Sons of Fortune (56 page)

Nora had laughed herself out before he finished, but her humour was restored. “I should have known better than to doubt that you understood what you were about,” she said. But later, in a more serious mood, she asked if he didn’t think the trade sounded a little overcrowded.

He puffed out his stomach and put his fingertips together in an imitation of a pompous businessman. “If, ma’am, I may summarize a lifetime in the trade, my advice is this: Never strive to be first; strive only to be best.”

Again he made his mother laugh. “Oh, Caspar! I’m so glad we have you. You are going to help us all, aren’t you? You won’t run away completely and abandon us altogether?”

“Nay!” He laughed, becoming the Yorkshire Tyke once more—the Aloysius Abercrombie who had sold those beds and who now, in place of the Hon. Caspar, was going to learn all about guns. “Nay! I shall need to know th’ terms afore I can answer that!”

This time Nora did not laugh quite so freely.

Two weeks later, living a day-long impersonation of Aloysius Abercrombie, he had vanished among the smoke of the forges and the clang of the engineering shops of the English Midlands—Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton—an apprentice to fortune. And Winifred sat at the barred windows of her cell and drank deep of bitterness. She did not cry. Not once since the outer gate had shut behind her had she cried. Her soul filled with a quiet and abiding hatred of a world in which this outrage was possible. A male world—for, even without Nanette’s smuggled letter, she understood well how powerless her mother now was. Night after night she sat at that window, renewing, reinforcing, resharpening her resolve that from the day of her release out of this odious place to the day of her final release from the larger imprisonment of being a female in such a world, she would work to end that monstrous domination of the regiments of men.

Beside her lay five letters from her father. Not one had she opened. Her own letters to him were calm, reasoned, and utterly damning. But she knew him; she knew he would hear the cry they suppressed.

Boy heard nothing of Winifred’s fate until, early in March, Caspar took a few days off from his new life and made the journey north to Cumberland to see him.

Boy had not made the expected mess of the Cockermouth, Keswick, & Penrith contract, yet his methods were as opposite to his father’s as they could possibly be. John’s system was to trust until trust was abused. Boy’s was to trust nothing and no one.

At first, people—his engineers, tradesmen, and navvies—said it was only natural. He was sort of on trial. Of course he’d be strict, wouldn’t he? Just wait and watch, though—he’ll ease up and become a chip off his father’s block.

They waited. They watched. And Boy did not ease up. Every inch of working had its deputy, foreman, ganger, timekeeper. Every yard of progress was charted minutely and pinned down to individual workers; no one here was ever going to be able to say, “It wasn’t me, it was someone else did that bit.” God help the man who showed late without damn good, copperbottom cause, or who got drunk, or brawled, or left early, or who did not pull his weight. Even calls of nature were rationed and charted. Two unpaid hours a week went on maintenance, when tools were cleaned, sharpened, tightened, and straightened; equipment repaired; staging checked and renewed; ropes respliced; and every nut, bolt, screw, clip, hinge, fastener, shackle, pin, and bracket checked and rechecked. If any nut showed the week’s mud undisturbed by a spanner, someone got dismissed.

It was the safest, most orderly, smoothest running, soberest and most miserable working ever to go under the name of Stevenson. But work was hard got that spring and summer, so desertions were few.

John had regular reports from “friends” on the site, of course. At first he assumed, like everyone else, that his son was starting tight and would loosen up. And even when it became clear to him that Young John was, by nature, a disciplinarian of a very tough kind, he was still more relieved than worried. He laughed, indeed, to think how his greatest fear had once been that Young John would leave everything to his deputies and lie around reading poetry and the classics all day!

Even as Caspar rode along the line of the workings he could tell that everything—superficially at least—was as it ought to be on a Stevenson contract. His fierce disappointment told him how deeply he still longed to take over the firm instead of Boy. It was a longing his conscious mind and will had disavowed on that baleful day after Christmas when the whole family had fallen apart. If ever there was a moment when his resolve to go to America finally set firm within him, it was when he passed the neat piles of stores and the shipshape workings and sensed that military purposefulness which pervaded every site. At least as an organizer and manager of men and enterprise, Boy was not going to disgrace himself.

Boy seemed almost ashamed of being so glad to welcome Caspar to the seat of operations.

“What d’you think?” he asked when their greetings were over.

“Very impressive, Boy, I must say.” Caspar nodded judiciously and looked around him again as if he thought some little out-of-place element might just have escaped his notice.

“You all thought I’d make an unholy mess, now didn’t you?”

“I expected it. But I see I was wrong. There’s no fear of that now.”

“And you?” Boy asked. “Where have you been—and doing what?”

