The Crimson Thread

by Suzanne Weyn

  For a brief moment, the officers studied the table where the O’Malley family sat, then exchanged knowing glances and approached.

  Bridget’s stomach clenched.

  This was it.

  Under the table, she grabbed Liam’s quivering hand. She could feel Seamus’s knee trembling nervously, rocking the leg of the table. Would they take him in too? Really, he was only thirteen, just a boy.

  Ray Stalls suddenly broke from his crowd of companions and lurched toward the officers.

  Was he drunk?

  It seemed so, the way he staggered so brazenly toward them. He stumbled and clutched the nearest officer in an effort to stay upright.

  Still holding the officer’s arm, he went down, spilling a pocketful of bills onto the floor as he went.

  A gasp spread through the room at the sight of so much money.

  “Pardon me,” Ray Stalls said with a distinctly drunken slur, blurring even further the words so heavily accented with German. “Ssso sorry.”

  “Where did the likes of you come upon all this cash?” demanded the officer upon whose arm Ray Stalls had fallen.

  Ray grinned foolishly at him. “An in-in-inheritance, I assure you.” He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. “I am sssooo glad you men are here. Would you be kind enough to esh-esh-escort me to my home?” He threw his arm on the officer’s shoulder, leaning heavily against hom while he gazed aroud furtively with the expression of a man driven mad by paranoia. “The shtreets are f-f-full o’ thieves, you know. I would be honored t’ pay handsomely f’r your protect…shun.”

  Greed lit the faces of both officers.

  “Gather you money, then,” the second officer told him. “And wait here a moment.

  He approached the O’Malley table. “Are you Patrick, Finn, and Seamus O’Malley?” he asked harshly.

  Bridget could barely hear his words through the pounding of her heartbeat. She lifted Eileen from her chair and rocked her, ostensibly to soothe the child but just as much to settle her own nerves.

  “No, officer, we are the Miller family, newly arrived from Wales,” replied Paddy.

  “Sure you are,” the officer scoffed. “And I’m Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Holmes,” Paddy said, not catching the sarcasm in the officer’s voice.

  “Thomas, he’s leaving,” the first officer alerted the one at their table.

  Ray Stalls was staggering to the front door, drunkenly clutching his cache of bills to his chest. The other customers looked on avariciously, not daring to move, as single bills fluttered, unnoticed by him, onto the floor.

  The officer named Thomas looked torn between making his arrest of the brawling O’
  Ray stalls banged the door open and staggered out into the night. The two officers jogged after him.

  Paddy was instantly on his feet, throwing down dollars to cover the cost of the meal.

  “Come on! Come on!” he urged his children

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go home,” Finn suggested.

  “Perhaps not,” agreed Paddy.

  “Where would we go?” Liam asked.

  Paddy thought, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. “Bridget, you return home with Eileen and Liam,” he instructed her in whispered, rapid-fire words. “If they come for us, say we’ve run off and abandoned you with the children. If you need us, we’ll be hiding in the carriage house of H.P. Wellington at Park Avenue and Thirty-third Street. But for the time being, forget that you know that. I’ll find a way to be in touch.”

  “Hurry! Hurry!” she urged them, moving the stunned Seamus out of his chair. “We’ll be fine. Hurry!” In the next minute, her father and brothers were fleeing out the door and into the dark alley.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Fired!

  It didn’t help matters that the next day was the hottest Bridget had ever experienced. Mrs. Howard’s attic sewing factory was a steaming sweatbox. “I didn’t know I was coming to the tropics,” she complained to Maria in a whisper, only to be shushed by the other women. The heat was doing bad things to their boss’s temper, and they didn’t want to risk crossing her for fear that she would rip out their newly finished seams or find some other excuse to call their workmanship shoddy and not pay them.

  When Mrs. Howard left the room, no doubt treating herself to an escape from the heat, Bridget arched her aching back, pushed her damp curls back on her forehead, and thought about Ray Stalls. She wouldn’t have taken him for a drunkard; there was something too keenly alert in him for that/ she recalled that Hilda had said the lived in her basement. Only the most destitute men slept there, yet he had claimed to have come into money. “Does Ray Stalls still live in your basement, Hilda?” she asked.

  Hilda grunted, not looking up from her sewing machine. “I have no idea. Come to think of it, I have not seen him of late. Are you still daydreaming about that scoundrel?”

  “I am not daydreaming about him.” Bridget denied. “I was only wondering.”

  Mrs. Howard came through the door and locked Bridget in a steely glare. “Come with me, young woman,” she instructed sternly. “Bring all your belongings, including your needles. You shall not be returning.”

  Bridget looked desperately to Maria. What was happening? “Are you firing her?” Maria demanded bravely.

  “That is none of your concern,” replied Mrs. Howard. “Come now, Miss O’Malley.”

  Bridget gathered her things and followed Mrs. Howard out. The woman dug into a change purse and handed her a dime. “This will pay you for the work you have done. Please leave now and do not bother to return tomorrow or any other day.”

