Spider Dance (45 page)

“At least we’ll avoid an area in the Forties and Sixties on
the West Side from Eighth to Twelfth Avenue known as Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Sounds even hotter than upper Fifth Avenue. And far too close to Millionaires’ Row for comfort.”

“Oh, it is. But there’s another area on the Lower East Side where poor women will do anything for a slab of bread or a cot to sleep on. That’s where babies are to be had, by the droves.”

He extended his elbow. Trust an Englishman to walk into hell in polite precision.

I took the proffered arm. I was an ordinary wife now, desperate for issue, ready to beg, borrow, or steal the needed infant . . . or to buy it if necessary. A henchman husband only added to the credibility of the masquerade. I was sure Joshua and mother had done the baby-hunting for Eva.

I flexed my ring finger, left hand. It would be a cold day in hell when I would wear such a symbol of submissiveness in real life, but in my quest for justice and front-page news, I would suffer any indignity, even if it came attached with an arrogant, albeit good-looking, Englishman.

MARGARET BROWN, alias YOUNG, alias HASKINS,
alias oLD MOTHER HUBBARD

Sixty-one years old in 1889. Born in Ireland. Weight,
120 pounds. Height 5 feet, 3 inches. Gray hair, gray eyes,
light complexion. Generally wears a long cloak when stealing
.
—
1886 PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS OF AMERICA
,
INSPECTOR THOMAS BYRNES

F
ROM
N
ELLIE
B
LY’S
J
OURNAL

“Good God,” said Quentin Stanhope, “this is as unsettling as parts of Bombay, India.”

After dismissing our hack at Broadway in lower Manhattan, we had penetrated darkest New York City on foot. I was interested to hear that one as well traveled as he found the tenement areas as oppressive as any overcrowded, poor quarter on earth.

Odors of food and filth mixed into that peculiar potpourri that grinding daily want produces. I had smelled as bad or worse in the madhouse, but here the inmates were free to run around and populate and they did. The streets rang with the cries of hordes of dirty, ragged, barefoot children, not the happy cries of a park but wails and screams, and even these littlest residents of Tenement Hell preyed on each other in a dozen tongues.

“Do we simply inquire after any spare infants from one of the street peddlers?” Quentin asked.

“I’ve been given a name by one of my liaisons in the area. We are looking for Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard.”

“You’re joking!”

“This is another New York here, and certain people are known on the streets as if they lived in a village instead of a mighty metropolis.”

“In that case—” Quentin’s arm shot out to snag a youth who was running by and dragoon him into our service.

Filth and freckles hid most of the skin color on his face. A dingy checked cap thankfully hid what condition his hair might be in. His fingertips were oily and raw, and open sores festered on his dingy neck.

“A dime if you tell us what we want to know,” Quentin offered in a passable American accent

The word “dime” caught the ears of several running boys. They surrounded us with the smell of damp cloth and rank sewers.

“We want Mother Hubbard’s.”

“Coppers?”

“Hardly,” said I. “We’ve . . . lost a child and heard she could help.”

“She’ll help ya right into Blackwell’s Island, all right. A dime?”

“Two!”

“Two.”

The boy hitched a shoulder toward the row of soot- darkened brick buildings. “Middle one. Ground floor. Runs a school, she does, so you’d better mind your p’s and q’s.”

The other boys snickered, so I didn’t ask exactly what he meant. Such boys’ mouths were as filthy as their skins. And several were eyeing me with the hungry looks of wolves, only with a disturbing human hunger.

Quentin tossed the boy his two dimes, something of an overcharge for a location but forty paces away, and threw a handful of nickels at the rest of the mob.

We left them scrambling to rob each other of the coins.

The street din rose with the addition of their squeals and at the second-story window a woman leaned out and hollered for them to be quiet.

“I’ve got a colicky baby who needs sleep,” she shouted.

But no one heeded, or cared, and she withdrew back into the dark interior.

The heat inside must have been awful, for the cries of irritable infants streamed from every building.

“What becomes of them?” Quentin asked.

