Steam was not the only enemy of traditional shipping. The second shot in the war had been fired by Jeremiah Thompson and his Black Ball Line. Thompson’s sailing packets set out for England not when their holds were full and the weather fair but on an announced schedule. A few years back the first Black Ball vessel left the harbor in a snow squall, precisely as the clock of St. Paul’s struck ten, carrying only a few passengers, some mail, and a bit of freight. She reached Liverpool twenty-five days later. Meanwhile a sister ship had set out for New York at exactly the same time. It took forty-nine days to make the westward journey, but men of business either side of the Atlantic fancied the notion of scheduled departures firmly adhered to and the idea caught on. Only the Black Ball’s crews knew what brutalizing was required to make tars keep to those artificial schedules that disregarded wind and water. The line’s flag was crimson with a black circle, but that’s not why her ships were called blood ships.
Time and speed. Master them and you control commerce. Control commerce and you control the world. He was Samuel Devrey. That understanding was bred in his bone.
His twice great grandfather was Willem van Der Vries, son of a Dutch doctor, and Englishwoman Sally Turner, an apothecary, who murdered her Netherlander husband and hung his tarred body from the town gibbet. As for Willem, he recognized the rule of time and speed in the late 1600s, when he founded what became Devrey Shipping after its owner modified the name more appropriate to New Amsterdam than New York. Devrey’s first ships were schooners engaged in the triangle trade, sailing from the American colonies south to the Caribbean, then east to the African coast and home again. Molasses to bibles to rum, that was the common explanation. It was a lie. The ships carried black gold—slaves. In those days the slave market at the foot of Wall Street was second in size only to that of Charleston in South Carolina, and had been the hub and heart of the slave trade here in the north. But though in this nation of twelve million, two million were still held as slaves, the practice was no longer legal in New York. Statewide Emancipation was declared in 1827.
No matter. Devrey ships had been off the Africa run for over a century. The nigras were docile enough stood up there on the block on Wall Street as long as the whipper was ready with his lash and the goods were properly shackled. But you had to take the irons off if you wanted any work out of them. You had to give your new property a place to sleep, and city life didn’t offer space for the separate slave quarters of the southern plantations. So what was to keep those nigras housed under your roof from rising up to murder you in your bed? Two revolts, a few dead whites…After that, no amount of public burnings and rackings and hangings could restore New Yorkers’ sense of ease, and bringing slaves direct from Africa was outlawed.
For a time they were replaced by seasoned slaves from the canebrakes of the Caribbean, already lash-trained to obedience. Eventually a flood of immigrants from the Old World came to meet the city’s need for labor. As for the Devrey ships, these days they filled their holds with the made goods of England and France. And after Independence the bounty of the China trade.
Sweet Christ but didn’t he know about that.
“Tea and silk and porcelains from the Orient. They’ll make us rich again.” So said Bastard Devrey after his foolhardy speculations with the moneymen of Wall Street nearly exhausted the Devrey fortune. That’s why Bastard sent Samuel, his only son, to Canton, to learn the ways of doing business in Asia.
Fourteen years old Sam was in December of 1811 when he saw Canton for the first time. He should have been home in six months; instead the War of 1812 brought with it a British blockade, and he was marooned half a world away. He couldn’t blame Bastard for that or for the fact that the war strangled the life out of American trade. Devrey ships were not the only ones left to rot in harbor.
But while most of the shippers hung on, Bastard Devrey pissed away Samuel’s legacy. Mired in debt and drink, he lost everything to his despised cousin Joyful Turner and to Turner’s partner, Jacob Astor, the richest man in New York. When Samuel returned from China in 1816 he was heir to nothing worth having. His mother was overseeing the building of a Broadway mansion that was gobbling the last of his father’s resources, and Bastard was so steeped in Madeira he had little notion of what was happening.
Name Carolina’s child after his feckless father? Not if Bastard’s ghost came round rattling his chains and demanding the honor.
