“Oh, Ben, I…” For a moment she did not register what Ben had said. “My case?”
It took a long minute for each to sort out the mutual misunderstandings. Finally Ben forced himself to define her supposed illness precisely as “uncontrollable sexual desire, morbid lusts.”
Her anger was fierce, righteous, and resolute. She stepped from her bed and started to dress, pulling on her chemise, kicking at his boots, grabbing a petticoat. He tried making excuses for himself, but she said nothing.
He finally said, “It isn’t as if I’d called you a, a, a whore.”
She stopped dressing for a moment and looked at him coldly. “You ludicrous prude. What a tiresome and common combination—fornicator and prude. A hypocrite like every other piddling ‘gentleman.’”
“Perhaps I—”
“I don’t care.”
He tried to summon anger. You foulmouthed freethinking Yankee slut. She was leaving for Philadelphia in the morning. Dearest love of my life. “Polly, if in my ignorance and innocence of the world, and of your modern American sensibility, I’ve presumed—”
“Shut up. And go.”
“SHUT YOUR SMART mouth, you lyin’, thievin’, stinkin’ little dandiprat,” Peregrine Christmas said as he wiped his nose with his sleeve, “and set down, there, on the floor in front of me where I can see you right.”
Priscilla had just come from school to the dank brown room she shared with her father, and mentioned to him helpfully that the mucus beslubbering his upper lip was about to fall into his beer. Perry Christmas was sitting in his chair, as usual, with the beer pail between his legs on the seat, the tin cup floating on top. But the chair was turned away from the open window to face the door. He was red-faced and seething, as usual, but this afternoon there was some elation whipped into his anger as well. In his right hand he gripped his wooden cudgel, nasty with bits of dried meat and fur and feather, which he employed to bang mice and pigeons. In his left, she finally saw, he held the little muslin bag that she kept hidden in the straw of her mattress.
She started to sit down on the floor where she stood.
“Closer, Prissy, so I can see your lyin’ eyes.”
He shook the bag in her face, jangling the coins. “Forty-seven U.S. silvers buried in your bed. Forty-seven shiny dollars.” He had never earned more than twenty dollars in a month, and barely forty-seven dollars altogether during the last six.
“Savings, Papa. I was going to tell you about it when I had fifty.” This was true, after a fashion. Fifty dollars had been her goal, and when she reached it she had planned to write him a letter explaining herself.
He wheezed, but did not otherwise reply.
“Savings for a new start in some better, clean, green town on Long Island, like Middle Village—or Gravesend, ‘by the same sea that touches home,’ like you always say.” Perry Christmas referred to West Sussex, in England, as “home,” although his family had emigrated when he was seven. His self-pity was inflamed by the ignominy of living as an Englishman among so many Irish in the Five Points.
He only stared at Priscilla, saying nothing.
“Savings to move out of here once and for all,” she said. This was true as well, but only narrowly, since Priscilla’s plan of escape from Daggle-Tail Alley and the Points had never included her father.
“I don’t judge you wrong for pinchin’ it, whoever you nimmed it off, Prissy—but keepin’ a fortune like this here secret from your poor dad is very naughty. It’s ungrateful and unfair and goddamned un-Christian of you.”
His accusation stirred her spunk, and before she could think better of telling the truth, she blurted out, “I swear I did not steal that money.”
Her father knew his daughter well enough to see that her indignation was sincere. And after only two growlers and a half of beer (it was just past six o’clock), he was not yet too boozy to make the inevitable inference. If she had not stolen the money, there was only one way a girl could have earned forty-seven dollars. And this epiphany—the surprise more than the fact of it—made him angrier still.
“You punk. You whore.”
She quickly considered various alibis—selling flowers in the streets, odd jobs performed for Mr. Skaggs and Miss Lucking—but found none of them convincing.
