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.
“Tuesday,” the man replied. It was now Friday.
“Have you been vaccinated for smallpox?” Marcus asked, feeling his patient’s neck and examining the inside of his eyelids for signs of jaundice. Jenner’s new, safer method of preventing smallpox, which used a strain of cowpox to prevent the disease, had revolutionized medicine. Marcus felt sure this was the beginning of a brighter age for patients, with more effective cures based on stimulating the body’s responses to disease.
“No, monsieur.”
After examining him, Marcus didn’t think the man had smallpox, or yellow fever, or any of the other highly contagious diseases that struck terror into the hearts of the city’s residents. Instead, the man’s watery diarrhea and vomiting suggested cholera. With New Orleans’s poor drainage, poverty, and crowded housing, cholera was endemic.
“I’m pleased to tell you, sir, that it’s cholera, not smallpox,” Marcus reported, noting the diagnosis in his ledger. He was tracking his patients by age, which ships they had arrived on, where they were living in the city, and whether or not they had been inoculated or vaccinated. In New York, medical records like these had helped Marcus react swiftly when new outbreaks of fever occurred, and here in New Orleans they were already a resource for city officials.