David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

“May I join you?” asked Lavien.

“And what if I should say no?”

Lavien’s mouth twitched. “Better not to explore that possibility.”

I looked at him, prepared to let him know that his company was provisional, and if I did not like what he did or said, I should banish him at once. I said nothing, however, because I’d witnessed him in a flash of lightning, in the blink of an eye, overcome and disable three men. If he wished to join me against my will, I had no notion of how I might stop him.

By the time we left, the rain had mostly abated and we walked through the muddy ruins of Helltown. The walk did me good, set my blood to flowing, worked the pain out of my system. I’ve never been particularly good at fighting, it being a rough sort of work best left to rough men, and I’d learned long ago how to handle a beating with equanimity. Also, I had more important things to consider. Cynthia was in some sort of trouble, and she came to me. I’d only been in Philadelphia for four months, following my flight from Baltimore and a misunderstanding involving a cousin or niece or some such. Cynthia somehow knew I now lived here, and in her time of trouble she’d turned to me. No pain could compete with my curiosity, my buoyant and irrational enthusiasm at the thought of having, once more, some contact with her. I was not so ready to disregard reason as to believe that somehow, against hope and propriety, we might be together. I only wanted to see her, to hear her, to have her near.

As we moved, silent and huddled in the cold, toward the center of the city, the landscape metamorphosed from an outlying camp of poverty and debauchery to the height of American propriety. The streets, as if changed by magic, were all at once bricked, with lamps lit on walkways and watch houses occupied. The homes were no longer makeshift affairs, serviceable and expedient huts of castaway wood and thatch, but Philadelphia redbrick, stately and handsome, with stone fences that hid clever little gardens.

Jacob Pearson’s house, at the corner of Third and Shippen, was one of these. It was no great monument to American wealth like the Bingham house, or like the Morris mansion where the President resided, but it was a large and stately home of three stories, surrounded by denuded apple and-appropriately-pear trees, shrubs, bushes, and plots set aside for flower gardens when the weather turned warm. Pearson’s home was made of the same redbrick as the house where I rented, yet here was wealth on an order I could never hope to attain. Looking upon this fine building, could I wonder why Cynthia had married him?

During our walk, I’d heard the church bells strike ten, but Pearson’s home was bright with lit candles, and from the outside it looked a hub of activity. The rain, light though it had become, undid my time before the fire, and we were quite wet by the time the three of us approached. I stood upon the porch and contemplated the knocker. There was, I understood, no way to prepare myself for what must happen next, no way to make myself ready. There was nothing to it but to move forward. I wished I could face Cynthia in a clean suit, unbloodied and neatly ordered, but it was not to be. She thought herself in danger, and I would not ask her to wait while I made myself fit for presentation.

“Do you require that I knock for you?” asked Leonidas, having apparently noticed the gravity with which I regarded this moment.

“No, I believe I can manage.”

“I am quite willing to bear the burden,” he said, “and, with the rain beginning to fall harder, I am even eager to undertake the physical labor required to bring a servant to the door.”

“He’s very cheeky,” I said to Lavien, and then knocked myself. I was, after all, capable enough, requiring only a little browbeating from my Negro to make it happen.

A footman soon opened the door. His livery was rumpled, as though a dirty set of clothes had been thrown on hastily, and he had dark circles under his eyes. I’d seen the look before, and I had no doubt this was a household in distress.

“Captain Ethan Saunders to see Mrs. Pearson,” I intoned with an importance my hatless wet head belied-or at least contradicted.

The footman, tall and rugged in build as was common for his species of servant, looked to me like a stage actor who had only been waiting for another player to speak a line that he might speak his own. Practically biting off my words, he said, “I’m afraid Mrs. Pearson is not accepting visitors at this hour.”

“Of course she is,” I assured him, “as she went to the trouble to summon me, and I have gone to the trouble of answering. You need do no more than go to the trouble of inviting us in and presenting us.”

He looked me over, perhaps for the first time taking in my deplorable condition. “That shan’t happen, sir. Good night.”

The fellow was actually going to close the door in my face. Once a door is closed, it is not an easy thing to get it open again, so I stepped forward, pressed one hand upon the door, and strode directly toward the footman. The primary responsibility of such a servant is to see to the safety of his employers, so he ought to be possessed of a great deal of courage. Nevertheless, surprised, and faced with my alarming appearance, he took a fatal step back. This proved enough for my pair of worthies to move past him. It was an effective ploy, but I had no doubt that, had it not worked, Lavien would have dispatched him with little trouble. I was glad to avoid that outcome, however, as I did not wish to begin my reunion with Mrs. Pearson with the hobbling of her footman.

Regaining his confusion, the serving man stammered a moment and then managed to utter a coherent sentence. “I must ask you to leave. At once.”

“My God, man, have you never had a wet drunk, a Negro, and a Jew call upon Mrs. Pearson before?” I said. “Don’t just stand there. Tell her we’re here.”

“Get out or there will be trouble you shan’t like, violent trouble, sir.”

If this fellow thought he and a handful of kitchen boys were a match for Leonidas and Lavien, he was sadly mistaken. Nevertheless, it all proved unnecessary, for at the end of the front hall a figure emerged, silhouetted by the light of the sconces behind her. I could only see a shadowy form, but I knew her at once.

“It’s all right, Nate, I shall tend to this.”

The vibrating in my chest reverberated through my body. I could feel my pulse in my fingertips. My breath came in short bursts. After ten years, I stood in the same room with the woman I had once loved, once believed myself destined to marry. I wished to rush to her, and I wished to flee. Instead, I held my ground and attempted to conduct myself with the greatest possible dignity for a man so befouled and ill used as I was.

I attempted an awkward little bow, though my middle sections pained me considerably. “Mrs. Pearson, you have summoned me, and here I am.”

She advanced a step and at once became visible. She wore a gown of pale green, perfectly chosen to match the shade of her eyes. Her hair was piled into a bun, from which a few delicate golden-straw wisps escaped, and she wore a prim little bonnet that did no more than suggest the possibility of a head covering.

Once, a month or more ago, near the covered market, I chanced to observe Mrs. Pearson upon the streets as she went shopping with her maid, her two children-a boy and a girl-in obedient tow. It had been fleeting, for I dared not let her see me. In ten years I’d not had the chance to gaze upon her face. When I’d known her, she had been a mere girl of nineteen, but now she was a woman, and the soft features that had made her so pretty had sharpened into beauty: her eyes, wide and liquid; her lips, full and red; her nose, sharp and distinguished. If her loveliness were not enough to move me, I should have been undone by the sadness overlaid upon it, for it was apparent that Mrs. Pearson was a melancholy woman and, indeed, a fearful one. I had not been a student of human nature for so long-it was what distinguished my service during the war-without being able to see such things.