by Erin Lindsey
I greeted it with special enthusiasm on that Wednesday, since it freed me to pursue an idea I’d been mulling over all night: confronting Mr. Burrows.
I’d played the scene out over and over in my mind. I’d arrive on his doorstep and demand to see him, brimming with such righteous determination that even the haughty butler wouldn’t dare deny me. Mr. Burrows would receive me in the parlor, all cheeky smiles and subterfuge until it became clear that I was not merely some fragile Fifth Avenue flower to be trifled with as he pleased. At which point he would tell me everything.
When I put this plan to Clara, she didn’t see its merits straightaway. “That’s the dumbest idea you’ve had yet, Rose Gallagher,” she said, jabbing an oatmeal-coated spoon at me. “And you know it.”
Some part of me did know it, but that part had been muzzled at around two o’clock in the morning. Now, as I stood in the kitchen with my overcoat on, the loudest sound in my ear was the ticking of Mr. Wiltshire’s watch. Its weight, subtle and persistent, tugged at the breast pocket of my dress; I fancied I could even feel it beating gently against my rib cage, a constant reminder of the precious minutes flying past. Mr. Wiltshire had disappeared on Saturday, and here it was Wednesday. Four days. You didn’t have to be a copper to know what that meant. “I have to do this, Clara. I have to try. Please.”
Grudgingly, Clara ordered me out for groceries again.
I struck out a little before eight o’clock, and for once I didn’t let myself be distracted by the splendor of Fifth Avenue, bowing my head against the chill and tramping up the street like a horse with blinders on. I caught a stage just past the Vanderbilt mansion and spent most of the journey rehearsing the speech I planned to give. I don’t recall the details of my discourse, but I can assure you it was worthy of a Bathsheba Everdene or even an Elizabeth Bennett. I might not have had the benefit of an expensive education, but I was the daughter of a schoolteacher, and I’d been diligently studying Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s for years. I knew words like vituperate, and I meant to use them.
I hopped off at Seventy-Second Street, intending to walk the remaining block while I composed the final flourishes of my vituperation, but as I approached the house, I saw to my dismay that Mr. Burrows’s brougham waited by the front door. He was on his way out, and if I missed him … I hurried my step, but before I could cross the avenue, the coachman twitched the reins and the carriage rattled away.
Gathering up the hem of my dress, I made an absurd and thoroughly undignified attempt to run after it. I can only imagine what Mr. Burrows’s elegant neighbors must have thought of the spectacle of a disheveled housemaid chasing after his brougham like a stray dog, hollering and waving as it retreated splendidly down Fifth Avenue.
After about half a block I gave up, breathless and distraught, watching helplessly as my best chance to find Mr. Wiltshire faded into the distance. And then, like the voice of Providence itself:
“Cab, miss?”
“Yes!” I whirled to find a hansom cab drawn up at the curb behind me. “That gentleman’s carriage,” I said, pointing. “Can you follow it?”
The driver eyed the retreating brougham. “If you need me to, miss.”
“I do, but discreetly, please. I mustn’t be seen. Er, that is…” I stumbled, too flustered to come up with a respectable explanation for my request.
But this was New York, after all; the driver just touched the brim of his hat with his riding crop and said, “Discreetly it is, miss. Hop aboard.”
We caught up to Mr. Burrows’s brougham easily enough. It was a heavier vehicle than the hansom cab, and though pulled by a sleek trotter, it trundled along at a dignified pace. At half past eight on a Wednesday morning, New York traffic was in full flood; we blended in easily with the crowd of carriages, carts, and horses clogging Fifth Avenue. Even so, I huddled up against the tufted upholstery, feeling all too exposed by the cab’s open design.
I wasn’t sure what I intended to do when we reached our destination (Mr. Burrows’s office, I presumed). Officially, my plan was still to confront him, so why had I decided to follow in secret? This was, I suppose, just another of the many flashes of intuition that guided my steps in those early days. And the farther south we went, the more I congratulated myself on my instincts, because it soon became clear that Mr. Burrows wasn’t headed for his office after all. Unless, of course, he happened to be employed in a run-down saloon in the Tenderloin.
