The Enchantment (5 page)

He reached toward her.

"Don't touch me," she hissed. She couldn't bear it; not now. One touch and she'd shatter into a million pieces. She grabbed the folder from him and hugged it to her chest like a shield. "I must go," she said shakily.

"Emma?"

"I'm fine, Eugene. Truly." She forced her chin up a notch and squared her shoulders. "But I have to go now. After all, I've a fortune to remake."

He smiled weakly. It was a lie, and they both knew it. "You're smart, you're young. You'll find a way."

Another lie. She tightened her grip on the leather portfolio to still the trembling of her fingers. "You're damn right I will."

Before Eugene could say a word, she turned and bolted out of his office. She hurried through the suddenly oppressive, overly quiet halls of the bank, her head held high as she sailed past Miss Baxter's cage. The teller's snicker nipped at Emma's heels, clawing at her confidence, but she set her lips in a grim line and ignored the laughter. At the door, she snatched her umbrella and gloves from the doorman and marched outside.

The doors slammed shut behind her.

At the sound, her composure crumpled. Her shoulders trembled and slumped, her chin sank.

Dear God . . .

It was over. After fifteen years of clawing and scraping and sacrificing, she'd lost it all.

Somehow she kept moving. Like a sleepwalker she glided forward, seeing nothing, feeling less. Moving, drifting, staring straight ahead through wide, painfully dry eyes. Sheer force of will kept her feet moving.

The buildings on either side of her melded into one another, forming an indistinguishable blur of gray.

Equally gray

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was the sky above; no sunlight penetrated the gloom or warmed Emma's cheeks.

She clutched the slick wooden handle of her umbrella with frozen fingers. Rain thumped the black pongee satin over her head, its staccato beat an echo of the headache behind her eyes.

Broke. The word repeated itself with every raindrop that hit the umbrella. Broke . . . broke . . . broke . .

. She squeezed her eyes shut to block the taunting word from her brain, and kept moving forward. "Hey, lady!"

A hand curled around her forearm and yanked hard. She stumbled backward, slamming against a strong, barrel-sized chest.

She opened her mouth for a scathing retort, but before she uttered a single sound, an electric trolley rattled past her. Water spewed off the fast-moving car and splashed her face.

"You okay, lady?" It was the same voice, softer this time.

Okay? She felt as if her bones had turned to porridge. She'd almost walked into a moving trolley! Taking a deep breath, she turned to look at the man who'd saved her life. He was a big, burly, middle-aged man, a stevedore by the looks of him, and he was looking at her through the warmest brown eyes she'd ever seen. Gratitude filled her heart, but as usual, the words stuck in her throat.

He doffed his worn red cap and offered her a fatherly, concerned smile. "You okay, miss?"

She tried to dredge up an answering smile, but

couldn't. The best she could summon was a small nod.

He led her back onto the flagstone walkway, and once

there, she looked around. For the first time, she real-

ized that she was no longer in the financial district. "Where are we?"

"I figgered you was lost. Don't get too many ladies like yourself on Mott Street."

Mott Street. Emma's heart lurched. Her throat seized up. It had taken fifteen years to scrape her way out of this cesspool of poverty. Now here she was again.

And dead broke—just the way she'd started. A chill crept across her flesh. Jesus, she thought with sudden, fierce desperation, had it all been a dream? Had she ever really gotten out? "Why're you here, miss?"

The question lodged in her brain like a shard of glass. Why was she here?

The answer was obvious. Too obvious. It was one she'd run from all her life. Because you belong here.

You 've always belonged here.

Could it be true? she wondered with a rising sense of panic. Had a vengeful God given her the moneyed life on Eighth Avenue, only to snatch the goodness away at the last moment and plunge her back into the coldest darkness she'd ever known?

She shivered at the thought. It fit so well with her perception of the Almighty.

"You wanna come with me, miss? You don't look so good. The missus—"

Emma forced an answer past the lump of fear in her throat. "No, thank you. It appears I know where I am after all." "You do?"

She felt his skeptical gaze on the expensive rubberized wool gossamer that protected her from the cold wind and driving rain, and the tiny, fashionable hat that perched just so on her perfectly coiffed hair. She licked

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her dry lips, then said softly, "I grew up in Rosare Court."

