CHAPTER 6
Favian snapped awake at dawn, the sea-born reflex surviving even the months of duty ashore. His eyes traversed the ceiling of the rented cottage, recognizing it, hearing the steady ticking of the clock in the parlor. No, he was not at sea. His six feet, four inches were not crammed into some little box of a bed; a telltale compass did not wave overhead in its brass box; the cottage, despite a momentary illusion when he first opened his eyes, did not rock to the sound of the seas. He glanced next to him, seeing Caroline’s hair spread on the pillow, comforting and familiar.
He closed his eyes, hearing through the window the distant bellow of a cow as it awaited the morning hands that would relieve it of its burden of milk. Captain Favian Markham, USN, man of property! Owner of a hundred and sixty acres of Manhattan Island, five hundred acres in New Hampshire, a tenanted house in Portland, and a mistress kept out of sight in a rented cottage outside Poquetanuck.
The final few days in New York, three months ago now, had been busy ones: he had invested much of his prize money, but not in Fulton’s steamboats. His banker cousin Micah had handled all the financial details, and Favian had been compelled to spend many hours in that unhappy household. Micah was bearing his misfortunes well, at least in public, and if Favian hadn’t been alerted by the sidewalk gossip he would have noticed nothing he could have put a name to; but as it was, a number of Micah’s intemperate outbursts at Toryism, flung angrily when his wife was out of the room, seemed to confirm the worst. But Micah had mentioned nothing directly and so Favian had followed his cousin’s lead, refraining from intruding in Micah’s affairs when there was no hint of any intrusion being wanted or appreciated. They had remained friendly cousins and businessmen, not intimates; perhaps Micah had been relieved to deal with someone he thought had not known the gossip.
Micah obviously had a firm grip on his business. Approached with Favian’s hesitant questions, Micah had discerned their object immediately and virtually ordered Favian to invest. In land, not steamboats; Micah explained that it would take only a single court case to end Fulton’s monopoly and that would be the end of profits. The surveyors boarding with Frau Fux had suggested some land they knew to be for sale; Micah had approved of most of the suggestions, adding one or two of his own, places farther south where houses could be built at once, generating immediate income in rents. Several days later, when Favian had ridden north on his mare, preceding the stage in which Captains Stewart and Jones were riding, it had been as the owner of eighty acres of farmland west of Broadway at Twelfth Street, another sixty acres off Bleecker Street just to the east of Frau Fux’s place, and twenty acres— the acres on which rental buildings would be constructed that winter— just inside New York City proper near the intersection of Greenwich Road and Prince Street.
Favian was still not entirely easy about the land. Speculation was not his line, and this was all speculative; there was no absolute guarantee that New York City would continue to grow northward, but Micah assured him that much of the land would have been tenanted already had it not been for the combined misfortunes of the yellow fever epidemic of ’01, the economic catastrophe of the embargoes, and the halt to commerce brought on by the war. Favian had invested, comforted somewhat by the awesome thought of Demologos, which might well break the blockade and bring about a resurgence of prosperity. It had seemed safer, at any rate, than keeping his money in the banks and watching its value fall.
The procedure— writing the bank drafts, signing the contracts with the banks and builders, acquiring the deeds to land that, for the most part, he had not seen, and paying for it with money in sums that, with the reflexes of a naval lieutenant earning fifty dollars per month, he was not able quite to comprehend— all had seemed slightly unreal. He was slowly unlearning poverty and trying to learn instead the habits of a moderately wealthy man.
Favian Markham, man of property! Perhaps the acquiring of a mistress, as much as the land speculation, had marked the transition. Favian’s carnal habits had been formed early, during his year at Harvard, and strengthened during his years in the Navy: long periods of enforced abstinence followed by a prolonged, covert plunge into high-class brothels. That had been the pattern generated by poverty: he had not been able to afford a relationship with a woman extending beyond a few hours, let alone a wife. Favian’s first experience with a professional courtesan had been in Norway; it had been, initially, a delirious experience, far superior to the sort of thing he’d been used to; but complications had arisen and a duel had been fought, leaving the memory bitter.
