The Tea Rose

by Jennifer Donnelly

  There was a good deal of grunting and cursing. A yelp. A few minutes of silence. A cry of triumph, then: “Start it up!” The monster rumbled back to life. Fiona came crawling back out of the maze of pipes and shafts. Nick saw that she’d managed to get grease on her cheek and that one of her hands was bleeding. Tins rolled out again. She dropped her wrench and grabbed the first one, hurriedly inspecting its contents. A grin lit up her face.

  “Yes!” she cried, throwing it high into the air and laughing. “Yes! Yes! Yes! We did it!” As a hundred little bags rained down, she spotted Nick. With a squeal of delight, she picked one up and ran to him. She sat down on a tea chest and dangled the muslin bag – which he now saw was filled with tea – in front of him. The bag had a string attached to it by a tiny metal staple, and attached to the string’s other end was a red paper tag printed with the words “TasTea Quick Cup.”

  “It’s fabulous, my love. Just smashing. What on earth is it?” he asked, wiping the blood off her hand with his handkerchief. It had dripped over her fingers, onto her diamond wedding band and the stunning ten-carat emerald-cut diamond he’d given her for their first anniversary. He frowned at her hand. Rough, grimy, scarred in places, it belonged to a charwoman, a laundress, not the richest woman in New York. A woman who owned the largest, most lucrative tea concern in the country, as well as thirty-five Tea Rose salons and over a hundred high-end groceries.

  Fiona pulled her hand out of his grasp, impatient with his ministrations. “It’s a tea bag, Nick!” she said excitedly. “It’s going to modernize the entire industry! You just put one of these into a cup, add boiling water, steep, and you’re done. No mess, no waste. No cleaning teapots or making more than you need.”

  “Sounds very efficient,” Nick said approvingly. “Very American.”

  “Exactly!” Fiona crowed, leaping to her feet. “It’s all to do with saving time and effort, you see. ‘A new tea for a new century!’ Like that? Nate came up with it. He wants to target young people – modern types who think tea is fuddy-duddy – and create a whole new market. Nick, you should see Maddie’s sketches! One shows an actress in her dressing room having a Quick Cup. And there’s a typist making herself a Quick Cup at work, and a student having one while he’s studying, and a bachelor having one as he’s shaving. And Nick, Nick … listen to this: Nate’s hired the composer Scott Joplin to write us a song. It’s called ‘The Hasty TasTea Tea Bag Rag’! A month from now, everyone will be humming it and dancing to it. Oh, Nick luv, can’t you just see it?”

  Fiona’s incomparable eyes sparkled with blue fire. Her face was flushed. Nick thought then, as he had on so many occasions, that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her passion made her so. He found himself every bit as thrilled as she was about her latest invention. She’s always had that gift, he thought, an astonishing ability to make other people feel as excited about her ideas and projects as she was. It explained, in large part, her enormous success.

  He remembered how, years ago, she’d convinced the Southern states to drink TasTea. Her sales in that region had been dismal. She’d tried ads, discounts, and contests, but nothing seemed to spark interest. Her fellow tea merchants said the South was an impossible market to crack. People drank lemonade and punch and mint juleps. Few people drank tea; it was too damn hot for it. Fiona had mulled these gloomy statements for weeks, racking her brain for a way to prove her competitors wrong. And then, one morning at breakfast, she’d impetuously poured the remains of her teapot over a glass of ice. “If we can’t get them to drink TasTea hot, we’ll get them to drink it cold,” she’d declared.

  She’d tinkered and experimented until she’d perfected a technique for brewing a crisp, clear glass of iced tea, then she, Stuart, and a half dozen of her salesmen had marched on the South. They set up booths in cities and towns, flying banners that said, THIRSTEA? TRY A NICE COLD, ICE COLD TASTEA! They tirelessly handed out glass after glass of ice tea and coupons good for a nickel off a half-pound tin. Fiona charmed, cajoled, and strong-armed people into trying her tea and they found it every bit as bracing and refreshing as they found her. By the time she and her troops limped home three months later, they’d won the South handily. Nick didn’t doubt for a second that she’d convince the whole country to buy her new tea bags, either.

