“Stockin’, too.” He reached up her skirt to find where the top of her stocking was cinched tight, just above her knee, and peeled the stocking away, then repeated the gesture with the other foot.
“How’s that?” He held her foot in his hand, gently massaging first one and then the other, and the sensation was nothing short of heaven.
“Now, let’s find your nightgown and get you into bed. You’re exhausted.”
He gently set her foot onto the floor and began to go through her things. The first item brought out of the bundle was Clara’s Bible. “This’ll be handy,” he said, fanning through the pages before placing it in the middle of the table right next to the lamp.
Next he unfolded her blouses and skirts and walked to the wall next to the bed where a blanket hung from a rope spanning corner to corner. He pulled the blanket back, revealing a series of hooks where two shirts and a pair of trousers hung. Ben moved some of his clothing aside, making room for Kassandra’s, then closed the blanket back over the lot.
“Quite fancy, eh?” he said with amusement as he pawed through her underthings before opening the top drawer of the dresser to deposit them.
Finally, he came across her nightgown.
“Careful,” she said. “There is something wrapped inside it.”
“Is there now?” Slowly he turned the bundle, until the top of the little china bird popped out of the fabric. “Well, isn’t this a pretty?”
He lifted the figurine out of its flannel nest, and Kassandra let out a grateful breath knowing it was intact.
“This’ll go right up on the dresser,” Ben said.
In just a few minutes, every item that was a part of Kassandra’s life was placed away neatly in Ben’s world.
“Come now, love. Let’s get you undressed.”
He took her hands in his and pulled her to her feet, guiding her the few steps across the room to the bed. He kissed her once, softly, then went to work unfastening the row of delicate bone buttons down the front of her bodice. She brought her hands up to grip his wrists.
“Stop that.”
Ben smiled, lifted his hands up and kissed Kassandra’s fingers until she loosened her grip. A little. He took her face in his hands and kissed her deeply, once, then gently, twice.
“Listen to me,” he said, his voice a more serious, intimate tone than she had ever heard from him before. “I won’t do any-thin’ to hurt you. D’you believe that?”
Kassandra nodded.
“An’ I’ll be good to you. And gentle. Have I ever given you any reason to fear me?”
Kassandra broke her gaze away and looked around the room, sparse and foreign and throbbing with the sounds of the saloon downstairs and the laughter of those women on the floor below.
“Not this place,” Ben insisted, commanding her attention again. “Me. Ben. You trusted me enough to come away with me, didn’t you now? You can trust me here.”
“But Ben, we’re not … Should we not get married first?”
“All in good time, my love. All in good time. Now, I’m goin’ downstairs to have a drink. Let you settle in.”
He gave her one last peck on the cheek before turning and walking out the door. Left alone, Kassandra sank onto the mattress, unable to take any comfort in its softness. Something told her she should cry, but tears seemed childish as she sat on this bed that she would share with this … man.
A sense of calm resolve overtook her as she resumed undressing, hanging her clothes on one of the hooks behind the blanket and dropping her summer nightgown over her head, loving the feel of it as it settled on her shoulders and billowed protectively around her. She picked up her brush from its new home on Ben’s dresser, took down her hair, and sat on the edge of the bed, brushing it thoughtfully just as she had every evening of her life.
“Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers …” she recited with each stroke. It was a game she’d played with Clara, a way to prepare herself for Reverend Joseph’s Bible lessons. She wondered if she would ever again be called upon to recite these books. By the time she reached “Jude and Revelation,” she was so tired it seemed a heroic effort to be able to replace the brush on the dresser top. She did, though, just before pulling back Ben’s mother’s Irish quilt and sinking beneath it.
She was in bed. Ben’s bed.
Kassandra had vague ideas about what it meant for a man and a woman to share a bed together, pieced together mostly from sly passages in forbidden novels and giggled conversations in the school yard. Sarah James was a particularly fertile source of information, having accidentally walked in on her Uncle Stephen James and the third-floor maid one afternoon, but her account of what she saw was fraught with such comic implausibility that Kassandra had dismissed it.