Caroline Huxley was, she claimed, an actress. She spoke with a soft Maryland accent and was about twenty-five. Favian knew her to have formerly been the property of a dragoon lieutenant who had been called off to the Niagara frontier; Favian had met her at someone’s lawn party, a week or so after his return from New York, walking on the arm of a local politician; she’d flirted expertly and invited him to call. The first visit had been proper, Favian feeling the waters; the second, decidedly, had not. Caroline had blushed charmingly as he tugged at her clothing and then torn at his with an ardency that had amazed him. By the third visit he’d concluded arrangements for the cottage near Poquetanuck.
It was a convenient arrangement. Favian was getting too old, and far too well-known, to be leaping in and out of bordellos. This was New England, after all, and although sporting palaces existed they were under considerable harassment from the authorities. The spectacle of a national hero caught in a raid was not at all the image the Navy preferred for its captains; a discreet cottage in the country was much better.
Favian stretched lazily and glanced to the window. Early September had been unusually cool; soon the maples would be turning. Autumn would soon be here. Shark was nearing completion; by November at the latest she’d be off the stocks and given her masts. The guns, the main broadside of thirty-two pound carronades and the long twelve-pound chasers, would leave Philadelphia any week now, if they hadn’t already. Favian hoped they’d arrive before the roads turned to muck.
Caroline stirred on the bed next to him. Perhaps sensing his alertness through her sleep she turned to him with a lazy, unconscious moan, laid her head to rest on his shoulder, throwing her arm across his chest, and promptly fell again into deep slumber. Favian felt the warmth of her body lying beside him, smelling the comforting female scent of her massed auburn hair. What else did he need? Moderate wealth, property, the status of a hero, a desirable mistress— that was a lot, more than he had ever hoped for. But Emma Greenhow was lost to him, and William Burrows was dead; his only intimate friends were gone. Caroline, though he enjoyed her company, was not a substitute.
He heard Caroline’s breathing grow shallow, then the little crystalline tink of her eyelids coming unglued. She stretched up lazily to kiss him good-morning; he felt his bristles scratching her lips. “I’ll bring water for shaving,” she said. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You were far away, weren’t you?” She had propped her chin up on her hand and was peering at him with amused curiosity from out of a shroud of unbound hair. “I can always tell when you’re thinking deep,” she said. “Were you at sea?”
Near enough; no point in going into it. “Yes,” he said.
“Do you want to go to sea very badly?”
He hesitated before answering; the question touched him. He did not love the sea in itself, the way Burrows had; but he was, by training and occupation, a seaman. Watching the Shark building had been a considerable education; knowing he was to be her first commander he had been able to offer suggestions and make certain the dockyard made no mistakes. But the civilian shipbuilders knew their craft well, and were furthermore honest men; they wanted Shark to be a success, intending to make their reputations with her; in this rampant honesty they were radically unlike their English counterparts, and a good many American ones. In truth, aside from the testing and tinkering with Markham’s Recording Log, Favian had little to do. The financial arrangements he’d made, the property he’d purchased, were not entirely real to him; the Shark and the sea were. He needed an occupation.
“I would like to be at sea, yes,” he said.
Caroline shook her head. “I don’t understand you sailors. Always rushing off to sea when there’s so much more fun to be had here. Or do you like boys better, hey?” She jabbed him playfully in the ribs with a knuckle, grinning wickedly. “I hear there are men that do,” she said. “Are you one of them?”
“Silly girl. You should know better than anyone what I like,”
“I’ll get your shaving water,” she said. Her smile was irresistible, creating delicate little lines around her eyes and nose. With both women and ships Favian had always found something to love that was uniquely their own, something that existed in each that was superior to any other. With the frigate United States it had been the stolid way she shouldered through the water, making her a uniquely steady gun platform; with Caroline Huxley it was almost certainly her smile.
He crossed his arms behind his head, propping himself up so he could watch her leaving the room, her figure swaying inside its thin shift, female and therefore by definition wonderful— even after the best part of a year ashore he had not entirely lost a sense of wonder at a woman’s walk, a sensation that could strike him like a hammer after months at sea with only men for company. Caroline was aware of his interest and moved with deliberate provocation, smiling over her shoulder as she disappeared into the kitchen.
