Gerson, Noel Bertram, 1913 – 1988
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N.B.
THIS BANTAM BOOK contains the complete text of the original edition. Not one word has been changed or omitted. The low-priced Bantam edition is made possible by the large sale and effective promotion of the original edition, published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., under the title “The Impostor”.
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FOR Nicola
AND Diana
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Foreword
Few cities in this world have known the glory of the West Indies' fabled Port Royal, and fewer still have faded so deep into oblivion. In the seventeenth century the glittering, wicked Jamaican port was the "jewel of the Caribbean," the first city of the Western Hemisphere. But like the harlot she was, she lost her glamour when adversity struck her, and she never regained either her importance or her insolent abandon. This sleepy village that is today Port Royal was once a seat of empire, a military and naval base without a peer, a trading center of the first magnitude, and a depraved metropolis unknown since the lost cities of antiquity flourished.
I have tried to impart a little of the flavor that made her so gay in her prime, so pathetic in her decay. Her atmosphere may explain why she attracted that incredible trio, the Duchess Caroline Stuart of Glasgow, Sir Ian MacGregor, and Lord Thomas Murray, and why she took them to her heart. She, like they, truly existed.
All other characters in this story, with the exception of a handful of government officials, are the product of the author's imagination, however, and any relation these people may bear to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional.
I am grateful to the director and the staff of the Institute of Jamaica for making their extensive records available to me, and I am equally thankful to the Maroons of the mid-twentieth century for supplying me with so much data on their ancestors who lived more than two hundred and fifty years ago.
There are so many who helped in the preparation of this book that it would be impossible to list them all, but I should like to express my particular appreciation to Sam Hart of Kingston for the use of his unique library, which made it possible for me to do adequate research on the earthquake of 1692. I shall always remember a trip into the Blue Mountains of Jamaica to inspect that library, for it was destroyed in the modern counterpart of the Great Earthquake, the hurricane of 1951.
As always, I appreciate immeasurably the painstaking advice and loving help of my wife, Cynthia Ann Gerson. My thanks, too, to Mrs. Rhoda Levine, who labored long over the manuscript.
I am grateful also to my agents, Paul R. Reynolds and Oliver G. Swan, for their never-failing, ever-patient counsel and assistance, and to my editor, Timothy Seldes, to whom no word was sacred and no idea profane.
N. B. G. New York City
Chapter One
IT WAS bitterly cold even for a December day, and snow was piled high on the four cannon of the Battery. Strangers newly landed in New York Town from England gaped at the big guns and were satisfied; if the war with France should be resumed, the enemy would think twice before invading a port protected by such formidable weapons. A score of small boys hurled snowballs at each other, and when an occasional missile struck an adult, the immigrants were lenient, smiled indulgently, and wiped their clothes dry. Few of the established residents, who would of course tolerate no such nonsense, were in the neighborhood of the unprotected open spaces of the Battery. Despite the weather, a holiday atmosphere prevailed, for Christmas was only three days past, and the bare branches of the trees on the rim of the Battery were trimmed with bits of colored cloth in the old Dutch custom.
A few workmen carrying planks of roughhewn lumber straggled into the tiny park and began to erect a platform. The governor of the colony had ordered that the new year be opened with a celebration that would feature a pledge of loyalty to King William and Queen Mary from all of their subjects, and His Excellency intended to administer the oath in person. The platform was made necessary by the presence in the town of Duchess Caroline of Glasgow, cousin of the Queen and the first member of the royal family ever to visit New York. The council of burghers had decided that it would be wrong to ask one of so exalted a rank to stand in the wet snow, and the sum of five pounds had been appropriated for the erection of the stand.
Meanwhile, there was considerable activity aboard a brig riding at anchor a short distance up the mouth of Hudson's River. A swarm of young apprentice laborers wearing distinctive green-tasseled stocking caps were moving up and down the sturdy deck of the four-hundred-and-fifty-foot craft. They were bolting a new cannon into place fore and aft, and a small three-pounder was being lifted into position at the rear of the quarter-deck. The ship herself was trim, for she had just received a fresh coat of dark red paint. Her decks were well tarred, and gleaming gold-leaf lettering brought out her name, Bonnie Maid, in bold relief. Her furled sails had been patched, and mounds of boxes and crates were clustered around an open hatch on her aft deck.
Two young men, both dressed in somber black linsey-woolsey short coats and breeches and wearing the narrow-brimmed hats that identified them as journeymen craftsmen, stood together on the quarter-deck, supervising the work of the apprentices. One, Jeremy Stone, was almost six feet tall and slender. Twenty-seven years old, he seemed older when preoccupied, as he was at the moment. His hair was dark brown, he wore no wig, and a shabby, utilitarian eelskin fastened his queue. The few who ever bothered to glance at his eyes invariably looked at him again, for they were his most arresting feature; gray-green, they indicated an alertness, an intelligence, and a sense of self-confidence rare in one so low in the social and economic scale.
He liked to consider himself as one of the gentry, albeit one who was temporarily dispossessed, and he had actually been born and raised as a gentleman in Cornwall. His mother had died when he had been a baby, and his father, Colonel Bartholomew Stone, had given his son an education, a taste for good living, a boundless ambition, a sound drilling in the art of swordsmanship—and a future without hope. The colonel, with appetites far beyond his purse, had dug himself deep into debt. His creditors had finally lost patience with him, had thrown him into prison as a bankrupt. Heartbroken and humiliated, the old man had taken sick, and the jailers at Newgate had found his body one dull morning. And Jeremy had promptly been sold into bondage and sent to the North American colonies as an indentured servant; the proceeds of the sale, of course, had helped to pay off his father's creditors, and if the procedure was unorthodox and on the shady side of the law, there had been no one to stand and cry "Shame!'* in the Commons.