“But true,” she counters with a familiar stubbornness. “The wife is unbelievably drab. Besides, everyone knows she was once—”
“She’s very devoted, my dear. On the occasions when we’ve seen them both together, she strikes me as—”
“Dogs are also devoted, John, and yet human beings do not marry them.”
Durand clears his throat and struggles with his cravat, but Emily, focused on her own concerns, fails to detect his deep unease. “Not every lady can hope to sparkle as you do, my dear wife.”
Emily tilts her head. She perceives the pretty words as both manipulative and a covert warning, and searches her husband’s eyes, but they remain inscrutable.
“We could ask Martha Beale as well, don’t you think, Emily …?” He clears his throat and fidgets with his cravat a second time. Despite these outward signs of anxiety, moment by moment, John Durand feels himself growing more confident in the deception he’s arranged. For not one second has he recognized the strangeness of his wife’s behavior. “Yes … have her to sup and so forth … her and the Roseggers …”
“Martha Beale’s in mourning, John” is all Emily can think to reply.
“Oh, not yet, my dear. What I mean to say is there are no funerary arrangements—”
“Not as such, no, although given the circumstances of her father’s disappearance—”
Durand won’t concede his wife’s interruption. In fact, he now seems quite sure of his position. His thick body almost swells with pride. “Which there won’t be, of course, unless a body is found … So, yes … You could write to Martha Beale and the Roseggers, and … and …” Then he suddenly realizes that he’s grasping at straws with this suggestion. “… And … and that Italian johnnie the Ilsleys had … Make a bit of a stir, don’t you know … Have another of those … what do you call them? Private séances? Is that it …? Yes … yes, and you could easily outdo the Ilsley set …”
Emily opens her mouth to reply, but no matter how much she wishes to sound calm and nonchalant, no sound comes.
“After all, why should Henrietta Ilsley outshine you, my dear? Your soirées are ten times more scintillating than hers.”
Again Emily can only remain mute and immobile.
Without his wife’s definitive answer to his proposal—a response John accepts as agreement—he nods agreeably, then strides quite purposefully from the room.
Left alone, Emily forces her gaze to return to the table but finds she cannot see anything; the linen, the silver, the porcelain, the now-chilled egg cup: All are blurred and meaningless. Oh, what has John discovered? her mind demands. What can he mean by this peculiar scheme? If Emily could lay her head upon the table and weep and scream aloud, she would, but that’s not an act she’s ever permitted herself. Not as a child, and certainly not as a married woman. So she remains rigidly still, thinking and thinking. I must outmaneuver this man, she decides. I must.
In the stable, however, Durand’s show of self-confidence deserts him. He leans heavily against a box stall and releases a long and troubled sigh, then attempts unsuccessfully to regain some measure of remembered peace. He concentrates on the customarily companionable smells and sounds of the horses surrounding him, but solace eludes him. He sinks down onto a three-legged stool, carelessly letting his coattails sweep the ancient wood floor. He has little fear of being discovered in this unusual pose; the groom and undergroom have long since finished their duties of currying the animals and cleaning out their stalls. John sighs anew; his wide chest constricts, and his neck and face grow hot. He has lied to his wife; the new groom is an excellent man. It’s he, John Durand, who’s at risk.
He listens to the crunch of oats, the papery mastication of hay, the crackling of fresh-strewn straw, the contented blowings and mutterings of the horses taking their fill, the occasional peaceable whinny. He reaches out toward the iron bars surrounding a nearby storage bin and shuts his eyes. In his tortured imagination, he sees the very metal ripped from his hands, the box stall and its eleven neighbors yanked away beneath his feet, the barn gone, the paddock gone, the fields and orchards sold, the venerable stone house auctioned, and all the possessions in it: family portraits, porcelain and silver tea services inherited from long-dead great-grandparents, tables and chairs and bedsteads commissioned long before the War of Revolution: everything carted off by strangers. And all because of his despicable deeds.
John groans and reaches for the flask he always carries on his person. He sips at the fortified wine, then sips again until the flask is empty.
