City of Promise (17 page)

“We are alone, Josh. All the same, I—” Mollie broke off. Auntie Eileen’s voice was as loud in her head as if she stood beside them.
If the wives of the gentlemen who come here provided what we provide, mark my words, we’d soon have no clients.

Mollie reached down and lifted her skirt and the two petticoats
that were all she wore because of the late summer heat. “Stop fussing with my buttons,” she said. Kissing him back between the words; quick, impatient little kisses as heated as his own. “Pull down my pantaloons,” she commanded. “Hurry.”

And when he had, she stepped out of them and forced him back in his chair so the peg would present no problems of balance, then herself unbuttoned the front of his trousers before straddling his lap.

Josh’s first indication of the return of the Tickle cousins was the presence of a large and sturdy wagon outside the ironworks on Thursday afternoon of the second week of Tickle’s occupation of the premises. There was a considerable quantity of straw still evident in the back of the wagon, and a trail of bits and pieces of it leading to the foundry door; indicating that the material had been used to cushion the transport of whatever it was Obadiah and Henry Tickle had brought back from Kentucky, and that the mysterious object was now inside the foundry.

Josh pulled open the door and stepped into the dim interior. Thanks to the thick brick walls it was a few degrees cooler than outside, but reeking of the musk of men’s sweat and echoing with the clang of metal on metal as the workers went about hammering the old equipment into working order. Josh had grown accustomed to the appearance and smell and sound of the ironworks. Not, however, to what he was looking at. “Jesus, God Almighty. What is that thing?”

“A Kelly converter,” a voice said at his elbow. “Only one of its sort still in existence. You must be Mr. Turner.”

“I am. And you are—”

“Henry Tickle, Mr. Turner. Ebenezer’s cousin.”

He knew there was no reason the dwarf’s cousins must be dwarves as well, but he’d gotten it in his head they were. Not so. Henry Tickle was taller than Josh himself, while the man he took to be Obadiah—standing beside Ebenezer, the pair of them working on the halfassembled
structure called a converter—was only a bit shorter than Henry. Despite that, the three cousins looked alike; dark hair and square jaws and prominent noses. As for the thing brought back from Kentucky, it was a broad-bellied ovoid some eight feet tall that immediately reminded Josh of the drawing the dwarf had shown him that first day on Dey Street. Just then it was sitting on the ground, though Josh figured the two iron stands not far away were meant to eventually lift it clear of the floor, and would add another four or five feet to the height.

The role of two other pieces of equipment he’d not seen before was less obvious. “Those are trunnions, aren’t they?” he asked.

“That they are, Mr. Turner.”

He’d recognized them from his army days. Trunnions were the things the artillery used to pivot their big guns. “I take it then that thing you’re calling a converter, once it’s mounted on those stands, swings in some way.”

“It does, Mr. Turner. All topsy-turvy, you might say. Straight over. So’s we can pour the steel out from the hole at the top.”

“And this converter is somehow superior to the furnaces already here?”

“They’s a different thing entire, Mr. Turner. These here furnaces burn coke and melt pig iron. It’s that liquid iron what gets ladled into the converter. Then the charge comes. Twenty minutes later we’re pouring steel out the top. Converted. From pig iron.”

It was an explanation of sorts. “It’s enormous,” Josh said. “How’d you get it in the wagon?”

“It was all in pieces. Put aside like. And it ain’t so big as all that. This was the Kelly brothers’ first converter. Only takes five tons of melted pig iron.”

“And presto change-o,” Josh said, “turns it into steel. In twenty minutes you said.”

“That’s right.”

“This charge you mentioned, what is it?”

“Air, Mr. Turner.” The answer came from Ebenezer Tickle, who had
left his work to join them. “Ordinary air. As I told you on the first day.” Then, turning to his cousin, “Go help Obadiah finish up, Henry. I’ll be explaining all he needs to know to Mr. Turner.”

