by Kate Belli
“Of course, I don’t really belong there anymore, and I haven’t for many years,” Daniel relayed. He eyed the sideboard but decided to hold off for the moment. Surely it would be dawn soon, and they’d have to get Genevieve home safely. “The money creates a barrier. My first few summers coming home from Harvard, after I inherited, I was challenged repeatedly, taunted, got into more fights than I’d ever been in before in my life. But that was to be expected—what wasn’t expected was Tommy. At least once a year or so, he’d find me, or I’d find him, but not by chance, you understand? He’d figure out where I was going to be and be there too, and engage in some sort of … atrocity.” Daniel shook his head, deeply lost in thought. “I really don’t want to tell you the details, but suffice it to say I have pulled him off of countless others in the intervening years. It was always someone weaker than him, often women.”
He fixed Genevieve with a hard stare. “Women who did not want to be with him. Do you understand what I’m saying?” She nodded slowly.
It was as if Tommy had wanted Daniel to find him, he explained. Had wanted him to intervene, so they could have an excuse to fight. It became a pattern: Daniel, with the help of his friends, would pull Tommy off whomever he was attacking. Tommy would then challenge Daniel and Daniel alone.
“You always need to save the day, don’t you, Danny boy?” Tommy had panted, dancing around Daniel with his fists raised. The other boys, later young men, would draw back into the shadows, knowing this was not their fight but staying close. Sometimes other men, members of other gangs or additional members of theirs, would drift out of nearby taverns or whorehouses or tenement buildings to watch. And Daniel would raise his own fists, sometimes furiously, sometimes wearily, but always with resolve, and the two would proceed to fight until one of them was too incapacitated to move.
“I traveled the continent after I finished my apprenticeship, and when I began making intermittent returns a few years ago, it stopped. I never saw Tommy on the streets again—well, not those streets. I knew he’d become involved with politics, and I suppose he didn’t want to risk being known as a street thug anymore.”
“What a shock it must have been to find him in the Bradley mansion,” Genevieve breathed, looking rather shocked herself. “How could such a horrible person be taken seriously as a candidate for mayor?” She flopped back on the love seat, looking drained.
Daniel didn’t have an answer for this. He had thoughts about it, about the myths the wealthy liked to tell themselves about the ability of the deeply impoverished to pull themselves out of that poverty of their own volition, with no assistance, but now was not the time for such a discussion. They needed to think about getting Genevieve home before light.
“But what about Robin Hood?” Genevieve said slowly. “What does stealing from the Astor 400 have to do with this? Is it Meade, rubbing their noses in their wealth?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I have a theory about our Robin Hood, though.”
This made her sit up tall again. “What?”
Uh-oh, Daniel thought. This wasn’t going to go over well. He slid her a rueful, sideways look. “I can’t tell you.”
Sure enough, fury spread over her features. “I thought we were partners.”
“We are partners, but this is dangerous enough. I can’t endanger you any further.”
“This is my investigation, remember? I dragged you into it, as you so often see fit to remind me. And now you know something you won’t share?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“But you suspect something.”
“I can’t say. Yet.”
Genevieve stood, hands clenched into fists at her sides. “You don’t trust me, is that it? Or you don’t believe I’m up to the task?”
Daniel stood too, the exhaustion temporarily wiped from his body. He was furious, furious, that she would continue to be so cavalier about her own safety.
“You were nearly killed! I won’t risk you again!”
That made Genevieve draw back in surprise. He was equally surprised at himself.
“That is not your decision to make,” she finally said in a low voice.
Frustrated, confused, Daniel turned from her and began to pace the room again. What had he even meant by that, that he didn’t want to risk her? He stopped by the sideboard and stared at the decanters, less wanting a drink than needing a place to focus his eyes, gather his tumultuous thoughts.
She followed him a few steps, then stopped. “What don’t you want me to know?” Genevieve breathed. “Was I right all along?” She advanced a few more steps.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re Robin Hood.”
Daniel’s heart pounded. He had to make this right. He turned back to her slowly.
“I can’t tell you anything further about Robin Hood right now. But, to earn your trust back, I can tell you something else. I can tell you how I came to inherit the Van Joost fortune.”
CHAPTER 17
He watched her fists unclench. “You … what?”
“You deserve to know the truth,” he replied. “And you should know with whom you’ve partnered. I want you to know how I came to inherit Jacob’s fortune.”
This was it, then. This was the person to whom he was going to entrust all his secrets. A reporter outfitted as Aphrodite with the most glorious hair he’d ever seen. He gestured back to the love seat.
She took her seat again, eyeing him warily. “If you wish to tell me, then I’d like to hear about it.”
He decided he did want more whiskey, retrieving his glass and adding a splash. He gestured toward Genevieve’s, but she shook her head. He settled in on his half of the love seat.
Where to begin? It wasn’t that atypical a story, not really. Not for immigrant families in the years immediately following the Civil War. Parents dead, children left on their own.
