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?