Nineteen years old when he finally got home, and only his wits to rely on, but Sam Devrey knew Canton by then. Spoke the language, knew the ways of the mighty ships cramming the treasures of Asia into their cavernous holds, knew the Pearl River trade. Knew the Hakka pirates, whose junks ruled the waterways surrounding the tiny offshore islands and controlled the receipt and distribution of the British shipments of wooden chests packed with balls of a new form of black gold. Opium.
“The Chinese call it ya-p’ien,” he told Astor. “They smoke it, call it swallowing a cloud. Grabs them fast and won’t let go. No way a man can do without swallowing clouds once he’s developed a taste for it.”
Opium was made from poppies, he’d explained. The best and the cheapest of it came from British-controlled India. No hope of getting any of that. But he’d heard of another source of supply, the Levant, and there was a web of distribution outside the grasp of the British. He knew how to tap into that.
“My partner in this Devrey shipping,” Astor said softly. “Your cousin Joyful Turner…”
“I understand, sir. He will not approve.” Spoken as knowingly as young Samuel Devrey could manage and with surprising calm, given that until a short time earlier he’d been worrying himself sick about the opposition of Joyful Turner. “I had word yesterday that my poor cousin is caught by the fever.” Devrey had nodded toward the windows of Astor’s Broadway mansion, tightly closed against the contagion of yellowing fever raging in the city. “He must not have been as cautious as you are, sir. They say one of Joyful’s twin boys is abed with the selfsame affliction.”
“As of this morning,” Astor had said, “both boys.”
He should have known John Jacob Astor would have the latest news.
“Then it seems to me”—Samuel had leaned forward and fixed Astor with a steady gaze—“you’ve a duty to make the decisions in my cousin’s stead.”
“A duty,” Astor repeated. “Ja. Perhaps.” And after a pause, “Your supply route, it is reliable?”
“Absolutely, Mr. Astor. I guarantee it.” Why would it not be reliable? The money to be made in one exchange was frequently more than the smugglers had previously seen in a lifetime.
“And your guarantee, Mr. Samuel Devrey, it is worth something?”
“My bond, Mr. Astor,” he replied, never letting himself look away from the older man, giving him the full brunt of that earnest stare.
“Ja, very well.” Astor stood up and offered his hand. “Done, Mr. Devrey.”
“Done, Mr. Astor.”
Even so, they might not have gotten away with it. The emperor of China had recently outlawed trading opium for one thing. But corruption riddled Chinese governance, Chinese pirates were smarter than those charged with enforcing the law, and the British were not to be bested by a nation whose navy consisted of open boats propelled by oarsmen pulling to the beat of a drum. Moreover, Samuel’s luck, what the Chinese called his joss, held. The yellowing fever took Joyful Turner’s life as well as those of his two sons. Any loyalty Astor might have felt to his former partner was ended when he paid over a generous sum to Joyful’s widow, who, it was said, consoled herself by nursing the poorest of the stinking poor in the hellhole of Five Points.
So Samuel Devrey need have no further concern for any opposition to opium that might have been voiced by Joyful Turner, much less for the longstanding enmity between the Turners and the Devreys. He was entirely on his own. It was up to him to get back what his foolish father had lost.
He’d been trying to do so from that day to this. Seventeen long years since he’d made his ba
rgain with Astor and brought his first shipment of opium to China, and he’d still not achieved his goal. John Jacob Astor yet held the controlling position in Devrey Shipping, but the opium trade nonetheless changed Devrey’s life forever. It took the young man back to the East, to the Hakka pirates on the Pearl River, and to Mei-hua.
She was three years old the first time he saw her, and he was twenty-two. She was sitting on her haunches at Ah Chee’s feet on the deck of a sampan tied up to the one on which he was doing business with the man known as Di Short Neck. The river pirates roped their boats together to create equivalents of the mansions of wealthy men on the mainland, and the nursemaid and her charge were on the sampan that acted as the women’s quarters. The servant’s fingers deftly twisted the child’s lustrous black hair into braids. The little girl looked up, straight over at him, and he saw those incredible sea-colored eyes. In that moment something to which he never gave a name was born in Samuel. “Your daughter?” he asked, careful to keep the wonder from his voice.
