New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [284]
“Here.” He gave her a key. “Nobody can go out in this weather.” He pointed to the stairs. “Up there. Second on the left.”
But he didn’t offer to help the bitch with her bags.
Looking out of her window across Central Park, while Frank sat in a hot bathtub, Lily de Chantal watched the wind whip tornadoes of snowflakes across the empty spaces. In Gramercy Park, for some time, Hetty had gazed in puzzlement at the strange telegram that had come for Frank earlier in the evening, from Boston, asking him if he was selling a railroad. But now, hearing the strange howl and whistle of the wind, she pulled back the curtains and looked out in astonishment to see a maelstrom of snow, and hoped poor Frank was safe, out on the cold waters of the Hudson, on such a terrible night.
Where on earth, she wondered, could such a blizzard have come from?
It had come from the west. A great snowstorm with freezing wind, carried all the way across the continent from the Pacific on an icy airstream, at six hundred miles a day. But it took two to make this storm. Up from Georgia had come a huge, moist, warm front. Near the mouth of the Delaware River, some hundred and twenty miles below New York, the two had collided.
The temperature had fallen, pressure had plummeted, and suddenly the sea and the river had been whipped into a fury. Then, up the coast, had come a mighty blizzard. Soon after midnight, New York’s rain turned to snow, the temperature dived below freezing, and the wind began to gust at eighty miles an hour.
It went on all night. When dawn came—or should have come—the blizzard ignored it, smothered it, blotted it out. As the hours of morning passed, the whole north-eastern seaboard and every creature on it was swallowed up in the great, white hurricane.
There was nothing they wouldn’t do for you at the Dakota. But this went so far beyond the call of duty that Lily de Chantal was almost embarrassed. The porter’s boy didn’t mind, though; he seemed to relish the challenge, and the porter assured her: “This boy of mine could find his way to the North Pole and back, Miss de Chantal. Don’t worry about him.”
So she gave young Skip the note, and told him to be careful.
It was ten o’clock on Monday morning when Skip left the building. He was fourteen years old, small for his age, but wiry. He was wearing stout boots with a heavy tread, and his leggings were tied tightly with string around his ankles. He wore three sweaters and a short coat, which made it easier to move. He had a thick wool cap over his head, earmuffs, and a scarf wound round his face. Skip was happy.
As he left the safety of the big entrance yard, he’d already decided what to do. There was no point in trying to cross the park, which was like an arctic landscape, with the blizzard blowing as hard as ever. He didn’t even try to go down beside it. Instead, he walked west half a block and turned down Ninth Avenue. A few blocks south, and he’d be able to pick up the great diagonal of Broadway.
It wasn’t easy even to walk. The icy gusts almost blew him off his feet, the wind was so strong that the snow couldn’t settle in any normal pattern. In some places, it had driven the snow into drifts that were already above his head. In other places, where the wind had almost brushed it clean, he could see the ground.
The avenue was almost empty. People had tried to get to work—this was New York, after all—but most had been forced to give up. The El above him was silent, its tracks so solid with ice that, even had an