Priscilla shook her head and held up the empty pail. “My dad needs beer. He’ll be too angry when he wakes if I haven’t brought his growler home full.”
“He’s passed out, is he, already at this hour?” Polly asked.
Priscilla nodded. Polly sighed. But Skaggs was unwilling to let this moment turn into some cautionary anecdote about the evils of drink.
“Well, fine then,” he said cheerfully, hopping down onto the boardwalk, extending his hand toward Priscilla, “we’ll have you back here with a gallon of ice-cold lager before the old sod realizes you’ve escaped. Trust me, Miss Christmas—I am an expert in the science of inebriation.”
She smiled, took his hand, and stepped aboard. Her face powder did not entirely hide the purple and green on her bruised left jaw.
THEY WALKED ALONG the Battery and settled on a shady spot between two pear trees in full flower. After they ate, Polly helped Priscilla sketch a sloop, then left her on a bench at the water’s edge to draw alone and joined Skaggs back on the grass. He spread out his coat as a blanket for her and lay back on one elbow to read his newspapers.
“Lovely, isn’t she?” Polly said. “There in the breeze with her pencil and picture?”
Skaggs looked up and agreed, but then reflexively inserted his distressing glimpse of the future. “Beautiful—and obsolete, alas, in our age of the all-mechanized. The sketchbook is doomed. Damned Daguerre.” His friend and physician Simon Solis had once diagnosed him, only half in jest, as a victim of “anticipatory nostalgia.” Skaggs sipped from his pint bottle of German wine. “Speaking of which, I am sorry I haven’t brought along my camera today. Such a sad and lovely photograph this scene would make.”
“Your camera is only a different sort of pencil,” she said. “New devices breed new types of artists.”
“An ‘artist’? Not I. No, the new devices permit the unskilled and untrained to impersonate artists.”
They sat in silence while Skaggs read his Tribune.
“What news of the wars in Europe?” Polly asked.
Skaggs turned the page and placed his finger on the top of an article—A BRAVE INSURGENCY REPRESSED by the Tribune’s correspondent via Sandy Hook—that he had written yesterday based on a brief conversation with a fifteen-year-old prince shipped from Poland to America for temporary safekeeping. “Only what my horrid little Polish friend told me on Friday, about a massacre of peasants by his uncle in the province of Posen.” He pointed at another headline. “But elsewhere in Prussia there’s some new Parliament convening. I am afraid, however, that is when I lose all interest in revolutions—the moment they form subcommittees and start debating the boundaries of Schleswig-Holstein.”
Down at the water, Priscilla was now drawing a picture of a fisherman on the bank. Polly smiled. She had decided to end her own nascent career as an artist’s model. The Heilperins had called her performance as Liberty Leading the People at the Barricades “genius,” and proposed that she become the featured member of their troupe. But while the tableau vivant felt almost like acting a part in a play, she had seen too much pitiful carnal hunger in the eyes of the men drawing her. One of them—a huge fellow with flour in his hair and eyebrows—had simply stared at her, sniggering and licking his lips, not even pretending to draw. If she were going to earn a wage indulging men’s animal appetites, she decided, she would rather do it without the elaborate charade that Heilperin’s entailed. She would be an actress or a whore, but she would not split the difference to work as a phony artist’s model.
And indeed, she was feeling hopeful about getting a part in one of the plays opening at the Broadway or—she fervently dreamed—in Burton’s production of Dombey and Son.
As Skaggs finished with his paper, turned over on his back, and laid his head against the basket with his eyes closed, Polly had a question.
“Is there any further news about our own little revolution?”
Skaggs opened his eyes.
“In Albany,” she added. “The women’s bill.” The Married Women’s Property Act would for the first time allow married women to keep any property they owned or money they earned. “I saw it yesterday in the Tribune.”
Skaggs decided that it would be unwise for him to joke that it was un-ladylike of her to read the newspapers. “No mention today at all, I think.” He reached for the bottle lying next to him. “But I am certain that you, Polly Lucking, shall be able to keep your fortune out of the clutches of the otherwise lucky fellow you finally marry.” He lifted the bottle to his lips and swallowed his last dram of wine. “Yet another reason why we shan’t ever be husband and wife.”
