City of Promise (2 page)
It was well known that the South had no good choices, and that desperate men do desperate things. Royal was aware of the surveillance of the pickets of the Seventh Regiment—once the 23rd Militia and under either name the city’s military elite—who were posted at every intersection. The Union troops did not, however, eye the four with wariness. Apparently they perceived no threat from well-dressed men who wore their privilege with casual and accustomed ease.
Royal and his companions were officers of the Confederacy who had volunteered to do the most dangerous job in the military. They had become sappers, the men sent to harvest hell. Packages of Greek Fire, a mixture of phosphorus and bisulfide of carbon that ignited on contact with the air, were packed into their shiny boots and hidden in the sleeves of their fashionable jackets and stuffed beneath their fine linen shirts.
On the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, near P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, the sappers parted company. Each carried in his head a list of targets. Royal’s knowledge of the town where his wife had been born and raised, where her family still lived, had been particularly useful. He’d mapped out all the major hotels: the Astor House, the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan, and nine others. He’d specified as well that they should aim to burn as many docks as they could manage, all fronting the Hudson River. Not, he assured himself, because the shipping business of his Devrey in-laws was concentrated on the East River shore. In his experience, he told the others, there was always a
good wind blowing on the Hudson side. It would carry the flames up the island and finish the job the draft riots had started. With luck and the help of a just God they would burn New York City to the ground.
Every man for himself, they said. Meet up again across the border in Canada, they said. Royal looked away and murmured something that could be taken for assent.
Would he be doing this if Ceci and his babies were still alive? Royal Lee did not ask himself the question because he did not know the answer.
T
HE LAD RAN
pell-mell into his office soon after dawn. Zac had slept in his clothes in a makeshift bed in the Devrey Building that housed his shipping business, nothing unusual in that these days. War changed a man’s habits. “It’s him, sir! I’m sure it’s him!” Frankie struggled in the grip of the bigger and older man who had tried to stop his headlong rush.
Zac held up his hand and spoke first to the man, one of his clerks who did double duty as a night watchman. “I know the boy. It’s all right, let him go.”
The man took a step back. Frankie shook himself free, like a puppy let off the leash. He was, however, no puppy. Zac had long since spotted the boy’s rapacious talents and nurtured them. “Who exactly? And why should I care?”
“It’s the reb what you sent me to see those times ’bout a year ago. He’s the one they caught. Got him down by City Hall now. Got a stake fixed and everything. Gonna burn him the way he done the town. Thought you’d want to know.’”
Jesus God Almighty.
Zac stood up and pushed past the boy and started running. Through the counting room that occupied the ground floor of the grand white marble building that represented two hundred years of the wealth of nations brought to New York under Devrey sail, and of late, Devrey steam; out to the street, ignoring Frankie chasing after him with hand held out for the coins that were his due for bringing word. He paused only long enough to unhitch the nearest horse. Not his, but that didn’t matter. Not the empty-handed urchin either, though he felt bad about that. Never mind. He’d deal with such things later. They could be fixed with money. If his brother-in-law, who was also his oldest friend, was burned alive by a rampaging mob, that was a thing as admitted no possibility of repair.
The heavens opened while Zac whipped the horse down Broadway, weaving his way between the carriages and the horsecars that moved like sludge, trapped in their own conflicting wakes. Even after such a night as it had been. Even with a riotous crowd baying in the streets. Even with the acrid stench of dozens of major fires still hanging in the air—beaten out mostly in the nick of time, though word was the damage would cost millions—even so. Nothing could tame the New York City traffic.
Worse when the weather turned bad. Always.
Finally, City Hall Park, and Zac hatless and coatless, and uncaring that the cold of the November dawn was made worse by slashing rain. The downpour was a mercy of sorts. Meant they couldn’t burn him. Not that a rope was any less effective. Either way, he’d been too late and Royal was dead, the loss permanent and irreparable.
The tips of his brother-in-law’s boots were level with his eyes. Motionless now. By Zac’s calculations it was some minutes since the rope around Royal Lee’s neck had snapped taut. Enough time for the tall body clad in Confederate gray to stop swinging.
God damn this war to everlasting hell.
The rain was letting up some, but Zac was already soaked to the skin.
His glance was pulled from the toes of his dead brother-in-law’s boots to a much younger man standing some twenty feet away. Drawn in that direction perhaps because the other man was looking at him. Recognition came all at once, with no doubt, though it had been three years. “Joshua?” Zac spoke aloud, though his half brother was surely too far away to hear.
The pair began maneuvering their way toward each other—Josh, it seemed to Zac, carried by the throng, half stumbling as the two narrowed the space between them.