  “But why?” Bridget demanded. “Was the vest I did yesterday so terrible? I promise you that today’s work will be better.” She did not want to lose this job. Despite this heat, from what she’d heard, it was better than any of the factories.

  “It has nothing to do with your work. While I was just downstairs, a neighbor told me that the police were at your apartment asking about members of your family. As I understand it, they’re wanted in relation to some sort of assault down at the box factory. I can’t employ anyone who is in trouble with the law,” she informed Bridget coldly.

  “But I am not in trouble,” Bridget insisted. “It has all just been a misunderstanding.”

  Mrs. Howard let out a scornful laugh and knowing chuckle. “I’ve heard that many times before. It’s always a simple misunderstanding with you people. Please, go.”

  Bridget could see that there was no sense on pleading any further. The hard mask of finality on Mrs. Howard’s face was impenetrable. Her cheeks burning with the unfairness of this humiliation, she descended the splintered stairs until she came out into the blinding sun of the bustling street.

  She weaved through the crowd, once having to jump into the street as someone threw a bucket of gray wash water from a window above. When she returned to the sidewalk, she found that she’d stepped into a pile of horse dung. “Ah, saints take pity on me,” she muttered angrily as she stopped on the corner to wipe the excrement from her boot. Could this day get any worse? She sincerely hoped not, although she knew it was entirely possible.

  “Psst!”

  The sound made her wheel around sharply to face the narrow alleyway from which the hiss had come. Seamus stood with his back pressed against the wooden building. With a quick check around, she darted into the alley. “What are you doing here?”

  “I could say the same to you,” he retorted. “Why aren’t you at work? I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

  “I was fired,” she told him. “Listen, you have to get out of here. The police are looking for you.”

  “Da sent me to get you. There’s a job for a girl who sews up at the grand house. You should see the place, Bridget! It’s
near to a palace.”

  “Let me go home and freshen up.”

  “No! He says you are to come right away. They’ve already interviewed a line of girls, but Da has told them that you are the finest seamstress in all of Wales.”

  “What did he tell them that for?” she cried.

  “You know Da,” was the only reply he needed to make. She certainly did! No doubt this was more of his so-called resourcefulness and quick thinking.

  Together, Seamus and Bridget headed uptown. Along the way, he told her how Finn had run into a fellow Irishman he’d met at the box factory who had offered him work on a fire truck. “He didn’t even have to pretend to be Welsh,” he informed her enthusiastically. “The man said there’s lots of Irish on the trucks these days. He said there were even beds where he could sleep and food at the firehouse. It’s good Finn’s going there, because you know Da and he have not been getting on since last night. Da says Finn’s being a fool, and Finn says Da’s not loyal to the old country.”

  Bridget shook her head regretfully. “They’re both so stubborn. I’m sorry to see Finn go, but it sounds like a good opportunity.”

  “I’m about to have a good opportunity too,” Seamus added eagerly. “Da is going to talk to them about taking me on as his assistant. I could learn to be a stableman and even a coachman eventually. There’s decent money in that.”

  “Good for you,” she praised him.

  “I’d be living there with Da. Maybe you could live in the carriage house too. It smells of horses, but it’s not a bad smell once you get used to it. All three of us could wind up living in the grand house. Da says they’d give you a room upstairs in the servants’ quarters if you get the job. Think of that!”

  “What about Liam and Eileen?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we could bring them.”

  “Well, we’d have to. We can’t just leave them behind now, can we? I wonder if they’d allow it.” She breathed in a nervous, quavering breath. She certainly needed a job, but she was far from a fine seamstress.

  Since arriving in America, she hadn’t traveled out of the Five Points neighborhood. She’d thought the entire city looked the same, but as they continued uptown she became aware of how completely wrong she had been.

  Well before they even reached Twenty-third Street, the streets became wider, which let in more sunlight. The people walking along were more orderly, staying to the clean, quiet sidewalks. The roads were paced with cobblestones rather than dirt, and they were not strewn with filth.

  When they turned a corner, Bridget gasped and staggered back in surprise, clutching Seamus’s thin shoulder. A giant copper hand, easily three stories or more high, jutted up above the trees in a park across the road, a gleaming copper torch clenched in its grip.

  With her hand on her panting chest, Bridget laughed at her own frightened reaction. “Saints have pity, I didn’t know what I was seeing at first,” she said.

  “It’s part of a huge statue they will be building in the harbor,” Seamus told her. “They have put the hand here just for the time being.”

  “It must be a colossal thing, this statue, to warrant a hand the size of that,” she commented.

  Seamus nodded as they hurried across the wide road toward it. Elegant men and women circled the impressive hand.

  Bridget took in the attire of the fashionable uptown crowd. The women wore tall hats, somewhat similar to the ones worn by the men, but the female version of the hat came with ornate feathers, netting, bows, and veils festooned around them. The tailored bodices and slim skirts of their outfits created a narrow silhouette until they turned, revealing a bump under the frock that gave the impression that the wearer possessed an unnaturally large rear end.

  They passed diagonally across the park and went a few more blocks until they came out onto Park Avenue. “I don’t know about this, Seamus,” she said. “We don’t belong in such a grand place.”