Smiling now, she rose onto her knees, grabbed his hat off the grass, and pushed it down hard over his face.
“At Mrs. Stanhope’s,” she said, “I read your article about the two sisters in Rochester who speak with the ghost by knocking. She thought you had invented them. When I told her they were real girls, she became quite feverish with excitement. As if she had seen a sign from God. She says we must turn this to Priscilla’s advantage. That a golden opportunity had arrived. That Priscilla will be the first Spirit Girl in any New York house, the first on earth. That gentlemen will beg to pay ten or twenty dollars for an evening with her.”
Skaggs shook his head. “Margaret Stanhope is the Barnum of your world.”
“Of her world. But in any event,” Polly continued, watching two daddy longlegs stepping across Skaggs’s newspaper, “I shan’t allow her to turn Priscilla into…that.”
A strong gust blew the newspapers and spiders sprawling across the grass, and as he scrambled to his feet to catch the sheets, they heard Priscilla shouting cries of distress. Polly stood. Skaggs ran.
A very small black spaniel puppy was in the water, six feet out, paddling frantically, barely keeping its head above water and bobbing away from the shore. The owner, a rich girl of about nine, was sobbing, and the girl’s elderly nana stared at the struggling dog and slowly shook her head. Priscilla had borrowed her fisherman’s nine-foot leader and tied it to the handle of the beer pail, which she was shoving as gently as possible into the water as a lifeboat for the puppy.
Polly and Skaggs exchanged a look—sweet, hopeless. But the breezes sent the bucket floating toward the puppy quicker than he was drifting out to sea. And then he started sniffing eagerly in its direction. He was only a couple of feet away.
“Swim,” Polly shouted. “Climb inside!”
Skaggs was delighted. “He smells the ale.”
“I think the lard,” Priscilla said. At her father’s insistence, she always rubbed the inside of his pail with lard, which reduced the foam and so gave Mr. Christmas an extra couple of cents’ worth of beer.
Miraculously, the puppy reached the edge of the bucket and started to scrabble inside. But each time he tried, the rim of grease around the top edge kept him from getting a good purchase, and his paws slipped and scratched down the side, shoving the bucket farther away and leaving him paddling more desperately than ever. The dog was fatigued, and drifting out beyond the nine-foot limit of the bucket. The old lady was trying to make her weeping granddaughter turn away and leave. The rescue attempt was more awful than the predicament—as always, Skaggs thought.
Polly put a hand on Priscilla’s shoulder. “Let the line go,” she commanded.
“Let it go?”
“If the pail reaches him quickly, he might still manage to get inside. It is his only chance.”
“Her chance,” the dog’s owner cried, “she’s a girl, Cindy, I only just got her.”
“But…but, Polly,” Priscilla asked, “what kind of chance? Even if she should climb inside, she’ll float away and probably drown.” Tears lined her cheeks. “She looks like my Jonathan.” Priscilla was referring to her stuffed dog, the only store-bought toy she had ever owned.
“But she might survive,” Polly said. “One of those men in the dinghy there,” she said, pointing at a boat fifty yards away, “might snatch her out of the water.” Or, more likely, t
he wake of one of the ketches or ferries would flood the bucket and sink her. “At the very worst, we shall enable her to survive another minute, or another ten. Unless she swims to shore on her own, without the bucket she has no hope at all. Drop the line, Priscilla. Now.”
She did. And less than a minute later, the puppy managed finally to heave herself into the bucket, headfirst. The little crowd of spectators applauded.
“That’s ten cents you owe me, miss,” the fisherman said to Priscilla the next moment. “That was a brand-new leader of the best silkworm gut.”
Priscilla looked forlorn.
“I shall pay,” Polly said. But the rich old lady interceded and gave the fisherman his dime.
So Polly handed her own coin to Priscilla. “For your father’s new beer pail.”
