City of Promise (14 page)

She had been imagining him in a nightshirt. Maybe even an old fashioned nightcap, though that seemed unlikely. The picture had not attracted her and she was glad instead to see that he still wore his shirt and trousers, though he’d removed his stock and the morning coat that marked him a fashionable groom. His shoe and stocking as well. The foot below his good left leg was bare. The blunt tip of his peg showed next to it. He pulled the shirt over his head and dropped it on a small chair beside the door, then crossed to the bed and sat on it with his back to her. “I know,” he said, “that it’s supposed to be the
bride who is shy and embarrassed on her wedding night, but you must admit I have more reason than most men to share the feeling.”

She nodded, then remembered he wasn’t looking at her and said, “I understand that. But you shouldn’t be so. Not with me. I could not admire you more if you still had both your legs.”

He didn’t turn to face her and his voice was very low when he said, “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“I really do. I love the way you’ve allowed yourself no bitterness over your loss, the way you never complain, and always cope. And I know you count no man your better because he has both his legs when you have one.”

He didn’t answer, only sat still for a few moments, and Mollie feared she may have said too much.
A wise woman always allows the man to control the conversation, Mollie.
Then, when he moved, she was sure she sensed greater sureness in his movements, and a greater ease with her.

Josh loosed the buttons of his trousers, and stood up long enough to drop them and quickly afterward his cotton undersuit, and suddenly she was looking at his superbly muscled naked back. And the taut, very white flesh of his equally uncovered buttocks. There was a leather strap around his waist and she realized it was part of the harness for his wooden leg, but she wasn’t staring at that. She’d been raised in a whorehouse, to use Auntie Eileen’s blunt language, and she’d never before seen, even from the back, a naked man.

Another of those blushes she didn’t seem able to control. Never mind that he couldn’t see her. He knew what she was seeing. She heard his peg drop to the floor with a soft thud. Well, that was one question answered.

Then he was beside her under the sheet and lightweight summer coverlet. His hand touched her waist first, then slid down her hip a few inches, before traveling upward over her midriff. “Well, well,” he murmured. “I don’t have to struggle to find you.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I like that very much, my darling Mollie. Very, very much.”

Suddenly she was astonished at her own forwardness, and embarrassed by it, though she had not been until this moment. “You must think me shameless not to have worn a nightdress. I made one, but—”

“But you guessed what would please me more,” he finished for her. “And I think you are my Mollie the magnificent.” Then his mouth was on hers again and there were no more words.

So what had she learned, being raised as she’d been? The mechanics were, of course, entirely familiar to her. She knew what he had and what she had and what fit where. Even all about how long the thrusts were supposed to last and what it was supposed to mean if they went on for a shorter or longer than average time. Talk of such things had been all around her when she sat at Hatty’s kitchen table and heard the morning-after chatter of the women with whom she lived. But no one had ever mentioned what she was feeling now. A great wave of delight welled up and filled her. It was not a physical satisfaction of the sort that came from some pleasurable sensation such as sinking into a hot bath, or loosening a corset after a long day and scratching where it itched. It was instead more pure and more intense and considerably more profound; a sense of rightness and belonging, and even . . . however strange, a joyful power. She had something to give him that Joshua Turner wanted very much, and in the giving of it she was made at last completely alive.

For his part, Josh could feel the blood rushing in his veins and the thudding of his heart, and knew he wanted to roll on top of her and drive himself toward that explosive moment of gratification his body demanded. But he held back.

His first time had been as a boy of fourteen, in the back kitchen at Sunshine Hill. The woman who came once a week to do the laundry had asked him to come and help her move a large kettle of hot water to one of the copper tubs in the yard, but he never got as far as the stove before she’d pushed him up against the wall and had her hand down the front of his trousers and one of her enormous breasts squashed against his face. Later he’d seen her laughing with the cook and the old
man who looked after the stables. He figured he’d been a dare of some sort. Never mind. He was glad to have that mystery solved.

