City of Promise (12 page)

“At a favorable rate of interest, no doubt,” Eileen said.

“Very favorable. And perhaps delayed for a period. So let’s say an interest-free loan during construction,”—Eileen started to respond, but Josh wasn’t finished—“and to remain interest-free for the first three years after completion.”

“A loan of a hundred thousand dollars,” Eileen said. “Unsecured, no doubt.”

Josh nodded.

“And interest-free for a period of years.”

“Exactly,” Josh said.

Eileen smiled. “Done, Mr. Turner. At least from my perspective.”

“Then it’s up to Mollie.” He had kept hold of her hand. Now at last he turned back to her. “What about it? Will you marry me, sweet Mollie Brannigan?”

So here it was.

After all the years, after she had schooled herself to accept spinsterhood
as her fate, a man had appeared who wanted to marry her. And not just any man. Someone who frequently made her laugh, who made her heart beat faster each time she saw him, a man whose touch was making her feel quite warm in ways to which she was entirely unaccustomed. Mollie gathered herself, waited a few seconds, aware of how momentous her next words must be. Then, finally and firmly, said, “Yes, Joshua Turner, I will.”

5

E
BENEZER
T
ICKLE WAS
a dwarf.

Josh had seen General Tom Thumb in Barnum’s museum; barely three feet tall and dressed up like Napoleon, or Cupid, or the commander of a Highland regiment. Unlike Thumb, Tickle was not a miniaturized man as he might be conceived by someone making a drawing. The man facing Josh had an ordinary-size head and torso, with powerful though short arms, a barrel chest, and hams like oaks. It was the shortness of his legs that dictated his height.

The address on Dey Street had turned out to be a small room cut out of a corner of a coal cellar. With the door shut the only light came from an old-fashioned whale-oil lamp that cast flickering shadows on the raw brick walls and the sparse furnishings. There was a cot, a small table, and two wooden chairs. Josh sat on one and Tickle on the other—both legs stuck out straight in front of him—smoking a corncob pipe. The pungent smell of his tobacco hung over the place like a pall. “’Bout these flats of yours, Mr. Turner. There’s no question what’s needed.”

“It’s a question to me, Mr. Tickle.”

“Steel,” Tickle said.

Josh brought his eyebrows together over the bridge of his nose. “Steel?”

“Yup.” Tickle was tamping more tobacco into his pipe meanwhile. “You want to build a building as goes up a fair number of floors and doesn’t have to give up half its space to bloody great stone walls and tree trunk beams, you need steel. Plenty as know that. I ain’t telling you anything worth much on the open market.”

“Sounds as if you’re describing an ancient castle, not a modern building, Mr. Tickle. Not too many tree trunk beams around these days. We use cast iron.”

“Ain’t safe above seven, maybe eight floors,” Tickle said. “Leastways, not safe enough. Not unless you put a bloody great iron pillar every ten or so feet. Sometimes not even then.”

“True,” Josh said. There had been half a dozen bridge collapses over the last quarter century. And any number of building cave-ins. A few years back someone got the idea of building an elevated railway along Greenwich Street. Take the Babel of traffic up over everyone’s heads. Except on the first attempt the iron framework hadn’t proved strong enough for the task and they had to build it a second time. “I take it steel is stronger than cast iron.”

Tickle had just taken a long pull on his pipe and his snort made smoke pour out of his nose and mouth. “Ten times as strong. Maybe twenty.” He reached over and opened the drawer of the table and produced a piece of metal. It was gunmetal gray in color, some six inches long and four inches wide and an inch thick. “Steel,” Tickle said. “Strongest building material in the world. And the thinnest. Make yourself a framework of that, clothe it up with brick or granite outside and plaster in. You can pile on as many stories as suits your fancy. Steel framing it’s called. Everyone’s known about it for maybe two hundred years.”

“Then why,” Josh asked, “has it not been done?”

This time Tickle took a few moments before he answered, using the pause to scrape the embers out of the bowl of his pipe and begin
the process of refilling it with fresh tobacco. “You a scientific sort of man, Mr. Turner?” he asked finally.