Daniel stared at the whiskey in his glass and swirled it slowly. He watched the amber liquid revolve around the cut-crystal glass, heavy and real in his hand, grounding him. “My father died in the war. I was seven. My mother died four years later, probably from cholera, though of course there was never any official diagnosis.”
“You mentioned a sister,” she said.
He put the whiskey down, kept his gaze on her instead. “Yes, my older sister. I also had three younger siblings. Maggie was fifteen when Mother died, and we were left on our own. She tried to play mother to all of us as best she could, but I was too wild, and the younger ones, well, she couldn’t keep an eye on them all the time. Not with the constant battle of trying to find us food and keep us and the house clean.” Here Daniel paused, gathering his thoughts.
This was the hard part to tell. It was the disappearance of his younger siblings, Mary, Connor, and little Stephen, that had pushed Maggie over the edge. When everything began to unravel.
“Disappear?” Genevieve asked quietly.
“As good as,” Daniel replied. Maggie had been in the small shared courtyard of their tenement, washing the family’s scant bedding. She had sent the younger children out to play in the street, as they were accustomed to do. It was understood that Mary, who was five, would watch over the littler ones. Daniel, eleven, desperately wounded by the recent death of his mother but determined to be a man and not show it, had refused his older sister’s attempts to corral him as his parents had. On that particular day, he’d joined up with some local boys his age and wandered over to the piers on the city’s west side, where they jumped off the docks and swam away the heat of the summer day in the dirty Hudson River. Daniel could still feel the cool water sluicing over his body, a blessed relief from the unrelenting, oppressive steam of the city’s hemmed-in streets, as he plunged into the river’s murky depths again and again. By the time he leisurely returned to Elizabeth Street, his hair dripping, his gnawing grief briefly sated from the hard exercise of jumping, swimming, and fighting the river’s currents, Maggie was frantic. The little ones had been missing for over three h
ours, as far as anyone could tell. A neighbor woman offered the best clue: she had seen an older woman in a drab blue gown leaning down and talking to the children. At one point this woman had cupped little Stephen’s chin so she could look into his mouth.
“Checking his teeth, we assumed,” Daniel recounted, finding it hard to resist the waves of sadness that came over him whenever he talked about his long-lost younger siblings. “The woman in the blue dress was almost surely from the Children’s Aid Society, you see.”
Genevieve stiffened slightly on her side of the love seat. “The orphan trains?” she asked.
Daniel nodded at his glass. “Most likely. Even though Maggie was of an age to take care of us, to the Children’s Aid Society we were parentless, and could be snatched up and shipped away at will to Ohio or the like to work on a farm. If I hadn’t been swimming, I might have been taken as well—they often employed large men to take some of the older boys, like me. But children were fairly valuable, you see—good labor. It’s still going on, you know.” He glanced over at her. “They still take children.”
“Did you try to find them?” she asked.
“We did,” Daniel said, swallowing some more whiskey. “We tried. But who was going to listen to a pair of grubby street kids like us? To the authorities, the orphan trains were and are a godsend, getting unwanted children off the streets and into loving homes.”
“But these children weren’t unwanted,” Genevieve finished for him.
“No. No, they were very much wanted.” Another flash of memory, another pang: his little sister Mary, about one year old, toddling across the floor of their crowded apartment into his waiting arms as his parents and Maggie cheered. His father had been holding brand-new baby Connor. Irish twins, they’d called Mary and Connor, babies born within a year of each other. And little Stephen would follow about twelve months after that.
Daniel was distracted from his recollections as Genevieve grabbed his arm excitedly, almost knocking his glass out of his hand.
“We could find them,” she said. “I, or Polly Palmer, she could find them. As a journalist I could get access to records, discover where they were sent …” She stopped short at the sight of his shaking head.
“Thank you,” Daniel said, setting down his glass again. He should have known that Genevieve would pounce on this part of his tale like a dog on a juicy bone, that she would take it and worry it and try to fix it. It was part of her very nature, this desire to fix things, particularly any injustice. “Thank you,” he repeated, “for saying that. But I have tried. I have been trying. Those records are sealed very tightly. I have people working on it, though, and I feel I’ll have an answer soon.”
Genevieve looked at him sadly. “Oh, Daniel. I do hope so. I can’t imagine losing my brothers. I’m so sorry.”
“Are you wondering what all this has to do with Jacob and the money?”
“I assumed you were getting there.”
After the little ones were lost, Daniel continued, Maggie was utterly inconsolable. For days, she sat in the corner of their apartment, wrapped in an old dressing gown of their mother’s, staring sightlessly out the window into the street. She could not be persuaded to either eat or drink and remained impervious to Daniel’s pleas. Neighbor women would stop by and try to cajole her into taking a bite or sip or getting a few moments of sleep, but nothing roused her from her almost catatonic state. Daniel began to fear she would simply wither away and he would be left with no family at all. Word must have gotten out—it was a small, gossipy community—and even the gang leaders stopped by, standing in the doorway of their dim tenement rooms. Maggie was a great beauty, and her quick laugh and pretty ways, so similar to their mother’s, were much admired. Even these gruff men tried to tell her, in their own way, that it wasn’t her fault—children played alone in the streets all the time; the Children’s Aid Society matrons were no better than predators—to no avail. Finally, one unlucky man said the unthinkable. As the leaders were taking their leave, having been given tea and soup by a kindly neighbor, one of the younger men paused in the doorway and looked over his shoulder at the once-lovely young girl slowly wasting away by a window.
