The houses looked like country mansions, more like those she had seen surrounding the village of Manhattanville than like anything in New York City. They were identical, each three stories tall with a mansard roof and a chimney at each corner and a covered porch in front. Made of wood, which she would later learn had been chosen because in this location it offered better feng shui than either brick or brownstone.
Both houses had a large walled garden behind. In the one that was to be Mei-hua’s a grave had been dug for the coffin of Samuel Devrey.
“Nick, I’ve had a letter from the Mother Superior of the Madams of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville. Linda Di did not return to school after the Christmas holiday.” It was no surprise that the nun would write to Carolina; for eight years she had been sending the checks that paid the girl’s tuition. She sent them first from the house on Fourteenth Street. When later they moved to Sunshine Hill, the letters simply omitted a return address. In recent years the checks had been sent from the Canal Street offices of Devrey Shipping. That was where the nun had written, explaining the situation and returning Mrs. Devrey’s latest check. Zac, who in this winter of 1852 had left Princeton in favor of lodging in the town and working full time for Devrey’s, had brought the letter to his mother.
Nick was immediately concerned, though he tried not to show it. “Perhaps she simply had enough of school. The girl’s sixteen, after all.”
“She wasn’t to be graduated for two years more.”
“Children do not always do what their parents intend they should do,” Nick said. They had both thought Zachary should finish his education at Princeton before taking his place in the business empire Carolina had built for him. He had, after all, three years left before reaching his majority and coming into his inheritance. But Zac had insisted he was not cut out for the academic life. Let me go to work at Devrey’s. I want to start on the docks. Learn everything from the ground up. Carolina had made him promise he would spend only one day a week in the rough and tumble of the waterfront and work the rest of the time in the office, but neither she nor Nick had thought it wise to insist Zac stay at Princeton.
Linda Di was, however, an entirely different case. “I am not easy in my mind about this, my love.”
“Be easy,” Nick said, kissing her forehead. “I will go to Cherry Street tomorrow and see what I can learn.”
He was gone most of the next day and returned long after the dinner hour, carrying a huge bunch of white lilies, which he presented to her with a flourish. “For my bride to be.”
“Nick, what are you saying? And they’re gorgeous, but where did you get lilies in February?”
“It seems a gentleman on Staten Island has been raising them in a glasshouse and bringing them into the city to sell. A promotional effort connected with a scheme to build a Crystal Palace in New York next year. Like the one in London.”
Carolina took the flowers, burying her face in them and inhaling the intoxicating scent. “Lilies in the dead of winter. Whatever next? Nick, what did you mean by bride to be?”
“You’ve pollen on your nose,” he said, using his handkerchief to wipe away the offending yellow-orange dust. “I mean that we can marry, my dearest love. Samuel Devrey died last month.”
“Nick, are you sure?”
“Absolutely. I had it from at least five different people on Cherry Street. Mind you, these days there aren’t a lot of people you can speak sense to down there. The neighborhood has become astonishingly unsafe and unsavory. I think you must sell the houses at once, my dear. Or perhaps simply let them go.”
It was not Carolina’s way to allow any asset simply to go, as Nick put it, but that was another problem for another day. “What about the girl?” she asked.
“I’m told she hasn’t been seen since Sam died.”
“But she can’t just have disappeared.”
“To all intents and purposes she has. Forget about it, my love. Will you marry me?”
“Of course I will marry you. But I won’t be put off by a not-so-romantic proposal, Nick, not even one accompanied by these gorgeous lilies. You know more than you’re telling me.”
“Very well. They’re all gone. The woman Mei-hua and the servant Ah Chee, and the girl. There was an enormous Chinese funeral procession with a hearse and drums and what-all. And that’s the last anyone saw of them on Cherry Street.”
“And? Come, Nick. I know you too well. There is an and. Tell me.”
“There’s a white man involved, a Mr. Kurt Chambers. He serves with me on the board of St. Vincent’s Hospital. It seems that Mr. Chambers has business interests in the area, and he is said to have arranged everything to do with Samuel’s funeral.”
