City of God (50 page)

“Wait,” Mr. Chambers said, and snapped his fingers. A man came bringing a long cloak made of white fox and put it over her shoulders. Another man brought a square of white cloth, and this was draped over her head. “Now we will go,” Mr. Chambers said, and went to join the mourners, taking a respectful position at the rear.

They progressed slowly north for nearly three hours, along streets that frequently seemed to have been cleared in anticipation of their loud
and extraordinary passage. Sometimes, on a particularly crowded block, they had to wait, but soon a way was arranged through the traffic and the procession went on. Gradually the city was left behind. By the time they had reached the Croton Reservoir at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue there were no more passers-by to gawk at the spectacle or cover their ears against the noise. Then, some way further on, Mei Lin saw a pair of houses standing by themselves, side by side, separated only by a strip of grass and trees. She knew at once they were the ones Mr. Chambers had mentioned that night in Delmonico’s when he told her his plans.
One for first tai-tai. One for us after we are married
.

The houses looked like country mansions, more like those she had seen surrounding the village of Manhattanville than like anything in New York City. They were identical, each three stories tall with a mansard roof and a chimney at each corner and a covered porch in front. Made of wood, which she would later learn had been chosen because in this location it offered better
feng shui
than either brick or brownstone.

Both houses had a large walled garden behind. In the one that was to be Mei-hua’s a grave had been dug for the coffin of Samuel Devrey.

“Nick, I’ve had a letter from the Mother Superior of the Madams of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville. Linda Di did not return to school after the Christmas holiday.” It was no surprise that the nun would write to Carolina; for eight years she had been sending the checks that paid the girl’s tuition. She sent them first from the house on Fourteenth Street. When later they moved to Sunshine Hill, the letters simply omitted a return address. In recent years the checks had been sent from the Canal Street offices of Devrey Shipping. That was where the nun had written, explaining the situation and returning Mrs. Devrey’s latest check. Zac, who in this winter of 1852 had left Princeton in favor of lodging in the town and working full time for Devrey’s, had brought the letter to his mother.

Nick was immediately concerned, though he tried not to show it. “Perhaps she simply had enough of school. The girl’s sixteen, after all.”

“She wasn’t to be graduated for two years more.”

“Children do not always do what their parents intend they should do,” Nick said. They had both thought Zachary should finish his education at Princeton before taking his place in the business empire Carolina had built for him. He had, after all, three years left before reaching his majority and coming into his inheritance. But Zac had insisted he was not cut out for the academic life.
Let me go to work at Devrey’s. I want to start on the docks. Learn everything from the ground up.
Carolina had made him promise he would spend only one day a week in the rough and tumble of the waterfront and work the rest of the time in the office, but neither she nor Nick had thought it wise to insist Zac stay at Princeton.

Linda Di was, however, an entirely different case. “I am not easy in my mind about this, my love.”

“Be easy,” Nick said, kissing her forehead. “I will go to Cherry Street tomorrow and see what I can learn.”

He was gone most of the next day and returned long after the dinner hour, carrying a huge bunch of white lilies, which he presented to her with a flourish. “For my bride to be.”

“Nick, what are you saying? And they’re gorgeous, but where did you get lilies in February?”

“It seems a gentleman on Staten Island has been raising them in a glasshouse and bringing them into the city to sell. A promotional effort connected with a scheme to build a Crystal Palace in New York next year. Like the one in London.”

Carolina took the flowers, burying her face in them and inhaling the intoxicating scent. “Lilies in the dead of winter. Whatever next? Nick, what did you mean by bride to be?”

“You’ve pollen on your nose,” he said, using his handkerchief to wipe away the offending yellow-orange dust. “I mean that we can marry, my dearest love. Samuel Devrey died last month.”

“Nick, are you sure?”

“Absolutely. I had it from at least five different people on Cherry Street. Mind you, these days there aren’t a lot of people you can speak
sense to down there. The neighborhood has become astonishingly unsafe and unsavory. I think you must sell the houses at once, my dear. Or perhaps simply let them go.”

