by Kat Ross
I held his gaze. “Indeed, sir. But I don’t think Myrtle will be troubled again. In fact, I’m certain of it.”
We stared at each other for a moment. His eyebrows lifted a fraction of an inch. “I’m glad, Miss Pell,” he said quietly. “Very glad.”
It felt awkward to hang about at Pearl Street — and, quite frankly, depressing — so John and I took our leave.
“If you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask,” Kate Prince said, taking my hands. She gave me an encouraging smile. “The time will go quickly, Harry, you’ll see.”
“Hang in there, Weston,” Wayne Copperthwaite said. “You, too, Pell. No hard feelings.”
I nodded my thanks and we went down the staircase, nodding at Joseph on the way out. Outside, the sun was shining like any other day, though my feet felt made of lead. Despite my words, I wondered if I should have fought harder.
“That underhanded woman,” John muttered as we walked past the adjoining brick buildings of Edison’s power station. “I can’t believe she went to the Board of Directors behind our backs. She must have planned it all from the beginning.” He glanced at me. “I’m sorry about how it turned out.”
“It’s all right.” I forced a smile and tucked my arm through his. “You were lovely back there, John. Thank you.”
He patted my hand. “At least Kaylock understands and he’s your direct superior. Mrs. Winter always had it in for you, Harry.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” I said slowly. “She comes off a bit harsh, but I think she does have the S.P.R.’s best interests at heart. If I were her, I might have done the same.”
We reached Centre Street in the vicinity of City Hall, with its hubbub of Chinese cigar sellers and aggressive newsboys hollering “Extra!” As we started to cross the park between the courthouse and the post office, I saw a young woman standing with her back to me. She was oddly still, staring into the distance. Wisps of strawberry blonde hair had come loose from her hat. She was a few inches over five feet tall and wore a coat identical to my own.
My heart started to race. My knees grew watery.
Then the woman turned and I saw her face. Large brown eyes and a pert, upturned nose without a single freckle. Her coat, I noticed on closer inspection, was in fact a slightly darker shade of red.
“Are you all right?” John asked, scrutinizing me. “You’re not. Of course you’re not. Who would be after being pilloried like that? Let me take you out to lunch at the Atlantic Garden, Harry. We’ll plot our comeback and Mrs. Winter’s demise over a giant platter of German sausages.”
I loosed my clenched fingers and forced a smile. “Agreed. But John?”
“What?”
“Let’s make it Chinatown instead.”
Chapter 19
It was a cold, bright morning in late October when a knock came on the front door at Tenth Street.
The first hard frost of autumn had arrived overnight, withering the purple and gold asters in their window boxes. Mrs. Rivers had gone shopping, dragging Connor along to carry her baskets. John was at school taking yet another midterm examination. And I was sitting at the kitchen table staring into a cold cup of coffee, wondering what would become of us.
Myrtle had accepted a few small cases that she pondered from the confines of her bed, but she was far from fully recovered – and growing more unbearable by the day. After the debacle of the S.P.R. hearing, I’d holed up to lick my own wounds. John came over for dinner most evenings, undeterred by the miasma of gloom hanging over the house. He told stories about peculiar medical conditions and his visits were the best part of my waking hours, which had started blurring together.
I raised the cup to my lips, wincing at the acid dregs but too listless to make a fresh pot.
Tap-tap.
It was a gloved hand rather than the knocker; I could tell by the sound.
The thought occurred to me that it might be a new client, but they would invariably want Myrtle and I could hardly impersonate her when she was only a few rooms away. So I ignored the summons, hoping whoever it was would give up and leave.
The knocking came again, harder this time.
“Answer it, Harrison,” my sister screeched from the depths of the house, “or I’ll shoot whoever’s standing there!”
I trudged to the door and opened it.
James Moran stood on the stoop, a black silk top hat on his head and a silver-headed cane in his hand. He wore kid gloves in maroon leather that matched his staggeringly expensive fur-trimmed cashmere overcoat.