She got out of bed and padded across the room to turn out the lamp, and it wasn’t until she was alone in utter darkness that the enormity of her decision hit. Her knees buckled beneath her, and she fell to them and crawled until her outstretched hand met the intricate Celtic stitching. Instead of climbing into the bed, however, she remained on the floor.
“Holy Father,” she said, then stopped. Had she fallen to her knees earlier in her own room, by her own bed, would she be here now? “Forgive me, Lord, for not seeking Your will.” But surely she wasn’t the first person ever to act on impulse. Did Jonah not flee from God? She opened her eyes and was able to make out a few shapes in the room with the little light let in through the small window. It wasn’t exactly the belly of a whale.
“Please, dear Father, hold Reverend Joseph close to you.” Right now he was probably mad with fear, calling her name, searching the neighborhood, calling on friends, anyone, asking if they had seen his little Sparrow “Help him to find peace and comfort. Speak to him, Lord. Let him know that I am … well.”
She climbed up into the bed and pulled the quilt up to her chin. She turned her eyes to the ceiling beams above her and whispered, “Please, dear God, keep me from harm. Amen.”
She must have fallen asleep, though she would have sworn that the noise downstairs and the fear in her heart would have kept her awake. But sometime in the night she was awakened by the sound not of an opening door, not of a footstep, but of the rustle of a mattress and the whisper of her name.
“Kassie, my love. Turn to me.”
Strong hands willed her to obey.
“I have never—”
“Ssh, ssh now, darlin’. I’ll be easy.”
She should have panicked. Should have pushed him away, run screaming from the room. Thrown herself into the crowd downstairs hoping that at least one soul would take pity on her. Take her away. Should have cried out through the window for Reverend Joseph who, for all she knew, had followed them every step of the way and was waiting outside right now—his carriage ready to once again take her out of this place and back to his safe, chaste home.
But she did none of those things, because on that first night Kassandra came to two conclusions. For as much as he promised to be gentle, Ben was a man of his word. And Sarah James was right about everything, down to the last detail.
he stench reminded her, in the first hours of every new day, that she was once again a creature of the city The tiny apartment window, thrown open to alleviate the stifling heat of the summer night, ushered in some semblance of a breeze, but with that came the fetid evidence of the teeming life three stories below She had lived in this filth as a child—scavenged through it, fought through it, bedded down in it—without ever giving any thought to its source. Now, though, her senses could pick out each element in isolation. Putrid, rotting food left for the foraging pigs that roamed the streets and alleys. Animal carcasses left too long at the slaughterhouse. Piles of muck left from the countless beasts that pulled the countless carts of vendors and artisans mingled with the sewage seeped out of overburdened outhouses. It clung to her skirts and stuck to her shoes, wormed its way into her home, swarmed, inescapable, over every inch of her life.
Except, perhaps, their bed.
&nb
sp; Long before daylight would revive the relatively quiet streets, Kassandra would lie in bed, eyes closed against the predawn shadows, and search for something clean to smell. If she’d had a chance to do a washing, she would bring a corner of the bed-sheet to her face, cup it around her nose and mouth, and breathe in deep the odor of the cheap soap that lingered in the worn fibers. When she could, she would buy a small bunch of violets from one of the wide-eyed little girls on a street corner and sleep with it under her pillow until its fragrance became little more than a faint hint of green.
Most often, though, it was Ben himself who provided her with a brief respite from the foul odors of the city. Sleeping beside her, one arm pinning her to the mattress, Ben never seemed to carry an assaulting scent. He reminded her of Reverend Joseph’s black oilskin coat, which repelled the harshest raindrops, sending them into harmless rivulets snaking down the sleeves. On these mornings, she would turn to him, carefully maneuvering under the weight of his arm, and sneak her cheek across his shoulder until her nose just touched the hollow at the base of his throat. There she breathed. Deep. His skin smelled of ginger, though she could never trace the source. In the early days she had followed behind him, sniffing the cake of soap he slivered and worked into a furious lather before shaving each evening, but it smelled like glycerin and lye. Not like Ben. On particularly hot nights, the ginger mixed with a thin sheen of sweat that evaporated under her breath as she buried her face in his skin, drinking in that sweet, warm scent.
