Belle Cora: A Novel (8 page)

My grandfather, father, and brothers emptied the warehouse, assisted by their clerks and by anyone else willing to lend a hand. The merchants gave things away to whoever would help them save their stock. “Thank you: here’s a coat, here’s a hat,” they would say, as heaps of goods rose in the street, acquiring a film of fine soot, and the carters charged several times their usual rate to take the heaps to safety.

My mother and I knew none of these details at the time—we were at home, worrying, until at last I fell asleep.

When I woke the next morning, my mother was coughing uncontrollably into a bowl. Her pale hands were speckled with blood. “Don’t look,” she gasped, “don’t cry.” For I was crying; I had never been so frightened for her. In a wheezy voice she gave me some instruction which I did not understand, and she had to repeat it: “Tell Sally to start the fire in my room.”

When the fire had warmed my parents’ room, Christina helped my mother into her bed. I stood by the door and heard again my mother call Christina “Sally.”

My father sometimes went on business trips, or went early to the store, so it was not unusual to wake and find him gone in the morning, but that Frank and Edward should also be gone felt strange. My grandfather’s clerk had described the fire as “eating blocks,” and I had pictured
it immediately as a beast; I had pictured its mouth. But I had confidence in my father, and I was not as worried as I would have been if I were older. That my mother should go to heaven while we still had need of her, that was the particular calamity threatening us from as far back as I could remember, and this morning she had vomited blood.

Wanting to fend off bad luck by being very good, and useful, I added wood to the kitchen fire and started a batch of biscuits. I had just learned how to make them.

Lewis came in and asked me, “Is the fire still burning?”

“I don’t know.”

“When can I see the fire?”

“I don’t know. Mama is sick, Lewis.”

Christina appeared in the doorway. “I’m making breakfast,” I explained.

“Good,” she said. “Good. Make breakfast. I go. I bring doctor.”

“Oh no,” I said. A doctor meant it was serious. “Oh no.”

When I had finished making breakfast, I called out to Lewis to come into the kitchen, but he didn’t answer, and I went to look for him. With increasing panic I searched downstairs, upstairs, in the attic, the backyard, and the street. I searched the house again, this time walking into my parents’ room to see if he was with my mother.

She was in bed. Her chest heaved in shuddering breaths that seemed to require all her concentration. When I came in she opened her eyes. “What is it, Arabella?”

“I was calling Lewis for breakfast, Mama,” I said.

She nodded slowly.

“May I bring you some biscuits and toast?” I asked her.

“No, thank you, Arabella.”

LEWIS HAD GONE TO SEE THE FIRE
; I was sure of it. On a piece of wrapping paper, I wrote a note saying that I was going to look for him; I pinned it under a candlestick on the kitchen table. I clothed myself in two of everything except my coat, into the pockets of which, wrapped in newspaper, I put the biscuits, and I went out to follow my poor foolish brother to the docks in weather so cold it had frozen every cistern and well in the city.

I wrapped my scarf around my face and walked, sometimes into
the wind, over patches of dirty snow, frozen puddles, and frozen dung. Cloudy icicles as thick as a man’s arm clung to the railings and shutters. Above the roofs, smoke from small, regularly spaced chimneys rose in groups of three, and a much larger column of smoke loomed beyond the houses, like the giant mother of those smaller plumes. The smoke told me where to walk.

Much sooner than I had expected, I stood among the charred ruins and knots of people guarding their belongings. The fire had stopped only a few long blocks from our house. Whenever the smoke cleared, it exhibited the shocking fact that the river was in plain sight because there were no longer any buildings to interrupt the view. It was as if the whole world had been put to the torch. Here and there a jagged, blackened section of a wall or a marble façade stood before piles containing all the nonflammable contents of the building, which had fallen through its wooden floors. Stacks of rescued goods rose higher than my head. Some were piled neatly in bales and boxes, some strewn helter-skelter. More than once I mistook some bundle on the sidewalk for the frozen body of my brother.

“Lewis!” I called out. “Lewis! Lewis, where are you?”

Iron wheels rattled on paving bricks. Bosses shouted out orders to the clerks and the laboring men. I asked men in black silk hats and capes, men in uniforms, and men who sat exhausted on the curb if they had seen a five-year-old boy with brown hair. They said yes. They had seen dozens of them.