How thin Josh was. The planes of his face seemed only bone covered by skin, nothing substantial enough to be named flesh. Taller than the boy he’d been when, barely sixteen—headstrong, foolish, and determined—he enlisted in the First Mounted Rifles without asking leave of his parents or anyone else. Uncaring that men of their class were officers, or stayed home to tend the business that paid for war. Joshua Turner went his own way, and even back then the family knew there was no coming between him and what he wanted. Eighteen now. And alive. Thank God Almighty.
“Josh!” The space separating them, filled as it was with strangers, narrowed enough for Zac to know he could be heard. “Josh! It’s you, isn’t it? God be praised. It’s you.”
“It’s me, Zac.”
They were near enough to touch. Zac reached out his hand. A woman abruptly shoved her way between them, ignoring both and looking up at the dangling corpse. She moved in and began hauling on Royal’s left boot. The gesture set off a swirl of similar scavenging. The brothers hesitated for a moment, each knowing there was no hope of stopping this next desecration. They moved aside.
“I didn’t get here in time,” Josh said.
“Nor did I,” Zac said. “But I suspect there was nothing we could have done.”
“If I’d been in time, I might have been able to get him away,” Josh insisted. “Spirited him out of here.”
Zac’s thought as he had thundered south along the Manhattan streets was to use the authority of Devrey Shipping to demand imprisonment, and a judge, and a proper trial. No doubt an insane hope in the face of hatred fed by years of carnage. As absurd as Joshua thinking he could have contrived a secret escape through the city’s narrow alleys and close-packed doorways. Zac shook his head. “Unlikely.”
He opened his mouth to say more, but shock stopped the words. The crowd had fallen sufficiently away for him to see his brother whole. Joshua had marched off to war on two strong legs. He’d come home walking with a stick, and only air below his right knee.
It was in 1845 that Dr. Nicholas Turner built Sunshine Hill for Carolina Devrey, the love of his life and pregnant with his child, though she was not his wife. In those days what was officially Seventy-First Street and First Avenue was still much as old Peter Minuit had found it some two hundred and fifty years before, when he weaseled Manhattan from the Canarsie Indians: steep hills and rushing streams and heavily wooded glades and glens, and bobcats still to be found prowling the cliffs above the East River. These days over half of the city’s population of nearly a million lived north of Fourteenth Street, and stretched itself as far as the small Fifties. Carolina and Nick had long been married. Respectable enough, so before the war, in his Princeton years, Carolina’s eldest son did not hesitate to bring home his friend Royal Lee from Virginia.
“A slaveholder, Zac,” Carolina, whose abolitionist sympathies were well known, had said with distaste.
“Do not,” Nick cautioned her, “bring into our home the discontent that rules everywhere outside it. All Zac’s friends should be welcome here.”
That Royal might be smitten by Ceci as soon as he saw her was
something none of them anticipated. When Ceci wanted to marry him, her mother and her stepfather let their feelings be known, but reconciled themselves to what they couldn’t change.
Life had taught Carolina to be grateful for whatever blessings came her way. That night, when Zac brought home her second son minus one of his legs and the story of Royal Lee’s hanging, Carolina wrapped her arms around both her boys and did not forget to count her blessings, though her heart ached with her daughter’s sadness. Southerner Royal may have been, and entirely wrong on the matter of Negroes, but Ceci had loved him and borne him three children.
They must bring Ceci and her babies home to Sunshine Hill, Carolina told Nick later that night. Get them right away from Virginia and here to New York where they could be looked after.
Nick’s mind was more on the need to look after Josh’s rough wound—done, Nick was sure, by no proper surgeon—and see it healed clean. And on afterward, on how they could insure a future for Josh that would not be diminished by the loss of a leg. It wasn’t that Nick didn’t love his stepdaughter, only that just now she was outside the range of his ability to be of use. He refrained from pointing out that they had not heard from Ceci in many months. Instead he said, “I can’t see how we could bring her here, my dear. Not until after the war.”
“I shall speak to Zac,” Carolina said. “He has kept some lines of communication open, I know. Zac may find a way.”
The notion was never put to the test. Royal’s letter arrived a week later. It was addressed to Zachary, his dear brother-in-law and friend as Royal called him. Sent from Canada by a Confederate comrade. “One of the sappers who was with him, I’d wager,” Zac said, speaking to the entire family gathered in the library at his behest, looking at him now, waiting.
“You think Royal really did help to set those fires?” Nick’s way always to believe the best of everyone. His private explanation for Royal’s presence in the city was something to do with Zac. Carolina was right about Zac having kept some channels open. He and Royal had,
Nick knew, occasionally met secretly, looking to lay groundwork for reconciliation at war’s end. “I can’t believe Royal would—”
“He did it.” Zac’s tone was without emotion but allowed for no disagreement. “And he meant the city to burn to the ground.”
“And himself to die in the bargain,” Josh added. “Otherwise he’d never have worn his grays under those civilian clothes.”