Alexander C. Irvine

by A Scattering of Jades

  Today, though, he felt different. He felt hopeful. Somewhere out there was the story that Bennett would not be able to turn down. Maybe something would happen at the Water Celebration, something Archie Prescott alone could suitably commit to paper. Whistling a popular tune whose name he couldn’t recall, Archie rummaged in his pockets to see how much money he had and to locate his key. On the street, a wagon loaded with barrels of beer forced its way through the crowd. The driver cracked his whip over the mules, the beggars who ran alongside the wagon, and the pedestrians who blocked his way. As he cursed a knot of women going to market, two men ran to the back of the wagon and made off with a cask. As soon as they had it free, the women strolled on and the driver, none the wiser, resumed his slow progress.

  At the corner beneath Archie’s window, the troop of paper-sellers converged on the wagon, their high-pitched shouts carrying above the constant din of the intersection. He looked from one to the next until he found the only girl in the group, a pathetic wisp bundled in clothes far too large and a pair of men’s brogans, a battered cap pulled low over her face to hide her disfigurement. It was her, the poor lunatic girl who had for some reason fixated on Archie, following him around and calling herself his daughter. He was already dreading the confrontation he knew awaited him on the front steps.

  He looked around the room, something nagging at the back of his mind. The tick mattress on its low frame, the battered writing desk and chair rescued from the garbage, the washstand with bowl and ewer; everything he owned was in its place. He had his coat, and his notebook and pencil were in his pocket; his hat hung on a nail by the door.

  The knife, that was it. Archie took a short step in the direction of the bed, but he didn’t want to look at it and be reminded. Its blade was still streaked from the intense heat of the fire, even though he’d had it polished and sharpened. A new handle had been put on as well, but the blue-brown streaks on the blade could only be removed if it was completely reground.

  And memories were hardly the worst of it. Whenever he touched the knife Archie had the uneasy feeling that he was attracting … not attention exactly, but some kind of offhand regard. Of what he couldn’t say, but the feeling was there nonetheless. Every time he left his room without the knife, he was plagued by the sensation of having forgotten something. With an effort, Archie left it where it was under the bed and went out into the hall, carefully locking the door behind him.

  The girl selling the Herald was waiting for him on the front stoop when Archie came out onto the porch. He had a few pennies fished from his pocket, hoping that for once he could just buy a paper without having to speak to her. Her addled conceit that she was his daughter brought certain memories a bit too close to the surface, and they were already bubbling dangerously high that morning. He took a deep breath, waiting for the gauntlet to begin.

  “Morning, Father,” she said, pushing the stained cap up to her hairline. The pale, puckered welts that dominated the right side of her face flushed to an angry red as Archie looked at his feet, the chipped paint covering the porch, anything to avoid having to look back into her hatefully glittering eyes. “Can’t you see it’s me, Jane?”

  She smiled, showing crooked gray teeth, the smile pulled into a leer by streaked ridges of scar tissue that disappeared under her cap. She had taken the cap off once, revealing the bald patches on her head and the twisted knot that had once been an ear; it had been weeks before Archie could sleep again.

  “Can’t you see it’s me, you bastard?” He could see her shoes, toe to toe with his, but he still couldn’t look at her. He stood frozen in place on the slanting porch, holding out the handful of pennies and wondering for the thousandth time where she had heard that his daughter’s name had been Jane.

  “In the circus Mr. Steen told me where to find you,” she said. He could smell the rancid tang of her anger, feel the tension as she trembled furiously in front of him. “In the circus they know lots of things, and when they tell you they beat you so’s you remember them right.”

  Archie thought that if he had to look at her, he would simply go insane, join her in raving at passersby and accusing random workmen of being father or lover or long-lost cousin. He knew that in a few seconds, having exacted her tribute of him, she would slump and allow him to pass. As he stepped past her, careful not to brush up against the ragged cutoff overcoat she wore, she would begin to sob. By the time he reached the end of the block, she would be cursing him at the top of her lungs.

