Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  How odd, he thought, that he should have to come all this way and sit with this unknown, wounded girl in this filthy room, and all the bizarre circumstances outside, before he could even frame that question, let alone face it honestly.

  The girl was quick to sense that he was not relating a string of history and stale conclusions; instead he was—not only in her presence but because of her presence—undergoing a private odyssey. She shared all of its excitement. The revelations of English Society as a holder and dispenser of power (a very different picture from the one promoted in the ladies’ journals) caused her no difficulty. She seemed very familiar with all the mechanisms he outlined. But Caspar’s revelation of himself kept the shine in her eyes, the smile on her lips, and on her tongue all those sympathetic little interrogatory words that help a narrative to flow and to flow.

  So, three hours later, Caspar knew far more about his present situation. But he understood all the less why his response to his father had been so extreme. Did he regret having laid bare so much? He looked down at Miss Lane and found he regretted none of it. He knew how artfully she had probed and winkled to hear more, more, more, and he begrudged her not one word of it. He hardly dared admit the comparison yet, but he believed he could tell her all those things he had once promised himself he would tell Mary Coen. Could tell her? He had already told her, or begun to.

  It bound him to her, he realized, in a unique way. If those ruffians broke in here now he would give his life to protect her—not, as it would have been in Wall Street, out of the general demands of chivalry, but out of…not love. Surely not? Out of something unique. Some uniquely great liking that was not quite love.

  His thirst was by now raging, and so, he felt sure, was hers. “I’ll go upstairs,” he said. “See if anyone up there can spare us some water.”

  He knocked on several doors and, though he was certain there were people within, he got no reply. He came back downstairs. Outside they were pouring oil over the officer’s corpse; one of the men had just made sure it was a corpse. Clearly they were going to hang him to the lamppost and torch him. Caspar was just wondering what to do for the best when one of the men climbed the lamppost. He was two-thirds of the way up, and on a level with their window, when he happened to glance inside and see Caspar looking out. He dropped like a flag and called several other louts urgently to him. They had a shouted consultation, with many glances up at the window.

  As soon as it was clear they intended to come in, Caspar told Miss Lane. She smiled. “Don’t fret yourself,” she said. “There’s no harm in them.”

  He gave one snort of derision, threw a blanket over her, told her at all costs to stay still, and, over her feeble protests, went to the door. He had only just shut it behind him when the first of the thugs burst open the front door. Caspar didn’t wait to argue or bluff it out but hurled himself at the fellow, leaping into the air and kicking out with both feet. He sent the man backward down the steps and projected himself, in reaction, halfway back up the passage.

  “Hon’able!” he heard her cry.

  “Be quiet, you stupid woman!” he shouted back.

  He reached the door just before the second assault. There was no key. He had to try to hold it shut. It was soon clear he was not going to be able to keep them at bay for very long. They were battering at it with some sort of implement, a bench or a pole of some kind.

  He would have to lead them away from this house, away from Miss Lane. He would open the door just in advance of one of their batterings and hope to take advantage of their confusion to leap out and get away. He counted the shuddering knocks to get the rhythm: one…two…three!

  On the three he jerked open the door and stood aside. A shaft from a demolished cart just grazed his thigh. But the men at the other end fell sprawling up the steps. His yelp of agony added to the shock as he limped-jumped over them and on them, down the steps, and limped-ran toward Pearl Street. As he went he shouted, “Fetch the priest! Fetch the priest!” in the hope of adding to the confusion.

  He made it into Pearl Street and almost reached John Street before he was brought down—not by any man, but by a stray dog as terrified as himself. Before he could rise again he was firmly in the grip of four of the rioters.

  He gave no struggle, pretending to be only semi-conscious. If he was to make another run for it, they should be lulled into lowering their guard. The people, seeing his state, offered no immediate violence. Surrounded by skipping, chattering children—the same who had stoned the officer—he was carried feet first back toward Platt Street.

  As they passed the house where he and the girl had taken refuge, the window he had used for a lookout was thrown up and a rioter poked his head out. “Go steady with him now, boys. He’s all right, that one, so he is.”

  Their attitude changed at once. Their grip on him became gentler and more supportive. As they neared the front step he gave up his pretence of semi-consciousness and struggled to be allowed to stand. They did not resist.

  “What is it?” one of his erstwhile captors asked a man at the top of the stairs.

  “Isn’t he with Joe Delaney’s girl!” the man answered.

  “If you’ve harmed her…!” Caspar shouted and ran at him up the steps.

  The man, much bigger than Caspar, caught and held him easily. “If we’ve harmed her!” he laughed. “Boys, that’s a good ’un. If we’ve harmed her! What about dem bastards wit’ the guns?”

  Further argument was cut short by the sudden appearance of Miss Lane herself at the doorway of the room. One man supported each arm.

  “Miss Lane!” Caspar broke free from the giant and ran to her.

  She levered herself out of the men’s support and almost fell on him. “It’s all right,” she whispered through her pain. “These are friends.”

  “We’ll see, shall we!” he said grimly. “Get a cart,” he told the two men who had held her. “Horse cart, handcart, anything she can lie on.” The two men looked for confirmation to the giant. “Damn your sides—move!” Caspar barked.

