City of Promise (3 page)
“Perhaps for the shame of it,” Carolina murmured. “Not for pride.”
“Neither,” Josh said, moving closer to her side. “I think Royal had taken as much as he could, and didn’t care much about the consequences.”
Carolina drew a sharp inward breath. Her mind was leaping ahead the way it inevitably did. (Too clever for her own good. For any woman’s good. She’d heard that plenty of times.)
Josh took her hand. She gave up the foolish hope that she was wrong. “General Sherman,” she whispered. “I thought . . . According to the newspapers his route didn’t go through southern Virginia. Not through Clarksville or anywhere near Birchfield.”
“There were others,” Josh said quietly. “Rogue bands of blues who went off marauding on their own.”
Nick felt the anger rising in him, the bitterness. “I told them. All those shortsighted Washington men, the generals. Even Mr. Lincoln himself. You can’t involve civilian populations without unleashing the worst inside any man, particularly in wartime.” Sherman’s march, he’d said, the policy of scorched earth, would give them all tacit leave to wreak havoc. No one listened. It was Dr. Turner’s celebrated medical skills the government prized, not his opinions on how to make war.
Zac unfolded the letter and cleared his throat. Josh waited, knowing what was coming because he’d been told. Zac had gone to Josh with the dreadful news first. There were twelve years between the brothers but that moment they’d shared standing beneath Royal’s corpse had made them conspirators of a sort, contriving to make it easier on the others. No matter now.
Nonetheless, the others seemed to know without being actually
told. Even young Simon who was sitting at his mother’s feet, leaning against her knees. He was letting her stroke his hair; content for once to be her baby, though he was fourteen. And sixteen-year-old Goldie, perched on the arm of Papa’s chair with her embroidery hoop in her hand. She had not taken a stitch in many minutes.
“My dear brother-in-law and friend,” Zac read. “Much as I hope for the success of our mission to burn New York to the ground, I also pray God that you and yours will somehow survive whatever turmoil we unleash. Not, I assure you, because it gives me any kind of perverse pleasure to tell you the terrible news that I have lost my darling wife and my precious three babies to the bayonets of Union soldiers . . .”
I
T WAS THE
quality in her coming out through the needle. Each time Auntie Eileen inspected a piece of Mollie’s newly finished embroidery that’s what she said. “And,” she inevitably added, “I know quality when I see it.” Usually by then Eileen Brannigan would have spread the bit of lawn or cambric over her knee in order to inspect the tiny stitches that blossomed into an exquisitely formed flower or bird.
On this occasion, with a log fire crackling brightly in her private sitting room and a winter snowstorm whitening the early December world beyond her windows, it wasn’t needlework Eileen was inspecting. She had her hand beneath her niece’s chin, tipping Mollie’s face to the gaslight so she could see it more clearly. “I know quality,” she said, studying the blue eyes surrounded by tangled dark lashes, and the cheeks that didn’t need pinching to be stained pink. “You’re not a great beauty, Mollie my love,” this while she pushed back a black curl escaped from the ribbon that tied the rest into place. “Your face is a bit too thin and sharp, and the rest of you is far too straight and angled
to gain a man’s instant approval. You take some time to appreciate, no denying that. But for any as have eyes to see, the quality in you jumps straight out. She did that much for you, did Brigid Brannigan, for all her foolish willingness to have a bit of fun with never a thought for what would happen next.”
This assessment of her origins was a story Mollie had heard repeatedly. Auntie Eileen had for a brief time been married to Brian Brannigan, the brother of Mollie’s mother. Just long enough, Eileen said, to cross with Brian and Brigid from the Old Country to the New. And for Eileen to be the one who buried them both within a year of stepping onto the pier at Castle Garden.
Brian was taken by the yellowing fever, and his sister by the fever that all too often followed childbirth. Leaving on their own Eileen and the month-old infant Brigid had insisted on naming Mollie, though Eileen would have preferred something a bit more elegant and a bit less Irish. “I could have changed it since you were so young,” Eileen always said, “but it did not seem right. She loved you, Mollie, empty-headed though she was. Poor little fool fell into it on the boat. Put paid to all the grand plans to find her a husband in New York once we got ourselves settled. Though from the way you cooked up there’s never been a doubt in my mind that she spread her legs for one of the gentry. Someone from the first-class cabins on the upper decks most likely. Not,” she invariably added, “that Brigid shared my ability to discern quality. She was simply, on that occasion, lucky.”
Mollie thought it a strange kind of luck, but she never said so. As for her own good fortune, Mollie reckoned it had little to do with her nameless father. It was the fact that Eileen Brannigan had assumed responsibility for the child who was a niece by marriage, not even her own flesh and blood, that first kept Mollie alive, then spared her the horror of growing up in some depraved Five Points rat-infested hovel with the rest of the drunken, brawling, dirt-poor Irish who poured into the city looking for a dream and finding a nightmare.
Eileen released her hold on her niece’s chin. “Put a fresh log on the
fire, Mollie, while I pour us another cup of tea. Then we’ll get down to business.”
The pleats of the pink petticoat that showed beneath Mollie’s rose-colored taffeta day dress made a soft rustling sound when she moved, and when she added the log her aunt had requested the fire roared up and filled the room with the rich scent of applewood. Eileen Brannigan would burn nothing cheaper. “Applewood,” she said, “is quality. And for all everyone’s busy switching to heat provided by a coal furnace in the cellar, such a thing will never bring the comfort of a fire.”
Which was not to say that Eileen Brannigan was profligate. She paid rigorous attention to every penny spent or earned, and relied on her niece to record both. The girl’s ability to do quick and perfect mathematics, frequently in her head, had been manifest by the time she was eleven. Eileen promptly put her niece in charge of the financial records. Good bookkeeping, she said, was the very foundation of good business. One reason, Eileen maintained, she owned this elegant three-story brownstone on the corner of University Place and Eleventh Street.