She took it, but her spirits did not lift. “I knew,” Priscilla said softly to Polly. “Before the girl and her granny came by, in my mind I saw a picture of—I had the feeling of someone sailing away.” Polly took her hand.
The old bucket, although yawing precariously, remained afloat, for the wind had subsided. The puppy, occasionally peeking over the side as she licked at the lard and residue of beer, appeared happy enough to be bobbing south and east into the harbor, in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean.
15
April 15, 1848
Liverpool
PRINCES DOCK, ON the north bank of the river Mersey, was built at the swirling, murky border between the waters of the sea and those of the river, at the point where the lively blue-gray of the salt water disappeared into the stinking flat silty chemical flow from Liverpool’s bleach factories and lead mills. And lashed to the dock’s longest pier, aglow in the smoky Liverpudlian light, lay the new America. The low roar from its guts vibrated the keel, dispatching from the waterline manic little waves that wind and water could never produce on their own. All sixteen furnaces were lit and stoked, and both engines were coming up to speed. It was after eleven. At noon the side-wheel would engage with the gears of the engines, sending Cunard’s latest out on its maiden voyage, bound for New York.
One of the second-class passengers stood in Bath Street, hands in his trouser pockets, bags on the sidewalk, staring up and smiling like a half-wit at the gleaming, steaming, smoking ship.
It was now a hundred hours since Ben had made his escape from London. And he had begun to doubt himself again. Had it really been the French sergeant who’d chased him into the Thames Tunnel? In the cold light of Liverpool, it seemed incredible, impossible.
After sprinting through the tunnel, Ben had waited until nightfall, then crept back across London Bridge and taken a cab to Isabel and Roger Warfield’s house, figuring that his pursuer might somehow know his own address in Bruton Street. After a breathless explanation, he’d persuaded his sister and brother-in-law that he was being stalked by the soldier who’d murdered Ashby in Paris. He’d rejected their suggestion that they ask Philip to organize an official Foreign Office hunt for the rogue—indeed, he’d pleaded that they not tell his brother or father of this bizarre circumstance, since he was leaving for America anyway and it was therefore moot. Ben feared—he knew—that Philip and Sir Archibald would manage to use the Frenchman’s pursuit to embarrass him.
But he had accepted Roger’s offer to conscript men from the new detective branch of Scotland Yard to secure his departure from London. And so early the next morning, a pair of special officers had appeared with his bags fetched from the dock, and drove Ben away in a large closed coach with metal bars across its windows and LUNACY COMMISSION painted on the back. At Euston Station the constables had insisted on waiting with him inside his London and North Western Railway carriage—“explicit orders from Lunacy Commissioner Warfield, sir”—until the train began rolling in the direction of Liverpool.
During the stop in Birmingham, Ben had watched with interest as a group of lunatics in the next carriage were led by uniformed attendants out to the platform and then into a private asylum that seemed to be part of the railway station. “Isn’t that strange!” he’d remarked to the passengers around him. “I am not certain if that is civilized or monstrous.” The others had only nodded. Ben had been unaware of the awkwardness of the next several minutes, as his carriage mates waited for the attendants to return from the asylum and take this well-dressed and well-spoken but oddly talkative young stranger away as well.
When the train had started moving again, the man beside him breathed a sigh of relief and asked, “Is Liverpool your final destination, then?”
“No, sir,” Ben had replied more emphatically and cheerfully than necessary. “I am sailing to America.”
“Ah. And on which vessel?”
He chuckled. “I am afraid I do not know. I left London strangely, in a terrible hurry.” In the view of the people sitting near him, Ben’s sanity was once again in question.
In Liverpool, as soon as the ticket agent had informed him that Cunard had established direct steam service to New York, and that the line’s newest ship, the RMS America, would make the first voyage that very weekend, Ben had without another word handed over a £20 note for his passage. It seemed God had smiled.
Standing at quayside now, adoring his ship, grinning at its paddle wheel as big as some of the buildings behind him, he found himself thinking of God again—as the America’s mammoth steam whistle blew, it sounded like a low, flat chord from the biggest church organ on earth.
