Land of a Thousand Dreams (52 page)

Alice watched him stride smoothly from the dining room, not looking back. Crumpling her napkin into a ball, she was pierced by another stab of pain.

At first, Patrick's utter lack of interest in what he referred to as her “good deeds” hadn't bothered her. It wasn't that he was uncaring, after all. Naturally, she couldn't expect him to add her concerns to his own. The man hardly ever had a free moment the way it was, what with his seemingly endless business involvements.

Still, some peculiar petulance made her wonder if he couldn't have shown at least a polite curiosity about the choir in Five Points—or about her personal concern for little Billy Hogan.

The sudden awareness of anger surprised her. She never,
never
felt anger toward Patrick, and for good reason: he never gave her
reason
to be angry. Oh, he could be cross at times, but not often, and he was never unkind.

She understood, however, that she could test his patience. They were vastly different, after all. Her mind worked slowly and deliberately, whereas Patrick's wits were sharp and mercurial. Often, things had to be explained to her, while Patrick seemed to grasp the most complicated of ideas with no prompting whatsoever. She tended to be precise and methodical; Patrick was given to whims and an adventuresome spirit.

Small wonder if he occasionally grew impatient with her. She was being shamefully unfair, Alice thought guiltily, and she must stop. Pushing herself away from the table, she stood and smiled at the children. “Your papa's right; I've been neglectful this evening. Let's all go into the parlor and we'll have a game of whist.”

As it happened, Isabel had lessons to do, and Henry preferred to spend time with his telescope. So Alice spent the rest of the evening alone, just as she usually did.

In Rossiter's small office at the midtown hotel, Patrick Walsh stood, looking out the window.

There was nothing to see but a night with no moon and a few dim spots of light from other windows. Waiting for Hubert Rossiter, the hotel's bookkeeper, who also served as middleman in a number of Walsh's other business ventures, he found his thoughts going to his wife and her odd behavior of late.

Seldom did he feel the inclination to think about Alice one way or another. His wife usually required no more of his attention than a routine peck on the cheek, a brief conference about some rare infraction or problem with one of the children, and, rarer still, an uninspired night in her bedroom. Alice was a dutiful, if dull, wife. Her efforts to keep him comfortable and happy were, for the most part, admirably successful. He had little complaint with her, even less interest in her.

Lately, however, she was beginning to get on his nerves. She seemed different, somehow, had for days now. He couldn't quite put his finger on what it was—he thought it might be a touch of a new confidence he'd detected in her. And, more peculiar still, a bit less attention to
him.

The changes were scarcely noticeable. But ever since she'd started that silly piano playing for the Englishman, he'd sensed a certain distraction, a cheerfulness, about her that had no apparent connection to him or the children.

Whatever it was, he was losing patience. As a matter of fact, he was growing more than a little tired of hearing about her new “interests”'—that “fine Christian gentleman, Mr. Whittaker,” for example, and his “amazing accomplishments with his boys.”

Walsh almost snorted aloud. “Mr. Whittaker” was a one-armed stick of a man who had apparently wangled himself into the good graces of one of the wealthiest men in the country—the shipbuilder, Lewis Farmington. Obviously, the man was simply a clever parasite who happened to fancy himself some sort of missionary.

As for “his boys,” they were merely a bunch of raggedy immigrant and Negro scalawags who apparently had nothing better to do than fritter away their time singing songs.

Bracing a hand on the wall beside the window, he began to tap his fingers in agitation. He supposed he had both the Englishman, Whittaker, and the high-and-mighty Sara Farmington Burke to thank for Alice's involvement in this Five Points business.

Sara Farmington Burke.
Walsh curled his lip and cursed aloud. He'd had reason enough to despise the woman before: in spite of her being the only daughter of Lewis Farmington, she'd gone and married that bloodhound police captain, Burke—who for some reason seemed to have made Patrick Walsh his own personal quarry. Bad enough that she was the wife of his nemesis, but now she'd involved
his
wife in that do-gooder nonsense for which the Farmingtons were legendary.

Alice, of course, had no way of knowing that one of his two most lucrative businesses was built on the squalor of the Five Points district. Still, he didn't much like her being down there every week. It didn't seem right somehow.
His
wife should have no part in that filthy slum.

He liked even less her involvement with Sara Farmington—Sara Farmington
Burke,
he corrected himself sourly. Every time Alice mentioned the woman's name, he ground his teeth. He was going to have to put a stop to all this foolishness before it went any further.