Carolina took a few moments to think through all the implications. “Are you saying this Mr. Kurt Chambers may have simply spirited the girl away with her mother and their servant? Nick, that’s dreadful.”
“It may be, but then again it may not. I shall have to make further inquiries, my love. But you are not to trouble your head about it. Frankly, given what that neighborhood has become, there’s an element of genuine danger in all this and I don’t fancy your being involved. In fact, I must insist that you are not.”
Earlier that day, while he was in the city, she had led two runaway slaves out of the Sunshine Hill root cellar and down the cliff to a hidden and makeshift dock, where a small rowboat waited to ferry them to a rendezvous with a Devrey ship bound for Halifax. They were to be smuggled aboard, then passed off as servants to a family active in the cause of abolition who were legitimately bound for Canada and with whom Bella Klein had made the arrangement some weeks earlier. The whole endeavor was facilitated by perhaps the most radical preacher in all the northeast, the Reverend Henry Beecher of the Presbyterian Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, whose antislavery sermons were notorious in rabidly antiabolition New York. “Nothing dangerous,” Carolina agreed. “Of course not. But you must speak with this Mr. Kurt Chambers, Nick. Promise me you will.”
He did promise, not mentioning that he’d already sent a note round to Manon, asking her to arrange a meeting between himself and Chambers as a matter of personal and urgent business.
Nothing in Mei Lin’s life had prepared her to live in such a house as the one on what was officially designated the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, though the streets were still largely woods and grass grew between the patchy cobbles of the avenue.
In the house in which Mei-hua, Mei Lin, and Ah Chee were installed there was something Mr. Chambers called a bathroom. It had tiled walls and a large tub that was permanently in place and could be filled from its own spigots, one for hot and one for cold water. And while Mei-hua insisted on using the same chair she had always used, with a large bucket below that was emptied by Ah Chee, the house had a privy attached to the rear. One could reach it without ever having to go outside, and unpleasant odors were carried away by a tall pipe that ran to the top of the roof. Additional wonders were a cast-iron cookstove in the kitchen, gas lighting in every room, and heat that came to all three floors from a big, coal-fed boiler in the cellar.
When, after the interment in the garden, they first entered the house, they had found everything from their rooms on Cherry Street already put in place. Mei Lin supposed carters must have collected the things after the funeral procession left, and taken a quicker and quieter route uptown. There was other furniture in the house as well, a necessity since the new living quarters were at least ten times more spacious than the old, but everything looked much like the furniture that had come from Canton with her mother. Whether Mr. Chambers had it all sent from China, perhaps on one of Mrs. Devrey’s clippers, or had it made here, she did not know. Either was possible. Mr. Kurt Chambers was a man, Mei Lin was convinced, who could make anything happen simply by snapping his fingers.
After the burial the mourners who had followed the hearse were invited inside, and everyone ate a huge banquet. The food was the sort Ah Chee prepared for major festivals, but mor
e of it and some even more delicious, though of course neither Mei Lin nor Mei-hua said so to Ah Chee. “Poor quality,” Mei-hua whispered loyally. “But very kind lord to do all this. Very kind.” She looked pointedly at her daughter, who she suspected was going to give trouble of some possibly catastrophic sort as soon as the fuss of the funeral was ended. “Very kind lord deserves utmost respect and obedience.”
“Very rich lord,” Ah Chee said. She had been calculating the expenditure of money from the moment when the Lord Kurt arrived with the news of the old lord’s death, bringing the white clothes the old lord’s widow and his daughter would require. But canny shopper that she was and as clever as she had become in the matter of judging the coins and bills of this place, Ah Chee had long since lost track of how many strings of copper cash would have been required to make everything occur as it had. “Very rich,” she said, as she drank the soup that ended the funeral banquet. “Very, very rich,” and left it at that.
