City of God Page 3

  None of Samuel’s tenants questioned the arrangement, or in any way encroached on the young beauty most had never set eyes on, the supreme first lady tai-tai. As for Ah Chee, they nodded respectfully when she went past, and when sometimes she joined them for a game of cards and a drink of plum brandy, they were inclined to let her win. This despite the fact that except for those two, the tiny Chinese community was without females of any sort. It was but one of the hardships they bore. Another was their inability to look like everyone else in this place. That was not simply a matter of skin color or having almond-shape rather than round eyes. In China, since the coming of the Manchu in 1644, it was the law that every male must shave the front of his head and wear a queue, a long braid down his back. If he cut his queue a man could not return to die in what they called the Middle Kingdom, the land between heaven and earth. He would not be buried with his ancestors. In the matter of making a new life in America, Samuel’s tenants considered themselves sojourners, those who had come to stay a little stay (so the expression in their language had it) and to return home. They found what work they could and sent as much money as possible back to relatives in China. In the matter of their attitude towards Devrey, he was a white man who spoke their language, a source of the temporary jobs on which they depended, and he could be counted on to provide rice when times were hard. In this place he need answer to no one.

  “You leave now, lord?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lord wait. I get horse.”

  The man was one of at least four called—in the Chinese fashion, family name first—Lee Yut. A good many were Lee Something else. Sixty-two tenants at this week’s count, and pretty much all of them Lees or Hors or Bos, all from little villages where everyone was related and the second and third sons were sent to sea to be cooks and stewards to the officers of the ships in the China trade. Nicknames helped sort out the confusion. This particular Lee Yut was known as Leper Face because his skin was severely pitted by the pox, the scars so close together that in some places his flesh looked to have been eaten away.

  Leper Face disappeared into the alley between the two buildings and returned a moment later with Devrey’s mare. She snorted softly, pleased to see her master. Samuel patted her muzzle. Leper Face dropped to his knees and extended his clasped hands. Samuel took the leg-up and swung himself into the saddle. Horseback was not the most appealing manner of travel on a cold night like this one, but a private carriage would attract too much attention in these parts. There were a few of the new hansom cabs for hire in the city but no chance of finding one on Cherry Street. An omnibus, a large multiseat vehicle pulled by a team of six horses, ran a few streets to the west, but it was too public, and since it was used almost exclusively by the men of uppertendom traveling back and forth to their businesses, far too convivial.

  Devrey adjusted his seat in the saddle, made a small sound in his throat, and the mare set out on the familiar northward journey. After a few seconds he turned and looked back. Leper Face had disappeared and Mei-hua’s window was dark. Ah Chee was under strict instructions always to keep the curtains drawn after sunset, but once or twice he had seen a sliver of light and known Mei-hua was up there watching him, already—or so he fancied—counting the minutes until he returned.

  Not tonight. All the windows were dark, and there were no gaslights in this neighborhood. Plenty to the south, of course, and recently as far up the town, to use the uppertendom expression, as his own front door on Fourteenth Street.

  Chapter Two

  MUCH OF FOURTEENTH Street was lined with red-brick houses. They’d been fashionable enough a few years back, but in New York nothing changed more quickly than fashion. Wilbur Randolf, who had made his money in tanning but owned a number of Fourteenth Street lots, had been one of the first to build with the newly desirable tawny-brown sandstone quarried in central New Jersey. In New York, where even speech was shortened so that business might proceed at a quicker pace, they were called simply brownstones. When Randolf’s houses were finished, he arranged that the deed to the finest of them, number three East Fourteenth, on the corner of the somewhat improved Fifth Avenue (a rutted gully become a cobbled street beneath which flowed the now hidden stream known as Minetta Water) would on his death go to his only child, Carolina. Meanwhile it was hers to live in. The handsome gift marked the occasion of Carolina’s marriage to Samuel Devrey.

  “You’re late, Samuel. I’ve been waiting for you.” Carolina took his hat and gloves herself.