  He’d written an article for Bennett about her and the multitude of others like her, demented by the savagery of their young lives, fixating on wishes and nurturing fantasies until they believed them to be true. Bennett had read it quickly while slurping oysters in his office, then set it aside. “Mad children are the project of the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society,” he’d said in his thick burr. “They don’t sell papers.”

  Bennett might have been correct in his observation, but Archie wished fervently that the society would take this particular girl on as a project. She bedeviled him to the point where he could only banish the memories with gin.

  Standing on the porch with his hand held out, eyes closed lest he see her ravaged face, Archie couldn’t remember what Helen had looked like. But his memory of Jane had never faded, chubby, laughing little dark-eyed Jane pointing at the moon over Lake Champlain; this wasted creature capering out of the gutter mocked her memory.

  He heard her sniff, saw that as he’d expected, she was crying. She picked the pennies off his palm one by one. “The paper’s only a penny, but it’s always all right to accept a gift from your father, isn’t that right, Da?”

  Archie didn’t answer. He took a paper, folding it under his arm as he walked off down the bustling street. By the time he turned down Worth toward Broadway, she was screeching like a Fury.

  Broadway was full of New York’s wealthy, promenading slowly north toward the new Croton Reservoir at Forty-second Street. Their carriages were freshly painted in vivid blues and stately black, their horses brushed to a shine and bedecked in bells and ribbons. Archie watched them as the omnibus he’d caught at City Hall Park jostled along, the driver shouting indecipherable Gaelic threats at coachmen, pedestrians, and pigs alike. A long line of similar vehicles streamed north along the thoroughfare, carrying those too poor to afford a carriage of their own. The edges of the street were jammed with families and strutting groups of young men, the men calling to the women who waved and flirted out the windows of the cabs. Serious-faced young children tried to carry themselves like the society folk across the way while avoiding the pigs that rooted in the gutters and dodged nimbly in and out of traffic. The activity was dizzying, too chaotic to be boiled down into prose. Archie leaned back against the hard wooden seat, closed his eyes, and tried again to come up with an angle on the holiday. Persistence was the key.

  The omnibus cruised to a halt at the corner of Forty-second Street. This far north, Broadway was a wide dirt track, graded but not yet paved. Away to the north was farmland and the occasional sprawling manse, while to the south Archie could see the city gradually gather itself into the maelstrom of the Lower East Side and Wall Street. Bells rang as wagons moving south with produce or livestock tangled with those carrying dry goods or scrap iron north to the city’s growing outskirts. Drivers flung curses at each other and, not infrequently, exchanged lashes.

  It was all, somehow, very fine. Mad little girls were a part of living in the Five Points, but New York had much else to divert the mind and engage the senses. Do not dwell, Archie told himself, on misery. Udo is right. Don’t go chasing sorrow.

  Archie jumped over a wallowing sow to the margins of the torrential human flow, where people stood and meandered in small eddies instead of charging headlong into the current. A breeze came up, and a column of fallen leaves charged down the street until pedestrians crushed them underfoot. Archie walked for a short time among the crowd, getting a sense of them before arriving at the reservoir, where Mayor Morris would give h
is speech.

  The cannonfire that had awakened him would have been the fanfare of the opening ceremonies near the northern end of Manhattan Island. That had been perhaps an hour ago; the parade would be arriving soon to make the situation even more of a mob scene than it already was. Best to find a place to sit and read the paper until the parade arrived. Reactions of the crowd to the mayor’s speech would be interesting, although hardly novel, as Bennett had no special affection for Morris and attacked him in the Heralds pages at every opportunity.

  No surprise, Archie thought. Ever since Bennett had fallen out with Matty Van Buren, he had savaged Tammany Hall whenever he had the chance. It made little difference; Tammany owned the city, and during Old Kinderhook’s presidency, the Society had pulled America’s strings as well. Now that Van Buren was out of office, they had retreated from their ambitious national agenda, but within the city Tammany Hall had always run things fairly well the way it wanted. They were far too powerful and entrenched to be bothered by the accusations of a newspaper publisher whose audience was limited to those who could read.