“Jesus Christ, Pell,” he remarked. “You look like you’ve been dragged through the gutters of Bottle Alley. Backwards.”
I glanced down at my wrinkled dress and stocking feet. My big toe poked through a hole and the ragged nail was black with dirt. Mrs. Rivers had given up hounding me about my unkempt appearance, though she clucked in dismay every time our paths crossed, which was as rarely as I could manage.
“What do you want?” I asked. “Myrtle just offered to shoot whoever was banging on the door and now that I know who it is, I might let her.”
He squinted, his thick black eyebrows furrowing. “Are those coffee grounds?”
I ran an exploratory tongue across my teeth.
Yes, they were coffee grounds.
“Who is it, Harrison?” Myrtle called down from her room.
I drew a deep breath. “Mormon missionaries!”
I retracted my bare toe into the stocking — it was getting cold from the draft blowing through the open door — and took a moment to study my former client.
Moran had gained weight and looked as buffed and polished as the floor of Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. Gone were the shadows under his eyes and the hollows in his cheeks. His complexion was ruddy with health, his mouth curved in the arrogant smirk I recalled so vividly from days of yore.
I resisted the urge to reach out and knock his top hat off. Or perhaps to flick the end of his aquiline nose.
Moran seemed to read my thoughts for he smiled nastily. “Have birds been nesting in your hair, Pell? Or do you simply no longer comb it?”
“Once again,” I said with dignity. “State your business or be gone.”
Moran tipped the hat to a rakish angle so he could scratch his ear. “Well, now, I just thought you might want to know how dear Auntie Emma found out about the charter.”
Despite myself, I felt a spark of interest. I absolutely loathed loose ends.
“Talk fast,” I said, dropping my voice. “My sister just graduated to crutches. She’s mobile to a degree, not to mention armed. It would be most unfortunate for both of us if she found you here.”
“Ah, Myrtle.” He spoke the name with fondness. “I’ve missed her at the Avalon. I think I’ll send over a bottle of our finest champagne once she—”
“Auntie Emma and the charter,” I hissed, throwing a quick glance over my shoulder. Myrtle had trouble with stairs, but she couldn’t stand missionaries and might come down to shoot them on principle. “I haven’t time for your inane prattling, Moran.”
He held his gloved hands up. “All right, all right. It seems Quincy Hughes told her about it. He came to the house a few months ago hoping to nick it from my room. He had some notion that I might try to blackmail him once he gained public office. Threaten to make him look like a fool who befriended misfits and oddballs, not to mention convicted murderers.” Moran sighed. “I told you Quincy was too ambitious.”
“What a mad notion,” I said flatly. “Why would he ever think such a thing?”
Moran shook his head with an expression of bewildered innocence. “I haven’t the foggiest, Pell. Anyway, Emma caught him trying to jimmy the lock to the music room and pried the whole story from him. She knew the other boys were my friends from school but not that we called ourselves the Pythagoras Society. She promised Quincy she’d destroy the charter and he went away. Of course she didn’t.”
“She stole it herself.” I thought for a moment. “It explains the third set of scrat
ches I found on the door. And it also explains why it took her so long to get revenge after she bought the spell from Hannah Ferber. The dried blood of the signatures must have been the missing ingredient, the one thing she couldn’t get her hands on.”
“Indeed. I remember now that she offered to give me a shave when my valet fell sick last spring. Happily, I declined.” He scrubbed a hand across his jaw. “No doubt the razor would have slipped.”
“Well, that is all quite enlightening,” I conceded. “Thank you for telling me. How did you learn the truth?”
His eyes darkened. “I thought it rather strange when Quincy turned up at the fire so quickly. Turns out that’s where Emma had gone — to meet him. He was starting to suspect she had used the charter for a wicked purpose and threatened to expose her.” Moran gave a regretful sigh. “So I invited him to the Avalon for a little chat. He admitted everything.”
