Wild Wind Westward

by Vanessa Royall

  First in line was a big, glittering high-wheeled affair—Gustav’s, no doubt—drawn by four fine thoroughbreds. Half a dozen other carriages stood behind it, reasonably decent in appearance, and hitched to healthy horses. Then came the rest: poor, dirty hacks with tattered canvas awnings, wheels on which spokes had broken and been tied or wired back together. Plug horses pulled these, or swaybacked nags displaying ribcages and festering sores where raw harnesses had worn through hide. As Kristin watched, another fine carriage drew up onto the pier, and stopped some distance away from the other vehicles. Kristin could see the shining blond hair of a woman inside, a woman alone. Perhaps she is here to meet some elegant man on the Valkyrie, Kristin thought. If so, that passenger had certainly kept his identity secret from Kristin during the voyage. The only man on board who was at all interesting had been Captain Sonntag, and that owed less to character than to the experience of his many voyages. All of which, due to innumerable times at table, Kristin knew by heart.

  Then, just as the gangway was being lowered, she saw Eric!

  Almost at the same moment, even while her heart prepared to pound in joy and triumph, she realized that something, some nameless, sinister, unexpected thing, was terribly awry.

  Why did he appear to be concealing himself? No, he way concealing himself!

  Her skin grew instantly cold, and fine hairs quivered at the back of her neck. She stood for the first time face to face with something terrible in this new world, and she did not know what it was. But she knew it was there, all right, out there in that mighty city, or over there, beyond, in the green rolling fields of America. It had to be there, that terrible something, because what else, other than an horrific trackless entity, would cause Eric Starbane to conceal himself behind a wharf piling?

  “We’re going ashore now,” Gustav said, coming up behind her and taking her elbow. He guided her toward the gangway. “All you have to do is smile, and if you show a little ankle while getting into our carriage, that wouldn’t hurt.”

  Kristin lost sight of Eric. And she wondered that Gustav seemed not to sense the terror swarming in this new land.

  Or perhaps he already knew it.

  Or perhaps he was its brother.

  Whatever happened between them, or afterward, Eric knew he must speak to Kristin. But, at first, he despaired of doing so. There were too many people around, and when Gustav and Kristin left the ship first and moved toward the carriage, Eric almost gave up. All he would be able to do was hail a hack, spend a portion of his fourteen dollar fortune, and follow them to their destination. But then Kristin climbed into the carriage, while Gustav remained on the dock to talk to a number of men who flocked around him. Eric saw the sheets of paper and the scribbling pencils. Reporters. Gustav and the reporters stood between the Valkyrie and the carriage.

  Eric advanced up the pier, toward the opposite side of Kristin’s carriage. He did not notice, yet, an equally expensive vehicle drawn up parallel to the first, so that the two carriages were no more than five yards apart.

  After climbing inside, Kristin’s first thought was to sit next to the door, and try to see if she could locate Eric again. She thought she could see the piling at which he’d been earlier, but now she was not sure. All the pilings looked alike; they all were alike.

  “Sir, I don’t mean to be rude,” she heard one reporter asking Gustav, “but how did you come by that scar?”

  “Not rude at all,” boomed Gustav, in a hearty, open-handed manner he seemed to have devised for dealing with Americans. “I acquired it during a duel, in my university days.”

  The reporters scribbled furiously; duels were very European, hence fashionable, even noble.

  “If you think this is awesome, you ought to see my opponent’s scars!” exclaimed Gustav, with relish. The reporters laughed. This Norwegian tycoon would make good copy.

  “God rest my late opponent’s soul,” Gustav added.

  The reporters laughed some more. Foreign nobility were always so distinguished. The newspapermen, who spent considerable time and creative power mocking Abraham Lincoln for his homespun manner and physical ungainliness, looked at Gustav Rolfson and saw not the red cunning acquisitive eyes above that broad wolfs nose, but rather an intelligent and charming mercantile ambassador, whose acquaintance would be useful to cultivate.

  Because the day was warm and clement, the isinglass shade on the door of the Rolfson carriage had been rolled up, so that when Kristin looked out to try and find Eric, she had a clear view of the waterfront. She let her eyes move from piling to piling, looking.