An odd silence stretched between them, as if he no longer knew what to make of the unfamiliar creature standing so primly before him. "Oh, well, then," he finally said. "Good-bye. Keep your eyes open this time."

"I will," Emma answered to his retreating back. She clutched the collar of her woolen cape and stared dully into the hissing, smoking gloom. The soft hum of the streets vibrated beneath her feet. She stood frozen, her gaze glued to the sidewalk stretched out before her. The slums seemed to be calling to her, beckoning in the same sly, taunting voice that had haunted her nights for as long as she could remember.

They were ready, these pathetic, dirty streets, to welcome her back as one of their own.

The buildings melted into a gray, swirling layer of fog. Out of the colorless mist came the high, keening cry of a fishwife hawking her wares. Whitefish, day-old whitefish . . .

Emma shuddered. Above her head the elevated railway sputtered and rattled, sending a cascade of sparks to the wet pavement below. All around her, people scurried to and fro like ants, their pale, careworn faces turned in to the ragged collars of hand-me-down coats. The rain had stopped, but the air remained sour, thickened by the stench of long-forgotten garbage, darkened by the outpouring of smoke from too many chimneys. She heard a high-pitched giggle and glanced toward the noise. Beside a rickety horse-drawn cab, a dozen or so dirty, half-clothed children chased an equally dirty mongrel down the streets. The noisy pack dashed between broken-down stalls and overfilled pushcarts, their THE ENCHANTMENT

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bare feet splashing through the dirty puddles that pocked the cobblestone road. Everywhere they went, the sound of angry hollering and childish giggles followed.

Behind the children, a group of stoop-shouldered women was huddled around a broken hydrant. White water spewed over their feet and splashed across the cobblestone street. They hurried to fill anything they could find—shoes, hands, buckets—with the fresh water.

Emma bit down on her lower lip to keep it from trembling. Even now, after all these years, she remembered what it had felt like to stand at the hydrant, waiting, praying, to get even a cupful of water before the policemen arrived and shooed her away. Her hands had been dirty then, and cold. Always cold. And it had hurt like Hades to plunge her tiny fingers in the freezing cold water, but she had done it, and gladly. The poisoned, filthy water in the tenement's broken-down communal sinks had been undrinkable.

Emma wrenched her gaze away from the women clustered around the hydrant and slowly turned, knowing what she'd see: the alley's entrance.

She allowed herself only a moment of doubt, then squared her shoulders and forced her chin up.

Clutching her umbrella in shaking fingers, she turned down the twisting, dirty walkway that was no more than three steps wide.

Gritting her teeth, she walked past one broken-down building after another until she came to the building that had haunted her dreams for years: Rosare Court.

The tenement's red-brown face was as blank as a dead man's eyes. No windows relieved the stark, straight pattern of the bricks, no flowers bloomed from boxes be-42 Kristin Hannah

side the closed door. The only ornamentation on the building was the crisscrossed ironwork of the fire escape.

Fire escape. What a cruel joke to call those useless ladders escapes. Emma still had nightmares about the night dozens of men, women, and babies had burned to death in a building exactly like this one. The escapes, they'd discovered too late, didn't reach the ground. The victims had burned to death staring down at the firemen and the water wagons clustered in the alley below. Even though she'd taken a job as a typist on Wall Street and moved to Catherine Street by then, Emma had been close enough to hear the screams. . . .

Something, some wisp of sound, floated to Emma's ears.

It was a lullaby.

Drawn almost against her will, she followed the sound to a tumbledown rear tenement less than fifty feet away. The top floors of the building disappeared into the low-slung layer of haze. Below the fog, clotheslines traversed the dirty backyard, and from their sagging expanses, wet, worn clothing snapped in the wind.

Sounds battered her ears, pulled her back in time: the barking of half-starved dogs looking for food; the bellow of an angry husband seeking his helpless wife; the soft shuffling of bare feet on rainy sidewalks.

And above it all, the haunting strains of a mother's lullaby. She walked to the sagging fence that lined the tenement's muddy backyard. Looking up to the second floor, she saw a woman huddled on the cold iron slats of the fire escape, and in her arms was a baby wrapped in a tattered blanket.