  Which by no means meant that they would not take measures to protect their reputation. Archie knew at least a dozen people who bore scars or a limp from having spoken the wrong way about a particular “brave” or “sachem,” as Tammany members called themselves. The terms made him snort; he didn’t think any Indian had ever been a member of the Society. Shaking his head, he unfolded the paper and found a bench to read it on.

  His attention was immediately riveted by a headline below the obligatory blazing paean to the aqueduct. TAMMANY VOTE-FIXING OUTRAGES REVEALED! it read. Below it was the byline: Eye Peeled on Orange.

  It was his byline, the one Helen used to tease him with when he dreamed of publishing his own paper some day. He had used it exactly once, when the Herald had run the back-page paragraph about the “other” fire of December 15, 1835.

  What was Bennett thinking? Archie skimmed the story quickly—the usual collection of allegations that everyone knew to be true but nobody cared to prove, enlivened by Bennett’s bombastic editorial asides and eyewink.

  Surely he had people covering Tammany Hall, and one of them had just as surely fed him the information in the article. But why publish it under Archie’s byline? Restive after Van Buren’s failed reelection bid, the Hall was inclined to return to the old days of running the city and throwing their weight around in Albany. Any attempt to shake their hold on the boroughs would bring a swift reprisal, and they doubtless had ways to find out who “Eye Peeled on Orange” was.

  So Bennett was intentionally waving Archie in front of the Tammany Society, a red flag in the face of a bull already angered by the banderilla of Van Buren’s defeat. What in God’s name was in Bennett’s head? It was a situation that could get Archie killed.

  Archie flinched as the paper was snatched from his hands. He looked up to see a long-legged young Irishman with a soap-locks haircut calmly fold the paper twice and slide it into the pocket of his coat. Following the motion, Archie saw red piping on the sides of the youth’s trousers. A Dead Rabbit. Tammany had found him already.

  “I agree,” the Rabbit said, rubbing the few whiskers on his narrow jaw and looking around, ” ‘tis a fine day to be admirin’ yer handiwork, isn’t it? I’m a bit put out myself. All them names and I’m not mentioned once.”

  Smirking, the b’hoy executed a graceful mock bow, his pale green eyes never leaving Archie’s face. “Royce McDougall, Mr. Prescott. I’ll thank you to remember that next time you take up your pen.”

  He moved closer, shifting so the sun came directly over his shoulders. The blinding halo obscured the features of Royce’s face.

  Archie looked away, blinking, and saw that the crowd was giving his bench a wide berth. Lounging near a pile of uprooted tree stumps were two more Rabbits, and Archie thought he saw another standing behind Royce.

  “Archie?” Archie squinted back up at Royce. “I might advise you, though, in the spirit of human kindness, that there are some who might prefer that you direct your attentions elsewhere.” Royce stepped aside, and the sudden sunlight blinded Archie completely.

  He ducked his head, grimacing in anticipation of the first blow, and flinched again when Royce whispered into his ear, “I’m sure a man of your perceptive qualities will take my meaning.”

  When Archie could see again, the Rabbits were gone, melted into the milling crowd as a strident brass march announced the arrival of the parade.

  Bennett looked vaguely irritated as he invited Archie into his office. He sat and indicated Archie should do the same.

  “You and I both have plenty to do, Archie,” he said. “What was it you wanted to say?”

  “Mr. Bennett,” Archie said, “I noticed this article in the paper today.” He flipped open a copy of the day’s Herald that lay on Bennett’s desk and pointed at the article that bore his byline.

  Bennett leaned back in his chair and pulled at his bushy red sideburns. Through the window behind him, Archie watched traffic streaming up and down Broadway. “Seven years ago you used that byline once,” Bennett said. “It’s a clever one, but you can hardly be proprietary about it, can you?”

  He picked up an editing pencil as he spoke, doodling a succession of arrowheads across the blotter that covered the desk. “If all you’ve come to do is complain about trivia, Archie, I don’t have time,” he said, glancing pointedly at the grandfather clock in the corner near the door.