“Not really, no.”

“Well then, I’ll try to tell it simple. Iron for casting, pig iron, it’s got more ’n two percent carbon mixed in. Steel’s got less. You make steel by taking most of the carbon out of iron. Find a way to do it without taking all the time and trouble it used to took, you got yourself something special.”

“Am I to assume, Mr. Tickle, that you’re a man who knows his way around the foundry floor?”

Tickle nodded. “Foreman over at Novelty,” he said. “They say the little people got a calling for the foundry trade. You probably heard that.”

Josh allowed as he had, and that he knew of Novelty Iron Works.

“Besides me, nine of my kind works there. Mind you, that’s ten out of two thousand, and I’m the only one as is a foreman. I can’t say for sure it’s a calling, Mr. Turner, but I can tell you working iron’s as hard a job as a man can do, whatever his height.” Tickle clamped his pipe in his teeth and drew back the shirt sleeve of first one arm then the other. Both were knotted with muscles and crisscrossed with the reddened welts of burn scars. “Thing I do know, it’s a ways better than being a dressed-up doll in Barnum’s freak show.”

Josh didn’t comment on that. “I seem to remember,” he said instead, “that Novelty was the last of the ironworks to be unionized.”

“That’s so. Happened a few years back during the war. Before my time that was, but the North needed iron if they was going to win. Foundry workers had some cards to play and they played ’em.”

“And you, Mr. Tickle, are you a member of the Iron and Metal Workers League?”

“I am. Proud of it as well.”

“Yet you’re not with your brothers today,” Josh said. “It’s my understanding they’re marching down Broadway as we speak. Demanding an eight-hour workday. Do you not believe in their cause?”

“I do, Mr. Turner. But they can march to hell and back and it won’t
make a difference. They’re not going to get the same day’s pay for two hours’ less work. Not if every laboring man in the city joins together to demand it. The bosses say the eight-hour-day’s Communism, say it’ll put an end to any kind of economic progress here in America. Mayor’s in thick with the bosses. Says he’s never going to let no eight-hour-day Communism come over here. His Honor’s going to send in the police with their clubs. A man like me, I don’t figure to do very well in that sort of thing.”

Josh could not argue with that truth and he did not try. “We were discussing steel, Mr. Tickle.”

“So we were, Mr. Turner. It’s stronger, thinner, a hell’s sight easier to work with. Nothing new in that, like I said. Thing is, it’s never been easy to make steel. Open hearth mostly, though I heard tell of other ways over in Europe. Way we do it here, furnace needs to be a hundred tons at least. Furnace that size eats fuel faster ’n a dog eats his dinner. Takes a huge amount of charcoal. You’d have to cut down every tree between here and China to get as much as you’d need to make any sizeable amount of steel that way. Course,” cocking his oversize head and examining his visitor, “there’s some easier methods nowadays.”

“And what methods are those, Mr. Tickle?”

“Depends who you ask. The way it’s mostly told, man named Bessemer over in England invented a process to force out the carbon with a blast of air. You still has to melt the iron and that takes a fair bit of fuel, but you can use coal you dig out of the ground. Don’t need charcoal made from wood. And air’s free, Mr. Turner. Means the whole thing becomes a sight more practical than it was before.”

Limited land here in New York, but unlimited air. That’s what he’d told Trent Clifford. “Then I don’t see the problem, Mr. Tickle.”

“Like I said, Bessemer holds the patent. Won’t say how his process is done unless you put your hand in your pocket and pay him for a license. Ain’t too many else as knows how to do it apart from him. A few, but not too many.”

Josh’s eyes were starting to tear in the smoky atmosphere, but he didn’t wipe them. Narrowed them instead. And sat back and considered
Ebenezer Tickle with great attention. “I think you’re going to tell me you know how Bessemer’s process works. Am I correct, Mr. Tickle?”

“You are, Mr. Turner.” Tickle jumped off his chair and headed for the door in the back wall. He walked with the waddling stride common to men made as he was, but he got where he was going soon enough. The rear door opened on a trash-strewn square of space hardly big enough to turn around in, but it admitted a wave of relatively fresh, warm June air, and that helped some with the tobacco fumes.