It was not Carolina’s way to allow any asset simply to go, as Nick put it, but that was another problem for another day. “What about the girl?” she asked.

“I’m told she hasn’t been seen since Sam died.”

“But she can’t just have disappeared.”

“To all intents and purposes she has. Forget about it, my love. Will you marry me?”

“Of course I will marry you. But I won’t be put off by a not-so-romantic proposal, Nick, not even one accompanied by these gorgeous lilies. You know more than you’re telling me.”

“Very well. They’re all gone. The woman Mei-hua and the servant Ah Chee, and the girl. There was an enormous Chinese funeral procession with a hearse and drums and what-all. And that’s the last anyone saw of them on Cherry Street.”

“And? Come, Nick. I know you too well. There is an and. Tell me.”

“There’s a white man involved, a Mr. Kurt Chambers. He serves with me on the board of St. Vincent’s Hospital. It seems that Mr. Chambers has business interests in the area, and he is said to have arranged everything to do with Samuel’s funeral.”

Carolina took a few moments to think through all the implications. “Are you saying this Mr. Kurt Chambers may have simply spirited the girl away with her mother and their servant? Nick, that’s dreadful.”

“It may be, but then again it may not. I shall have to make further inquiries, my love. But you are not to trouble your head about it. Frankly, given what that neighborhood has become, there’s an element of genuine danger in all this and I don’t fancy your being involved. In fact, I must insist that you are not.”

Earlier that day, while he was in the city, she had led two runaway slaves out of the Sunshine Hill root cellar and down the cliff to a hidden and makeshift dock, where a small rowboat waited to ferry them to a rendezvous with a Devrey ship bound for Halifax. They were to be
smuggled aboard, then passed off as servants to a family active in the cause of abolition who were legitimately bound for Canada and with whom Bella Klein had made the arrangement some weeks earlier. The whole endeavor was facilitated by perhaps the most radical preacher in all the northeast, the Reverend Henry Beecher of the Presbyterian Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, whose antislavery sermons were notorious in rabidly antiabolition New York. “Nothing dangerous,” Carolina agreed. “Of course not. But you must speak with this Mr. Kurt Chambers, Nick. Promise me you will.”

He did promise, not mentioning that he’d already sent a note round to Manon, asking her to arrange a meeting between himself and Chambers as a matter of personal and urgent business.

Nothing in Mei Lin’s life had prepared her to live in such a house as the one on what was officially designated the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, though the streets were still largely woods and grass grew between the patchy cobbles of the avenue.

In the house in which Mei-hua, Mei Lin, and Ah Chee were installed there was something Mr. Chambers called a bathroom. It had tiled walls and a large tub that was permanently in place and could be filled from its own spigots, one for hot and one for cold water. And while Mei-hua insisted on using the same chair she had always used, with a large bucket below that was emptied by Ah Chee, the house had a privy attached to the rear. One could reach it without ever having to go outside, and unpleasant odors were carried away by a tall pipe that ran to the top of the roof. Additional wonders were a cast-iron cookstove in the kitchen, gas lighting in every room, and heat that came to all three floors from a big, coal-fed boiler in the cellar.

When, after the interment in the garden, they first entered the house, they had found everything from their rooms on Cherry Street already put in place. Mei Lin supposed carters must have collected the things after the funeral procession left, and taken a quicker and quieter route uptown. There was other furniture in the house as well, a necessity since
the new living quarters were at least ten times more spacious than the old, but everything looked much like the furniture that had come from Canton with her mother. Whether Mr. Chambers had it all sent from China, perhaps on one of Mrs. Devrey’s clippers, or had it made here, she did not know. Either was possible. Mr. Kurt Chambers was a man, Mei Lin was convinced, who could make anything happen simply by snapping his fingers.

