The Runaway's Gold (20 page)

“Far as I know they've never been found. Although you can bet the people on Bressay Isle keep looking.”

For a moment he was silent, and then he turned slowly toward me, eyes wide as saucers.

“Chris Robertson, where exactly is this broch of yours?”

“Miles from Bressay. On the western end of the island.”

We could hear Mann's voice bellowing down the hallway: “Chamber pots! Get 'em ready!”

“Tell me, lad,” Malcolm continued, his voice barely a whisper. “Is it the kind of place one might hide something of value?”

Billy's Bargain

New York City, September 30, 1842

illy Tweed's “office,” as he called it, was a desk on the second floor of the Skaden Brush Works, where he worked as the bookkeeper. Me boardinghouse was but a few blocks south, and when I walked by at dawn on me way to the O'Reilly Forge, I noticed a light in the upstairs window.

“Roberts,” Billy said, looking up from a thick volume spread wide on his desk. Then he smiled. “A bit early for an Irish lad to be up.”

A bony white cat with gray patches slinked across the towering bins of horsehair and wire to Billy's left, stopping to rub its chin against his shirtsleeve.

“You know why I'm here,” I said. His offer to “help” me find Sam Livingston was all I had thought about since the day before—when he had walked out of the O'Reilly Forge with my coin.

“I've something to show you,” Billy said, reaching into his desk and pulling out a burgundy colored leather folio. Then he opened it and swiveled it toward me. It was a coin collection, with a variety of pieces inserted in rows of pockets on each side. Under each coin he had scrawled a description. The last coin in the row was mine.

“Belongs to me!” I hissed.

Billy donned a look of surprise. “You mean the coin
I found
on the floor at the O'Reilly Forge? Makes a perfect addition to my collection, wouldn't you say?”

I made a grab for it, but he snapped the binder closed and shoved it back in his desk before I could get it. Then he leaned back in his chair and laughed. “I believe I've stated my terms.”

“Aye,” I grumbled. “And I've come to meet them. You asked why I was interested in Sam Livingston. He was a friend of me aged grandfather's,” I lied. I had conjured me story in haste. Billy Tweed knew nothing of me life, and if I was careful with me words, he never would. “Gave the coin to me grandfather. For safekeeping. On his deathbed, me grandfather asked me to return it.”

Billy stared at me, silent as a snake, until I could bear it no longer. “I'm told it's worthless,” I blurted. “You canna have a need—”

“Need?” He laughed. “For a coin as rare as this?”

“Rare?”

“Of course! Any memento from our Colonial rebels is a find—everyone knows that. At least those of us who are true Americans,” he added with a wink. “And it will only get rarer as time goes on.”

“They say you've many talents, Billy Tweed,” I said. “A coin expert I hadn't heard.”

“Numismatist, they call it, Roberts,” he instructed. And then he held up the volume he had been studying when I walked in:
Coins of the Americas, 1600–1825
. “I've been reading up. As of late, I've found it quite profitable to gather more knowledge of the profession.”

“Then you've noticed that
me grandfather's
coin is old and worn.”

“Oh, yes, and of a most unusual size. A Pine Tree Shilling, as I told you at the forge. Do you know, Robertson, what that is?”

I shrugged me shoulders.

“Says here they were some of the first coins struck by the American Colonists.”

“Aye, 1652. Says on the back.”

He glanced up. “Studied it, have you?”

I nodded.

“But you might be surprised to learn that what makes this particular coin special is that, although it says 1652, that wasn't the date it was actually struck.”

I glanced at him, brow furrowed, as the cat rubbed his delicate pink nose against Billy's cheek.

“It's all in here,” Billy said, pointing to the book. The cat started to purr and stretched out on the book's open pages. “Colonists weren't allowed to strike their own coins unless the king said so,” he continued, brushing the cat aside, white fur flying about us. Then he held a magnifying glass to the writing before him. “So they found a way round it. They struck coins with the year 1652, because that's after the unlucky King Charles had his head chopped off and no one was sitting on the throne.”

I rubbed me eyes, wondering what this had to do with any of us in the year 1842.

“Don't you see, Robertson?” He laughed and hammered his fist on his desk with such force that the cat screeched and leapt from the desk. “They outsmarted the Crown!”

“Aye,” I replied, thinking that Wallace Marwick and most everyone in Shetland would highly approve. “An act for which you have great respect, Billy?”

