Two Moons (35 page)

“Oh, it’s been dispiriting as can be, Mr. Allison. For a long time I thought they’d tear the thing down rather than finish it. And I don’t mind telling you, I’ve had more than one bout of marsh fever sitting out here every fall.”

“Have you tried Schenck’s Pulmonic Syrup? It’s marvelous, isn’t it, Mrs. May?”

“The best remedy you can find,” she assured Officer Shea, who nodded his thanks and went on to declare that matters had been more cheerful since the engineers arrived with their shovels and plumb lines. Their investigations of the ground had shown it surprisingly sturdy for a patch so near a swamp. If Congress and the Monument Society continued to provide the money, the shaft might yet rise to its full five hundred and fifty feet.

The watchman revealed himself as a frustrated guide who would rather be showing visitors around a finished memorial than guarding this sodden site of interruption and uncertainty. As it was, he could name every item that had gone into the cornerstone in 1848. “We’ve got something from your outfit, you know,” he told Hugh, explaining that
the
Astronomical Observations for 1845,
presented by Superintendent Maury, were right inside the stone, along with the
Farmers’ Almanac
and every coin they’d minted to that day.

“The dollar of our daddies,” said Cynthia.

“Perfectly phrased, ma’am,” said Shea, a bit shyly, who embarked on a vigorous explanation of how resuming the coinage of silver might give help to debtors like himself. “Why should the banking interests get all—”

“Might we have a look inside?” asked Hugh, who said he hated to miss any of the officer’s argument, but felt he must point out the lateness of the hour. He really ought to be seeing Mrs. May home, and they would so enjoy getting a glimpse of the interior first.

“Well,” said Shea, pulling on his beard and giving it some thought. “It’s against regulations, but I imagine the lady might like to see the New England granite on the inside walls. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it came from quarries she rode past growing up.”

He said he’d fetch a key. Hugh accompanied him and made a note of where this crucial object hung. It was so massive it looked like a ceremonial joke, but it actually turned a lock, and with one push and a slight groan from both the hinges and Officer Shea himself, the giant eastern door gave way.

“Be careful in them shoes, ma’am.”

Some squeaks indicated the presence of at least a few rats, attracted by remnants of the engineers’ recent lunches.

“Even in this light you can tell the granite’s blue,” said Shea, holding his lantern up to one of the walls. Its stones turned out to be as heavily inscribed as an Egyptian tomb’s.

Cynthia looked upward, calculating the rate at which the shaft tapered toward the night sky—one-quarter inch to the foot, she felt certain—while Hugh intently surveyed some rotten-looking scaffolds.

“How ever did they get up there?” Cynthia asked Shea. “The workmen, I mean.”

“You’ve brought me to the most interesting thing of all,” said the
watchman. “There’s going to be a steam elevator rising the whole five hundred and fifty feet! And two iron stairways, on the north and south sides. Fifty flights for the fellows who’ll be doing the construction!”

“But in the earliest days?” asked Cynthia, whose lantern-lit expression, like Hugh’s, was growing anxious.

Officer Shea walked behind one of the scaffolds and beckoned the couple to join him near the granite wall. “See there? Dangerous as all hell—you should pardon my language, ma’am. But there it is. Wooden steps on iron struts, winding around all four walls. The grade is nice and gentle, but I wouldn’t trust those planks with
my
life. The air that seeps in here has made ’em soggier than my lungs.”

Hugh knocked one or two of them with his hand. “At the very top, Officer. What caps the thing now?”

The watchman laughed. “Nothing but some wooden flats. You hear ’em banging up and down whenever there’s a storm. The next big rain’ll let in enough water to drown those rats, I promise you.”

“But,” Hugh asked, “one can still get all the way up—and out onto the top edge?”

“Well,” said the watchman. “In theory.”

Four nights after dining with Cynthia, Conkling sat in his rooms at Wormley’s and let impatience get the better of him. Having her eventual consent meant nothing compared to her immediate absence. He wanted her here now, wanted the only numbers before him to be the grand exponential ones she dealt in, not these double-digit tallies, the yea-and-nay projections he’d been revising for weeks. Right now the nominations fight seemed less a thrilling strike at the king than a laborious effort to hoist his three overfed lieutenants above their own difficulties in New York.

Frustrated with ardor and suspicion, he reached for one of his gilt-edged note cards:

My dear Madam Costello—

This should be taken as a severe caution. Anytime you see peril to a Scorpio from consorting with an Aries, you had better think to inform
him
and not her. I shall assume you were telling Mrs. May the truth—at least as you see it from behind your celestial counter—but I shall not have you informing her of my worries and affairs. Where the three of us are concerned, all intelligence is to travel in one direction only—from her, through you, to me. Is that clear? I shall call on you tomorrow evening, and when I do, you had better tell me everything there is to be told about Mr. Hugh Allison. I do not trust Mrs. May on the subject, and woe betide your little den of necromancy if I cease to trust you.