By now they had strolled away from the huts that comprised Boy’s headquarters. The small and flimsy structures were dwarfed by the masses of Skiddaw Fell to the north and Grisedale Pike to the southwest. It was scenery of rugged grandeur, closer to God than to man. And today, when a whole landscape of clouds poured overhead, spanning peak to peak in one rolling roof of liberated white cliffs, it would have been easy to understand John’s fears that Boy might lie around reading poetry and classics. It was a place in which to sit and invent new symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven; it was a place that did three-quarters of the inventing for you.

“I’m more worried about Winnie,” Caspar said. “Has your father let her out yet?”

“Let her out!” Boy was too astonished at the words to take up the “your father.”

“Have they not told you?”

“I’ve wondered about her and worried, I must say. I keep writing and she doesn’t answer. But I’ve been so busy here. What should I have been told?”

“She’s in a private jail in France. Your father’s put her in there until she agrees to give in to him.” Caspar could almost feel the coldness and stiffness invade Boy at his side.

“I’m sure it’s in her best interests,” Boy said. “Our father would never do anything so serious unless it were for the best in the long run.”

“The mater says he regretted it as soon as he’d done it. Now he wants to get her out. Even the slightest gesture from her would do. But, of course, she’s his daughter. She’d die first. And he’d die rather than just give in. So it’s a matter of seeing which stiff neck breaks first.”

“If you’re going to talk in that disrespectful way, I wish you’d change the subject.”

“Well!” Caspar gave a bitter laugh. “I suppose that answers the only question I really came here to ask—forlorn hope though it was from the start.”

Boy looked curious. He obviously wanted to know exactly what Caspar had been going to ask; but he did not want to prolong a distasteful conversation.

“I was hoping to persuade you to use the fact that you are also, by courtesy, Lord Stevenson, to deceive the governess of Winnie’s jail and get her out. I thought it might appeal to the romantic in you to break this impasse.”

“You must be mad.”

“I must be.” He turned and began to stride back toward his horse, forcing Boy to follow. “I’m glad you’re doing so well, Boy,” he said. “I truly am. I hope, though, that you’re never really put to the test. And I hope you will always be able to think of your father as you do now.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Boy asked angrily. Half his anger was at being forced to trot along behind Caspar.

“If you ever find out, you’ll remember I said it.” Caspar swung himself up onto his horse. “If I want to get in touch with you, I’ll write to the London office. All this”—he glanced for one final, envious time at the encampment of huts—“has a depressingly temporary look.”

“Where will you be?” Boy asked.

Caspar spurred his horse away at a canter. “America!” he shouted back over his shoulder.

Four months later, when Caspar stepped out of Castle Garden, Manhattan, and into the Battery, he knew more about small arms—their design, manufacture, and ammunition—than anyone in the world. At least, the proof that that was so would not have surprised him. It had certainly cost him enough to acquire this expertise; his capital had shrunk to just over £310—or, as he must now learn to think of it, $2,114.48 American. A miraculously revived Aloysius Abercrombie had haunted the small arms manufactories in and around Birmingham, first as a skilled stockmaker, then, by degrees, rivetter, lathe turner, reamer, general machinist, and temperer. Where he could bluff, he did; where he could not, he bribed or bought.

Actually, in the few humble moments of his day, those minutes before he sank into sleep, when he allowed himself briefly to contemplate the as-yet empty future not as a Stevenson heir but as an untried businessman of uncertain trade and no fixed address, in those moments he knew how thin his skill really was. He just had to hope it would not be tested too severely all at once.

Five pounds of his capital had gone on an immigrant ticket from Liverpool to New York. For the first few days he had regretted not paying the extra seven pounds and going second class; conditions in steerage had been really appalling. But then he realized they were actually slightly better than at Old School when he had first gone to Fiennes, especially once he had struck up a couple of friendships among his predominantly Irish fellow passengers. After that, he weathered the six-week passage with little sweat. Those shipboard friendships, though they had endured three thousand miles of ocean, did not survive thirty yards beyond the wide-open portals of Castle Garden. From there on they were all in competition.

His first call after finding rooms had to be at the National Bank of the Republic where the newly dead Aloysius Abercrombie’s letter of credit should be awaiting the newly revived Hon. Caspar Stevenson. It was, and Caspar breathed a lot easier.

“Just visiting?” the cashier asked.

“Quite honestly, Mr. Ford, I don’t know,” Caspar answered. “I’ve not been on your soil an hour.”

“You surely haven’t.” Mr. Ford grinned and stamped his heel on the bank’s marble floor. “No soil here, sir. This island comprises—if I may so adumbrate—solid, living rock.”

“I shall certainly stay a while.”

“Take my advice, sir. This is no town to visit…”

“Oh, I was looking forward to…”

“I mean at this particular juncture in history, sir. If it would not seriously discommode you, my advice is to absquatulate forthwith and return in a month. Not to say two months, sir. Or three.”

