City of God (39 page)

The pen and the inkpot and his journal were under a loose floorboard. He kept them handy so that he could make notes of his experiments, but hidden so no one else could read the observations he’d been recording. His hands were trembling so it wasn’t easy to prize up the board. He wanted to ask for her help, but he would not. Finally the thing lifted. He retrieved the pen and the ink and started to let the floorboard drop back into place, but Carolina extended the pointed toe of her leather boot to prevent it. “That book,” she demanded, “in the hole. What is it?”

Sam had hold of the floorboard. Wreck of a man that he was these days, he could still summon enough strength to smash it down on her foot. He looked up at her and realized she knew that as well. Slapping
her, once even blacking her eye, beating her about the legs with a riding crop. It used to help. Not anymore. The time when physical violence directed at Carolina somehow eased him was apparently past. Quiet, that’s all he wanted now, and, if he told the truth, to swallow clouds. “I’ll extend our bargain,” he said. “The book contains all the secrets of the ship. You need the one as well as the other. I will give it to you in return for one thing more.”

“What is it?”

“The little girl. My…Mei Lin.” The words were thick and heavy in his mouth, and the smell of opium somewhere in the building was driving him nearly frantic with longing. “Mei Lin,” he said again.

“Yes? What about her?” Surely he wasn’t suggesting she adopt his bastard.

“She goes to school. Nuns. Madams of the Sacred Heart. They call her Linda Di. She must keep on going. Half Chinese. It’s her only chance. You will pay her tuition.”

“How much?”

“One hundred dollars a term.”

She didn’t ask to be born, Carolina.
“Very well.”

“Until she is eighteen?”

“Until then. You have my word.” She moved her foot and stretched out her hand for the notebook.

Sam handed it to her.

When Carolina went outside, the child was waiting. Impossible to know how much she might have heard. “You’re called Linda Di, I’m told.”

Mei Lin curtsied. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And you attend a school taught by Catholic nuns.”

“Yes, ma’am. The Convent of the Sacred Heart on Mulberry Street.”

Carolina took one of her visiting cards from the drawstring bag, which now held Samuel’s journal and the document giving her ownership of the vessel under construction in Danny Parker’s auxiliary yard. “Here,”
she said, handing the card to the girl. “This is my name and my address. I take it you can read.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Call me Mrs. Devrey.” God knows what the child thought her mother might be called. “And if you need anything. Or if something happens to your father. Indeed, anything you think I should know about, come and see me.”

“D
OES SHE HAVE
a name, Mr. Parker?” It was, Carolina knew, considered the worst possible luck to change a ship’s name.

“Not yet. Owner’s privilege to pick the name. I’ve been waiting for Mr. Devrey to say.”

“Well, as you know, I am now the owner.” She nodded at the document Danny Parker clutched in his hand. He’d kept hold of it all the while they surveyed the ship. The keel and the ribs were rising from stocks erected above ways headed directly into the river. That was the ordinary manner of such things, Carolina knew. What was not ordinary was that in this instance the whole affair was tented beneath a vast expanse of tarpaulin supported on thick posts, the frontmost set in the river itself. The arrangement might not have been necessary up here in the Thirty-fourth Street wilds, but obviously they had put a high price on secrecy. Besides, it kept out the worst of the November winds and thus helped the quest for speed. Carolina knew all about the
Houqua
and the race for Canton. It was now her business to know such things.

The soft slap of water lapping at heavily oiled canvas was the only sound to be heard. It would have been pitch black had Danny Parker
not held a lantern. They stood amidships, the lantern’s yellow glow illuminating the length of the vessel stretched either side. “One hundred and seventy feet stem to stern, not counting the bowsprit,” Parker said. “And thirty-three feet across the beam. There’s nothing larger afloat. Might never be. She’ll lade eleven hundred tons.”

“You’re proud of her, aren’t you, Mr. Parker?”

“Aye, I am. Mr. Devrey and I designed her. After his experiments, o’ course.”

She had spent hours poring over Samuel’s notes of those experiments. “And you believe she will be the swiftest ship as well as the biggest? Because of her flat keel?”

Danny didn’t let on how surprised he was that she should know such a thing. “I do. Her keel and her length,” he added. “Those seem to be the key. Plus how much sail she’ll carry.”

“Eleven hundred tons of fresh tea that arrives soon after harvest. That will fetch a fair price at auction, don’t you think, Mr. Parker?”

“Aye, it will. And twenty-five percent of the gain mine. That was the arrangement, Mrs. Devrey. I’ve a note signed by your husband.”