Josh was still trying to fathom the process. “If you somehow apply air to that thing when it’s full of molten iron, Mr. Tickle, does it not cool and become hard, and therefore impossible to pour out the top? Presuming you manage to use those trunnions to tip over something so heavy.”

“Trunnions’ll work. You can take that for gospel. Seen ’em do it with my own eyes. Plenty of times. As for the air, I thought the same as you once. Cool everything down and what good’s that? But it don’t happen like that. Pump air into the bottom of the converter and it sets liquid pig iron boiling fiercer and faster than any kettle on a hot stove. Shoots flames right out the top and burns off the carbon. Thing is to know when you’ve burned off enough but not too much, then pour it out. Matter of judgment,” Tickle said. “Matter of experience.”

“Which you have.”

“I do, Mr. Turner.”

And later, after George had presented him with the reckoning of the cost of Henry and Obadiah Tickle’s journey, “Do you realize, Mr. Tickle, that I have paid seven hundred and thirty dollars to bring this Kelly converter all the way to New York by horse and wagon? And neither the wagon nor the men served any purpose of mine on the journey to Eddyville. It would have cost considerably less if we’d arranged a local hauler to get it to a port in, say Raleigh, or even Norfolk. Could have come the rest of the way by sea. Perhaps on a Devrey ship at a favorable rate.”

“No, it could not, Mr. Turner.”

“Why not?”

“Converter was all in pieces. Stored at different places. Weren’t no one in Eddyville knew how to collect ’em all, much less be sure nothing was missing and pack everything for safe shipping. Had to send Henry and Obadiah for that.”

New information. Josh considered it, then looked around. He and Tickle were standing on the foundry floor, somewhat apart from the others, but not totally out of earshot. He motioned his foreman to follow him, then walked out the door, waiting until Tickle had closed it behind them to say, “You’re telling me the thing was hidden, aren’t you? Scattered about down there in Kentucky. And no one knew the whereabouts of each piece except you.”

“Not exactly.” Tickle had produced his pipe and a portion of tobacco and was preparing a smoke while they talked. “Henry and Obadiah knew as well. That’s why they could go and get it. Not nobody else. You’ll earn back your seven hundred, Mr. Turner. My word on it.”

That nagging something, the one thing he wasn’t entirely sure about in the matter of Ebenezer Tickle, started buzzing in Josh’s head. “Trenton Clifford’s involved somehow,” Josh said. “I know he is. How?”

The dwarf had taken some safety matches from one of his many pockets and was busy striking one against the sandpaper strip on the side of the box. Josh waited until the pipe was lit. “You’re not denying Clifford’s involved, are you?”

“Converter don’t belong to him, if that’s what you’re thinking. Belongs to me. Mr. Kelly gave it to me in return for back wages.”

Josh turned his head, as if he could see through the closed door to the thing that lay behind it. “A thing of value, you said. Kelly must have owed you a considerable sum of money.”

“Six months’ pay,” Tickle said, with the stem of the pipe still between his teeth. “But he said the converter weren’t worth all that much. Not seeing as how he’d sold the patent to Bessemer.”

“Where’s Kelly now?” Josh asked after a number of silent seconds, aware that the other man was avoiding a direct gaze.

“Last I heard, Louisville. Makes axes and such like.”

“Not steel?”

“Not far as I know. And not unless he’s built himself a new converter. Smashed up all the bigger ones after he went bankrupt and sold out. Only this one left.”

“And Trenton Clifford’s not involved?”

“Not with the converter, no.” Punctuated by a puff of smoke that curled above the dwarf’s head and hung motionless in the hot, still air.

Josh turned and looked again at the foundry door, then out across the docks to the river. “Jesus,” he said.

“That’ll do fine, Mr. Turner. You pray. Me and the others, we’ll make your steel beams and girders.”

