City Of Promise Part 1

City of promise : a novel of New York's Gilded Age.

Beverly Swerling.

For Bill as always.

And for Michael, our forever darling boy, RIP.

*Until the late 1880s, when it was widened to accommodate the subway, Lexington Avenue was a dirt track above Forty-Seventh Street.

Prologue.

November 25, 1864.

SUCH A CITY. Tumbling, raucous, never-to-be-forgotten New York.

Royal Lee detested it. He hated the town with almost as much pa.s.sion as he had loved his wife and his babies and Birchfield, the South Carolina plantation that had been in his family since 1770.

All gone now. Raped, murdered, pillaged. Dead.

The Southerners met at the intersection of Prince Street and Broadway. Northeast corner, Royal had told them. Look for Niblo's Pleasure Garden. When they came together they were simply four fas.h.i.+onable gentlemen dressed in pale, slim trousers and black tight-waisted, knee-length coats and s.h.i.+ny black top hats. Royal, however, wore his grays underneath. The uniform added some bulk, hid how the war had ground him down, made him less than he was before. Inside and out.

The hustle and the hawking-newsboys, vendors of everything from pies to parrots-were as he remembered. So too the crowds. Everyone rushed from place to place; on foot or carried by horses and carriages and by omnibuses, known as horsecars, that could take thirty people behind a team of four. The traffic all seemed to go in every direction at the same time, everyone fighting for priority. It was always the same in this town. But these days New York was more than a crowded city; she was the financial engine that fueled Mr. Lincoln's war.

Royal and his companions kept their Southern tongues in their mouths and walked with the swagger and confidence bred into their cla.s.s, as if they had every right to be where they were. Consequently, no one paid them any mind. A year before that would not have been the case. Merely looking as they did-like gentlemen-would have been enough to cause howling mobs to scream for their blood. In July of '63 New Yorkers had sacked their city; turning on themselves, eating their own flesh and gnawing their own bone. To Royal and the other Confederates the reason was obvious: a military draft from which a man could exempt himself if he had three hundred dollars was guaranteed to produce volcanic resistance. How, the South wondered, could the warmongering Union men, who claimed the right to hold those who would peaceably go, not understand so obvious a truth? Royal knew the answer. Because this was the world that had sp.a.w.ned them. Great ma.s.ses of people and buildings, all crammed together breathing each other's stink, and nowhere a horizon to rest a man's eyes, or a whiff of green country to soothe his heart. That was their accustomed reality. Men who lived in such conditions were certain to develop a perverted understanding.

Cities such as New York were a Northern abomination. They invited the world's rabble to labor in their mills and factories and shops, then packed them into festering slums where violence was a contagion more virulent then lice, and they were left to make their own rules and govern themselves without the civilizing influence of their betters. Then the Union fools wondered at the consequences. It was, Royal knew, in the nature of rats to form packs and hunt prey. No plantation owner in the entire Confederacy would allow such conditions to prevail in his slave quarters, much less his villages and towns.

That moral superiority had not saved the Confederacy. This War of Northern Aggression was all but lost now. Everything the South held dearest, its entire way of life, was coming to an end. Mr. Lincoln's election to a second term had insured the war would continue until the Confederates were made to heel.

It was well known that the South had no good choices, and that desperate men do desperate things. Royal was aware of the surveillance of the pickets of the Seventh Regiment-once the 23rd Militia and under either name the city's military elite-who were posted at every intersection. The Union troops did not, however, eye the four with wariness. Apparently they perceived no threat from well-dressed men who wore their privilege with casual and accustomed ease.

Royal and his companions were officers of the Confederacy who had volunteered to do the most dangerous job in the military. They had become sappers, the men sent to harvest h.e.l.l. Packages of Greek Fire, a mixture of phosphorus and bisulfide of carbon that ignited on contact with the air, were packed into their s.h.i.+ny boots and hidden in the sleeves of their fas.h.i.+onable jackets and stuffed beneath their fine linen s.h.i.+rts.

On the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, near P. T. Barnum's American Museum, the sappers parted company. Each carried in his head a list of targets. Royal's knowledge of the town where his wife had been born and raised, where her family still lived, had been particularly useful. He'd mapped out all the major hotels: the Astor House, the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan, and nine others. He'd specified as well that they should aim to burn as many docks as they could manage, all fronting the Hudson River. Not, he a.s.sured himself, because the s.h.i.+pping business of his Devrey in-laws was concentrated on the East River sh.o.r.e. In his experience, he told the others, there was always a good wind blowing on the Hudson side. It would carry the flames up the island and finish the job the draft riots had started. With luck and the help of a just G.o.d they would burn New York City to the ground.