After the burial the mourners who had followed the hearse were invited inside, and everyone ate a huge banquet. The food was the sort Ah Chee prepared for major festivals, but more of it and some even more delicious, though of course neither Mei Lin nor Mei-hua said so to Ah Chee. “Poor quality,” Mei-hua whispered loyally. “But very kind lord to do all this. Very kind.” She looked pointedly at her daughter, who she suspected was going to give trouble of some possibly catastrophic sort as soon as the fuss of the funeral was ended. “Very kind lord deserves utmost respect and obedience.”

“Very rich lord,” Ah Chee said. She had been calculating the expenditure of money from the moment when the Lord Kurt arrived with the news of the old lord’s death, bringing the white clothes the old lord’s widow and his daughter would require. But canny shopper that she was and as clever as she had become in the matter of judging the coins and bills of this place, Ah Chee had long since lost track of how many strings of copper cash would have been required to make everything occur as it had. “Very rich,” she said, as she drank the soup that ended the funeral banquet. “Very, very rich,” and left it at that.

Eventually, when everyone had gone except for two civilized men who were busy cleaning up, Mei Lin went to find Mr. Chambers and thank him. “I am very grateful. We all are. My mother and Ah Chee as well.”

Mei-hua was sitting nearby, and though she could not understand the English words she understood what was happening. She murmured that her daughter should kowtow. “Show proper respect. Proper. Very kind lord do all this.”

Mei Lin could not bring herself to kowtow to Mr. Chambers. She
had been performing the kneeling bows for two days now. Some in front of her father’s coffin, others in front of the replicas of all the Chinese gods. She had even lit countless joss sticks and banged gongs and wailed as custom demanded. But to perform the ritual of a deeply reverential obeisance before Kurt Chambers was, she knew, to give him something of herself she was not at all ready to offer and might never be. “Thank you,” she said again. “I mean it most sincerely.”

Chambers, who had in fact spent upwards of thirty thousand dollars on the funeral (nine thousand alone in bribes to the police to insure that the procession would be allowed to march unmolested from Cherry Street to here) and considerably more on the property and pair of houses, waited a moment, giving her time to offer him the profound respect her mother had correctly identified as appropriate. When after a few seconds it was clear she would not, he smiled and nodded his head. “You are most welcome, Miss Di. Now I will leave you all to get some rest. You must be very tired.”

“You mean us to live here, don’t you?” Mei Lin blurted. “My mother and Ah Chee and me, here in this house.”

“Of course. It has been prepared for you for some time. I told you so a month ago when we were at Delmonico’s.”

She felt her cheeks coloring, but she didn’t care. She really was exhausted, and her tiredness was like a drug; combined with the plum wine she had drunk, it loosened her tongue. “Are you to be in the house next door?”

“I live there, yes.”

“And you intend that I…You mean for me and you…You said…”

“You will be my wife. Yes. But not for three months. That is when the official mourning period you owe your father will have passed. Then we will find an auspicious day and everything will be arranged.”

“But I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to live here. I don’t even know where there is a Catholic church. I want—”

“Enough.” He spoke softly and in English but in the same tone that demanded strict obedience which he had used at the restaurant. “Tell
me please where you can go instead? Where can your mother go? Will she be safe anywhere else in this city? Anywhere she is not under my protection?”

Mei Lin shook her head.

“You are correct. She will not be. Neither will you. What can you do to take care of yourself, let alone your mother and the old servant? What has your convent education prepared you for except to be a rich man’s wife, and who besides me is interested in a half-Chinese mongrel?” When he had finished speaking he turned away, ignoring the tears running down Mei Lin’s cheeks and not waiting to see if she intended to make a reply. He went instead to bow to Mei-hua and wish her good night, then he left.

The next day he appeared again for just long enough to tell them there was a carriage and a driver at their disposal whenever they wished to leave the house to shop or do anything else, including attend church on Sunday, and to point out the stables in the rear that the two houses shared. “The driver is a
yang gwei zih
,” he said, “but he can be trusted.”