New York - The Novel

his father if he could go outside for a while.
    “Course you can, son—only don’t go too far. Then when you come back, we’ll go to the lodgings and turn in. Get a good night’s sleep before tomorrow.”
    Buffalo was quite small. People referred to it as a village, but Frank reckoned it was a small town really, and you could see the place was expanding. There was no one about, so it was quiet. It was clear overhead, but it wasn’t cold.
    He crossed over the canal and came to a short stretch of riverfront where there was an open area, with some rocks and a stand of pine trees, and he sat on one of the rocks and gazed at the water. He could feel a light breeze pressing softly on his cheek, and soon he reckoned that it was getting a little stronger because he could hear it, now, up in the trees.
    And as he sat there, the image of the girl came into his mind, and he thought about her for a while. He was glad for what he had done, and he wondered where she was now, and if maybe she was thinking about him too. And he hoped she might be. So although he was getting a little cold, he stayed there some time, and thought of her some more, and listened to the voice of the wind, sighing in the trees.
    After that, he went back.

Past Five Points
1849
    M ARY O’DONNELL LEFT the store early. She was moving quickly. Instead of following her usual route past Fraunces Tavern, she ducked into Whitehall, glancing over her shoulder as she did so, just to make sure the devil wasn’t there. Not a sign of him, thank God. She’d told him she wouldn’t be leaving for another hour. If he came looking for her, he’d find her long gone. He wouldn’t be pleased about that. Not pleased at all.
    She didn’t care. Just so long as he didn’t know where she was.
    The area had changed a lot in recent years. Two big fires—the first in 1835, when she was little more than a baby, the second four years ago—had gutted many of the handsome old blocks below Wall Street. The fine old houses, Dutch and Georgian, had gone. The southern tip of Manhattan was commercial rather than residential now. The store where she’d been working wasn’t so bad, but she wanted to make a break, escape from where she was and start a new life. Away from the devil and all his works. And now, thanks to her guardian angel, she might have a chance.
    Normally Mary’s route took her up the East River, past the docks and the merchants’ counting houses on South Street as far as Fulton. Then west for a block. Then northward, picking up the Bowery. She’d hurry past Five Points, then cross Canal by the Bull’s Head Tavern with its bear-baiting pit. From there it was only four blocks more to Delancey Street, where she and her father lived.
    But today, walking quickly up Whitehall, she turned with a sigh of relief into the great long thoroughfare of Broadway. The sidewalk was crowded. No sign of the devil.
    Soon she was at Trinity Church. Some years ago, it had been rebuilt in High Gothic style. Its pointed arches and sturdy spire added a note of old-fashioned solemnity to the scene, as if to remind the passer-by that the Protestant money men of Wall Street, who frequented it, preserved a faith just as good as any piety from medieval times. Opposite its doors, however, Wall Street was more pagan than ever. Why, even the Federal Hall, where Washington had taken his presidential oath, was now replaced with a perfect Greek temple, whose stout columns contained the Custom House.
    She gazed ahead. Back in the days of Washington, the houses on Broadway started to peter out into fields and farmsteads a half-mile or so above Wall Street. But now Manhattan was completely built up, from river to river, for another three miles. And each year, the great grid of New York extended further—as if some giant, with a mighty hand, was planting rows of houses every season. In front of her, Broadway’s busy thoroughfare stretched in a wide, straight line for another two miles until it made a half-turn to the north-west, and continued on its way in a great diagonal, up the line of the old Bloomingdale road. Her destination was a good half-mile above that turn.
    She came to the old Common. It was still a large triangle of open ground, but some while ago a huge new City Hall had been built there. Like some gaudy French or Italian palace faced with marble, it stared proudly southward down the broad avenue. If one looked across the back of City Hall, however, one noticed a curious thing.