Every man for himself, they said. Meet up again across the border in Canada, they said. Royal looked away and murmured something that could be taken for a.s.sent.

Would he be doing this if Ceci and his babies were still alive? Royal Lee did not ask himself the question because he did not know the answer.

Book One.

18641874.

1.

THE LAD RAN pell-mell into his office soon after dawn. Zac had slept in his clothes in a makes.h.i.+ft bed in the Devrey Building that housed his s.h.i.+pping business, nothing unusual in that these days. War changed a man's habits. "It's him, sir! I'm sure it's him!" Frankie struggled in the grip of the bigger and older man who had tried to stop his headlong rush.

Zac held up his hand and spoke first to the man, one of his clerks who did double duty as a night watchman. "I know the boy. It's all right, let him go."

The man took a step back. Frankie shook himself free, like a puppy let off the leash. He was, however, no puppy. Zac had long since spotted the boy's rapacious talents and nurtured them. "Who exactly? And why should I care?"

"It's the reb what you sent me to see those times 'bout a year ago. He's the one they caught. Got him down by City Hall now. Got a stake fixed and everything. Gonna burn him the way he done the town. Thought you'd want to know.'"

Jesus G.o.d Almighty.

Zac stood up and pushed past the boy and started running. Through the counting room that occupied the ground floor of the grand white marble building that represented two hundred years of the wealth of nations brought to New York under Devrey sail, and of late, Devrey steam; out to the street, ignoring Frankie chasing after him with hand held out for the coins that were his due for bringing word. He paused only long enough to unhitch the nearest horse. Not his, but that didn't matter. Not the empty-handed urchin either, though he felt bad about that. Never mind. He'd deal with such things later. They could be fixed with money. If his brother-in-law, who was also his oldest friend, was burned alive by a rampaging mob, that was a thing as admitted no possibility of repair.

The heavens opened while Zac whipped the horse down Broadway, weaving his way between the carriages and the horsecars that moved like sludge, trapped in their own conflicting wakes. Even after such a night as it had been. Even with a riotous crowd baying in the streets. Even with the acrid stench of dozens of major fires still hanging in the air-beaten out mostly in the nick of time, though word was the damage would cost millions-even so. Nothing could tame the New York City traffic.

Worse when the weather turned bad. Always.

Finally, City Hall Park, and Zac hatless and coatless, and uncaring that the cold of the November dawn was made worse by slas.h.i.+ng rain. The downpour was a mercy of sorts. Meant they couldn't burn him. Not that a rope was any less effective. Either way, he'd been too late and Royal was dead, the loss permanent and irreparable.

The tips of his brother-in-law's boots were level with his eyes. Motionless now. By Zac's calculations it was some minutes since the rope around Royal Lee's neck had snapped taut. Enough time for the tall body clad in Confederate gray to stop swinging.

G.o.d d.a.m.n this war to everlasting h.e.l.l.

The rain was letting up some, but Zac was already soaked to the skin.

His glance was pulled from the toes of his dead brother-in-law's boots to a much younger man standing some twenty feet away. Drawn in that direction perhaps because the other man was looking at him. Recognition came all at once, with no doubt, though it had been three years. "Joshua?" Zac spoke aloud, though his half brother was surely too far away to hear.

The pair began maneuvering their way toward each other-Josh, it seemed to Zac, carried by the throng, half stumbling as the two narrowed the s.p.a.ce between them.

How thin Josh was. The planes of his face seemed only bone covered by skin, nothing substantial enough to be named flesh. Taller than the boy he'd been when, barely sixteen-headstrong, foolish, and determined-he enlisted in the First Mounted Rifles without asking leave of his parents or anyone else. Uncaring that men of their cla.s.s were officers, or stayed home to tend the business that paid for war. Joshua Turner went his own way, and even back then the family knew there was no coming between him and what he wanted. Eighteen now. And alive. Thank G.o.d Almighty.

"Jos.h.!.+" The s.p.a.ce separating them, filled as it was with strangers, narrowed enough for Zac to know he could be heard. "Jos.h.!.+ It's you, isn't it? G.o.d be praised. It's you."

"It's me, Zac."

They were near enough to touch. Zac reached out his hand. A woman abruptly shoved her way between them, ignoring both and looking up at the dangling corpse. She moved in and began hauling on Royal's left boot. The gesture set off a swirl of similar scavenging. The brothers hesitated for a moment, each knowing there was no hope of stopping this next desecration. They moved aside.

