The Gilded Cage (34 page)

He could not wait, it seemed intolerable to wait one second longer. She lay back on the satin coverlet and pulled him to her with strong, urgent arms, and he entered her instantly in one long thrust. Columbine gasped, her eyes wide. Her fingers clutched his shoulders. He waited, feeling himself swell within her, accommodating every enfolding soft curve. And then she began to kiss him, lightly, along the chin, her lips brushing against his beard. He moved, and she moaned again, and a sob caught in her throat. She pressed her cheek against his as they rocked together, and he felt her tears. She was crying and moving and her legs wound around him and her arms clutched him to her. Her skin felt hot; her lips were slick with tears as she kissed him, over and over, and held him against her tightly.

For an instant, against his closed lids, he saw Ben's face, pale and spectral, and he screwed his eyes shut tighter, seeing red flares. His rhythm grew more rough, but Columbine, with another deep sound of pleasure, matched it. He breathed her in and felt her skull against his fingers against the softness of her bright hair. He cradled her head. Love burst through him; his heart swelled and his senses drowned in her. He was lost in her, and he gave himself up. And then she was crying out, and coming with him, and he was weeping too.

Lawrence found Bell work in a corset factory. It was strange, she thought, how quickly she adjusted back to that life. It was like a remembered dream. She went to work in the dark and came home in the dark. She had to pay rent for her chair and her sewing machine. The manager of the shop disliked her on sight, seeing in the tilt of her head and her posture a troublemaker, and he never let up on her.

Misery filtered down like ash through her days. The weight of returning to factory work was like an anvil on her chest. She would walk to work from Lawrence's rooms, timing her steps in concert with deep breaths of air. She felt she was about to be buried alive. She began to take a small volume of poetry with her, and she would memorize lines every morning. She was almost through “Dover Beach.”

But slowly, as the weeks passed, Bell began to have certain satisfactions. The first, of course, were her nights. Living with Lawrence was intoxicating. She called herself his wife now, though of course they could not marry, since they did not believe in state sanctioned marriage. Bell got a secret thrill out of calling herself “Mrs. Birch,” though of course she would never admit this to anyone. But it was nice to belong to someone. To have someone belong to her.

Bell never got used to the work, but she did begin to enjoy the workers. On lunch breaks and after work she would listen to the other women talk, and she saw that for these women their job was not purgatory. They were proud of earning their bread; this job was miles ahead of domestic service in status. They viewed their bosses with a cynical eye, and many were polticial, keeping up with the progress of the cloakmaker's new union. As May Day approached, Bell surreptitously talked a group into going with her to Union Square, where a great rally to support the cloakmaker's union would be held. Even the anarchists were attending, though Johann Most had blasted the effort in the
Freiheit
. Of course, ever Most's disciple, Lawrence refused to go.

But Emma Goldman disobeyed Most, and, using the oratory skills he'd been teaching her, gave an impasssioned speech on the platform, standing next to Joseph Barondess, who'd emerged as the the fiery hero of the new union. The cloakmakers were among the worst paid of the garment workers; only nine dollars a week, working fourteen or fifteen hour days. Their hard struggle to form the union showed no signs of easing; recently, the bosses had begun lockouts of union workers.

Bell positioned herself as close to the speakers as she could. She was thrilled when the charismatic Barondess urged all workers to support their struggle. She had come to see, from attending meetings with Lawrence, that unlike her lover, many anarchists
did
support reform. She felt more comfortable with that side of the movement. Her commitment to anarchism was as yet a philosophical one; she still shied away, to Lawrence's disgust, from the
attentat
. Bell was more interested in the ideas of Dyer Lum, who thought that worker associations would be the natural core groups within a future anarchistic society. He believed that unionism was on the way to that goal, and the young firebrand Voltairine de Cleyre, who Bell admired, also spoke eloquently of the need for worker organizations.