  But there he was, approaching her, no more than a few yards away! She had not expected him to appear so suddenly. She had not expected to see him in the clothes he was wearing, which had been unnoticeable at a distance. But she did not care about that. It was Eric! He was here! But he looked so wan and pale.

  Eric saw her face, framed in the carriage window. He saw love there, love as great as his own for her. And he saw something else as well, which was actually surprise, but which, in his depressed condition, he misread as pity.

  There would be but a few moments to exchange words, Kristin realized, perhaps the most important words of her life. Gustav was regaling his court with prognostications of his future in America; he would be the first—hence greatest—oil baron in the whole wide world.

  Then Eric stood by the carriage.

  They spent one moment looking at each other. Kristin wanted to leap from the carriage into Eric’s arms; Eric wanted to erase from the world all but the two of them.

  “Kristin, my darling—”

  “I love you.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “We will be at the Madison Hotel.” She did not know why Eric winced. “Come there tomorrow morning.”

  Did she not see how he was dressed? Did she not know he couldn’t enter a place like that?

  “I am prepared to leave him,” she was saying.

  “But I have nothing!” Eric hissed urgently, hoping to make her see, understand.

  Kristin spent a moment turning that over in her mind. She seemed confused to the depths of her being. “What does that matter?” she asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “That will be all,” Gustav boomed to the sycophantic reporters, on the other side of the carriage. The horses pranced, eager to be off. The driver, attired elegantly, as befit the owner of a first-class rig, clucked to soothe them a moment more.

  “Thank you, sir,” the scribes said, in unison. “I wish you every success America has to offer,” added one of them fervently. It was Horace Greeley, noted New York journalist and dyed-in-the-wool abolitionist. “Remember, go west. The place to go is west. That’s where the future is.”

  “I shall give that advice considerable thought,” responded Gustav, heavily judicious.

  “The Madison Hotel,” Kristin said again. She was worried now. Eric did not seem in good spirits, and he looked worn down. All the more reason for her to be with him. Tomorrow he would come to her, and somehow everything would work out.

  Eric had time to say, “I love you,” before Gustav opened the opposite door and jumped into the carriage. He was too delighted with his fine reception and tremendous interview to catch more than a fleeting flash of some man’s head as it disappeared from the open window on the other side of the vehicle.

  “Who was that?” he asked, without interest. “Some American tramp looking for a handout? You must be careful here, my dear, not to mix with the peasants. These Americans regard us as nobility, you know, and we must set a proper example.”

  “Yes, husband,” Kristin said. Nobility! she thought.

  The driver cracked his whip and the carriage wheeled smoothly away from the ship.

  III

  Eric waited in the shadow of a dock warehouse until the carriage was out of sight, then trudged disconsolately uptown. He had no plans. He would have to find a place for the night. He needed money. He ought to have decent clothes if he went to see Kristin in the morning. If h
e went to see her. He had to see her. But he remembered that strange look on her face, that he had interpreted as pity. Something in him froze. A ball of ice formed deep inside him, a cold implacable entity he had never known before. Eric had already changed, but he did not know it yet.

  He cut crosstown, then walked north on Madison Avenue for a time, reflecting upon Gustav Rolfson’s interview with the fawning newspapermen. He did not even notice the elegant shops and great mansions, so deep was his bitter concentration. The same Gustav Rolfson upon whose countenance he had etched what ought to have been a scar of shame for all the world to see was being feted and celebrated on his first day in America. Whereas Eric, who had worked and struggled here for years, slouched aimlessly uptown, his once warm heart turning hard and cold.

  Passing a series of expensive shops, he collided with a silk-hatted gentleman emerging from the establishment of Saul Leffert, tailor. The man was crossing from Leffert’s doorway to his buggy, waiting at curbside, his head turned away to bid the tailor good-bye. He did not see Eric approach, nor was Eric attentive. The impact was sudden and sharp. Eric staggered, the gentleman was knocked off balance, and his stylish hat fell to the walk, rolling into a pile of horse manure in the gutter. He let out a cry of anguish.

