“So it’s just blind luck, is it, then, that you’ve come to me now, today? In the nick of time? You are one lucky Englishman, sir,” he said, suddenly rubbing Ben hard on his shoulder with his fingers as if he were scrubbing a stain. “Give me some of that luck of yours!”
By city law, Magoffin explained, no lease could last longer than twelve months, and every lease expired on the same date each year. And Moving Day was more correctly Moving Morning, since the law required that every tenant vacate his rented apartment or house by 9:00 A.M. on May 1, and take up residence in his new quarters by noon the same day.
Once again, Ben wondered if he was listening to the fictions of a confidence man or prankster.
London
GABRIEL DRUMONT HAD endured worse conditions as a soldier. But his weeks sleeping on Baptiste’s kitchen floor on Guernsey now seemed like a vacation compared with his weeks living among the enemy in their grim, graceless capital. He had spent two days in their jail after the two English municipal guardsmen—the awful irony of it!—had grabbed him at the river tunnel and allowed the fugitive Knowles to escape justice once again.
Their threats to deport him had ended when their superior officer had seen that he was no vagabond but a man of some means—he was welcome to spend his three hundred francs in Great Britain.
The shack he rented behind the cottage of a Huguenot silk weaver in Pleasant Place was cold and shabby but hardly worse than barracks life. A bed was a bed, a pisspot a pisspot. And while these London French seemed half British—their talk a mess of French and English words, without the excuse of the Guernésiais—they did eat real sauce and loaves of real bread. And if they drank beer and gin, that was a result of persecution: the British government taxed wine from the motherland so onerously that the Frenchmen here could not afford to buy it. At least as long as he remained in the French streets of Spitalfields, he could understand and make himself understood.
And Knowles was here in London. He had seen him. He was close.
But Drumont despised the city nevertheless. He wanted to damage someone. He wasn’t a murderer. Yet he needed to execute those responsible for sweet Michel’s death. Tears filled his eyes, still, when he thought of Michel, which meant he cried more than once a day.
He shared the truth about his mission with no one. He told these French Protestants only that his dear younger brother had been shot dead in a street in the ninth on the first night of the revolution. He was spending the spring in London, he said, because he was too distraught to remain in Paris just now. Let these strangers believe that Michel had been an insurgent. Let them believe that Gabriel Drumont was a weakling on holiday from his anguish.
He had no training as an investigator, but he had once engaged in conversation with Eugène-François Vidocq himself at Monsieur Vidocq’s private detective agency on the Galerie Vivienne, No. 13, the famous Bureau des Renseignements. Vidocq was a hero. Indeed, one of the few books Drumont had ever finished was the old man’s Mémoires, a mammoth chronicle of his criminal youth and redemption as the original and ultimate police detective. From the night Michel was killed, he had asked himself more than once: What would Inspector Vidocq do now?
Drumont had arrived knowing only two useful facts about the criminal Knowles—his surname and his democratic sympathies. The fact that the Jacobinical little bastard had been there among the crowd on the riverbank the day he arrived in London—a crowd, he learned later, that had consisted of English socialists returning from their demonstration—confirmed for Drumont that Knowles was indeed a revolutionist, that he had been a confederate of the bomb-thrower Marie Brasseaux that night in Paris, a foreign agitator.
This afternoon Drumont had found a gun shop called Rivière where a man spoke French. He spent fifty-five francs on a small American revolver—.31 caliber, less than a kilo, what the clerk called a “Baby Dragoon.”
Seeing Knowles that first day had been so lucky, so tantalizing, so exasperating. In the last three weeks, he had visited dozens of socialist outposts all over London, lecture rooms and clubhouses and publication offices and taverns, posing day after day as “a man of the Paris streets” in search of his “missing February comrade Mr. Knowles.” And he had found nothing, no new clues.
Some days he wandered the streets aimlessly, looking at each passing face, thinking he might see Knowles. This was not what Inspector Vidocq would do. The trail was cold.