Seeing the brougham slow, I instructed my driver to pull over, then watched in astonishment as Mr. Jonathan Burrows of the Philadelphia Burrowses, silk hat on head and ivory-handled walking stick in hand, descended beneath the stoop of a cheap hotel into a dive the likes of which even the average Five Pointer would fear to tread.
“Your gentleman friend’d best be careful,” the cab driver said, chewing on the nub of a cheap cigar. “Rich fella like him—they’re liable to slip ’im a mickey finn.” Pausing, he added, “That’s where they put knock-out drops in your grog, so they can—”
“I know what a mickey finn is.” Where I came from, tales of crooked barkeeps (invariably Irish) and their hapless victims were practically the stuff of legend. Why, all of Five Points had heard the yarn about old Tom Payne, a bum from Bottle Alley who claimed to have struck it rich at the fights one night only to wake up naked and penniless in a back alley off the Bowery. But would Mr. Burrows have heard the tales? Though you may laugh, it actually occurred to me to rush to the gentleman’s rescue. Surely he didn’t understand what kind of place he was in? And yet he must have, because he’d sent his carriage on as soon as he’d got out, presumably to avoid it being seen outside a fleabag hotel in the Tenderloin.
“What on earth is he doing?” I murmured.
“You know the place?”
I cast a cold glance through the trapdoor. “I most certainly do not.”
The driver gestured with his soggy cigar. “Black-’n-tan saloon, goes by the name of One-Eyed Johnny’s. Rough joint.”
“So?”
“Just sayin’, miss, hunting the elephant’s one thing, but there’s limits to what you can get away with, least if you wanna keep the clothes on your back.”
“I’m sure that’s not what he’s doing.” In truth I was sure of no such thing. It struck me that Mr. Burrows might be just the sort of swell who braved the gutters purely for the thrill of it.
I wasn’t sure what to do next, but before I could make up my mind, Mr. Burrows reappeared on the steps, donning his hat with a worried frown.
“That didn’t take long,” the driver opined around his cigar. I think he was enjoying himself.
Mr. Burrows wandered up the sidewalk, chin tucked into the fur collar of his overcoat, stick rapping the pavement meditatively. It didn’t look to me like the countenance of a thrill-seeker. No, whatever had brought him to this part of town, it was obviously a serious matter. Something to do with Mr. Wiltshire, maybe?
Whatever it was, he obviously wasn’t through. His brougham waited on the corner, and he climbed aboard and joined the southbound traffic on Broadway.
“Here we go,” my cab driver said, with a little more enthusiasm than was seemly.
Downtown we went, following the crooked cant of Broadway, past the dance halls and oyster cellars, past the hock shops and hash houses, our surroundings growing shabbier with each passing block. Soon we joined up with the Bowery, and I looked on incredulously as Mr. Burrows’s sleek buckskin pranced through the winter muck, negotiating a delicate path through the menagerie of bootblacks, hot corn girls, patterers, and fortune-tellers. The carriage bore him along like a boat on a river, and he the intrepid explorer forging ever deeper into the wilds of the urban jungle, surrounded by the shrieking calls of the local species. “Fresh oysters!” “Get your Times here!” “Slaughter in a Pan! Red Mike with a buncha violets!”
Still the brougham rolled on, and as we neared Canal Street, I found myself rising out of my seat in disbelief. If I was puzzled to find Mr. Burrows slumming in the Tend
erloin, imagine my shock when we plunged into the dark heart of Five Points. This can’t have anything to do with Mr. Wiltshire, I thought. Not here, of all places.
Maybe he’s into some bad business, Clara had said, and it had seemed reasonable enough. An investment gone sour, maybe, or a falling-out between partners. Even a gambling debt seemed like a distant possibility, but this? The Thomas Wiltshire of my imagination would never set foot in Five Points, let alone sink into its moral quicksand.
