Conjurer (15 page)

“Oh,” she gasps, then runs for the corner cupboard where the tailor stores his wares, burrowing in amongst the woolens and silks and making herself into such a small package that she's certain she's turned invisible. In the dark nest created by the fabrics, she closes her eyes, remembering the truth of her past and not the fiction her savior has created for her.

Ella knows she had a mother once, and a sister, too, and a little brother who'd pitched forward into the hearth when he was but an infant and so developed a face that was half an angry purple demon's and half a startled angel's.
And those two?
Ella wonders.
Did Father sell my brother and sister also? Or do they still reside at home in the countryside? And does my mother sing to them as she sang once to me?

Ella's shut eyes envision her mother crooning. She lifts her head as though she could hear the tune, pointing her nose as if it were the scent of her mother and not uncut cloth she was sniffing.

One fire gang roars to the rescue, whipping the horses and hurling oaths at passersby too slow or stunned to leap from the path. But “the Killers,” under the leadership of the notorious saloonkeeper Billy Mullins, refuse the interlopers entry to the scene of destruction. Instead, the members of the hose company descend from their tanker coach and build a solid wall of white bodies that faces out upon the crowd and allows the flames behind to soar unabated.

Shouts of outrage and invective ensue, until the verbal threats between the fire gangs become blows, become cobbles and bricks wrenched from the streets, become bleeding heads and battered hands while whatever Killer is able to leave a comrade's side starts rounding on the Negroes who are yet struggling to wrest themselves and their possessions from the blaze. Children are beaten about the head, and old men and women shoved full force into the road. Then a pistol appears in the midst of the fracas, and a Negro youth is shot and killed.

His body tumbles forward, and in that single moment the earth among these warring nations grows still. Both sides watch the young man fall until a wail of grief springs forth only to be answered by a shout of taunting glee. Soon the noise and bloodlust reclaim the street as the white mob proceeds to grab whatever loose objects come to hand: slop buckets, empty feed sacks, broken crates, heaving them into the blaze while the flames, so handily fed, leap from one building to the next, and the next after that. “Go home to your Southern masters, Sambo!” the crowd roars above the flames. “Woolly-heads!” “Niggerism! Nigger-friends!”

Daniel limps forward; his intention is to help rescue the children, but, alas, he has no formulated plan. He reaches out his arms in succor but is jabbed in the back by a red-faced man wielding a club. “Nigger-friend!” the spittle-slick lips scream. “Go home, dirty Jew!”

Daniel turns to face his assailant. “I'm not—”

“Papist foreign filth!” Another man raises his cudgel; Daniel scuttles sideways out of reach.

“Crippled abolitionist swine. I'll give you something to pray about—” But the intended blow is arrested by the sudden arrival of the militia: packs set squarely upon their tensed backs, gold-braided hats upon their heads. Weapons begin firing on both sides; and the seething crowd, either good or ill, huddles low in a swirl of broken flesh and fear.

Daniel gazes at babies lost, mothers fallen, blood growing sticky on the stone, tufts of hair, scraps of clothing, a shoe, a paper picture wrenched from a now-vanished frame. He sees a young Negro woman crouching amidst a group of circling white men; as they descend upon their victim, her cries for mercy sound like the bleatings of a newborn calf. Daniel backs away, worming through the mass of people, head down, shoulders hunched, arms held squirrel-like in front of him. He can't help. He's never been able to help. At the moment, “Daniel” seems the worst possible choice for his new name.

The riot continues all night, and all the next day. The Southwark Beneficial Hall, known far and near as an abolitionist meeting place, is burned to the ground. The African Presbyterian Church is also reduced to cinders. Fires—and looters—gut trinity homes on the alleys abutting Fitzwater and Catherine. Finished with those poor dwellings but far from sated, the mob threatens to move deeper into the city, and even the militia is hard-pressed to control the spill of screaming citizenry that begins to spread north toward the mansions that line Washington Square and westward to the orphanage where Hannah Yarnell has barricaded herself and her terror-stricken charges. On Washington Square, the Ilsleys' home and those of their neighbors are turned into fortresses manned by owners and their loyal servants. Shutters are pulled fast; lamps are extinguished, pistols readied.