  Fiona was humming a ragtime tune now. Laughing, she grabbed his hands, pulled him up, and commenced a giddy quickstep. Nick followed her light steps, keeping up with her perfectly, then stopped and twirled her around. As he did, a vicious pain shot through his heart, making him gasp. With a great effort, he managed not to clutch his chest.

  Fiona stopped dead. Her smile was gone. “What is it?” she asked. “Nick, are you all right? Tell me what’s wrong. Is it your heart?”

  He waved off her concern. “No, darling, not at all. It’s my back, actually. A muscle cramp, I think. I’m getting so old and creaky, I must’ve pulled something.”

  Fiona’s expression told him she didn’t believe him. She made him sit down and started to fuss over him, but he reassured her that he was perfectly fine. He made a good show of massaging the muscles in the small of his back, confident the pain in his chest would subside in a minute or two. Fiona, unconvinced, was asking him whether he thought it might be a good idea to call Dr. Eckhardt when Stuart came over to say hello, accompanied by the mechanic, Dunne, a grizzled and cantankerous man, who – Nick learned – had come from Pittsburgh with the machine to make certain it worked properly once installed in its new home.

  The discussion turned to the machine’s capabilities and Stuart, giddy with plans for world domination, babbled on about output and distribution. Nick tried to steady his breathing, hoping it would quiet his heart. He had to get out of there. Quickly.

  A sudden crunch of gears hurried Stuart and Dunne back to the machine. Feeling as if a giant hand were squeezing his heart, Nick stood and lightly told Fiona that he had to go, too. He said he was expecting Hermione, the manageress of his gallery, to stop by with the weekly report. Hermione Melton was a young Englishwoman he’d poached from the Metropolitan Museum two years ago, after Eckhardt had told him he could no longer work. To his relief, he saw his hale-and-hearty act was working. The worry had receded from Fiona’s face. He asked her if she would be home for supper. She said she would. He kissed her good-bye and sent her back to work.

  The pain in his chest was paralyzing now. Slowly, he walked toward his carriage. He climbed in, leaned against the seat, and closed his eyes. When he could, he reached into his breast pocket, took out a small bottle, and extracted a white pill. It would calm the struggling organ that was heaving and flopping inside him like a beached fish. “Come on,” he groaned, “do something.”

  After what seemed like an eternity, his carriage pulled up outside the palatial Fifth Avenue mansion that he and Fiona shared. He climbed out and steadied himself against the balustrade that flanked the front steps, his trembling hand blue against the white marble. The door opened. He looked up and saw Foster, his butler. He heard the man’s customary welcome turn into a cry of alarm. “Sir! My goodness … let me help you …”

  Nick felt his legs go weak as the pain in his chest exploded, engulfing him in a burning blaze of light. “Foster, get Eckhardt …” he managed to gasp in the instant before he crumpled.

  Fiona Finnegan Soames, her skirts gathered in her hand, picked her way carefully over the lattice of train tracks that separated her tea factory from West Street. A young night watchman, perhaps eighteen years of age, trailed after her.

  “Can’t I hail you a carriage, Mrs. Soames?” he asked. “You shouldn’t be out by yourself. It’s dark and there’s all types about at this hour.”

  “I’ll be fine, Tom,” Fiona said, striding ahead of him, suppressing a smile at his concern. “I’m in need of a walk tonight. Too wound up about the new machine.”

  “She’s a beauty, ain’t she, Mrs. Soames? One hundred bags a minute, Mr. Bryce told me. I ain’t never seen anything like her.”
/>   “Indeed she is,” Fiona said. She stopped suddenly and turned to face the lad. “Why is it a she, Tom?” she asked.

  “Beg your pardon, ma’am?”

  “The new machine. Why is it a she, not a he?”

  Tom shrugged. “Same reason a boat’s a she, I guess. You never know what it’s gonna do. Sweet one minute, meaner than an old sewer rat the next. Just like a woman.”

  Fiona arched an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

  Too late, Tom realized his mistake. “I … I’m sorry, Mrs. Soames,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean nuthin’ by it. I always forget you’re a woman.”

  “Thank you very much!”

