Ten days after the wreck of the Anglo-Saxon on the ragged rocky shore of Cape Race, Newfoundland, the schooner Sheila Maxwell docked at Pier 18 on South Street at the foot of Maiden Lane carrying sealskins and salt cod. The Sheila Maxwell had been one of the first rescue ships to arrive at Cape Race to pick up survivors and the very first to leave St. John’s en route to New York. The Count assumed by then that the British authorities would know he’d fled England aboard the Anglo-Saxon, and getting away from Newfoundland as quickly as possible had become an immediate priority. Even with the adoption of his new identity it had seemed prudent to travel to a city outside the formal jurisdiction of the British Empire.
The Count, now calling himself Enoch Bale and carrying the ticket receipt from the dead boy’s pocket to prove his identity, went down the Sheila Maxwell’s gangplank to the pier in the early morning. It was midweek and South Street was throbbing with vibrant life. A forest of masts blocked the view of the East River, and the bowsprits of the hundreds of ships docked along the long row of piers almost poked through the windows of the ship chandlers, warehouses and taverns on the far side of the broad cobbled street that ran along beside the docks.
The air was heavy with a rich combination of smells made up mostly of a hundred thousand tons of horse manure, coal smoke from ten thousand stoves and the animal odors and rich, thick blood of the Hell’s Kitchen slaughterhouses. Over all of this was the simple stink of almost eight hundred thousand people living in close proximity to one another.
The noise of it all was equally incredible: squeaking cartwheels rumbling on cobblestone streets, the creak of ships’ masts down by the piers, the neighing of horses, the rattle of cranes, the yelling calls of thousands of tradesmen, the clatter of hooves, the ringing of bells, laughter, screams, shouts, roars and singing all mixed together in a raucous music you could sink into like a man drowning in a sea of incessant babbling, carousing and madness.
Enoch Bale was entranced. The narrow alleys were capillaries, the streets were veins, the avenues arteries, the rush of horses, carriages, carts and people the lifeblood of a huge living organism that was the city. Here was a place to settle, vanish, live and satisfy any possible appetite. He had found a home at last, perhaps the first he could call that for the better part of nine hundred years.
He saw a Hasid come out of one of the South Street warehouses and followed him to a cramped and crowded street called Maiden Lane, where he immediately discovered what he wanted. Continuing for a little way up the street and into the city, he found a rooming house with an eatery nearby called the Fraunces Tavern, and he took a room. Over the next several days he followed a familiar routine: removing the hidden pouches sewn around the cuffs and side panels of his frock coat and extracting the secret cache of gems he carried there, mostly diamonds, pearls, emeralds and rubies, all of the finest quality and of moderate but not excessive size.
Maiden Lane, as he’d discovered on his first day in New York, was the center of the city’s gem trade. He had no difficulty in converting a portion of his collection into gold, making sure not to attract too much attention, but selling enough to give him a substantial sum, which he put on deposit at the Irving Bank and Trust, which was also traded on the stock exchange. Consulting with an officer of the bank, he opened a trading account with George Peabody’s office, a counting house and brokerage he was already familiar with, having dealt with its London branch as the Count Draculiya, a name now rapidly becoming infamous in England.
The people at Peabody’s, seeing the size of his deposit at the Irving Bank, quickly arranged a mortgage for him on a recently vacated and fully furnished property decorated by the well-known firm of Pottier & Stymus at 15 Gramercy Park in the more socially acceptable area of Kips Bay, close to Irving Place and Madison Square.
The house was four stories, made of brick, and elegant in a plain and unobtrusive way, which was precisely what Enoch Bale was looking for. A good, but not overly ostentatious, bespoke wardrobe from the people at Brooks in Catharine Market completed his transformation. So thus it was that in the space of two weeks, Enoch Bale, fugitive and shipwrecked castaway, was transformed into Mr. Enoch Bale, resident of New York and respected man of means. During those two weeks he managed to liquidate the rest of his store of gems without arousing suspicion, spreading his resulting gains through several banks. Enoch Bale was a wealthy man. All he needed to make his new life in New York complete was the services of his friend. If he was to survive here, he needed Chang Fu Sheng.
Echo Van Helsing and her younger brother, Matthew, arrived at Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Pier 3 in Hoboken, New Jersey, on the steamship America almost two weeks to the day after Enoch Bale’s arrival in New York City. Well-seasoned travelers after many years with their late father, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, Echo and her brother had very little luggage and it was with a minimum of fuss and bother that they made their way to the Hoboken Ferry Terminal a few blocks down from the pier. They had only to wait for the quarter hour before traveling across the North River to the foot of Christopher Street.
