The Crimson Thread (Once Upon a Time)

by Suzanne Weyn

  “I don’t know,” Bertie admitted. Then, though, she spied a crowd milling around in front of a tavern called the Copper Penny. Approaching it, she saw a sign in the window. With a surge of pride, she realized that she could read it: JOIN THE STRIKE! COME INSIDE! HEAR ALL ABOUT IT! FREE LUNCH!

  A man barreled out the front door, talking animatedly to another man. “Excuse me,” Bertie interrupted them. “What is a strike?”

  The man looked her up and down as if he recognized her from the mill, and then decided that this thin, pale woman couldn’t be the same one who had managed the mill. “The workers are organizing,” he told her. “We’ve walked off the job until they offer us better pay and decent working conditions.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Bertie said.

  “It’s long overdue,” said the other man. “The United Mine Workers have come down to help us organize. The Amalgamated Society of Tailors is here to support us too. Wellington threatened to fire anyone who walked off, but we’ve banded together: He can’t fire everyone in town.”

  Bertie wanted to say something encouraging, but she was suddenly overtaken with another fit of coughing. The first man she’d spoken to steadied her as she listed to one side. “Say, miss, why not put the tot down and go inside for some of that free lunch? They’ve got big pots of corned beef and cabbage going. At least you’ll be able to sit.” He helped lift Eileen from her shoulders and held the door open for them to enter.

  Holding Eileen tightly by the wrist, Bertie pushed her way into the crowded tavern. Inside, a wall of heat and the mingled odors of cabbage boiling and body odor from the tightly packed throng assailed her, causing her empty stomach to lurch.

  The striking workers were shoulder to shoulder, listening to a fiery speech from a man who stood on a table. Bertie couldn’t see over the people in front of her, but she heard the words “organize” and “human rights” and “union,” spoken with an accent.

  The voice was familiar.

  Standing on her toes to see better, she caught sight of the speaker.

  It was Ray who was speaking to the crowd!

  Bertie jumped up, waving her arm as best she could in the tight quarters to attract his attention. He didn’t notice her, so she jumped again.

  There was a sharp whistle at the door. Four uniformed police officers strode in forcefully. “This is an illegal assembly for the purposes of promoting civil unrest and a conspiracy to riot!” the tallest officer barked. “You are all under arrest!”

  All around her, panicked people began to run. Bertie was pushed in the stampede.

  “Stand your ground!” Ray shouted, but it was no use; the need to escape overpowered the crowd, and they were desperate to avoid arrest.

  Hanging on to a table to keep from being swept along, Bertie regained her balance once again and stood Eileen on top of the table so she wouldn’t be crushed by the crowd.

  In the next second, she lost her grip. The moving throng of fleeing people carried her along like a relentless ocean current. “Stay there!” she shouted at Eileen as she struggled to keep her head above the flow. “Don’t move. I’ll be back for you!”

  She was carried out the front door into the street. Outside stood three horse-drawn police wagons. The struggling strikers were being collared by police and forced inside. In the confusion, many others were running.

  Bertie found a clear space to break from the crowd and staggered around the corner away from the mob.

  All at once, the miles of walking, the lack of food, the persistent, rib-quaking cough, the crush of the moving crowd—all these debilitating factors converged. Her knees caved and another wave of coughing caused her to buckle forward, holding on to the outside wall of the tavern. The ground below lurched up, tipping her backward.

  The last thing she felt was unyielding hardness as her head crashed down onto the ground.

  Bertie opened her eyes and peered around. She was on a cot in some narrow, sparely furnished, windowless room. As soon as she turned her head she was slammed with a sickening pain that set off a round of coughing.

  A woman in a plain dark blue dress appeared in the doorway. “Ah, you’re awake, at last.”

  Rolling onto her side, Bertie waited until the coughing quieted. “Where am I? What happened?”

