City of God

by Swerling, Beverly

  Carolina reached for his hand, then raised it and placed it on the soft skin above her breast exposed by the green velvet bodice of her daring gown. She heard his strangled intake of breath. “Do not tease me, Carolina. I cannot bear it. If you do not intend to yield to me, then let me leave at once.”

  “I wish to yield.” Her voice trembled on the word. “Oh God, I wish it so much. But I’m afraid, Nicholas. Dreadfully afraid.”

  “Afraid of me?”

  “No, never of you. I fear the past.”

  “Then you fear what does not exist.” He drew her close and kissed her. She tasted of champagne and the many glories of this magnificent evening but also of the eleven years since he’d first seen her, of all that had happened between then and now. Of herself. The only woman he would ever love. At first she was tense in his arms, then, at last, she melted against him. She was, he knew, finally his.

  “Not upstairs,” she murmured when he started in that direction. “And not in the front parlor.” She would be swamped by ugly memories in either place. “Come.” She took his hand and led him to her small and cluttered office, the place in this house where she was most herself, where there were no ghosts of the misery of her terrible marriage. She closed the door, then stood with her back to him. “You must help me. I can’t manage by myself.”

  Her gown fastened down the back with a row of tiny buttons, and when he seemed to be taking forever to undo them, she said, “I can’t wait, Nicholas. Tear it off me.”

  He pulled the frock apart and heard the soft plopping sounds as the buttons fell to the floor. Carolina stepped out of the gown, then the petticoats. “And I still don’t come to you as God made me,” she said, giggling softly, fumbling behind her back with the laces of her corset. “Fashion is not meant for lovers, I fear.”

  He laughed with her. Samuel had never once taken her with laughter, not even in those first months of their marriage, when she had suspected nothing of the sham and the lie she was being asked to live. Only Nick laughed, then crushed her up against him with an urgency that somehow seemed to include her rather than be directed at her. Only Nick kissed her neck and her shoulders and finally, when he had helped her loose the ties of her final undergarment, her breasts. Only Nick discovered ways in which she was somehow virgin, newly introduced to the meaning of what transpired between a man and a woman.

  Carolina trembled in his arms and found herself whispering his name over and over again, a talisman to protect her against the shadows of memory, a promise to be forever his.

  Then, when it was over, there was more laughter and soft kisses. And a new world.

  Book Four

  1848–1853

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  THEY CALLED IT Sunshine Hill, and though it was a house that ran more to gaiety than to grandeur, it had a large library on the first floor. Nick’s consolation, Carolina said, for having to give up the site he’d found on the even more remote west side of Manhattan. She must, she said, look out on the East River, not the Hudson, because, as Nick knew without her saying so, that’s where the Devrey docks and warehouses were. And despite all she had accomplished and all they had dared together, getting Devrey Shipping back for Zachary remained (after hopes for himself and her children) Carolina’s dearest dream.

  Sunshine Hill, however, was the dream they shared. They chose the name together after the house was built by a Baltimore architect who brought his plans and his craftsmen and laborers with him, and took them all away again when the house was done. The Hill part was misleading. The house’s lonely position on what Manhattan maps showed as Seventy-first Street and First Avenue was in fact at the top of a heavily wooded cliff. The only access was a long carriage road that climbed steeply to the front door and was barred and gated below. There was a small cottage off to one side of the house, built with the idea that Aunt Lucy should one day come and live with them—Perhaps when I get old, Carolina dear, but right now I am not ready to leave the city—otherwise they were entirely alone.

  To the north there were woods and for a short distance still more cliffs, though the outcropping disappeared within half a mile on either side. Their nearest southerly neighbor was the Mount Vernon Hotel at Sixty-first Street, where the high ground ran out and the river lapped a gentler shore. The hotel served as a stopping place for travelers to the city from Westchester and escapees from the city’s hubbub traveling up to the country on a Sunday afternoon.

  Isolated enough, Nick had decided in ’45, when they built the place, his caution intensified by the fact that now he had not just Carolina and Zac and Ceci to protect.

  I am with child, my dearest.

  During the year they had been lovers they’d been drifting, deciding what was best to do while Nick paid frequent visits to Fourteenth Street but maintained his Eighth Street lodgings. Carolina’s news—no surprise except that joy had fogged his brain—sent him on an intensive search for a site where he could build a house in which to hide her away and keep them all safe from wagging tongues.

  Two weeks after her announcement he bundled her into a hired carriage and took her far up the Hudson River shore to a spot looking across to what were called the Palisades of New Jersey. “What do you think? The view’s magnificent, don’t you agree?”

  “I suppose it is. If you mean to spend the rest of your days looking at the Hudson River.”

  “I take it that means you do not.”

  “I would rather not,” she amended, slipping her arm through his, “though I will live anywhere in the world, as long as it’s with you.”

  “But? Come, Carolina, what is the rest of the sentence.”

  “Only that I entirely agree with your plan. It’s how we must fix things. Zac must board at school, and Ceci have a resident tutor rather than go every day to Miss Alderson’s Academy for Young Ladies, which anyway she loathes, and we must have a very private house.”

