New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [251]
“You Mr. Master?”
“What if I am?”
“Your wife’s up on Fifth by the orphanage in a heap of trouble.”
“Who are you?”
“Billie, mister. I work for Madame Restell. She brought me. She’s in her carriage over on Lexington. Says she ain’t coming any closer. You’d better come quick, mister.”
What the devil the infamous Madame Restell would want with Hetty he couldn’t imagine. But Frank didn’t hesitate.
“Guard the house, Tom,” he called, and with the stick in one hand, and the boy’s arm in a vice-like grip in the other, he let the boy lead him quickly to Lexington Avenue. “If you’re lying,” he told the boy quietly, “I will beat you to a pulp.”
Hetty hadn’t much experience of crowds. She did not know that, caught at the right moment, in the right mood, a crowd can be made to do anything, or will of its own accord.
The crowd wanted to kill the children, because they were colored black. It wanted to destroy the building, because it was a temple of the rich Protestant abolitionists. The rich white Protestants who were sending honest Catholic boys to die so that four million freed slaves could come north and steal their jobs. For the crowd was mostly Irish Catholic. Not all, but mostly.
And the crowd meant to loot the building because the black children in there had food, and beds, and blankets, and sheets that they themselves, often as not, did not possess in their crowded tenements.
They had started stoning the building, and now men were running forward to break down the door.
Hetty tried to push her way through the crowd.
“Stop this,” she cried. “They are children. How can you?”
The crowd wasn’t listening. She struggled forward, but the press of people was too great. She found herself wedged beside a huge red-headed Irishman, bellowing with rage like all the rest. She didn’t care. She beat with her fists upon his back. “Let me through.”
And at last he turned, and looked down at her.
“Tell them to stop,” she cried. “Will you let them kill innocent children? Are you a Christian?” His blue eyes continued to stare at her, like those of a giant looking down at its supper. Well, let him do what he liked. “Will you tell your priest you murdered children?” she challenged. “Have you no humanity? Let me through and I will tell them to stop.”
Then the big Irishman reached down and picked her up in his powerful arms, and she wondered if he was going to kill her there and then.
But to her astonishment, he started pushing his way through to the front of the crowd. And moments later, she found herself in open space.
In front of her was the orphanage. Behind her, as the giant put her down and she turned, was the crowd.
It was a terrifying sight. Its rage came at her like a roaring hot breath. It was staring, screaming, hurling missiles and breathing fire at the orphanage beside her. Now that she was here, how could she speak to this terrible monster? How would she even be heard?
Then, suddenly, some of its many eyes started to look in her direction. Arms were pointing past her. Something behind her was catching a part of the crowd’s attention. She turned to look.
A little way down the street, a side door of the orphanage had opened. A woman’s head was looking out. Hetty recognized her. The matron of the orphanage. The woman looked up the street with horror. But it seemed that she had decided there was no alternative, for now a small black child appeared beside her, then another, and another. The children of the orphanage were filing out. Not only that: to her astonishment, Hetty saw that they were obediently forming up into a line.
Dear God, they might have been going to church. A moment later, the superintendent came out as well. He was shepherding the children into a little column. And there was nobody there but the matron and the superintendent to help them. They just kept coming, as the matron urged them to hurry, and the superintendent made sure they lined up in good order.
They were going to take all two hundred and thirty-seven children out, into that furnace,