The Lenox Library might have been full of the whiff of gentlemanly scholars in wet woollen coats but the soft late morning light that filtered through the Fifth Avenue porticos gave it a faintly mystical feel. It was just right for invoking the last vestige of her creative energy for the conservatory entry.
Rose feathered her pencil over the paper to give the intricate iron lacework on her new butterfly house a deeper perspective, then sat back, surveying her work with a swelling sense of satisfaction, and gave the sketches a proud tap. They were perfect. She couldn’t wait to see what Jack would do with the final watercolours.
‘She’s all yours now, Jack. Take care of her.’
Jack launched across the desk and gave them the once-over, then let out a long, slow appreciative whistle that went unappreciated by the dour silver-haired gent in front of them, who gave them a withering glare.
Rose buried her face in the crook of her elbow to stifle a laugh, but Jack whipped the pencil from her fingers and held it aloft, twirling it like a baton between his thumb and forefinger. She could barely believe the way Jack disregarded the old-fashioned rules when everybody else seemed to worship them.
‘You’re wicked.’
‘Why thank you!’ He grinned, little currant eyes shining. ‘Now, I can already see where to add the artistic accoutrements.’ He pointed to the arched doorway. ‘A sculpture of Gaea, the Greek goddess of earth on one side, and perhaps Aphrodite, love, fertility and bounty, on the other. They can mother nature every day, so to speak.’
Rose was almost bursting with anticipation. ‘I can’t wait to see the final watercolours. When will they be done?’
‘Wednesday, in time for the deadline. Let’s meet at Central Park then.’
‘I think the weather is brightening up, and the cherry blossoms are out. Perhaps we can picnic?’
‘Sounds delightful.’ He regarded her thoughtfully, twisting his moustache.
‘What?’ she whispered.
‘I’ve never known anyone with such an appetite for hard work.’
‘You would have one too if you were stuck in my position.’
Jack’s grin flickered slightly, and he scraped his chair in close. ‘Don’t worry, I know what it’s like.’
‘And how could you possibly?’
He sat for a moment and stared at a worn spot on the timber desk like he was weighing something up, then coughed into his fist. ‘So tell me, how’s the investigation into the necklace going? It’s been weeks. Any leads?’
‘The detectives have interviewed every one of the staff at the Waldorf, the police on duty that night and even Pinkerton’s men. They are almost certain it was an “inside” job. Actually’—Rose unbuckled her workbag and pulled out a folded copy of the New York World—‘there was an article this week.’
She handed the paper to Jack, who studied the piece with intent. She watched his dark irises flick over the words, then he pointed to the paragraph that described the perpetrator.
‘So this is him? The thief?’
She nodded, not wanting to think about him again. Those green eyes came to her every night. Made her heart trip and her conscience convulse.
Jack pinched his lips with his fingers, then handed the paper back.
‘No, take it,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of being reminded.’
‘But if they can’t find the jewellery, then what happens?’ He shot her such a serious look that it made her stomach flip, and she steadied herself, not wanting to entertain anything but optimism.
‘We win the competition, of course!’
‘Will you re-sit the exams at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts?’
She shrugged and closed the subject with a snap of her pencil tin.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘All right. I need to drop these books back I’ve got an appointment this afternoon that I just can’t miss.’
‘Where are you off to?’
‘The Players Club. Apparently Tesla’s holding court this afternoon with some cockamamy idea about wireless electricity.’
‘Everybody thought his alternating current was cockamamy too until the Chicago World’s Fair.’
‘True.’ Jack picked up his pile of library books and marched off to the front desk while Rose admired his well-dressed form: the fine cut-away jacket, tight high-waisted trousers and the same permanently arched eyebrow that she had spotted in class at the Art Students League of New York six months ago.