  “You won’t be horribly unhappy, my love? You won’t think I’ve caused you to give up all your newfound pleasures as an independent woman?”

  “I will be more ecstatic than I am now, if that’s possible. As long as we can hide away on the east side of Manhattan island, not the west.” And a few days later, “I’ve seen the ideal place, Nick darling. Perhaps an hour and a half’s journey into town, if we invest in a brougham and don’t rely on my old buggy. You can see patients at Crosby Street a few days each week, though I doubt it will be practical to make the trip every day. Will you mind that terribly?”

  He did not tell her that he exulted in the thought of more time spent with her and his books, and perhaps an experiment or two if he could find a corner somewhere to set up his equipment. Nick feared only that the site was not distant enough to protect her from the city’s gossip. And there was the matter of the Astor mansion about a mile to the north, but the old man was pretty much a recluse these days. Ill, people said, and certainly past caring about Devrey household affairs, if he ever had. Anyway, it was the site Carolina wanted. So they settled on Sunshine Hill, just barely near enough for her and almost far enough for him, and where each, thinking the partner in this madness might come to feel deprived by the bargain, arranged the other’s consolations.

  It was Nick’s idea to build a tower at the top of the house. “You can take a spyglass up there and have a view up and down the river, my darling. In Providence there are many such arrangements. Indeed, rooftop perches are a New England commonplace.” He did not mention that in New England such lofty lookouts were called widows’ walks. Because, since she was not legally his wife, she could never be his widow.

  Carolina’s Turret they called their top-of-the-house aerie. Nick commissioned a powerful telescope from the same company that supplied his exquisitely crafted microscopes. He mounted it himself while she was still abed recovering from the birth of their son Joshua, and carried her up to see it when the baby was two weeks old and he judged her still too weak to climb the steep stairs on her own. “Most men would buy a jewel to mark such an occasi
on,” he told her. “But I know my darling Carolina.” Her squeals of delight when she looked through the telescope and the inner and outer harbor both appeared as near as her hand were proof he’d been right.

  That no gift could have been more prescient was proven on a cold March day in 1848, when Carolina draped herself in furs and a large black bonnet with a dark veil and went to stand in the Trinity churchyard as—shortly after his eighty-fifth birthday—they put John Jacob Astor in the ground. There was a great crowd present at the service and the internment; she need not have been so concerned about attracting attention. August Belmont, however, seemed equally interested in discretion. He moved quietly to Carolina’s side just as the preacher was offering a final blessing to Astor’s elaborate coffin. “My carriage is parked behind the Exchange,” he murmured. “Ten minutes.”

  She had no difficulty identifying which rig was his. A large letter B was the centerpiece of the elaborate escutcheon mounted on the door, and the coachman was apparently watching for her. In what seemed the flicker of an eyelid he had the door open and had helped her inside. Mr. Belmont and another man were waiting for her.

  Both tipped their hats as Carolina took her place on the velvet-covered bench across from theirs. She might not have been sure of William Backhouse Astor’s identity had she not just minutes ago seen him standing beside his father’s grave. She had never traveled in the same exalted social circles, not even as a girl. In his fifties now, Will had waited a long time to take full charge of the Astor empire. Having done so at last, he was apparently in a great hurry to consolidate what was at last entirely in his control. “Good afternoon,” he said, not waiting for Belmont to introduce them. “I’m sure you know who I am, and I know that you are Carolina Randolf Devrey. I’m told you are interested in having the Devrey shipping company return to your family’s control.”

  “My control, to be exact, on behalf of my son. No one else, even if a bearer of the Devrey name.” It was, she was quite sure, clear to both men that she spoke of Samuel. Celinda had died the year before, having choked on a piece of mutton and fallen face forward into a plate of carrots stewed in cream.

  Astor cleared his throat. A trick, Carolina knew, of many businessmen seeking a few seconds to phrase their next remark. “My understanding,” he said when he was ready to speak, “is that the financing will, in part, come from Mr. Belmont.”

  “Yes, though the majority shareholding will lie with Zachary’s trust. I was referring to familial control.”

  Astor looked hard at her, as if trying to discern the expression hidden behind the veil. “Some in the town say you’re a widow, Mrs. Devrey. Others are not quite sure.”

  “People say many things, Mr. Astor. Most of them are not particularly important. The deed of sale is to be made over to the trust of Zachary Devrey. Those are my terms.”

  “And Master Devrey’s father?”

  “Is not of any concern in this transaction. I am the sole trustee of Master Devrey’s estate. He will not reach his majority for six more years.”

  “But if at some point the boy’s father should object? I mean if he is not, as some presume, already gone to his reward. There could be an exposure of the sort that is not in my best interest.”

  “There’s little likelihood of that,” Belmont said.

  “Of what?” Astor had taken to studying his nails.

  “Any objection by any third party,” Belmont said.