Which, by cleverness and will, and what she called her instinct for quality, she had turned into the best whorehouse in the city.
Eileen never bothered to say parlor house, much less brothel. Quality, according to her, had no need to hide behind euphemisms. Her competition—in as far as she conceded she had any—was simply not in the same league. There were other houses in respectable residential areas, a great many of them, and many that like Mrs. Brannigan’s catered to the finest sorts of gentleman. The so-called Seven Sisters on West Twenty-Fifth Street—threaded between fashionable houses like jewels in a necklace—sent engraved invitations to famous men whose arrival in the city was announced in the press. Their callers were required to wear evening dress, and the ladies who received them were gowned and bejeweled as grandly as any woman in the city. Eileen aspired to nothing so formal. Ostentatious, she called it. What set Brannigan’s apart was that it was truly a home from home.
The most influential and the wealthiest men of New York City came to Mrs. Brannigan’s not simply because they required a place to put their peckers. Though Lord knows such men needed a bit of relief from the cares that weighed so heavily these days, what with the war raging and fortunes to be made if one danced to the right tune. The high-stakes game such men played demanded at the very least relief from the weight between their legs and the burdens on their backs. Eileen was the first to say so. And given that their wives were frequently confined for many months awaiting the birth of a child, or sequestered for many more after the ordeal ended, likely as not they couldn’t get what they needed at home. They could, however, find it on pretty much any city block, and for a tenth the price Eileen Brannigan charged. Even houses deemed expensive, where they offered a variety of experiences—small boys, or women in multicolored assortments, or everything done up to make you believe you were in an Oriental seraglio—even such places as those didn’t command Eileen’s prices.
The fantasy Eileen Brannigan catered to was the one in a man’s most hidden heart: That a woman who looked and sounded and acted like the demure and chaste creature he thought he’d married would, once they were in the bedroom, behave as the willing, even lusty, companion of his most secret imagining. Such a woman was not only capable of making a man believe himself to be a god, she showed herself worthy to make the judgment. That was a pleasure so heady, supplying it meant Eileen Brannigan could name her price and get it.
Add to that the one-client-per-evening rule that prevailed at Brannigan’s, and the house became as desirable for the women who worked there as for the men who patronized it. Eileen blessed the day she had thought up the scheme and found the courage to try it. But however successful, it was not a solution to the problem that faced her just then, with the applewood fire burning brightly and her niece sitting with her sewing on her lap, waiting to hear what her aunt had to say.
“Your birthday is next week, Mollie. You will be eighteen.”
“I know.” While threading a needle and rolling the end into a knot between her thumb and forefinger.
“You are,” Eileen said, “approaching twenty. And twenty is spinsterhood. I do not believe, dear child, that is what you want.”
“It’s not.” A home of her own and babies were what Mollie wanted. Meaning she had to have a husband. Faithful, mind you. Not someone who’d go running off to Brannigan’s or a lesser establishment at the first opportunity. But definitely a husband. “I wish,” Mollie said, “to be married. But only to the right sort of man.”
“Well,” Eileen said, “given the circumstances, that is not a simple thing to find. You must face facts, Mollie. You are a bastard and you’ve been raised in a whorehouse. It was never going to be easy.”
Mollie kept her eyes on her needlework, but her heart rose and sank, then rose again. It didn’t seem likely her aunt would have raised the subject if she didn’t have a prospect in mind. On the other hand, they had circled the topic any number of times in the past year. The issue was never resolved and the dream of herself as a bride and eventually a mother seemed unlikely to be fulfilled.
“I’ve had an offer,” Eileen said. “The question is whether you will entertain the idea.”
Mollie had been about to take a stitch. She stopped with the needle hovering in midair.
“Max Merkel,” Eileen said.
A few seconds went by. Mollie did not speak.
“He’s considerably older than we might have wished,” Eileen conceded. “But his breweries are very successful. And—”
“Mr. Merkel became a widower last year, didn’t he?” Mollie was not particularly interested in her suitor’s breweries. She had a vague notion he had two, possibly three, but that he could afford to visit Brannigan’s as often as twice a week said everything necessary about his financial status. “And his wife had been ill for a long time before that. That’s correct, isn’t it?”
“On death’s door for at least five years,” Eileen said eagerly. She’d been afraid Merkel’s age and his unfashionable black beard and his
paunch would put Mollie off. As it was the girl was only raising her usual objection—that she could not see any point in marrying a man who had already proved himself incapable of fidelity. “Possibly six or seven years,” Eileen added. “No man could be expected to live like a monk for all that time, could he?”
Mollie had lapsed back into silence. After a few moments she began to sew.
“Well?” Eileen demanded.
“I will talk to him.”
The meeting—only herself and Mr. Merkel, Mollie insisted—took place on a Sunday night. Since Brannigan’s was always closed on the Sabbath the downstairs reception rooms were empty, but Mollie refused to discuss Max Merkel’s suit in the rooms where he met his whores. Since it was winter, the postage-stamp garden behind the house was out of the question. Needless to say, her bedroom under the rafters was the least suitable place of all. Eileen’s private sitting room was the only venue possible.
“Very nice in here,” Merkel said, cocking his head to examine the ornate plaster ceiling, and take in the flocked, cream-colored wallpaper. “A lady’s private chamber. Very nice.”
“Where do you live, Mr. Merkel?”
“Please, call me Max. And across the river I live, in Brooklyn. Near my first brewery. Which I opened when I came from Munich. Thirty years ago now. I may call you Mollie?”
“Yes, if you like.” If he’d opened a brewery thirty years ago he had to be closer to fifty than forty as they’d first thought. “Do you have children, Max?”