  “I … I didn’t meant it like that,” Tom said, hopelessly flustered now. “You’re awful pretty and all, Mrs. Soames, it’s just that you … you know what you want. You’re not all silly and fluttery. Batting your lashes and making like you don’t know how to cross the street on your own. You know what I mean?” He took his cap off. “Aw, geez, Mrs. Soames, please don’t fire me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Fiona said. “Speaking one’s mind isn’t a firing offense here.”

  She expected the boy to be relieved, instead he looked pained. “See?” he said. “You never know where you stand with a woman. If you were a man, you’d have tossed me out on my ear.”

  “Then I’d be a fool.”

  Tom’s confusion deepened. “For what? Being a man?”

  Fiona laughed. “That, too. But mostly for firing one of my best workers.”

  The lad grinned. “Thanks, Mrs. Soames. You … you’re all right.”

  “For an old sewer rat,” Fiona added with a mischievous wink.

  “Yeah! I mean, no! I mean –”

  “Good night, Tom,” Fiona called, stepping into the street.

  As she crossed West Street, deftly dodging carriages, trolleys, and the odd automobile, she walked at her usual brisk pace with her head held high, her shoulders thrown back, her gaze direct and unshrinking. That directness – not just in her gaze, but in her speech, her demands and expectations, her entire manner – had become her trademark. She was known for her ability to see through the bluster and condescension of bankers and businessmen and cut through the false numbers and padded invoices of suppliers and distributors. The coltish uncertainty of her teenage years had vanished, replaced by an indelible, unshakable confidence, the kind earned from hard work and achievement, from battles waged and won.

  As she reached the east side of the street, she turned to take one last look at her factory, pleased by what ten years of her labor had wrought – the huge red freight cars, each with the white TasTea logo emblazoned on its sides, and the massive building rising above them. Behind the building were TasTea’s docks, port to a fleet of moored barges standing ready to depart at dawn’s high tide. Some would travel across the river to New Jersey, others northward to bustling Hudson towns: Rhinebeck, Albany, and Troy. Still others would sail farther yet, up the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario, where huge freighters waited to take TasTea to the bustling cities that lined the Great Lakes, ports of entry to the burgeoning northwestern states.

  Most women would not find enchantment in a riverside factory, but to Fiona it was beauty itself. Worry wrinkled her brow as she thought about her new machine and what she hoped it would do. She had spent a fortune on it, and she would spend more still. On local and national ad campaigns, on packaging and promotions and new means of distribution. On every plan, scheme, and stunt she, Stuart, and Nate could dream up. Over the coming year, she would be shoveling money at this new venture. It had better work.

  She took a deep breath and blew it out again. The frogs were on the move. She’d long ago decided that “butterflies” was too delicate a term to describe the feeling she got in the pit of her stomach when she undertook a new project. These weren’t butterflies she was feeling; they were big, heavy bullfrogs. She knew them well. They’d visited her when she’d first unlocked the door to her uncle’s abandoned shop. And the day she’d ordered her first fifty chests of tea from Millard’s. They were there when Miss Nicholson, long dead now, had sold her the building that would become The Tea Rose. They’d worried her when she and Michael opened the second Finnegan’s grocery, on Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and every time she’d opened a new Tea Rose, be it in Brooklyn Heights, Baltimore, or Boston.

  Nick could tell when she had them. He would fix her a pot of tea, steeped until it could strip paint. Just how she liked it. “Douse the little bastards with this,” he’d say. “Frogs hate tea.”

  At this stage of her life, she recognized the frogs as necessary evils, little green demons whose presence forced her to rethink obsessively all her assumptions and expectations, to streamline plans and expenditures, and in so doing, minimize the margins for error. She knew by now that she ought to worry only if the frogs didn’t plague her.

  They jumped and bounced now, but even their acrobatics couldn’t dampen her enthusiasm for Quick Cup. Oh, the promise that new machine held! If Quick Cup did well in the United States, she would launch it in Canada and eventually England and France, too – markets ripe for a new approach to tea – and conceivably triple, even quadruple, her sales.

  She continued north past Jane Street, lost in her thoughts, unconsciously walking faster in an effort to burn off the jittery excitement coursing through her. I really should hail a cab, she thought, I don’t want to keep Nick waiting. But she didn’t. She was still anxious and couldn’t bear the thought of riding in a stuffy carriage. And there was something else disturbing her. Underneath the jostling of the frogs lay a deeper dread – a fear for Nick’s well-being.