"I didn't get here in time," Josh said.

"Nor did I," Zac said. "But I suspect there was nothing we could have done."

"If I'd been in time, I might have been able to get him away," Josh insisted. "Spirited him out of here."

Zac's thought as he had thundered south along the Manhattan streets was to use the authority of Devrey s.h.i.+pping to demand imprisonment, and a judge, and a proper trial. No doubt an insane hope in the face of hatred fed by years of carnage. As absurd as Joshua thinking he could have contrived a secret escape through the city's narrow alleys and close-packed doorways. Zac shook his head. "Unlikely."

He opened his mouth to say more, but shock stopped the words. The crowd had fallen sufficiently away for him to see his brother whole. Joshua had marched off to war on two strong legs. He'd come home walking with a stick, and only air below his right knee.

It was in 1845 that Dr. Nicholas Turner built Suns.h.i.+ne Hill for Carolina Devrey, the love of his life and pregnant with his child, though she was not his wife. In those days what was officially Seventy-First Street and First Avenue was still much as old Peter Minuit had found it some two hundred and fifty years before, when he weaseled Manhattan from the Canarsie Indians: steep hills and rus.h.i.+ng streams and heavily wooded glades and glens, and bobcats still to be found prowling the cliffs above the East River. These days over half of the city's population of nearly a million lived north of Fourteenth Street, and stretched itself as far as the small Fifties. Carolina and Nick had long been married. Respectable enough, so before the war, in his Princeton years, Carolina's eldest son did not hesitate to bring home his friend Royal Lee from Virginia.

"A slaveholder, Zac," Carolina, whose abolitionist sympathies were well known, had said with distaste.

"Do not," Nick cautioned her, "bring into our home the discontent that rules everywhere outside it. All Zac's friends should be welcome here."

That Royal might be smitten by Ceci as soon as he saw her was something none of them antic.i.p.ated. When Ceci wanted to marry him, her mother and her stepfather let their feelings be known, but reconciled themselves to what they couldn't change.

Life had taught Carolina to be grateful for whatever blessings came her way. That night, when Zac brought home her second son minus one of his legs and the story of Royal Lee's hanging, Carolina wrapped her arms around both her boys and did not forget to count her blessings, though her heart ached with her daughter's sadness. Southerner Royal may have been, and entirely wrong on the matter of Negroes, but Ceci had loved him and borne him three children.

They must bring Ceci and her babies home to Suns.h.i.+ne Hill, Carolina told Nick later that night. Get them right away from Virginia and here to New York where they could be looked after.

Nick's mind was more on the need to look after Josh's rough wound-done, Nick was sure, by no proper surgeon-and see it healed clean. And on afterward, on how they could insure a future for Josh that would not be diminished by the loss of a leg. It wasn't that Nick didn't love his stepdaughter, only that just now she was outside the range of his ability to be of use. He refrained from pointing out that they had not heard from Ceci in many months. Instead he said, "I can't see how we could bring her here, my dear. Not until after the war."

"I shall speak to Zac," Carolina said. "He has kept some lines of communication open, I know. Zac may find a way."

The notion was never put to the test. Royal's letter arrived a week later. It was addressed to Zachary, his dear brother-in-law and friend as Royal called him. Sent from Canada by a Confederate comrade. "One of the sappers who was with him, I'd wager," Zac said, speaking to the entire family gathered in the library at his behest, looking at him now, waiting.

"You think Royal really did help to set those fires?" Nick's way always to believe the best of everyone. His private explanation for Royal's presence in the city was something to do with Zac. Carolina was right about Zac having kept some channels open. He and Royal had, Nick knew, occasionally met secretly, looking to lay groundwork for reconciliation at war's end. "I can't believe Royal would-"

"He did it." Zac's tone was without emotion but allowed for no disagreement. "And he meant the city to burn to the ground."

"And himself to die in the bargain," Josh added. "Otherwise he'd never have worn his grays under those civilian clothes."

"Perhaps for the shame of it," Carolina murmured. "Not for pride."

"Neither," Josh said, moving closer to her side. "I think Royal had taken as much as he could, and didn't care much about the consequences."

Carolina drew a sharp inward breath. Her mind was leaping ahead the way it inevitably did. (Too clever for her own good. For any woman's good. She'd heard that plenty of times.) Josh took her hand. She gave up the foolish hope that she was wrong. "General Sherman," she whispered. "I thought . . . According to the newspapers his route didn't go through southern Virginia. Not through Clarksville or anywhere near Birchfield."