Caspar was not yet aware of the American instinct when faced with the demands of a formal situation (and what could be more formal than a meeting with an Honourable so early of a Monday morning!) to vanish in a cloud of learned-sounding polysyllables, like a squid into his ink (or, rather, a decacephalopod into his own nigrescent exudations). He could not make out whether or not the man was just trying to be jocular.

“Why at this particular time, Mr. Ford?”

“We are at war, sir.”

“And have been for over two years, surely?”

“Ah!” Ford held up a finger and beamed as if Caspar had gone right to the heart of the matter. “Exactly so, young man. And we have used up all our patriots. The fodder for next month’s cannon must he drafted, you see.” He looked suddenly as if he feared all this might be boring the young gentleman.

“Go on,” Caspar said, encouragingly. “I may say, I may tell you, Mr. Ford, for you seem a decent, discreet sort of a fellow”—Caspar leaned over the edge of the man’s desk and lowered his voice—“I might, I just very well might, open a business in this city. So anything you may tell me, in the strictest confidence, you understand, would do more than satisfy an idle curiosity.”

“A business, mmh? A business.” He looked troubled.

“Is there something wrong, Mr. Ford?” Caspar asked.

Ford obviously decided to be frank with him. “We are, you understand, a very
Irish
city. I would think two out of every seven you meet here are of that…ah…Hibernian…ah…”

“Extraction?”

“Quite.”

“Or ‘eviction,’ more like.”

Ford pointed at him. “Doubly true, sir. Doubly true. Yes. And your Irishman, having shed his own troubles, is loath, you see, to shoulder those of the nigger slave. Especially when the freed niggers are pouring north and taking all the hod-carrying jobs at any wage.”

“Ah! You mean the war is not popular here—the Union cause is not popular?”

“Indeed—and this draft is detested, sir. Detested. Especially since any man with three hundred loose dollars may buy himself immunity from the draft. So it will be the poor who will be coerced into uniform. And the poor are the Irish.” He sighed. “No sir! I would not be a nigger in this town, not for all the money between here and Charlestown pier.”

“Here” was the corner of Wall Street and Broadway.

“Nor,” Caspar said, “by implication, an English aristocrat?”

Ford smiled impishly. “For all the money in Wall Street? I might. I just might at that!”

Caspar laughed. “Well, Mr. Ford, you are very encouraging. But, surely, New York is a big city? There must be room.”

“Big?” Ford was surprised. “You come from London and you call this ‘big’—New York? Why, it’s but a village by comparison.”

Caspar assumed the man was just showing a polite modesty; he did not yet understand how rare a commodity that was. “Surely,” he said, “I have a map of the city—avenues nearly thirteen miles long, streets over two miles, numbered up to two hundred or more…”

He petered out as he saw the smile on Ford’s face.

“You’ll pardon me, sir, but maps of this city have looked like that since my grandfather’s time. I think the first thing you’ve got to do is climb”—he took Caspar to the window and pointed to it—“Trinity steeple. Over three hundred feet, I believe. The tallest building in the city. And from there you may have a bird’s-eye view of the entire built-upon area. An hour’s stroll north of here there are cows in green fields!”

At first Caspar was disappointed but then he reflected that even an area five miles by two was a lot of stone and mortar; there must still be room for the founding home of America’s greatest weapons manufacturer-to-be.

Ford, rightly sensing that Caspar did not yet want to discuss his business, left the matter of his bank’s help vague—vague but positive. In parting he told Caspar of the Mercantile Library up in Astor Place, where he might glean a great deal of useful commercial information. Caspar thanked him and said he felt sure he would be back for more than the mere business of drawing out his weekly expenses.

***

For some reason the view from the top of Trinity steeple put him in mind of the tower at Thorpe Old Manor. He could not think why, for, physically, there was not one single point of similarity. Perhaps it was that both were places from which to survey the empires of fantasy. From Thorpe tower he had (in his mind’s eye) looked down upon the whole range of the Stevenson empire and possessed it. Now, here, on Trinity steeple, a lump came into his throat at the memory.

He thought it extraordinary. All those stifling summer evenings and nights on the Atlantic when he had watched the water coil back in the slick wake behind the ship, had watched yard by yard the distance grow between him and all he had ever wanted—all that time he had felt more hopeful than downcast. Yet here, where the focus of those hopes was spread in a vast panorama at his feet, he thought instead of all those things his father’s tyranny had denied him forever—for Caspar now had no thought of going home again except as a rich and independent businessman in his own right.

He shook his head, as if he might thereby dislodge these gloomy thoughts. He told himself that this nostalgia would serve no purpose. He reflected that most people probably felt this way an hour or two after the euphoria of landing. He needed a woman. Tonight he’d go out and find one. Or even hire one—why not? Heartened at the idea, he turned to take stock of his new empire.