The child gave a violent shudder, then let out a loud, high-pitched hacking that was immediately followed by

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a wheezing wail. The mother sang louder, and reached a too-thin, blue-veined hand to the child's face.

"Shh, Jeannie. It'll be okay, love. ..." Emma turned quickly away. Tears stung her eyes and clogged her throat. The scene was so close. . . . She had sung the same lullaby to her dying mother, raised a similarly shaking hand to Mum's fire-hot bow. Whispered the same desperate, aching words . . .

Emma moved closer. She could barely make out the woman's face, for her too-pale, care-creased skin was almost indistinguishable from the cheap gray wool fascinator that wreathed her head and neck. The woman's drawn mouth worked softly, haltingly, and the lullaby left her lips in hesitant, painful spurts.

The child hacked again, harder this time. Emma had no doubt that the babe was dying; nor that the mother knew it as well. With half a chance, the baby might live, but here, in the hopeless pit of poverty, there was no chance at all.

Unless Emma herself made one. She stepped forward. Her knee brushed the rickety fence and a rotted slat fell onto the wet sidewalk.

The mother's head jerked up. Her tired, bloodshot eyes narrowed suspiciously when she saw Emma.

Wordlessly the woman bundled up the baby and hurried back into her apartment. The door creaked, then slammed shut in her wake.

Emma stared at the closed door for a long time, the mother's glassy eyes etched into her memory. There had been no hope in those eyes; no hope in that quiet lullaby. No hope of escaping this hellhole. No hope of even surviving.

Once again Emma realized how lucky she'd been. Unlike most of the people in this neighborhood, who 44

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were beaten by poverty until they dropped, exhausted and depleted, into a waiting grave, Emma had never let herself accept life in the slums. Never.

Yes, she'd been lucky. And something else, something even more important. She'd been smart.

She was still smart, still lucky, still hungry for success. She'd made one fortune, and by God, she could make another. And once she'd made it, nothing on Heaven or Earth would pry it from her hands again.

Nothing.

Emmaline looked up at the ornate chateau-styled town house and swallowed thickly. A flutter of butterflies nested in her stomach. She pressed a slim, gloved hand to her abdomen.

It was foolish to be nervous. She'd gone over this decision a thousand times in the last few days, and it seemed the perfect plan of action. She and Eugene

should marry.

Marry. She suppressed a shiver of repulsion at the word. It was so ... personal, conjuring up myriad disturbing images—joint checking account, shared power, female subservience.

"No," she said sharply, jerking her chin to a defiant tilt. It wouldn't be an ordinary marriage. Not one of those fluttering-eyelid sorts of affairs the socialites specialized in. Rather, she saw marriage to Eugene as a convenience. A merger. She got a place to live and enough money to start over, and he got an intelligent, sexually progressive, financially gifted wife. All in all, she thought, a good deal for both of them.

Plucking up the heavy folds of her pleated French sateen skirt, she climbed the marble steps and rapped smartly on the door.

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The butler appeared almost immediately. "Miss Hatter," he said in a pinched, nasal voice, "is Mr.

Cummin expecting you?" She forced a smile. "No."

He nodded. "Very good, miss. Come in and sit down." He led her to a comfortable tapestried bench in the foyer. "I'll tell Mr. Cummin you're here."

Emma watched the uniformed man climb the stairs and disappear. Her breath escaped in a nervous sigh.

Lord, she hoped she was doing the right thing. . . .

She sat stiffly erect and forced the anxiety from her mind. Glancing idly around, she studied the foyer.

The decorations were expensive, but rather sparse. Elegant but poorly placed.

In need of a woman's touch, she decided. As soon as they were wed, she'd hire a woman to give it one.

"Emmaline," came Eugene's voice as he padded quickly down the carpeted stairs. "What a surprise."

She stood. "Good evening, Eugene." "Come into the salon," he said, leading her into another sparsely furnished room. "Would you like a drink?"

Emma took a seat. Fanning her fashionably narrow skirt out around her legs, she shook her head. "No, thank you. I'm here on ... business."