City of Glory (68 page)

“No,” Eugenie shook her head. “You know everything, Meg. You always do.”

“So with you and the pirate, it’s just about the blackbirding?”

“Yes. But the night I was with Gornt, he said something about pirates, as if he knew…”

Eugenie was nibbling her lower lip. Meg knew that was always a sign of worry. “No way he could know. Ain’t nothing to be scared of.”

“There is,” Eugenie said. “I feel it in my bones. Where’s Gornt now?”

“No idea,” Meg admitted. “One minute he was there, with all the butchers and their cleavers in a ring around him, next minute he was gone.”

And no sign of him all day today. The
Evening Post
had published an early noon edition with a full description of the riot, including a number of details Meg hadn’t reported, but had nothing to say about where Gornt Blakeman might be. Finally, a little after three, she’d sent Meg into the streets to see if there was news. Over two hours now and…Ah! Thank heaven. There she was, hurrying up the road.

Eugenie ran to the door, throwing it open before Meg had come all the way up the path. “Well? What’s happened? What did you hear?”

“Just a minute. Let me get my shawl off and rest my bones.” They went inside, into the front room, and Meg plopped her bulk into the nearest chair. “Might be you’d like to sit down as well,” she said.

“Bad news,” Eugenie whispered, sitting not because Meg told her to but because her knees felt weak.

“Depends. Gornt Blakeman’s dead.”

It shouldn’t really matter. He was never going to marry her. She’d known as much and made her choices. Still the thought of never seeing him again…“How did it happen, Meg?”

“No idea. Someone said stabbed. Someone else said he was shot. Heard he was drowned as well. Thing is, Jacob Hays and his men brung his body back to the city and he’s dead for sure.”

“Back from where?”

“A pirate ship as was hiding over near Wallabout Bay. I figure it’s the same one you was taken to.”

“Of course it’s the same. There aren’t going to be two of them.” Eugenie sprang up, starting to pace. “I knew it! I told you there was some connection.” Her mind racing, trying to figure out what, if anything, an alliance between Gornt Blakeman and Tintin meant to her. Particularly since Blakeman was dead. “It shouldn’t change anything. Even if he was trying to get Tintin to do business with him—”

“Stop talking and listen. I told you the news was bad. You ain’t heard the worst of it yet.”

Eugenie stopped pacing and put her hands on the back of a chair to support herself. “What?”

“Tintin’s dead as well. Along with all his pirates. And they’re fixing to sink the pirate ship. Talk is, it was the cutter, Joyful Turner, as brought them all down.”

Eugenie stayed where she was, not moving, her eyes closed, her mind racing. It took her a moment to see it all.

“You want me to get you some hot tea?” Meg said gently. “Or maybe fix a bath? I know things look black now, pet, your lovely scheme all gone to naught and no money coming in after all. But you’ll find another man to marry. Ain’t one alive can resist the way you look, and—”

“Where’s the newspaper?” Eugenie said. “The early edition of the
Evening Post.
Find it.”

“What you want a paper for, when—”

“Find it, Meg. It must have been taken down to the kitchen. Get it. Go! Go!”

She couldn’t stay still now. Her body needed to move, to keep up with her mind. Back and forth, back and forth, across the room, window to door. It would work. There was no reason why it shouldn’t. She’d make it work.

“Here it is.” Meg came back, carrying the paper that had just missed going onto the kitchen fire. “Cook was about to—”

“Give it to me. And you can leave now, Meg. Go fix that bath you promised me.”

She waited until she was alone to read the story a second time. It had run over to the second page, two columns above the usual advertisements about runaway slaves and another reminding the public that Devrey’s Pharmacy now offered delivery of their superior goods. “F. X. Gallagher,” Eugenie read the words aloud in a soft whisper. “A butcher by trade, but also believed to have numerous dealings with the Irish blackbirding gangs of Five Points.”

Gornt dead. Tintin dead. F. X. Gallagher dead. A great hole left in the ordering of the lrish blackbirding gangs. How could they function without someone to organize their activities, speak to the magistrates, obtain the proper papers…Her heart was thudding the same way it did when she had her legs wrapped around a man’s hips and he was…Forget all that. Forever if need be. Forget Meg’s notion that she return to the endless scheming to attract a rich husband. Another road was open. She would take it.

The Synagogue on Mill Street, 9
P.M.

The Jewish Sabbath was over, but the sanctuary was as beautiful by candlelight as it had been when the sunlight poured through the golden-colored glass of the windows. “The urns, Dr. Turner,” Samson Simson said. “You may remember I went to great trouble to call your attention to them when we met here before.”

The pair of urns were set high above the two doors to what Joyful remembered was called the
hehal,
the Ark of the Covenant. “Engraved with almond branches, I do remember, Mr. Simson.”

“Excellent. Because you’re considerably taller than I am, sir, that was why. I could see nothing amiss, but I had to be sure that for a man of greater stature, someone such as yourself, that would also be the case.”

“Because you hid the real authentification in one of the urns.”

“The one on the left, yes. Some might see that as sacrilege, Dr. Turner. I do not believe it to be so. I saw it as a way to protect this country, and therefore the future of my people. And that, sir, is why we meet here, not in my law office, or in a private home.”

Joyful waited, knowing there was more to come.