“We both know Quincy Hughes isn’t the confessing type. What did you do to him, Moran?”
“Nothing he didn’t richly deserve, Pell.”
“Oh God.” My hands knit together. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Not dead.” Moran leaned forward and lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “Merely in the hold of a galley bound for Shanghai. The crimps of the Fourth Ward were more than happy to oblige me.”
I thought of Quincy’s haughty manner and aristocratic drawl and couldn’t help laughing, but my mirth soured at Moran’s next words.
“I heard they suspended you.” He gave me a level look. “I’m sorry for that.”
I shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I can still take private clients. Perhaps Myrtle and I will hang out a shingle together.”
“Well, good luck. I hope I never require your services again,” he said with a dry laugh.
“Mr. Moran.” I smiled. “All the gold in Egypt wouldn’t induce me—”
“Oh, I almost forgot.” He reached into his pocket and handed me one of the little wooden puzzles they sold in Chinatown. “A parting gift. It’s called a kong ming lock. Give it to your sister to pass the time.”
I turned it over in my hand. It looked like the sort of thing that would drive me crazy for days. “Can’t. She’ll know where it came from. Instantly.”
“Would she?”
I slipped the puzzle into my pocket. “She knows you better than you know yourself.”
Moran looked pleased at this. “Well, then.” He adjusted his hat, running a gloved finger along the brim until it was just so. “Perhaps we’ll see each other around. I’m staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel with Mother while the house is repaired.” He winked and trotted down the front steps.
“Wait!”
Moran paused and looked back at me expectantly. He stood on the sidewalk in plain view and if Myrtle were watching from one of the upstairs windows, I was doomed.
But I didn’t care. I wanted to know. Not about Emma Bayard or Quincy Hughes or any of those minor details. I wanted an answer to the question that haunted me then and always would.
“What did it say to you?” I drew an uneven breath. “In the music room, when you were sitting at the piano together?”
James Moran regarded me impassively for a long moment. Then he doffed his hat and bowed at the waist.
“Good day, Miss Pell,” he said softly, and there was something cold and frightening about him again.
I rubbed sweaty palms on my skirt as I watched him walk away.
Moran’s black brougham waited at the corner. When he reached it, he turned back and our eyes met one last time. I thought he was smiling. Then he climbed in and the driver shook the reins, guiding the carriage into the flow of traffic up Sixth Avenue.
My sister’s waspish voice echoed down from the second floor.
“Harrison!”
I sighed, shut the front door and climbed the stairs. Myrtle was lying in bed surrounded by the morning papers, a cigarette burning in an overflowing ashtray. I knew she’d recruited Connor to make runs to the tobacconist shop. She wore a dressing gown with dried egg yolk on the sleeve. Mrs. Rivers must have braided her hair a few days ago and one side wasn’t too bad, but the other was an absolute mass of knots. I could see the pearl handle of a pistol sticking out of her pocket.
Suddenly, the fog of misery I’d been living in for the last month lifted and I started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Myrtle demanded.
“I don’t know. I suppose we are. Would you like some fresh coffee?”
“No.” She scanned the newspaper, her grey eyes intent. At least she had kicked the morphine. “The police say the fire was an accident. Most likely an ember from the fireplace that got past the screen and set the carpet alight.”
I tried to plump her pillows and she swatted me away. “The Moran mansion was gutted, yet the master of the house escaped unharmed,” she murmured. “How lucky.”
Did I imagine the edge to her voice?
“Indeed.” I stubbed out Myrtle’s cigarette before it set our own house on fire. “Or unlucky. I mean, for the good people of New York.” I gathered a stack of dirty plates and started for the door.
“I don’t see it that way,” Myrtle said.
I turned back, a heavy weight of dread in my stomach. This time I was sure I detected a current of amusement running beneath the surface of her words. The cat toying with the mouse.
God, she frightened me sometimes.
