City of Promise (52 page)

Josh lowered his head and kissed that available hand. Mollie sighed softly.

Ten minutes later she lay on her bed in exactly the same position as he’d set her down, seeming not to have the strength even to move. He sat beside her and ran a gentle finger over the red and angry-looking bumps on her cheeks and forehead. “What did they do to your face?”

“Nothing. Bee stings. How I escaped . . . I tipped over a hive and . . .”

The words stopped, dammed, he realized, by her total exhaustion. “It’s all right. You’ll tell me about it later. Tess will be up in a minute with hot water and cloths. And Simon will be here soon. You’re a heroine, my dearest Mollie. Quite remarkable. And you are going to be fine. I shall not permit anything else.”

She smiled but seconds later the expression changed to a wince of pain. “Josh, my shoes. Do you think you might . . .”

He started at once on the laces, but even after he’d entirely freed them from their hooks he couldn’t pull the shoes off. He saw her grimace when he tried. “I need to cut them off. Scissors?” She directed him to the bottom drawer of a small chest and he found her old sewing basket sitting on top of a number of tissue-wrapped parcels. It occurred to him that it had been many years since he’d seen her with a needle in her hand, but the basket yielded a choice of scissors and he picked the pair that looked to be the strongest.

He’d freed her right foot, taking off her stocking as well as her shoe,
and was finishing the left when Tess arrived with piles of towels, a bar of lavender soap, and a large pitcher of steaming water. “Good Lord Almighty,” she murmured looking at Mollie’s swollen and purple foot. “However did she walk on that?”

“I’m guessing she ran on it,” Josh said. The second boot came off while he spoke and he removed that stocking as well, revealing a left foot as deeply purple and misshapen as the right.

“The bumps on her face and arms are bee stings, Tess.” He was working hard to control his rage and the words came out quiet and subdued, but edged with steel. “I’ll have Jane bring up some chamomile and the doctor will be here shortly. Meanwhile, please make her as comfortable as you can.”

“Josh, wait . . .” Mollie’s voice was a faint and exhausted whisper. “Something I must tell you.”

He had to bend over to be sure her heard her. “Yes. What is it? I’m listening.”

“I saw him,” she murmured. “In the doorway, watching me leave.” Then she told him the name.

“I’ve been working out the connections,” Josh said, turning the pad on which he’d been making notes so Eileen, sitting across from his desk, could see what he’d written. Her name was on one side of the paper, that of Solomon Ganz on the other. A dark and purposeful line had been drawn between the two.

Eileen leaned forward and peered at what he’d shown her, then sat back. Her face was deeply flushed, a pink contrast to her white hair. “You cannot think I would be behind any kind of harm coming to Mollie. Or to you, for that matter. Surely you realize—”

“I know you would not consciously harm either of us. Far from it. But Mollie saw him. There’s no mistake. Solomon Ganz really is the villain of the piece, and from the first his connection to Mollie and
to me has been through you. Did you suggest him as the pawnbroker Mollie should approach?”

Eileen shook her head. “Absolutely not. I have no idea how Mollie chose him, but once she pawned the jewels Mr. Ganz figured out they were mine and paid me a visit. I thought at first he was threatening you and Mollie, but I was wrong. He was after profit. For his grandchildren he said. It was a motive I understood. And there was something else.” She hesitated. “Mr. Ganz claimed someone was going to print calumnious lies about you. He said he could prevent it.”

“What sorts of lies?”

“That you colluded with the enemy during the war. The time you spent with your sister, on her plantation . . .”

Josh nodded. The pieces were beginning to come together. The article from nine years earlier,
The
Times
of November 1871, was still in his desk drawer.
Mr. Theodore Paisley, a naturalized American citizen immigrated from Ireland many years ago, was found dead in his home . . .
“I presume the someone of whom you’re speaking was Teddy Paisley,” he said. “And Paisley appears to have died shortly after Mr. Ganz paid you a visit.”

“Josh, I did not—”

“Of course you didn’t. Such an idea never occurred to me. But there is a connection, is there not? Between Ganz and Paisley’s murder.”

“I have always thought so.” Eileen was pale now, but her cheeks were stained with two bright red dots. “I had no choice, Josh. I could not allow you and Mollie to suffer at the hands of someone who wanted only to use you to get at me. All her life I have protected Mollie. I hope you understand.”

Josh leaned forward and covered Eileen’s hand with his own, then withdrew. “You said Ganz was after profit. How was that to be arranged?”

“I sold him half my interest in the St. Nicholas Corporation. I thought that way he would have a reason to want you to succeed. I was right, Josh. Solomon Ganz has earned thousands from your ventures
these past six years.” She glanced at the piece of paper that had started the conversation, the one that showed a connection between her and Solomon Ganz and was meant to be related to Mollie’s disappearance. “Why do you think he would be involved in such a terrible scheme?”

“First because two different sources told me so.” He would not try to explain about Mama Jack or DuVal Jones. “More important, Mollie says she saw Ganz standing in the doorway of the house where they kept her. Right after she ran away. And the cabby who brought her home was only on Bayard Street because the fare he’d picked up on Avenue A asked to be brought there, and required that he wait to bring him home. Mulberry Bend is, after all, an unlikely place to get a hansom.”

She shook her head, still unwilling to grant his interpretation of events. “Five years ago. The panic. Mr. Ganz was the one who warned me it was coming and instructed me to warn you.”