The orphanage is not afforded such resources. Hannah and the two young and untried Negro women who serve the Association as nursemaids and aides are the sole adults in residence when the riots commence. None would know what to do with a firearm should it be proffered; and as to boarding up the windows, they haven't the time with so many frightened children to attend to. Instead, Hannah walks purposefully from room to room, spreading comfort, singing songs and hymns, reciting prayers, stroking heads and shoulders, and speaking aloud and intimately with God until even the most quivering child begins to believe that Miss Hannah is capable of saving them.

Only the nameless epileptic boy remains beyond her persuasive touch. He has fit after fit, sleeping openmouthed and leaden-bodied when the spasms pass; and Hannah experiences such concern for his survival that she decides he must be baptized lest he perish before the horrible ordeal is past. She takes a prayer book, calls for one of the nursemaids, and christens the child Caspar after the home's visiting physician, Caspar Walne.

The name has an astonishing effect. “Ca,” the boy answers, which is the first verbal communication he has made since his arrival.

“Caspar,” Hannah repeats, drawing out the vowels and consonants.

“Cai,” the child slowly replies.

The effort is close enough for Hannah. “Well then,” she says, smiling although her eyes swell with joyful tears. “Cai you are, and will always be.”

And Cai, oh miracle of miracles, beams back at her.

Ruth

O
NE DAY AFTER AN UNEASY
peace has been established, the city of Philadelphia still smolders: buildings and tempers, both. There are those who blame city hall, those who blame the Irish gangs or the militia or the tardy and criminally stubborn hose companies, those who continue to curse the Negroes for “stealing bread from honest men,” those who rage at a system that makes free men and women out of people who were so much better off enslaved. Poverty of means and spirit is terrible when wed to the god of righteousness.

Ruth has survived the attack Daniel witnessed, but just barely, and that probably because she lay as limp as a rag until the men using her believed they'd killed her.

It's Dutch Kat who finds Ruth's battered body while prowling the eerily empty neighborhood, going out, as she told her ladies, “to see what finery might be left to purloin.” Ruth's soft and whimpering cries first arrest the madam, but it's the sight of the swollen, battered face and bleeding lips that sends Kat hurtling back to the fancy house to fetch two of her strongest workers to bear the hurt woman to safety.

“Irish boys!” Kat snaps as she marches at the head of this somber parade. Of course, she's guessed who the culprits are. Who else could it be but the ruffians who laud their Fenian heritage? “Billy Mullins and his benighted breed,” she fumes in her still foreign-sounding voice. “Them boys prefer clods of dirt to a bed. The girl's lucky not to have been a sheep. They would have done her and then slaughtered her, to boot!”

Ruth's bruised lips move in response, but they're too thick to form speech.

“What makes them think they're God's gift, I ask you? More like God's great joke, if you want the truth. More like one of them awful pestilences released upon the earth in the Bible times. The Irish be damned. Every mother's son of them. And their blasted ancestors, too. They were naught but naked savages when the Holland people were ruling the seas in elegant bateaus …”

Dutch Kat's tirade continues all the way home and all the way upstairs to the small room, where Ruth is then placed atop a freshly sheeted bed. “I'll give you a week or maybe a bit longer for the worst of those pricks' damage to heal. After that, if you wish to live here you'll need to work as hard as the other girls do. The house ain't a house of charity, but I'm a fair mistress. Do well by me; I'll do well by you. Dutch Kat is an honest woman who runs a proper establishment. Anyone can tell you that.”

Ruth hears the words but cannot respond with more than a painful grunt. Lying on her back, she gazes at the ceiling; the room is tiny and misshapen and dark, but the mattress below her feels surprisingly new, as does the bolster pillow.

“You can't put her in this room, Kat. It's where—”

“Never you mind about that now,” the madam interrupts as she perches her ample behind beside Ruth's aching body. “No bugs in this mattress,” she announces in a commander's lofty tone, and she bounces up and down twice as if to prove her point. “It's as new as can be.”