  They ran past him and down the steps.

  “And you—big fella—get the mattress from in there, or a clean one if you can find it, to cushion her.” He heard the man go. “Are you…could you get more comfortable?” he asked her gently. “Do you want to sit down? Or lie down.”

  She made a little murmur of pain and kept her arms tight about him. He felt her head shake on his chest. The blood seemed to have stopped oozing from the graze on her scalp.

  Once she was on the mattress—a brand-new one, looted from a shop, together with several luxurious covers—she became a great deal easier and more relaxed, until she turned her head and saw the ghastly, mutilated body of the police officer hanging from the lamppost. The cart began to move at that moment but her eyes were fixed upon the corpse until they were going north on Pearl Street and their refuge house cut off her view of it. Moments later it was put to the torch. They saw only the reflection of the flames in the windows around. The gleeful laughter followed them. The driver also laughing, told her all the things they had done to “dat dam fella.” Throughout the narrative her eyes never left Caspar’s face; he sat on the cart at her side, his legs dangling.

  There were tears in her eyes as the man finished. She pulled her hand from beneath the covers and grasped Caspar’s, giving it a squeeze. “God love you,” she said, not understanding the sudden pain that clouded his eyes.

  ***

  It was several hours before he was allowed into her bedroom—at her insistence—for a brief farewell. During that time he had come to terms with many surprises.

  She was not “Dee Lane” but a Delaney. Leonora Delaney, known for short as “Laney” Delaney. Her father, Joe Delaney, was an important politician in the Fourteenth Ward—undisputed territory of the Bowery Boys, the Plug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, the Shirt Tails, the Chichesters, the True Blue Americans, the O’Connell G
uards, and all the other gangs whose blood ran as green as a shamrock leaf. His response to the appearance in his house of a young English aristocrat as the saviour of his daughter’s life may be imagined. It took more swallowing than Joe Delaney could manage in the space of one evening, especially on top of a gruelling day spent in prying his constituents from the grip of the Yankee police, the agents of England.

  He made no secret of his dislike for Caspar; so much so that when the man came down from his daughter’s room and told Caspar to go up for a few minutes, Caspar could not help saying, “You surprise me, sir.”

  A grim smile of amusement showed briefly through the man’s set features. “’Tis that girl is surprising me,” he said. “But if I cross her, sure she’ll only be worse.”

  Laney was bathed and bound and comfortable in a huge mound of a goosedown mattress. A pretty little mob nightcap covered the wound on her head, leaving her auburn curls loose about her face. Caspar’s heart turned over. She was beautiful, he realized.

  She held out a hand. He took it and sat beside her. An old woman—a grandmother?—sitting in the corner, and unnoticed by Caspar until then, put down her knitting, cleared her throat, and pointed to their linked hands. Reluctantly Laney let go of him. “She’s mostly deaf,” she said quietly to Caspar. “If you talk no louder than this, she can’t follow.”

  “I’ve been pondering one or two things, Miss Laney,” he told her.

  She blinked prettily. “Yes, Hon’able?”

  “You were in no danger from that mob—”

  “Ah, ah!” she warned.

  “All right—from that Sunday-school outing. They wouldn’t have harmed a hair of your head.”

  “Did I say they would?”

  “You let me believe it.”

  She shrugged her right shoulder and smiled. “God, you’re so full of false beliefs, where would I begin? You believe our people have no good cause…”

  He drew breath to interrupt, but she went on: “Of course you do. You’re English, aren’t you? Don’t you damn us the minute you hear the brogue? You don’t even listen once you hear that.”

  “Oh, come up!” he cajoled. “You know full well there’s a difference.”

  “But you don’t deny it.”

  “I do, as it happens. But you’d have to know me and my family and what we’ve done in Ireland a great deal better before I’d expect you to believe it.”

  She looked at him a long time then. “All right,” she said. “I should have told you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Again the silence. She drew breath. She almost spoke. “I’m not going to tell you,” she said.

  He smiled knowingly. She joined in. “We could talk so easily there, couldn’t we,” she said. It was partly a comment on their silence, partly the explanation she had just refused him.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” she went on. “If you’re going to start in business here, you’re going to need the help of men like Joseph Delaney. So what you did today won’t…”

  He laid a finger on her lip to silence her. The old woman stopped knitting. He took his hand away and, when the woman looked down again, he briefly kissed the finger that was still warm and wet from her.

  “You don’t need to say that,” he told her earnestly. “If you said your father was my sworn enemy, I would still try and see you again. I am not to be bound to you by promises of help—you pick my nits, I’ll pick yours. There is no need for that.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “So am I.”

  This time the silence was warm and easy.

  “We’re mad,” he said at last.

  “Of course we are.” She spoke with her eyes shut. She seemed greatly at peace.

  He left her then and came quietly back downstairs. Halfway down he was surprised by Joe Delaney’s peremptory, “Is that the fella?”

  He looked over the banister rail. Delaney was holding the arm of the man Caspar had kicked down the steps of the house in Platt Street. Behind them stood the giant. Caspar turned and ran back to the stairhead…how could he escape? Where?

