Never Look Back (108 page)

Matilda loved them both, and knew all their strengths and weaknesses. Sidney was the fun one, a mad-cap who radiated sunshine. Peter was solid, utterly dependable, and she leaned on his intelligence. Together they created a very strong force.

Her first thought was to forbid them to go to Five Points. They might be grown men but they still always obeyed her when she put her foot down. Yet she wasn’t sure she had the right to force them to her will. Maybe they did need to face where they came from! Would she allow anyone to stop her from seeing Finders Court if she went back to England?

‘We’re going, whatever you say,’ Peter said, sticking out his chin in just the same determined way he had as a small boy.

‘We’re not going to come to any harm,’ Sidney chimed in. ‘It might be dangerous at night, but not this early in the morning!’

Matilda looked from one face to the other and realized nothing she could say, short of throwing a tantrum and waking up their wives, would stop them.

‘Then I’m coming with you,’ she said.

They argued with her, but Matilda held her hand up to stop them. ‘If you go alone you might get into trouble. Besides, without me you won’t see the things which might make it a valuable lesson to you.’

Ordering them to stay where they were, she went into her adjoining dressing-room to put her clothes on. She chose her plainest black dress and cape, a pair of stout boots, and a black untrimmed bonnet, for these were clothes she’d bought to go exploring herself.

Taking her small repeater pistol from a drawer, she quickly loaded it and slipped it into a hidden pocket at her waist. It had been some time since she last had occasion to threaten anyone with it, but she always carried it with her back home, and it had become a habit she couldn’t break.

She slipped on her gloves as she came back into the bedroom and looked appraisingly at Sidney’s green coat and grey derby hat. They were too conspicuous, but she knew he hadn’t anything more sober here in New York. Peter’s tweed coat was an expensive one, but quietly so. Yet as Sidney had pointed out, it was very early, and thugs and thieves were hardly likely to be out and about. But as a precaution she ordered both of them to leave their pocket watches and wallets behind.

The previous day’s warm spring weather had vanished overnight. Outside on Fifth Avenue a chilly wind was blowing hard, and although it was only eight in the morning the street was busy with omnibuses, carts and gigs. Matilda hadn’t been out this early before, and it was quite a revelation to see the street sweepers, servants scurrying to the stores and markets for their masters and mistresses, maids polishing door-knockers and washing down steps. A great many of them were Negroes, yet by mid-morning they would have vanished out of sight, to leave New York’s most fashionable street mainly white.

The cab they called took them down Broadway, but as it turned on to the Bowery, Sidney became silent, staring intently out of the window, clearly remembering.

All at once Matilda realized that it was he who needed to see this area again, far more than Peter. It was almost thirty years ago that she had led him and his little band away from here, but for the first eight years of his life these streets had been home, and no doubt he had a million memories he’d never spoken of. Sidney claimed at the time he was rescued that his mother had died, and she had accepted it as true. Only now she wondered about this, for he’d never told her one thing about her. He could have just run away from her, many children did when a new man came into their mother’s life. Maybe having children of his own had made him feel guilty about it?

If that was the case, maybe it was a good idea to come here again after all. It might prompt him to talk about that very early part of his life.

The cab slowed right down in the heavy traffic and up ahead Matilda could see a band of ragged, bare-footed small boys eyeing up a display of fresh fruit outside a store. Just the way they were discussing something and looking all around them made her certain they were about to pounce.

‘Watch them,’ she said to Peter, pointing them out. As they watched, all but one boy moved away slightly, leaving the one on his own to sidle up to the display and begin to pocket fruit. The shopkeeper spotted him, yelled and ran out, and the boy ran off with the man in hot pursuit. Meanwhile the rest of the gang rushed to the shop, grabbed what they could, then ran off in the opposite direction.

Peter laughed heartily. ‘That was almost a military operation,’ he said.

Matilda nodded sagely. To Peter it might look like boyish mischief, but she knew better. ‘That might be the only food they get for a couple of days,’ she said.

‘Is that what you used to do, Sid?’ Peter asked.