  The woman, who was only a little older than she, pulled a stool beside the bed and sat. “My name is Emma. I work here at this mission, which is where you are right now. You were outside the Copper Penny, and you must have been knocked down or fainted. You hit your head rather hard, I’m afraid.”

  “It feels like someone hit me,” Bertie said, “with a sledgehammer.”

  “The doctor thought you could have a hairline skull fracture,” the woman said.

  “How did I get here?”

  “Many people passed you by, I’m afraid, thinking you a drunkard who had passed out. But finally a kind gentleman stopped and saw that you were bleeding. The tavern had shut down by then, so he put you in his wagon and brought you here to the mission down the road.”

  Bertie felt her head and realized it was wrapped in gauze. “How long have I been here?”

  “Close to fifteen hours.”

  Fifteen hours! Bertie lurched forward in alarm, but the pain in her head drove her back onto the bed. “Where is Eileen? Is she all right?”

  The woman gazed at her blankly, not understanding.

  “The little blond girl who was with me.” Bertie’s heart began pounding wildly.

  The woman shook her head. “They brought you in alone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Real Name

  Bertie slept fitfully on the narrow cot, opening her eyes every few hours to ask if Emma had found Eileen. Various strangers came in and told her that Emma had not yet returned from the Copper Penny, where she had gone to inquire. They urged her to sleep more, which she found easy to do.

  Several hours later, she became aware of an elderly man in a suit, a doctor, who checked her bandages with amazing gentleness. “Thank you, sir,” she murmured with sleepy, half-open eyes. “Have they found Eileen?”

  “Emma is not back yet.” He lifted a glass of milk to her lips. “Try to get this down. I believe part of your problem is that you haven’t eaten. The only cure for that whooping cough is to rest.”

  The milk caused the churning in Bertie’s stomach to stop, but it made her very tired, and she fell back to sleep. When she awoke again, she felt better than she had, though her head was still in agony.

  Emma was again sitting by her side.

  “Do you have Eileen?” Bertie asked immediately.

  Emma sighed. “No, but after much searching I found out who she’s with. She was last seen with a man named Rudy.”

  Bertie sat up in alarm. “I know no one by that name.”

  “They told me he was speaking to the crowd when you fell.”

  “Do you mean Ray?”

  “They told me his name was Rudy.”

  “No, it’s Ray,” she insisted, but even as she spoke a picture was forming in her head. She could see Maria sitting beside her in the sweatshop speaking these words: That’s what he calls himself, but that can’t possibly be his name, can it?

  Was Rudy Stalls his real name? Or maybe Stalls wasn’t even his real name either.

  “What last name did they know him by?”

  “No one I spoke to knew it. They only knew him as Rudy,” Emma told her. “Honestly, I asked everywhere and everyone I could find. I was told that union organizers like this man often keep their last names a secret so that the heads of corporations and the police can’t find them after they leave town.”

  Bertie remembered that she had once asked him what his real name was, but he had told her it was a secret. If only she had pressed him harder to reveal it.

  “Is Eileen with him now?” Bertie asked.

  “I couldn’t say. Is he a friend of yours?”

  “He used to be.”

  “Then you know where he lives?”
>
  “No. I never knew, and we’ve not been in touch in some time. Is he staying in Atlanta?”

  Emma sighed and looked away for a moment before speaking again. From her pained expression, Bertie could tell she was about to deliver distressing news. “He was seen with her in the railway station very early this morning.”

  She remembered his enraged words. He’d threatened to take her firstborn child. Eileen was like her own child.

  He’d done it! He’d taken her! He knew it was the one thing that would break her heart!

  Sick as she was, Bertie staggered from her cot. In her weakness, she had to lean against a wall, but she straightened up as best she could. “I have to find him. Where did they go?” Bertie asked urgently, her heart palpitating rapidly. “What train did they get on?”

  “No one knows,” replied Emma.

  “No one knows?” Bertie echoed Emma’s words frantically. “Someone must know. Someone has to know!”

