City of God

by Swerling, Beverly

  “Entrusted to both of you, Mrs. Joyful. It was the cleverness and good intentions of both of you on which Mr. Simson and I relied. But now, what you are thinking, it is not entirely correct.”

  “Is it not? How so?”

  “Mr. Simson and I, no longer we are working hand in glove, as the saying goes. Our interests have diverged. That is the English word, is it not?”

  “It is.”

  “So, if Mr. Simson has approached you to recover what is in your keeping, that is not any affair of mine.”

  “Mr. Astor, are you asking me to believe you have no interest in something so extraordinary?”

  Astor laughed. The dark eyes were every bit as piercing as they had been when she first met him, and the brain seemed just as active. Never mind that he had to be well over seventy. Perhaps having such incredible wealth kept him young.

  When Manon visited him that first time, soon after Joyful’s death, Jacob Astor still lived on Broadway and Barclay Street in what was now the resplendent Astor House. She’d not been to the hotel, but she remembered Astor’s home as a palace. This one far up the town was if anything more grand. It overlooked the part of the East River known as Hellgate because of a confluence of currents, Eighty-eighth Street according to the grid. They were in a long parlor off the front hall. The walls were paneled in rare rosewood, on the ceiling was an elaborate mural of the Garden of Eden (three artists were said to have spent a month on their back to complete it), and seven enormous crystal chandeliers would of an evening cast shimmering light on furnishings of marble and gilt and intricately carved woods, the names of which Manon did not know.

  “A little more wine, Mrs. Joyful?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Astor.” She should refuse, but his Madeira was delicious. Besides, she needed fortification at least as much as a clear head. “You are not telling me you’ve no interest in the treasure, are you?”

  “No, no. Much interest I have. Always. But with you it was infinitely more safe, Mrs. Joyful, because no one would expect you to have it. Lately my mind it has changed a little. Only I want to know why, since apparently you refused to give it to Mr. Simson, you are prepared now to give this thing to me.”

  “I didn’t say I was, Mr. Astor.”

  “No, but why else would you come here? Something you want, Mrs. Joyful, that you believe I can give to you and Mr. Simson can not. That is correct, no?”

  There was no point in sparring with him. Joyful always said the man had a mind like a bear trap, wickedly sharp and always ready to spring. She must not make the mistake of thinking age had changed him. “Yes, Mr. Astor, that is correct.”

  “Good, then you will tell me what you want and I will see if I can provide it for you. If I can, we will arrange to trade. Ja?”

  “Ja. I mean yes. I didn’t intend to—”

  Another burst of explosive laughter. “It is not to worry, Mrs. Joyful. In the Five Points there are one-eyed beggars who better than I speak the language. But still they are beggars, while I…” He shrugged. “My English to me has not been a hindrance, and sensitive about it I am not. Now, the terms.”

  No hindrance indeed, at least not to the amassing of enormous wealth, which should make her request for land and a dispensary a trifle. Particularly considering what she could give him in return. Manon leaned forward and began speaking.

  Astor insisted he would take her home in his carriage. “On Vandam Street you are living now.” She had not told him she’d moved, but Manon was not surprised that he knew. “So,” he continued as he helped her into her cloak and gathered up his hat and his gloves and his walking stick, “together there we will go and you will give me the Great Mogul diamond, ja?”

  She had not heard it called by its proper name since her father died. To herself she thought of it only as a millstone, a responsibility she could not shake and did not know how to discharge. “I’m not entirely sure I should, Mr. Astor.”

  “But you said—”

  “I have no hesitation in giving you the stone. It has been nothing but an enormous worry to me ever since my husband died. But how can I be sure about the rest of our bargain?”

  All the effusive bonhomie disappeared from Astor’s expression, and Manon had some sense of the darkness of the man’s true character. Things were very bad in the town this spring, particularly for the working class. Astor was the landlord for a great many of them, and he was said to be putting at least a dozen families a day on the streets, as well as foreclosing on vast numbers of the mortgages he’d taken on in better times. Why not? He was rich enough to wait out the inflation-born depression and sell again later at an even greater profit. “You think I will cheat you?” he asked.

