Chatham Street, 4 P.M.
Gornt Blakeman moved quickly through the streets of Manhattan, the smell of the countinghouse still on him. He’d been sitting in a cubby off the main room, hearing the clink of the coins—cash money he’d promised for Devrey scrip and cash money he’d delivered—watching through a crack in the door while the certificates mounted into a higher and higher pile on the clerk’s desk. At three he’d had to order the doors closed and the purchases stopped because he was out of ready money. Virtually beggared, if the truth be told. The thought made him howl with laughter. Beggared was he? With what had come in on the Canton Star? Not quite. He laughed again, enjoying the looks of the curious passersby. They all knew who he was, every poxed resident of the city was talking about him this day. Sweet Jesus, but sometimes life was good.
The midday storm had greatly lessened the day’s heat; now the sun was shining and there was a cool easterly breeze. It felt good, fine in fact, and hunger was making a pleasant anticipation in his belly. Still, Blakeman paused a few steps before Eugenie Fischer’s house.
He looked across the road to the Common, dominated by the new City Hall, finished two years before. Marble on three sides only, and plain brownstone at the back. It was a plan put in place by small-minded men who could not imagine the city growing further north. But already the city extended well beyond City Hall, the population moving always deeper into the woods known as the Manhattan wilderness. These days New York City occupied the full three-mile stretch of the island’s narrow southern tip. As for what was coming…The grid laid out in 1811, before the war, showed all of Manhattan—the entire thirteen-mile length, by God!—divided by a dozen north-south avenues a hundred feet wide, and crisscrossed with a hundred fifty-five numbered streets, each sixty feet wide. The plan was for a city of uniform side-by-side lots and straight-
sided, cojoined, right-angled houses that would be cheap and easy to build. No fancy parks or sweeping vistas in the manner of European capitals. Workers were what New York City needed if she was to fulfill her destiny. Thousands of them; Christ, maybe tens of thousands. Seeing the city develop in just that fashion was one of Blakeman’s dreams. Today he’d brought it a little closer to reality.
The thought made the sap rise in him. He strode to Eugenie’s front door.
Eugenie Fisher had a table for two laid in the boudoir off her bedroom, and she served Blakeman herself from a makeshift sideboard set up in front of a fireplace not needed in summer. Because, she explained, “I thought you’d want more than the usual amount of privacy, dear Gornt.”
“Mmm, yes.” Blakeman drank the soup she gave him without much attention. He was more interested in her than in the food, however hungry he’d thought himself when he arrived.
Eugenie was aware of his brash gaze. Sometimes she stared back, but never for very long. And she never gave even the merest hint that she knew what he was thinking. Mostly, she made small talk, an amusing thing she’d read in the Federalist Evening Post, or the Democratic-Republican paper, the National Advocate. How her maid had been the first to bring Eugenie word that a ship was coming into harbor, only according to her it was a British man-o’-war coming to shell the city. Until finally, “Gornt, I can’t bear it. You’ve been here nearly twenty minutes and you still haven’t told me what happened with Bastard Devrey.”
“Exactly what I planned to happen. I like your frock.” He leaned across the table and fingered the short, puffed sleeve that bared her arm. The fabric was white and thin and felt incredibly soft to his touch. A wide blue satin ribbon caught the gown below her breasts. The dress flowed free from there to her ankles; he could see she’d adopted the latest French fashion and wasn’t corseted. He’d heard that in Europe the women adopting this mode actually damped their underchemise so it would cling closer to their bodies. Called it a blow struck for freedom. “I didn’t think you were a republican.”
“Heaven forbid.” She laughed, a tinkling little sound he found himself thinking of many times when he was not with her. “You forget, I was Eugenie LaMont before I married,” she said. “French fashion is my birthright. I adore it.”
Another part of Eugenie’s heritage was knowing when a man wanted to talk of business and politics, and when he did not. It was a skill she had honed during the four years she was married to her handsome lawyer. Dead two years Timothy Fischer was, a victim of the yellowing fever. But her wiles were all the more necessary now that she was a twenty-four-
year-old widow and must struggle every month to find the funds to keep her household afloat. “Will your ship have brought me some new silks from Canton, Gornt? If so, I will have another frock made to this same design. Will that please you?”