“You sneaky little damned crack-for-sale! Like mother, like daughter, eh?” In fact, Mrs. Christmas had never prostituted herself, but she had abandoned her family in 1844 and left for Michigan with a handsome German widower she had met in a line for free firewood. “You know, I could’ve let ’em keep you in the public home, but no, I worked and sweated all alone for goin’ on five years to give you a real home here.” He shook her bag of dollars again. “So this is the reimbursement, eh? This is mine. Thank you, Prissy. And you’re welcome.”
“I’ll give you half, Papa.”
He smiled.
Just then, a mourning dove landed on the windowsill. They both turned to look and the dove started to coo, filling the room with Priscilla’s favorite song in the world.
In the corner of her eye, she noticed her father’s cudgel flutter. She had seen him hurl it at pigeons on the sill a hundred times, once or twice breaking a wing or leg, another time knocking out the pane that was now stuffed with oilcloth.
“No, please, don’t bang him,” she said, and began to make for the window and shoo the dove to safety.
He had not intended to throw his club at the bird. But faced with Priscilla’s lies and now this impertinence, he flailed it at her, backhand, as she started climbing to her feet, and missed.
“I hate you, Papa.”
She knew what would happen now. For one thing, he was consistent—indeed, Peregrine Christmas believed that his consistency, no matter how rough, made him a good father. Also, when the dove had landed on the sill, the hairs on Priscilla’s neck had stood up: she knew—in that way she knew certain things—that her father would strike her.
He was apoplectic, and literally roared as he sprang from his chair, spilling his pail.
If the floor had been dry, Priscilla might have made it to the door a step ahead of him. But the puddle of beer slowed her just long enough that his first standing swing struck her squarely across the shoulders, and when she stumbled to one knee he hit her on the back a second time, which knocked her head onto the side of the stove. As she collapsed to the floor, he paddled her one last time on her bum for good measure.
He was out of breath, which he hated to be. He was not a cruel father, in his view, since he seldom hit her very hard. He pulled the filthy little pillow from his chair and laid the bag of silver and the cudgel down in its place. Priscilla’s eyes were shut. She was not moving. He looked down at her. He sincerely hoped she was not dead. She was his only daughter, and he loved her. Besides, as long as she was already selling herself to men—he’d always suspected she was an early-ripener—she could keep at it now and then and start paying her way in the household.
He squatted down next to her, turned her over, and shook her shoulder, then patted her cheek. She did not awaken. He held the back of his hand near her mouth and nose. He believed she was breathing. And she didn’t seem to be bleeding. He slipped the cushion under her head, then pulled the hem of her dress down to cover her calves, for modesty’s sake.
He took his hat from the nail and the money from the chair. Before he left, he glanced back and saw that the string of her bonnet was stretched very tight around her neck. He walked back, bent down, and untied it. Not such a bad dad, he thought, feeling happy and even gay for the first time in years, and stepped out, eager to spend some of his booty.
The mourning dove returned to the sill, cooing as the dusk turned from gold to fuchsia to dark blue. Priscilla did not stir.
FIRECRACKERS AND CANNON and rockets were lit at sunset, beginning the twenty-four-hour-long racket of July Fourth celebrations. Polly barely noticed, for despite her best efforts, her mind was filled with images of Ben Knowles and stray lines of Dombey dialogue. She was packing her luggage for the
next day’s trip and silently repeating to herself Mrs. Pipchin’s line to Miss Nipper from the play—“Does that bold-faced slut intend to take her warning, or does she not?”—when the knock came at her door. Priscilla was pale and (despite the summer heat) shivering. She began sobbing as soon as Polly took her into her arms.
Polly listened and sympathized and soothed, and checked carefully that Priscilla wasn’t too badly injured. But she was calm and clear and resolute.
Polly had a plan.
She would enlist Duff and some of his boys from Engine 15 to find Mr. Christmas and retrieve Priscilla’s money. And tomorrow Priscilla would join Polly on her journey. They would leave New York together and find some better, happier place and way to live, away from the mean, filthy, hypocritical city.
