New York

by Edward Rutherfurd

“I’ll stick to making money like an honest rogue,”

There were more slaves as a percentage of population in the New York region than anywhere north of Virginia.

“But because he lives in America, your father cannot have the very rights that make him English, and therefore loyal. The system of empire doesn’t permit it. Your father is not a freeborn Englishman. He is a colonist. He may be grateful to be ruled by freeborn Englishmen in London—and that, I grant, is better than being ruled by a tyrant—but that is all he can have. If your father is loyal to the king and to the empire because he thinks he is an Englishman, then he deceives himself.

“All empires become arrogant. It is their nature.”

Others, it seemed to Master, were more devious. Before he died that spring, old Ben Franklin had claimed to be a member of every Church, and prayed with each congregation in turn. The cunning old fox. But Jefferson, this handsome, Southern patrician with his fine education and his fancy Parisian friends, who had returned to America to run the nation’s foreign affairs—what was he? A deist, probably. One of those fellows who said that there must be a supreme being of some kind, but who didn’t seem to think they needed to do a damn thing about it. A fine belief for a coxcomb.

“Exactly. Bringing loads overland is expensive, and slow. But barges filled with grain can get from Buffalo to New York in only six days. As for the cost … that drops from a hundred to only five dollars a ton. It’ll change everything. The wealth of the West will flow through New York.” “Not so good for New Orleans, I guess.” “No … Well, that’s their problem.”

And that was what she found so contemptible about most of them, really. They had plenty of money. They weren’t going to live that long. There was no way they could go through the money they already had, yet they still saved it. Habit, she supposed.

the resulting Five Boroughs of New York made the metropolis, after London, the most populous city in the world.

It was almost funny really, when you thought about it. All his life, he’d been rich. But he’d been living in a prison cell—in the great jail, called Expectation. And he couldn’t get out of it.

Salvatore always remembered the day that his big brother had come back safely, and walked down Mulberry Street in his uniform, getting smiles and congratulations from their neighbors, and even a friendly nod from an Irish policeman who happened to be passing. And perhaps that was the moment when Salvatore truly became American,

“People come to New York to be free, but you have constructed a prison for yourself.”