"Me neither," I said.

"Got your eye on Claybourne?" she asked.

"Nope, I've got my own man."

"Where he at?"

"I don't know. And you," I asked. "Do you have your eye on Claybourne?"

Bertilda's mouth curled up and her eyes widened in the darkness. "I been spending my nights waiting on him and wondering if the plain fool's ever gonna ask me for a little bit of loving."

"Maybe he needs to know you want it," I said.

"You ain't got nothing going on with him?" she asked.

"Nothing at all," I said.

"Good. Don't you go changing your mind on me, then."

ROASTED DUCK. BOILED POTATOES. String beans. Coffee with molasses. I ate a fine meal on Lieutenant Malcolm Waters' account, and he didn't come to any particular point during the whole time we ate. He had been stationed in New York for a year, he said, and was well regarded by his commanding officers. The war was proving difficult with the rebels, he acknowledged, but yes, absolutely, Lord Dunmore was perfectly serious in offering freedom to any Negro who would take up arms for them.

"Any Negro man?" I said.

He swallowed a sip of coffee. "Yes, well, there's that," he said. "Yes. Negro men is what he intended, for his fighting forces. But there are other ways to serve. There are other things a trained and trustworthy person might do."

I looked down at my glass of coffee and waited for him to continue.

"I need to speak with you in utmost privacy," he said.

The dining room was empty except for us. Sam Fraunces stepped in to check on us, and I asked if he could arrange to keep his workers out of the room for a while.

Sam raised his eyebrows and shot me a look that seemed to say, I hope you know what you're doing. But when Lieutenant Waters turned around to see him, Sam said, "Certainly," and left us.

Lieutenant Waters said, "Just the tact I need at this juncture."

"And what is particularly critical about this juncture?" I asked.

His mouth dropped open. "Has anybody told you that for an African woman, you have the most astonishing-"

"Diction."

He grinned. "I guess they have." He let a moment pass, and then began to speak again. "I've got myself in a bit of a pickle."

I sipped my coffee.

"You are a midwife," he said.

I nodded.

"Caught many babies?"

I nodded again.

"Have you heard of Holy Ground?" he said.

"I wasn't far from it when you saved me from that attacker," I said.

"Yes, there's that," he said. "A rough area. You will know that there are many ladies of the night in Holy Ground."

I looked at him calmly and let him go on. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, chin in cupped hands, face close to mine. "I've got myself in a little too thick with one of them."

"You have a lady friend," I said gently, "and she needs my services."

"I think the most of her, but she is . . . she is . . . how best to put this . . . a coloured girl. From Barbados, to be exact. Lovely girl, perfectly gentle, pretty as can be, and I'm afraid she is in need right now."

"How pressing is her need?"

"I was rather hoping you would come and judge for yourself."

"My fee is one pound in silver."

"That's a small fortune."

"It's my fee."

"You're not telling me that a Negro in Canvas Town coughs up a pound for you," he said.

"It's my fee," I said again, resisting the temptation to add the words "for you."

"Ten shillings," he said.

"It's my fee." I was already thinking of warm clothes that I would buy. I needed thicker socks, a woollen sweater and a coat.

"Fifteen shillings," he said.

I met his eyes.

"Fine," he said. "One pound. Can we go?"

"When?"

"Well, now. The situation is pressing."

ROSETTA WALCOTT HAD A CREAMY COMPLEXION and dark brown freckles all over her cheeks and a huge, swollen belly to go with her thin arms and slender legs. She had come over from Barbados with the white family that owned her. Not long after they settled in New Jersey, she fled on foot one night and ended up in Holy Ground. She was thirteen years old and eight months pregnant, and she said she loved Lieutenant Malcolm Waters.

"He never beat me one single time," she said, "and he gave me clothes and food, but now he say I gots to go. I can come back when I'm skinny again, but I can't come back with any child."

"What do you want to do?" I asked.

"Drown this child in the river and come back for Lieutenant Waters," she said.

"That feeling may change when the baby is suckling you."

"The lieutenant loves me," she said.

"How do you know that?"

"All this time he took care of me. Set me up in this little room, and I didn't have to go with any of the other officers. He kept me for himself, and came to see me every week."

"If he loved you," I told her, "he wouldn't tell you to get rid of the baby."

"He said I couldn't come back with the baby. But I don't need no baby. I loves him and he loves me."

Lieutenant Waters offered to walk me back to Canvas Town. I refused. He tried to insist, but I told him to let me be if he wanted me to come back and deliver his child.

"Shh," he said, even though we were standing alone. "You are delivering her child, and that's all that needs to be said about it."

Wishing I had made him pay five pounds instead of one, I let him walk me back to Canvas Town. It had taken Solomon Lindo some time to reveal an uglier side, but the shine had worn off Lieutenant Malcolm Waters the very same day that we shared a meal.

"How old are you?" I asked.

"That's an impertinent question," he said.

"If you want me to help you, tell me your age."

"Twenty-two."

"Well, she's thirteen," I said.

"She's old enough."

"For what?"

"To know what she's doing."

"She thinks you love her and that you'll take care of her," I said.

"Holy Ground is no place for babies."