“Really?” I said in a light tone. “How so?”
My sister stretched and lit a fresh cigarette, exhaling a plume of smoke at the ceiling. “As much as I wish to see Mr. Moran behind bars, it would be a shame for him to die pointlessly. There’s really no other criminal of his caliber in the city. Perhaps the entire country. I fully intend to mount his head on my trophy wall, but until that day arrives, I’d be quite put out if something happened to him.”
She gave me a bland smile and returned her attention to the papers.
I carried the plates downstairs to the kitchen, my head spinning. At what point had she figured it out? From the very beginning? Or maybe it was when Moran climbed in my window, the fool. She could have overheard us.
I suppressed a grin. Did Myrtle also realize her nemesis had become her protector? As clever as she was, I thought not.
She would have been much angrier.
It was all oddly heartwarming.
I washed the dishes and took a bath, combing the snarls from my hair and donning a clean dress and stockings without holes. I even put shoes on and dabbed a bit of powder on my freckles. I was just brewing a fresh pot of coffee when John arrived. I knew his knock as well as his voice.
“Hello, Harry,” he said, eyes widening a fraction. “You look. . . .” He cleared his throat.
“Clean?”
“No! I mean, you looked fine before. I wasn’t implying—”
I laughed and dragged him inside. “How did the examination go?”
“Grueling, but I think I passed.” John wore the scarf I’d given him for Christmas last year and his cheeks were flushed from the cold. Unlike Moran, his brown hair was messy and his hand-me-down coat bore traces of dog hair from the Westons’ bull pup. “Where is everyone?”
“Mrs. Rivers is shopping for supper,” I replied in a loud voice. “We just had some Mormons stop by, but they’re gone now. Won’t you have a slice of plum cake?”
I shot John a dire look and he understood immediately. We crept into the kitchen and I shut the door behind us.
“Myrtle knows,” I whispered. “Not everything but most of it, I think.”
He frowned in mock confusion. “And yet she hasn’t shot you.”
“No.” I smirked. “Because Myrtle doesn’t want Moran dead. She wants him alive so she can match wits with him. I think she actually approves of what we did.”
John let out a low chuckle. “Of course she does.” He leaned back against the cold stove. “They deserve each other, don’t they, Harry?”
I studied his face for a moment. H
is honest, kind, laughing face. Then I got up on my toes and kissed him on the mouth as brazenly as Moran had done in the music room. John looked startled for a moment but recovered quickly, kissing me back with ardent enthusiasm.
“Yes,” I whispered against his warm lips. “They definitely do.”
Acknowledgments
I grew up on Twenty-First Street in Chelsea (Hannah Ferber’s exact block) when everything west of Tenth Avenue was given over to rampant vice in the same spirit as the old Tenderloin, so my first debt is to New York City. Some of the street names are different, and apartments that were once tenements in terrifyingly bad neighborhoods now rent for breathtaking sums of money, but the basic character of the place and its denizens has actually changed very little in the last century.
As Owen Davis wrote for the Police Gazette in the 1890s:
It may be that you — whoever you are or wherever you are — don’t know what it means to go “down the line”. But in New York — in order that we may start right — “The Line” means that part of Broadway where at night the lights burn brightest, and where the mob — swell and otherwise — move back and forth like the ebb and flow of the tide —hunting, hunting, ever on the hunt.
From Twenty-third street to Forty-second, and back again, and you have gone down The Line. Sometimes it costs you nothing for this innocent little amusement; this feast of the eyes; and then again it is liable to cost you a great deal.
It all depends on who you are, and what you are and how easy you are.
And there you are.
Any research errors are my own, but I relied on a number of books and anyone interested in New York’s Gilded Age should check them out for further reading. Luc Sante’s Low Life was indispensable (and highly entertaining). Also Manhattan Moves Uptown, King’s Handbook of New York City 1892, Eighty Days, How the Other Half Lives, Lights and Shadows of New York, and 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.