  This country was huge. Where would she begin to search?

  Never to see Eileen again? No! It couldn’t be! It was too much to take. It couldn’t be happening.

  An enormous wave of guilt hit her. She had made this bargain with him. Why? Because she wanted wealth. She wanted to marry James.

  She had made this bargain, and now she had lost Eileen, maybe forever.

  The terribleness of what she’d done was so impossible to bear that she fainted, crumpling to the floor.

  On the third day of Bertie’s recovery, she was able to get up. She went to one of the long tables in the mission dining hall and slowly ate a bowl of beef broth that one of the mission workers had brought to her. Each day her head felt somewhat better and her cough was less racking. Bed rest coupled with a steady supply of the plain but nourishing foods the mission served was improving her health, although her mind was fiercely tormented day and night with worry for Eileen.

  Emma came in and sat beside her. “I’ve learned more about this man who was seen with your sister,” she said. “I’ve been talking to anyone I can find who met him while he was here in Wellington. I’ve learned that he told people he had gone back to using the name he was born with.”

  “Did anyone know what his original name might be?”

  “No, but I’ve also learned that he went back to New York with her. I asked at the train station, and one of the ticket clerks remembered seeing them.”

  Bertie hugged Emma. “Thank you for doing that.”

  “Now that you know those things you can track him down.”

  “How will I find him?” asked Bertie.

  “Detectives, I suppose. It doesn’t sound like he is a bad man.”

  “No. But he is a strange and mysterious man. Once, in a fury, he told me he would take my firstborn child in payment for a favor he had done for me. Now I fear that he’s done it.”

  Emma gasped. “Surely not! Eileen is not your firstborn.”

  “But in a way, she is like my own adopted child. You could say she is my first child.”

  “Why would he do such a thing?” Emma asked.

  Bertie hung her head as tears slid down her cheek. “I suppose he could have done it to be spiteful, because he was angry at me and he knows that Eileen is dearest to my heart. I must find him and get her back, but I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Maybe this will help,” said Emma, sliding an envelope stuffed with coins and some cash across the table to her.

  Bertie looked at her, confused. “I don’t understand.”

  “The people in Wellington took up a collection. It seems that my descriptions made someone realize that I was speaking of James Wellington’s fiancée, who used to manage the mill. They’d heard how Mr. Wellington had wronged you and that you were experiencing hard times. They told me you were always kind to the workers, especially the children, and so they wanted to help.”

  “Oh, this is a miracle,” Bertie said, squeezing Emma’s hand gratefully. “Now I can go back to New York to search for Eileen. I will discover Ray’s real last name, no matter what I have to do.”

  A bitter winter wind blasted up Park Avenue as Bertie was coming from the train station with suitcase in hand. The trip from Atlanta had taken many hours. She’d gotten some sleep on the train but it hadn’t stopped her from feeling stiff and exhausted. Every block she walked felt like a mile and the shock of the cold weather didn’t help. Bertie stopped to pull her cape more tightly around her shoulders.

  A horse-drawn coach in the road began to slow down as if to stop. When it was directly beside her, the door opened. “Bertie, remember me?” said George Rumpole from inside.

  “George, hello,” she greeted him uneasily. He was James’s best friend, and she wasn’t sure how much he knew of what had happened.

  “Can I offer you a ride somewhere?” he asked.

  “If I knew where I was going, you could,” she said.

  “Then get in, and we’ll figure out a destination for you,” he said merrily.

  She climbed in, pulling her suitcase in behind her. Once she was inside, the driver continued down Park Avenue while she filled George in on everything that had happened in Atlanta with Wellington Industries.

  George hadn’t spoken to or heard from James since their night of carousing last October. He was not at all shocked to hear of his friend’s bad behavior. “James was fun while we were in school,” he recalled, “but he’s been headed down a bad road for a long time now. I’m sure he gambled away all the money and then accused you of stealing it because he couldn’t face his father.”