"There were others," Josh said quietly. "Rogue bands of blues who went off marauding on their own."

Nick felt the anger rising in him, the bitterness. "I told them. All those shortsighted Was.h.i.+ngton men, the generals. Even Mr. Lincoln himself. You can't involve civilian populations without unleas.h.i.+ng the worst inside any man, particularly in wartime." Sherman's march, he'd said, the policy of scorched earth, would give them all tacit leave to wreak havoc. No one listened. It was Dr. Turner's celebrated medical skills the government prized, not his opinions on how to make war.

Zac unfolded the letter and cleared his throat. Josh waited, knowing what was coming because he'd been told. Zac had gone to Josh with the dreadful news first. There were twelve years between the brothers but that moment they'd shared standing beneath Royal's corpse had made them conspirators of a sort, contriving to make it easier on the others. No matter now.

Nonetheless, the others seemed to know without being actually told. Even young Simon who was sitting at his mother's feet, leaning against her knees. He was letting her stroke his hair; content for once to be her baby, though he was fourteen. And sixteen-year-old Goldie, perched on the arm of Papa's chair with her embroidery hoop in her hand. She had not taken a st.i.tch in many minutes.

"My dear brother-in-law and friend," Zac read. "Much as I hope for the success of our mission to burn New York to the ground, I also pray G.o.d that you and yours will somehow survive whatever turmoil we unleash. Not, I a.s.sure you, because it gives me any kind of perverse pleasure to tell you the terrible news that I have lost my darling wife and my precious three babies to the bayonets of Union soldiers . . ."

2.

IT WAS THE quality in her coming out through the needle. Each time Auntie Eileen inspected a piece of Mollie's newly finished embroidery that's what she said. "And," she inevitably added, "I know quality when I see it." Usually by then Eileen Brannigan would have spread the bit of lawn or cambric over her knee in order to inspect the tiny st.i.tches that blossomed into an exquisitely formed flower or bird.

On this occasion, with a log fire crackling brightly in her private sitting room and a winter snowstorm whitening the early December world beyond her windows, it wasn't needlework Eileen was inspecting. She had her hand beneath her niece's chin, tipping Mollie's face to the gaslight so she could see it more clearly. "I know quality," she said, studying the blue eyes surrounded by tangled dark lashes, and the cheeks that didn't need pinching to be stained pink. "You're not a great beauty, Mollie my love," this while she pushed back a black curl escaped from the ribbon that tied the rest into place. "Your face is a bit too thin and sharp, and the rest of you is far too straight and angled to gain a man's instant approval. You take some time to appreciate, no denying that. But for any as have eyes to see, the quality in you jumps straight out. She did that much for you, did Brigid Brannigan, for all her foolish willingness to have a bit of fun with never a thought for what would happen next."

This a.s.sessment of her origins was a story Mollie had heard repeatedly. Auntie Eileen had for a brief time been married to Brian Brannigan, the brother of Mollie's mother. Just long enough, Eileen said, to cross with Brian and Brigid from the Old Country to the New. And for Eileen to be the one who buried them both within a year of stepping onto the pier at Castle Garden.

Brian was taken by the yellowing fever, and his sister by the fever that all too often followed childbirth. Leaving on their own Eileen and the month-old infant Brigid had insisted on naming Mollie, though Eileen would have preferred something a bit more elegant and a bit less Irish. "I could have changed it since you were so young," Eileen always said, "but it did not seem right. She loved you, Mollie, empty-headed though she was. Poor little fool fell into it on the boat. Put paid to all the grand plans to find her a husband in New York once we got ourselves settled. Though from the way you cooked up there's never been a doubt in my mind that she spread her legs for one of the gentry. Someone from the first-cla.s.s cabins on the upper decks most likely. Not," she invariably added, "that Brigid shared my ability to discern quality. She was simply, on that occasion, lucky."

Mollie thought it a strange kind of luck, but she never said so. As for her own good fortune, Mollie reckoned it had little to do with her nameless father. It was the fact that Eileen Brannigan had a.s.sumed responsibility for the child who was a niece by marriage, not even her own flesh and blood, that first kept Mollie alive, then spared her the horror of growing up in some depraved Five Points rat-infested hovel with the rest of the drunken, brawling, dirt-poor Irish who poured into the city looking for a dream and finding a nightmare.

Eileen released her hold on her niece's chin. "Put a fresh log on the fire, Mollie, while I pour us another cup of tea. Then we'll get down to business."