New ideas, new speakers, constantly filled Bell's head. Despite long hours at the factory, her nights sparked with energy. She had only to cross the threshold of their rooms on Tompkins Square and see Lawrence bent over
Liberty,
Benjamin Tucker's anarchist journal, to feel strength fill her limbs again. A quick meal and coffee and they were off into the night, to a lecture or a meeting or a Second Avenue cafe, where talk swirled around them, dramatic and dangerous. She would put her head on the pillow every night, her brain busy, her trust secure that the strength of these ideas would change the world forever.

With the first hint of spring, when the still-biting breeze held the smell of damp earth and the pale sun had a fleeting warmth, fishing began again on the piers. Lawrence and Fiona's old spot was taken, but since she was living, five nights a week, at the Van Cormandt mansion, she managed to get away on her day off and come to his rooms. It was handy that Bell had agreed to take the factory job, for there was no chance, as there had been when she was only a few blocks away at Union Square, that she would appear during the day.

For the first time, Lawrence had Fiona in a bed, and he did not like it nearly as much. Somehow she sensed this, being a creature of the devil, and one day she took his hand and led him upstairs to the roof, where they lay on his coat amid the laundry lines and took their pleasure. Lawrence was excited by the windows surrounding them, empty eyes, and the soaring blue sky above. The light caught the strands of gold in her orange hair and turned her eyes pale green.

“Do you love me, Mr. Birch?” she asked him afterward, one white arm flung out among the cinders, and her skirt still bunched around her pale thighs.

“Aye, Mrs. Devlin,” he said, imitating her lilting brogue.

She gave him a sidelong look. “Would you marry me then?”

Lawrence was taken aback; he'd never dreamed Fiona would be so conventional. “And what would Jimmy say?”

She made a face. “Jimmy and I dont have much of a marriage, as well you know. We're not even living together but two nights a week, now. And I've been thinking if things go wrong with the bomb. If Ned lives. You tell me I can disappear and take a new name. Can we have one together, man and wife? Go away together, out west?”

He grimaced. “I came from the west.”

“Europe then.”

“I don't have any money for such things, Fiona.”

“What about what you lifted from that society of Mrs. Nash?”

“I had to pay for the bomb, you know,” he said impatiently. “And I had to live.”

Her reddish eyebrows came down in a deep frown, and she looked across the rooftop. “Are you telling me no, then?”

There would be no danger in agreeing; his plan was perfect, and he would have to trust to her wits to keep her head afterward. And she was Catholic; she would never divorce her husband. Jimmy Devlin was hale and hearty, though only one-armed, so there was no danger in agreeing. “Yes, I would marry you,” he said, taking her hand. “And I would go with you, should you have to run. Would you do the same?”

She pulled down her skirt. “I suppose I would, yes.”

“Of course,” Lawrence continued, glad to see that she'd relaxed, “it's against my principles. I don't believe one needs the state to sanction a union.”

She waved her hand. “I'm not interested in your theories, Lawrence. I wouldn't feel right otherwise. You'd have to overcome your scruples for me.” She lay back and met his eyes mockingly. “Even though you have so few, I'm sure you can sacrifice one.”

He kissed her. “I'd kill for you and die for you, so I suppose I'd marry you, too.”

Fiona laughed, her teeth catching her bottom lip. “You're a liar,” she murmured, running her hands along his chest. Lately, she'd been affectionate with him, her brusqueness tempered with tenderness.

“So how do you like your new master?” Lawrence asked lazily as he buttoned his trousers.

“We don't have conversations, if that's what you're asking,” Fiona replied, sitting up again. “As a matter of fact, I rarely see our Ned.”

“Let's go over the plan again,” Lawrence said, smoothing the crease in his trousers. “You leave the inside lock of the summer parlor open when you clean it sometime during the day. Then you plant the fuse at night, running it underneath the rugs. What time does Mrs. Campbell go to bed?”

“I told you already—”

“Tell me again.”

“She's in her room by eleven-thirty,” Fiona said in an exasperated tone. With strong fingers, she wound her loosened hair into a tighter bun and stuck the pins back in. “Then Mr. Granger takes Neddie his brandy and soda at midnight and goes to bed himself. His light goes out at twelve-thirty. Everyone's asleep, then. The place is as quiet as a tomb.”

“And Mary is a heavy sleeper, you said.”