A Dinner Interrupted
HE’S CALLED MR. ROBEY,” JOSIAH, the tailor, tells his young charge, “although I don’t believe that’s his true name.” Josiah sets forth two bowlfuls of sausages cooked in brown gravy as he speaks, the aroma spilling into the air and perfuming every crowded corner of their one-room home on lower Fitzwater Street: a “trinity” matching similar “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” dwellings that line the block and contain an entire family on each of the three ten-by-twelve-foot floors.
“Eat, Ella.”
The girl’s eyes mirror her delight. “Sausages,” she whispers. She might as easily be saying, Silver and gemstones: Are they for me?
“Sausages,” Josiah answers her with solemnity. “It is a special occasion. I’ve received a gift from Heaven. A client of my own. And you know what that can lead to.”
“No,” Ella responds. She gazes at her plate and the hallowed food resting there. She thinks she might like to bury her nose in the wondrous stuff, just like a dog would.
“It means that if I’m careful, and more attentive to my work than the others are, that if I remain respectful and discreet, one day I may own a shop myself.”
“And I will be your wife.”
The tailor turns on her angrily. “You must cease that kind of talk, Ella. You are yet a child, and I am as old as any father you could have. As any father you do have. As any mother, too.”
“But I—” she begins.
“Stop, Ella. I do not wish to hear more. Your past is your past, as is mine. We will not speak about such things. Eat your supper, and be still. Besides, you must remember that you’re supposed to be my young cousin now, the child of a relative living in the country.”
“Yes, cousin.” Ella’s voice is meek.
“And my name?” he prods.
“Jo … Daniel,” Ella corrects herself. “You are my cousin Daniel.”
“And he is?”
“A … a cousin to an aunt who has been rearing me after my own parents died … but … but my aunt could no longer afford to keep me”—Ella recites the tale she’s been supplied—“and … and so you kindly agreed to take me into your home in Philadelphia in order that I might learn good stitchery and so prove helpful to your work.”
“Excellent, Ella.” The tailor’s nervous anger gradually begins to dissipate, and he lifts up his spoon. “That is very good. Is there more to your history, perhaps?”
Ella thinks for a second only. “Yes … My parents moved so many times when I was living with them that I can no longer remember where I was born.”
“Perfect.”
Ella beams. “Thank you for the sausages, cousin,” she answers. Except for the falsified relationship, this statement is altogether true.
“Let us hope that we have many, many more.” Daniel who was once Josiah also smiles; and as he does he reflects on how well his newly chosen name suits him: Daniel, who in the biblical tale was rescued from the lions’ den; Daniel, whose friends survived the fiery furnace of King Nebuchadnezzar. The stories are excellent omens, he believes. Besides, Josiah, the escaped prisoner, must cease to exist if Daniel, the tailor, is to remain a free man.
“Now, let us eat before our suppers cool.”
They eat; a baby cries on the floor above; a baby bellows on the third floor, too. A chicken, escaping the depredations of a roving dog, hurtles itself against the window; a pig snorts greedily near the door. Ella jumps in fear when she hears it,
and Daniel attempts to laugh away her terror.
“That pig cannot enter our door, little cousin. I won’t let it.”
“Pigs eat human babies. Dead ones, that is” is her still-addled reply, to which Daniel adds an unexpectedly bitter:
“You’ve seen too much for your age, Ella. We’ll have no more talk about pigs and their food … Now, let us finish our own good meal.”
She bends to her bowl, eating slowly and sparingly. “Is he a fine man, your client?” she asks after several more silent moments.
“I think he is.” Daniel considers his response. He puts down his spoon and leans back from the table. “He could be a thief, though. The chief of a gang. His fingers have never seen hard work.”
Ella shivers involuntarily at this description, but Daniel doesn’t notice. “I’m inclined to believe he’s a fine man, a gentleman who’s found himself in an uncomfortable position. A debtor in hiding from his creditors, perhaps. He has an odd and secretive manner about him.”
Ella knows all about odd manners among men. She nods in empathy. “He’s demanding, Cousin Daniel?”