In the street beside the smoldering ruins of a warehouse, its exterior reduced to a staring door insanely offering passage through a triangular shard of wall, I came upon some grizzled old-timers, with ripped, soiled clothing, warming themselves by a sweet-smelling fire, a tame fire, a pet fire, which they lovingly fed with morsels of wood from broken crates. “Have you seen a five-year-old boy?”

“Aye,” said one of them. “Some.” Since he said “aye” for “yes,” I decided he must be a sailor.

I asked, “Did you see one about this tall?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Are you cold? Come and warm yourself.”

I was shivering, so I accepted the invitation. There were two other men, dressed in tattered coats, with dirty rags stuffed into the collars
and sleeves, and rags wrapped around their wrists and the knuckles of their raw hands. A broken crate had been sacrificed to the fire. Its corners glowed orange, and the stenciled words
CODDINGTON & BARROW HYSON TEA
transiently swelled and shrank and shimmied in the flames.

“He has red mittens,” I remembered. “Did you see a boy with red mittens?”

“Follow me,” said the man. He took my hand and started walking. He was taller and younger than he had seemed a moment earlier, but very unprepossessing, with a scraggly beard, and purple bruises on his face—he fought; low people got in fights—and his tight grip hurt my hand. He scared me, but though I might with a sudden effort have pulled away, and I could certainly have screamed for help, I didn’t. I was too worried about Lewis to pay much attention to my own safety. Nothing very bad had ever happened to me, and whatever else he may have been, this stranger was a grown man with a grown man’s resources.

“Where are you going, Bill?” called out one of the man’s companions.

“To look for the lost boy,” answered the man holding my hand—Bill—and then, very oddly, he asked me: “Is he your son?”

“How can he be my son? I’m a child.”

“Is that so? How old?”

“Seven and a half.”

“A smart little girl?”

“I have been called so.”

“Do you read?”

“Yes.”

“That must be why they call you smart. What’s the boy’s name?”

“Lewis,” I answered, and I called out, “Lewis! Lewis! Do you hear me, Lewis? Where are you, Lewis?”

“Let me call him,” said Bill. “Lewis. Lewis. Come, Lewis. Come here, Lewis.”

He was joking, I supposed, because he called very quietly, almost in a whisper.

“He can’t hear you. You must shout,” I said. “Lewis! Lewis!”

Some barrels of raw sugar had spilled out, and a few small children were scooping it into their hands and eating it. We passed a place that had been a bank. Soldiers with rifles stood before it. It did not occur
to me until they were far behind us that I might have asked them for help. Anyway, perhaps Bill was helping me. He was either helping me or abducting me.

“Can you read the small sign on that lamppost?” Bill inquired.

“It says Wall Street,” I answered.

“Does it? So that’s what it was saying all this time.”

There was no way to distinguish street from curb. I stumbled, and he picked me up and carried me in his arms, squeezing my thigh through my trousers.

He had carried me to the wharves, where stacks of stovepipe hats, barrels of rum and coffee beans, crates of pepper, heaps of silks and tweeds and calicos and chests of teas had temporarily melted the East River ice, which now tightly gripped it all and slowly bore it all away. A little farther, there was smoke, and I coughed. I knew there was something wrong with him, though I could not have told you exactly what it was, and I was becoming alarmed. In my innocence, the range of bad fates that I imagined befalling me were limited: I was afraid he would throw me into the river or the fire or enslave me, making me into one of the poor little girls I had been told of who sold hot corn or swept street corners for pennies that they brought home to their unimaginable fathers.

“B-B-Bill,” I said, stuttering from cold rather than from fear, though I was scared enough. “M-my grandfather and my father hand out B-B-Bibles. On South Street and in the F-Five P-Points.” I am not sure why I said this: I suppose to make him know that my family was a friend to those living in darkness—to people like him—and he should consider this before he threw me into the river. “M-maybe you have met them, Bill. My grandfather is Solomon G-Godwin, the silk importer. He has a store and warehouse on P-Pearl Street.”

“Not no more he don’t.”

He walked to Pearl Street and stood before the remnants of a sign on half a charred wall:
SO
__
MO
__
GO
__
W
__. Boys were poking the embers with sticks.