  That pain he’d had at the factory today – had it really been his back, or his heart? His hand hadn’t gone to his chest. And he always rubbed his chest when he had pains. And he would’ve taken the medicine Eckhardt had given him. He’d been ordered to take it right away at the very first sign of discomfort and he was very good about doing so. Fiona’s brow smoothed a little, her shoulders relaxed. He had looked a little pale, and tired, but that was to be expected. After all, he had a serious illness and there were bound to be effects. “But he’s really all right,” she said aloud. “He is.”

  Over the last ten years, Fiona had taken every precaution to ensure Nick’s health. She had seen to it that he ate well – not his champagne-and-caviar diet of old. She made sure he had plenty of rest and the necessary exercise. And once, in a misguided burst of conviction that someone somewhere must be able to cure syphilis, not just treat it, she’d dismissed Eckhardt and engaged a series of doctors from both America and Europe to examine him.

  Nick had acquiesced, patiently tolerating the poking and prodding of the first half dozen physicians she’d inflicted upon him. He put up with stinking poultices and vile medicines. He endured therapeutic baths – sitz baths, steam baths, air baths. Massages. A shaved head. Open windows in December, long underwear in July. But when the seventh doctor put him on a diet of nothing but boiled cauliflower and celery juice and tried to bar him from listening to his new gramophone – too stressful to the nerves, the doctor had declared – his patience snapped. He told Fiona her quacks were only hastening his demise and demanded Eckhardt’s immediate reinstatement.

  Chastened, she had gone to the German to apologize and to beg him to come back. And without fuss or recrimination, he’d agreed. When she thanked him for his graciousness, saying it was more than she deserved, he’d waved her words away. An expert on the physical workings of the human heart, Werner Eckhardt also had a deep understanding of its emotional motivations. “Be careful of too much hoping, ja?” he’d warned her. “It is hope, not despair, that undoes us all.”

  Eckhardt could say what he liked. She would continue to hope. And he would continue to take good care of her precious Nicholas. If he hadn’t been able to arrest the disease, he’d at least managed to slow its effects. It had not attacked Nick’s brain or nervous system, as Eckhardt had originally feared. It had settled in his heart and sta
yed there. And as far as she could tell, it had not gained a great deal of ground since the day she’d found him deathly ill at Mrs. Mackie’s. Nothing will happen to him, she assured herself. He was fine and he was going to stay fine. He had to, because she could not bear losing her best friend, her husband.

  She smiled to herself now, remembering the first years of their madcap marriage. They’d lived in Nick’s flat above his art gallery and The Tea Rose. She had spent all her time opening more tearooms, more groceries, and building her TasTea business, and Nick had worked to establish himself as the city’s preeminent dealer of Impressionist art. Both of them were out of the flat all day, chasing business, making money, utterly devoted to their work. They limped home at night after Seamie had been retrieved from Mary’s, opened a bottle of wine, and ate whatever they could scrounge up from The Tea Rose’s kitchen, hearing Seamie’s lessons, sharing the events of their day, advising and encouraging each other.

  Neither Fiona nor Nick had any interest in domestic duties and it became a joke between them that nobody in their marriage wanted to be the wife. Now, poor Foster was stuck with the job. It fell to him to decide what they would eat for supper, what kind of flowers were required for the dining room, and if the laundress was getting the sheets white enough.

  “Carriage, missus?” a cabdriver bellowed at her, jarring her out of her thoughts. She was about to accept his offer when she realized where she was: Gansevoort Street, with its Friday-night market. Dozens of braziers glowed brightly. Their hot orange flames beckoned to the evening shoppers, drawing them close for a handful of chestnuts, a roasted potato, hot soup. Fiona could hear two women chatting, their mittened hands wrapped around fat brown mugs, their breath and the vapor from the hot liquid mingling in the cold night air. She saw a butcher hold up a rope of sausages, smelled doughnuts frying. “No, thank you,” she told the driver, waving him on. Within seconds she had turned off West onto Gansevoort, indescribably happy – as always – to be at a market.