New York City — May 1766
May began with dust.
Not the clean dust of summer roads, but the gritty, tired dust that rose when the top layer finally dried and the ground beneath still held winter's wet like a secret. The mud did not vanish; it retreated into ruts and corners, waiting for a wheel to find it. The river ran freer now, and sails moved with more confidence, but the city's temper stayed cautious—like a man who had survived a fever and did not trust his own strength yet.
Thomas Hawthorne marked the month the way he marked all months: not by the sun, but by the ledger.
May meant movement.
Movement meant talk.
Talk meant mistakes—made loudly, and then paid for quietly.
He preferred quiet payments.
On the morning the news arrived, the city did not learn it by proclamation.
It learned it by the way men ran.
A sloop from down the coast came up the bay and made the dock with a kind of impatience, her crew shouting before the lines were even set. By the time Edmund Reese reached Thomas's workshop, Reese's face was bright with sweat and something close to joy—an expression Thomas distrusted on principle.
"They say it's done," Reese said. "Repealed."
Thomas did not ask what "it" was. There was only one "it" that had held the colonies by the throat for a year.
Reese thrust a folded paper forward, already creased by too many hands. The ink smelled fresh, as if men believed smell could make news true.
Thomas read without changing his face.
He let the words settle like a weight.
Then he folded the paper again and handed it back.
"Who else saw it?" he asked.
"Everyone," Reese said, half laughing. "Everyone who can read, and everyone who can't. They're shouting it at the Fly Market already."
Thomas nodded once. "Go back. Listen for what comes after the cheering."
Reese blinked. "After?"
Thomas did not explain. Joy was often the doorway through which foolishness entered.
Within the hour, the streets began to fill.
Not with rage, as they had in the autumn, but with celebration that carried its own danger: men who thought victory meant permission. Church bells rang in some places. In others, men banged on shutters and barrels as if noise could convince the future to be generous.
The Watch did not expand.
It did not need to.
William Hart posted men where crowds narrowed—corners, market edges, the mouth of an alley that had a habit of producing fists when drink ran too warm. Hart did not order arrests. He ordered presence.
Presence was cheaper than punishment.
A Watchman stopped a boy with a torch and turned him back without touching him—just a flat look, and a shake of the head. The boy hesitated, then ran off to find a corner where he could be celebrated for disobedience.
Thomas watched from a distance and felt his jaw tighten.
He would not have children used as sparks.
Not for any cause.
By noon, names moved through the crowd like currents.
Isaac Sears was seen near the river, surrounded by men who treated him the way sailors treated a storm—half fearful, half admiring, always watching. John Lamb spoke with merchants in a doorway, his hands moving sharply as he argued. Alexander McDougall's name surfaced again too, carried by men who liked the sound of a voice that did not soften.
None of them came to Thomas.
That was correct.
They were not his friends. Not yet. Possibly never.
But the way they looked at the city had changed. The anger of the last year had made them hard. The repeal did not make them gentle. It made them confident.
Confidence could be useful.
It could also be contagious.
Thomas's business did not stop for celebration.
If anything, it accelerated.
In the back room of the workshop, Isaac Loring already had three new stacks of paper laid out—contracts that had been waiting for the right moment.
"Merchants are asking if the agreements end today," Loring said, voice low, as if celebration outside made the room private.
Thomas took off his coat carefully and hung it where it would not touch the damp wall.
"Not today," he said.
Loring waited.
Thomas tapped the contracts. "An agreement that ends the moment you can profit again wasn't an agreement. It was a pause."
Loring's mouth tightened. "Then how do we answer them?"
"With a price," Thomas said.
He did not mean a bribe.
He meant mathematics.
"Any partner who breaks a declared term—non-importation, payment schedule, delivery guarantee—pays higher fees for six months," Thomas said. "Public. Written. No arguments."
Loring nodded slowly. "That will anger some."
"It will reveal who wanted the agreement for virtue," Thomas replied, "and who wanted it for leverage."
Loring began writing.
Outside, a cheer rose again as if the city could not bear silence.
Late in the afternoon, a knock came at the workshop door that did not sound like celebration.
Three men entered—wet boots, cleaner coats than dockworkers, the scent of tobacco and good wool. They did not introduce themselves as a committee. They did not claim authority.
That restraint told Thomas more than any title.
Edward Laight spoke first, polite as a blade. "Mr. Hawthorne."
