New York - The Novel

perhaps he had brought her there so that the crowd would kill her.
    Yet just for a moment, the crowd seemed to hesitate. Then the woman’s voice rang out again.
    “They’re nigger children, lady. It don’t matter killing them.”
    There was a roar of approval. The crowd was edging forward.
    “You cannot! You cannot!” Hetty cried desperately.
    And then, to her surprise, the Irish giant beside her let out a mighty cry.
    “What are you thinking of? Have you no humanity? Has none of you any humanity?”
    Hetty did not understand crowds. The crowd, despite the fact they hated her, had hesitated to attack her for one reason only: she was a lady. But the giant beside her was a man. One of their own. And now a traitor, siding with their enemy to rebuke them. With a scream of rage, two women rushed at him. The men were close behind. If they might not have the children, then they’d have him. He was fair game.
    His size did him no good at all. A giant is nothing to a crowd. It had him down in no time.
    Hetty had never seen a mob attack a man. She did not know its violence and its power. They started with his face, punching, and kicking with their heavy boots. She saw blood, heard splintering bone, then could see nothing at all, as they threw her across the street, and his body disappeared under a rabble of men, stamping with all their strength and weight, again and again and again.
    When they broke off, the Irish giant had almost disappeared.
    The crowd had entered the orphanage now. There was plenty there for everyone. Food, blankets, beds: the home was stripped bare. But the children, thanks be to God, had been left to walk quickly away.
    So Hetty slowly got up, and looked down at the pulped mess that had once been a mighty body with a face, and dragged herself into Fifth Avenue. And there, scarcely knowing what was happening to her, she suddenly felt a pair of strong arms around her and saw her husband’s face. Then she clung to him, as he helped her stagger down to the reservoir and eastward along Fortieth until, at the next avenue, he lifted her into the big carriage that had brought him.
    “Thank God you came,” she murmured, “I was looking for you all day.”
    “I was looking for you, too.”
    “Never leave me again, Frank. Please never leave me.”
    “Never again,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “Never, as long as I live.”

    When Sean O’Donnell looked around his saloon in the early evening, he knew he was right to make Hudson stay in the cellar. All over the West Side, the crowds had been attacking the black people, burning their houses, beating them up. There were rumors of lynchings. Over at St. Nicholas Hotel, the mayor had been joined by the military. Troops were being summoned. President Lincoln had been telegraphed. With the Confederates in retreat after Gettysburg, he must spare them some regiments before New York went up in flames. A body of gentlemen had armed themselves with muskets and gone to defend Gramercy Park. Sean was glad of that. Meanwhile, he’d seen fires coming from Five Points.
    “It can’t be long now,” he warned his family. “We’ll be next.”
    It was a quarter of an hour later that a vigorous figure with the face of an adventurer and long, drooping mustaches strode into the saloon. Sean smiled.
    “Mr. Jerome. What’ll you have?”
    Sean liked Leonard Jerome. The daring financier might not have been born at Five Points, but he had the instincts and the courage of the street fighter. He mostly ran with the rich sporting crowd like August Belmont and William K. Vanderbilt. But Jerome liked newspapers and newspapermen too. The rumor was that he was invested in newspapers. And he’d come into the saloon once in a while.
    Once Sean had asked him where his family came from.
    “My father’s name was Isaac Jerome, so Belmont says I must be Jewish.” Jerome had laughed. “Of course, you have to remember that Belmont’s name was Schoenberg, before he changed it. But the truth’s less interesting. The Jeromes were French Protestants. Huguenots. Came over in the 1700s. Farmers and provincial lawyers mostly, ever since.” He’d grinned. “My wife’s family swears they’ve got Iroquois blood, though.”
    “You believe it?”
    “A man should always believe his wife, sir.”
    In answer to Sean’s question now, he answered: “Whiskey, Mr. O’Donnell. A large one. I’ve a busy night ahead.”
    “You expecting trouble?”
    “I thought they’d burn my