She could see his face now, peering round his easel at her with a mischievous smirk. She’d been using her pencil to size up the dimensions of a semi-naked, pot-bellied muse in Life Drawing class. Jack caught her eye and winked. She had blurted a laugh so unexpectedly loud that everyone else had shushed her. What followed was the most awful case of the giggles she’d ever had. The harder she’d tried to suppress the tickle inside her, the harder the mirth had come. She’d never known a disease quite like it. Since then, they’d struck up a firm friendship and she now imagined him to be the brother she might have had, had John had lived – with their rich conversations about the arts and crafts movement, Sullivan’s Chicago School of design, and, of course, Gaudí and the many other contemporaries she’d been besotted by recently. And through it all Jack never once questioned her authenticity nor her right to be an architect.
She gathered her paperwork as he strode back towards her. ‘I’ll see you Wednesday, at Central Park opposite the lake, near Bow Bridge, at, say, noon,’ he said, looking at his wristwatch. ‘If the weather is fine, let’s picnic. But if not – a carriage ride, with blankets and hot chocolate.’
‘Splendid!’
He gave a tiny salute and clicked his heels. ‘Shall I wait for you?’
‘No, I’ll be perfectly fine.’ She waved him away. ‘See you Wednesday.’
He pushed his bowler hat firmly on his dark curls, tweaked the amplitude of his winged moustache and strode from the library.
Rose packed up her things and slid her chair back, eager to leave before any antiquarian gent took pleasure in pointing out her lack of chaperone, but the chair leg caught on something beneath the desk. Looking down, she saw the worn strap of Jack’s satchel. She untangled it and hurried out to catch him, but he had already been lost to the black-hatted throng of Fifth Avenue’s lunchtime mayhem.
Rose took a seat on a sidewalk bench while she decided what to do about Jack’s bag. She could just give it back to him on Thursday, but what if he needed it to finish the conservatory entry? She toyed with the clasp and snatched a quick peek inside. Harmless enough, and not really stepping over any prohibited thresholds, since all she could see was a sea of crumpled paper, but in going this far, her curiosity asserted itself with unnerving vigour. The heat rose in her cheeks as she began snooping through the artefacts of Jack’s wild imagination and she felt a guilty excitement as her fingers raced to plumb deeper. She brought out myriad gritty water colour street scenes, a couple of dusty nickels, pencil shavings and hair polish before finding a pocket stitched into the side seam hiding a leather-bound sketchbook.
She eased it out and opened it with care, ensuring the scraps of paper marking different pages weren’t disturbed. With the seal of her conscience now irreparably broken, she ran her greedy eyes over his sketches of newspaper boys touting on busy corners, men playing cards on barrels in front of a butcher shop and a woman hovering over a sewing machine under a dingy light. And then there were sketches of the goddesses of nature he’d been describing just now. She found a street address at the front. It had been partially scratched out, but it was still legible when she held it up to the light.
‘Hester Street,’ she murmured, thinking the address a bit odd for a man of such sophistication. It was somewhere down near the Lower East Side. She grabbed her bags, stuffed everything back into the satchel and dashed to catch the Third Avenue elevated, telling herself she wasn’t prying – just returning Jack’s notebook so he could finish the conservatory designs.
Rose took the stairs to the platform two at a time, ignoring the slight complaint in her spine and the looks of strangers at her indelicate deportment, then jumped into the carriage with seconds to spare, choosing a seat up the front where she could cross her legs in comfort without any men jostling to sneak a peek at her ankles. She rolled with the rail car as it clanged south, past an orderly neighbourhood like hers, of identical chocolate-brown houses, past the grand Romanesque edifice of the Bowery Savings Bank, and then screeched into the teeth of the Lower East Side, where the belching black smoke from the locomotives stained the faces of the crooked tenements huddling together on either side of the street.
It was impossible to avoid staring into the second- and third-floor tenements as the train went by – the dingy, overcrowded rooms, the cramped sewing nooks, the filthy children hanging over fire escapes. Their windows were open to the world, like tiny, squalid fishbowls of humanity, giving her and the other well-dressed commuters a quiet, comforting measure of just how far above the poverty line they were.
