The Furies (45 page)

He pressed his belly against the edge of the open door. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t prevent his flesh from betraying his feelings at the most unexpected moments—

I must do it,
he said silently.
Tonight, while it’s quiet and Ma’s away.
He still thought of her as Ma, though Amanda had long since trained him to use the word
Mother
when he spoke.

Sweating a little, he watched the falling snow. He knew he’d never be heard upstairs. Except for Kathleen, the servants didn’t venture beyond the first floor. Right now, before going home for the night, they’d all be taking supper down in the mansion’s raised basement—

The insistent pressure between his legs refused to go away.

But it’s too risky!

An inner voice mocked him:
It isn’t too risky. You’re frightened, that’s all.

What would his ma do in a comparable situation? He thought he knew. She did whatever she wanted, went where she pleased, and brooked no interference. That had been apparent to him ever since the time in California when he heard she’d shot a man who interfered with her up in the mining camp—

His swarthy face troubled and his dark eyes focused at some remote point beyond the snow-whitened square, Louis slowly backed up and shut the door. He was afraid of his mother. Her toughness and her preoccupation with business affairs made her forbidding, somehow. Yet he admired her—

He decided he was being foolish to worry about repercussions.
She
never seemed to—

All right. What he wanted, he’d take. That was the privilege of wealthy people, wasn’t it?

Turning, he stepped on the tail of the white tomcat before he realized it. The cat, whose name was Mr. Mayor, had evidently crept out of the library and approached him silently.

Mr. Mayor meowed loudly and went bounding back toward the library doors—which opened all the way a moment later.

From the doorway, Michael Boyle looked at Louis. The boy was sure Michael could see guilt on his face.

Mr. Mayor sought protection behind Michael’s legs, peering at Louis with green eyes that caught the gaslight and shone. Suddenly Louis realized what he needed in order to proceed with his plan. He should be able to get it, too. In the darkened dining room—

If only Michael didn’t suspect, and try to stop him.

“What are you doing skulking out here, Louis?” the young man asked, cheerily enough. “I thought I’d caught myself a burglar.”

“I was only looking at the snow.”

Louis walked back toward the entrance of the library. He wanted to glance down, to see whether there was a telltale bulge to give him away. He didn’t dare.

Michael Boyle was a head taller than Louis. Almost six feet. He was twenty-two, with a handsome, fair face, rust-colored hair and golden brown eyes. He had wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and looked elegant in whatever he wore—tonight a loose-fitting white silk shirt, snug gray trousers and expensive Wellington boots. Only a long white scar across his forehead marred his appearance.

The scar was the result of trouble on the piers. Michael Boyle had worked as a longshoreman since he was eleven years old. At twenty, he had joined a worker’s movement to increase wages five cents per hour during the twelve-hour day.

The bosses who controlled the dock crews worked more on behalf of the ship owners than on behalf of their own men. Someone had informed on the leaders of the wage movement. One by one, those longshoremen had suffered mysterious accidents. On his way home one evening, Michael Boyle had been waylaid by unknown assailants and beaten until he could barely crawl. During the beating, a man had slashed at his throat with a knife. Michael had dodged. The blade cut his forehead open.

After that, he’d never been able to get employment as a longshoreman. All the dock bosses knew him as an agitator. He had worked at odd jobs until a year ago, when Amanda had hired him over eleven other applicants who had presented themselves in response to a newspaper advertisement for a confidential clerk. The advertisement was one of the few in the paper that didn’t carry the line
No Irish need apply.

From all Louis could tell, Amanda was well pleased with her choice. Michael was self-educated, a voracious reader—something uncommon in the Five Points. His parents had come from a village in County Antrim, where his father had belonged to the Hearts of Steel—one of the gangs that harassed the English landlords. “A brawling boy,” Michael had once said of his father, without implying praise or admiration. “The village matched his temperament exactly. My father often repeated a joke—true or not, I can’t say—about one of the local ladies who walked out of her cottage one morning and said with a smile, ‘A lovely day—ten o’clock and not a blow struck yet.’ ”

When the first of the famines devastated Ireland in ’22, the Boyles had removed to America—going no further than New York because they had no funds, and because they were soured on the idea of working land; the land in Ireland had already rejected them. Five years after Michael was born, his father had died in a bloody confrontation between two of the Five Points gangs. His mother had lasted only two years more. Michael had survived by determination and his wits.

