Sons of an Ancient Glory (30 page)

If there was one thing Quinn O'Shea despised with a vengeance, it was sewing. For as long as she could remember, she had been all thumbs with a needle.

Although she had never voiced her suspicions, she expected the reason for her clumsiness with the sewing had to do with her eyesight. Close work had ever been a bother to her, for such things as tiny stitches and fine patterns seemed to blur and run together.

In spite of her protests to Miss Crane, however, Quinn had spent almost the entire time since her arrival at the Shelter—close on three months now—hunched over a stack of shirts, stitching buttonholes and shirt cuffs. Her fingers were pricked raw from her clumsiness with the needle, and her eyes watered and burned incessantly.

Today she was finding the sewing particularly difficult, what with the room being dim and gray from yet another rainy afternoon. Her stomach knotted with bitterness as she jabbed the needle through the shirt front she'd been working on.

She had hoped to catch a glimpse of the ladies touring the Shelter today, on the chance that the society widow, Mrs. Deshler, might be among them. Quinn was almost certain she had sensed a hint of kindness in the woman's eyes that night back in July, in the Bowery—a kindness she could appeal to, if given the chance.

Somehow, she must make known the truth about this place they called a
Shelter.
But stuck up here in the crowded, cheerless sewing room, there was no likelihood of that ever happening, she reminded herself despairingly. Ladies from the various missionary societies never visited the third floor.

No doubt, there would be some questions to answer if they
did.
Crowded with eight women—two of whom were in advanced stages of their pregnancies—the narrow sewing room would have been cramped with four. It was dimly lighted by only two flickering candles at each end, and cold and damp in the late September chill.

When she first arrived at the Shelter, Miss Crane had set her to work in the kitchen, which suited Quinn just fine. She had always been fairly handy with food, and if Mrs. Cunnington, the cook, had not turned out to be such an old shrew, the work might even have proved enjoyable.

On Quinn's third day in the kitchen, however, the hatchet-faced Miss Crane had relieved her of her duties, assigning her instead to the sewing room upstairs. Quinn's objections were met with the terse statement that “Miss Cunnington is disturbed by your cough. She feels it might be unhealthy for a consumptive to be handling the food.”

“Consumptive?”
Quinn had shouted. “I'm not
consumptive
! I have a cold, ‘tis all!”

The administrator had fixed her with a look of such distaste that for an instant Quinn felt as if she were, indeed, diseased. Recovering, she informed Miss Crane that since she had planned to leave by the end of the week all along, she might just as well be on her way immediately.

To her amazement, Ethelda Crane proceeded to inform her that it would be “quite impossible” for Quinn to go just yet, that she would be required to stay on until she had “paid her debts.”

“Debts?
What debts?” Quinn demanded, stunned by the woman's remark. “I have no debts!”

The other's thin lips curved slightly in the mockery of a smile. “To the contrary, Miss. You owe us for two days' room and board, not to mention the expenses incurred for your medical treatment.”

Quinn seethed anew at the memory of that confrontation. The
medical treatment
to which Miss Crane had referred had been some weak tea with a drop of camphor! She had seen no surgeon, received no medication whatsoever. Medical treatment, indeed!

In spite of the ridiculous allegations, Quinn had stayed. Miss Crane's final thrust had been too frightening to ignore. “Penniless immigrants who cannot pay their debts find themselves in jail in
this
country, Miss. Either you stay for a full month hence, or I shall turn you over to the authorities.”

So Quinn had stayed on, forcing herself to hold her tongue about the blatant injustices and unfair treatment that went on at the Shelter. Determined to “serve her time” and be done with the place, she followed the rules and worked hard, without complaining.

But when the month finally drew to an end, she was told that she had incurred “new debts” which must be paid. The threat of jail was once again hung out to her.

This time Quinn exploded in rage, making a few threats of her own. In the midst of her outburst, however, Ethelda Crane quietly produced what appeared to be a detailed list of Quinn's current obligations. To an unsuspecting eye, the list would seem to prove that Quinn's meager “wages” in no way covered her considerable expenses.

Quinn was not one to give up easily, but the threat of being locked up was the one thing that could intimidate her. More than anything else, she feared imprisonment.

She had left Ireland to avoid a cell. It made no difference at all that Millen Jupe would have beat her to a bloody pulp if she hadn't knifed him. He had meant to kill her, and that was the truth. She had acted only to save herself. But the authorities would not have listened to a word of defense on her behalf. In their eyes she was naught but a strumpet—a
murdering
strumpet. It would have been the hanging tree for certain, had they caught her.

She could not bear the thought that she might have escaped one prison cell only to land in another!

And so, months after her arrival, she was still caught—as were the other residents of the Shelter—in a seemingly hopeless, inescapable trap.

Meanwhile, she had grown to detest Ethelda Crane as she had never disliked another human being in her life, except for Millen Jupe. Her bitter feelings toward the woman had begun to fester that first night at the Shelter. Even then Quinn had sensed that the seemingly virtuous Miss Crane might turn out to be more foe than friend to someone like herself.

Time, she now acknowledged wearily, had proved her instincts sound.

How she wished she had heeded those instincts from the beginning! Had she known then the ugly truth about the Chatham Charity Women's Shelter, she would never have allowed that smooth-talking policeman to send her here.

Although the place was altogether miserable and grim, apparently it had once been the fine home of a wealthy Dutch family. But that had been many years ago, and there was little left to suggest its past elegance. The wall coverings had long since faded, and the few remaining pieces of furniture looked tired and outdated. To Quinn, it seemed a bleak, inhospitable place with not a single cheering attribute to mark it as anyone's home. Indeed, sometimes it seemed little better than the prison she was so determined to avoid.