  Eric prepared to apologize—there was nothing else he could do—but Leffert, the tailor, made a bad situation worse. A small, lean, flinty man, he stepped onto the sidewalk and began brushing the gentleman’s coat energetically.

  “Mr. Baines,” he bleated, “Mr. Baines, I’m so sorry. It is the fault of this ignorant dolt. You,” he ordered Eric, “fetch that hat and clean it at once.”

  Eric, who might just yesterday have done exactly that, refused. Surprising even himself for a moment, he stood his ground, glared down at the diminutive tailor, and said, “I am no ignorant dolt.”

  “It was an accident…” Baines began, sensing trouble he had not yet consciously identified.

  “Pick up that hat, you ignorant dolt,” Leffert ordered, shouting now, “or I’ll have the police here to drag you in that gutter before I’m through!”

  “Come now,” managed Mr. Baines.

  Eric grabbed Leffert by the collar, lifted him, and slammed him against the wall of his shop. The tailor’s eyes popped open in fear.

  “You call me sir!” he told the tailor.

  “Please…” Baines said.

  Leffert gulped, his face coloring deeply.

  “Sir!” said Eric, not in a loud voice, not loud at all. But there was something in it…

  “Police?” Baines bleated tentatively.

  “Say it or I’ll ram your skull right though these bricks,” Eric advised the tailor calmly.

  “Sir,” Leffert gasped.

  “Sir, what?”

  “Please pick up the hat, sir?”

  “Police!” called Baines, more determinedly now, backing away from Eric. Passersby were gathering now, asking one another what was happening.

  “Please pick up the hat, sir,” repeated Eric. And, with that, he carried Leffert across the walk, set him down on his feet next to the soiled hat. “Pick it up,” he ordered.

  Shakily, the tailor did so.

  “Now put it on.”

  “Sir,” pleaded Baines, “that is enough. The man meant no harm. You have gone too far.”

  Poor unfortunate Leffert did not know it, but at that moment he was the forger, Thorvaldsen; he was the crooked judge, Amundsen; he was Rolfson, father and son; he was Kuffel and Dubin of the Anandale, Mick and Joan Leeds. He was everyone who had conspired to harry and belittle and ill-use Eric Gunnarson, born Starbane.

  “Put on the hat,” Eric said again, in that utterly calm, unsettling tone.

  Leffert hesitated, but Eric was through waiting. He had changed. He had turned a corner in life, a corner he had not foreseen, and of which, even now, he was only partially aware. He took the manure-spattered hat from Leffert’s trembling hands, grabbed it by the wide brim, and pulled it down over the little tailor’s eyes and ears.

  The gathering crowd gasped, some in outrage, others in frank amazement.

  “That will teach you to call someone an ignorant dolt,” he said.

  “Police!” yelled Baines, at the top of his lungs. He feared Eric would come for him next.

  But Eric simply pushed through the crowd, and went his way, astonished at himself at first, then astonished at how he felt. He felt good.

  In that frame of mind, he felt a measure of optimism return, and he began to make plans. First, food. The April afternoon was fair and clear. He had little money, and did not want to spend it just yet, so he walked over to Turtle Bay, on the east side of Manhattan Island. He found a discarded fishing line, tied it to a sapling, borrowed a hook from an old man fishing along the bank.

  “They’s bitin’ pretty good,” the codger reckoned, showing Eric a dozen good-sized perch laid out on the grass beside him. “You want some bait? Here, I got some caterpillars. Been doin’ right good with caterpillars.”

  Eric baited his hook, cast the line, and sat down on the bank. There are some things I’m going to have to take, he reflected, not thinking at all of fish, but I’ll only take what I must. Only what I need to survive.

  Two hours of patience yielded ten perch. He gutted and cleaned them, built a small fire, and cooked them on a sheet of boilerplate abandoned along the river. He invited the old man to use the fire, and the other accepted.

  “What’s your trade?” the man asked Eric, with laconic curiosity.

  “I don’t know yet. So far I’ve farmed, worked on a ship, and driven a team of delivery horses. I was on the docks lately, but hard times have come.”