Louis admired the young Irishman’s obvious strength. He liked his quiet cheerfulness. At the same time, he occasionally resented Michael’s growing closeness to his mother.

Now Michael leaned down and scooped up his white cat. Mr. Mayor was a huge, rather sinister-looking torn. He regarded Louis from the crook of his master’s elbow. The young man said, “You’re looking odd, Louis. Got a bellyache?”

“No,” Louis replied, too quickly. “I’m fine.”

Michael grinned. “Whatever you say. I’ve a plate of mutton in the library. Care for some?”

“No, thanks.”

“Come in and keep me company for a bit, at least.”

Louis hesitated. To lull Michael’s suspicions, he’d better do it. “All right.”

He followed Michael through the double doors into the overheated room.

About half of the library’s wall space was filled with ceiling-high bookcases. Near the outer windows stood a desk uttered with papers and ledgers. Along the wall on Louis’ right, another table held the telegraphic equipment that connected the house with the Rothman Bank in Boston.

Michael’s booted feet scraped on the carpet, a sound slightly louder than the hissing of the two gas jets over the mantel. Four logs burned in the grate. Beside Michael’s chair, a small taboret bore a platter heaped with slices of meat.

Mr. Mayor jumped from Michael’s arms. The cat had come with the young man from Five Points, his only possession. Michael had christened him Mr. Mayor “because he’s ten times as intelligent as most incumbents, and could do a better job even without the power of speech—which in the case of a politician is usually a hindrance, since it permits his idiotic ideas to be heard.”

The cat put his forepaws on the edge of the taboret, shot out his head as if to sample a bit of the mutton. Michael batted him away.

Then, stepping carefully between two piles of manuscript paper at the foot of the chair, Michael sat down. He helped himself to a slice of mutton which he tore into smaller pieces, stuffing them into his mouth one at a time.

“I’ve never seen one person eat so much, so often,” Louis said. “And how can you stand this heat?”

“Because I spent the winters in the streets when I was growing up. Never felt the warmth of a fire—nor tasted decent food, either. I expect in forty years, I might get my fill of both.”

Louis wandered to the mantel, gazing at the French infantry sword hung horizontally above the Kentucky rifle. The small green glass bottle half filled with powdery tea shimmered in the gaslight.

He heard Michael riffling some of the manuscript sheets, then caught the distant creak of a floorboard overhead.

Kathleen.

Turning down the beds—

He couldn’t stay here long. Not if he meant to do what he’d promised his classmates.

“How is Professor Pemberton treating you?” Michael wanted to know.

Louis turned, wondering why Michael had raised that subject. He avoided the young man’s eyes, gazing instead at the oil painting of his great-grandfather hanging on the outer wall. On a smaller table underneath the painting and behind the desk, a glass display case with wooden ends held cousin Jared’s medallion. The medallion stood vertically, wedged into a slot in a small velvet pedestal. Lying on the velvet in front of the pedestal was a frayed circlet of tarred rope.

Louis answered the question carefully. “The school’s boring.”

“Ah, but you must suffer through if you’re to go on to Harvard as your mother intends.”

“I wonder if she’ll let me use my right name in college. I feel funny being called Louis de la Gura. Everyone thinks I’m a foreigner.”

Bitterness crept in when Michael replied, “And
foreigners
aren’t the most popular souls in New York, are they?”

“Michael, do you know why I’m not allowed to call myself Louis Kent?”

“Why, how should I know that? I’m only hired help. What does your mother say when you ask her?”

“Nothing that makes much sense. She just says it’s necessary to keep the Kent name hidden a while longer—” He shook his head, gesturing at the sword and rifle. “If she’s so proud of our family, you’d think she’d tell everyone who we are.”

“I can’t give you an explanation. It’s not in my province,” Michael answered, his voice so flat Louis suspected the clerk knew more than he was saying. He’d brought up the subject with Michael once before, receiving the same sort of evasive answer.