It was four in the morning before Duff and his two pals finally did find Perry Christmas, passed out in the weeds and muck behind the backhouse of a dive in Mulberry Street. He was, of course, dead drunk, and he had been robbed of his treasure bag hours before. His hair and clothes were soaked in the robbers’ urine.
Priscilla started crying again when she heard this news from Duff, who badly wanted to be her rescuer, her savior, her avenging knight—and had no idea what to do. Polly took her aside and bucked her up. She had enough money for the both of them, she promised, and they would go together to Mercer Street to make Mrs. Stanhope hand over the four dollars she still owed Priscilla—and, yes, of course, she said when the girl asked, while they were there they would also pick up her velveteen dress and Phantasmion.
At dawn on the Fourth every church bell in the city started to ring, and artillery began blasting from the Battery up to Madison Square. As the rest of the city descended into the merry holiday hell, Polly and Priscilla remained unsmiling and diligent, walking and riding like soldiers on their various missions—back to the tenement in Daggle-Tail Alley to gather her few belongings (two dresses, underclothes, a bonnet, a hairbrush, schoolbooks, and her stuffed toy dog), to Mrs. Stanhope’s, to a dry-goods store for supplies (including a packet of blank drawing sheets), back to the ticket broker to book Priscilla’s passage, back to Polly’s rooms. They felt themselves to be the only serious people in the streets, ignoring the drums and trumpets and drunken Hurrahs and pop of Chinese crackers, nearly oblivious to the sulfurous haze and drifts of paper debris covering the pavements.
Their boat was scheduled to depart at three, and they were standing at the foot of Barclay Street with their luggage by two, ready to board.
“Nice hot corn, smoking hot, smoking hot, just from the pot!” The season’s first hot-corn girls wandered up and down the piers and through the waterfront crowds with their baskets, hawking snacks at a penny a cob.
“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’” an old man declared to a small crowd in Washington Street, “‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’” He was one of ten thousand American men reciting the Declaration of Independence aloud at that moment, standing before crowds from Boston to Chicago to New Orleans.
At the next pier upriver from Polly and Priscilla, a cattle boat was docking, and the animals were skittish, pawing at the deck and lowing. They were frightened by the July Fourth ruckus, but unaware of the slaughterhouse knives that would actually kill them before sunset. We’re right to be scared, Polly thought, but in our ignorance we are scared of the wrong things.
Priscilla was excited about their trip. Wedged into her new canvas sack was Jonathan, whose ragged brown beaver-fur head she discreetly petted. Nothing in her manner suggested that she (and her father) had been robbed and beaten nearly to death during the last twenty-four hours. “I have never traveled on a steamer before,” she said, “nor on any boat overnight.”
Polly smiled. She herself had been on a steamboat only once, one-way, down the Hudson when she and her mother and brother and the twins had moved from the country, half her life ago.
She would write Duff soon. And she would write to Ben as well. Her throat tightened, and tears threatened to come. But she took a deep breath. She hefted her purse to feel the weight inside, the pair of paper tubes each packed with a pound of gold eagles, her savings from the last year and a half and her wage from Burton. She reminded herself that she was grateful to be steaming out of New York on a bright blue and gold summer’s day, to be starting with a new dream in her head.
And with a new sister she was duty-bound to save. The black and purple from her father’s blows covered Priscilla’s back from her neck to her bottom. Priscilla reassured Polly that the injuries were not as bad as they looked. She removed her bonnet carefully to show the goose-egg bump on her head. It was enormous.
“Wow,” Polly said, and very gently touched it.
“Ow,” Priscilla said, then smiled at her accidental rhyme.
A rocket exploded overhead. “Pow,” Polly said.
The cattle responded to the aerial bomb with a chorus of frightened moos, and Priscilla’s eyes brightened. “Cow,” she said.
They clasped hands and smiled at their nonsense.