“I will honor the agreement, Mr. Parker. You need have no fear on that score.” Danny Parker’s participation in the profit was noted in Samuel’s book, so she was not surprised. August Belmont, however, would not consider himself bound by the agreement. Thus Mr. Parker’s twenty-five percent share would come entirely out of her earnings. Fair enough.
Businessmen as let greed rule them are inevitably headed for ruin, Carolina.
One of the lessons she’d learned at Papa’s knee, when Wilbur Randolf talked to her because he had neither wife nor son with whom to share his ruminations, back when it would not have occurred to either of them that one day she might own the majority share in the fastest ship afloat. “But, Mr. Parker,” she said, “you must promise not to hold me liable if we lose our gamble and she founders.”

Parker nodded. “That’s how we laid it out. Me and Mr. Devrey.”

“Then that will be our agreement as well. I will require a new note between you and me speaking directly to that. I’ll have my attorney draw it up.”

“Do that,” he said. “I’ll sign.”

Cold as it was outside the tarpaulin, it suddenly seemed to Carolina very close in the damp dark beneath it. She took a handkerchief—edged in black lace because she was still in mourning for her father—from her muff and dabbed at her face. “That’s it then. We prosper or fail together, Mr. Parker.” Carolina held out her hand.

Danny hesitated a moment, then he took it. “So we do, Mrs. Devrey. What about a name for her, then? Seeing as you’re the new owner.”

She had toyed with Zachary Celinda or even a made-up combination such as Zac-Ce or Cezac. Then, the night before, she’d wakened from a sound sleep and known exactly what the name of the vessel was to be.

“She’s to be called
Hell Witch,
Mr. Parker.” Samuel had said she was a witch from hell; perhaps he was right. Perhaps it was entirely unnatural for a woman to be so exhilarated by these matters of business, but she had Samuel Devrey to thank for whatever she’d become. He had not permitted her to be the wife she’d longed to be. Now she and her ship would sink into oblivion or sail to glory together. “
Hell Witch,
” she repeated.

“I fear it won’t be easy getting a crew to sign on to sail a ship with that name, Mrs. Devrey.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Parker. I think it will be very easy once she’s seen to be the most beautiful thing ever to set sail from New York. Anyway, we will tempt them.”

“With what?”

“Money, of course. Bonuses for getting her to Hong Kong and back in the fastest time ever made.” So much promised to so many meant that her own profit, the profit accruing to Zachary’s trust, might turn out to be little or nothing at least on the maiden voyage and perhaps the next one or two as well. But according to Samuel’s notebook, a ship like this might make two round-trip voyages in a year. So they would sail on to fabulous riches together, Carolina Randolf Devrey and her
Hell Witch.
And would that repay her for everything she had suffered at Samuel’s hands? Yes, because it must. “
Hell Witch,
she is,” she said.

They took her down river to Parker’s main yard at the foot of Montgomery Street on the evening of June 13, 1844, triple reefed but still catching all the breezes that customarily rose after sundown, and waited until sunup the following morning to send her into the inner harbor at the foot of South Street. Early as it was, a crowd had gathered. There was no way it could not be so. The tarpaulin had come off two months before, when the masts of
Hell Witch
rose a hundred and forty feet into the air.

Hell Witch.
As long and sleek as a greyhound, with a razor-sharp bow and a rounded stern and a hull that rose above the waterline in graceful concave curves. Painted black she was, with a blood-red stripe, and her figurehead a woman with golden hair streaming in the wind. Modeled after Carolina Devrey herself, people whispered. But when Carolina’s ship moved into the outer harbor and at last released her sails, they had something else to talk about.

Hell Witch
rode beneath a cloud of canvas such as New York had never seen. The
Houqua
had sailed two weeks before and they’d thought her rigging remarkable. But this…
Never seen the like. Probably never will again. Not after she goes below the waves at the Cape.
Mainsail, topsail, topgallant, and royals, those were not strange sights to New Yorkers. But Carolina Devrey’s ship carried as well a skysail so high it might, someone said, be a napkin to tie beneath God’s chin. There was as well an assortment of other sails hung on extended yards either side of the normal rigging, and triangular sails between the masts, and still more hanging from the bowsprit. One by one, or so it seemed, they were unfurled and caught the wind, and the exquisite craft glided towards her destiny.

“There’s never been anything to match her,” Carolina murmured. “Never.”

“Never,” Nick agreed, putting his arm around her waist and drawing her close, something he could do only because they had total privacy inside Mr. August Belmont’s carriage. Belmont had lent it to Carolina for the occasion, along with his driver, and they were parked hard by the
South Street dock that belonged to Devrey Shipping, peeping through the carriage’s curtained windows. The ship—which did not fly the gold lion and crossed swords of the Devrey arms on the owner’s pennant run up to mark the occasion, only the initials,
HW
—became a white speck on the horizon. The crowd began to disperse, all talking, everyone with an opinion. And each as good as the next for the moment. It would be months before the fate of
Hell Witch
would be known for sure.