And from those dizzying heights, he had to confess, it looked nowhere near as large as imagination (fed by that somewhat bombastic map) had painted it. The built-upon part of the city pushed up two fingers to the level of Central Park—one fat one between Sixth and Eight Avenues, one thin one on Third. Between and on either side the buildings dropped back to the low Thirties. To be sure, he could not number them so precisely from where he stood, but the general pattern was clear: New York was small.

After lunch he lay despondently on the bed he had hired in the least fly-infested room of twelve fly-infested rooms he had seen before resigning himself. The house was between Lispenard and Canal streets and had horse railways on both sides. If he opened the windows, the dust and cinders came dancing in on the merciless sunbeams; if he closed them, he stifled. It was certainly no city to be in during early July. Maybe he ought to go to the Mercantile Library that Ford had mentioned and look at directories going back over the last ten years. He hadn’t been able to do that in England. There he’d see how the gun trade was growing. Or if it was.

Armed with this new resolve, he leapt up from the bed, regretted the exertion, and strolled at a much more leisurely pace out into air so hot and sticky you could almost bottle it. He could not face the idea of going back indoors, into a library especially. He’d do it tomorrow. Surely he’d earned this half day off?

He had it in mind to explore the edges of his new territory, and so set off up Broadway. After a mile or so, Astor Place, running diagonally northeast, offered some relief from the depressing monotony of the right angle and he took it. At Third Avenue he decided to ride a car uptown, but before he had gone four blocks north the track was blocked by a line of stationary cars as far as the eye could see. By Thirteenth Street he was back on the foot pavement; most of the people in the street were heading north. There was an air of suppressed excitement about them.

From Twentieth Street all the shops were shut. From the low Thirties the throng grew steadily more dense. In several places small crowds had collected around street orators who spoke to one purpose only—to damn the draft. But the crowds seemed curious rather than responsive. It was the same at Forty-sixth Street, where the press of people entirely blocked the highway. The centre of their interest was a three-floor wooden house guarded by a single line of frightened-looking policemen with drawn locust sticks.

Caspar learned from a man in the crowd that this was one of the draft offices. There were several competing explanations of what was happening, or going to happen, but the most popular among the bystanders was the belief that the leader of a local volunteer fire company called the Black Joke had been drafted, and the company had come to destroy the house and the wheel.

It soon became clear that the mob on the south side of the street was mostly of peaceful, curious sightseers, but on the north a much larger and very much less orderly mob was pouring down from the direction of Central Park. It did not take them long to drive the police indoors, and then out again by the back door; and very soon after, the Black Joke had set fire to the place. Within half an hour it was a heap of glowing cinders. Other fire companies were then, at last, allowed through to save the ashes.

Throughout, Caspar was astounded at the behaviour of the more respectable part of the crowd. They did not exactly laugh or cheer, but they treated it as a fairly everyday sort of spectacle—something to look at, shake the head and frown over, but not to be unduly upset by. Anywhere in England such scenes would be the talk of the country. The police and the military would have been there at once.

And every rioter would have been safely in chains within the hour. Clearly, he thought, life in America, even in its most civilized city, was going to be a shade more raw than in Tipperary.

The mood was less tolerant at Lexington Avenue, whither most of the rioters drifted once it was clear that the draft office would not be saved. Lexington was undeveloped beyond Forty-first Street, but at Forty-fifth there were two isolated houses on a vacant block and these became the next focus of the mob’s anger. One person said a wounded policeman had gone into one of the houses, another that a draft officer lodged there, a third that it was occupied by Negroes.

Soon there was no window left whole in either house. The occupants—no wounded policeman, nor military person, nor anyone who was not white of skin among them—fled through the back yard and over the fields. Caspar felt, and could sense around him, a bitter anger as laughing, drunken louts and women looted both houses of all portable articles, even washstands and writing desks. Soon a slow curl of smoke came from one of the downstairs windows and, rather than face again the sickening sight of a property burning, unhindered, to its foundations, he turned west and made for Fifth Avenue in the middle of the island. People in the crowds had said there was now serious rioting all down the east and west sides. The mob was going for the weapons and ammunition in the Armory on East Twenty-second Street.

At Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, on the northern edge of the city, he came to the reservoir. Opposite were the smouldering remnants of what had once obviously been a fine, large building. There was a grim-faced man, a gentleman by his clothes, standing a little apart from the crowd. Caspar asked him quietly what the building was.

The man looked at him, sizing him up. “You are an Englishman, sir?”

“Caspar Stevenson, at your service.”

“Bidwell Fox, sir, at yours.” Both men bowed. “What it
was
”
—
Fox returned his gaze to the remains of the building—“is the Colored Half Orphan Asylum. What it
is
is the fruit of the corrupt and unbridled Democratic politics that has turned this city into the modern Sodom and Begorrah.”

“And the children?” Caspar asked, appalled.

“All saved but one—a little girl of six. They battered her to death for the crime of nigritude. She hid beneath her bed.”