New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [234]
Sunday morning. The street was quiet, but he stayed there a little while, for he was a cautious man.
He turned. This time, he gave young Hudson a thoughtful look.
“Thinking of going out today?” he asked.
“I got to be at the church later this morning,” said the black man.
The Shiloh Presbyterian Church. It wasn’t far away.
“Tell me,” said Sean, “before you go.”
It was three years now since he’d encountered Hudson. Like most of the Negroes in the city, he’d arrived after a long and dangerous journey up the underground railway, whose terminus had been the Shiloh Church. A journalist, a friend of the Negro minister at Shiloh, had asked Sean if he could find a place for Hudson. To oblige a regular customer, Sean had agreed to see the young fellow.
Personally, Sean wasn’t too keen on helping runaway slaves. Like most Irish Catholics in the city, he disliked the privileged Protestant evangelical ministers who preached abolition, and had no wish to antagonize the South. But there were quite a few Negroes doing the menial jobs in New York saloons, and nobody paid them much heed.
“New York ain’t a very friendly place for a black man,” he’d warned Hudson.
“My grandaddy told me we came from here,” Hudson had replied. “I was figuring to stay.”
So Sean had given him a try, and Hudson had proved to be a good worker.
“Is Hudson your family name?” Sean had asked.
“My father was Hudson, sir. And I’m Hudson Junior. But I don’t have no other name.”
“Well, you need a family name,” said Sean. “And ‘Hudson Hudson’ sounds foolish, in my opinion.” He’d considered. “Why don’t you take the name of River? Then you’d be Hudson River. That sure as hell sounds like a New York name to me.”
And soon the young man was registered as Hudson River, and before long this curious name had made him something of a mascot in the saloon.
“Hudson,” said Sean O’Donnell now, “step over and help me close these shutters, will you?”
Together they closed the big green shutters that covered the two windows that gave onto the street. Then Sean went outside and began to push and pull on the shutters, which rattled quite a bit. Then he went back in, and asked Hudson if the latch for the shutters had seemed firm, and Hudson said no, not very.
“Do you reckon you could fix a bar across the shutters that’ll hold them firm?” Sean asked, for Hudson was good at those things. And Hudson said yes. “I want you to do it today,” said Sean.
“We expecting trouble?”
Sean O’Donnell could smell trouble. You didn’t survive thirty-eight years in the streets around Five Points without developing an instinct for danger. From his youth, he could tell from the way a man walked whether he was carrying a knife. Sometimes he could sense trouble before it came round a corner—though he couldn’t say how he knew.
Now that he was older, and had become a man of property, that same instinct had been transferred to his business affairs. His attitude to the financial community was characteristic.
“The way I see it,” he’d told his sister, “since most of the men in Five Points will rob you if they get the chance, and since I know there isn’t a single alderman in the city that can’t be bought, why would the merchants on South Street or the bankers on Wall Street be any different? They’re all criminals, I reckon.” Part of the reason why nobody knew how much money he had was that he refused to entrust it to any financial institution. He lent money, certainly, to men he knew personally and reckoned a fair risk. He invested in numerous enterprises, which he could watch over himself. And he held government bonds. “The government’s as crooked as anyone else, but they can print money.” His hoard of cash, however, was kept in locked boxes, which he hid in safe places.
This expedient, primitive though it might be, had at least saved him worry. Half a dozen years ago, when the head of the great Ohio Insurance Company, having