by Suzanne Weyn
The last thing she felt was unyielding hardness as he 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 least.”
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 fin. 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 as 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? Mo! 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 had 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 foe 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 that 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 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 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 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 last 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 came 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 the 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 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 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 measurements 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 her relatives in Pennsylvania.
Bertie never let George see where she was working but met him at a table in Sullivan’s Tavern, where she handed him the latest dresses to deliver to Catherine’s friends.
“Does her father know she’s doing this?” she asked him one day in mid-February.
“No, but he’s in Atlanta most of the time now, so it’s not hard for her. All her friends want your dresses,
George told her. “Here’s the money.”
Bertie counted it out and separated it into three piles. “A third for me, a third for you, and a third to invest back into the business for buying supplies.”
He slid his pile back t her. “You can keep it. I don’t need it.”
She shook her head, returning it to him. “Partners, remember?” she insisted. “Have you heard from Mr. Freemont?”
“No. I went by his office yesterday, but he told me that he still hasn’t found anything,” George reported.
As they left Sullivan’s Tavern, Bertie heard a bell clanging in the distance and thought of Finn, who had worked on just such a fire truck. The fire truck’s blare grew closer, and soon the truck rounded a corner toward George and Bertie. People began to run down the street, passing them by.
One of the running people was Maria. When she spotted Bertie, she came to a complete stop and stared, as though she wasn’t sure Bertie was really there. In the next minute, though, she threw her arms around her. “Bertie!” she cried. “Why didn’t you tell me you were back?”
“I looked for
you but couldn’t find you,” Bertie told her.
“I moved and changed jobs. I thought you were still in Atlanta.”
“Where is everyone going?”
“There’s a big fire at Stiltchen’s Fabrics.”
“Where?”
“It’s Ray’s new shop. Haven’t you heard about it? Of course you haven’t. You’ve been out of town.”
“Ray’s shop?” Bertie questioned. “But you said it was called Stiltchen’s.”
“Rudolph Stiltchen – Ray opened the store using that name a few months ago. Apparently it’s his real name,” Maria informed her.
“Rudolph Stiltchen,” Bertie repeated. “And he’s opened a shop you say?”
“Well, you may never get to see it. It’s on fire, I hear. I was on my way to see what was happening. They say everyone’s trapped inside.”
“Eileen!” Bertie cried, reeling with the sudden realization that her sister might be trapped in the fire.
By the time Bertie, George, and Maria raced to the corner of Rivington Street, the blaze had reached the sky. Smoke choked the area with gray soot.
“Stay back, miss,” a firefighter warned, holding out his arm to stop Bertie as she ran toward the building.
“I have to get in there! My baby sister might be in there!”
But he would not let her pass. Bertie paced like a caged tiger, nearly insane with the need to know if Eileen was inside the shop.
A half hour later, the efforts of the fire department brought the flames to an end. An ambulance arrived to collect the stretchers of customers who had passed out from the smoke. Fortunately, none had been burned.
As the smoke began to clear, a corner shop with a smashed plate window and charred insides appeared. A man covered in soot stumbled out, carefully stepping over the shattered glass left on the window frame.
Bertie ran toward him and grabbed his shoulders violently. “Where is she? Where is she? What have you done with Eileen? Tell me or I’ll kill you! I swear I will!”