Carolina squeezed Nick’s hand. “Captain Paxos,” she said, speaking aloud her greatest worry. “Do you think I did the right thing?”

“I think you followed your best judgment. There’s nothing else you could do.”

The captain is as important as the ship.
So said Samuel’s notes.
The right man can bring her through the Atlantic gales, the Cape’s fifty-foot waves, or the monsoon winds, indeed the weather of any time of year. But he must be as finely tuned to his purpose as the vessel.

Aristotle Paxos had presented himself to Carolina two months before, introduced by August Belmont, who claimed that the man had come from Athens by way of London, with a personal recommendation from someone Belmont claimed to trust totally in such matters. Paxos was almost as tall as Nick, dressed entirely in black, with a silver beard, and with a huge silver cross hanging round his neck.
I am a Greek, madam, born of the union of Poseidon and a naiad. The blood of Odysseus runs in my veins! I was born to possess your witch from hell. I shall make her my bride and she will yield to me and we will make your fortune.
She could picture him now standing at the helm, bellowing orders, not just to the crew, to the wind itself. “Perhaps,” she said. “Nothing to do now but wait and see.”

“Yes.” Nick agreed. “No other choice.”

In late July, a ship docked that had seen
Hell Witch
riding the Brazil current past the coast of Argentina and heading towards the stretch of ocean known as the Roaring Forties.

“They saw her four weeks ago, Nick.” Carolina’s voice trembled with
excitement. “That means she reached Argentina only twenty days into her voyage.” She had tacked a map on the wall of the back parlor on Fourteenth Street. She called it her office and from there administered all the things to do with Zachary’s trust. “Where do you imagine she is now? Where shall I put the pin?”

Nick came and stood behind her. “Here,” he said, and guided her hand to a position just west of the Cape of Good Hope. Though by now, if she had survived that peril,
Hell Witch
must be well around it. “Let’s not tempt fate.”

In late August they heard from a seaman who whispered a rumor that the next morning was heard first at the Astor House bar, where the shippers customarily gathered for breakfast, then repeated all over the waterfront. The tar said he’d been on watch in a fierce storm south of the Java straits and seen a ship on the horizon sailing in the opposite direction under more canvas than any sane captain would unfurl in such weather.
Heeled over so far she was it seemed she must be riding on the wind. A bloody miracle she wasn’t swamped. But she wasn’t. Not while I watched.
That was remarkable enough, but not all the tar had to tell. He claimed that four days after he’d seen the vessel that could only have been
Hell Witch
, his ship had passed the
Houqua.
She had left port two weeks before
Hell Witch;
now she was sailing in her wake.

This time it was Nick who moved the pin, positioning it just west of the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java. Seventy-eight days into her voyage, Carolina’s ship was—at least she might be—an estimated two weeks from making landfall at Hong Kong.

The best tea was said to be the early spring crop from the lowlands; it was known as Heaven Pool tea. But in late summer came the tea called Dragon Fountain,
Long Jin
, grown in the mountains, where the plants leafed out much later after the last snows melted. “The first harvest of
Long Jin
tea from Hangchow,” Carolina said. “If that’s where
Hell Witch
is”—she pointed to the pin near Java—“it’s possible, Nick. It is, isn’t it?”

He stared at the map. “It would seem so. If the talk isn’t only that.”

But talk there was. Even Aunt Lucy, now a frail old woman, brought
rumors to her niece. “I’m told your ship has taken but sixty days to arrive at Hong Kong, Carolina. Apparently that’s very fast.”

“If it were true it would be not simply fast but miraculous, Aunt Lucy.
Hell Witch
may have made the voyage in something more like ninety days, and that’s remarkable time. If it’s true. We can’t know for sure until she comes back, of course.”

“Ninety days? I shall be sure to correct the next person who tells me sixty.”

“Please do.”

“But that’s not all I hear.”

Carolina was stitching a bit of picot tatting to one of Ceci’s chemises and went on with her work. Lucy would pass on gossip as long as there was a breath in her body. No encouragement was required.

“I’m told your cousin by marriage, Dr. Nicholas Turner, works miracles on Crosby Street. Absolute miracles. My friend Sally Whitaker’s daughter had a plague of boils on her backside and he rid her of them after three treatments. Apparently it’s this new Croton water that does it.”

“Not because it’s Croton water, Aunt. Because it’s fresh water that runs.” Sally Whitaker’s daughter, as Carolina remembered her, was a slut, however much she was presumed to be a lady. “If one can be persuaded to bathe more frequently because of it, any sort of running water will be an aid to good health.”