“I wish you’d stop your fidgeting, Louis. You’re making me nervous.”

Louis forced his hands to his sides. “Was I fidgeting?”

“You were. Are you sure nothing’s bothering you?”

“No,” Louis lied. His eyes slid to the wall clock above the telegraph equipment. The hands had reached ten past the hour.

I must go upstairs. She’ll be finished soon
—

“What is Professor Pemberton having you read these days?”

“Plutarch.”

“In Latin or English?”

The boy grimaced. “Latin. I just can’t get the hang of it—the other boys have studied it for much longer—”

“Don’t feel discouraged. I’ve listened to Latin mass for years, and I can’t get the hang of it either.”

Mr. Mayor jumped up on Michael, purring audibly. After digging his claws in Michael’s trousers a couple of times—earning a gentle knock between the ears—the cat settled down in the young man’s lap. Michael slid the polished toe of a boot toward the stacks of manuscript.

“If you need something to read, perhaps you’d find this a little more interesting. It came late this afternoon, delivered from one of the California Steamers.”

Louis craned around to study the closely written sheets. “What is it?”

“The autobiography of your mother’s nigger manager.”

“I don’t understand why she had him write it—Kent’s will never publish it, will they?”

“Not under present management,” Michael agreed. “Your mother had the nigger go ahead because she’s confident she’ll own the company soon.”

“How?”

Michael’s eyes moved away. “Oh, she’s working on it in various ways—” Another evasion.

“Is the manuscript any good?”

“Not half bad, actually.”

“Mr. Hope’s a bright man.”

“Also an enterprising one. The parcel contained a letter saying the Ophir Combine’s about to begin work at the claim in the mountains. They’ve completed the flume that brings in water, and Hope and Mr. Pelham look for handsome profits.” He grinned. “You’re going to be richer than ever.”

Louis didn’t answer.

“I am a bit surprised a colored fellow could do so well in business,” Michael added. “And turn out an acceptable manuscript.”

“You don’t care for the colored, do you, Michael?”

Michael Boyle’s bright hair guttered as he raised his head.

“I don’t hate them, if that’s what you’re asking. Neither do I think all this effort on their behalf is warranted. You see, Louis, the famines in the old country have grown worse and worse. You know how many boatloads of Irish dock in New York every year—”

“Dozens.”

Michael nodded. “I’ve read we may have two hundred thousand arrivals this year alone. Hoping for a fresh beginning—which includes work. To every such family, a black face means competition for the job that can spell the difference between survival and starvation. It’s not surprising abolitionism is hated in the slums. If the abolitionists had their way, there’d be just that many more free nigger laborers pouring into the northern cities. Poor white people are starving to death not twenty blocks from here, Louis! Yet some of the great thinkers can talk of nothing but the unfortunate colored man. They should look closer to home! To the babies who die out in the heat of Mulberry Street in the summer, put there because some girl can’t afford to feed her own mouth, let alone her infant’s when it grows. I’ve seen other babies who were gnawed to death by rats that got into their cradles. The babies were left alone while their mothers strolled Paradise Square to earn twenty-five cents with a man. Walsh knows the way it is, right enough.”

He was referring to a colorful, audacious city politician. With the aid of a group of raucous roughnecks Walsh called his Spartan Band, he had finally forced recognition of New York’s Irish constituency by the Tammany Democrats, and gone on to represent the constituency in the State Assembly and, in 1850, the Congress.

“Walsh told those do-gooders in Washington that the only difference between the nigger slave in the south and the white wage slave up here is that one has a master without asking for him, while the other has to beg for the privilege!”

He was interrupted by the rhythmic clanging of a gong attached to the wall above the telegraph equipment and just to one side of the clock. He jumped up—ruffling Mr. Mayor, who stalked off to a corner.

Michael crossed to the table as the Morse sounder clicked off a rapid series of dots and dashes. He scowled at the sounder until it was silent.

“That’s the third time the bank’s telegraphed since five o’clock. I keep telling them she hasn’t returned—”