‘Worse than that sometimes,’ he replied with a smirk. ‘My favourite target was the sausages hanging up on hooks. I used to get another smaller kid on my shoulders, rush by and get him to grab them. But once we did that, and I didn’t notice there was a barber’s pole sticking out right next door. The poor kid was
knocked right off my shoulders, and we ran off. Later on I heard he’d died, must have cracked his head right open on the sidewalk.’

‘But that’s terrible,’ Peter gasped.

‘It was all terrible round here,’ Sidney said with a shrug. ‘Only the quick and the tough survived.’

‘Sure this is where you want to go?’ the cab driver asked as he dropped them off at the start of Mulberry Street.’ ‘T’ain’t a good place to be.’

‘We have business here,’ Sidney said, handing him the fare. The driver cracked his whip at his horse and drove off, looking stunned that anyone staying on Fifth Avenue should have any business here.

Mulberry Street had once been a winding cow path for cattle coming home from pasture. The old wooden houses which lined it in later years had been the homes of the wealthy, but like all the streets in the neighbourhood it had been taken over by the poorest immigrants. When Sidney was a boy, it had been almost as rough an area as neighbouring Five Points, but its quaint and almost picturesque appearance had given it a certain charm.

Matilda remembered almost fondly the hot sunny day she came here to collect the two little orphaned boys to take them out to New Jersey. But there was nothing quaint or picturesque about it now.

‘The Bend’, as the crooked elbow at the middle of the street was called, was lined with pedlars’ carts and shops, where people were selling things as diverse as cigars, bread, secondhand clothes and fish. But these were not real shops, mostly just open doorways of the dilapidated buildings and boarding houses above, the seller plying his wares from an upturned ash can or a wooden box. A great many people were already milling around, and the contrast between them and the sort of folk they’d mixed with on the previous day was so marked it was like being in another country. Dirty old hags in rags crouched in doorways smoking clay pipes, whiskered, grim-faced men in shirtsleeves, often with a piece of sacking to serve as a jacket, hobbled along in worn-out boots. Younger women were haggling noisily over baskets of fish, their faces as grey as the slimy creatures they were bartering for.

The smell was so appalling, Peter covered his nose. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Human and animal excrement, unwashed bodies, putrid meat and stale beer,’ Matilda said simply. ‘San Francisco smelled just the same back in 1850, but at least there wasn’t the poverty too. Just look at that bread!’

They were coming up to two old Italian women squatting by a basket. Their faces resembled dried prunes, and they pulled bread shaped like plaited wreaths out of filthy sacks with hands so dirty it made Matilda’s stomach heave. The bread must have come from some fancy baker’s uptown, several days before, and had almost certainly been retrieved from a garbage can.

They saw another two ancient crones hacking offal into lumps and shoving it into newspaper for their customers. It already smelled high, and their clothes and hands were encrusted in blood from several previous days’ sales.

Sidney recognized an old wooden house as one which had marked one of the Five Points. A group of desperate-looking men were sitting on the ground outside, one trying to fix some cardboard into an almost sole-less boot. They scowled as Peter’s eyes lingered on them just a little too long, and Matilda hurried him along.

But Five Points as Matilda and Sidney had known it was gone. The Old Brewery, Rat’s Castle and all those other decayed wooden houses had been torn down and replaced by row after row of five-storey tenement blocks with rickety wooden stairs that snaked up the outside. Matilda and Sidney stood stock-still in surprise. She felt they ought to be glad that the terrible place they remembered was gone, yet she could feel no joy, because the new buildings were almost as bad, built so close together that precious little fresh air and sunshine could get in.

Sidney, however, seemed disappointed that he couldn’t show Peter his birthplace. He used the word ‘improvement’ with a tone of regret.

Peter looked up at the grim buildings, ragged washing festooned along each wooden landing in horror. ‘This is an improvement to where I was born?’ he said.

‘No improvement, Peter,’ Matilda said, seeing rats playing on a pile of refuse out of the corner of her eye. ‘Except perhaps for the landlords who get even more rent for each square yard. I
can’t believe that such a wealthy city would use its poor so badly Just look at those children!’

Although it was early, they were everywhere, thin, barefoot, dirty, with matted hair, ghostly faces and wearing rags. Their hungry, bleak eyes, runny noses and apathetic stares were so very disturbing, and it was doubtful they’d been sent out to go to school, more likely just to give the adults indoors more room.