Eventually, when everyone had gone except for two civilized men who were busy cleaning up, Mei Lin went to find Mr. Chambers and thank him. “I am very grateful. We all are. My mother and Ah Chee as well.”
Mei-hua was sitting nearby, and though she could not understand the English words she understood what was happening. She murmured that her daughter should kowtow. “Show proper respect. Proper. Very kind lord do all this.”
Mei Lin could not bring herself to kowtow to Mr. Chambers. She had been performing the kneeling bows for two days now. Some in front of her father’s coffin, others in front of the replicas of all the Chinese gods. She had even lit countless joss sticks and banged gongs and wailed as custom demanded. But to perform the ritual of a deeply reverential obeisance before Kurt Chambers was, she knew, to give him something of herself she was not at all ready to offer and might never be. “Thank you,” she said again. “I mean it most sincerely.”
Chambers, who had in fact spent upwards of thirty thousand dollars on the funeral (nine thousand alone in bribes to the police to insure that the procession would be allowed to march unmolested from Cherry Street to here) and considerably more on the property and pair of houses, waited a moment, giving her time to offer him the profound respect her mother had correctly identified as appropriate. When after a few seconds it was clear she would not, he smiled and nodded his head. “You are most welcome, Miss Di. Now I will leave you all to get some rest. You must be very tired.”
“You mean us to live here, don’t you?” Mei Lin blurted. “My mother and Ah Chee and me, here in this house.”
“Of course. It has been prepared for you for some time. I told you so a month ago when we were at Delmonico’s.”
She felt her cheeks coloring, but she didn’t care. She really was exhausted, and her tiredness was like a drug; combined with the plum wine she had drunk, it loosened her tongue. “Are you to be in the house next door?”
“I live there, yes.”
“And you intend that I…You mean for me and you…You said…”
“You will be my wife. Yes. But not for three months. That is when the official mourning period you owe your father will have passed. Then we will find an auspicious day and everything will be arranged.”
“But I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to live here. I don’t even know where there is a Catholic church. I want—”
“Enough.” He spoke softly and in English but in the same tone that demanded strict obedience which he had used at the restaurant. “Tell me please where you can go instead? Where can your mother go? Will she be safe anywhere else in this city? Anywhere she is not under my protection?”
Mei Lin shook her head.
“You are correct. She will not be. Neither will you. What can you do to take care of yourself, let alone your mother and the old servant? What has your convent education prepared you for except to be a rich man’s wife, and who besides me is interested in a half-Chinese mongrel?” When he had finished speaking he turned away, ignoring the tears running down Mei Lin’s cheeks and not waiting to see if she intended to make a reply. He went instead to bow to Mei-hua and wish her good night, then he left.
The next day he appeared again for just long enough to tell them there was a carriage and a driver at their disposal whenever they wished to leave the house to shop or do anything else, including attend church on Sunday, and to point out the stables in the rear that the two houses shared. “The driver is a yang gwei zih,” he said, “but he can be trusted.”
“By whom?” Mei Lin asked.
“By all of us.”
“You are not afraid I will run away?” Mei Lin asked.
“Run to where, Miss Di? The Madams of the Sacred Heart perhaps? I have no doubt they would take you back, and that Mrs. Devrey would continue to pay the cost of your tuition—”
“How do you know about that? How do you know everything? Are you some kind of evil wizard?”
“Stop. You are needlessly exciting yourself, and you will disturb your mother’s harmony if you continue to speak to me in that tone of voice. As I was saying, I expect you could return to Manhattanville, but where would your mother go?”
Mei Lin looked around, observing the comfortable and appropriate surroundings in which Mamee and Ah Chee were now housed.
“Yes,” Mr. Chambers said softly. “Exactly. I can see you are considering the available alternatives. Very wise.”
“You mean,” she said, “that my mother and Ah Chee can stay here only if I do.”
“Entirely correct. Of course, you can go downtown and find Lee Big Belly and ask him to take your mother. I’m sure he would agree. And that he would also allow Ah Chee to come with her. She could cook for all of them. Big Belly and the others who would be using your mother.”