There had been any number of whores since, but to the best of his knowledge, he’d never been with a virgin. Least of all one he cared for as deeply as he cared for this creature who had shown herself so different from the first moment she’d taken his arm and guided him through the twists and turns of Macy’s department of ladies’ lingerie.

When he was paying for the privilege he didn’t give a damn what a woman might think of his mutilation. With Mollie the thought that she might be repulsed had been on his mind from the moment she agreed to marry him. Earlier even. It was why he hadn’t broached the subject until Eileen Brannigan forced the issue. But he sensed no withdrawal in Mollie, no disgusted retreat because he was not whole. She’d come naked to his bed in a gesture of remarkable generosity, and she trembled in his arms in a manner that spoke more of anticipation than fear. He loved her for both.

Josh rolled himself above her, supporting himself on arms grown enormously strong with the need always to balance his incomplete lower half, and held himself at the ready long enough to look into her face. She did not have her eyes closed in the feigned ecstasy of commercial intimacy. Instead she was looking at him and he read in her glance both surrender and demand. “Now?” he asked.

“Now, Joshua.”

He met a moment of intense resistance, and saw her wince, but while he might have found enough self-discipline to hold back a bit because of it, she made it clear there was no need. Mollie rose to meet him and moved in rhythm with each thrust and he sensed her opening herself with an astonishing abandon that had he not just encountered the proof of her innocence might have caused him to wonder. Not just instinct, he realized anew. The rightness of it all. Whatever they might be apart, together they were perfect and it seemed they both knew it.

6

E
BENEZER
T
ICKLE MADE
his way through Washington Square, and turned into the narrow passage, the mews, that ran between the fine houses on the north of the park and the stables behind them. There were a few steps at the far end. They were hewn from natural stone and moss-covered and cool and damp, even now in the August heat, when the setting sun was a fiery ball in an orange sky. The steps ended below ground level at a stone outcropping and appeared to go nowhere.

Tickle knew better. He drew level with the descent, slowed his pace, and glanced over his shoulder. The passage was empty. He clambered down the stairs to a strip of ground ankle deep in windblown trash, including a few yellowed leaves which hinted at the autumn to come, and waded through the debris to a narrow opening between it and the foundation of the adjacent building. Tickle slipped through the gap and disappeared. Anyone standing at the top of the stairs would have thought he’d been magicked into the ether.

By the time he entered the cellar known as Mama Jack’s Cave, he
was in the midst of a noisy cacophony of talk and music—eight-foot-tall Black Tonio wailing on his trumpet, and bearded Sally banging on the piano—and, according to a legless woman who called herself Zarina and claimed to be a gypsy gifted with second sight, the moaning and bleating and wailing of the ghosts of those who had frequented this spot in colonial days when so-called bawdy houses hid themselves in the woods. Places for folks who, like the people who came to Mama Jack’s, would not be comfortable in an ordinary taproom or tavern. Freaks as some called them. Ghost freaks as well as the real ones of the present day. Their spirits occupied the shadows beyond sight.

A pair of sisters joined at the hip, until in an infamous act of desperation they cut themselves apart with a butcher’s knife and bled to death.

A man with a spiny growth like a unicorn’s horn protruding from his forehead.

A woman with a black growth the size of a man’s fist clinging to her jaw.

The legless and armless and blind, and people whose faces were eaten away by the pox, as well as mere fugitives from so-called justice.

Dwarves.

These creatures of the past hovered just out of sight some said, but this night there were at least half a dozen little people in various parts of the large cave—really more of a cellar dug out centuries before for some long-forgotten purpose—who were alive and breathing. Tickle headed for two who sat at a low table on stools made to suit their height, each with a tankard of ale. “I’ve news of a sort,” he said by way of greeting. “Some good and some as is not.”

George Higgins, the dwarf to Tickle’s right, said, “I’ll have the bad first.”

