Part 1 (1/2)

City of promise : a novel of New York's Gilded Age.

Beverly Swerling.

For Bill as always.

And for Michael, our forever darling boy, RIP.

*Until the late 1880s, when it was widened to accommodate the subway, Lexington Avenue was a dirt track above Forty-Seventh Street.

Prologue.

November 25, 1864.

SUCH A CITY. Tumbling, raucous, never-to-be-forgotten New York.

Royal Lee detested it. He hated the town with almost as much pa.s.sion as he had loved his wife and his babies and Birchfield, the South Carolina plantation that had been in his family since 1770.

All gone now. Raped, murdered, pillaged. Dead.

The Southerners met at the intersection of Prince Street and Broadway. Northeast corner, Royal had told them. Look for Niblo's Pleasure Garden. When they came together they were simply four fas.h.i.+onable gentlemen dressed in pale, slim trousers and black tight-waisted, knee-length coats and s.h.i.+ny black top hats. Royal, however, wore his grays underneath. The uniform added some bulk, hid how the war had ground him down, made him less than he was before. Inside and out.

The hustle and the hawking-newsboys, vendors of everything from pies to parrots-were as he remembered. So too the crowds. Everyone rushed from place to place; on foot or carried by horses and carriages and by omnibuses, known as horsecars, that could take thirty people behind a team of four. The traffic all seemed to go in every direction at the same time, everyone fighting for priority. It was always the same in this town. But these days New York was more than a crowded city; she was the financial engine that fueled Mr. Lincoln's war.

Royal and his companions kept their Southern tongues in their mouths and walked with the swagger and confidence bred into their cla.s.s, as if they had every right to be where they were. Consequently, no one paid them any mind. A year before that would not have been the case. Merely looking as they did-like gentlemen-would have been enough to cause howling mobs to scream for their blood. In July of '63 New Yorkers had sacked their city; turning on themselves, eating their own flesh and gnawing their own bone. To Royal and the other Confederates the reason was obvious: a military draft from which a man could exempt himself if he had three hundred dollars was guaranteed to produce volcanic resistance. How, the South wondered, could the warmongering Union men, who claimed the right to hold those who would peaceably go, not understand so obvious a truth? Royal knew the answer. Because this was the world that had sp.a.w.ned them. Great ma.s.ses of people and buildings, all crammed together breathing each other's stink, and nowhere a horizon to rest a man's eyes, or a whiff of green country to soothe his heart. That was their accustomed reality. Men who lived in such conditions were certain to develop a perverted understanding.

Cities such as New York were a Northern abomination. They invited the world's rabble to labor in their mills and factories and shops, then packed them into festering slums where violence was a contagion more virulent then lice, and they were left to make their own rules and govern themselves without the civilizing influence of their betters. Then the Union fools wondered at the consequences. It was, Royal knew, in the nature of rats to form packs and hunt prey. No plantation owner in the entire Confederacy would allow such conditions to prevail in his slave quarters, much less his villages and towns.

That moral superiority had not saved the Confederacy. This War of Northern Aggression was all but lost now. Everything the South held dearest, its entire way of life, was coming to an end. Mr. Lincoln's election to a second term had insured the war would continue until the Confederates were made to heel.

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 h.e.l.l. Packages of Greek Fire, a mixture of phosphorus and bisulfide of carbon that ignited on contact with the air, were packed into their s.h.i.+ny boots and hidden in the sleeves of their fas.h.i.+onable jackets and stuffed beneath their fine linen s.h.i.+rts.

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 a.s.sured himself, because the s.h.i.+pping business of his Devrey in-laws was concentrated on the East River sh.o.r.e. 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sent.

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.

Book One.

18641874.

1.

THE LAD RAN pell-mell into his office soon after dawn. Zac had slept in his clothes in a makes.h.i.+ft bed in the Devrey Building that housed his s.h.i.+pping 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 G.o.d 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 slas.h.i.+ng 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.

G.o.d d.a.m.n this war to everlasting h.e.l.l.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.d Almighty.

”Jos.h.!.+” The s.p.a.ce separating them, filled as it was with strangers, narrowed enough for Zac to know he could be heard. ”Jos.h.!.+ It's you, isn't it? G.o.d 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.”