“No, that’s the very problem. He’s not demanding. And I expected he would be, given the elegant clothing he’s ordering from me. But I have yet to elicit more than a few words from him at one time.”
“What do his servants tell you?”
“I’ve never seen one. Mr. Robey opens the door to me himself.”
Ella has already finished her marvelous supper. She knows she can’t ask for more; if scraps remain, water will be added to the leftover gravy, making a thin soup for their meal the next day. “Perhaps he’s a foreigner.”
Daniel considers her suggestion. “He has no accent that I can detect.”
“Maybe he’s disguising it—and is residing in a strange and hidden house as a spy. Maybe ‘Mr. Robey’ is an invention. You just said you thought it might not be his true name.”
This suggestion is uncomfortably close to Daniel’s own situation, so he returns to his bowl, scraping the last morsels as he says a dismissive “You’re a very fanciful child.”
Ella is about to protest this additional reference to her youth and explain how knowledgeable life has made her when a calamitous noise erupts from a street nearby. There are screams and oaths, and a fierce and heart-stopping rumble as if the earth beneath the city has suddenly burst open. Then the night sky turns into a scorched and angry yellow.
“They must be firing the Negro houses” is Daniel’s astonished exclamation. “A riot like the one six years ago! Stay here; bolt the door after me, and do not leave under any circumstances. I’ll see what help I can render.”
Before Ella can protest, Daniel hobbles out the door. She hurries to do his bidding as the clamor increases and the neighboring babies wail louder in response. For no reason that she can understand, an image of Mr. Robey and his gentleman’s hands comes into her thoughts. She pictures him lurking outside in the deafening air, watching and waiting as her “cousin” Daniel leaves her all alone.
“Oh,” she gasps, then runs for the corner cupboard where the tailor stores his wares, burrowing in amongst the woolens and silks and making herself into such a small package that she’s certain she’s turned invisible. In the dark nest created by the fabrics, she closes her eyes, remembering the truth of her past and not the fiction her savior has created for her.
Ella knows she had a mother once, and a sister, too, and a little brother who’d pitched forward into the hearth when he was but an infant and so developed a face that was half an angry purple demon’s and half a startled angel’s. And those two? Ella wonders. Did Father sell my brother and sister also? Or do they still reside at home in the countryside? And does my mother sing to them as she sang once to me?
Ella’s shut eyes envision her mother crooning. She lifts her head as though she could hear the tune, pointing her nose as if it were the scent of her mother and not uncut cloth she was sniffing.
One fire gang roars to the rescue, whipping the horses and hurling oaths at passersby too slow or stunned to leap from the path. But “the Killers,” under the leadership of the notorious saloonkeeper Billy Mullins, refuse the interlopers entry to the scene of destruction. Instead, the members of the hose company descend from their tanker coach and build a solid wall of white bodies that faces out upon the crowd and allows the flames behind to soar unabated.
Shouts of outrage and invective ensue, until the verbal threats between the fire gangs become blows, become cobbles and bricks wrenched from the streets, become bleeding heads and battered hands while whatever Killer is able to leave a comrade’s side starts rounding on the Negroes who are yet struggling to wrest themselves and their possessions from the blaze. Children are beaten about the head, and old men and women shoved full force into the road. Then a pistol appears in the midst of the fracas, and a Negro youth is shot and killed.
His body tumbles forward, and in that single moment the earth among these warring nations grows still. Both sides watch the young man fall until a wail of grief springs forth only to be answered by a shout of taunting glee. Soon the noise and bloodlust reclaim the street as the white mob proceeds to grab whatever loose objects come to hand: slop buckets, empty feed sacks, broken crates, heaving them into the blaze while the flames, so handily fed, leap from one building to the next, and the next after that. “Go home to your Southern masters, Sambo!” the crowd roars above the flames. “Woolly-heads!” “Niggerism! Nigger-friends!”
Daniel limps forward; his intention is to help rescue the children, but, alas, he has no formulated plan. He reaches out his arms in succor but is jabbed in the back by a red-faced man wielding a club. “Nigger-friend!” the spittle-slick lips scream. “Go home, dirty Jew!”