“Lewis!” I shouted. “That’s him! Put me down!”

“Help me, Arabella,” said Lewis, as if we were home and I had just come in from the next room. He was trying to work a brass-tipped cane from the embers.

“P-put me down,” I commanded Bill.

“Did I find your brother for you?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“And you’re grateful?”

“Yes.”

“And do you know how to show gratitude?”

“I’ll tell my papa. My papa will give you something.”

“Your papa? No. Something from you.”

We were bargaining. I understood that. But what could he want from me? I had in my room some pennies, and dimes, one English shilling, books, toys, a collection of seashells; I knew he would not trust me to go home and come back with them. I had my scarf; I was unwilling to surrender it in this cold. I had biscuits in my pockets. I decided I would offer them to him, but I thought it prudent to ask first, “What do you want?”

“Give me a kiss.”

Well, that cost nothing, and it was not even the first time I had made this exchange; perfectly respectable strangers, after telling me how pretty I was, had often solicited my kisses, and once I had kissed a store clerk who had afterward given me a penny, and Christina had reminded me to thank him. So now I cooperated readily; my lips grazed the sandpapery whiskers of his filthy cheek. “Not like that,” he said. Gripping the back of my head with his free hand, he kissed me on the mouth, while the hand that held me from below clutched a place on my body that seemed unnecessary to the task of holding me aloft. It was as foul a surprise as you would expect it to be; and I leave you to decide, knowing what ultimately became of me, whether this strange man saw or in some mysterious way influenced my future, or whether, as I believe, it only seemed so later because of the events which I shall relate in their proper order.

At any rate, he put me down, and then I was wiping my mouth with one hand and grabbing Lewis with the other. “Lewis, we sh-shouldn’t be out. We have to get home.”

“In a minute,” he said. “Help me.”

“Nanaowowow!” I demanded. The word was elongated by my shivers, as in a game we used to play when I would shake him while he said his name and it would come out “Lllllllloooooooo-iiiiiii-sssssss”; but the cold was our rough playmate now. There was no feeling in my fingertips,
and I considered it very strange to stand surrounded by embers and worry that we might freeze before we reached our home.

“Help me,” said Lewis. He meant help him get at his loot.

“Will you come with me when you have the cane?” I asked.

After a hesitation, he said, “Y-y-yes.” He was shivering, too.

The cane, half buried under assorted office furniture, had a curved brass handle in the shape of a snake’s head. It was the handle he wanted. I stepped tentatively on the cane. Then I stepped on it harder. Within a puff of fine ash, which expanded slowly in the air for a long time afterward, the cane snapped near the handle. I stepped again, and it broke off completely. Lewis stuffed it into a pocket already bulging and sagging with other loot.

He was trembling with the cold, and I pulled him close to me as we walked home. He told me his head hurt and asked me to pick him up. I told him that I didn’t feel well either. I, too, had a headache, and I was tired. I remembered that we had missed breakfast. So we stopped to warm ourselves by the heat of a burning house, and ate cold biscuits, though neither of us was hungry.

When we reached our street I saw the doctor’s carriage waiting by the black iron fence. I banged the knocker until the door opened, and Christina pulled us into the house, touching our heads and our cheeks, exclaiming over the dirt and soot that covered us.

“How is Mama?” I asked.

Christina had a careful, emphatic way of imparting information, staring into your eyes, as if she meant you to memorize her words. “The doctor is with your mama.”

I started to go upstairs to see her, but Christina insisted on cleaning us up at a basin in the kitchen first. “How you both shiver!”

Christina helped us up the stairs. As we reached the landing, the boards creaked to announce the approach of Dr. Boyle, whose name had been spoken so often in our house that it had been among my first words. He was tall and stout, well dressed, ruddy, a model of health and good appetite for his patients to imitate. “So these are the young fugitives!” He beamed down at us benevolently.

Lewis began to vomit. Dr. Boyle stepped away to save his boots. He did it deftly, and with no change of expression, as if he had been expecting
Lewis to vomit and it was, medically, a good sign. Then he became interested in the vomit. He sat us both on the steps. He looked at his watch while holding Lewis’s wrist and feeling his forehead. Then he did the same for me and told Christina to put us to bed.