New York City — April 1766
April was not spring as people spoke of it.
It was mud—endless, patient mud—piled on top of winter's debts.
The river ran freer now, but the roads were worse. Wagons sank to their hubs in places that had carried them cleanly on frost. The city smelled of thawed refuse, wet rope, damp wool, and the sour breath of cellars that had been sealed too long. Men aired bedding in doorways when the sun showed itself, then dragged it back inside when the wind turned.
That was April's trick: it offered warmth like a coin you could not keep.
Thomas Hawthorne began the month with a sore back from nothing heroic—just lifting a jammed crate with his own hands because the men who should have done it had been delayed on a road that no longer held.
He did not like being forced to be present.
He preferred systems that worked without him.
So he made April a month of repairs.
Not repairs you could boast about.
The kind that prevented a wheel from snapping when no one was watching.
Isaac Loring met him at the workshop table with damp pages and a careful expression.
"Road crews report twice the plank use," Loring said. "They're laying it faster than the mud eats it."
"Pay them," Thomas replied.
"They want higher rate," Loring added, and then—because Loring had learned to speak plainly—"and they're right."
Thomas nodded once. "Pay the higher rate for work done in the worst stretches. Not for standing around. And keep the list public."
A public list did two things at once: it prevented theft, and it prevented rumor from claiming Thomas was buying a private road.
Loring wrote, blew on the ink to dry it, and slid the page into the ledger.
"There's something else," he said.
Thomas waited.
Loring set down a folded note that smelled of tobacco and damp. "Edmund Reese brought word from the docks."
Edmund Reese arrived a quarter hour later, cap in hand, boots still wet.
"The talk's changed," Reese said. "Less about the Watch. More about… who's watching the city."
That was not fear. That was politics beginning.
"Names?" Thomas asked.
Reese swallowed. "Isaac Sears. John Lamb. And McDougall's name again."
Thomas did not change expression. He had heard Sears's name before, as other men had. A seaman-merchant whose name already carried weight along the waterfront. Men spoke of Sears as someone who could draw a crowd into a street as easily as others hauled a rope-because he already had, more than once, during the unrest over the stamps.
But Reese kept going, carefully.
"They're not giving orders here," Reese said. "It's… like a shadow. People saying the Liberty Boys have a list—correspondents. Who's trusted. Who's not."
Thomas had already confirmed that such a list existed in that season—Maryland's Sons compiled one dated 1 March 1766, naming New York City correspondents including John Lamb, Isaac Sears, William Wiley, Edward Laight, Thomas Robinson, Flores Bancker, Charles Nicoll, Joseph Allicoke, and Gershom Mott.
That list meant two things at once:
First: organization was hardening.
Second: merchants who broke agreements would remember what it felt like to be remembered.
Thomas's mouth tightened slightly.
He had built a system that made violence unnecessary.
He had no intention of letting other men borrow his order as a mask for disorder.
"Is anyone threatening anyone?" he asked.
Reese shook his head. "Not yet. But the talk is… sharp."
Sharp talk was an early stage of broken windows.
Thomas tapped the ledger once. "Go back. Listen. If you hear a name tied to a threat—tied, not guessed—tell me."
Reese nodded and left quickly, as if speed could outrun mud.
By the second week, April forced the first real shortage Thomas had faced all year—not of goods, but of clean movement.
A sloop came up the East River with iron and tar. The tar mattered more than the iron; tar sealed roof planks and wagon hubs and kept wet spring from becoming rot. But unloading took twice the labor because the landing was slick and men slipped.
Thomas did not give speeches. He did not call meetings. He did not ask the Watch to "assist."
He sent Peter Lang with coin and two written rates—one for standard unloading, one for danger work—and a rule: no children on the ropes.
Lang returned with the ropes moved and the tar stacked, and the dockworkers muttering about Hawthorne's "cold generosity."
That was fine. Better cold than uncertain.
At the workshop, an apprentice—Caleb Sutter—scrubbed mud from iron bands with sand and water until his fingers reddened.
Thomas watched him once, then looked away. He did not like being watched while working, and he assumed boys hated it even more.
"Gloves," Thomas said.
Caleb blinked. "Sir?"
"Gloves," Thomas repeated. "Your hands are raw."
Caleb hesitated—the way a boy hesitated before accepting something that sounded like kindness.
Isaac Loring cut in smoothly, saving the boy from having to answer. "We've got old pairs in storage. I'll see to it."
That was how Thomas preferred it: the system providing without the man becoming soft.
The City Watch held its line through April's crowds.
William Hart reported twice that men had tried to bait the Watch into acting—insults shouted, a shove at the edge of the Fly Market, a spilled crate followed by laughter.
Hart's men did not respond.
They stood where contracts permitted them to stand, and nowhere else.