  “I think my husband would suggest that I should have any promise in writing,” Manon said.

  “Here you wait,” he said, and disappeared to another room. When he came back, he was carrying a piece of paper, blowing on it to dry the ink. “A fine lot it is,” he said, after he’d handed her the document. “On Waverly Place and Fourth Street, and a three-story building I am promising to build for you.”

  Manon glanced down and read quickly. “But the lot is not in Five Points,” she protested.

  “Of course it is not in Five Points. Forgive me Mrs. Joyful, but foolish you are being. You think you will get any nice respectable ladies like yourself to come and work in your dispensary if in Five Points it’s to be? Please, tell me how many of them go with you to be a nurse there now.”

  She didn’t have to say that none did. Obviously he already knew. “This document isn’t signed,” she said instead.

  “A lawyer maybe you are,” he muttered. “When I have the Great Mogul, then I will sign it. Now please, give it back to me and let us go.”

  “Addie, this is Mr. Jacob Astor. My companion, Miss Bellingham.”

  Addie jumped to her feet so quickly the sewing spilled off her lap onto the floor. “Mr. Astor,” she murmured. Heaven help them, were they to be put into the street?

  “Close your mouth, Addie, and get on about your business. Mr. Astor hasn’t come to foreclose on us and he won’t be staying long.” Then, to Astor, “Follow me, please.”

  Since she was bringing him into her bedroom, Manon left the door open. Her clothes cupboard stood against the opposite wall. She opened the double doors and began removing the hatboxes from the top shelf, taking them down one by one and stacking them on the bed. Silly to still have so many when nowadays she only ever wore a plain black bonnet in winter and an equally plain gray one in summer. The bonnets in the boxes were leftovers of another time and another life, like the one in the very last box she removed from the shelf, all pink straw and pale green satin streamers and a bunch of purple pansies stitched to the side. It had been a favorite of Joyful’s. She had opened the box only once every year since he died, to check on the thing wrapped in the blue velvet cloth.

  “Have you thought how extraordinary it is that we should have such a thing, Mr. Astor?”

  “I have, Mrs. Joyful.”

  “What shall you do with it?”

  “I am not entirely sure,” he admitted. But to possess the world’s largest diamond, for the time being that would be enough.

  Manon did not remind him that years before, he and Samson Simson had said that someday this fabulous jewel might be important for the country’s future. Now, she thought, it would be only about money. She reached below the pink and green bonnet to where the precious bundle had been hidden all these years. Foolish to give it to Astor perhaps, but surely to create something as much needed as a dispensary for poor women and children, it—“Oh.”

  “What ‘oh’? What is the matter, Mrs. Joyful?”

  “It’s not here,” Manon said. She tipped the hatbox upside down on the bed, pawing through the tissue and sending little motes of dust dancing in the May sunshine streaming through the window. “The diamond isn’t here!”

  “When is the last time you saw it?”

  “Right after the New Year. I checked on it
as I always do, once every year. Then I put it back.”

  “Maybe in another box you put it.”

  “No, it’s been in this one at the back of my cupboard ever since—”

  Manon stopped speaking when she heard the thud from the sitting room. Addie Bellingham had fainted.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “WHO DID YOU give it to?” Manon demanded. Addie clamped her lips into a thin line. “It’s thievery, Addie, the act of a common criminal. I would never have expected it of you.”

  “It fell out of the cupboard, like I said. I was looking for a bit of sewing cotton in that odd shade of yellow, and the thing fell at my feet.”

  “Ridiculous,” Astor said. His normally ruddy complexion was ghostly white, and his hands were balled into fists at his sides. He seemed far more upset than Manon Turner. “All the way at the back of the top shelf, the box was. Underneath a hat. Never it could have fallen at those feet.” He looked down at the sturdy workaday boots of Addie Bellingham. “And as Mrs. Joyful says, it is robbery. If Jacob Astor also says so, do you think in the police court the Police Justice will have any doubt? To the women’s prison in the almshouse you will go for sure, Miss Bellingham.”