Alighting down south, she realised her emerald-green afternoon dress, though modest by her standards, shone like a jewel among the tangled weave of brown and grey on the streets. She kept her head down and pushed on through the stew of pushcarts, barrels and market stalls beneath ragged awnings, and between the schlepper boys hauling loads of fabric on their shoulders, from the tenements’ seamstresses to the fashion houses up north.
Rose held her handkerchief to her nose. She looked away from the mounds of excreta and rotting garbage thawing in the early spring sun, emancipating squadrons of blowflies eager to find an open mouth, or worse, a nostril. From the corner of her eye, she made out people haggling for everything from fruit to fish to strung-up piglets or skinned lambs. Her stomach lurched as she caught sight of a dead baby seal atop a barrel, its frightened black eyes, and little flippers outstretched to her, as though appealing for help. And as she hurried on, she realised that until now she’d only ever debated the plight of the poor in the abstract or read about them in Jacob Riis’s popular book, How the Other Half Lives. His photographic essay now came to life in full reeking colour and tugged hard at her conscience. She kept her eyes on the broken roadway and when she did finally look up, she realised she was utterly lost, in a place that spoke in an unfamiliar tongue.
She spotted a young boy, no older than ten, lounging in a laneway. He was wedged between the tenements, feet up on one wooden wall, back against the other, his peaked cap low over his eyes, and he was watching her.
‘Excuse me, where is Hester Street?’ she asked.
He pulled his cap up and his sullen young face looked at her blankly.
‘Do you speak English?’ she said more slowly and much louder, as if turning up the volume would magically translate her words.
‘That’ll be a nickel,’ he said. ‘Another nickel and I’ll show you meself.’
Rose shelled out the money and rounding the first corner she came across a horse that had been left to die in the gutter of a busy intersection. The beast was fly-blown, glassy-eyed and panting.
‘Someone get this creature some water!’ she yelled, bending down to shoo the flies from its eyes.
‘You can tell you’re not from these parts, Miss,’ the boy said. ‘This beast is done for. There’s plenty of them round here waiting to meet their maker. Problem is, they rot where they lie. Puts up a stink.’
‘Oh.’ Rose ran her hand along the horse’s jaw and committed the address to memory. She would report this to the A.S.P.C.A. and see to a horse ambulance.
It was when they’d reached the corner of Hester and Orchard Street that Rose wondered if this had been a terrible mistake. She had expected to come out the other side of the hellhole into a row of Dutch townhouses or early Federal-style red-brick homes. Instead, she was picking her way between grimy buildings whose jigsaw of fire escapes bulged with old mattresses and barrels of waste. And children. Down low and up high, helping to hang laundered sheets to dry on lines over roadways, like semaphore signals of poverty.
‘We’re here,’ the boy finally said after they’d crossed a ditch running with raw sewage. He pointed across to a building that looked like an arthritic finger. Rose stared at the four-storey tenement with the street-level shopfront barricaded against the world by a crosshatch of grey, weathered wooden planks.
‘Beautiful lady, paper daisy?’ Rose looked down to see a little girl, holding up a pristine paper daisy between red raw fingers.
‘Go, get on with ya,’ the boy snarled at the girl, flinging his arm out as if she were a stray dog. She didn’t move. She sat, barefoot and pigeon-toed, offering up her daisy. The girl’s shoulders were thin and her dress, probably once a fluff of white petticoats, now hung off her like the transparent remnants of a decaying leaf. But her clear amethyst eyes were honest.
‘Thank you. I’ll be fine from here,’ Rose said to her guide.
‘Suit yourself.’ He shrugged and took off at a jog.
Rose knelt down slowly, as if the little girl might suddenly take flight. ‘What’s your name, little one?’
‘Aleksandra,’ she said in a husky voice.
‘Aleksandra. That’s a very pretty name.’