The dwarf returned to his visitor and hoisted himself back into the chair beside the table. The maneuver was performed too quickly for Josh to see exactly how it was done. He’s learned ways to cope with his situation, Josh thought. As have I.

“Better?” Tickle asked, gesturing toward the open door. And when Josh nodded, “I was talking about Mr. Bessemer over in England and his patent . . . Weren’t his idea to start out with.”

“It was yours? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Nope.” Tickle shook his head. “Never said that. Never would. Man named William Kelly. Came from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but did his steelmaking in Eddyville, Kentucky. West part, right where I was born. Kelly’s the one thought up using air to blow the carbon out of iron and figured how to do it. Got himself a patent and everything.”

“Let me guess. You worked for Kelly when he was in Kentucky.”

“Him and his brother,” Tickle said. “Right from the first day.”

“Is this Kelly likely to be less parsimonious with the rights to his kind of steelmaking?”

“Doesn’t have ’em. Not anymore. Good people, the Kelly brothers, but foolish about business. Went bankrupt. Sold their patent to Bessemer. Who says he had anyways invented the same thing over across the ocean.” Tickle shrugged. “Don’t matter now. You want to know how to blow carbon out of pig iron using something that looks like this . . .” Tickle pulled another treasure out of the drawer of the desk, a drawing of a kind of furnace, an elongated oval on legs, “you got to pay Bessemer.”

“Unless,” Josh said, “you already know how to do it.”

Trickle smiled.

The appeal of embroidered roses outlined with faux pearls had faded. Fashion had changed, and the years on the Ladies’ Mile had refined Mollie’s taste. Something a bit simpler she thought. Depending for its charm on cut and fabric.

Given that she was no longer a working woman but once more living with Auntie Eileen, Mollie had plenty of time to consider the matter of her wedding dress. She was aided in those deliberations by her aunt and Rosie O’Toole, who came frequently to discuss the matter. It was Rosie who produced a copy of
Harper’s Bazaar
for the first week in June. The magazine had three pages of illustrations of the latest bridal fashions from France. “Something like this would be lovely on you.” Rosie pointed to a dress described as being “. . . of fine white Swiss muslin, trimmed with pleated ruffles of the same, and folds and bows of white silk.”

Eileen particularly approved of the silk ribbons around the waist—Mollie’s was barely seventeen inches when she was laced into a good tight corset—and of the frock’s modest V-neck accented with a wide bertha collar. “You’re not going to bubble up over a plunging décolletage no matter how much push-up the corset applies,” she said. “So this would definitely suit you.” Her niece’s deficiencies of bosom had been one of Eileen’s minor worries these many years.

“Worn with,” Mollie leaned over the copy of
Harper’s Bazaar
—published every Saturday, ten cents a copy or four dollars a year in advance—and read aloud, “a long blond veil held in place with a wreath of orange blossoms, with long sprays falling over the back.”

“Mrs. Jackson can make that veil and headpiece for you in no time,” Rosie said. Mrs. Jackson was Macy’s head milliner.

“Will Mollie need to visit the store?” Eileen asked. As she’d predicted, Mrs. Getchell had fired Mollie the day after a sketch of her
niece appeared in
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
and Mollie was identified as having gone to the Tombs to help arrange the release of the notorious Mrs. Brannigan.

“That hardly matters, Auntie Eileen. I’m let go from my job, not banished from shopping at Macy’s.”

“No one,” Rosie said, “is banished from shopping at Macy’s. The old man would be apoplectic if Getchell suggested such a thing. But I shall make your wedding gown on my own time, Mollie darling. I’ll copy this one exactly and start as soon as you get the material. No charge for my labor, of course.” Leaning over to pinch the younger woman’s cheek. “Made your first party dress when you were four. This one will be my present on the occasion of your marriage.”

“Very kind,” Eileen said. “But don’t go thinking Mollie will name her firstborn after you if it’s a girl. The first daughter’s going to be Eileen, isn’t she?”