Sidney failed to pin-point exactly where Rat’s Castle had been, or the cellar in Cat Alley where Peter was born, and they wandered back towards ‘The Bend’. Peter had already seen enough and said he wanted to go back to the hotel, but Sidney insisted on going further.

‘You gotta see it all, Peter,’ he said, taking his arm and leading him into one of the many alleys which led off Mulberry Street. ‘I reckon it’s important to know where you came from, if only to see how lucky we were in getting out.’

The stench was even worse here, for this was the domain of rag-pickers. Matilda had to explain to Peter how they went about the city collecting up rags, then sorted them in the cellars of these places, and sold them on when they had a full load. She tried to make light of it, telling him about the day she’d run into such a yard and met Sidney for the first time, but it seemed even more ghastly than her old memories. Another alley was full of bottles of every shape and size, and small, thin children with hollow eyes patiently sorting them.

There were wounded ex-soldiers, some blind, others with missing limbs, arranging matches or cigars on a tray ready to go and sell them on the street. In a dank corner they saw a group of small boys all curled up together, still sleeping. Matilda guessed their lives were just the same as Sidney’s had been, and unless someone stepped in and offered them a home, they’d be hardened villains by the time they were twelve.

They saw children no bigger than four or five carrying a ‘growler’ home, a pint or two of beer in a tin can. One burly man was skinning a small goat outside his doorway, while three or four others stood by, clearly waiting for their share of the animal they’d no doubt stolen.

But over and above the smell and the squalor was the infernal noise: babies crying, women yelling to one another from upstairs windows, men bellowing, and constant banging and scraping
from work going on unseen in the buildings. So many, many people too, despite the early hour, women slumped on doorsteps, a baby at their breast, their dark-rimmed eyes and hollow cheeks suggesting they were as much in need of nourishment as the baby. Men huddled in groups, smoking pipes, looked suspiciously at Matilda and her two men as they passed, and all the time children were dodging around them, begging for money.

‘Have you seen enough?’ Matilda said a little later, for the narrow alleys were making her feel nauseous. Some they went through were full of Negroes, others Irish, Italians or Jews, but whatever the dominant nationality, they all shared appallingly similar conditions. She felt ashamed at coming here like a sightseer, knowing that in an hour she could be back in her fancy hotel tucking into a big breakfast. It was adding insult to the burden of misfortune these people already had to bear.

She had pointed out to Peter that if everyone was to come out of the buildings at one time, she doubted there would be room for them to pass. In truth she thought it was worse than the old Five Points, there at least the residents in the main were rogues, thieves and the flotsam and jetsam that society had rejected. But she could see for herself by the endless washing being hung up, the women with brooms, and the noise of work being done inside the dingy, rotting buildings, that for the most part these were decent enough people who had come to America with empty pockets and a head full of dreams. All they had achieved was to swap a slum in Cork or Dublin, Naples, or Rome, for something even worse.

‘I’ve seen more than enough,’ Peter said in a weak voice. His face had turned pale and he looked very shaken. ‘I had no idea.’

Sidney was still intent on exploring further, but Matilda refused, and taking Peter’s arm began leading him away in the direction of Broadway, assuming that Sidney would follow them.

‘It was very like this in the part of London where I grew up,’ she said as they picked their way carefully through the alleys. ‘But it’s worse for these people, Peter, so many of them don’t even speak English, they don’t understand how this country works, and often they’ve brought ideas from their own countries with them which are at odds with ours here.

‘Sebastian told me a story a while ago about a distraught Italian woman who came rushing into his clinic with her sick
baby begging him to make the child better because she couldn’t afford a funeral. He said it took him a minute or two to understand what she really meant. But it was just that! You see, it’s a matter of pride to the very poor to have a proper funeral, they will sell or pawn everything they own, even borrow money they can’t hope to pay back just to give their dead a good send-off. That woman wasn’t so upset at the thought of her baby dying, child death is a common enough event, only that the expense of a funeral would put her entire family at risk of starvation. Isn’t that terrible?’