The girl nodded shyly and cast her eyes towards the paper daisies in the lap of her dress.
‘How old are you, Aleksandra?’
She held up her fingers, their quicks peeling.
‘Five.’ Rose said, and the girl nodded.
‘And where are your parents?’
‘Ma is working.’ She inclined her head towards the door. ‘And Pa is dead.’
‘Here.’ Rose took a few loose coins from her pocket. ‘Give these to your mama.’
The little girl held up three paper daisies for her to take, but Rose patted them back into her lap.
‘Keep those.’ An idea occurred to her. ‘Would you like some pencils and paper?’
Aleksandra gave a shy smile as Rose handed her a few sheets of thick white cartridge paper and a handful of pencils.
‘What’s your name?’ the little girl asked.
‘Rose.’
‘Can you write it?’
Rose wrote her name in big letters. Then Aleksandra gathered her new possessions and disappeared behind a door barely held in place by its rusted top hinge.
Rose followed her inside. The dank, narrow passage had not so much as a lamp to steer her to the second floor, but she followed the little girl’s steps up towards the whirr of sewing machines, holding her breath as long as she could, so the smell of steaming cabbage didn’t make her wretch. Aleksandra raced inside a doorway and the knot in Rose’s stomach tightened as she was met on the landing by a woman, plump, square jawed, features condensed in the centre of her face, eyeing Rose suspiciously and swiping away a strand of wispy grey hair from her narrow eyes.
‘What do you want?’ she said gruffly, in an Eastern European accent.
‘Ah. Well. Does Jack Billing live here?’ Rose tried brightly.
‘Yacob?’ The woman said and looked back over her shoulder. ‘Petra, you come.’
Rose stole a glance into the rooms behind. She could just make out a concentration of people packed into two rooms, perched over sewing machines and ankle deep in multi-coloured materials.
A dark-haired girl wrung her hands placed them on the small of her back and stretched out. Her shadowed eyes constricted as she studied Rose from behind her sewing machine.
‘What do you want with my brother?’
‘I’m a friend of his.’
‘Name?’
‘Rose. Rose Kingsbury Smith.’
‘And why would a lady like you come for him?’
‘I have his art satchel,’ she stammered and held up the bag. ‘He— he needs it.’
‘Is there money in it?’
‘I think there’s a nickel or two.’
‘Give us the money,’ she said, approaching. ‘We don’t want the bag. Jack doesn’t live here anymore.’
‘Where can I find him?’ Rose fished around and pulled out the spare change, and placed it in the girl’s palm.
‘Pffff. I don’t know.’ The door began to close, but Rose jammed her hand in the gap.
The girl scowled.
‘Wait, take this.’ Rose plumbed her pocket and pulled out some more spare change.
The girl nodded, taking the money without thanks. The door closed and a bolt was slid across with a thunk.
Rose hovered for a moment, her mind reeling with the truth about Jack. For a moment she just stood there, rooted to the spot, feeling a strange mix of betrayal and hurt. She pressed her hand to her throat, as if it might smooth her breathing. There must be some rational explanation. Jack was so breathtakingly genteel. Billing was an English name, wasn’t it? So who was this ‘Yacob’? The older woman’s words stuck sideways in her ears. Oh God. The conservatory designs. Would she ever see them again? That thought anchored for a moment, then jigged free. Even if Jack were a liar, she refused to believe him a thief.
She turned to leave but, as she did, the door creaked open and the old woman appeared again. This time, a smile crimped the edges of her opaline eyes.
‘Please, come,’ she said, patting Rose’s hand and urging her inside. Then she pressed a hand to her ample bosom. ‘Galina,’ she said, by way of introduction.
Rose followed the woman into a chicken-coop-sized kitchen. ‘Here.’ She pointed beneath a wooden bench where little Aleksandra sat perched in a nest of paper daisy cut-outs and with Rose’s pencils and paper in hand. She was copying Rose’s name over and over again. The little girl looked up and smiled.
