New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [235]
As for Sean, he’d just gone to his chest of dollar bills, bought up some property that was going cheap, and continued to serve drinks to anyone who still had the money to pay.
But last night, listening to the talk at the bar, it wasn’t financial trouble he’d sensed. It was something much more visceral, belonging to Five Points rather than Wall Street. The crowd in the saloon on Saturday nights was different from the rest of the week. Hardly any journalists. Mostly local Irishmen.
And that’s what he’d sensed as he’d listened to them: danger. Irish danger.
The Irish community respected Sean. If there were people in Five Points who still remembered his knife with fear, there were many more among the countless immigrants who had come in following the Famine who had reason to be grateful to him for finding them a place to live, or a job, and generally easing their transition into this dangerous new society.
He was still close to Mayor Fernando Wood. Wood’s brother Benjamin, who’d owned a newspaper and written a book, would come into the saloon from time to time. And though Mayor Wood had fallen out with the other Tammany Hall men recently, Sean maintained good relations. One of them, known as Boss Tweed, had quietly told him: “You’re loyal to Wood. We respect that. But you’re still one of us, O’Donnell. Come to me when Wood’s gone …” At elections, Sean could deliver a thousand votes on his own authority.
In his saloon, he was king. Young Hudson had witnessed this soon after he’d started working there. In the fall of 1860, no less a person than Queen Victoria’s son, the Prince of Wales, had made a goodwill visit to Canada and the United States. After watching Blondin cross over Niagara Falls on a tightrope—and politely declining the funambulist’s offer to take him across the same tightrope in a wheelbarrow—the nineteen-year-old prince had arrived in Manhattan. The city had given him a royal welcome, for the most part. But to Irish immigrants, who blamed England for the Famine, his visit could not be welcome. The 69th Irish Regiment, to a man, had refused to parade for him. And to be sure, nobody was planning to take him round Five Points.
Why some well-meaning people, conducting him round the newspaper quarter, had suddenly decided to show him a New York saloon, nobody ever discovered. No doubt they reckoned that, with its regular daily clientele of journalists, O’Donnell’s would be a pretty safe bet. But whatever the reason, at one o’clock that day, a party of gentlemen, among whom the incognito prince was instantly recognizable, entered the saloon and politely asked for drinks at the bar.
Naturally, there were a score of writers and fellows from the print trade in the place at the time. But there must have been twenty Irishmen too.
And the saloon fell silent. The newspapermen looked curious, but the Irishmen were giving the young man a terrible, cold stare. Even a pair of Irish policemen in one corner had a look on their faces that suggested they might, at any moment, fail to see or hear anything. The royal party got the message. They were glancing around anxiously, wondering what to do, when, cutting through the awful silence, came Sean’s calm voice.
“Welcome to O’Donnell’s saloon, gentlemen,” and now his eyes moved round every man in the room, “where we show Irish hospitality to travelers who have lost their