“I told you before, Dr. Turner, I consider these United States not just my country as it is any citizen’s. To me this land is a place of sanctuary for my people, a nation where we may live in peace.” Then, in an abrupt change of subject, he said, “A jewel such as the Great Mogul, it is one of the world’s great rarities, an extraordinary treasure. I’m sure you agree.”

Joyful had been thinking almost continuously about the stone since he gave it to Manon. It had, for example, struck him as strange that Astor hadn’t asked him about it when they spoke that morning, or that Vionne had said nothing about the diamond when Joyful dined with him and Manon earlier. “One of the most extraordinary treasures,” he agreed. “I have considered what may be best to do with it, and I must admit, I am unsure.”

“We,” Simpson said, “Jacob Astor and Mordecai Frank and Maurice Vionne and myself, we are no longer unsure. We have conferred and decided to form ourselves into a society to be known as the Club of New York. We will not advertise our existence or seek any political office, but if it becomes necessary, we will attempt to be a modifying influence should the nation stray from the ideals of the Constitution.”

“I see.”

“No, I think you do not just yet. This republic, Dr. Turner, it is more fragile than we care to admit. These last days have proved that. The possession of something as unique as the Great Mogul could prove decisive in such circumstances. It can be a factor of great influence.”

“That is exactly how Gornt Blakeman tried to use it.”

“Precisely my point, Dr. Turner.”

“Let us be quite clear, sir. Are you asking me to join this Club of New York?”

“I am. On behalf of the others.”

“I’m honored, and I accept.”

“Forgive me, Dr. Turner, but I do not think you should do so quite so quickly. Quite frankly, we are asking more of you than of ourselves. It is our collective judgment that you, sir, should be the guardian of the Great Mogul. And since it has fallen that you have the stone in your possession—”

“No, I do not. I gave it to Mademoiselle Vionne. I assumed that by now she had given it to her father and—”

Simson smiled. “Your fiancée is apparently wiser than most young women. She told her father the jewel had been recovered, but did not say that she had it rather than you. I choose to think that bodes well for the future, Dr. Turner. I am asking you, here in this holy place, to swear before the Ark of the Covenant—and I remind you that in this very place you named yourself a Jew, though our law does not recognize you as such—that you will guard the diamond with your life, and that you will never consider it a personal possession but something you hold in trust for the Club of New York.”

Joyful took one deep breath, a pause long enough to remind himself that vows could be dangerous things, but that a man must have faith in his instincts about the future. “I am honored by the trust of all of you, sir. I do so swear.”

Maiden Lane, Near Midnight

It was hard to believe it was more difficult for them to be together now that they were betrothed, but it was. “The horse passage,” Manon had whispered, when he was leaving after dinner, in the very few seconds when they were alone. “Tonight.”

Joyful knew there was no way she could get out of the house at such an hour. She had to have meant the window.

And the window, it was opened just enough so she could hear his step. He saw her behind the glass, framed in the light of the lamp she held high just long enough to be sure it was him, then extinguished.

He heard the window open. Manon leaned toward him. There was only the starlight to see by now; it was enough.

“You are so beautiful,” he said.

“I will not always be so, Joyful. I will grow old.”

“But with me.”

“With you.”

“I cannot wait,” Joyful said, “to begin the journey.”

A Few Words More

T
HE HISTORY
in this book is true—except for the bit I made up. There is no evidence that New York was in any way part of the secessionist movement that played such a large role in what is generally referred to as “the crisis of 1814.” Serious intent to break up the Union appears to have been confined to New England, and only to a few individuals. The Hartford Conference to consider the subject was held in October 1814, but by then talk of a separate country was petering out and the meeting became one of history’s footnotes.

The discovery of the Oregon Trail, on the other hand, was unquestionably a seminal event for the nation. Jacob Astor, who financed the expedition that found the southerly route through the Rockies—one which did not require a painfully slow passage up the Missouri by keelboat, and could be traveled entirely by wagon—nonetheless had one of his rare business failures in the matter of Astoria. He could not engage a war-preoccupied Madison as thoroughly as he wished in the venture’s potential, and a duplicitous partner (certainly not Joyful Turner!) resulted in the colony being bought by rivals before Astor could prevent it. The Oregon Trail, however, was the “open sesame” that filled the American West with settlers. The anti-Indian prejudice of the time was so pervasive that the fact that they were yet again displacing a native culture with a prior claim simply meant nothing.

The loss of Astoria did not prevent Astor from continuing to flower as the greatest businessman of his age and the country’s first true tycoon. By the 1830s he was living in a still more grand and more remote manor in what would now be the Upper East Side, and the site of the Broadway mansion (which truly was staffed by the first Chinese in New York) where Astor and Joyful met to hatch their schemes became the city’s first luxury hotel, the Park. Eventually, the Park was torn down and a new and even more grand hotel was built on the site and named the Astor House.

As for the war, the attack on Baltimore was repulsed and became the occasion for Francis Scott Key’s composition of the lyrics for “The Star Spangled Banner,” celebrating the glorious truth that, despite the efforts of the highly professional British military, the often bumbling Americans prevailed, and after a night’s desperate fighting “…our flag was still there.” A short time later, far from throwing in his lot with the secessionists, the pirate king Jean Lafitte (a man without a country and a smuggler and slave trader) showed himself to be nevertheless a great patriot and a true believer in the American idea. He and his Baratarians played an important part in the U.S. victory at the Battle of New Orleans, fought in December of 1814, after the peace was agreed but before the fighting men on either side knew the war was over.