  “Come back, me boyo!” Delaney called, roaring with laughter. “We’re not after you.”

  As if Caspar would believe him! He ran to the back of the house and threw open a casement window. His thigh was beginning to get muscle-bound where the cart shaft had grazed it—could he make it over the sill, let alone to the outhouse roof below? Even then, was there any way out of the back yard? Grunting with the pain, he lifted one leg out of the window. Already there were heavy footsteps on the stair.

  He almost got the other leg over before his pursuer—the giant, not the man he had kicked—grabbed him back into the house, pinning him in a huge embrace.

  “You’re all right!” the voice said softly in his ear. “They mean you no harm now.”

  It sounded genuine enough. “I’ll walk,” Caspar said, pleased that the man let him go and made no attempt to stand near, where he could grab him if he ran again.

  “Well,” Delaney asked when Caspar showed again, “is it him?”

  “Sure how would I know!” The kicked man laughed and held his hand flat near his knees. “Wasn’t he so high when last I saw him. And me not much bigger.” But he turned to Caspar. “Do you know Keirvaughan?” he asked.

  “What if I do?”

  “Does your father be having a farm there?”

  “He might.”

  “John Stevenson?”

  “That’s my father’s name.”

  “Who took a big estate at Keirvaughan and paid the passage and eighty dollars each to three hundred families?”

  There was no point in denying it further. “He did so,” Caspar said in the man’s own vernacular. “And made going farms for the twenty who were left behind.”

  The kicked man turned to Delaney. “’Tis the very same,” he said.

  Delaney was one big grin, from political ear to political ear. “Young man!” he said. “Don’t I owe you the grandest apology that ever man gave or got?” He turned to the giant, who had overtaken Caspar on the stairs. “A drop, Michael,” he said. “That fella’s as dry as a stone and much too sober for my liking.” He beamed the full six inches of his smile back to Caspar. “Fáilte romhat!” he said, waving at the room beyond. “Fáilte romhat.”

  His cheerfulness was so sudden and so complete that Caspar instantly knew him as a man never to be trusted. But he would certainly be useful. In so many ways.

  “Sláinte!” Caspar said when the malt was in his hand.

  It was his second night in New York and the second night in a row that he ended up drunk. This was one hell of a city for liquoring up a stranger.

  That same evening the Great Eastern sailed from Liverpool, outward bound for New York. Among her passengers were the Countess of Wharfedale and her daughter Lady Winifred Stevenson.

  Chapter 45

  Although Boy organized and managed his railway working more effectively than even his father had dared to hope, he at last did something that really worried John. A Councillor Ericson, on one of the local councils, had done a great deal to ensure that Stevenson’s got the contract; it was the sort of “oil of angels” that went on all the time. And of course John had shown appropriate gratitude—or had thought it appropriate. Ericson had believed otherwise. He felt he should have had double, and he came, and said so to Boy.

  Boy had naturally refused to believe his father could be involved in any such underhanded business and had sent in a full report to the chief constable of Lancashire. After that it had taken John a great deal of behind-the-scenes work to keep the whole affair quiet and get it dropped. When this was safely done in mid-May, John asked his son to come down to London for a “half-term report.” Somehow the young man had to be made aware what sort of a world he was now moving in.

  They spent the morning going th
rough the books.

  “Even your mother says they’re impeccable; and there’s no higher praise possible,” John told him.

  They also went through the daily log and the progress sheets—Boy, in effect, talking his father step by step through the project and John just nodding and smiling and finding nothing to disagree with or even to criticize, except in the mildest way.

  It made for a very pleasant lunch, especially for Boy, who was longing to hear all the family news at first hand. He had felt it would be wrong during business hours to talk family.

  “How’s Winnie?” was his first question. “She’s stopped writing.” He hoped his father would now take him into his confidence—after all, he, too, believed that Winnie should be disciplined.

  “Er…she’s at a school in France. She’s very well. She writes to me several times a week.”

  The lie left Boy feeling betrayed. “Well, tell her to drop you just once in a while and think of sending me a line,” he said coldly.

  John nodded. He knew he was storing up future trouble in deceiving Young John like this. The fact was (as Winifred knew) the suppressed cry in each of her letters—her cold, damning, relentless, unanswerable letters—was tearing his heart out. He longed for some sufficient reason to bring her back home, but she gave him none. He had sent her there for falsely claiming she was submitting to his will; now she could repeat that claim—and make it a hundred times less sincere—and still he would release her. But he knew it was the very last thing she would now do.

  What was wrong with these Stevenson children? All as stiff-necked, in their different ways, as a rusted weathercock! Winifred, who would not bend an inch; Caspar, who simply vanished rather than bow to his father’s will; and now Young John, who had almost put a valued business friend in jail. Well, at least Young John was amenable to reason. He always saw sense in the end.

  They decided to walk around the park rather than go straight back to the office. It was a fine afternoon. The whole of the first half of May had been rainless and sunny, though rather on the cold side. The turf underfoot was hard and springy. Fleecy clouds streaming overhead kept a satisfying interplay of light and shade dappled over the view.