  Carolina did not doubt that August Belmont knew where Samuel Devrey was and how he was. It was one of the things she hated most about her situation, that at any moment someone who wished to hurt her or Nick or the children—Almighty God forbid—could wield such a weapon against them. In business, Carolina, you have to be extremely careful. But also sometimes you have to trust. Another lesson learned at her father’s knee. “Mr. Belmont is correct,” she said. “But I would say no likelihood. None whatever.”

  “So you say.” Astor was apparently not going to budge until he got what he wanted, but she wasn’t sure what that might be.

  “I will indemnify the transaction,” Belmont said, “as part of a separate agreement between us. With the provision, separately agreed with Mrs. Devrey, that if I am required to act on that guarantee, the ownership of Devrey Shipping will then revert entirely to me.”

  William Astor smiled. “That would satisfy me, but will you agree to it, Mrs. Devrey?”

  “I take it the indemnity would come into effect only if someone not a party to the agreement, an unknown third party, raised objections to the terms of the sale.” Even so, she would be in thrall to Belmont. He could easily find someone to act as this unnamed third party, but years before he had told her that he had no knowledge of shipping as such, that he was interested only in the profit to be made from it. And they had so far made a great deal of profit together. Trust, Carolina, is sometimes the most important thing in business. “Is that correct, gentlemen?”

  Both men agreed that it was. And when she pressed them further, agreed that the necessary papers could be drawn by her long-time attorney, Mr. Gordon James.

  “Then I agree,” Carolina said, “and I thank you,” making her voice a little tremulous, because otherwise she was afraid her gleeful triumph would show. “I’m sure you understand that as a woman I need to be quite clear about these things, and that I rely on gentlemen I can trust.”

  The two men murmured appropriate comments, and Carolina formally shook hands with each of them. Her eyes remained cast down behind her veil so that they might not see them spark with triumph. God be praised! Unless she had entirely misread August Belmont (and she was sure she had not) only Samuel could ever cause this thing to come to grief. And she’d see him in hell before that would happen.

  “You have been remarkably generous, Mr. Belmont,” Carolina said, her arm in his as he escorted her to Nassau Street, where she’d left her own carriage.

  “I have never failed to see a handsome return from our ventures together, Mrs. Devrey. I see no reason to think this will be an exception.”

  “Nor do I, Mr. Belmont. Here we are.” She’d taken the four-in-hand with the coachman Nick had insisted they hire after Josh was born. Not because she agreed with Nick’s objections to her single-handed sorties into the town. Because—though she hadn’t yet told Nick—she was quite sure she was again with child. “Thank you again. Mr. James will deliver all the necessary papers to your office within the week.”

  Belmont tipped his hat again and walked on. The coachman helped her up. Carolina gripped the bar beside the carriage door with one hand and kept the other deep in her astrakhan muff, pressing it against her belly. Child of triumph, she thought. Child of wonder.

  Was he, Nick wondered, the only man in America who had delivered all his own children and so fervently thanked God for what seemed like a providential choice of career? Their second child was a daughter they called Goldie because she arrived on the September day in 1848 when the Herald announced to New York that in far-off California gold had been discovered the previous July.

  Nick read the intelligence aloud to Carolina as a distraction, since by then her contractions were coming every five minutes. “Listen to this extraordinary news from the West. ‘The entire population of California has gone to the mines, many return a few days later with hundreds of dollars in dust and nuggets. Spades and shovels are selling for ten dollars apiece. Blacksmiths are making two hundred and forty dollars a week. Even a child can pick up three dollar’s worth of gold in a day from the treasure streams.’”

  “How extraordinary. If it’s true. You always say the Herald isn’t reliable.”

  “I don’t know if it’s true, but it makes a change from all Horace Greeley’s ranting in the Tribune. Especially about the rights of women,” he added slyly.

  She felt another contraction beginning and panted her way through it, barely finding the breath to say, “Not now, Nicholas. I’m at an unfair disadvantage.”

  Carolina had vociferously supported the Women’s
Rights Convention organized the preceding year by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, though given the situation of herself and Nick, she could make no open move. Carolina even thought women should be allowed to vote. Nick laughed aloud each time she mentioned the notion.

  In a lull between pains, she grew serious. “Do you realize what this situation in California might mean, Nicholas?”

  Nick said he did not, but they could not continue the conversation until a few hours later, because their daughter was suddenly in a great rush to be born. Carolina, however, did not forget. She’d no sooner taken the child to her breast when she said, “Droves will now head west, Nicholas. They are going to be in an almighty hurry, and no wagon train can possibly get them there fast enough. I shall build another clipper to accommodate them. And we shall call this precious little girl Goldie to mark the occasion.” It was Nick who insisted that while Goldie was a fine name within the family, Gilda Turner was more fitting for the young lady she would grow up to be.

  He took no part, however, in naming Carolina’s second ship. She was called West Witch. Captain Paxos, still skipper of Hell Witch, which had by now made a dozen voyages to Hong Kong, produced a cousin, Socrates Paxos, to captain her. On her maiden voyage in August of 1849, West Witch took one hundred and twenty-two days to sail down the east coast and around the tip of South America at Cape Horn, then north by northwest to San Francisco. No earlier ship, not one of which had been a clipper, had done it in fewer than two hundred.