“That’s Ceci’s dress.” Carolina almost hissed the words. “She’s wearing Ceci’s boots as well.”
All the color had drained from her face. Nick drew her arm further through his, gripping it with so much firmness that he was almost carrying her. “Let’s go. You don’t want a scene, Carolina. Not here.”
She said nothing, just took another long look at the child, who looked back implacably. As if she were accustomed to being stared at, Nick thought. Finally after one last glance over her shoulder, Carolina allowed him to lead her from the store.
“It’s not the child’s fault, Carolina. She didn’t ask to be born.”
“You’re right, of course. I know that. But—” She broke off and took another sip of wine. Nick had insisted on bringing her to Delmonico’s. Very grand, very elegant. She had wanted to come for years and never thought it likely she would have the opportunity. Now she was too upset to appreciate it. “You know the whole story, don’t you?” she asked him suddenly. “The night of the fire Samuel said, ‘Why have you brought her here?’ He wasn’t surprised to see you. Only me. I’ve always puzzled about that. I’m sure you know more than I do.”
Nick was past dissembling. “Yes, I expect I do. Drink your consommé, my dear. It will revive you.” She had allowed him to order for them both, and he’d thought a nourishing broth a wise idea. “It’s uncommonly delicious, Carolina. You must try it.”
“I shall, I promise. But you must not change the subject. Tell me what you know, Nick. It’s past time I should have all the details.”
He shook his head. “I’m a doctor, Carolina. I owe my patients confidentiality. You know that.”
“I know that Samuel Devrey has lied to me and cheated me, apparently from the first day of our marriage.” She stopped speaking long enough to lift the two-handled cup of soup and drink most of it, though she tasted nothing. When she put it down, her hands were again trembling, though she’d thought she had regained her calm. “Shall I tell you what my husband said to me last week? Just after you left. Had you stayed a few minutes more I’ve no doubt he would have said the same thing in your hearing. Lord knows, he has no thought of protecting me or his children.”
“Carolina, you need not tell me anything.”
“No. I want you know. My husband told me she—the woman we saw that night—Samuel said she is his wife. I, he said, am his…his concubine.” If she’d any tears left she might have shed them now but she simply sat, white-faced and numb with something that was either pain or shock, though she wasn’t sure which.
“Whatever else,” Nick said, “that’s not true. You are his wife.” The child’s mother had been his patient; Sam Devrey never was.
“How do you know? How can I know?”
“It’s what I thought as well originally,” Nick said. “But whatever else Devrey may be, he’s not a bigamist. Not by the laws of the United States at any rate.”
“How can you possibly know?”
“Because he told me.” They had not been in a sickroom when Devrey described the way things were between him and the Chinese girl, and under the circumstances, Nick’s promise of discretion seemed to have run its limits. “He said the girl had been given to him in some sort of Chinese ceremony. He married you in St. Paul’s. No pagan rite would supercede that.”
Carolina sat for a moment, assimilating his words. “You’re sure?” she asked at last. “Absolutely sure?”
“Absolutely. I give you my word that is exactly what he said.”
“Thank you. I have been grieving as much as anything over the fact that my children might not be legitimate. You have given me a great deal of peace of mind.”
He wasn’t a lawyer and he wasn’t as sure as he would like to be that what he’d told her, though literally true, was accurate. Civil marriages were, after all, legal in New York. But looking at her, seeing the color begin to return to her cheeks and the way she smiled at him, Nick didn’t give a damn.
Chapter Twenty-four
“IT’S CALLED LIFE insurance, dearest.” Wilbur Randolf’s voice was exceptionally subdued. He obviously did not enjoy the discussion, though it was he who had raised the topic.
Jenny Worthington stared at the document covered in the finest sort of print. No way she could read anything but the heading—Mutual Life Insurance Company—not these days, not without her spectacles, and she never put those on in front of Wilbur. “Life insurance? Wilbur, I quite understand insuring against a ship sinking or not sinking or a fire happening or not happening. But death, that is the one sure thing in the world for us all. What kind of a fool would offer insurance against it?”