It may surprise you that I would take this attitude given that we were barely two blocks from the flat where I was raised. I can only offer it as evidence of how very different I considered us to be, Mr. Wiltshire and me. I got along just fine on these streets, but I’d grown up here. I’d been pickled in the brine of Five Points, and like a factory worker who no longer smells the noxious fumes, or a seamstress whose finger has been hardened against the prick of the needle, I was pretty well immune. Mr. Wiltshire, though—his was surely a much more delicate constitution. I could more easily imagine the Queen of England consorting with the savage tribes of the Amazon.
Or so I thought, but when I saw the languid ease with which Mr. Jonathan Burrows alighted from his carriage and struck out among the natives, I started to wonder.
He sent his coachman on, so I decided to do the same, my cab being much more conspicuous in Chatham Square than on Broadway. I jumped down and scoured my reticule for the fare, which was more than I could easily afford. “Good luck to you, miss,” the driver said. “Though if you want my advice, you oughta hop back up here and let me take you home. Whatever your gentleman friend is doing in this part of town, a nice girl like you don’t need to see it. Ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes.”
My skin grew hot as I realized what the cab driver must think. But after all, could I blame him? “As it happens, I don’t want your advice,” I said tartly, tossing a few coins into his hand.
I caught up with Mr. Burrows on Mott Street, just south of my mother’s flat, and proceeded to follow him through the most colorful circuit of sin Five Points had to offer. If slumming this was, it was of the bravest, most foolhardy sort. He visited every opium den, every gin joint, every dark nook and fetid cranny of Mulberry Bend. He called in at the mission and the Tombs prison. He lingered inside Wang’s General Store for at least half an hour. By the time he ascended the steps of the Sixth Avenue el, I felt as if I were through the looking glass, chasing the White Rabbit through a Wonderland that both was and wasn’t the familiar world of my childhood. Any moment now, surely, I would wake up in my little room in Mr. Wiltshire’s attic wondering what I’d eaten that hadn’t agreed with me.
I kept my back to Mr. Burrows on the train, glancing over my shoulder every now and then to keep track of him. I assumed we were both heading home after a long and fruitless day, so I was surprised when he got off at Twenty-Third Street, and, exhausted and confused, I very nearly let him go. But I’ve never been one to leave a thing unfinished, so I slipped off the train and followed.
I fought my way through the press of bodies on the platform, breaking through just in time to see Mr. Burrows racing up the steps of a magnificent limestone palace on the corner.
To the untrained eye, it looked like a fancy hotel, or maybe a bank. But one glance at the flag thrusting out from its sloping mansard roof and I knew better. I froze instantly, a prickle of dread running down my spine. I hadn’t seen that heraldry since my childhood, but I’d never forget it. You wouldn’t either, if the mere sight of it inspired your mother to spit and cross the street.
The old Masonic Hall of New York City used to be just a few blocks from the flat where I grew up, but my mother never passed the place if she could avoid it, and when she couldn’t, she made such a great show of crossing herself with elaborate Catholic dread that passersby would stop to look. I never got the full story behind that; all I’d ever managed to find out was that something transpired in the fall of 1873 that put the Freemasons at odds with the neighborhood to such an extent that they were run out of Five Points. Which, considering what Five Pointers have put up with over the years, must have been quite something indeed. Whatever it was, the Masons were exiled to Twenty-Third Street, consoling themselves by building the grand palace in the shadow of which I now stood.
Through the front doors of which Mr. Burrows had just entered.
He didn’t linger. Barely ten minutes later he erupted through the doors, color high, the heels of his oxfords ringing against the stone. He very nearly caught me loitering by the steps; I dropped to the pavement, pretending to tie my laces.
“Burrows. Slow down, my dear fellow, you’re making a scene.”
I glanced up to see a middle-aged gentleman pursuing Mr. Burrows down the steps, hands raised in a mollifying gesture.
“A scene.” Mr. Burrows gave a hollow laugh. “I don’t think you quite understand the situation, Roberts.”
They paused not three feet from where I cowered in the lee of the steps, tying and retying my laces.
“We mustn’t indulge in speculation,” said the man called Roberts. “I’m sure he has everything well in hand.”