Short Neck looked across the deck to see what the yang gwei zih saw, then nodded. “I think so, yes. If she’s the one I think she is, she’s the youngest child of third wife, Mei Lin. She’s called Mei-hua. At least I think that’s her name.”
“You do not value her?”
“Girls,” the pirate said with a shrug. “You like little girls? I have a few more the same age. If you care to add an extra two chests of ya-p’ien, I will have two of them brought to you tonight. Four chests for three.”
Devrey made his voice neutral, ignoring the fire that had been set alight inside him. “One only. And not now. I will claim her when she is bride age. But not one of the others. This one. This Mei-hua.”
“Three chests of ya-p’ien if I am to lose her forever.”
Samuel nodded agreement. He could easily make a paper accounting of the transaction and slip it past Wong Hai, the Canton-based company facilitator, the comprador, who had been with Devrey’s for as long as Astor owned the controlling interest.
The child stood up just then and he saw her unbound feet. “She must have golden lilies,” he said firmly. His first time had been here in China with the exquisitely tiny wife of a wealthy Hong merchant who had delighted in initiating a boy. There had been any number of Cantonese whores since then, always the smallest he could find. He’d tried a few times with white women, but their size, particularly their large feet, repulsed him.
“Of course. I will give the order for the binding to begin tonight.” Short Neck looked at him without seeming to look, taking the foreign devil’s measure and recognizing the need for power that was like a worm deep in the white man’s belly, eating all else. “You can watch,” he said softly. “And see that it is done for you. The way you wish.”
The pirate, however, gave orders that the breaking of the instep arch with a heavy stone not be done until the yang gwei zih had left the sampans. He knew these foreign devil white men. They did not have the stomach for much that was real in life. They preferred only the illusions.
For Devrey there were many trips between the Levant and China after that, and a few times back to New York. But always he returned to Canton, to the Pearl River and the sampans of Di Short Neck to watch as Mei-hua grew. He became her friend and paid for tutors to come and teach her to read and to write, to draw and sing and play music on the zitherlike instrument called a gu zheng. He waited with ever increasing impatience while she acquired all the skills of a highborn lady. Waited for her to be thirteen. Bride age.
Later he realized he’d been on the river in July of 1823 on the precise day and at the hour when Bastard Devrey broke his neck in a drunken tumble off the half-built upper landing of the grand Broadway mansion he’d no money to finish. Bastard was long in the ground before Samuel heard he was dead. No matter. Samuel wouldn’t have returned to do his father honor if he could have magicked himself back to New York on a broomstick.
But he had no choice when it was Jacob Astor who summoned him home to take over the New York end of the shipping that was but one of Astor’s interests. A paltry interest some might say, given the size and the scope of the real estate and all the rest. Small and unimportant, like Samuel Devrey himself.
Let them talk. Astor did not own him. He was, for instance, entirely sure that Astor did not know about Mei-hua, brought to him two months after he returned to New York along with her dowry of furniture and clothing and the one-time wet nurse, Ah Chee. And while Astor probably did know of Samuel’s investment in the Cherry Street lodging houses and even about their Chinese occupants, the man who was rumored to own most of Manhattan island was unlikely to be bothered by that. Much less, the fact that Wilbur Randolf’s modest fortune would some day be in Samuel Devrey’s control.
As for the rest, Samuel was prepared to bide his time.
Chapter Three
“HAVE YOU CONSIDERED my suggestion, Carolina?”
“What suggestion is that, Mrs. Devrey?”