Despite living meagerly, he was running through his money. One afternoon in Spitalfields, as he’d paused in front of the place in Fashion Street where they gave away free food to the Jewish poor, an attendant had mistaken him for a Jew. He’d wanted to throttle her, but he’d only smiled; he thought he might need their free soup and bread and figs before he was through.
Most evenings he passed an hour or two in a French newsroom reading the imported papers to keep abreast of the insanity in Paris, and to search for any story about the killing of a certain Mademoiselle Brasseaux in the Latin Quarter. He also read every article about other Frenchmen driven out of France, like the one tonight in Le Figaro that mentioned an industrialist and inventor called Thimonnier who escaped across the Channel with a new sewing machine and was now doing business in London with an English bank in King William Street. Drumont wondered if one of these rich French refugees in London might find a way to give a fellow exile some respectable job temporarily.
How was he to live? Even after he had avenged his brother, he could not return home, where the regime of radicals and fools would call him a murderer. But as a man of France who spoke the English of an infant, what work could he get in England? A job as a common laborer? Impossible. He had not invested years in the army and the Garde Municipale, honing his skills as a paladin and warrior, in order to slip back down into the common muck now. He had spent a quarter century feeling superior to his Corsican boyhood pals who earned their livings cutting stone and sawing wood or stealing. He had taken Marie Brasseaux’s brooch, yes, but he was not a thief. He was an officer of the higher law, bound to mete out justice on behalf of Michel and of France.
21
May 1, 1848
New York City
ON MONDAY THE first Ben arose before the sun and decided to use his extra hours to shop for groceries and supplies to furnish his new home. Sure enough, as his cab took him west toward the river, he saw families in every block already making ready to leave their old houses and tenements, boys and men lifting chairs and mattresses into the backs of wagons, women and girls lugging clothes and carpets and open crates packed with lamps and pots and books.
The Washington Market covered all the riverfront blocks north of his ferry landing. It was like Covent Garden but much bigger and more comprehensive, overflowing with stalls and the stalls overflowing with every sort of meat and fish and green and grain for sale, as well as cakes and butter, coffees and teas and spices. He figured there must be fifty oystermongers alone, and a hundred butchers.
In his twenty-six years, Ben had bought only the odd apple or handful of flowers in Drury Lane, or cherries and cake from a cart in the Markt in Bonn; he had never shopped for groceries, not once filled a basket with meats and vegetables to make a proper meal. He bought a canvas bag and started wandering, asking for some of everything that looked good, without any menu in mind—a two-foot-long loaf of bread, Spanish oranges, a Bahamian pineapple, a bunch of Cuban bananas, peaches from South Carolina, two Quebec cheeses, half a small German ham, a pound of peas, three pounds of huge bright red American apples, and two whips of Italian sausage. His bag was already heavy, and he had not yet bought a pan or a pot or a knife or spoon, so he resisted the impulse to get a watermelon, which he had never seen before. He stared for a full minute at a pile of green lobsters from Maine—hideous monsters, still living, all engaged in a constant futile clawing dance.
Outside, he found his cab waiting in Fulton Street, still parked next to a public hydrant gushing water into the gutter. Ben wondered how many hundreds of gallons were being wasted. When
he had asked the driver if the stopcock was broken, the man had shrugged and said, “It never runs out.”
The driver jerked the reins, said “Yo, get” to his nag, and rolled up Washington Street. “You’re an Englishman, are you, sir?”
“I am.”
“Fresh in?”
“I beg your…What?”
“You just arrived here?”
“Yes.”
“Tired of old England, eh?”
“Yes. Exactly true. I had grown very tired of it indeed.”
The driver nodded.
“You don’t have to be telling me how great you consider America,” the fellow said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“No need to beg anything here. But I know a lot of our natives squeeze every foreign visitor to say how much better and freer and finer and richer this country is than other countries.”
“So I have been told. Are you, sir, one of those dissidents who do not consider this nation the finest on earth?”
The driver turned back again to look at Ben, to see if he was joshing or losing his mind.
“I only think it’s sad and girlish if I need for you to tell me so. I know it already. If America weren’t better ’an all the other places, what does every foreigner want to turn himself into an American for?”