From there they took one of the hansom cabs that were apparently fresh to the streets of New York but which they were quite familiar with themselves from their time in London. An American acquaintance of their father’s had suggested the Sturtevant House on Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street as both a dignified and relatively inexpensive hotel in the city, and by early afternoon they had secured a set of adjoining rooms on the American plan for a reasonable fifty dollars per week.
Echo Van Helsing looked out the window of her sitting room. On the other side of the avenue called Broadway, two teams were playing at English cricket, one dressed in plain white uniforms, the other wearing jackets of striped brown and gold with matching caps. The game seemed very sedate, which made the players look all the more ridiculous since Broadway itself was bustling chaos: carts, barouches, hansom cabs, expensive-looking phaetons, farm wagons and pedestrians crisscrossing in all directions, no one paying the slightest attention to the others.
Like in London, the atmosphere was a slightly foggy yellow even though the sun was trying its best to shine down through the smoky gloom. Unlike in London, the buildings seemed much less cramped, the sidewalks and the streets themselves much wider and the buildings taller. Even the people in their masses seemed rather different: the men wore the same sort of dark suits and the women the same sort of fan-front bodices and full, flouncing, silly skirts, but somehow the men’s strides seemed longer and the women’s movements much less proscribed than what she was used to.
It was a grimy, enormous city certainly, with an all-too-apparent rubbish problem piled by the curb in heaps and manure in staggering volume in the streets, but there wasn’t the soot of centuries on the brick or the rounded, worn-out look of ages on the cobbles. Big, brash and bustling, it was a young city, and a city fully enjoying its youth.
And somewhere out there, she thought, staring moodily across the smoky, fuming chimneypots toward the distant river, somewhere out there is the beast that killed my father.
She refused to think of the Count Draculiya as a man, for that he decidedly was not. But neither could she think of him as the supernatural creature her father had supposed. Rumors abounded about his powers to transform himself, to fly, to make himself invisible, but those were only rumors, not proven fact. The only thing she knew for sure about Draculiya was his sinister and seductive ability to bring people under his power, and once they were under that power to destroy them utterly, and in the end, kill them with savage ease and a terrible indifference.
She knew that because she’d felt the first powerful taste of it during their single brief meeting with him at Carfax Abbey on the eastern outskirts of London along with his odd friend and companion, Robert Renfield. It was a fateful meeting that had eventually led to her father’s murder at Draculiya’s hand and her own voyage halfway round the world to bring him to justice. Certainly no man and no demon either, but a beast, an animal, some ghastly primal creature out of history, but a creature that could be caught, and once caught, caged.
“Don’t worry, sister. We’ll find him.”
She turned away from the window and smiled at her brother, who had just entered the room.
“Do you really think so, Matthew? It seems an awfully big city.”
“Not as large as London.”
“Nor as familiar,” said Echo with a sigh. “We have no friends here.”
“We’ll make friends,” said Matthew, trying to look stern. Echo smiled at him. He was handsome, a young version of his father, slight and sandy haired, with freckles, unlike Echo, who had dark features and dark hair. He looked very dapper in his proper frock coat and collar, neck cloth neatly tied, but clothes unfortunately could not hide the fact that Matthew was more boy than man. He was only seventeen and not even shaving yet. Had it not been for the infuriating impossibility of being a woman and traveling without a male escort, she would have sent him back to Breda Castle and to his place at the royal military academy, where he belonged.
“You’re right, of course,” she said trying to put on a smile. “But first we must unpack.”
“Then eat!” Matthew replied enthusiastically. “They have a restaurant here that serves something called ‘ruddy duck’ and ‘tutti-frutti.’ Doesn’t that sound interesting?”
“That depends on how much it costs,” said Echo cautiously. Their father had left them comfortably endowed, but the money would not last forever; they had to be careful. A few weeks in the hotel would be enough; after that they would have to look for cheaper lodgings. The only asset Echo Van Helsing truly possessed was her intelligence, and for a woman in these times intelligence was worth absolutely nothing.
“Don’t be so glum, sister,” chided her brother. “You always look for the worst, never the best in things.”
“That is because the worst inevitably seeks you out and the best is always simply a pleasant surprise.” It had been her father’s credo and now it was hers. She felt a tug in the pit of her stomach and could feel tears welling in her eyes. She turned away and looked out the window so Matthew wouldn’t see her crying. If her father had followed his own best advice perhaps he’d still be alive.
She regained her composure and shooed her brother out of the room. She took one last look out the window before unpacking and preparing for a much-needed bath. The cricket game was over and the players were all shaking hands. In one corner of the field by the gate, a table was laid out with cakes and sandwiches and glass jugs of lemonade. Young black men and women in simple uniforms served the men and women clustering around the table now that the match was done. The women were laughing and chatting with one another beneath their colorful parasols. Down there on the cricket field was the innocent best that Matthew spoke about, but in her heart Echo knew that the worst was coming, and soon.