  “Where’s Dorothy?” They had only the one live-in servant unless you counted Barnabas, the boy who slept out back above the stable located in the communal mews. Other needs were met by day help. Still, his wife shouldn’t have to attend her own front door.

  “I sent her down to the kitchen to fetch a bit of supper for you as soon as I heard the mews gate.”

  “And how did you know it was me and not one of the neighbors?”

  “I guessed. Besides, you haven’t yet had the smith change your mare’s left rear shoe. It has a loose ring. I told you so a week past.”

  “Barnabas checked. He said the shoe seemed tight enough to him.”

  “Well, Barnabas is wrong. It’s loose. Please have it seen to, Samuel. I shall be sick with worry otherwise. Anyway, I don’t know why you insist on riding horseback when we’ve a perfectly good buggy. I certainly don’t need it these days.” Carolina looked down at her belly, swollen with child.

  He silenced her with a kiss on the cheek. “I like riding horseback, and I shall have the shoe looked at by the smith tomorrow or the next day. Promise.”

  “What of him, Samuel?” Carolina, placated by the promise and the kiss, drew his hand to her rounded middle. “No greeting for your son?”

  “Or my daughter.” He gave the bulge a dutiful pat. “You can’t be expert in that as well as the sound made by properly shod horses.”

  “Oh, but I am. You shall have a son. A Devrey heir. Your mother came to see me today. She agrees. Says it’s obvious since I bulge entirely in the front and not at all in the rear. She is insistent we name the boy Lansing. For your father.”

  “Insistent, is she? Well, I think she must be disappointed.” Lansing Devrey had been known as Bastard all his life because his bachelor father never married his mother and the town never let him forget it. Didn’t matter that he inherited one of the oldest shipping companies in the city and married a high-society Clinton. Bastard he was until the day he died.

  If Mei-hua had a child, it too would be a bastard in the eyes of New York. Only the Chinese would recognize her as the first and senior wife and think it perfectly ordinary for him to acquire a second. That’s what he’d been thinking standing next to Carolina in St. Paul’s Church eleven months before, vowing before God that he would cleave only unto Wilbur Randolf’s daughter. He was taking a second wife in the manner of any man in Asia. Besides, no Caucasian would recognize the marriage ceremony that took place on Cherry Street.

  It was the arrival of children that complicated things.

  Lavender water tonight, and the new white linen nightdress Carolina had made herself. It was open down the back, because the Irish midwife had suggested that now Mrs. Devrey was in her seventh month, if she had to give in to her husband, she must insist he approach her from the rear. “Sure, you’ll not want him lying atop you and crushing the wee babe. That wouldn’t be right, would it dearie?”

  Carolina had turned aside so the midwife wouldn’t see her blush and agreed it was not right. She also reminded herself that such a matter-of-fact approach to the business of conceiving and birthing was the reason she had insisted on having Maggie O’Brien attend her lying-in. Her mother-in-law had desperately wanted it to be Mrs. Carter, who was said to have recently delivered babies for an Astor as well as for Commodore Vanderbilt’s eldest daughter. Carolina wouldn’t give in. With no mother of her own since she was a tiny girl and a father she could always twist around her finger, she was accustomed to having her way, even when matched agai
nst as formidable an opponent as Celinda Clinton Devrey. Which was why she now had the frank and sensible Mrs. O’Brien advising her about the latest possible moment she could continue to accommodate her husband, as long as she offered him what the midwife called the backside way in.

  But only for a week or two longer, even under Maggie O’Brien’s forgiving regime. Before the end of March Carolina would start the eighth month of her pregnancy and must begin her confinement, which meant many weeks on either side of the birth when Samuel, like most men, would doubtless frequent a bordello. As far as men were concerned, that side of things was as it was and women were expected to turn a blind eye. Just as they must recognize their duty to submit in the marriage bed.

