Time's Convert

Marcus knocked on the door. An attractive woman in her late thirties with eyes the color of brandy and brown curls threaded through with silver flung open the door. Two boys stood with her, one of them bearing the poker from the fireplace. “Monsieur Paine! We have been so worried!”

“Might I bring him inside?” Marcus said. Paine hung, lifeless in his arms. He had passed out on the short journey. “Madame . . . ?”

“Madame Bonneville, Monsieur Paine’s friend,” the woman explained in accented English. “Please, bring him in.”

The moment Marcus crossed over the threshold of the boardinghouse on Herring Street, he traded in his life of isolation and work for one of lively debate and familial concern. The Bonneville family took care not only of Paine—who was a drunk and prone to apoplexy—but Marcus, too. It became his habit to return to Herring Street after working in the hospital, or after a busy day of attending private patients in his home on nearby Stuyvesant Street. France had rejected Paine, and Marcus’s fellow Americans now ridiculed the elder statesman’s radical ideas about religion. But Marcus liked nothing more than to sit with Paine by the south-facing window on the ground floor, the sash raised so that they could eavesdrop on the conversations in the street, and discuss their reactions to the day’s news. There were always books on the table before them, as well as Paine’s spectacles and a decanter of dark liquid. Once they’d exhausted current events, they reminisced about their time in Paris, and their shared acquaintances, like Dr. Franklin.

Marcus brought along his copy of Common Sense, so well-read that the paper felt plush and soft to the touch, and would sometimes read passages aloud. He and Paine talked about the failures of their two revolutions, as well as the successes. The colonies’ separation from the king had not resulted in greater equality, as Paine had hoped. There was still hereditary privilege and wealth in America, just as there had been before the revolution. And it was still possible to enslave negroes, in spite of what the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence stated.

“My friend Joshua Boston told me I was a fool to believe that Thomas Jefferson was thinking of people like him or the Pruitts when he wrote that all men were created equal,” Marcus confessed to Paine.

“Well, we mustn’t rest until America lives up to its ideals,” Paine replied. He and Marcus often discussed the evils of slavery and the need to abolish it. “Are we not all brothers?”

“I think so,” Marcus said. “Perhaps that’s why I carry your words with me wherever I go, and not the Declaration of Independence.”

As the weeks passed, Marcus got to know Marguerite Bonneville, Paine’s companion. Madame Bonneville and her husband, Nicholas, had known Paine in Paris. Bonneville had published Paine’s works, and when the authorities tried to shut his press down the man fled. When Paine returned to America in the autumn of 1802, he brought Madame Bonneville and her children with him. Marcus’s friendship with Madame Bonneville deepened after they started conversing with each other in French. Not long after that, the two became lovers. Still, Madame Bonneville remained devoted to Paine, managing his farm in the country and his affairs in the city as well as his engagements, his correspondence, and his declining health.

Marguerite and Marcus were both at Paine’s bedside when the man who had given voice to a revolution quietly passed on from the world of men on a hot and humid day in June 1809.

“He’s gone.” Marcus gently crossed Paine’s hands over his heart. The year Paine spent in Paris’s Luxembourg Prison in 1794 had left him frail, and Marcus had known that his friend’s devotion to strong drink would hasten his end.

“Monsieur Paine was a good man, as well as a great one,” Madame Bonneville said. Her eyes were swollen with tears. “I do not know what would have happened to us, had he not brought us to America.”

“Where would any of us be, without Tom?” Marcus closed the front of his wooden medicine case, the time for balsams and elixirs now over.

“You know he wished to be buried at New Rochelle, among the Quakers,” Madame Bonneville said.

They both knew where Paine kept his final testament: behind a thin panel of wood in the back of the kitchen cupboard.

“I’ll take him there,” Marcus said. It was more than twenty miles, but he was prepared to honor his friend’s last wishes no matter the cost or distance. “Wait with him, while I find a wagon.”

“We will go, too.” Madame Bonneville laid a hand on Marcus’s arm. “The children and I will not abandon him. Or you.”

* * *

—

THEY REACHED NEW ROCHELLE DURING the lingering summer twilight. It had taken all day. Two black men drove the wagon carrying Paine’s body. They were the only team Marcus could find who were willing to haul a dead man nearly as far as Connecticut in the summer heat. The first three men that Marcus approached had laughed in his face when he proposed the journey. They had plenty of work in the city. Why should they take a rotting body up the coast?

Marcus rode alongside the wagon, and Marguerite and her eldest son, Benjamin, accompanied them in a carriage. Once they arrived in New Rochelle, they checked into an inn, for it was too late to bury Paine at this hour. Marcus and the Bonnevilles shared a room while the drivers, Aaron and Edward, slept with the horses in the barn.

The next morning, Marcus and Marguerite were turned away from the Quaker burying ground.

“He was not our brother,” said the elder who barred them from entering the low stone walls.

Marcus argued with the man, and when that didn’t work, he tried to arouse the fellow’s patriotism. That failed, as well, as did Marcus’s attempts to stir his pity and his guilt.

“So much for brotherhood,” Marcus fumed, banging on the carriage door in frustration.

“What do we do now?” Marguerite asked. She was sheet white with exhaustion, and her eyes were circled with hollows of grief. “I’m not sure how much longer we can keep the hired men.”

“We bury him on the farm,” Marcus said, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze.

Marcus dug the grave himself under the walnut tree where Paine had sat on summer days gone by, the thick canopy of leaves providing shade from the sun. It was the second time Marcus had dug a grave between the roots of an ancient tree. This time, his vampire strength and his love for Paine made short work of the task.

There was no minister present, no one to say God’s words over the body as Aaron, Edward, Marcus, and Benjamin Bonneville lowered Paine into the ground. Marguerite held a bouquet of flowers she picked from the garden, and placed it on the shrouded figure. The drivers left as soon as their business was done, and returned to New York.

Marcus and Marguerite stood by the grave until the light began to fade, her sons Benjamin and Thomas standing quietly between them.

“He would want you to say something, Marcus.” Marguerite gave him an encouraging look.

But Marcus could think of nothing appropriate to say over the body of a man who did not believe in God, or the church, or even the afterlife. Thomas Paine had come to believe that religion was the worst form of tyranny because it pursued you through death and into eternity—something no king or despot had yet managed to do.

At last, Marcus settled on repeating something Thomas himself had written.

“‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’” Marcus took a handful of earth and sifted it into the grave. “Be at peace, friend. It is time for others to continue your work.”

The death of Thomas Paine cut Marcus’s final ties to his former life in ways the close of the last century, symbolic though it was, had failed to do. Marcus had walked the earth for more than half a century, and during that time he had always felt the retrograde pull of Hadley, his family, and the War for Independence. Now that Paine was gone, there was nothing left to look back upon but a chronicle of loss and disappointment. Marcus needed to find a future that did not have so much of the past in it, and wondered how long the search would take.

* * *

—

MARCUS FOUND HIS FUTURE at the southern boundary of America, in the sultry city of New Orleans.

“When did you arrive?” Marcus asked his patient, a young man of eighteen who had come from Saint-Domingue. Refugees continued to flood into New Orleans from the island that they had once called home, driven away by war between Spain and France.