husband had become a true border man. He would come home at night, exhausted and hungry but content to eat the meager repast I could provide—corn pone from our stock of meal and meat from what animals he had hunted, given what flavor we could by an always diminishing supply of precious salt. Venison was a rare treat, for he had little time to hunt deer, but almost without effort he might kill a turkey or bear or even a rattlesnake, which were ever lurking; no trip to our own gardens could be conducted without vigilance. In some strange compensation, the woods afforded a species of pigeon so insensible to danger that to kill it one need only walk up to one and hit it with a stick.

  This was our life. After his dinner, Andrew lay down upon our rough bed while I lit candles (which I learned to make with my own hands from bear fat!). Perhaps I might spin awhile or, if I could steal an hour, pore over my copy of Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce or James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. Even in the wilderness, I still sought inspiration for my novel, now little more than scraps of dead characters walking though their fictional lives like ghosts—empty and evacuated, present but incorporeal. Despite my bone weariness, I knew that this book resided somewhere inside me, wanting only its time of quickening, awaiting the right alchemy of idea and story and setting. The West, or perhaps the scheme by which we had come west, held something for me, but I could not say precisely what. I could not name it, but it was there.

  We were often enough called upon by what was there styled neighbors, though the nearest lived more than half a mile away; these visits were often a strange mixture of backwoods civility and the hostile curiosity with which outsiders are often regarded.

  Mr. Dalton and Mr. Richmond sometimes ate the evening meal with us, and I sensed that they imposed upon us not only because they had taken to Andrew but also because our hospitality allowed us, in a small way, to compensate them for the pains they had taken on our behalf. Dalton and Andrew talked at great length about land clearance. Mr. Richmond said little, but he did not
seem uneasy or resentful of Mr. Dalton’s interest in us. I surmised that Mr. Richmond was simply a quiet man, who rarely found in the routine of ordinary life circumstances that required speech.

  While Andrew and Mr. Dalton talked—of how we were neglected by the East, of how the government in New York (and then Philadelphia) would not send soldiers to fight the Indians, and of how Hamilton’s schemes in the Treasury Department would destroy the poor man for the sake of the rich—Mr. Richmond would sometimes aid me in washing and replacing the dishes. He might sit with me while I spun or sewed, content to sip his whiskey and look as though he thought about significant things. Once, however, he turned to me and offered me a rare smile of crooked teeth. “Andrew is a great friend to him.”

  There was something more than his words to what he said, but I did not understand it. I only replied simply, “I am glad of it. You have both been good to us.”

  Richmond said nothing, and then, after a moment, “Dalton is a good friend to have, but not to take advantage of.”

  “I can assure you, Mr. Richmond, that Andrew would never—”

  “I know Andrew would not,” he said.

  I could not have been more surprised had he struck me. Did he accuse me of in some way abusing Mr. Dalton’s kindness? I turned to him, but he only shook his head, as if to say that the subject had been exhausted, and with that he left the room.

  One night we sat with Mr. Richmond and Mr. Dalton, this time joined by Mr. Skye, the five of us enjoying some precious tea and sweet corn bread following a meal. Skye happened to glance over to a little round table next to our rocker upon which sat my copy of Postlethwayt. This interested him at once, and after rising to inspect its edition and condition, he inquired of Andrew what he did with such a book.