Robert Lautner - The Road to Reckoning

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Copyright © Robert Lautner 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015

Cover images © Ilona Wellmann / Arcangel Images (boy); Shutterstock.com(bird, paper texture)

Map © David Rumsey Collection

www.davidrumsey.co.uk

Robert Lautner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007511310

Ebook Edition © January 2014 ISBN: 9780007511334

Version: 2015-01-27

For my brother

The Lord made men.

But Sam Colt made them equal.

—Anon.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication For my brother

Map

Epigraph The Lord made men. But Sam Colt made them equal. —Anon.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

When I first met Henry Stands I imagined he was a man of few friends. When I last knew of him I was sure he had even fewer.

But, it could be said, just as true, that he had fewer enemies because of it.

And as I get older I can see the wisdom of that.

I was twelve when my life began, mistaken in the belief that it had ended when the pock claimed my mother. She had survived the great fire of New York in ’35 that we all thought might have quelled the pock.

The pock knew better.

In 1837 my father was a quiet man in a noisy world. At twelve I was not sure if he had been a quiet man before my mother had gone. I can remember all my wooden-wheeled toys, the tiny things for tiny hands that I cherished, but not the temperament of my father before the Lord took Jane Walker. The quietness is more important than that he was a salesman for spectacles, still quite widely known as ‘spectaculars’ by some of the silver-haired ladies we called upon.

Half the time as a salesman he would just be leaving his card with the maid and the other half would be following up on the business that the card had brought.

That was his day and for some of the week it would be mine also.

It was a slow business and an honest one. Slow for a boy. The closest it ever got to an element of shrewdness was when my father would tell me beforehand to sip slow the glass of milk or lemonade that I was always offered. Sip slow in order to postpone the moment when the lady of the house would be confident in her judgment that she could not afford a new pair of spectaculars today and politely asked my father to leave.

I did not mind to drink slow so much when it was milk or, worse, buttermilk, but the lemonade was hard to draw slow when I had been walking all day. And today if a lemonade comes my way when it is offered I still sip it like it is poison when all I want to do is swim in it.

All of that was in the city of New York, where I was born, and I had no notion of what the rest of the country was like. I also had little idea of what other children were like, being homeschooled by my aunt on my mother’s side and mostly staring out our parlor window at other boys pinwheeling down the street.

I was intimidated by their screams and backed away from the panes as people do now from tigers in the zoological. We had no zoological then but no want of beasts.

I now know this sound of children to have been their unfettered laughter, having had boys of my own once. At the time I thought they were savages, as dangerous as the Indians I imagined hid out on the edges of the roads waiting to snatch me if I did not keep an eye out for them and a piece of chalk to mark behind me, which every boy knew they could not cross.

I am pretty sure it was April when my father had his idea. I remember the crisp blue sky and I know I was still only a part of the way through my Christmas books that I was allowed to read for pleasure on Fridays, and so those weeks would pan out to make it April.

One of them books was about a boy on a ship in the wars against Napoleon, for it rubs at my memory, and the other was set hundreds of years in the future, when the world would be better. I liked that one. It was written by a woman, I remember that, and I imagined that my mother would have liked it. It had a utopian view of our country and my mother was always looking for the best in everything.

I am sorry that I can remember little more about them books but my memory of that time is clouded when it comes to the pleasing and too much of it burned black onto me with the other.

My father had gotten word of a new invention, the chance of a new venture that needed no capital, and I had never seen him so animated. I did not know, as a child, that the whole land was in depression and in New York in particular businesses and people’s homes were crumbling under the weight of paper. I had seen protesters in the park, the placards, and heard the cry. The same as it ever is.

When I think back it would seem that in just a few years, what with the pock and the fire, the banks closing and the gangs, that New York had gone to the Devil. But I was a boy and my belly was full and my aunt had reminded me that there had been some insurance on my mother’s life that would see me well but for the fact that I was drawing into it every time I scraped too much butter, which was her curse of me.