“Indeed the company must eventually pay, but they are gambling on the possibility that before they do, you will have paid more in premiums than they pay out in settlement. Actually, it’s a clever idea. Particularly if enough people can be persuaded to purchase the policies. I’m surprised they haven’t been offered before now.”
“But what earthly good is the settlement to do you if you must be dead to collect?”
“It’s not done for yourself.” Wilbur took her hand. “You name a loved one as beneficiary. You do it for those you care most deeply about, to see them right after you’re gone.” That was the answer being given to the preachers who insisted that such insurance was, like so much else in modern life, contrary to the law of God. Wasn’t prudence a virtue? Could it be right to leave those for whom one cared in life to the mercy of cold charity after one died? “I’m not getting any younger, Jenny dear.”
That’s what was on his mind, Jenny knew. Those weak spells he’d been having of late, the times when he said his heart seemed to race ahead of his ability to breathe. “And you’re quite sure this is genuine?”
“Quite sure. You are named as beneficiary of this policy, Jenny. I always told you I would provide for you, my dear. You’ve this house free and clear and in your name, and when I die you will receive five thousand dollars. It will all be quite discreet and no one to say you nay. Now put this policy away and don’t think about it again until you must.”
She could hardly think of anything else. Not while they were up in the bedroom and Wilbur was doing his business and she was, by force of long habit, making the accustomed noises and wriggling her hips in the expected manner, and not afterwards while they ate one of her delicious cold suppers in the yellow and white dining room that was now heated by steam from a coal furnace in the basement, so she’d been able to wall over all the first-floor fireplaces, though they were still required for the upper stories. Particularly not when she kissed him farewell before opening the door and allowing Wilbur Randolf to go happy and satisfied and with an apparently clear conscience into the pleasant crispness of the October late evening.
Five thousand dollars. Always presuming it was actually paid out and didn’t turn out to be only another way of taking money from fools who knew no better. Though heaven knows, when it came to business, Wilbur Randolf was no fool. Still, five thousand dollars when he was worth a hundred times that. Maybe a thousand times that. And all so he wouldn’t have to put her name in his will and embarrass his precious Carolina. Whose husband, as Jenny had made it her business to know, had virtually moved out of that fancy Fourteenth Street house her father had given her—far grander than this place on Bleecker Street—because Carolina’s husband preferred to live with his mistress on, God help us, Cherry Street. Five thousand measly dollars.
Some weeks later when the knock on the door came, she was ready for it.
“Mrs. Worthington, I believe?”
“You believe correctly, Mr. Devrey. Come right in.”
Sam was only slightly startled that she knew his name.
“I am told it is you who has set a Mr. Fearless Flannagan to watching me,” he said over tea in her pleasant parlor, “and I believe it. But so there can be no misunderstanding between us, I would appreciate your confirmation.”
Jenny refilled his cup, congratulating herself on having the prescience to use h
er best silver teapot. She had acted on the assumption that he was not here to say something about propriety and his children, at least those living up the town with Carolina, or to chide her for being Wilbur’s mistress, much less for running a part-time bordello. He was here as an ally, though of what sort she had yet to discover. “A Mr. Flannagan watching you, Mr. Devrey? Whatever for?”
“Let neither of us waste the other’s time, Mrs. Worthington.”
“Very well. I know a Mr. James Michael Flannagan, Mr. Devrey. Is that the man of whom you speak?”
“I suppose it is.” Sam took out his pocket watch and examined it. “I remind you that time, Mrs. Worthington, is worth money. In less than an hour, for example, you must turn over this parlor to the first of your expected customers.”
“The customers of my lodgers, Mr. Devrey. Nothing to do with me.” He opened his mouth to say more, and Jenny knew she had pushed him as far as she dared. “Very well,” she said before he could speak. “I hired Mr. Flannagan, yes.”
“Why?”