“Your argument has merit, sir,” Ben said.
“But we don’t have to brag about it all the time, do we?”
Before long they turned east from the river and found themselves entering the heart of Moving Day. The system Mr. Magoffin had explained on Saturday sounded insane. “It is like a celebration with damned little gaiety,” he had said, “a holiday on which New Yorkers labor more feverishly, not less.”
Presently the carriage was stopped on a block of Provost Street. A big coach, a carriage, and two cabs—and their six horses—were all jammed in tight behind them. Directly ahead was a wagon sitting crosswise in the street, blocking traffic. It contained a mountain of furniture covered by a canvas cloth lashed down with ropes. Men were being offered a half-dollar apiece to unload the wagon and pull it onto the sidewalk so that its broken front axle might be replaced. The wife of the owner of the pile wailed at her husband, with tears trickling down her cheeks, as he shouted in turn at the driver who had allowed his axle to snap. A small boy picked up moist nuggets of horse dung from the street and carried them carefully, like eggs, one at a time in each hand, to the house his family was leaving, and placed them in a neat line along the doorsill.
A celebration with precious little gaiety indeed—like ten thousand tiny simultaneous riots all over the city. When Ben’s carriage finally passed through the jammed block and turned up West Broadway, he got a glimpse of the whole helter-skelter panorama as it stretched north, like a painting by one of the Brueghels. A hundred overladen coaches and carriages and wagons and vans and carts raced in every direction, blocking intersections, while a thousand people carried burlap bags and boxes, some of them trotting or running. Even the horses and dogs jerked and brayed as if they had been infected with the Moving Day anxiety.
AS TIMOTHY SKAGGS walked down West Broadway toward the Tribune, he did not spot his English acquaintance in one of the carriages passing in the opposite direction. He carried with him his latest article about the revolutions, in which he’d mingled the accounts of several arriving travelers with whom he had spoken during the last few days—a woman visiting from Munich, a Canadian couple returning from Naples, and the Englishman, Knowles. Until he’d stepped out the door of his building, he had forgotten all about Moving Day.
He decided to walk east on the quieter streets down to Nassau. He stared fondly at the ancient New York Hospital, the untended trees and stone pesthouses beautiful now in their abandonment. He paid no attention to the brand-new factory and warehouse going up across the street, nor to the bustle of carpenters and plasterers wandering in and out of its cast-iron front.
UPSTAIRS, ON THE empty top floor, stood Duff Lucking. He had been there three hours already, cutting and crimping gas pipes and installing jets. He was taking a break, eating a cinnamon bun and sipping apple juice from his canteen, staring out one of the windows down at crowded Broadway.
Duff was envious of all the people moving, particularly the families. He lived in a boardinghouse, and over the winter had considered finding a proper apartment to rent. The low cost and regular meals and proximity to the firehouse were the reasons he gave for his decision to stay put, but he knew, looking down at the hundreds of people rushing to their new homes, that the choice to remain temporarily was really an admission that he had decided to leave New York for good.
More and more veterans of the war would be drifting into the city. There were too many fires, and too many temptations of every kind. Life had become too complicated. He knew he had no choice but to take off. He was saddened, however, by the idea of forsaking the pleasures of civilized life, by which he meant Timothy Skaggs, and at the prospect of abandoning his sister, whom he loved more than—
A monarch! The first of the season, fluttering and hovering inches from his face, just beyond the windowpane, a sentinel come to warn him or lead him to safety. ¡Bienvenidos, mariposa! Duff was pleased he remembered the word for butterfly. ¡Hola, amigo! Until that cool morning in Mexico, wandering through the pine grove, he had never thought about butterflies.
As soon as he’d returned home last fall, he’d begged Skaggs to take him to the Society Library. And what he discovered was a kind of mystery and grace and miracle of faith as wondrous as anything in the Bible. Each spring, the monarchs left their winter roost in Mexico, at the Nevado de Toluca, and flew across the Rio Grande and the Territories to meadows and woods in Michigan and the Carolinas and New York that they had never seen or smelled…and then, at the end of the summer, their descendants flew the same thousands of miles in reverse, returning south—incredibly, inexplicably—to the very Mexican mountains from which their grandparents had flown the previous spring. Of the 165,000 species of butterflies and moths, Duff had read, only Danaus plexippus, the monarch, undertook a journey of such ambition. The question that perplexed him still was whether God had created them on the fifth or sixth day of Creation—that is, did they appear first as butterflies flying across the face of the firmament of the heavens, or as caterpillars creeping on the earth?