  There were no listing wooden tenement buildings here, no people lounging idly on stoops, no garbage overflowing from cans. Here the buildings were all made of glistening stone or brick. Uniformed doorman stood at attention atop each gated, high-stooped entryway. Potted plants and sculptures adorned the small but immaculately manicured front yards. Then they reached the home of J.P. Wellington.

  “It’s a palace,” she murmured to Seamus as she stared up the steps, awestruck.

  Bridget O’Malley had never in her seventeen years felt a stronger urge to run away.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Balancing Act

  Paddy was waiting for her on the high, gated front steps of J.P. Wellington’s luxurious Park Avenue townhouse, his expression eager. “This is good,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon, but I came out just now to check, just the same.”

  “She got fired,” Seamus explained.

  Bridget opened her mouth to tell him the story, but he cut her off. “It’s fate,” he said. “And it only proves that you were meant to get this position for which I have put you forward. Seamus, go water the horses for me. I am going inside to introduce Bridget to the head seamstress.”

  She began to climb the steps, but Paddy put his hand on her shoulder to stop her. “We go in the servants’ entrance,” he said, steering her down several steps to a plain doorway slightly below street level.

  He whisked her through a kitchen bustling with busy servants and up a narrow flight of stairs into the front hallway. He paused only long enough to whisk a piece of lace off an end table and draped it around her shoulders by way of improving her plain, sweat-stained blouse.

  “Da, no!” she objected. “They’ll recognize it.”

  “Nonsense! Do you think they know every piece of lace in this grand house?” he replied, adjusting the material evenly on her shoulders/ “Button up your collar there.”

  He led her down the elegant hall with its sparkling crystal chandeliers overhead and thick, plush Asian rugs beneath until they came to a set of carved wooden doors whose brass handles had been polished to a rich gleam. Paddy banged on the door with his rough fist, and Bridget cringed a little. Surely this sort of thunderous noise was not fitting in such a fine and silent home.

  “Enter,” came a low-pitched voice.

  The woman who sat behind the ornate desk in the study was possibly the thinnest woman she had ever seen who wasn’t falling over faint from starvation. On the contrary, this woman seemed quite alert, with probing eyes below a wide forehead under a high nest of upswept gray hair.

  “Allow me to introduce my daughter, the greatest seamstress New York will ever see, Bertie Miller!” Paddy announced in a booming voice as though she were the star attraction at some theatrical entertainment.

  Bridget’s head snapped around to stare at her father in surprise.

  Bertie Miller!

  The greatest seamstress New York will ever see?!

  “What sort of name is Bertie?” the woman asked, eyeing Bridget critically. “Is it…Welsh?”

  “French by the way of Wales,” Paddy said. “It’s short for Bertrille.”

  Amusement played in the woman’s eyes. Unlike the man who had interviewed her father, Bridget had the distinct impression that this woman was not fooled for a moment. No doubt she knew an Irish brogue when she heard one. “Have you brought any samples of your work?” she asked.

  “No,” Bridget replied.

  “All our things were lost at sea when the ship we were sailing was nearly shipwrecked in a storm,” Paddy jumped in to explain.

  Bridget couldn’t believe she was hearing this latest fabrication, it was so wildly untrue. The entire trip had been days of dull, sometimes nauseating rocking under a monotonously overcast sky without a drop of rain.

  Paddy stepped forward, stretching out his arms proudly. “Fortunately, this very shirt I’m wearing survived the tempest. It was made by her hand.”

  Survived the tempest! Bridget tried not to let her face reveal her shock at this bold-faced lie. Her mother had made the shirt he wore
! It was hard to accept the fact that her father could be such an outrageous liar. But maybe that was too harsh. He was an avid storyteller, and all good tale tellers sometimes lost the line between truth and fiction. To him, anything might be true; it was only a matter of which version of the story he was telling. She almost had to laugh when she thought of how he objected to her flights of fancy, when she’d probably inherited her imaginative ways from him.

  “Of course, she made this garment some years ago, when she was only a child,” he went on. “But the workmanship has held up very well, weathered the storm beautifully. Come examine it for yourself.”

  The woman came out from behind the desk, revealing herself to be exceptionally tall. She examined Paddy’s sleeves and collar. “It is indeed well done,” she concluded.

  “This girl is a wonder,” Paddy went on. “Not only can she sew a perfect seam, but she can spin thread, tat lace, embroider, and weave. If you take her on, you will thank me for the rest of your days.”

  “Is that so?” the woman asked skeptically.

  “Mark my words,” Paddy assured her, deliberately missing the disbelief in her tone.

  “I would work very hard and do whatever you want,” said Bridget sincerely, hoping to bring some small sense of truth and reality into the proceedings.

  “Have you any reference?” the woman asked.

  “We are newly arrived and this would be her first employment in America, and, as I mentioned, the many testimonies she brought from home were all lost at sea,” Paddy said.

  A tight, pinched smile formed on the woman’s lined lips. “I see.” She turned her attention to Bridget. “You will start as my assistant. I hope that is not too menial a position for one as gifted as yourself.”