City of Promise (42 page)

She didn’t say anything, but at least she was smiling.

Josh had not been inside the house for two weeks. It was a quite deliberate act of restraint. He’d wanted to be as surprised as he was right now, seeing the warm yellow gaslight bathing polished wood and softly draped damask, and occasionally reflecting a sharper gleam as it encountered marble and the hard sheen of satin. And everywhere that wondrous smell of newness and beginning.

They ate a cold supper of mutton pie off trays on their laps in a comfortable family sitting room on the second floor, where the more formal fabrics of the downstairs drawing and dining rooms gave way to flowered chintz and checked gingham. “Your study is through there,” Mollie said, indicating a door behind them. “Just as you said you wanted.”

“Excellent. Incidentally, I’ve set up an office for Hamish down at the foundry, but he’ll come and work with you here two days a week.”

She nodded agreement. Then, the trays cleared and the room quite empty of anyone but themselves, “Will you show me the bedrooms, Mollie.”

He followed her up to the third floor. “Two here and two on the floor above,” she said. “Proper bedrooms up there. Not servants’ quarters. Agnes and Tess have rooms downstairs near the kitchen. Jane as well. She’s agreed to live in now that we need a full-time maid.”

“Downstairs,” Josh repeated. “They don’t mind that rather than the upper floor?”

“They haven’t said if they do. And Mr. McKim says that’s how it’s being done in all the better New York houses these days.”

“Makes sense,” Josh said. Looking meanwhile at the bed big enough
for two in the room in which they stood. It had four tall posts but no canopy or curtains.

“I’m told,” Mollie said, “that with modern heating there is no need to enclose the beds in drapery. But if you prefer—”

“No. This is fine. It’s a handsome room.”

“The one next door is exactly like it,” she said, speaking quietly and turning her back to him as she did so, while making a show of adjusting something on a dresser top.

He was, he realized, dismissed.

He could not, however, fall asleep in the room next door to his wife’s. There was a chiming clock in the entry hall and he heard it strike ten and then eleven. After that he got up and prowled about the place, not bothering to strap his peg back on, managing with only his cane and feeling more excited with each hopping step. By God, it was a place to do a man proud. Never mind that Mollie had wriggled out from under the task he set her and gotten her aunt to do the selecting and buying and arranging. He loved the way the house looked, and tonight, eating supper with him, showing him around, Mollie had been closer to her old self than anytime in the past six months.

More than ample time for what Simon called her female parts to have healed.

He did not knock but let himself into her bedroom as quietly as he could, grateful for the thick rug that quieted the tapping of his cane. He could hear her breathing. Soft and steady and not startled. Either she was asleep, or awake and expecting him.

Josh made his way to the side of the bed and slipped out of his robe and his nightshirt and lifted the quilt and crawled in beside her and whispered, “Mollie, are you awake?”

“I am.”

“I thought . . . It’s a new beginning, love. I want us to be as we were.”

She did not answer.

He reached out and stroked her cheek, leaning forward after a moment
to kiss first her forehead and then her lips. “I thought I’d taught you to kiss me back,” he said, a hint of teasing in his voice. “Have you forgotten so soon?”

She shivered. Not with that welcoming tremble of the virgin girl who despite her inexperience had delighted him by daring to come naked to her bridal bed. She was crying. He could taste the salt of her tears on her cheeks. “Mollie, please . . .” Then, because he knew he could not live with himself if he did not make the offer, “I’ll go if you wish.”

“You’re my husband, Josh. It’s what you wish that matters.”

Damn her. She wouldn’t even meet him halfway. He’d been celibate for months and he was not a monk; she should not expect him to act as such. “Look, I don’t want—”

“Yes, you do. And you can. So you may as well go ahead.”

He rolled on top of her without another word.

He felt rotten about it the next day and perhaps if things had worked out differently Josh might have tried again to effect a rapprochement with Mollie. As it was, events intervened.

A note was delivered the following morning. It was from Zac. Josh was at once summoned to Sunshine Hill.

He knew something was desperately wrong as soon as he approached the house; the gates at the foot of the long steep driveway were flung open. Zac met him at the door, his stricken face conveying the news before his words. “She didn’t wake after the night. It was very peaceful. We can be thankful for that.”

They buried Carolina from Trinity Church and interred her in the churchyard. Joshua was astounded at the numbers who showed up for the funeral. All the New York waterfront it seemed, everyone from an aged Greek named Socrates Paxos—the last survivor of the trio who had captained her clippers—to any number of gray-bearded stevedores
who remembered her with affection. A goodly number of black people as well. Confirming the truth she had never been willing to discuss, how active she’d been in the dangerous work of the underground railroad in the days preceding the war. Old friends as well, Papa’s old business partner, Dr. Klein and his family, and much to Josh’s astonishment, a contingent of Catholic nuns, as well as a Chinese woman. His father, he noted, spent a good amount of time talking with one of the nuns, and embraced the Chinese woman with obvious and genuine affection.

“Your mother was a woman of many parts,” Mollie murmured.

“Apparently so.”

Eventually, the graveside ceremonies were done and a verger in a white cassock and a purple cape began ushering them past the many worn and moss-covered headstones of this oldest part of the burial ground. Most were original and undisturbed, though the church itself had been rebuilt three times since it was erected in 1697.