“That's because of the blood on the other one,” another voice offers in a more pragmatic if less assertive vein. “Who knew a kid like that could have so much—?”

“That's enough idle chatter!” Kat lashes out. “I'm not running a salon for society ladies here. Gossip don't produce silver coins.”

“I'm only saying she should watch her step if she becomes one of us, Kat, toiling under the sheets and all. Men like him come back. You know they do. Especially when they've found it so easy to take their peculiar pleasure. And it may be that he bears a special fondness for this little box you've put her in. I wouldn't jump in here, not I.”

“No one's asking you to, you lazy slut,” the madam all but roars. Then she swears in her own language, adding a smattering of French, Italian, and German for good measure. Dutch Kat prides herself on her cosmopolitan ways.

“You should tell her all about it, though, Kat,” the voice continues in grim defiance. “Indeed you should. It's not right to keep the thing a secret.”

“Seems to me like you've already said all there is to know. Now move along, missy, if you wish to keep your own private box. I have plenty of others asking for it, if you'll recall.”

With that mysterious exchange, Ruth is left alone. She lies on the clean sheets, at first tentatively and then, as the hours stretch on, with an increasing sense of both ownership and doom.
My fate is sealed now
, she tells herself.
Ruth the maid-of-all-work is now Ruth the whore, and even if some miracle were to bring me my child, he would not be welcome here. Indeed, I would never wish him in such a place
.

Slumping deeper into the horsehair mattress, she falls into an uneven sleep, seeing the man whose hat she rescued, the man she thought she recognized. Then the hat becomes a baby, a naked infant rolling out into the busy street like a wet brown ball.

The dreaming Ruth dodges through the fine carriages and dusty market carts to save this helpless child who makes no sound although his mouth is open in a wide and terrible scream.
I knew that man
, she tells herself.
Indeed, I did. And do. And still, I do
.

While ruth sleeps, Martha listens to her bedroom clock chime off the long night hours. The riot, instead of sealing her retreat to her father's country home, brought Owen Simms hurrying back to the residence in town. With him, at her own persistent request, was Martha. But the acrid odor of burned dwellings and the intermittent shots still fired by the militia have proven more worrisome companions than the stillness at Beale House; and at two in the morning she's still very much awake. From her softly pillowed bed, she hears a lone carriage rattle past on the cobbles below her window, and a member of the night watch call out once from a neighboring byway.

She sighs at her inability to fall into slumber, then rises, lights a candle on the mantel, and walks impatiently to the window, where she pulls aside the several layers of heavy satin draperies and thinner lace curtains to gaze down upon the street. The gas lights are burning, covering the now-vacant roadway with intermittent and mustard-colored puddles, while the neighboring houses are only fitfully illumined; and some not at all.

Martha scans the scene, then draws in a sharp and startled breath. A man is standing within the shadow of the opposite house. He seems to be watching her window, watching her. Her first impulse is to release the drapery and turn back to the comfort of her cozy suite, but instead she holds her ground, studying the person who studies her. Almost, his posture looks like that of Thomas Kelman, but Martha can't fathom why he would hide in wait outside her father's house.

She tries to study the man's face, but the features are too obscure to recognize.
He knows I'm here
, she thinks, and experiences a peculiar impulse to raise her hand in acknowledgment.

Instead, she remains motionless, willing him to make the first gesture. But he makes not a sign; and at length she quits her sentry post, closes the drapes behind her, and moves to a chair, where she sits and forces herself to concentrate on the ticking of the clock.
Father
—
or someone resembling Father
—
has been seen walking abroad
, she tells herself.
What can this mean? And what can it mean that Owen Simms refuses to believe such a tale is possible?
As Martha thinks, the clock's measured beats seem to transform themselves into jangled notes. Loud, soft, fast, slow: They begin to sound to her like footfalls scurrying over the carpeted hall beyond.

For a moment, she imagines that Owen Simms is about to rush into her chambers shouting out the news that her father has indeed been found alive, found wandering lost and brain-sick in the city of Chester or New Castle—and that Thomas Kelman is waiting below to disclose the extraordinary and marvelous information himself.