New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [117]
As for the American colony, the refusal of American merchants to trade with England, besides being disloyal, does less to harm the mother country than they suppose. There are two reasons. First, the Boston and New York men may observe these embargoes, but the southern colonies privately ignore them. Even Philadelphia is trading with London. Second, merchants like Albion are more than making up for the shortfall in their trade with India and the other countries of Europe. But in any case, I think that the present quarrel with the colonies will end before long. The new prime minister, Lord North, is well disposed toward the American colony, and it’s thought that he will do all he can to end the quarrels. All that is needed is a little patience and good sense which, I have no doubt, the better sort in New York can provide.
And now, my dear parents, I have joyful tidings …
As Master read the rest of the letter, he groaned. For several minutes afterward, he stared straight ahead. Then he read the letter once more. Having done this, he put it aside and turned to the letter from Albion. It contained a number of business matters. Then it turned to the subject of James.
You will have learned from James that he is to be married. Normally I should never have allowed him to enter into such an engagement, while living under my roof, without his first obtaining your blessing. But I must tell you frankly that the young lady’s circumstances do not permit such a delay. A child will be born this summer. I must now tell you something of his wife—as she will be by the time you receive this letter.
Miss Vanessa Wardour—for so I call her, although she was briefly married to Lord Rockbourne before he died in a hunting accident—is a young lady of considerable fortune. She is also, it will interest you to know, a cousin to Captain Rivers, on his mother’s side. She has a handsome house of her own in Mount Street, Mayfair, where she and James will live. As you may surmise, she is a few years older than James, but besides her wealth and many fine connections, she is generally accounted a beauty.
I will not say that I am without reservations in this matter, nor did I promote it—I understand James first met the lady at the house of Lord Riverdale—but most of London would certainly say that your son had made a brilliant match.
John Master put the letter down. It was some time before he could bring himself to show it to Mercy.
1773
No one could remember a worse winter. The East River was frozen solid. But it wasn’t just the awful fact of the cold. It was the misery that went with it. And the deaths. Darkness was falling, but Charlie White was nearly home. His hat was pulled down, his scarf was wrapped round his face. He’d driven his cart across the frozen river to Brooklyn to buy a hundredweight of flour from a Dutch farmer he was friendly with. At least his family would have bread for a while.
Sometimes in the last couple of years Charlie had felt angry, sometimes just discouraged. If his personal feelings against John Master were as keen as ever, they were mixed with an outrage and a grief that was more general.
He knew the troubles of the poor, because his family often suffered them. And it seemed to him that there must be a better way in which the world could be arranged. Surely with a vast, fertile continent stretching westward, southward and northward, it could not be right that working folk in New York were starving. It could not be right that rich men like Master, backed by the British Church and British arms, could profit hugely when ordinary folk could not find work. Something must be wrong. Something needed to change.
Surely, if free men like himself were running the city, instead of the rich, and if their elected representatives ruled the land, instead of royal governors who cared nothing for the wishes of