Blakeman nodded, his mind on other things; Eugenie stood up and took the soup plates away, then busied herself at the sideboard serving the next course. He could see the curve of her buttocks as she moved, and when she stood a certain way, the light from the window showed off the slight roundness of her belly. The fact that she was a lady, not a doxy or a whore, made her boldness wonderfully titillating. “Tell me, will every fashionable woman in the city soon adopt this style?”
Eugenie laughed. “Would you like it if they did?”
“I’m not sure there would be a lick of work done in New York if they did. No man can be expected to keep his mind on business in such circumstances.” He got up and went to where she stood and drew her to him. “Today, Eugenie. It’s been a marvelous day. Make it perfect.”
She let him pull her close, then leaned back so she could still see his face. “Tell me what happened, Gornt. I’ve been thinking about it for hours.”
His hand moved to her breast. She didn’t push it away. “Soon as I knew my ship was headed for the harbor, I went to the Tontine and confronted Bastard Devrey, just as I told you I would.” His other hand ventured to her buttocks, and when that too was allowed to remain, he began a little pattern of strokes, always exploring a bit further.
“And what did he say?” Eugenie pressed herself against his thigh.
“What could he say? He’s all but bankrupt. And as of today I own forty percent of his company. Give me your mouth.”
“Gornt, where is the money for all this coming from?”
“That’s not your concern. Kiss me, damn you.”
“They say you’re a pirate. That you—”
He managed to stop her words with a kiss, but moments later she had slipped out of his embrace. Two months and it was always the same.
Eugenie returned to the business of dinner. “Will you have some of this roasted pheasant, dearest Gornt? And perhaps a bit of boiled beef? I told cook no pies because of the heat, but if you—”
He strode to the window. “Come over here. I want to show you something.” She stood beside him. “What do you see?” he demanded.
“Ah,” she said, looking down into the street. “Two escapees from the Tammany Society next door.” She was referring to a pair of feral pigs—the city was full of them—snuffling in the gutter of the street below, and to the building on her right which housed a social club that attracted mostly mechanics and laborers, people of the class that supported the Democratic-Republicans rather than the Federalists.
Gornt chuckled. “Look across the Common.”
He meant her to ignore the now decrepit and overcrowded almshouse, she knew. And, of course, the hulk of a building still called the New Gaol, though it had been built in 1766, and the Bridewell, where prisoners with longer terms to serve were packed together like salted fish in a barrel. “The splendid City Hall,” Eugenie said. “What about it?”
“Would you like to live in it?”
“On the Common among the Irish ne’er-do-wells and thieves? You are mad, dear Gornt. A touch of the summer heat. Besides, City Hall’s not a residence.”
“But it could be made so. It could be a palace. And you could be…my Pompadour.”
Pompadour. A French king’s courtesan, never his queen. Her smile was as radiant as always a
nd showed nothing of what she felt. “Mad indeed. But so charming with it.”
She wore her dark hair twisted in a coil at the back of her head, and between it and the scooped neck of her gown there was only bare skin. Blakeman placed one finger on her neck. “You wear no jewelry, Eugenie LaMont Fischer. Is it true then that after your husband died you were penniless and had to sell your jewels to live?”
“And is it true that you’re a Barbary pirate, escaped from Tripoli when Mr. Jefferson sent American gunboats to attack, and that you have chests of gold hidden in your countinghouse?”
“Not gold,” he whispered, putting his arms around her once more. “Diamonds. Emeralds. Rubies. You must come with me some day to that City Hall built by small-minded men and help me select a proper throne room. Bedchambers as well, Eugenie LaMont Fisher, who is driving me insane. Will you do that?”
This time for answer she kissed him. But an hour later when he left, though he’d eaten his fill and his belly no longer growled, Blakeman’s crotch was as heavy as it had been when he arrived.
The Manhattan Wilderness
Above the Village of Greenwich, 7 P.M.