Roscoe Conkling

When they got off the ferry from New Jersey, after the long nighttime train ride from Washington, Hugh and Cynthia headed straight to the Battery. Each carried a Gladstone bag, but neither seemed tired from the many hours of travel. The sunrise over the Hudson, this Friday, December 7, had appealed to both of them, but it stirred nothing like the excitement they now displayed over the distant approach of the
Juliette Marie.
The telegraph operator in Sandy Hook had communicated the first sight of the ship, and a revenue cutter carrying inspectors from the Custom House was already setting out to meet her. Cynthia imagined the mad salutes that had greeted Conkling’s arrival back in August, and felt certain they couldn’t match the crowing gusto with which Hugh Allison was waving his long white muffler at the precious cargo heading their way.

“Put it back on,” she gently urged. She tucked the ends of the wool into the lapels of his overcoat and reminded him: “We’ve got at least six hours of traipsing ahead of us.” By 4
P.M.
the
Juliette Marie
’s cargo would have undergone the required inspections, and the two of them
could claim the Mangin projector for its transfer to the ferry and a freight train south. Until then, with most of the day to kill, they wandered the many-leveled cornucopia of Stewart’s department store and sat by the huge open hearth of a Bowery beer garden.

Even so, they arrived at the Custom House well in advance of four o’clock, and had to spend some time just gazing at the immensity of its facade. Its Ionic colonnade stretched a whole block, and its windowed dome, so much higher than the Observatory’s, seemed to mock the tiny flag that flew from a pole on the roof below it.

She and Hugh made their way to an entrance on Hanover, or, as even the War God liked to joke, “Hand-over Street.” They climbed to the Rotunda, where hundreds of desks looked like haystacks in some vast imperial barn. The place seemed an inverse of the pension office back in the District, where a similar profusion of clerks sat disbursing mites to survivors of the war. Here it was all a matter of intake, the huge dome sucking in money as if its windows were the sluice gates of a dam.

By now, if the dam had operated with its usual speed, the Appraiser’s report to the Inspector would have made its way to the Surveyor and, at last, the office of the Collector, where it would be sitting on the desk of a Mr. Joseph Selden. He would report to Mrs. May and Mr. Allison that their projector had been cleared through the Port of New York with most of its fees paid and what little remained having been deferred to future installments. Cynthia looked forward to watching the professional smile that would appear on Mr. Selden’s face in gratitude for the couple’s contribution to the treasuries of both the United States and the New York Republican party. After handshakes all around, there would still be time to meet Mangin’s
ami
at the bonded warehouse for an instructive glimpse at the mechanical marvel before it was recrated and sent off on the rest of its journey.

Instead of smiling, Mr. Selden, without raising his eyes from the paper on his desk, said, “One thousand and eight hundred and fifty dollars.”

Hugh stood silent. “I don’t understand,” said Cynthia.

Mr. Selden looked up at her, his expression making it clear that, no,
he
was the one who didn’t understand.

“I was told that the bulk of the fee had already been paid,” said Cynthia, “and that what remained might be rendered—”

“One thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars. Payable immediately, or the item will be sold at auction thirty days from now.” Mr. Selden was already looking past them to see who was next and ready with a bank draft. “Please move away,” he said, putting the projector’s certificate into one of his desk’s lower drawers.

Hugh led Cynthia to a nearby bench. Even before sitting down, she realized what had occurred. Despite what he’d promised—
had
he promised? or merely indicated?—Conkling had decided not to work his will until
she
delivered the goods. To him, she was the same as the projector: a peculiar, desired commodity under embargo. Why keep his end of the bargain until she kept hers? She could picture him looking at the Senate calendar, counting the days until the nominations battle would be won or lost, and deciding not to play any card, in his public life or his hidden one, before it was absolutely necessary.

“Perhaps Mr. May tried and failed,” said Hugh, soothingly. Not even at the height of his fevers had she permitted herself tears, but he saw her crying now.

The sound of “Mr. May” made her shake—over the ever-finer entanglement of her lies and the name’s strange evocation of John himself, not the brother he had never had. “But he assured me—” she started to say, before guilty sobs overtook her.

“Come,” said Hugh, more composed than she could have imagined. “We can’t let the poor Frenchman just stand there.”

They recognized Mangin’s friend, waiting at the bonded warehouse, by the long ends of his mustache and a plaintive palms-out gesture indicating he had already learned of the difficulty.

“We have some apologizing to do,” said Hugh.

Even Cynthia managed to express her hope that he hadn’t been waiting too long.

“No, no,” said Louis Hiver, “
un quart d’heure,
at the most. But such a shame!” He pointed to the projector, still uncrated from its inspection, but roped off to any but an official’s touch. “And so easy to operate—it would be great pleasure to show you!” He leaned his head, insouciantly, to one side. “But if you like—maybe while you remain in the city and try to, how do you say, straighten this out—I will show you something else. I wish you could have been there this morning at the office!”

“What office is that?” Hugh knew almost nothing about him. Davidson had had him writing to Hiver at a rooming-house address.

“Of the
Scientific American.
I am the new ‘European correspondent.’ I am Scientific Frenchman!” He smiled and bounced, more like Cynthia’s idea of an Italian.

“Come to the office tomorrow and you will have a pleasure.”

She looked doubtfully at Hugh. However weary she might be, a lifetime of parsimony was urging her to start back for Washington tonight and avoid the price of the hotel. But she could tell from the sight of Hugh that he wasn’t up to it. He had had to put down his bag several times during their walk here from Hanover Street. Right now it rested at his feet, and she worried that some over-zealous inspector might try to tax or confiscate it.