And now the lone, jaunty Manhattan monarch left him—¡Adiós, mariposa! Buena suerte!—not diving lower or climbing higher but flying straight off in Duff ’s sight line. His gaze followed it into the westerly blue sky until it disappeared. For an infinitesimal fraction of the next moment, as his eyes swept back across acres of city to the pine-and-plaster-scented room where he stood, his sister—that is, his sister’s Broadway omnibus—was in his purview.
POLLY WAS EN ROUTE to the Greenwich Theatre to inform the manager that he would need to replace her as Queen Gertrude for the last week of the run, when she had to begin rehearsals for Dombey. She looked out the window of the bus and spotted a young woman whose name she could not recall, a page-folder at Harper Brothers who had worked every night at 101 Mercer for ten days last fall—as an “experiment,” she had told Mrs. Stanhope, and a means to buy Christmas gifts for her family in Connecticut. She was on the sidewalk walking slowly south, carrying two enormous carpet-cloth bags, one of the Moving Day multitude. Polly had renewed her lease for her two bright rooms on Third Street near Washington Square. But she thought now: I am moving, leaving behind 101 Mercer and my own eighteen-month experiment in whoredom, moving securely into the profession—she glanced down yet again at her name on the folded Hamlet playbill—the profession for which I am suited and even (dare I say it?) destined. She wondered whether the Connecticut girl was relocating to better or worse rooms—whether she was returning to the higher-paying work at 101 Mercer or had been sacked from her publishing job and needed a cheaper place…
The theater was now only a block ahead. She reached and pulled the leather signal strap. As her fingers searched inside
the silk of her coin purse for the fare, the bus driver reined his team.
London
PERHAPS IF HE had been more forthcoming with the local Huguenots about his true business in London, if he had not worried so much about keeping his quest a secret, he would have been guided straightaway to the directory. He would have saved himself fruitless weeks of walking and riding and searching. But no matter. The secrecy was important. It was what Inspector Vidocq would do. And the weeks of failure had improved Drumont, made him a more careful watcher and listener, and taught him humility and patience and some rudimentary ability in the gawky, tight-jawed language of the English.
In any case, success was now his. The other evening at the newsroom in Old Bethnal Green Road, he happened to see the proprietor consulting a big tattered book as he addressed correspondence. It was the London Post Office Directory, Drumont learned, and he had spent the next two hours copying out a list of the names and addresses of forty-four Knowleses living in the city.
Drumont posed as a Parisian cabinetmaker come to London to collect a bill his workshop was owed. He even forged an invoice for 1,100 francs made out to “Mr. Knowles, London,” which he would show at every doorstep. During his first four days, he spoke to a Mr. Humphrey Knowles, a Mr. Garrick Knowles, a Mr. Fernando Knowles, and fourteen other Mr. Knowleses or their wives or children or landlords or servants.
And on Friday, the morning of the fifth day of his census, he knocked on the red door of a small house in Bruton Street, No. 24, according to the directory the residence of a Mr. Benjamin Knowles. The carpenter who answered the door said that young Mr. Knowles no longer lived there, and his fancy old man no longer owned the house besides. But he dug out for Drumont a card with Sir Archibald Knowles’s office address printed on it—17 King William Street. And as he walked off, Drumont remembered, in a glorious burst of Vidocqian deduction: the French sewing machine manufacturer he had read about in Le Figaro, Thimonnier, was associated with a London financial firm in King William Street… A Frenchman exiled by the February Revolution to King William Street; a young Englishman named Knowles in Paris during the revolution; a rich old Englishman named Knowles in King William Street—these connections did not strike Gabriel Drumont as accidental.
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