  He had unwittingly said the words she was most afraid of hearing. Addie shrieked.

  Manon recognized their advantage and pressed it. “The almshouse for at least five years, I should think, Mr. Astor. With no possibility of getting out.”

  “Not five years. Ten more likely. I will tell the Police Justice ten years at least.”

  Another shriek. Then, “My friend Lilac Langton, she’s the one who has it. Going to take it to a Russian man with a fancy-goods shop. To see if it was real. We never thought it could be, a thing that big. We never thought—”

  Jacob Astor was staring at Addie as if seeing her for the first time. “Lilac Langton,” he said. “Certain you are that is her name?”

  “Of course I’m certain. We met at Mr. Finney’s church on the Anxious Bench. Both of us giving our lives to Jesus the same night. Been friends for quite two years now. You don’t know her, do you?”

  “Knowing her is maybe not how you would say it. I know who she is. The busiest and most popular lady to do abortions in all of the city.”

  Addie shrieked again.

  “Mr. Astor,” Manon asked, “how do you know this?”

  “Because I am her landlord.”

  Addie swayed, on the verge of fainting a second time, but Manon picked up a vase filled with water and spring flowers and dumped the contents over the other woman’s head.

  No one answered the door to Lilac Langton’s rooms on Christopher Street. They knocked a number of times, then Mr. Astor sent the driver of his carriage to his countinghouse on Little Dock Street to get the duplicate keys he kept there. He looked his age now, pale and drawn and with a thin blue line around his mouth that Manon found quite worrying. She looked around for someplace they could wait until the driver returned. “I think I saw a café around the corner. We can go there for a short while, Mr. Astor.”

  Astor shook his head and sat down on the steps of the building next to the one where Lilac Langton lived. “Here we can wait. Please to stop sniveling, Miss Bellingham. It annoys me.”

  Addie blew her nose loudly, then was silent.

  “I hope whoever lives here doesn’t mind our sitting outside their front door,” Manon murmured.

  “It doesn’t matter if they do,” Astor said. “This building also I own.”

  She should have known, just as she should have known that Addie Bellingham was more than a snoop who listened at open doors. A woman hurrying down the street went straight to Lilac Langton’s front door and knocked. Exactly as they had done. Manon jumped up and went toward her. “Excuse me, please.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re looking for Mrs. Langton, I take it.”

  The woman, younger than Manon, but well dressed and respectable-seeming, looked embarrassed, then lifted her chin defiantly. “I am. You as well, presumably.”

  “Yes, I was. I mean I am looking for her. Do you have any idea where she might be?”

  “None whatever. I came round to see her last week as well and she wasn’t here then. I suppose I’d better go to someone else now. Heaven knows the papers are full of advertisements for similar services. Mrs. Langton will lose all her custom if she continues to behave this way.”

  Manon watched until the woman had walked away, then returned to Mr. Astor and Addie. “Mrs. Langton’s been gone for days and days. At least that’s what it looks like. That woman came to look for her a week ago and she wasn’t here then either.”

  Addie again began to sob. Astor turned to her. “So, you told me you gave to your friend Mrs. Langton what did not belong to either of you a few days ago. This was maybe not the exact truth?”

  Addie sobbed louder.

  “The almshouse prison,” Manon said, “is far worse than the workhouse. Even I was afraid of the women in the almshouse prison.”

  “Three weeks it is since I gave it to her,” Addie said between gasps for air. “I been round here every day for the last ten looking for Lilac, and she hasn’t been here. We was going to share. If it turned out to be real, I mean. But she—”

  Astor’s carriage drove up and the driver jumped down carrying a ring hung with numerous keys.

  Neither Astor nor Manon nor even Addie Bellingham was surprised to find Lilac Langton’s rooms stripped bare. There was nothing anywhere that might give them a clue as to where she’d gone.