By evening another storm had reached the city. The summer dusk turned prematurely to dark; and lightning and thunder boomed and cracked overhead, and rain fell in sheets from the ferocious sky.
The cabin belonging to the woman the town called Holy Hannah was a hovel four miles from the southern tip of Manhattan Island, in the no-man’s-land beyond North Street, the limit of the city proper, beyond even the small rural settlement known as the village of Greenwich. The shack sat in a meadow at the edge of the thickly wooded hills that covered most of the island.
Holy Hannah had built the thing herself. The walls were rough planks nailed to tree trunks that had been stuck like posts into the ground; there were places where the gaps between them were as wide as a man’s thumb. In winter she collected rags and old newspapers and made a sort of mortar for the joints. Now, in summer, the make-do stuffing had been pulled out to let a breath of air into the windowless space. As for the roof, it was a patchwork of tin and board, and even some bricks that had once come to hand. In this downpour great drops of rain came through the cracks and splattered everywhere. Hannah could as well be standing outside.
She kicked the assorted bits of bedding spread about the floor into a single pile, and covered it with a square of tattered canvas. Then fussed with the pile a bit longer, making sure everything was as well covered as it could be. Another crack of thunder shook the walls.
There was no proper door, only a second square of canvas nailed to a bit of tree trunk acting as a lintel, and left free either side. The force of the rain was driving the makeshift barrier inward, depositing torrents of water at the entrance, churning the dirt floor into a muddy sump. Time was, there were some heavy stones about, good for weighting the bottom of the entry flap; she had no idea where they’d disappeared to.
Her shawl, a thing so old it was no color and no identifiable fabric, hung from a peg on the wall. Hannah grabbed it and put it over her unkempt mane of gray hair, then pushed the canvas flap aside and went into the meadow. You could no longer see the path trodden to the cabin through the high grass; the heavy rain had beaten down every blade equally. Couldn’t see much of anything, come to that. Except for the eerie blue-white light that came with each flash of lightning, it seemed like night.
“Hannah, why are you outside? Get back in and stay dry.”
She recognized Will Farrell’s voice before she could actually see him. Always looking out for her, Will was. His mama died when Will was eight, and without a father as would claim him, the boy had taken to living on the streets. That’s where she’d found him, huddling in a doorway on a night when the cold was a thing as could perish a body with some flesh on its bones, much less the scrawny little thing Will was then. Hannah had picked him up and carried him home. There were four or five boys living with her at the time, she didn’t remember exactly, and that night they had crowded together for warmth with the newcomer in the heart of the huddle, sustained by their combined heat. The others had disappeared, but never mind. Her boys had always come and gone as they liked, usually without so much as a thank-you or a goodbye. Not Will, though. He was the best of them.
“Get inside,” the lad shouted. She spotted his stovepipe hat, floating through the fog as if it traveled on its own. “Get a fire goin’, Hannah. I’ve brought us some proper supper.”
She almost couldn’t see what he seemed to be dragging behind him, until he got a bit closer and she made out the figure of a second boy, hunched over and wanting to hang back, except that Will had tight hold of him and was pulling him forward.
Another one. Hannah felt her heart lift.
“Do you have a name, then?” Hannah stooped over the brick-lined fire hole in the middle of the cabin and prodded a handful of wood shavings meant for kindling.
“He’s Jesse Edwards,” Will said. “Told me so when I found him.”
The shavings were damp. She kept blowing on them and repeatedly striking new sparks off the tinderbox. Still they did not catch. “And where did that happen to be?”
“Out behind Astor’s slaughterhouse on the Bowery. Same place I got that.” Will gestured to the large beef kidney waiting to be cooked. “Only I found Jesse first. He was poking around in the pit where old Astor dumps the stuff as smells too bad to do anything with. I told him I knew a better place to look,” he added with a sly smile. “But he’d have to turn his back ’fore I’d go and get something from it.”