  “You know what you must do, I expect,” Carolina’s father had said gruffly the day before her wedding, rising to the challenge of being the girl’s only parent. “Leave everything to your husband and do exactly as you’re bid. In all things, Carolina. However…odd they might seem.” No one could say Wilbur Randolf didn’t do his duty.

  “I know, Papa.”

  “Yes, I expect you do.” He’d turned aside, the matter done with and his obligation fulfilled. And the devil take all those folk who thought him a monster because he hadn’t married a second time after the cholera of 1814 took his precious Penelope and left him with a broken heart and a two-year-old daughter. “I expect your Aunt Lucy has seen to it that you know such things. She’s here often enough.”

  It would have been perfectly natural had Wilbur Randolf seen fit to marry his dead wife’s widowed and childless sister. Everyone thought so, and Carolina had to agree it had a certain logic. Aunt Lucy was certainly fond of the idea; it was why she came around as frequently as she did. Though of course it was also her bounden duty to give her sister’s motherless girl the benefit of female counsel.

  Which, after a fashion, she did. Though nothing had turned out quite as Carolina anticipated in the matter of what Aunt Lucy called the expectations of the marriage bed, described as being best borne with fortitude, patience, and closed eyes. It must be dreadful, the girl thought. Why else would everyone be warning her in such mysterious terms? But perhaps they did not realize that she adored her dark and brawny husband or that she had decided to marry him the very first time she saw him, when the wind took his tall stovepipe hat on a blustery street corner and she, agile and quick-minded as always, had been the one to catch and return it. And they had both laughed heartily at the realization of how they had reversed a scene popular in every music hall in the town.

  Dear lord, why hadn’t she heard that hearty laugh more often since the wedding? And why was it that Samuel apparently had so few expectations of the marriage bed, despite the admonitions of her father and Aunt Lucy?

  Lacking anyone with whom she would dare to discuss such questions, Carolina had devised an explanation of her own. Her husband worked so hard and such long hours that he spent most nights in a dead stupor. That’s why he was always careful to remain on his side of the bed, and turned to her only very occasionally in a quick and explosive joining that however soon it was over at least gave her the rare freedom to wrap her arms around Samuel and whisper his name, hoping to convey some of the passion she had felt from that first wind-driven encounter. But soon she must face those eight, perhaps ten, weeks before the baby was born—and at least three months after—sequestered among women. Not even Samuel would be without female ease for such a length of time. He’d go to a bordello for certain and remind himself of whatever it was men found so attractive in such places. Else why were they permitted to exist, despite the railings of preachers and moral reformers alike?

  She wouldn’t think about it; it was far too distressing. She would have enough to deal with surviving her part of this affair.

  Despite all the dreadful stories women whispered over their cups of tea in an afternoon “at home,” to Carolina her confinement loomed as more trying than the actual birth. Thankfully, since she was in Mrs. O’Brien’s care, her purgatory would be for the shortest possible time. The more fashionable midwives insisted the lying-in period must begin at the end of the fifth month. She had been granted an extra two months of normal life, or as normal as it could be with a great swollen belly preceding one everywhere one went. The time was nearing, however, when she would be required to spend most of every day abed or stretched out on a sofa, with the curtains drawn and windows closed tight. Only female visitors would be permitted, and only relatives at that.

  Five long months of such restrictions. Dear lord, it would kill her.

  No, it would not. She would endure. But thank heavens, as well as not confining her prospective mothers to their beds until the final eight weeks, Mrs. O’Brien said they need not sleep alone until then. “Though truth to tell, ma’am, once they’re in the bed aside ye, it’s for sure Adam will look for Eve. Big belly and all.”

  Would that it were so one more time before their separation began. So at least he would remember her. “Are you sleeping, Samuel?”

  “I’m trying to.”

  “Stay awake a bit longer. Tell me about your day. What kept you so late?”

  “Affairs of business, Carolina. They wouldn’t interest you.”

  “Oh, but they would. Papa always told me about his business. I found it fascinating. I’m sure yours is as well.”