Mei Lin stared at the floor and made no reply.
“Nothing in this world is free, my dear,” Kurt Chambers said. “Nothing. It is a lesson you may as well learn now as later.”
Chapter Thirty-three
“IT IS GOOD of you to meet me, Mr. Chambers.”
“But I am delighted to do so, Dr. Turner. I rearranged my schedule as soon as I heard from Sister Manon. A man of your distinguished reputation…No, not merely delighted, I am honored.”
Chambers turned and snapped his fingers in the direction of one of the waiters scurrying back and forth in the packed Rotunda Bar of the Astor House Hotel. They were seated at one of the bar’s few tables. Clouds of pipe and cigar smoke nearly obscured the flickering gaslight, but the waiter approached at once. Chambers pointed to their glasses. They were drinking straight rye whiskey, both having bypassed the fancy mixtures called cocktails that were so much in fashion. Despite the crowd in the place, all of whom seemed to be shouting for service in that way New Yorkers had of wanting everything done ten minutes earlier, fresh drinks appeared at their table within moments after Chambers had given the order. “Do you come here often?” Nick asked.
“No more often than I go to other venues, Dr. Turner. I am a man of business. In New York City that requires one to visit many places.”
“Including Cherry Street?”
Chambers sat back and took a cigar case from the inside pocket of his frock coat, offering it first to his guest. Nick shook his head. Chambers spent the next few moments rolling the cigar near his ear, then cutting the tip, finally lighting it with a wad of paper he held to the gas jet on the wall beside them. “Convenient sort of seat,” he said smiling. “If one wishes to light a cigar.”
Nick nodded.
“Cherry Street,” Chambers said, exhaling a long trail of smoke. “Why do you ask?”
“Perhaps, being a relative newcomer to our city, you didn’t know. Samuel Devrey was my cousin. I understand you made all the arrangements for his funeral.”
“Ah, yes, I may be a newcomer, but even I have heard stories of the once legendary family feud between the Devreys and the Turners. So perhaps you didn’t know how ill your cousin was or that his death was imminent.”
Nick knew he’d lose if h
e tried playing word games with Kurt Chambers; the man was slicker than he would ever be. “In fact I examined my cousin shortly before Christmas. I did know how ill Samuel was, and I was not surprised to hear of his death. My inquiry has more to do with the living than the dead, Mr. Chambers. The household my cousin maintained on Cherry Street was certainly irregular. Nonetheless, I am concerned about a Chinese lady called Mei-hua, and her daughter who is known as Miss Linda Di.”
“I understand, Dr. Turner. But I can assure you both women are quite well and in comfortable circumstances. As you say, I did make all the funeral arrangements, then I helped the ladies about whom you inquire, along with their old servant, move to a new home. Since you visited so recently, I’m sure you’ll have seen how their former neighborhood has deteriorated. Cherry Street is no longer suitable for respectable people. I’m sure you agree.”
“I do. But frankly, Mr. Chambers, it’s your involvement that puzzles me. What has any of this to do with you?”
Chambers exhaled another stream of pungent blue-gray cigar smoke and smiled. “I should have explained earlier, Dr. Turner. I am, I think, being overly discreet. Miss Di is my fiancée. We are to be married in the spring.”
Kurt Chambers became who he was because in 1810 a man named Cheng Yu walked out of Kwangchow, the bustling city the foreign traders called Canton, taking with him the clothes on his back and a pack containing seven taels of silver, the red silk robe that had belonged to his grandfather, and a few other things only slightly less precious.
He walked for five years.
Northwards the length of China. Across Mongolia into Russia. Through central Europe into the German-speaking lands along the Rhine, eventually into France, and finally, on the only leg of the journey he could not make on foot, into England. He was helped on his way by courage and cleverness and the fact that he had picked up a smattering of many foreign tongues from the traders of Kwangchow.
City of God Page 47
