City of Promise
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
ALSO
BY
BEVERLY
SWERLING
Shadowbrook:
A Novel of Love, War, and the Birth of America
City of Dreams:
A Novel of Nieuw Amsterdam and Early Manhattan
City of Glory:
A Novel of War and Desire in Old Manhattan
City of God:
A Novel of Passion and Wonder in Old New York
Simon & Schuster
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by MichaelA, Ltd.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2011
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Map by Jason Snyder; based on map “The City of New York,” Will L. Taylor, chief draughtsman (New York: Galt & Hoy, 1879. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division). Accessed at hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3804n.pm005990.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Swerling, Beverly.
City of promise : a novel of New York’s Gilded Age / Beverly Swerling.
p. cm.
Sequel to: City of God.
1. New York (N.Y.)—History—1865–1898—Fiction. 2. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.W47C66 2011
813’.6—dc22 2011010782
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3694-2
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5670-4 (ebook)
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.
City
of
Promise
November 25, 1864
S
UCH
A
CITY
. Tumbling, raucous, never-to-be-forgotten New York.
Royal Lee detested it. He hated the town with almost as much passion 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 fashionable gentlemen dressed in pale, slim trousers and black tight-waisted, knee-length coats and shiny 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 class, 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 spawned them. Great masses 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.