Favian swung out of bed, pulling on his smallclothes and stockings more because it was chilly than for reasons of modesty, dancing on the cold planks of the floor until he got his stockings on. Caroline brought in his shaving water and today’s razor— he had seven of them, each marked with a day of the week. She kissed him on the cheek, announced that coffee was on its way, and padded back into the kitchen on bare feet. He bent his considerable height over a table mirror, picked the razor up in his scarred hands— Caroline, thankfully, had not minded the touch of those torn fingers on her body— and scraped away the whiskers.
Domestic bliss, he thought. Was this something of what marriage was like? But no; with marriage there was not so much to be kept hidden, such a great deal of skulking and pretense. Caroline, as far as the deaf old woman who owned the cottage was concerned, was a niece under his protection, engaged to be married to Favian’s cousin Gideon, who was at sea in a privateer. That Gideon had been married for more than a year now was something Favian hoped had escaped the attention of the entire state of Connecticut, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t. As far as his landlady in New London knew, he was spending many of his nights sleeping at the shipyard, supervising the construction of the Shark.
Caroline, bound by the conventions of her existence no less than more respectable folk, spent a great deal of time alone. In a larger city, New York or Washington, where there was a demimonde that kept to its own circles independent of life elsewhere, she would have been less lonely, but here there was no place for her. It was fortunate that for the most part she was capable of amusing herself; she kept the cottage in immaculate order, well beyond the standards even of orderly sea officers; she had stitched Favian a number of shirts; and she read plays, poetry, and romantic novels. She claimed that she had committed great chunks of Pamela to memory. Why Caroline, something of a professional kept woman, should be so fond of Richardson, whom Favian considered a prating, moralistic prig, was something beyond Favian’s comprehension, but he accepted the fact with amusement.
Favian scraped off the last bristles and cleaned the razor. The smell of coffee was beginning to infiltrate the bedroom. The coffee he’d bought had cost him dear, but it was one of those luxuries in which he indulged himself; a substitute brew of acorns and scraped burnt bread— “Scotch coffee”— did not at all suit his fastidious palate.
“Will you come tonight?” Caroline asked, bringing in the first cup.
“I’m sorry, no,” he said. “There’s a dinner tonight. The Sons of Saint Something-or-other, raising money for war orphans.”
What saint was it, anyway? Favian wondered, annoyed at his forgetfulness. Saint Tammany? No, that was Burr’s old outfit in New York. Certain to be a bunch of whiskey-sodden Revolutionary veterans, anyway.
“You can come afterwards,” Caroline said, resting her cheek on his shoulder.
“Staggering with drink and asleep from dull speeches. You wouldn’t want me.”
“I’d wake you up,” she said, with one of her smiles.
He put down the coffee cup and took her in his arms. She was alone too often; he wished he could find her a discreet companion, but discretion was not a New England quality— like any bluestocking society, it thrived on gossip. He kissed her, sensing her need for reassurance, feeling her arms going around him.
He held her next to him, feeling a sudden surge of desolation sweeping him. The need to be desired, to be wanted, was so plain in her; she knew as well as he that he would never marry her, that probably none of her lovers would, that she would most likely spend years in rented cottages and rented rooms, unable to appear in public. But still she longed for a place, for a happy ending in a prim Richardson universe.
Was that what he, too, desired? A simple conventional life, free from the necessity of being a Navy officer, sans peur et sans reproche, whose every breathing moment was presumably spent in scheming to increase the accumulated glory of the United States of America, and whose private vices had to be kept rigorously out of sight? Was that what he had sought with Emma Greenhow, a life like an epilogue to one of the Walter Scott romances Emma favored? “He lived long and happily with Rowena, for they were attached to each other by the bonds of early affection.” Yes, he had wanted that, and yet he had been perfectly aware, all along, how foolish such desires were.
Caroline pressed herself tightly against him; he burrowed through her heavy mass of hair and kissed the soft flesh of her neck. This part at least was simple; he would make early morning love to Caroline and hope the memory would comfort her during her long day and night alone, and when he came in two nights he would try to bring her an expensive present.
She knew the rules; so did he. There was nothing, really, to be sad about.