  The other snorted, chewing fish. “There’s always hard times,” he allowed. “You just got to survive ’em.”

  “So I intend,” agreed Eric. “So I intend.”

  After eating he rested by the river until the sun began to fall, the air to grow chill. Then he walked back to Madison Avenue and down Madison until he reached Leffert’s tailor shop, closed and locked now, the drama of the day long over. The front door was securely bolted. In the window, on a clothier’s dummy, was one of Leffert’s wares: a morning coat of the latest style, narrow lapels buttoned high, framing a starkly white shirt with up-pointed collar, and a rich red silk cravat.

  That will do, Eric thought.

  He went on down to the end of the block, turned the corner, entered an alley, and followed it to the rear of the tailor shop. The door there was bolted, too, but no one was about. Finding a chunk of paving stone next to the building, he lifted it, took aim, and delivered a powerful smash on one of the door’s two hinges. Another blow, and the hinge gave way. Leffert, the ignorant dolt! His door was hinged with nails, not screws. Two more blows dislodged the second hinge, and Eric stepped inside the shop. It smelled dry and dusty, and it was very dark. Waning light from the partially open doorway showed a lamp and several candles standing on a work table. Eric lit the lamp. Then, using the paving stone, he made haste to pound the nails back into the blasted hinges. In daylight the damage would be obvious, but he planned to be gone by daylight.

  With the door shut and secure, he was alone in the shop. There were two rooms, workroom in the rear, showroom in front, off the street entrance. Dozens of coats and trousers in various stages of completion Uttered the workroom, but on racks in the showroom were garments of elegant cut, of all sizes and styles, waiting to be claimed by the rich of New York. Eric removed the morning coat from the clothier’s dummy in the window and tried it on. A bit tight in the shoulders, but otherwise excellent. He took the shirt and cravat too, replacing these items with others from the racks. Further perusal yielded cape, trousers, and hat. He retreated to the back room, closing the curtain between the two parts of the shop, making sure that no lamplight shone out into the front of the store, where a passing policeman might see it through the window. Then he tried on the clothes in front of a big workroom mirror. Splendid. He had never looked so good. His ragged boots
were the only items that would give away his current impoverished state in life, but these new fashionable long trousers almost obcured that fact. Satisfied, he took off the outfit, donned his regular clothes, and dropped into contented sleep on a pile of woolens and flannels, thinking of Kristin.

  On the street in the morning, with his fine clothes and fourteen dollars and thirty-five cents in his pocket, Eric felt like a millionaire. He had to spend a dollar and fifteen cents on breakfast in a hotel, however, because patronizing a vendor or a caf6 would have appeared unseemly for a man of his obvious high station in life. He tipped the waiter a dime, and found the Lexington Livery. There he inquired about the rental of a horse, closed carriage, and driver for the morning.

  “I will wish to drive about the city,” he said, “and show a visitor the sights. After that, I will want to be taken to Pennsylvania Station. I must catch a train to Pennsylvania.”

  “That will be four dollars for the morning, sir, payable in advance.”

  “Certainly,” said Eric grandly, peeling off greenbacks even as his heart sank. Now he had less than train fare for himself and Kristin. Possibly Kristin would have money of her own. She would have to. If not…if not, he would think of something. The thought of seeing Kristin, of holding her in his arms again, rendered absurd petty considerations of dollars and cents.

  He chose a high, rust-colored carriage, with polished spokes on its wheels, and rolled curtains to draw down over the windows. Horses were hitched to the vehicle, and a driver, young and yawning, climbed down from the loft where he had been sleeping.

  “Hotel Madison, if you please,” ordered Eric.

  The driver bounded up into his seat behind the horses, and guided them out into the bustle of morning traffic.

  Now Eric considered his next move. It would be unwise to enter the hotel himself, after yesterday’s humiliating flight. He might send the driver to the desk with a message for Kristin, but what if Gustav was with her when the message was delivered? He had still not decided upon a course of action when the carriage pulled up in front of the hotel. Then he did not have to decide, because God was with him.