  “Shipping is a much more complex endeavor than leather goods.” Wilbur Randolf had started as a maker of harnesses. These days he owned four tanneries, and some two dozen of the town’s harness makers were part of the extensive business he had created. These skilled workers, each in his own tiny workshop, counted on Randolf to supply not only the raw materials of their trade but the orders for harnesses that kept food in the mouths of their families. It was a far steadier source of income than simply setting up shop and waiting for customers. They might grumble about giving away three-fourths of their earnings, but very few severed their relationship with Randolf Leather and set up on their own. At least half of those who did returned in a few months begging to be allowed to resume the former arrangement. Sometimes Wilbur took them back. Frequently he did not. An example, after all, had to be made.

  From Sam’s point of view, that Carolina was an only child who would inherit her father’s estate—which for all practical purposes meant it would come to him as her husband—was one reason he’d decided to marry her. Or, as he thought of it, take her as a second wife. The other reason was that Carolina was a golden blonde and almost as tall as he. Her eyes were brown, while Mei-hua’s were that remarkable blue-gray he’d seen in no other Chinese. Carolina being so different from Mei-hua would help him keep the two worlds apart, as distant in his mind as they were in reality. That had been the plan. The practice was not always reliable. He could feel the heat of her body pressing against his.

  Samuel moved as far away as he could without falling out of the bed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to crowd you.”

  “You’re not crowding me. I like nestling against you as if we were a pair of spoons in the drawer.”

  Mei-hua fit snugly against his midsection; it seemed he could encompass her completely simply by drawing his knees to his chest. Even when she was slender, Carolina’s height made that impossible. Now with her big belly and her spreading hips…

  “See,” she whispered. “The gown opens from the back.” He felt her draw it aside. “Mrs. O’Brien says it’s quite safe this way for another little while.”

  “Are you telling me you discuss my most private life with that Irish midwife you insisted on engaging against all advice?” He didn’t want to sound angry. Not in light of her condition. But…damned women. “Do you?”

  “Not exactly, Samuel, but of course I—”

  “Never mind, Carolina. I didn’t mean to sound gruff. I understand you aren’t entirely clearheaded these days.” He rolled out of the bed as he spoke. “Anyway, it’s high time I started sleeping in the room across the hall. It will be better for you, I’m sure. I’m sorry I did not suggest it earl
ier. I didn’t mean to be so selfish.”

  Tell her about his business, she’d said. Sweet Christ, he was a Devrey, what would his business be but boats and seaports and trade?

  Ships were bellied up to the eastern edge of Manhattan in a continuous line from South Street to well above Franklin. Barques and brigs and schooners and sloops stretched along the waterfront, their bowsprits overhanging Front Street, their masts aggressively thrusting towards the clouds. On any given day there were three hundred of them this side of the island and almost as many over on the Hudson side. Nearly half the goods exported from the entire country left from New York, and fully a third of everything the nation imported entered here. At any hour you could see pilot craft shepherding a newly arrived vessel to a mooring. Walk down the town far enough to look across the harbor to the open ocean, and fair to certain you’d see a spread of square sail against the horizon, royals and top gallants bellying in the wind, blazing white in the sun. Damn fine, Devrey thought. A rousing sight. But not likely to last. Not the way it was now.

  Commercial craft were at war, with money and speed set to determine the outcome as sure as cannon balls did for the navy. The battle began eighteen years back in 1815 with Fulton’s steamboat, but Cornelius Vanderbilt took the measure of that innovation better than Fulton had. The inventor died a man of modest means. Vanderbilt created a fortune based on his youthful mastery of the game of boat ramming that marked the early skirmishes between steam and sail. Now he was called commodore. Sweet Christ, would you believe it? Malicious mischief raised to a title. Commodore Vanderbilt was said to be worth half a million, and steam ruled the inland waterways and the coastal packets. There was even talk of steamboats that could carry enough coal to make the ocean crossing to Europe.