  Archie bristled at the cavalier disrespect in Bennett’s voice. “Mr. Bennett,” he said tightly, “I don’t think this is at all trivial.”

  “I do,” Bennett said without looking up from his doodling. “Come, Archie, what’s the point?”

  “The Dead Rabbits are the damned point!” Archie shouted. “You’ve put me squarely in their sights, and right before an election on top of it!”

  He shoved the chair back and stood. “You put a piece out there that named people and accused them of vote fraud and graft, and then you put my name on it. What do you think is going to happen?”

  Archie stopped short when he saw that Bennett was smiling at him. He felt suddenly foolish, as if he was about to be the butt of some cruel joke.

  “You want to be a correspondent, Prescott?” Bennett’s grin was predatory as he leaned forward. The question hung in the air.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then don’t come whining to me about rubbish like who pinched your little pen-name. Of course it wasn’t an accident. If you’d walked out of here without mentioning your dance with the Rabbits, I’d have fired you tomorrow.” Bennett pointed his pencil at Archie. “You’ve been here too long to be just a disgruntled typesetter. I’ll be frank with you, Prescott; you’re never going to amount to anything if you live your life trying to flee your memory.” Bennett paused, waiting for Archie to say something. He nodded after a moment and continued.

  “What’s important in this situation, Archie, your pen-name or the fact that the Dead Rabbits might stomp you flat?” Bennett gestured for Archie to sit. “Rhetorical question. Listen, here’s my offer: Bring me something new on those Tammany bastards and the job is yours. Salaried correspondent. And I don’t want innuendo or hearsay, I can make that up myself. I expect names, dates, places. Murder, graft, whatever; I want front-page sixty-point revelations. You live in the right place, you’ve known the right people in the past; the opportunity is yours to take. And the Dead Rabbits and the Tammany sachems will be keeping an eye on you now. That’s useful. You watch who’s watching you and they’ll lead you to what you want to know.”

  Bennett stood and offered Archie his hand. “Truth be told, Prescott, I’ve done you a favor. It’s up to you now to capitalize. But you’ll do it on your own time, and right now you’re due on the floor.”

  Atlcahuala, 1-Rabbitt—December 19, 1842

  Rosetta Peer’s, Archie thought as he cut from Houston Street over to the Bowery and turned south. If anyone knew anything, it would be the wharf rats who went
to ground there, and Rosie’s brew is cheap. He walked fast to keep the cold away, covering the length of the Bowery to East Broadway in a few short minutes and turning down Oliver to pick up Water and follow it down to the dockside slums.

  Archie checked his watch, disguising the motion as an elaborate itch to avoid being accosted; he was due at the Herald right then. If nothing came of his prowling tonight, he would no longer need to worry about finding a story or anything else for James Gordon Bennett. After two months of obsessive looking over his Shoulder at every footstep and equally obsessive searching the Whiskey Wards for people willing to name names about Tammany corruption, he’d reached some sort of threshold. One way or another, he’d resolve things tonight. Either he would have a story for Bennett, and thus a career, or he wouldn’t be working for Bennett at all. The second scenario had its drawbacks, but at least it meant the Rabbits wouldn’t be stalking him any more.

  “Archie, fancy meeting you here.” The voice floated from an overhung breezeway on his right. Archie took a step toward the street, suddenly very aware of the knife pressing into the small of his back. Fearing reprisals by the Rabbits or other Tammany thugs, he’d begun carrying it around, and even though nothing had happened since Water Celebration Day, it had become a habit. The feeling the knife gave him of being watched had not abated, but Archie had gotten used to that as well; the vague presence was now comforting by virtue of its familiarity, and he caught himself sometimes in a fit of jealous worry that it was the knife that was being watched instead of him.

  It had been weeks since he had stopped to wonder what it was that might be watching, or why it was that the knife made him vulnerable to nervous delusion, but he found himself wondering both as he watched a gaunt shape amble out of the alley shadow. In the clear moonlight, Archie recognized the man.