One of the hot-corn girls, younger than Priscilla, came toward them. “Hot corn! Hot corn! Here’s your lily-white…”
The Declaration-reader had been handed a bullhorn, which gave him the voice of God. “‘When a long train of abuses and usurpations… evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.’”
“…corn! All you that’s got money, poor me that’s got none…”
“‘Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us.’”
Polly thought again of Ben Knowles.
Priscilla looked up at the steam funnel on their boat, and a few seconds later the whistle blew.
“…buy my lily-white corn, and let me go home.”
“‘With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’”
Polly picked up her bags and nodded to Priscilla to do the same. “We’re off,” she said, and they were.
32
July 15, 1848
New York City
HIS FOREIGN ACCENT and poor English did not seem to provoke New Yorkers, he’d discovered, the way it did Londoners. Americans were no more humane than the British, he decided, but too pleased with themselves and too busy to waste precious seconds sneering at a Frenchman.
And besides, here he was merely one among numberless foreigners, an outsider in a city of outsiders. It seemed as if every second American was not an American at all. In his hunt for Knowles, he’d found that the New York radicals’ clubhouses and taverns and newspapers were mainly German. There was even a small quartier where the French clustered, and he had rented a cellar room in that district.
Tonight at Ricard’s, the French café in Lispenard, it was so hot he had taken off his coat and drunk as much water as an American. And he had drunk more wine than usual as well, due to the good news from Paris, what they were calling “the Bloody Days of June.” The strongest and sanest men in the new regime had turned on their dangerous bedfellows, the smug social tinkerers and bandits disguised as reformers. The forces of order had defeated the sowers of chaos. Marie Brasseaux brats had been shot dead in the streets, and many more would be transported—ha!—to Algeria, and soon the reckless shits running their “free” newspapers would be required to show respect once again.
Drumont had drunk an entire carafe to celebrate, but also to numb his new pangs of confusion and regret. Now that the worst of the madness had been slapped down in Paris, he wondered if he had acted too rashly by killing the girl and exiling himself. He realized now that nothing endured anymore, not kings and their loyal armies, but not the revolution either; an irony. Perhaps Fran
ce would return to normal. Perhaps he could have stayed. Perhaps he should have waited.
But Michel’s honor could not wait. Gabriel Drumont had had no choice but to follow the killer.
Tonight he had said nothing to the Lyonnaise bitch at the next table at Ricard’s as she had first shouted and cried to another woman about the Days of June—la tragédie et l’horreur, l’horreur et la tragédie, bah. But a minute ago, when she had called the troops in Paris “dumb savages” and “murderers” and “demons,” then it had become a matter of duty. Drumont had turned and told her that she ought to take her ranting outside, where it would only annoy the pigs and dogs, and that she was unworthy of calling herself French. She had slapped him, began sobbing, and rushed out the open door with her friend.
Now Drumont noticed a man walking directly toward him from the other side of the café. If he wanted trouble, Drumont was ready to give him some; the Baby Dragoon was in his pocket, if it came to that. But the fellow, maybe a decade Drumont’s junior, did not look angry. He had the face and strong body of a workingman but the clothes of a gentleman. America was confusing.
“Vous êtes corse, oui?” the man said, extending a hand. “Je m’appelle Alexandre Roux.”
Drumont said yes, he was Corsican, by way of Paris, and shook the man’s hand.
Drumont’s forthrightness and firmness with the woman, he explained, had impressed him—very American. Would Monsieur Drumont allow Roux to order two cognacs and join him?
Roux had a close friend in the French army, and a cousin in the Garde Municipale, it turned out. He himself had emigrated twelve years ago, and now conducted an excellent business over in Broadway—making modern cast-iron chairs and sofas but also, he said with a wry smile, gilded rosewood pieces in the style of Louis Quinze, good fake-aristocratic furniture for the good fake aristocrats of New York. He asked Drumont how he planned to earn his living here.
“Un détective privé,” Drumont replied. A private detective.
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