“Aye, save the good for an ending.” The second speaker was Israel McCoy. He was built the same as they, but McCoy didn’t come from the western lakes of Kentucky like Ebenezer and George. Israel had been born in Daniel Boone country, the Appalachian hills on the
border between Kentucky and West Virginia, and he spoke with the slight burr of the descendants of the lowland Scots who had populated the area. There were fewer little people among the mountainmen, but dwarves were not unknown in Appalachia, where every kind of human condition showed up except good fortune and wealth.

“Seems like Trenton Clifford knows we’re here,” Tickle said.

McCoy showed no reaction. Higgins’s face went black with fury. “How you come to know that?”

“I know,” Tickle said, “because he sent someone to tell me.”

“I take it,” McCoy said, “this Clifford’s the bad news. So what’s the good?”

“Man he sent seems all right,” Tickle said. “And could be he’s got an interesting business proposition.”

George Higgins shook his head. “Ain’t no way I’m going to do business with—”

“Not with him.” Tickle cut him off before he could speak Clifford’s name. “The man I talked to.” He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “He wants to make steel and—”

“Evening, boys.” Zarina it was, she who had been born without legs. She propelled herself on a board on wheels, so her arms were the size of tree trunks and it was said she could crush bricks with her knuckles. She rolled up to their table and said, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Why’s that?”

“Had a revelation as concerns you.”

“I don’t believe in your revelations.” Tickle hopped off his stool and headed for the bar. Zarina and her predictions were no match for Maude Pattycake.

Maude swore that was her true name. Not made up the way some who frequented Mama Jack’s changed their names because they couldn’t change whatever it was they wished was different about themselves. But whatever the name she’d been born with, Maude Pattycake was unique.

She was Mama Jack’s one and only child for one thing, her adopted daughter. Mama had taken Maude with her when Mama decided to stop being the fat lady in Barnum’s traveling freak show. Once she made up her mind to that hard thing—getting by on her own—taking Maude along wasn’t difficult. Mama Jack weighed more than five hundred pounds and Maude, a perfectly proportioned, blue-eyed blonde who stood just two and a half feet tall, would almost fit in her pocket. And Maude could dance like nobody’s business.

She wore silver slippers with pearl buckles and pieces of iron on the heels and the toes, so every click and clack would be heard when she tapped out the music’s rhythms. She now raised her skirts to her knees so everyone could see her gorgeous shoes, but she didn’t move.

“Dance!” the assembly shouted. “Dance, Maude, dance! Tell her, Mama Jack.”

Tonio flexed his fingers and smacked his lips and raised his trumpet to his mouth, but he didn’t blow a note.

Mama Jack sat on a specially reinforced chair on a cast-iron dais raised above the crowd. She lifted her enormous arm, the rolls of flesh hanging from it shaking and jiggling like a jelly mold, and everything went quiet. Then, laughing so her great belly shook, she called out, “Got to have music before Maude Pattycake can dance. Make us some music, Tonio.”

The eight-foot-tall trumpeter started as he always did, with Maude’s very own music, an old Irish ditty called “Tom Tiddler’s Song.” Maude clicked once or twice. Then she clacked a few more steps. And by the time Tonio’s trumpet was wailing the second chorus, the tiny dancer was clicking and clacking her way up and down the bar.

Next Tonio went on to the stokers’ songs he’d learned back when he shoveled coal into the engines of the trains that ran from Buffalo to New York on Mr. Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad. The people in Mama Jack’s cave knew every note and every word. “I been workin’ on the railroad,” they sang, and banged their tankards in unison while
Maude danced. And, “Dinah won’t you blow, Dinah won’t you blow, Dinah won’t you blow your horn . . .”

This went on until neither the giant Tonio nor the tiny and perfect Maude Pattycake could find any more breath, and the songs and the dancing ended and Maude finished as she’d meant to do right along. She leapt off the bar into Ebenezer Tickle’s strong and waiting arms.