Soon she would feel his arms draw her closer, the first kiss of the day planted on the top of her head. She would look up, know that his eyes were still hidden behind his freckled lids and dusky lashes.
“Mornin’, Kassie, my love,” he’d say, his voice heavy with dozing.
And she knew she would be able to hold her nose and plunge through another day.
In the first weeks after their arrival, Kassandra had been too fearful-of the squalor of the neighborhood to venture far from the little apartment above Mott Street Tavern. Leaving only for the most necessary excursions, she spent long afternoons sitting at the open window, looking out on the raucous lives below. She felt a little like one of those princesses in the fairy tales Reverend Joseph used to read to her as a child—trapped in a tower, waiting for rescue from an uncertain fate. But in the end it was the tower keeper himself who saved her from exile, as Ben took her hand one afternoon, saying, “Come on, Kassie love, it’s not as bad as all that,” and began to introduce her into his world.
There was a clamorous volume to life on the streets. Men and women, standing not eight inches apart from each other, shouted their conversations over the constant noise of the jangling harnesses and rumbling wheels of the ever-present wagons, carriages, carts, and cabs that jockeyed for a clear path on the narrow streets. The street vendors—proprietors and drivers of many of those vehicles—shouted even louder, hawking their wares and services to the masses. Chimney sweeps strolled the sidewalks singing, “Sweep-o, sweep-o your chimbley today; sweep-o, sweep-o the black soot away!” Ragmen drove their wagons, shouting offers of two cents per pound of “good, clean rags” and two bits a bushel for bones.
At the corner of Mulberry and Canal, a fat man with a blond beard sold baked pears. After pocketing Ben’s nickel, he lifted two of them, dripping with syrup, from the shallow metal baking pan. Kassandra took her pear by the stem—as the man had demonstrated—and brought it to her mouth, sinking her teeth into the warm, sweet fruit. After weeks of nothing but bread and cheese and coffee in Ben’s apartment, it was the nicest treat she could imagine. So consumed was she with her snack that she failed to hear all of the conversation between Ben and the purveyor of the pear and was surprised when she saw the man reach into the same pocket where he had deposited Ben’s nickel and draw from it a handful of bills which were handed back over to Ben.
“Why did he give you that money?” Kassandra asked, wiping a drizzle of syrupy pear juice from her chin.
“Just a matter of business, darlin’,” he said, devouring half of his own pear in three bites before tossing the core into the street as a contribution to the pungent smell.
There were, it seemed, several matters of business all along the blocks that Ben and Kassandra strode together. As they made their way down Mulberry Street, across Bayard and back up Mott towards home, Ben stopped at several establishments, met their proprietors at the door, and left with his pockets considerably richer for the conversation. With some patrons there was a genuine affection to their greetings, but others spoke through tight-lipped resentment. He shook the hands of well-dressed, well-groomed businessmen who would offer Kassandra a gentlemanly nod in greeting, though Ben never formally introduced her. He also offered chaste kisses to brazen women of low reputation who eyed Kassandra with a leering grin before giving Ben a wink and a nudge, saying, “Popped you a good un, eh, Bennie?”
When he wasn’t conducting a matter of business, Ben was waylaid on the street, caught at the elbow by some young man or another. She’d seen many of them before, as they were regular visitors to Mott Street Tavern. Each doffed his hat in polite greeting to “Miss Kassandra,” revealing close-cropped hair that defied the style of the time. They all had clean-shaven faces—not a moustache or beard among them—and seemed, in comparison to many of the other men on the street, meticulously clean. Most wore green kerchiefs tied around their necks, and Kassandra had heard enough conversation about them to know they were called Branagans. Ben’s Branagans. Whenever one of these men came up to talk to Ben, Kassandra leaned in to listen, curious to know what matters needed to be discussed with such urgency. But she was usually disappointed when Ben would clap his arm around the shoulder of his confidant and take several steps away.