“About the baby’s name,” Celinda said. “Calling him Lansing.” Bastard had not turned out to be the sort of husband a woman wanted to memorialize, but it was important that Samuel and his wife recognized their duty. Not to the memory of Samuel’s father. To her. “I can understand that you might be thinking of naming a boy Wilbur, but your dear papa is still alive. Surely the next wee one can be named for him. You don’t look comfortable, Carolina,” leaning forward over the sofa but not making any effort to alter things with her own hands. “Shall I summon Dorothy to adjust your pillows?”
Comfortable? With her mother-in-law paying two visits in as many days? And soon to be one of the very few people she was permitted to receive? “I’m fine, Mrs. Devrey. Though I thank you for paying me such mind.”
Celinda Devrey held an embroidery hoop in her left hand and a needle in her right, but she hadn’t taken a stitch in ten minutes. “Of course I’m mindful, my dear. It is my duty. Particularly since you have no mother of your own.” One thing she had found to celebrate when Samuel announced his choice of bride. Because Carolina’s mother was long dead, there was no other woman to contest the role of family matriarch. On the other hand, she’d known at once that being the indulged child of a wealthy widower had imbued the girl with more independence of spirit than was desirable in a daughter-in-law. Nonetheless, she would cope. Celinda had been coping since the first day she herself became a wife. Or put more accurately, the first night. A dreadful business at best, made worse by Bastard seldom actually managing to make a job of it—too drunk most of the time. No wonder they’d had only the one son. “Does your Mrs. O’Brien at last agree you must begin your lying-in?”
“Not quite yet, Mrs. Devrey. I believe I told you she says start of the eighth month. I calculate there are two weeks to go.”
Celinda raised an eyebrow, remembered the embroidery and took a stitch, then held the hoop a bit away to admire the result. “Calculate,” she said, as if it were an extraordinary notion. Then, before Carolina could start discussing the unpleasant details of what she would probably call, in the manner of young women these days, monthly visits from grandmother, “No matter. I’m sure Samuel is taking special care of you just now.”
“Samuel is always most considerate.”
“I’m pleased to hear it. I do know he works very long hours.” At least that was the situation according to Barnabas, Samuel’s stable boy, whom Celinda tipped handsomely whenever she left her little chaise and pony in his care. An encouragement to pass on household gossip. “Such a great responsibility,” she said with a ladylike sigh, “managing all of Devrey Shipping. Samuel must be very tired much of the time.”
“A very great responsibility indeed,” Carolina agreed. And what had his mother done to protect Samuel’s legacy so that today he would be owner of the company rather than simply its manager? Nothing. All New York knew Celinda Devrey’s expensive tastes were as much to blame for the loss of the Devrey fortune as were Bastard’s wastrel ways.
“Well,” Celinda said. “I imag
ine these days you don’t so much mind how frequently he is away from home.”
“I always crave my husband’s company, Mrs. Devrey.” She could have bitten her tongue off the moment she spoke the words.
“Do you, Carolina? Quite natural, I’m sure, in one wed less than a year. But after the wee one comes, you’ll be preoccupied. It won’t matter so much.”
“What won’t matter?” God! Was there no end to her folly?
“The evenings Samuel is late home. The ways of men, my dear. We women must understand and seek to gently enlighten their baser nature with our sweet example.” Stupid of the child to turn her head away as if she didn’t want to hear. Her daughter-in-law, Celinda thought, must be made to see that her most important task was to allow nothing to disturb the household or change Wilbur Randolf’s plan to leave the tannery business to Carolina and thus to Samuel. Celinda’s husband had not provided for her old age; it was her son’s responsibility to do so. “It is our cross to bear as women, dear Carolina. I wouldn’t mention it—I’m sure you know your duty—except that with no mother of your own…”
By the time her mother-in-law left half an hour later, Carolina was finding it hard to breathe, much less quiet her beating heart. “Dorothy! Come here at once!” She shouted rather than ring the bell. A terrible breach of etiquette, but she could not control herself.
The servant appeared in the doorway almost instantly. “I was just seeing Mrs. Devrey out the door, ma’am.”
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