Josh caught a number of names as he walked by. Sally Turner Van der Vries for one, and Lisbetta Van der Vries Smythe for another. Lisbetta had been known to the town as Red Bess, he remembered, and one way or another deeply embroiled in the feud that originally tore the Devreys and the Turners apart. Death, however, was the great leveler. Not far from Red Bess was the grave of her brother, Willem Devrey. Born Van der Vries, he’d been the one who anglicized the name. And there was Christopher Turner, and beside him Samuel Devrey—not Zac’s father, the ancestor he’d been named for—and Sam’s brother Raif. And nearby a stone that was aslant and had a corner knocked off. Jennet Turner DaSilva it said, 1715–1783. Someone had left a single rose at its base, dead now but the browned petals not yet blown away. Josh bent over to examine the card beside the flower.
Heroine of the Revolution R.I.P.
He knew Jennet was his many times great-aunt, and according to family legend, in her time the most notorious woman in the city. It pleased him that someone in his own day had remembered the other part of who she’d been.

Everything passes, dearest Joshua. Try and leave behind more good than bad.

He would have sworn it was his mother’s voice whispering those words in his ear, and when at last the slow file of mourners went through the churchyard gate to Wall Street he felt as if he’d trodden through his own history and somehow emerged on the other side.

“I intend to carve my Thanksgiving turkey at my own table,” he’d said. And so he did.

Mrs. Hannity produced a bird of uncommon wonder, golden brown and succulent, and a series of accompanying dishes—chestnut stuffing and roasted potatoes and onions in cream and buttered squash and cranberry sauce—that showed no hint of having been made in a kitchen she’d not seen until forty-eight hours before. The family gathered and ate with gusto and exclaimed over the glories of the new house.

At the end of the meal both the cook and Tess arrived in the dining room, each bearing a pie in either hand. “Mince and apple and pumpkin, and custard,” Mrs. Hannity announced. “Course custard ain’t traditional for Thanksgiving, but it’s Mr. Turner’s favorite.” There were three Messrs. Turner at the table, but no one was in doubt that Josh was the Mr. Turner Mrs. Hannity wanted to please.

Master of all he surveyed.

The thought actually crossed Josh’s mind. He had the grace to, first, color, then chuckle to himself, though he didn’t think anyone but Aunt Eileen noticed. Probably his mother would have as well, and smiled at him in that knowing way she’d had.

They were, of course, all trying not to think of Carolina’s absence, nor the fact that Nick looked twenty years older now he had buried his wife.

For her part Mollie sat at the foot of the table and did everything expected of her. But she did not once meet Josh’s glance, and she disappeared upstairs the moment the guests left.

On Friday she did not join him for breakfast and he saw her outside, bundled up against the raw November wind, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a long coat and a scarf that was whipped about by the wind. She was using a sharp stick to mark places in the soil, while the stable boy came behind her with a narrow spade, digging a hole in the places she indicated. She seemed to be issuing a string of instructions and she spoke to Ollie Crump, Josh noted, with more animation than she’d mustered for her husband in six months. Certainly more than she’d exhibited the other night when he shared her bed.

He went outside through the pair of glass doors McKim had added to the breakfast room as an afterthought.
Given that your wife is making such a feature of the plantings, French doors might be pleasant, don’t you think?

Neither the boy nor Mollie acknowledged his arrival. “I thought gardening was a warm-weather activity,” Josh said. “What are you doing?”

“Planting tulip bulbs,” Mollie said. “They arrived from Holland only a few days ago. They must be planted now if they’re to flower in the spring.”

“I see. And what’s that?” He pointed to a small tree, its leafless branches showing above the burlap wrapping tied over its roots.

“A young Roxbury Russet apple from Sunshine Hill. Your father sent it over. We shall plant it later today. Over there.”

She used her pointed stick to indicate a spot some ten feet from where they stood. It looked to Josh not unlike any other place on the lot and he started to ask her why that was the favored position, but she had turned back to Ollie and was saying something about the depth of one of the holes. Joshua had come out without a coat and the wind was freezing. He turned and went back into the house.

That evening he called on Francie Wildwood.

Francie was exultant. She’d bided her time and kept her mouth shut, knowing that to be a wiser course of action than simply telling of Mollie’s arrival at the house on Bowling Green. (She’d suspected from
the first the visit was made without his permission. Joshua Turner was far too proud to send his wife to drum up custom for his business.)

At the time she had weighed her options carefully. If she told she would have the momentary satisfaction of seeing his face darken with anger and disapproval. But though the chief cause would be the almost-spinster who’d got him to propose marriage, the anger would quickly be directed at her as well. Francie, after all, was in charge of the rooming house, and she had allowed the meeting to take place. So she’d stayed silent. And here he was back in her bed not fifteen months after he married that skinny, drawn-out creature who, as it turned out, hadn’t managed to give him a child in all that time, and according to what she heard never would. And thanks in part to Francie helping to rent those first flats and saying nothing of it to him or anyone else, the Joshua Turner who’d returned to her was a lot richer than the one who’d smacked her bottom and given her pearl earrings to mark the last time he took advantage of her charms. “I mean to keep my vows, Francie. But I’d be happy to have you stay on running this house.”