“Now it’s you who is wasting time. You know why. I have an alliance with the father of your wife. The wife on Fourteenth Street,” she added, and had the pleasure of seeing him wince. “An alliance that has now lasted quite a good few years but that affords me no legal protection and nothing to assure me a comfortable old age. I endeavor to find advantages, Mr. Devrey. I accumulate them and set them aside. Like a nest egg, you might say.”
“I take it, Mrs. Worthington, that I am part of your nest egg.”
“In a manner of speaking, Mr. Devrey.” She shrugged. “Though now you know about Mr. Flannagan, perhaps a less important part. Might I ask how you found out?”
“Do you really need to ask?”
“Money,” she said.
“Fifty dollars, to be precise. You came at a steep price, Mrs. Worthington. So I ask again, what value do you suppose I shall be to you?”
“To be frank, Mr. Devrey, I’ve never been exactly sure. As I said, I am simply accumulating opportunities. And I expect that your arrival rather means there is to be one.”
Sam placed his spoon across the top of his cup in that old-fashioned gesture of gentility that indicated he wanted no more tea and sat back, tenting his fingers, and looked at her over them. She had been a good-looking woman once. Now her jaw sagged and face powder had collected in a pair of wrinkles either side of her nose. “Perhaps, Mrs. Worthington. Tell me, please, since I see very little of him of late, how is my father-inlaw’s health?”
He knew he was being a bit obvious, but there was no help for it. Time, Sam had lately come to realize, was running out.
The American Institute, headquarters of marine architecture, had recently put on display a small-scale ship that was eerily similar to the design he’d been playing with for half a dozen years. Her bow was sharply angled to cut through the water, and the stern was rounded. Sam saw at once what was gained by such a design. The water displaced by the sharp and narrow front of the vessel would slide easily past its broader curvaceous rear; the conventional wisdom of cod’s head and mackerel’s tail was reversed. Such a craft, Sam knew, would be amazingly fast, and thanks to the breadth of beam, it could carry as much as any merchant craft presently afloat. Perhaps more.
He spent a good many hours at the institute, studying the new design, watching others come in and out to gaze and to comment, listening to talk of how it would be impossible to plough through the fifty-foot waves off Cape Horn in such a vessel. Damn fool idea most of his competitors said. Swamped for sure, soon as those waves come crashing over the decks. Lose all the crew and all the profit, for an absolute certainty. Agree, don’t you, Devrey? Man of your experience, you’ve got to see that. A damn fool idea. Sam always indicated that he was in complete accord.
All the while his gut was roiling with the certain knowledge that the puzzle had been solved and that sooner rather than later someone was going to build such a ship and become as rich as Astor as a result. Rich enough to buy the old bastard out of Devrey’s all together. Or maybe Astor himself would become convinced the new ship design was brilliant, despite what Sam Devrey said to put him off the scent. What then? Sam Devrey’s single hope of reclaiming what was rightfully his would be gone.
In a burst of feverish activity Sam collaborated with Danny Parker to make a model similar to that on display at the Institute, and took it back to thirty-seven Cherry Street, the house next door to Mei-hua’s, to the tank, where sometimes in these last few months he had taken to smoking the occasional pipeful of opium to relax himself and clear his mind. The stuff had made its appearance on Cherry Street a few months back, with the coming of a new man they called Lee Big Belly. The opium trade was booming now that the British had crushed the Chinese government’s resistance. No point, Sam had decided, in his attempting to resist a small amount of white smoke winding up here. If nothing else it insured the ability of Big Belly and a couple of the other newcomers to pay their rent. They offered the Lord Samuel the occasional small wad, enough for one pipeful, as a courtesy. He would be churlish to refuse.
After some weeks of smoking a bit of opium and simulating high waves in his tank, Sam became certain that it was possible to find ways to navigate through them without the ship being swamped. The key was the length of the vessel. She must be long enough to move at the greatest possible speed, since he was convinced that length did contribute to speed. Then, with a first-rate captain, she would survive rounding the Horn. At least in theory.