Some months back Will had told Hannah he’d found a way to open the chest behind the slaughterhouse where Henry Astor saved choice bits of carcass he was keeping for himself, or maybe his almighty brother Jacob, who owned half the city and a bit besides. “Told you not to go there too often,” she said. “Otherwise he’ll think it out, know someone’s found the hiding place, and he’ll stop using it. We had that mutton chop only a week since.”
“Had to make an exception,” Will said, getting up to find a log to put on the fire now that Hannah had finally got the kindling going. It was a phrase he’d learned from Peggety Jack. When someone broke one o’ Peggety’s rules, Peggety would sometimes say he’d not dock the offender’s pay after all. He’d say he was making an exception out o’ the kindness o’ his soft heart, only if there was another time, well, he’d take three times the usual fine. “Had to make an exception out o’ the kindness o’ me soft heart,” Will repeated. “Jesse here was trying to eat that stinking stuff from the pit raw. So I said I’d get us a bit o’ supper and bring him here to eat it. Knew you wouldn’t mind.”
“Course I don’t mind. Birds with one wing need a nest more’n most. But they can sing same as those with two. Ain’t you gonna say anything at all, Jesse Edwards?”
“Don’t got nothin’ to say.” The boy mumbled the words into his chest and didn’t look at her.
At last the log caught and flames crackled and danced in the fire hole. “Give that kidney here,” Hannah said. Will complied, and she took a knife from her pocket and began cutting it into three pieces. “Smell that piss smell,” she chortled. “Some folks say you got to soak a kidney ’fore you cook it. But I say the piss gives the kidney flavor. When the Israelites was in the desert and the Holy One, Blessed Be His Name, sent them manna to eat—Book o’ Exodus that is—I bet it was kidney with plenty o’ piss stink still in it. Manna from heaven, that’s what we got here. Get the sticks, Will. How’d you lose your arm, Jesse Edwards?”
“In a battle. Last year.”
“You was in the war?” Will’s tone betrayed his awe.
Jesse seemed to come alive. “Aye. Aboard Commodore Perry’s flagship Lawrence.”
Hannah glanced sideways at him. Lord Almighty! Probably the only thing he ever did in his life made him feel a bit special. Though sure as David was a king, only thing he’d got out of it was the loss of one wing. She fixed a share of kidney onto each of three pointed sticks and handed th
e largest portion to the newcomer. “Don’t take but a single arm to do most things,” she said. “Like hold a bit of meat over the fire. Besides, the Holy One, blessed be His name, looks after his own. ‘Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.’ Book of Jeremiah. Got any family, Jesse Edwards?”
“Was just me and my ma, then she died and I went to sea.”
“And where you been since last year when you was a hero with Commodore Perry?”
Jesse shrugged. “Here and there. Thought I could get work in New York, but it’s the same here as anywhere else, nobody wants me ’cause o’ this.” He nodded toward the armless shoulder. “Ain’t my fault, but—”
“Don’t whinge,” Hannah said sharply. “The Holy One, Blessed be His Name, helps those who help themselves. Book of Proverbs. He don’t hold with whining and whinging.” The smell of roasting meat prickled in the air. Not that she’d have minded if there was only a bit of stale bread for supper. Or nothing, come to that. She had long since learned she had much in common with the wild creatures in the woods to the north. She could live off her fat when she must. The Holy One made women tough as they needed to be. Despite years of living rough, she was still as round and solid as a hitching post; still had all her teeth as well. She was forty-five or forty-six, she was never quite sure, and she saw plenty of women younger than she with nothing left but gums. But she had good strong teeth, like all the women in her family, like her mother and her grandmother. How proud of their looks they’d been in their fine taffeta gowns, and dainty leather shoes, and the tortoiseshell combs in their hair. They were…
They were dead. No point in thinking on them. Particularly not when now she had two lads to look after. She could all but see the hunger on this new one. The hand holding his bit of kidney over the fire was shaking with it. “Not long now,” she said. “Just let it get a bit more cooked, then you can have at it. And we’ll see about finding you something as will earn you a few coppers. New York’s a fine city for work, and Holy Hannah’s got lots of ideas for boys as ain’t afraid of it.”
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