The Fly Market itself remained what it had always been—an old outdoor market near the East River, operating since the late seventeenth century.
If a man wanted a fight, he had to do it without Hawthorne's uniformed witnesses.
That frustrated the kind of person who needed an enemy to feel alive.
Good.
Still, the Watch's restraint created a different kind of pressure: the merchants began to ask questions.
Not about safety.
About legitimacy.
One evening, Thomas attended a short gathering in the back room of a warehouse office—not a committee, not a council, nothing with minutes. Just men with damp coats who did not want to be surprised by events they could not control.
Matthew Crowell was there, smelling faintly of smoke.
Elijah Barnes arrived late, wiping mud from his boots with a rag he pulled from his pocket.
And with them, two men whose names mattered precisely because they were real and known:
Edward Laight, a merchant with connections and caution.
Flores Bancker, whose family name carried weight among New York's merchant class.
They did not "join" Thomas. They did not become his men. They simply occupied the same room because April made neutrality expensive.
Laight spoke first. "There are rumors from London. Some say repeal. Some say punishment."
"Rumors sell," Barnes muttered.
Bancker's eyes stayed on Thomas. "And in the meantime, the streets have… leaders."
He did not need to say Sears's name. Everyone knew which kind of leader he meant.
Thomas answered carefully. "Order isn't a leader. It's maintenance."
Laight gave a thin smile. "That's a merchant's answer."
"It's the only one that lasts," Thomas replied.
Crowell cleared his throat, uncomfortable. "Men are asking whether the non-importation holds. Whether agreements will be enforced."
That was the real question. Not repeal. Not London. Whether the city's own people would tear it apart in the name of virtue.
Thomas folded his hands. "Agreements should be kept because breaking them makes tomorrow more expensive."
Bancker nodded slowly, as if he had expected a different answer and found this one… usable.
"And if Sears and Lamb enforce them by the street?" Bancker asked.
Now Thomas allowed the smallest edge into his voice. "Then they'll teach London the wrong lesson."
No one spoke for a moment. Outside, someone cursed as a cart wheel slipped.
Laight finally said, softly, "You're Catholic."
It was not accusation. It was a reminder that half the city would look for a reason to mistrust him even if he performed miracles in daylight.
Thomas met his gaze. "Yes."
"And you aren't… like the Catholics they imagine," Laight added.
Thomas did not accept the compliment. Compliments were hooks.
"I'm a merchant," he said. "And I keep my word."
That was all the room needed.
The next day, Thomas did the one thing that made street enforcement unnecessary.
He made the cost of breaking agreements visible.
Not through threats.
Through credit.
He instructed Loring to add a line to new contracts: fees rise for partners who violate declared non-importation terms.
No moral language.
No politics.
Just mathematics that punished unreliability.
Merchants who wanted to break agreements could still do it. Thomas could not stop them.
But he could ensure they paid for the instability they created, rather than making their neighbors pay.
It was the same principle as plank roads: the man who broke the ground paid the cost of repair.
By late April, the river traffic improved, but the city's mood did not.
People were tired of waiting. Waiting made even good news feel like a lie until it arrived.
Thomas received a small packet from Talbot—no official seal, no proclamation, just a few lines copied from a London paper and three sentences of Talbot's own.
Parliament had acted on repeal in March—the King and Parliament agreed to repeal the Stamp Act on 18 March 1766, and did so alongside the Declaratory Act.
But the ocean was still the ocean.
New York did not have the news in hand.
Not yet.
So April remained what it had been: a month of preparation without resolution.
Thomas read Talbot's lines twice, then burned them in the forge fire himself. Not because they were dangerous, but because paper traveled where it wished.
He did not need the city to know he knew.
He needed the city to keep functioning until everyone knew.
On the last day of April, the sun held long enough that men lingered outside without shivering.
Thomas walked past the Fly Market, past the wet boards and fish smell, past women bargaining hard because hard bargains were the only defense poor people had. A Watchman nodded. Hart's men looked tired but not frightened.
At the edge of the Common—still a muddy open space that swallowed shoes—he saw a small knot of men talking, and he recognized one of them from a distance by posture alone: John Lamb.
Lamb did not look like a poet or a preacher.
He looked like a man who could endure.
Thomas did not approach. He did not wave. He did not acknowledge.
Historical figures did not need to be "met" in clean scenes.
They existed like weather.
You prepared for them, or you paid.
He turned back toward his workshop as the light faded, and the mud made its soft sucking sound around his boots.
April had not delivered truth.
It had delivered alignment.
Business kept moving.
The Watch stayed limited.
The Liberty Boys watched the city without touching it.
And Thomas, Catholic and immigrant and alone, held his line without giving anyone the satisfaction of calling him a leader.
May would bring news.
And when it did, New York would have to decide whether celebration was peace—or the first step toward something that could not be undone.