“Who? The children? If they survive the first years and their mother doesn’t get sick or the family evicted, they grow up to join the mongrels scrabbling in the street If they survive that, they grow up to get jobs on the docks. Some get drunk on their pay and kill each other in saloons. A few, I imagine, earn their pay and marry and have children of their own and fight to move into a building a little closer to the respectable parts of the city.

“Maybe their children will get some schooling, and grow up to get better jobs and move out of these slums entirely. But that’s the fairy-tale ending doled out only to the exceptional. Most of the girls get pregnant and they never even progress to being tenement shop workers. They bear children till they die of consumption or one cuff too many from a drunken husband.”

“There’s a tone of personal umbrage in your voice, Nellie Bly.”

“I do take it personally. My father was a judge, but my mother was his second wife. When he died she and us kids had to get out with a few goods, and that was it. She married again, a Civil War veteran, but he drank, and was crazy anyway. I finally got my mother free of that brute, and my brothers and sisters too. So I know a bit about what these poor children go through, and that’s what I bring to the readers of
The World
, what poor people go through.”

“So whether you commit yourself to a madhouse or to finding some poor waif to buy, you really act as a spy, as I do.”

“You might say so.”

He tipped his hat to me. “Let’s find this Mother Hubbard and see what she has hidden in her cupboard.”

It turned out that Mother Hubbard ran a school for street thieves, all of them under the age of fifteen.

This New World Fagin had ensconced herself and her larcenous brood in the deserted ground floor of a former factory building.

Quentin and I approached her discreetly, as the only adult in sight, and tendered our cards: two one-dollar bills.

We explained our quandary most piteously, recognizing that we were performing for a mistress of the piteous appeal.

“Mother Hubbard,” said I, as if this ridiculous name were an honored one, “we’re in terrible trouble and heard you might help.”

She was a sharp-featured old dame dressed all in black like a Dickens grandmother. “How’d d’you hear o’ me?”

“A friend,” I said quickly. “A friend who you helped previously.” I wasn’t sure if Eva herself had gone baby-shopping, but I was pretty settled that Mrs. T. Anna Swinton had something to do with it. “Mrs. Swinton. An older lady. Quite respectable. She swore . . . oh, dear, perhaps this is the wrong place.” I wrung my hands until the gesture burned and brought tears to my eyes.

“Now, Philomena,” Quentin said, startling the Hepple-white out of me. Where’d he get that name? “You mustn’t get upset. You know your health is delicate.”

“Delicate,” I repeated, managing to snivel slightly. “Yes, I . . . I lost our baby. In childbirth. And can never have another, the doctor says. And . . . and Jefferson’s parents are coming to New York and expecting to see their grandchild!”

I had now begun to wail like a guttersnipe. Quentin took my wringing hands.

“And my folks were planning to settle a christening gift upon their grandchild. With all the expenses of the laying-in,
not to mention the empty cradle and such, we sorely need their support.”

“And I want my baby back!” I wailed, quite convincingly, for I had pretended that it was one of my sisters who had died at birth and became quite weepy.

“Can you help us?” Quentin asked. “And what would it cost?”

“Depends.” Mother Hubbard was all business, despite her black bonnet and capelet. “What age do you require?”

We exchanged connubial glances. “Under three months,” I said. “It must be young enough to look like Grandfather Fettlespeed.”

“Girl or boy?”

Again we consulted each other.

“We never said,” Quentin explained. “Once the baby, a girl, died, it seemed best not to get my parents’ expectations up.”

Mother Hubbard nodded. “But you never said it died, either, or your expectations of a settlement would have gone rock-bottom down.”

“Well . . . yes,” I admitted, trying to sound more bereft about the baby than the money.

“How soon d’you need it?”

We hadn’t decided on this.

“Two, three days,” Quentin said.

“And you’ve money on you.”

“Some,” he admitted stiffly.

“It’ll be twenty dollars!”

“Twenty dollars!” The words burst from me unrehearsed. That a child could be bought and sold for little.

Mother Hubbard’s shrewd eyes darted from Quentin to myself. “Eighteen dollars and not penny less.”