Thomas inclined his head. "Mr. Laight."
Laight did not smile. "Merchants are drafting a letter of thanks to friends in Britain. There are names being spoken—men in Parliament, men in trade. A dinner, perhaps. Toasts. You understand."
Thomas understood that gratitude was also a signal: a way to make future demands seem reasonable. And he understood that if New York's merchants thanked the right people, London would hear it.
Flores Bancker stood beside Laight, watchful, eyes narrowed with calculation rather than anger.
"We won't ask you to sign," Bancker said. "We know what your faith costs you in this town. But we ask whether you'll… lend structure."
Thomas looked at him steadily. "Structure is not a favor. It's a habit."
Laight's gaze sharpened. "You don't celebrate."
"I maintain," Thomas said.
Bancker's mouth twitched—approval, or amusement, Thomas could not tell. "Then help us maintain."
They spoke for less than a quarter hour. Not about ideology. About timing, phrasing, and—most important—what not to promise. Thomas suggested nothing that bound the city permanently. He offered no declarations of loyalty that could be used later as chains. He advised restraint in the only language merchants truly respected: avoid commitments you cannot keep.
When they left, Laight paused at the door.
"You will be blamed for this order," Laight said softly, not unkindly.
Thomas met his eyes. "Then order must be ordinary."
Laight hesitated, then nodded once and departed.
That night, the city's joy changed shape.
The first hours were harmless: drink, song, men hugging enemies because victory makes fools generous. Then came the second wave—boys and young men who wanted a story to tell tomorrow, one that made them brave in retrospect.
A crate was overturned near the market. Someone shouted that a merchant had been hoarding goods. Another man shouted back. A fist swung.
The Watch stepped in—not with clubs, but with bodies and voices.
"Back," Hart's men said. "Back."
No one drew steel.
No one seized a man and made him a martyr.
They separated the knot of anger until it unraveled on its own.
Thomas heard of it later, not from Hart, but from Peter Lang, who had no love for violence and less love for crowds.
"They wanted a fight," Lang said. "Your men didn't give it to them."
"They're not my men," Thomas corrected.
Lang shrugged. "They're paid by your ledger."
Thomas did not answer. Payment created association whether he liked it or not.
In the days that followed, celebration gave way to bargaining.
Ships began to appear more regularly. Merchants who had held back orders now leaned forward, hungry to regain lost ground. Some spoke of importing as if it were a moral right restored. Others spoke of it like a weapon to punish rivals.
Thomas watched all of it through invoices.
He refused to let the city swing from boycott to glut without structure.
Storage rules remained. Quality inspections remained. Payments remained on time.
And quietly—without speeches—he began to reduce the Watch's visible footprint where it was no longer needed.
Not because the threat was gone.
Because permanence was poison.
Hart reassigned men back to warehouses and docks as traffic normalized, and the ledger showed it plainly: fewer posts, same pay, same end date.
A city that celebrated liberty by building a permanent force had learned nothing.
Thomas would not let New York learn the wrong lesson.
Catholic suspicion did not disappear with repeal.
If anything, May made it sharper in a different way.
Victory produced pride, and pride produced purity tests.
A man in a tavern mocked "papists who cheer the King only when he gives them something." Another replied that Hawthorne paid wages on time and asked no questions of a man's prayers. The first man spat and said coin was not virtue.
Thomas heard of it and did not respond.
He had learned something in England, and more in New York: you do not argue a man out of hatred. You outlast it. You make yourself useful until his hatred costs him comfort.
That was not mercy.
That was patience sharpened into policy.
Near the end of the month, Thomas walked past the Fly Market at dusk. Fish smell, damp boards, women bargaining hard with faces that did not soften just because Parliament had relented. A man can celebrate repeal and still be hungry the next morning.
At the edge of the Common, he saw the remnants of a gathering—trampled grass, a few broken bottles, ash from a bonfire that had burned too hot. Beyond it, a tall pole had been discussed by some men as a symbol to raise—one that would not speak of repeal alone, but of something more dangerous: liberty as an object men could claim.
Thomas watched the darkening ground and felt the future shift.
Repeal was relief.
It was not trust.
It was not reconciliation.
It was a lesson—one London might misunderstand, and one New York might misuse.
Thomas turned back toward his workshop as the last light drained from the sky.
May had brought news.
June would bring symbols.
And symbols, once raised, were hard to lower without blood.