Josh spent most of September tramping around the city looking for a building site. Until summer was over and there was an autumn nip in the air, and he still had not located anything suitable that fit his plans or his budget. “Cart got put ahead of the horse,” he told Mollie. “Not how I intended it. I got involved in making steel before I’d had a chance to think it through.”

“Because the opportunity presented itself,” Mollie said.

“Something like that.”

“Josh, what about Auntie Eileen’s promise? Won’t that extra hundred thousand help with the purchase of a site?”

“It might do, but the truth is I’ve calculated your aunt’s loan in ten different ways for ten different parts of the project. And I can’t go to my brother yet again. Devrey’s is having the devil of a time just staying afloat. Literally and figuratively. What’s that expression about borrowing from Peter?”

“To pay Paul,” Mollie said. “I understand.”

He’d poured himself a small glass of sherry wine and one for her as well, and he brought them to the dining room table where they did most of their living and talking now that the parlor had been made into an office. “Besides,” he added, “a hundred thousand’s small change what with the cost of land these days. There’s a piece not too far from Gramercy Park, Twenty-Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues, where there are two vacant lots side by side and a third next to them with a ramshackle old two-story building I could take down.
Three years ago I might have bought the lots for four thousand each and the building for fifteen. Now the building’s forty-seven thousand and the owner of the lots is asking twenty thousand each.”

Mollie nibbled on her lip.

“What are you thinking?” Josh asked. “You’re always thinking something when you do that.”

Mollie didn’t know what he meant for a second, then she realized and stopped chewing. Thinking, meanwhile, that it was quite marvelous that her husband, a busy man of affairs, had noticed such a small thing about her. But she knew this moment was not about romance. “It occurs to me,” Mollie said, “that the answer may be boldness. More even than you’ve already displayed.”

“What I’ve displayed,” he said, “might equally be called foolhardiness. C’mon out with it. What’s your idea?”

“Your father’s lots in the East Sixties,” Mollie said. Then, before he could make the customary objection about that land being too far from the heart of the town, “That’s what I meant about being bold. You must convince possible tenants that the city is moving north faster than they realized. You can do it, Josh. I know you can. And I’m sure you could work out favorable terms with Dr. Turner.”

7

C
AROLINA INSISTED THE
meeting take place in her bedroom. She was propped against a number of pillows, wrapped in a crocheted shawl, with her silver hair in a braid that hung over her shoulder. Looking, Mollie thought, pale and ill, except that her eyes twinkled rather like her son’s, and she was obviously still as clever about business as ever.

“The biggest problem with Papa’s lots, Josh,” Carolina said, “is that they are miles from anywhere. How will these middling business types you plan to let to get from Sixty-Third Street to where they earn their living?”

“I’m expecting,” Josh said, “Mr. Tweed to follow through on his New York Railway Company.”

Nicholas Turner sat beside his wife, holding her hand. “Seems like a fair assumption,” Nick said. “Apparently nothing whatever can stop Mr. Tweed from stringing an elevated railway right round all of Manhattan. He’s got everyone who matters on his board, and the city’s pledged five million toward construction.”

“The city,” Simon Turner said, “had best do something.”

At twenty-one Simon was the youngest of Mollie’s new family and the only one of Josh’s siblings she saw regularly—Zac was still in Liverpool and Goldie had gone to visit him. Nonetheless, she found Simon the hardest to fathom. He had a coolness about him. At least where she was concerned. She didn’t think he’d spoken two complete sentences to her since they’d met. Like his father, Simon was a doctor. He’d been graduated from Columbia Medical College a few months before, but had gone on living at home. Mollie thought that was probably because of Carolina’s illness; Josh said he simply enjoyed having everything done for him. Whatever the reason, these days Simon traveled daily from Sunshine Hill to New York Hospital on Sixteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. “The horsecar I was on this afternoon,” he said now, “had better than sixty people crammed into the space meant for twenty-two. Fully half of them were hanging off the outside at peril to life and limb.”