“There, lass, don’t take on so,” he said, his accent revealing he was recently arrived from the old country, as they called it. “The wee ones are probably better off, headed to a clean life in the country.” He had glanced around their two and a half rooms with distaste, Daniel remembered. Daniel also recalled the very unchildlike fury that rose within him, hot and bilious. He had wanted to fling himself at this stranger and rip out his throat for even daring to suggest that his siblings would be better off elsewhere. Adult Daniel understood better: the homesick, newly landed man had probably been thinking of the green pastures and open spaces he’d left behind in Ireland. All this man saw were the piles of unwashed dishes and clothes, the tight, mostly windowless rooms, and the accumulated dirt and soot in the corners and on the walls that no amount of his mother’s or Maggie’s washing and scrubbing had been able to alleviate.
But Daniel did not fling himself at the man. Instead he focused on his sister’s pale, still-gorgeous face and silently implored her to take a sip of lukewarm tea, desperately wishing that all these people would leave his house. He was utterly astonished when, after almost a week of barely moving, Maggie’s big green eyes slowly traveled to the doorway, taking in the strange man. Her mouth worked, as if she wanted to speak but couldn’t quite form the words.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” exclaimed the neighbor lady. What had her name been? Daniel couldn’t recall, but he could clearly see the shocked expression on her careworn face, old before its time from too many children and too much poverty, as she crossed herself.
The gang leaders stopped in the doorway and looked back. They watched as Maggie began to unravel herself from the dressing gown she had been wearing like a shroud, her mouth still working. Her luminous, large eyes remained locked on the newcomer, their deep color accentuated by the dark circles underneath, stark in her pale skin.
“There, now, see?” smiled the newcomer. “She just needed to hear God’s honest truth is all.”
She moved so fast, later the men would swear she was part banshee. That no mortal girl, particularly one who had not eaten, drunk, or slept in almost a week, could descend on a man with the kind of ferocity Maggie inflicted on the newcomer. Given her weakened state, the others were able to pull her off fairly easily once they recovered from their shock, but the damage had been done. The young man, as it turned out a cousin of one of the most prominent members within the gang’s leadership, had been blinded in one eye by Daniel’s furious sister’s outraged fingernails.
Temporarily driven mad by grief, they all agreed later. He could still see the neighbor lady’s stunned and frozen expression, his sister’s red hands clawing at air as two of the larger men held her back, and hear the young cousin’s howls as his own hands covered his face, blood gushing in even, regular pulses through his clenched fingers.
There were no police called, no charges made, no lawyers, no trial. This was a community matter, to be dealt with by the community. Which meant dealt with by the gang leaders. Despite the injured man’s being kin, it was decided that no punishment would be meted out—the girl had clearly been out of her head, and what the cousin said had been right insensitive to the wee lass. But still, it was thought best to get her out of the environment and into a new life. Daniel agreed—not that anyone asked his opinion. In the few weeks it took to make the arrangements, he noticed the injured cousin’s one good eye making a bead on him, and more alarmingly, on Maggie, who had slowly recovered after her attack. She was still a pale and wan version of her former lively, chatty self, but at least she went through the motions of living: eating, sleeping, fetching water from the community well, mending one of Daniel’s socks. She even talked a bit to him. Daniel’s parents had been much beloved in the neighborhood, his father an admired member of the Bowery Boys. In honor of them, inquiries and introdu
ctions were made, strings were pulled, and before he knew it, Daniel found himself and Maggie bundled into a carriage, driven uptown, and deposited at the servants’ entrance of the stately Gramercy Park mansion of Jacob Van Joost, Esq.
Maggie took one look at her new surroundings and nodded. This was safe, she decided. Daniel had become everything to her, and if she needed to be a maid to keep him from getting snatched away too, or to keep him from getting killed in a senseless gang brawl, then that is what she would do.
Daniel hated it. He rarely saw old Jacob, but from their first introduction the two loathed each other. He was eleven, fiercely missing his own mother after her recent death, overwhelmed with grief for her and for the loss of his younger siblings. If only you hadn’t gone swimming that day, his brain would hammer at him incessantly. If only you’d stayed and played with them, just that one afternoon, they would still be together. If only you hadn’t gone swimming that day, over and over, an endless loop of guilt. He’d watched his only remaining sister almost destroy herself with sorrow, and was old enough to know they had both narrowly escaped a worse fate than being sent uptown after Maggie’s attack on the young Irishman. He wasn’t a child, either, to be babied by his older sister; he was tough (a Bayard Tough, after all), a street kid, and wanted nothing to do with this namby-pamby, hoity-toity, uptown fancy world with its money and its arrogant, confusing ways.