The dockside crowds about did not consist mainly of the regular collection of sailors and travelers and longshoremen and drunkards. He was surrounded by families of scrawny children in tattered dresses and trousers shuffling along behind mothers and fathers carrying dirty, ripped, overstuffed canvas bags and searching for a street sign or a relative’s face or any plausible remedy for their confusion and fatigue. They were immigrants. Two ships had docked this morning at the other end of Princes Dock, pouring several hundred Irish newcomers into Liverpool.
Ben had read about the horrors since the famine began, eyewitness stories that seemed like accounts of medieval or Asian misery, not life today in the United Kingdom just across the Irish Sea. But he had never seen the starving Irish so clear and distinct.
A few yards away, one family was standing in the gutter, facing away from him. The parents were barely older than Ben. The father searched his pockets for something—a paper with a name or some instruction, or perhaps the £4 fare for a berth in steerage to America. The mother appeared dazed. One child, maybe seven, was almost bald and had pus oozing from red sores on the scalp. Another, younger boy was shirtless; Ben stared at his bony arms, the skin tight against his ribs, the tiny belly protruding over his gunnycloth pants. A soggy scrap of gray animal hide hung from a younger sister’s mouth and flopped against her chin like a newt’s tail as she chewed.
The America’s whistle bellowed again. It was time for him to go aboard. But just then the fourth and oldest of the Irish children, a fierce-looking black-haired girl in a muslin smock belted to resemble a real dress, turned to look at the ship’s stacks and saw the gentleman staring at her family. Ben touched his hat. The girl approached him.
“Is it Mr. Cavanaugh, then?” she asked in a gravelly voice. “Or Mr. Shanley? We’re the Kellys, off the Free Trader. There’s jobs for me mum and dad here in Liverpool, and a passage for myself to the States? Oona Kelly.”
“No, miss, I’m sorry, I am afraid I am neither Cavanaugh nor Shanley.”
She nodded without emotion. Disappointment was her expectation.
Ben smiled. “But while I am also a stranger to this city, I have come to know its streets rather well during the last few days, so perhaps I could help you and your family find…whatever place it is…?”
“No,” Oona Kelly said. She had been warned back home in Balbriggan about the “runners” and “mancatchers” in Liverpool who appeared as friendly as the serpent in the garden in order to cheat Irish newcomers.
Ben was startled. He knew the Irish could be tetchy, but this was onl
y a girl, maybe thirteen, and he was offering to help. He maintained his smile and reached into his coat. He would give her a few shillings.
“No, sir,” she said more firmly, and returned to her family, certain that this sharper was attempting to ensnare her family in some slick English fraud.
Defeated in his attempt at charity, he showed his ticket and climbed aboard. Up on the bridge a mate pulled and held the chain once more, and the whistle blasted a third time. Now Ben could feel the sound in his gut. By the time the last suppers were served, with every oil lamp in the cabins and corridors and saloons lit against the darkness, the ship was making its broad starboard turn toward Cape Clear. Nothing but a rocky crumb of Ireland stood between the virginal America and America itself.
16
April 21, 1848
New York City
THIS MUST BE her week’s punishment.
Priscilla had learned long ago to expect at least one or two punishments every week, and to accept each without complaint. Argument and tears never reduced the severity, anyhow, and sometimes aggravated it. So she always endeavored to remain quiet.
Last week upon her return home from the picnic on the Battery she had made no plea for mercy, not even a whimper, when her father struck her for disappearing all afternoon, and then slapped her twice more for attempting to pass off the new beer pail as his dear old one.
Then a few days later came the necessary unpleasantness in Dr. Solis’s examination room, and the attendant pain.
And now Fatty Freeborn was pounding away at her, soiling her just an hour after her Friday bath at 101 Mercer. Half standing and half crouching, both wrists pinned against grimy bricks and her face pressed into the damp, stinking, suffocating shirtfront between his heaving breasts, she was taking this week’s punishment.
Heyday: A Novel Page 24