“Protecting his investment,” Josh said. “Until such time as he decided it should be cashed in. Eight city blocks, Aunt Eileen. On what many believe destined to be one of the finest avenues in all New York. A king’s ransom. In this case, a queen’s. Mr. Ganz, as you pointed out, is in this for profit.”

“Joshua, I cannot believe he—” Eileen stopped speaking, drew a sharp breath, and pressed a hand to her face. A single tear rolled down her cheek.

I have never seen my Auntie Eileen actually cry, Josh. She is the strongest woman I know.
“You’ve thought of something, Aunt Eileen?”

“As soon as you told me what had happened.” She whispered the words. “The moment you left. I went to Mr. Ganz. I knew him to be a man of extraordinary resources and I wished to enlist his aid. But . . .”

“What is it?”

“He knew,” Eileen said. “About Mollie having been taken. I’ve been so distraught, I never made the connection, but . . . I remember now. I called out to him as soon as I walked into the shop, and he said, ‘Come in, Mrs. Brannigan. I have been expecting you.’”

20

“S
HE’S SLEEPING NOW,”
Simon said. “I gave her something, so it will be a good long while before she wakes. I gave your Tess a sedative as well, incidentally. Couldn’t stop her sobbing otherwise.”

“What about Mollie’s feet?” Joshua asked, unable to shake the memory of those purple stumps so distorted they looked like hooves.

“Three and a half days should not have done any permanent damage. Mollie is strong, not to mention determined. Do you know how she actually got away? She said something about having knocked over a beehive and covering someone in honey.”

“That’s more than I know. Why would honey be a weapon?”

“The bees, I expect.” Simon was meanwhile repacking his black bag with various pincers and wooden sticks, all the gear modern medicine demanded physicians carry with them to a house call. “Think about it. The little stingers are going to descend en masse wherever their stolen honey lands.”

“Good God.”

“Quite resourceful, I must say. I think perhaps you’d best not make
your wife angry.” Simon grinned as he tucked away his syringes and needles, then remembered that Josh and Mollie had been angry at each other for a number of years. “In a manner of speaking, of course. I don’t mean she would defy your auth—”

Josh waved away the awkward apology. “It’s all right. I know what you meant. She was indeed astonishingly resourceful, as well as brave.”

His brother nodded. “I was a bit concerned she might be concussed, but there’s no indication of that. She’s simply suffering from complete exhaustion. As near as I can make out, they kept her in some kind of wooden rooftop structure where she could neither stand nor stretch out. She was bent into an accordion shape and had to remain so.”

Joshua clenched his hands into fists, but said nothing.

“You’re looking rather beaten and bent yourself,” Simon said. “You need to get some rest.” He folded his stethoscope away, but hesitated before closing the bag. “Would you like something to help you sleep?”

“I think you are considering drugging this entire household. No, thank you.”

“Fine. But I mean it, Josh. You must get some proper sleep.”

“I shall,” Joshua promised. He walked Simon to the door, pausing just before he opened it. “Thank you for coming so quickly. I know it wasn’t an easy time for you to leave.”

“Rachel,” Simon said smiling, “does this sort of thing rather on her own. With no help from me and as I understand it, not much from Dr. Thomas. But,” checking his watch, “I think I may have a third child about now. So I’ll go home and become acquainted.”

It was after nine when Josh had his last consultation of the day with Frankie Miller and dragged himself up the stairs. There was a soft glow coming from beneath Mollie’s door and it was not closed all the way. He pushed it open and stepped inside. An oil lamp was lit but turned low. Eileen was sitting in a chair beside the bed. A book lay
open on her lap but she appeared to be dozing. Josh put a hand on her shoulder. “Go to bed, Aunt Eileen. I’m going to stay with Mollie.”

She blinked a few times, then looked up at him. “If you’re quite sure . . .”

“I am. Go on.”

Mollie lay on the bed, rather as he’d last seen her, but the lacy edge of a pale blue nightdress peeped out from beneath the summer quilt, and her hair had been brushed to its customary dark gleam and curled softly around her face. She seemed to him to look as young as when he’d first seen her, when all that silly talk of spinsterhood at twenty-two had her believing he wouldn’t want to marry her. But he’d wanted to very much indeed, and looking at her now he could remember the exhilaration of that extraordinary trip to the Tombs to rescue Eileen. Followed by the bargaining over Mollie, which he’d allowed because it tickled him to see her so discomforted by it—and the way he’d dared to pat her bottom because he knew they were going to be betrothed when the little game he was playing with her aunt was done.

She sighed and shifted her position slightly. Josh watched for a moment, then decided she was as deeply asleep as before. He sat in the chair Eileen had occupied and began taking off his clothes. They felt stuck to him after this long and emotion-filled day. His peg as well. He had to yank it off and the stump itched something fierce when it was finally gone. “Massage, don’t scratch,” his father had told him early on. “You mustn’t tear at the scars or they’ll fester. It’s loss of circulation that causes the itching. Rub the stump hard to get the blood flow back.” After they’d been married for a time Mollie cottoned on to the routine and offered to rub it for him. He’d refused at first. Permitting her to touch what was left of his right leg was in a way a more intimate thing than even their sexual congress, but he’d come to allow her the liberty. Even to celebrate it. Almost always such encounters finished with her yielding to him with that breathless eagerness that had marked their early years together.