  “There were other reasons too,” she told him. “I knew things about him he was afraid I’d reveal to his father.”

  George sighed and shook his head. “I never thought James would go that low,” he admitted, “but he’s terrified of old man Wellington. He lives in constant fear that he’s going to disappoint him so badly one day that he’ll cut him out of the will. If that happened he would be lost, because he has no concept of how to work at anything.”

  Bertie then told him about how Ray had taken Eileen. “Ray is known as Rudy now. He’s gone back to his original name. I have to discover his real last name before I can even begin to track him down,” she told him.

  “I know a detective agency my father uses sometimes in his investment business,” George told her.

  Ray and Eileen could be miles away by now. There was no time left to be cautious. “Can we go see these detectives now?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said George. Leaning out the window, he directed the driver to a new address. They went in together and spoke to the detective, Leon Freemont, a short, potbellied man with keen eyes. The man listened while he pulled on his pipe. “I can track this man down easily if he ever used his real name in this country,” he said when she was done. “If the trail takes me back to Europe, it will take longer and cost you much more.”

  “I don’t care what it costs,” George said. “I have the money.”

  “Then I’ll get right on it,” he said.

  Outside the detective’s office, Bertie and George walked. “Where are you going now?” he asked. “I can get us a coach and take you there.”

  An idea had come to her, and she gave him the address of the basement where she knew the refurbished loom and the spinning wheel to be. “George,” she said. “I want to make you a business offer.”

  “I have a trust fund at my disposal,” he told her. “What kind of business proposal?”

  “I want to start a dressmaking business. I’d only need some fabric and thread to start,” she said. “It wouldn’t be a huge investment.”

  “Bertie, I saw the dresses at the Autumn Ball, and I know your work is wonderful.”

  “You haven’t seen my work, George. The man I’m seeking did that work. But I’ve learned a lot from Margaret and even more from working at Wellington Industries. I want to make some dresses and try to sell them.”

  “You could contact the Wellington girls and see if their friends would buy your dresses,”
George suggested.

  “I couldn’t go back there,” she protested.

  “I could. In fact, I’d welcome an excuse to see Catherine again.”

  “Ahh, I see,” she teased playfully.

  He shrugged with a wistful sigh. “She has a new beau, but I’ve always liked her.”

  Bertie rubbed his shoulder soothingly. “She’d be a fool not to have you,” she said. “Now then, stop with me at some sewing supply and fabric vendors I know of on Orchard Street. We’ll buy what we need and I’ll get right to work.”

  After making her purchases with a loan from George, Bertie said good-bye and headed for the alley in the Five Points. From the moment Bertie walked back into that basement room, she knew what she needed to do. It was all there: the spinning wheel, the loom, the open packing crates. Scraps of the dark fabric were still tossed around. There were even scissors and a few pieces of tailor’s marking chalk tossed in the corner.

  Lying down, she stretched a tape measure from outstretched hand to hand and marked the measurement on the floor. She continued to mark all her measurements on the floor. Now she was ready to make a dress—and to spin golden material from the shreds in the packing material for collars, sashes, bows, and cuffs.

  A glint of something red caught her eye. From inside one of the opened crates, she picked up a nearly empty spool of red thread. She recognized the vendor’s stamp on top of the wooden spool. It was the original spool of crimson thread that Ray had bought for her so many months ago.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Searching for Eileen

  Bertie lived in the basement, sleeping on the floor, sometimes wrapped in no more than her cape for a blanket and coming up just to eat. As the weeks progressed from January to February, it grew ever colder in the dark cellar.

  Her harsh, barking cough returned, but the dresses were selling well. She would have had enough to rent a proper apartment, but she spent the money on the detective, Leon Freemont, instead, in spite of George’s offer.

  She did her own searching as well. She sought out Maria at the restaurant where she worked but learned that her friend was no longer working there and that her family had moved from their apartment. She looked for Hilda, but she had gone to live with relatives in Pennsylvania.