  It was dark beyond the windows of the Vandam Street lodging house. It was dark inside Manon as well, but within her was not the balmy softness of a May evening, but the bitter, soul-destroying cold of winter. “It was a wicked, wicked thing to do, Addie. I trusted you and tried to help you and you betrayed me. I’m afraid we can no longer live together. I want you to leave.”

  “Now? But where will I go? I—”

  “Tomorrow morning first thing. And I don’t care where you go. You are very fortunate it will not be prison.”

  Not even a man as vindictive as Jacob Astor had any desire to explain how it was he knew where the world’s largest diamond could be found, or why all these years he’d allowed it to remain hidden in a widow’s hatbox. Manon had realized from the first that he would not press charges against Addie Bellingham. As for her, she had never considered the Great Mogul diamond as being her possession, so she could not imagine claiming she’d been robbed of it. Only because Addie Bellingham understood none of those things had she been so frightened by their threat of a return to the almshouse, to the prison wing no less.

  “You have some money put by, I know, Addie. And I shall give you a hundred dollars.” She could not turn even Addie Bellingham into the streets without some means to survive. “There are some quite inexpensive boardinghouses here and there in the town. I’m sure you can find one. Along with your income from sewing, if you’re prudent, you will manage, Addie. Now please go to your room. Frankly, the sight of you makes me quite ill.”

  “And that’s it?” Nick asked. “No sign of the stone?”

  “No sign whatever,” Manon said. “Mr. Astor was quite sure he knew which fancy-goods merchant this Mrs. Langton likely had in mind, a Russian merchant on Broadway near Wall Street. He went there immediately. The man’s shop was shuttered closed and no one has seen him for days. Mr. Astor said there was a rumor he had taken ship for Europe. With a lady friend, according to some of the neighbors.”

  “Your Mrs. Langton, no doubt. Incredible.” Nick sat back in the large chair behind the sizable desk that occupied his book-lined consulting room. He had already shown Manon the similar chamber for Ben Klein, the examining and treatment room they shared, and the small but impressively equipped laboratory in the rear of the suite on Crosby Street. He and Ben were now engaged in the practice of medicine in an area that had twenty years earlier been a rural fastness. These days the neighborhood was home to rich Jews of the old guard, bankers and moneymen who
considered themselves entirely different from the latest wave of German Jewish tradesmen and entrepreneurs. It was home as well to Catholics of French and Spanish descent, who of course saw little to connect them to their Irish coreligionists. Both groups considered it fitting to make their home in the shadow of the very imposing Shearith Israel Jewish synagogue or, for the Catholics, close by St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The neighborhood was for Nick a world so far removed from Bellevue as to make it seem like fairyland. Manon’s extraordinary tale was of a piece with it. “A diamond as big as a pigeon’s egg,” he repeated.

  “It was extraordinarily beautiful, Cousin Nicholas. To look into such a stone…I’m sorry I never showed it to you.”

  “So am I. Cousin Manon, may I ask how you came to have such a thing?”

  “No, dear Nicholas, you may not. It’s an incredible story involving Canton and intrigue among thieves and runaway slaves, and you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you, though I assure you it was painfully real when we were living through it.” Unlikely either that he would believe she’d once been beautiful enough for someone to want to spirit her away on a pirate ship. “Anyway, it was really my husband’s story. I only told you as much as I have to explain why I’m looking for somewhere to rent. To open a less ambitious version of the dispensary I originally planned.”

  “Astor wouldn’t make good on his promise?”

  “Not once it became clear I could not make good on mine.” To be a bargain both sides must do what is offered, Mrs. Joyful. She shrugged.

  “Wretched woman,” Nick said, unwilling to mention Addie Bellingham’s name. “And after you’d done so much for her.”

  “Wretched indeed. And one of the things I’ve learned these past years is that if one does the right thing for the sake of being thanked, much less loved—well, it seldom works out that way. Now I must go, Nicholas. I see that your location here is far too grand for what I have in mind. But if you hear of anything, you will keep me in mind?”