"You just don't want any baby around."

"Do you know a place where she can stay?" he said.

"Why don't you do something for her? Why don't you help her?"

A look of frustration came into his eyes. "I did grow fond of her. I wasn't thinking it would come to this."

"So why don't you help her now that it has come to this?"

"That's where you come in."

"One pound to catch the baby, and three more to move them both to Canvas Town."

"That's outrageous," he said.

"What's outrageous is that you're making her leave with your baby. And I'd like to see you build them a shelter for three pounds."

A FEW WEEKS LATER A MESSENGER from the British barracks-a Negro lad who aroused no suspicions-tracked me down in Canvas Town and asked me to come with him immediately to Holy Ground. I caught Rosetta Walcott's baby, and used the money to pay Claybourne and a crew of men to steal, buy, carry and hammer together materials for a shack big enough for mother and daughter. There was no space next to my shack, as it was already taken. Fifteen more lean-to shelters had been built since I had moved in, so Rosetta and the baby were set up at the end of the haphazard block.

I caught another ten babies in Holy Ground over the next few months. I despised the British officers, but knew that their women would suffer without my help. Among the officers in the British barracks at Broadway and Chambers, I became known as "One-pound Meena." With the money, I bought food, clothing and scraps of lumber to make it through a long, cold winter.

In April of 1776, a year after I had arrived in New York, I returned from teaching at St. Paul's Chapel to find Rosetta Walcott weeping at my shelter.

"They're all gone," she told me.

"Who?"

"The Brits, that's who. Haven't you noticed? They've been rowing out to the ships for days, and the last ones left last night. I went up with the baby to see Lieutenant Waters."

"You call him 'Lieutenant'?"

Rosetta looked at me impatiently. "He's only seen her once before. But the barracks are empty. The Brits are all gone. Soldiers, officers, all of them. And he's gone with them."

The entire British military had retreated from New York City. The New Amsterdam Gazette said that even Governor William Tryon had taken refuge in a ship in the harbour. Rebels streamed down Broadway, shooting guns and tipping back bottles of gin.

Customers sang and cheered and drank until late in the night at the Fraunces Tavern. I felt lucky to have work in the kitchen, but now that the British were gone, I wondered how I would earn enough for food, clothes and repairs to my shelter.

"What?" Sam said. "You think the rebels don't have brothels? As long as there are fighting men, there will be work for girls like Rosetta-and work for you as well."

Negroes or other property THE REBELS HELD MANHATTAN FOR SIX MONTHS. Then the British took it back and held it for seven years. There were no more English classes at St. Paul's Chapel, because the Tories locked rebel prisoners inside and left them there to starve. The cries of white men dying sounded so much like those of captives on the slave ship that I avoided walking anywhere near the chapel.

I was left with just three places to teach Negroes to read and to share news with them: the Negro burying ground for large gatherings; a room in the Fraunces Tavern (for twenty people at most), and a meeting circle in front of my shack.

Canvas Town had been attracting fugitives in twos and threes each day, especially after the Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779. Every Negro I taught learned the words of the proclamation, issued by Sir Henry Clinton, the British Commander-in-Chief: To every Negro who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full security to follow within these lines, any occupation which he shall think proper.

Every Negro who was capable took a job working for the British. This time, it wasn't just soldiers they wanted. They needed cooks, laundresses, blacksmiths and labourers. They needed coopers, rope makers, carpenters and night-soil men.

And they needed me.

Malcolm Waters returned to New York with captain's stripes on his shoulders. I told him his promotion probably had to do with his true calling in Holy Ground, and called him Captain Holiness. The British no longer kept their mistresses in separate houses in Holy Ground, since senior officers had commandeered homes throughout the city. But the flourishing brothels offered women of all types-Negroes in some houses, whites in others, and every kind going in still other places.

I wasn't just asked to catch babies. Often, I was called upon to give doses of tansy or cottonroot and to stay with the women as their pregnancies bled out of them. Men too sought me out for relief for the blisters and excretions on their penises. I kept a ready supply of bloodroot and aloe, and charged everyone who could pay the same one-pound fee. I needed the money and I needed it desperately. Prices were soaring and everyone was cheating-even the bakers. It got so bad that the British capped the price of bread at twenty-two coppers per loaf and ruled that each loaf had to weigh exactly two pounds. To prevent fraud, bakers stamped their initials into loaves.

Each time there were rumours of change, the people of Canvas Town assembled outside my shack, waiting for me to show up with the New Amsterdam Gazette. I read to them about Thomas Paine and his book Common Sense, which made most of the Canvas Town residents boo and hiss. They thought it absurd for any white man in the Thirteen Colonies to be complaining of slavery at the hands of the British.

Sam Fraunces had dropped by for that reading, and said that Thomas Paine had a point. "Say what you will, but the Americans are winning against King George and the English," he said. The rebels just wanted to control their own affairs, Sam argued, and that's all Paine meant when he went on about Americans being slaves in their own land.

The Negroes of Canvas Town adored Sam Fraunces for his donations of leftover food after parties and banquets, and they were proud to see one of their own running the most popular tavern in town. However, that day they shouted him down.