‘Spasibo.’ The woman’s watery eyes held hers until she finally found the English translation for the Russian word. ‘Thank you. Alessa very happy.’
Rose had used the last of her coins to flag down a cab. Dusk was not the right time for a young lady to be alone in the streets of the slums – nor, for that matter, was any time.
Arriving home, she collected her fractured wits and put them back together in a way that helped her see why a Russian boy called Jacob might have transformed himself into the elegant American artist Jack Billing. Strangely she now didn’t feel deceived. She was full of admiration. She stood for a moment at the steps of her brownstone, looking up at the ornate Italianate features, sloping mansard roof, and the quirky little dormer windows diffusing a warm electric glow into the gathering darkness and giving Rose a newfound appreciation for every part of the place she called home. Her father had always said when discussing their designs that perspective was a great teacher – and now she understood exactly what he meant.
Inside, the generous waft of Thea’s roast beef enveloped her, and she indulged Emily Roebling’s overenthusiastic yapping with a tickle behind the ears. Giles received her hat and coat and Rose smiled her thanks, wondering if the old man’s tenure might soon be coming to an end. Their furniture had begun to disappear off to the auction houses and Giles, being vintage himself, seemed a luxury the family could scarcely afford. She was about to enquire after his day when her mother peered around the parlour door, smiling with a warmth not befitting Rose’s tardy arrival.
‘Oh, Amberley-Rose, you’re finally home. How was art class? Giles waited for you out the front of the Art Students League, but somehow you must have slipped past.’
Rose was about to offer her well-rehearsed excuse, but Edith circled her waist with a gently persuasive arm and steered her into the parlour. Rose’s skin prickled. Edith was too genial, and her father’s green chair was too empty.
‘Look!’ Edith grinned triumphantly, holding up a card engraved with gold. ‘Finally, it’s your invitation to a high six-hundreds address on Fifth Avenue. Can you guess from whom?’
Rose shook her head. She didn’t want to give in to her mother’s little game.
‘Oh! Of course you can. It’s from Maude Randall. Seems she’s given you a second chance after all!’ Edith’s black eyes twinkled beneath the electric lamps.
‘Let me see.’ Rose took the invitation and turned to the window to study it in private. The gold lines felt like the bars of a gilded cage, curling around her.
‘I was starting to second-guess myself, you know,’ Edith prattled. ‘I mean, the last time we saw Mr Randall, he was all dolled up as Henry the Eighth, trailing around after you, with that odd papier-mâché head on a tray.’
‘What?’ Rose could clearly remember the carnal gleam in Henry’s eyes as he stepped into her path. And the flutter of her mother’s lashes when he’d addressed them.
‘Did you not realise that was the dashing Mr Randall? Oh, yes. He complimented me several times on your fine turn of foot. He was entranced by your Pocahontas costume and boldly declared you the pick of the bunch.’
Rose collapsed on the chaise. ‘But, Mother . . .’ She stopped on seeing Edith’s pupils shrink as she peered into Rose’s eyes, like she was searching for her soul.
‘As you wish,’ Rose exhaled, to keep the peace as her father had pleaded. Just this once, it might be better to confront the situation head-on rather than continue to fight. It was just one night, after all. A small inconvenience, in the scheme of things. In fact, if she were clever, she might just be able to use the opportunity to repel old Chet Randall once and for all.
‘Good. I’m glad to see your father has finally talked some sense into you, though God knows, it was long overdue. One day, you’ll realise that all this business about liberation and women’s rights is nonsense. The loss of that necklace might just be the best thing that ever happened to you. Really. It has finally taught you how to behave like a true woman of breeding – with a modicum of respect.’
Rose offered no rebuttal. She was too busy thinking that what this had actually taught her was how to refine her penchant for subterfuge.
Edith gave a little sniff of triumph and smiled at herself in the mirror, as if things were going perfectly to plan.