The Banished Children of Eve by Peter Quinn Read Free Book Online Page B

scribble a fancy description of the city’s gratitude for Miss Lind’s generosity as demonstrated by the singing, dancing inmates of the New-York Orphan Asylum. Then it sailed off, leaving behind nothing but its tail of luxurious smoke, and everyone ran as fast as they could to the orphanage, the only time we was ever eager to get back behind its doors.
    Next evening, two of the kids put a log in the water and tried to sail to the Manhattan shore. Couldn’t have lasted long in water that cold, with the tides so strong. Was a month before the river gave them up, their bodies found floating in Deadman’s Bend, across from Corlears Hook.
    The ferry docked in Brooklyn with a loud thud. Dunne got off. He walked a block to the Swordsman Hotel. The streets were busy but seemed far removed from the battle scene across the river. The Swordsman was a faded wooden building that catered to the whores who worked the ferry trade. “No S AILORS ,” read the sign on the door. Dunne paid the charge for a room. The clerk winked as he handed him the key. “Should any visitors arrive, I’ll send her right up to your room, sir.”
    â€œDo that,” Dunne said.
    The room was on the third floor. It held only a bed and a dresser. Dunne took off his shoes. He put his claw, file, and the loot from Brooks Brothers beneath the mattress. The pillow had a large stain on it the color of tobacco.Dunne took a handkerchief from his pocket and covered it. He put his head down. As disapproving as Dandy Dan would have been of his conduct so far this day, of this Dunne knew Dan would approve. Rest, he was fond of saying, is the single most important thing a man in our line of work can get.
    True enough, especially when scheduled to meet with Waldo Capshaw, a grudging, niggling croak of a man, the way all fences are, a Protestant True American to boot, the sharpest of that sharp race. An invitation to his house means a moneymaking scheme is afoot. Got to have your wits about you if you’re not to be the goat.
    Through the fragile walls of the hotel came the noise of huffing and grunting from next door, the mounting creak of bedsprings rising and falling, faster and faster, a momentary moan, then silence.
    Well,
Dunne thought,
there’s one thing that’s the same on both sides of the river.
In an instant he was asleep.

II

    T HE RAIN SCATTERED the small crowd in City Hall Park. The band of musician soldiers wrapped their bugles and drums in their canvas coverings. Men without umbrellas ran for the portico of the Hall of Records across Chambers Street, willing to risk pigeon droppings over rain.Stephen Collins Foster, umbrellaless, didn’t run. He walked at his regular pace toward the Astor House.
    As he went past the sagging, weather-beaten barracks that had been erected as a temporary measure two years before and had become a dreary and permanent part of the park, the music filled his head, the instruments still outside their canvas, the sounds forming themselves into notes and half notes, scales and bars, black marks on white paper, a three-cent royalty per sheet, thirty thousand in the first printing, a song for the nation’s warriors, the printing presses never stopping, sixty thousand in the second printing, the presses
gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day, an’ his rider’s drunk in de old hayloft, Oh! Doo-dah, day!
    He stuck his hands into his pockets, the fingers numb and red. The traffic was heavy on Broadway, and he stood on the curb, the rain playing its own music in the puddle at his feet.
Dat, dat, dat, doo-dah, doo-dah.
A wagon went through the puddle, the monotoned rush of its wheels spraying red-brown water over his feet and pants. There was a break in the traffic. He ran across the street in front of a white omnibus with SOUTH FERRY in red letters on its sides. The driver pulled on the reins when he saw Foster, dragging the horses to a halt, and yelled an inaudible obscenity,