The first thing required of any roomer was to give up her own clothing—right down to her petticoat, if she had one—in exchange for an ugly, shapeless brown dress. “We adopt a practical, modest attire here,” Miss Crane was fond of saying when a new resident attempted to hold on to her own apparel. “We do not conform to the world.”

The place was supposed to house women down on their luck, but in reality most of the residents were young girls, some mere children of nine or ten. Others arrived “in disgrace,” as Miss Crane referred to their situation: unmarried mothers-to-be who had no recourse but to seek charity.

The few mature women who did board at the Shelter worked outside, at the factories, while the younger girls cleaned and cooked, or else took in piecework from the shirt mills to earn their keep. No one was allowed to keep even a small part of her pay, but instead was required to turn each week's wages over to Miss Crane, to pay for their “board,” or, in the case of the expectant mothers, to accumulate for “forthcoming medical expenses.”

Even the pregnant girls worked until they were ready to drop. Nobody rested until bedtime, and they were hauled out well before dawn the next morning.

On the rare occasion when one of the newer residents ventured to protest, she was threatened—as Quinn had been—with immediate expulsion to a police workhouse or a jail cell for “unlawful indigents.”

Ethelda Crane frequently reminded her charges that “idle hands are the devil's workshop,” and that “she who does not work, does not eat.”

It seemed to Quinn that the long-nosed administrator did little enough work herself, other than when she whipped through the building with a flock of society ladies in tow. These were usually from one of the big city churches uptown, interested in seeing the fruits of their financial support. All residents were warned ahead of time that there was to be no conversation during these excursions, and no reply to questions other than a simple yes or no.

There were few questions, of course. On those rare times when she had been downstairs during a tour, Quinn had not missed the fact that most of the finely dressed women flouncing through the halls, while duly impressed by the Shelter's “cleanliness and order,” displayed little if any interest in the residents themselves.

And why would the place
not
be clean and tidy? Ethelda Crane seemed obsessed with “cleanliness and order.” Let the woman spot so much as a fleck of dust or a ball of lint, and didn't she act as though a mortal sin had been committed?

Oh, she was a strange one, was Ethelda Crane! According to Ivy Meeks, the one truly close friend Quinn had made at the Shelter, Miss Crane was a devout Christian lady, a spinster woman who had been administrator for nearly four years. Apparently, she was a loyal member of a small congregation who met in each other's homes. Their leader was a man they called “Brother Will.”

The entire group had come to hold services at the Shelter once since Quinn had been there. They seemed a fiercely religious bunch, just as sour as Miss Crane, every last one of them, except for Brother Will. A big man, with a full head of curly gray hair and a great wide mouth of white teeth, he often flashed a smile that Quinn noticed was not reflected in his eyes.

He appeared pious enough, leading the services in the parlor with loud prayers, even weeping as he pleaded for souls of the “lost.” At first Quinn couldn't figure what there was about the man that gave her the shivers, until she realized that he had a look about his eyes that was familiar.

She had seen that glint before, in the eyes of Millen Jupe. It was the look of a falcon set on his prey.

Ivy shared Quinn's doubts about Brother Will. In truth, she and Ivy shared many of the same feelings. Had it not been for her new friend, Quinn would have been unbearably lonely, for most of the women seemed either silent and embittered, or too timid to develop close friendships.

Ivy was just a year younger than Quinn—sixteen—and had come up to the city with her folks from Pennsylvania. They were farm people, Ivy explained, who had lost their homestead when the illness of her younger brother drained the family's resources. Despite their efforts, the little boy had died, and Ivy's father decided to pull up roots and move to the city to find work.

A month later he was dead of the influenza, leaving Ivy and her mother, who was expecting another child, on their own in the city. The two of them came to the Shelter at the recommendation of a street mission worker. When her mother died giving birth to a stillborn child, Ivy could think of nothing else to do but stay on.

Ivy was a pretty, lively girl with fair hair and a quick smile. She worked days at a shirt factory; evenings, after performing her chores about the Shelter, she stole off by herself to study her reading. Her daddy had taught her the little he knew, she told Quinn. “But I'm going to learn more, as much as I can, so I'll make a good impression when I apply for service.”

As a rule, Quinn divulged little about herself. But seeing the younger girl struggle night after night, she finally offered to help.

“I can read a streak,” she told Ivy somewhat gruffly. “It'll be no trouble to teach you.”

Millen Jupe had taught her to read, early in her employment at the Big House, before he turned mean. She told Ivy nothing of this, of course, nor did she let on how it strained her eyes to make out the words. Ivy's gratitude for her help was so childlike, so eager, that Quinn would not have spoiled her pleasure for anything. Didn't the girl have little enough to smile over?

Didn't they all?

Quinn wished Ivy were here with her now. Perhaps they could have given each other the courage to sneak downstairs.

She felt a growing urgency to try
something.
What if the Widow Deshler were here in the building, right at this very moment?

Disregarding the possible consequences of her behavior, Quinn suddenly flung the shirt from her lap onto the rickety table near the window. As she started toward the door, Marjorie Gleeson looked up. “Where are you going?”

“I am going to be sick,” Quinn said, not stopping.

It was the first thing she had thought of to say, but as she hurried out the door and down the dim hallway, she wondered if she might not live up to the lie. Now that she had set her head to making a move, the full import of her decision washed over her.

Her stomach heaved, but she went on. Below her, from the hallway, came the muffled voices of women. Quinn gripped the banister, took a deep, steadying breath, and started down the stairs.