Daniel turns to face his assailant. “I’m not—”
“Papist foreign filth!” Another man raises his cudgel; Daniel scuttles sideways out of reach.
“Crippled abolitionist swine. I’ll give you something to pray about—” But the intended blow is arrested by the sudden arrival of the militia: packs set squarely upon their tensed backs, gold-braided hats upon their heads. Weapons begin firing on both sides; and the seething crowd, either good or ill, huddles low in a swirl of broken flesh and fear.
Daniel gazes at babies lost, mothers fallen, blood growing sticky on the stone, tufts of hair, scraps of clothing, a shoe, a paper picture wrenched from a now-vanished frame. He sees a young Negro woman crouching amidst a group of circling white men; as they descend upon their victim, her cries for mercy sound like the bleatings of a newborn calf. Daniel backs away, worming through the mass of people, head down, shoulders hunched, arms held squirrel-like in front of him. He can’t help. He’s never been able to help. At the moment, “Daniel” seems the worst possible choice for his new name.
The riot continues all night, and all the next day. The Southwark Beneficial Hall, known far and near as an abolitionist meeting place, is burned to the ground. The African Presbyterian Church is also reduced to cinders. Fires—and looters—gut trinity homes on the alleys abutting Fitzwater and Catherine. Finished with those poor dwellings but far from sated, the mob threatens to move deeper into the city, and even the militia is hard-pressed to control the spill of screaming citizenry that begins to spread north toward the mansions that line Washington Square and westward to the orphanage where Hannah Yarnell has barricaded herself and her terror-stricken charges. On Washington Square, the Ilsleys’ home and those of their neighbors are turned into fortresses manned by owners and their loyal servants. Shutters are pulled fast; lamps are extinguished, pistols readied.
The orphanage is not afforded such resources. Hannah and the two young and untried Negro women who serve the Association as nursemaids and aides are the sole adults in residence when the riots commence. None would know what to do with a firearm should it be proffered; and as to boarding up the windows, they haven’t the time with so many frightened children to attend to. Instead, Hannah walks purposefully from room to room, spreadi
ng comfort, singing songs and hymns, reciting prayers, stroking heads and shoulders, and speaking aloud and intimately with God until even the most quivering child begins to believe that Miss Hannah is capable of saving them.
Only the nameless epileptic boy remains beyond her persuasive touch. He has fit after fit, sleeping openmouthed and leaden-bodied when the spasms pass; and Hannah experiences such concern for his survival that she decides he must be baptized lest he perish before the horrible ordeal is past. She takes a prayer book, calls for one of the nursemaids, and christens the child Caspar after the home’s visiting physician, Caspar Walne.
The name has an astonishing effect. “Ca,” the boy answers, which is the first verbal communication he has made since his arrival.
“Caspar,” Hannah repeats, drawing out the vowels and consonants.
“Cai,” the child slowly replies.
The effort is close enough for Hannah. “Well then,” she says, smiling although her eyes swell with joyful tears. “Cai you are, and will always be.”
And Cai, oh miracle of miracles, beams back at her.
Ruth
ONE DAY AFTER AN UNEASY peace has been established, the city of Philadelphia still smolders: buildings and tempers, both. There are those who blame city hall, those who blame the Irish gangs or the militia or the tardy and criminally stubborn hose companies, those who continue to curse the Negroes for “stealing bread from honest men,” those who rage at a system that makes free men and women out of people who were so much better off enslaved. Poverty of means and spirit is terrible when wed to the god of righteousness.
Ruth has survived the attack Daniel witnessed, but just barely, and that probably because she lay as limp as a rag until the men using her believed they’d killed her.
It’s Dutch Kat who finds Ruth’s battered body while prowling the eerily empty neighborhood, going out, as she told her ladies, “to see what finery might be left to purloin.” Ruth’s soft and whimpering cries first arrest the madam, but it’s the sight of the swollen, battered face and bleeding lips that sends Kat hurtling back to the fancy house to fetch two of her strongest workers to bear the hurt woman to safety.
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