Billy Tweed's eyes twinkled. “But of course!” He chuckled. “Those Colonists remind me of myself!” Then he leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on top of the stack of papers. “Only today it's City Hall we need to outsmart, not the king.” He beckoned me closer as if to give me the most private of information. “The only thing Mayor Morris's got going for him is he's a Democrat and not a Whig. Do you know he's set out to
reform
the aldermen?”

“Aldermen?”

“The men the fine citizens of New York elect to run the city. An alderman and assistant alderman from each of the seventeen wards.”

I looked at him, puzzled. “And what exactly do they do?”

“Well, pass the laws, for one. And set the taxes. Give out contracts and grants—that sort of thing.”

“But isn't reform what Peter O'Reilly and the other workers are always asking for?”

“Of course! Their taxes keep going up! They want to put a stop to what the papers call
rampant peculation
.”

“Peculation?”

Billy tugged on his ear, his eyebrows raised. “The
creative
use of public money, is one way to put it.”

“Mayor Morris wants to keep the aldermen from stealing from the people?”

Billy nodded. “From taking bribes for contracts. Special compensation for licenses. Giving themselves and family members
deals
with the city.”

I scratched me head. “And who, exactly,
wouldn't
want the mayor to do that?”

He looked up, a sly grin across his face. “Someone who will one day be an alderman. Such as the handsome gentleman sitting before you . . .”

“Ah,” I mumbled, everything suddenly clear. “Billy Tweed has ambitions beyond brush making.”

“And one needs cash to be elected, of course.”

“What does this have to do with me?” Billy stared at me, softly rubbing his angular chin as the wee brass clock on the mantel behind his desk struck 6:00. “I'm due at the forge.”

“So you are. And if you're late I'll have that whining Peter O'Reilly coming down here to complain. Lord knows there are hundreds more hungry Irishmen arriving at the docks today to replace you.”

“Go on,” I muttered, teeth clenched. There I was again. At the mercy of a man more powerful than I. And after all that had happened to me before I arrived in New York, it was a situation I knew all too well. That gnawing, clawing pain in me gut that told me what I was about to be asked to do was going to be wrong. It was going to be dangerous. And it was most certainly going to be against the law.

“I need you to make a delivery. Tonight.”

“That's it?” I asked.

“A very special, private delivery. For a friend who's just arrived from the South.”

“And then you'll bring me to Sam Livingston?”

“Yes.”

I swallowed hard. “All right, then. Where do I go?”

Billy beamed as he always did when he got what he wanted. And then he crossed his arms over his brawny chest. “Magruder's Slaughter House at Henry Street and Market. Eleven o'clock. One of my men will be waiting for you. And be sure you come alone.”

“Aye.” I turned to the door. “I'll be there.”

“And be back here tomorrow,” Billy said. “Same time. Then—if you've done the job to my satisfaction—we'll discuss my end of the bargain.”

I paused at the top of the stairs, listening to the shuffling sound of the brush workers coming in the door. “And what is it, Billy, that I'm delivering?”

He reached for the magnifying glass and turned back to
Coins of the Americas, 1600–1825
. “Something no one else is desperate enough to move.”

Night Delivery

hat I didn't know, of course, was that to Billy Tweed “helping a friend” meant hauling two heavy bags, loaded with goods I was forbidden to see, from the bloodied back entrance of Magruder's Slaughter House to a dock on the East River. It meant delivering them to a man who wouldn't give his name or show his face, and who put a knife to me throat when, in a moment of sheer terror, I forgot the password one of Billy's thugs had given me.

“Birds to Roost,” I finally managed, the blade cold at me skin.

“Watch it, kid,” the man's gravelly voice scolded through
his hood as he snatched the bags from me and shoved me aside. “Next time I won't be so patient.”

“Next time?” I gasped as the hooded figure turned from me to the dock. I wasn't sure what Billy was up to, but I knew it wasn't good. And I also knew, without him ever once having to say it, that if I was caught, or somehow failed in me delivery, I'd never find Sam Livingston. Or would end up facedown in the East River like the other lads who'd crossed him.

The hooded man hesitated, a sinister cackle creeping from his shrouded face. “Don't be a fool, boy. With Billy Tweed, the job is never done.”

So when I met Billy at dawn at the door of the Skaden Brush Works, I was quick with me demand.

“You had success, they tell me,” he said, leading me past the bins of brass wire and horsehair bristles and blocks of wood waiting for the day's crew of laborers to arrive.