“There's but a foot between our beds, and for three nights now I got up and banged her blessed Bible on the floor, she didn't wake up. She'll sleep on, never fear.”

“So you can get the keys earlier—”

“Mrs. Campbell sneaks out and takes a drink from the brandy bottle while Granger is taking our Ned his drink. She leaves the keys on the kitchen table. Since she's been tippling all day the brandy is all she needs to go straight out like a light. Sometimes she leaves the keys all night on the table, or the counter. She won't miss them if I take them, not till morning. And I hear her snoring fit to beat the band by twelve-twenty.”

“And our target goes to bed when?”

“One-fifteen, I told you, just like clockwork.”

“So I'll have about fifteen minutes between when Granger goes to bed—allowing time for him to be in a deep sleep—and the target goes upstairs.” Lawrence put his hands behind his head and looked up at the sky. “That's hardly enough time,” he mused. “But it will have to do, I suppose. As long as you can plant the fuse the night before.”

“That will be the tricky part, make no mistake,” Fiona said gloomily. “Mary is always poking about with her dustrag.”

“You'll have to manage it. So when does he leave for Washington?”

“Two weeks, I think.”

“Next week then,” Lawrence said.

Fiona shivered. “So soon?”

Lawrence didn't notice the shiver; he was thinking hard, staring ahead of him. “He's going to Washington to meet with the president,” he said. “I wish I could get that bastard, too, but I'll have to settle for his lackey.”

“Next week,” Fiona said dully.

Lawrence turned to her briskly. “Let's go over it all again. What time does Mrs. Campbell retire?”

M
ARGUERITE HAD SAILED
through Toby's lessons over the past months without any nerves at all. Whatever he asked her to do, she did. If he wanted her to extend a note, she did. If he wanted her to use her hands on a phrase, she did. If he had asked her to dance around the room in her drawers, she would have. She trusted him, and somehow that trust belied any nerves on her part. Toby told her she was remarkably free of any fear of failure. Secretly, he hoped that would carry her through the grueling pressure of an audition with the great William Miles Paradise himself.

He was already a legend at thirty-two, starting out as a playwright at twenty-five and after two smash hits turning to producing. Whatever he touched seemed to turn to gold. He worked with the greats: Adelaide Ristori, Richard Mansfield, Edwin Booth, Maurice Barrymore, Ada Rehan, Maude Adams. Recently he had turned his eye to the revue, and his current hit was called
Potpourri!
The exclamation point was pure Willie P.

Toby had escorted Marguerite to the theater on the nights when Edwin was not available due to family duties. Even her disgruntlement at Edwin's desertion faded the moment she swept through the doors of the theater and sniffed the air. All theaters smelled the same to her; it was a perfume that went straight to her head and heart, better than anything from Paris, and instead of violet and musk she picked out floorboards and velvet curtains and sawdust and hammers and nails as well as the scent of furs and satins and silks of the audiences who crowded the seats night after night. When the house lights came down and the show began, good, bad, indifferent, tears would spring to her eyes. She would forget Toby next to her and lean backward, not forward, for her emotion was so overwhelming she was embarrassed by it.

As the play progressed she would lose her self-consciousness and begin to lean forward, rapt. She concentrated fiercely if it was a musical play, memorizing the words to songs and practicing the dances in her mind. The next day, she'd do them for Toby in his room. She had an excellent memory for steps and tunes, impressing even the blasé Toby.

She had approached her training with Toby as a lark; it was something she possessed that had nothing to do with Edwin. She had that, at least, for herself. And secretly she had planned to use the audition with William Paradise as a lever to get Edwin to marry her. He'd had enough time to vacillate. She would tell him it was either him or the stage, that the great William Miles Paradise wanted her. And, as it was with men, that would make Edwin want her more.

So if her confidence was high, if Toby told her her arrogance knew no bounds, why, on the morning of her audition, did she wake absolutely sick with fright? Just the thought of standing and singing for William Miles Paradise made her run to the bathroom directly after breakfast and deposit her rolls and coffee in the basin. She dressed with icy cold hands, feeling light-headed. She tottered her way to the carriage.