Please note that we will soon be in Saratoga Springs, where my aunt is to perform her dancing. I have assisted in some of her performances and may again, but will not now say how, as I wish to surprise you. We arrive in Saratoga May 30th, and I expect to see you soon thereafter, at which time we shall make plans for you to steal me. You have my love forever and a day, and another forever and another day.
Maud
P.S. I saw Joseph K. Moran perform in Utica and thought him an affecting person. Please thank him for putting me in touch with you. I await you, Daniel Quinn.
Maud, nothing in my life has been equivalent to the thrill of reading this letter. I confess I had hoped for a hint of your affection, but am overwhelmed by what you have said. I must add that your meetings with spirits and your plans involving me give me great unrest that I cannot solve of the instant. You consider me more powerful than I am. However, I will do what I am capable of doing.
Maud, I send you love.
Capricorn brought the news that the warring factions from the foundry were assuming positions. Lyman said he feared that if word of the presence of the Ryans in the mansion reached Alfie, he and his cronies might seek satisfaction of the bloodlust that was upon them. Before sunrise the call went out for all in the mansion to be ready, and so Hillegond took Petrus’s pistol from its case, loaded it, and sat with it in the lap of her night robe; and Capricorn laid four rifles and two more pistols on the dining table. I could not believe we were anticipating that men from the foundry would invade this grand home to kill children.
As for Joey, he kept himself busy through the night creating a slungshot, a bludgeon fashioned from a rock wrapped in oilcloth and wound tight with string. I saw him in an upstairs hallway flexing his creation cleverly: slapping it with thuds against his left palm. When I saw his mother, Margaret Ryan, and his sister, Molly, at morning, they looked no less affrighted than they had the previous evening, but immeasurably more comely with clean skin and hair and fresh clothing.
Dorf Miller and his company, as well as Emmett and Will, had left the mansion during the night. Lyman stayed in the room long reserved for him on the fourth floor — his aerie, he called it — which gave him his preferred morning view of the Staats woodland and creek, and of the pond Petrus built when Hillegond first became enamored of the wild ducks that inhabited the swamp.
By the first rays of the morning sun the tea was steeping in the kitchen, Matty was taking bread from the oven, and our cluster of souls was gathering near the warmth of the fire. The good feeling among us all seemed inappropriate with a death struggle in the offing, but I attest that thirteen years hence the same feelings would prevail in me when, as a correspondent in the war, I’d speak with soldiers and other journalists around a fire. We would drink coffee of the rankest order and convince each other it was fitting nectar for those about to conquer, or die, or both, or neither.
I must convey now that the fated stroke that aligned Alfie Palmer against the Ryans was an event of historical moment in Albany, for it defined boundaries, escalated hatreds, and set laboring men of near-equal dimension and common goal against each other. In years to come, periodic battles would be waged anew as a consequence of what was about to happen this day. These battles, which invariably took place on Sundays, when men were off work and free to maim one another, raged for hours without interference from the constabulary. The battles (the first was called the Ryans against the Palmers) were in time called the Hills against the Creeks, the Hills being the neighborhood to which Alfie Palmer, and others like him, had risen: high ground that represented a social ascendancy from where the Creeks lived — the low-lying slums, the mean and fetid nest of hovels on the shores of the Foxenkill, that foul creek where the shacks of the Irish erupted overnight like anarchic mushrooms and where the killing of Toddy Ryan took place.
Will Canaday returned after breakfast, and he, Lyman, and Dirck made ready to leave the mansion. I followed behind, and Joey Ryan behind me.
“No, no,” Will said to us. “You stay here. Down there is no place for children. Take care of the boy here,” and he pointed to Joey.
“It would be good for my education to see such a thing,” I said.
“I want you alive to get an education,” said Will as he and the others climbed into the carriage. Hillegond stood in the doorway as the carriage pulled away, and then called Joey and me inside.
“Come in where it’s safe,” she called.
“No,” said Joey, and he broke into a run, following in the wake of the carriage.
“I’ll get him,” I said, and then I, too, was running, with Hillegond’s screams fading behind me.
I COULDN’T CATCH JOEY. He was fleet as a wild animal, and more fit than I for such a run, which was two miles or more across open fields, down the gully, and over the footbridge that spanned the Patroon creek, then up the hill on the far side, where I lost sight of him amid distant houses. It was my assumption he would head for Canal Street, where he lived, and it was toward that notorious thoroughfare that I headed.
Bells welcomed me to the populated city, and I saw women and children walking — toward church, I presumed. People were also moving into a vacant field that began the long slope eastward toward the canal and the river. At the crest of the field I saw forty or more men below me, standing, talking, many with clubs in hand. I sensed what they were about and that they would not be likely to give allegiance to Toddy Ryan.
I kept walking south and approached Canal Street, with its creek coursing beside it. This was the neighborhood called Gander Bay, named after the sassy fowl the Irish kept in the Foxenkill. It was a place of dread and danger, of woe and truculence. Its dirt pathways, which became deep and pervasive mud when it rained, were narrow, crooked, and violable by the sudden erection of hovels that would force a detour. Many of these hovels looked as if they’d been thrown together in a day, an upthrust of uneven boards with no windows, buttressed by sod or raw earth. Looming up among them was the occasional giant of an ordinary house, half a century old, built when this was open space and the crowd had not yet arrived.
I’d been in the area before, but not often. It gave no welcome to strangers. In one of the big houses near the creek lived two old brothers, Dinny Reilly, who collected grease from neighbors to make soap (for a certain amount of grease he’d give you a bar of soap), and Johnny Reilly, called Johnny the Cats, who went to jail at cholera time for throwing dead cats into the Foxenkill. Johnny won his name by living with four dozen cats, and the neighborhood rhyme about the men was known to many:
Pitty-pat, sugar and fat,
Old Dinny Reilly
And Johnny the Cats.
Children were running free, and women were doing their washing in the creek, clothes already drying on tree limbs in Gander Bay’s early sunlight. A man sat astride a backless chair in the doorway of one shanty, arms folded, pipe in teeth, back stiff and straight: prepared for events. Around him lay half a dozen cats and I took him to be Johnny of the rhyme.
“Good morning, sir,” I said.
“It’s a good morning if ye think it is,” he said.
“Do you know where the Ryans live?”
“There’s Ryans the world over.”
“A boy. Joey Ryan. His father was Toddy.”
“Aaah, those Ryans. Ye’d best stay away from that house.”