“And I’m sure he hasn’t. Thomas Wiltshire has never missed an engagement in his life, and now suddenly he misses two?”
My heart froze in my chest.
“What do you mean, two?”
“Good God, man, have you listened to a word I’ve said? He made an appointment with Wang for Sunday afternoon. He never arrived.”
The older man grunted skeptically. “And you trust Wang’s memory? He’s chased a few dragons in his day.”
“No one saw him, do you understand? Not at Wang’s or any other place. I’ve scoured the city, every supplier I could think of, every informant, anyone I’ve ever known him to work with. No one has seen him.”
“It’s a concern, I’ll grant you.”
“It’s a damned mess is what it is!”
“Well, naturally. Did you suppose it would be otherwise? We are talking about murder, after all.”
There was a brief stretch of silence. I huddled by the stairs, the word murder ringing in my ears like a gunshot.
Roberts sighed. “Look, have you spoken to the police?”
“As much as I dared, for all the good it will do.”
“You don’t think they’re up to the job?”
“Neither do you, or we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”
“We’re doing everything we can, Burrows.”
“Which is what, exactly? Why do I get the feeling there’s more to this than you’re telling me?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. I’m as in the dark as you are.”
Another pause. Then: “The situation is a good deal more complicated than we thought.”
“Pardon?”
“The last words Wiltshire spoke to me on Saturday,” Mr. Burrows said. “The situation is a good deal more complicated than we thought.”
“What does it mean?”
“The devil if I know. And now he’s gone. I tell you, Roberts, with God as my witness, if you’ve gotten him killed—”
“Come now, you’re the one who suggested the arrangement.”
“It appears that was my mistake,” Mr. Burrows said coldly, and he took the remaining steps two at a time.
CHAPTER 5
DEEP BREATHS—DIMMI TUTTO—SMELLING LIKE THE DEAD—THE WOMAN ON THE SIDEWALK
I drifted through the train station as if in a dream, the crowd flowing around me in an anonymous blur. If you’ve gotten him killed, said the voice of Mr. Burrows in my head. We are talking about murder …
I meant to head back uptown, but instead I found myself on the opposite platform, a decision made without conscious thought. An animal, when startled, will instinctively scurry back to its den. Apparently the same goes for frightened Irish girls, because there I was, scurrying back to Five Points.
I huddled in my seat, hugging myself protectively, lips moving in silent prayer. But the voices pursued me all
the way down the tracks, echoes of what I’d overheard playing and replaying like one of Mr. Edison’s talking machines. I like to think that if the subject of the argument had been anyone but Thomas Wiltshire, I’d have managed it with a little more grit. As it was, I felt as if a great weight pressed down on my chest. Every lungful of air was an effort. Heavenly Father, protect us from evil …
The stairs of my mother’s building seemed even steeper and more lopsided than usual; I had to grope my way along the wall to steady myself in the dark. The landlord was too cheap to put in gas lighting, leaving his tenants to strike matches on the stairwell or risk tumbling headfirst into the cracked plaster. Ordinarily, I could negotiate these stairs with my eyes closed, but I was still numb with shock—so much so that I didn’t even notice the state of Mam’s flat when I walked in.
It was my mother’s boarder, Pietro, who appeared in the kitchen to greet me. “Ah, Fiora,” he said, looking embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were coming. Here, let me…” His lanky form did a quick tour of the kitchen, collecting items of clothing that had been strewn over virtually every surface.
Gradually, my senses began to clear, and I took in the scene. “What is this? It looks like someone’s trunk exploded in here.”
“Sorry, I just … un momento.” Pietro tossed an armload on the floor, then hustled into the sitting room to collect another.
“Whose clothes are these?” Not his, obviously. There were dresses and skirts, waistcoats and trousers, everything from children’s clothing to a suit that looked fit for an undertaker.
His lilting accent floated back from the sitting room. “Nobody’s. Mine.”
“What, you’re a ragpicker now?” The banality of the conversation washed over me like a warm, soothing bath. It was exactly what I needed in that moment, a refuge from the confusion and fear that had followed me home on the train.