But at the moment, he had bigger fish to fry. Turning away from the window, he sat down at Rossiter's desk and began to thumb idly through the papers in front of him. When the door opened, he looked up, nodding to the bespectacled Rossiter, then to Tierney Burke, who stood just inside the door behind the bookkeeper.

Walsh leaned back in the chair, his fingers playing over the papers on the desk. “Come in, Tierney,” he said, smiling.

“You sent for me, Mr. Walsh?”

Rossiter stood at a respectable distance on the other side of the desk, but Tierney Burke drew closer.

Walsh studied the boy in silence. The good-looking face bore no sign of the severe beating he'd endured several months ago, except for the thin, angry scar that ran along the side of his left eye. The ice-blue eyes, slightly hooded and always defiant, stared back at Walsh with something akin to disdain.

Lately, the boy tended to put Walsh on edge. There was no sign of the deference due a generous employer, no real indication he even respected the man who paid his wages. In fact, the more he drew the young rascal into the business, the more keenly he felt Tierney's arrogance.

Yet this one was worth half a dozen others in boldness and daring alone. The boy had proved himself absolutely reliable time and again.

Walsh reminded himself that Tierney Burke had a couple of weak spots. For one thing, he was known to drink. Not regularly, it seemed, but often enough that the men had noticed it on him now and then. Walsh himself had detected a slight slur to the young rogue's words on more than one occasion, and at times, like tonight, those intense blue eyes seemed to hold an even brighter glint of defiance than usual.

Then, too, Walsh despised that unresolved zeal and Irish patriotism of his. Although the boy seldom spoke of Ireland, almost never referred to his political leanings, he'd opened up just enough early in their acquaintance that Walsh knew him to be a rebel at heart. A fanatic on the subject of Ireland.

Since Walsh had spent most of his adult life burying his own Irish roots—burying them so deeply that even
he
tended to forget them—he had little patience for what he thought of as Ireland's national madness. As for the drinking—he viewed it as a definite character flaw, one that continued to consume and destroy the Irish immigrants by the score.

Still, whether the boy turned out to be an authentic fanatic or a rolling drunk really wasn't his concern. As a matter of fact, either tendency, or both, might just prove to be of benefit if the boy got too independent for his own good.

Walsh's smile brightened still more as he regarded young Burke. “Tierney, I've been giving some thought to your request about taking on something else, in addition to running deliveries and messages—something more…lucrative. I thought you might want to sit in on my conversation with Hubert here this evening.”

Amused, Walsh saw Rossiter flush with undisguised annoyance. It was common knowledge among the men and messenger boys that the nervous little bookkeeper disliked Tierney Burke immensely.

Patrick Walsh thought it more likely that Rossiter feared the boy. And it wasn't all that difficult to understand why.

The conversation between Walsh and Rossiter had gone on for over an hour, and Tierney was becoming more and more impatient. Impatient, and a bit uneasy.

He had caught the drift of things after the first few minutes. Walsh had himself a kind of slave trade in the works, right here in the city. It couldn't be much slicker. Negro kids, both boys and girls, were rounded up from the streets and alleys and herded off to the Bowery, where they were delivered to their “new owners” for a prearranged purchase price. Of course, in many cases, there was no previous owner; a number of the pickaninnies were children of free Negroes. On the other hand, as many others probably had parents on the run, hiding from the slave catchers, hoping they'd never be caught in a city as large as New York.

What Walsh was doing was illegal, at least in the North. It was also, his father would say, immoral.

Tierney immediately dismissed the thought of his father's disapproval. Still, he didn't much like what he was hearing. There was no telling what kind of scoundrels bought up these black kids, no imagining what their plans were once they got hold of them.

But the fact remained that the city was becoming overrun with Negroes—Negroes who took jobs from the Irish. They'd work for almost nothing, and that was the truth. In a city that was papered with signs reading NO IRISH NEED APPLY, the blacks
did
apply—and were often hired.

After a while, feeling somewhat dull from the whiskey he'd had earlier, Tierney banked his sympathy for the black kids and began to ask questions about his part in the operation. Including how much it was going to be worth to him.

34

Feed My Sheep

And this is the Christian to oversee
A world of evil! a saint to preach!
A holy well-doer come to teach!
A prophet to tell us war should cease.

JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY (1844–1890)

N
o doubt, thought Kerry Dalton, if any of the straitlaced, ponderous pillars of the Fifth Avenue congregation were to see their pastor at this moment, there would be still another fuss about “Mister Dalton's questionable behavior.” Casey-Fitz and Arthur had him trapped in the middle of the parlor floor, the three of them roughhousing like a litter of frisky pups.