The pleats of the pink petticoat that showed beneath Mollie's rose-colored taffeta day dress made a soft rustling sound when she moved, and when she added the log her aunt had requested the fire roared up and filled the room with the rich scent of applewood. Eileen Brannigan would burn nothing cheaper. "Applewood," she said, "is quality. And for all everyone's busy switching to heat provided by a coal furnace in the cellar, such a thing will never bring the comfort of a fire."

Which was not to say that Eileen Brannigan was profligate. She paid rigorous attention to every penny spent or earned, and relied on her niece to record both. The girl's ability to do quick and perfect mathematics, frequently in her head, had been manifest by the time she was eleven. Eileen promptly put her niece in charge of the financial records. Good bookkeeping, she said, was the very foundation of good business. One reason, Eileen maintained, she owned this elegant three-story brownstone on the corner of University Place and Eleventh Street.

Which, by cleverness and will, and what she called her instinct for quality, she had turned into the best wh.o.r.ehouse in the city.

Eileen never bothered to say parlor house, much less brothel. Quality, according to her, had no need to hide behind euphemisms. Her compet.i.tion-in as far as she conceded she had any-was simply not in the same league. There were other houses in respectable residential areas, a great many of them, and many that like Mrs. Brannigan's catered to the finest sorts of gentleman. The so-called Seven Sisters on West Twenty-Fifth Street-threaded between fas.h.i.+onable houses like jewels in a necklace-sent engraved invitations to famous men whose arrival in the city was announced in the press. Their callers were required to wear evening dress, and the ladies who received them were gowned and bejeweled as grandly as any woman in the city. Eileen aspired to nothing so formal. Ostentatious, she called it. What set Brannigan's apart was that it was truly a home from home.

The most influential and the wealthiest men of New York City came to Mrs. Brannigan's not simply because they required a place to put their p.e.c.k.e.rs. Though Lord knows such men needed a bit of relief from the cares that weighed so heavily these days, what with the war raging and fortunes to be made if one danced to the right tune. The high-stakes game such men played demanded at the very least relief from the weight between their legs and the burdens on their backs. Eileen was the first to say so. And given that their wives were frequently confined for many months awaiting the birth of a child, or sequestered for many more after the ordeal ended, likely as not they couldn't get what they needed at home. They could, however, find it on pretty much any city block, and for a tenth the price Eileen Brannigan charged. Even houses deemed expensive, where they offered a variety of experiences-small boys, or women in multicolored a.s.sortments, or everything done up to make you believe you were in an Oriental seraglio-even such places as those didn't command Eileen's prices.

The fantasy Eileen Brannigan catered to was the one in a man's most hidden heart: That a woman who looked and sounded and acted like the demure and chaste creature he thought he'd married would, once they were in the bedroom, behave as the willing, even l.u.s.ty, companion of his most secret imagining. Such a woman was not only capable of making a man believe himself to be a G.o.d, she showed herself worthy to make the judgment. That was a pleasure so heady, supplying it meant Eileen Brannigan could name her price and get it.

Add to that the one-client-per-evening rule that prevailed at Brannigan's, and the house became as desirable for the women who worked there as for the men who patronized it. Eileen blessed the day she had thought up the scheme and found the courage to try it. But however successful, it was not a solution to the problem that faced her just then, with the applewood fire burning brightly and her niece sitting with her sewing on her lap, waiting to hear what her aunt had to say.

"Your birthday is next week, Mollie. You will be eighteen."

"I know." While threading a needle and rolling the end into a knot between her thumb and forefinger.

"You are," Eileen said, "approaching twenty. And twenty is spinsterhood. I do not believe, dear child, that is what you want."

"It's not." A home of her own and babies were what Mollie wanted. Meaning she had to have a husband. Faithful, mind you. Not someone who'd go running off to Brannigan's or a lesser establishment at the first opportunity. But definitely a husband. "I wish," Mollie said, "to be married. But only to the right sort of man."

"Well," Eileen said, "given the circ.u.mstances, that is not a simple thing to find. You must face facts, Mollie. You are a b.a.s.t.a.r.d and you've been raised in a wh.o.r.ehouse. It was never going to be easy."

Mollie kept her eyes on her needlework, but her heart rose and sank, then rose again. It didn't seem likely her aunt would have raised the subject if she didn't have a prospect in mind. On the other hand, they had circled the topic any number of times in the past year. The issue was never resolved and the dream of herself as a bride and eventually a mother seemed unlikely to be fulfilled.