Danny would have none of it. “Steam,” he muttered. “That’s what’s coming. They’ve already got engines that can take a packet cross the Atlantic. Everybody said that wouldn’t happen neither, but it did.” He looked bleak when he said it; Danny Parker was a man who had been born to the glories of sail.
“Not for the China trade,” Sam insisted. “They’d need to tow a second ship just to carry all the coal. It’s halfway round the world, Danny. All the way if you consider the return journey.” But sweet Christ, the profits for the making of each such journey. These days it wasn’t only the traditional Canton trade. The peace treaty that ceded Hong Kong to the British had opened up the ports of Amoy, Fuchow, Ninghsien, and Shanghai, and the British couldn’t keep the Americans out. Better still, these days both here and in England the rich wanted not just China’s tea and silks but her cinnamon and porcelain, her furniture, even her firecrackers. “Ships like this,” Sam said, pointing to the model, “they’re the future, Danny. Don’t you want to be part of it?”
“Aye, I do. But I have to be paid first. Can’t afford the future otherwise.”
The future, Sam realized as he sat drinking tea in Jenny Worthington’s front parlor, was apparently also the problem most worrying her. “My father-in-law’s health,” Sam repeated. “Are you concerned?”
“Well, to tell the truth,” Jenny said, “it does worry me a bit. Care deeply for Mr. Wilbur Randolf I do. And sometimes he seems to me quite poorly.”
“I’ve wanted to visit before now, Cousin Manon—if I may still call you that—but I was told that you’d been spirited away to Maryland to make what was called your novitiate and that no gentlemen visitors, not even cousins, would be allowed.”
“I am officially Sister Marie Manon, since they could find no proper saint who corresponded to my odd French Protestant name. But everyone calls me simply Sister Manon. And indeed, after forcing me to become a Catholic, they locked up all of us novices in a great brick fortress and fed us bread and water until we learned to do as we were told.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m joking. Anything to make you look less like a startled rabbit and more like your old self. As for me, I know I look peculiar.” She gestured to her ruffled black cap and to the unfashionable long black dress and short black cape. “But I am just as I always was. And so happy to see you, dear Cousin Nicholas. When I heard I was to be sent back to New York to St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum, it was one of the many things for which I th
anked God. That I would be able to see you again and know how you’ve fared.”
“As you can see, I’ve fared well. I’m a fortunate man. The practice thrives.”
“And Dr. Klein? I hope he is well.”
“Fighting fit. Ben and his Bella have three children, two girls and a boy, and a fourth on the way. There was a set of twins as well, also boys, but they lived only a short time—” Nick caught himself. “Manon, forgive me. That was thoughtless.”
“No, it was not. I don’t grieve so anymore, Nicholas. At least not in the same way. Now what about painless surgery? Surely you’re well placed to do more testing of sulfuric ether.”
Nick shook his head. “We don’t touch the stuff. We promised Samson Simson we wouldn’t, because so many see it as against the law of God. Simson says that the Jews probably wouldn’t be of that opinion. But”—he shrugged—“I can understand them not wanting more criticism.”
“From Catholics as well as Protestants, I must say,” Manon said briskly. “We’re just as prejudiced about the Jews. More so, perhaps.” She was pleating and unpleating the skirt of her habit in a nervous gesture for which the novice mistress had many times reprimanded her. “Tell me, Nicholas, do you hear any talk of any kind of dispensary? The sort of thing I had in mind before.”
“There’s still nothing like it in New York, though we’re to have something new. The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Judging by your tone, you don’t approve of it. I thought you would.”
“It’s more of the same, Nicholas. Rich bankers and businessmen who say they want to help the deserving poor but then find so few of them deserving. And they continue to insist that the reasons for poverty are to be found in the paupers themselves. If they would only—”
“—adopt moral habits and pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” he finished for her. “Their lot would improve. Yes, I know what you mean.”
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