It was one of these men—tall and strong with piercing black eyes, jet-black hair, and a face with continuous stubble that would sprout without effort into a beard if ever allowed—who stopped Ben just outside a shoe repair shop. His name was Sean, Kassandra recalled, and he wasted little time tipping his cap to her before letting flow a stream of language, speaking syllables that sounded like they were delivered through a mouth full of cotton. Kassandra could not understand a word of it, but knew from hearing some of it tossed about in the streets that he was speaking Gaelic. Then, to her utter surprise, Ben responded in kind, allowing Kassandra to listen to every word. Though the topic was unclear, the feelings behind it were not. By the end of his talk with Sean, Ben was furious in the stony, jaw-clenched way that often made Kassandra reach down for her quietest self, disappearing until the anger passed. Within the space of an afternoon Ben became a complete stranger before her eyes.
When Sean finished his conversation, he clapped Ben on the back, received a reassuring return gesture, and actually offered a polite smile to Kassandra before leaving. Ben started again on his trek up Mott Street, seemingly unaware that Kassandra was not following. He was at least ten paces away before turning, signaling for her to join him, and finally walking back to her side, where he reached for her wrist and gave it a strong tug.
Kassandra refused to move, standing as if mired in the street. Indeed, glancing down, she saw there was plenty to be mired in, as her boots were precariously close to a steaming pile of horse dung.
“Tell me about Sean,” she said, forcing authority into her voice.
“He’s a friend. That’s all you need to know.” He gave a more forceful tug of her wrist. “C’mon.”
“No, Ben,” Kassandra said, finding the courage to refuse to take another step. “Tell me what is happening. Why are these people giving you money? Are you collecting some kind of rent?”
Ben laughed and dropped her hand. “What? D’ya think I’m a secret millionaire, hidin’ my fortune in my cap?” He turned and bowed to her, taking off his cap as if to prove its lack of fortune. “No, Kassie. There’s no money ownin’ a buildin’ in the Points. One minute y’have a thrivin’ trade, the next a pile of ashes.”
To punctuate his point, he nodded toward a s
tructure scorched by fire, having lost only its topmost floor while its neighbor was nothing more than a blackened foundation.
“Then wh—”
“It’s the people inside,” Ben interrupted, quickening his pace. “Let the landlords own the property, take their rents and sit back, fat and rich off the lives of the poor man livin’ and workin’ in it. Me? I own the people. Just a bit of ’em—” he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of defense against Kassandra’s indignation, “—not enough to tear the flesh, but enough to make ’em feel the pinch of it.”
Kassandra felt her own flesh prickle at the utter calm and seeming humor behind Ben’s words. Even with this she didn’t fully understand his meaning, and she was still deciding whether or not she really wanted clarification when a voice called from across the street.
“Connor! I gotta piece with you!”
The voice scattered the people gathered around the front of the property—a grocery store that sold produce and daily goods stocked on floor-to-ceiling shelves, and a barrel of uncertain liquor set up on the counter from which customers could siphon a nickel shot before leaving with their purchases. The man himself looked rather like a barrel, with his tiny feet and a smallish head that capped a large, round middle.
“What’s your problem, Kinley?” Ben asked.
“You’re not getting a dime from me this week, Connor. You hear me? Not a dime!”
“Now, Kinley, you know that’s not true,” Ben said, the compassionate tone of his voice a far cry from the implied threat of his words.
“Oh, it is true.” Mr. Kinley nervously fumbled with the apron that covered a pair of stained, brown striped trousers and a sweat-soaked shirt. He wore small round spectacles, and try as he might to hold eye contact with Ben, his gaze was soon darting past him, to the small gathering of Branagans, all with shorn hair and jaunty caps, who seemed to have come from out of nowhere to gather in a loose semicircle behind Ben. “It’s just—uh—I been robbed, Mr. Connor. Three times this week.”
Speak Through the Wind Page 8