But Daniel did not fling himself at the man. Instead he focused on his sister’s pale, still-gorgeous face and silently implored her to take a sip of lukewarm tea, desperately wishing that all these people would leave his house. He was utterly astonished when, after almost a week of barely moving, Maggie’s big green eyes slowly traveled to the doorway, taking in the strange man. Her mouth worked, as if she wanted to speak but couldn’t quite form the words.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” exclaimed the neighbor lady. What had her name been? Daniel couldn’t recall, but he could clearly see the shocked expression on her careworn face, old before its time from too many children and too much poverty, as she crossed herself.
The gang leaders stopped in the doorway and looked back. They watched as Maggie began to unravel herself from the dressing gown she had been wearing like a shroud, her mouth still working. Her luminous, large eyes remained locked on the newcomer, their deep color accentuated by the dark circles underneath, stark in her pale skin.
“There, now, see?” smiled the newcomer. “She just needed to hear God’s honest truth is all.”
She moved so fast, later the men would swear she was part banshee. That no mortal girl, particularly one who had not eaten, drunk, or slept in almost a week, could descend on a man with the kind of ferocity Maggie inflicted on the newcomer. Given her weakened state, the others were able to pull her off fairly easily once they recovered from their shock, but the damage had been done. The young man, as it turned out a cousin of one of the most prominent members within the gang’s leadership, had been blinded in one eye by Daniel’s furious sister’s outraged fingernails.
Temporarily driven mad by grief, they all agreed later. He could still see the neighbor lady’s stunned and frozen expression, his sister’s red hands clawing at air as two of the larger men held her back, and hear the young cousin’s howls as his own hands covered his face, blood gushing in even, regular pulses through his clenched fingers.
There were no police called, no charges made, no lawyers, no trial. This was a community matter, to be dealt with by the community. Which meant dealt with by the gang leaders. Despite the injured man’s being kin, it was decided that no punishment would be meted out—the girl had clearly been out of her head, and what the cousin said had been right insensitive to the wee lass. But still, it was thought best to get her out of the environment and into a new life. Daniel agreed—not that anyone asked his opinion. In the few weeks it took to make the arrangements, he noticed the injured cousin’s one good eye making a bead on him, and more alarmingly, on Maggie, who had slowly recovered after her attack. She was still a pale and wan version of her former lively, chatty self, but at least she went through the motions of living: eating, sleeping, fetching water from the community well, mending one of Daniel’s socks. She even talked a bit to him. Daniel’s parents had been much beloved in the neighborhood, his father an admired member of the Bowery Boys. In honor of them, inquiries and introductions were made, strings were pulled, and before he knew it, Daniel found himself and Maggie bundled into a carriage, driven uptown, and deposited at the servants’ entrance of the stately Gramercy Park mansion of Jacob Van Joost, Esq.
Maggie took one look at her new surroundings and nodded. This was safe, she decided. Daniel had become everything to her, and if she needed to be a maid to keep him from getting snatched away too, or to keep him from getting killed in a senseless gang brawl, then that is what she would do.
Daniel hated it. He rarely saw old Jacob, but from their first introduction the two loathed each other. He was eleven, fiercely missing his own mother after her recent death, overwhelmed with grief for her and for the loss of his younger siblings. If only you hadn’t gone swimming that day, his brain would hammer at him incessantly. If only you’d stayed and played with them, just that one afternoon, they would still be together. If only you hadn’t gone swimming that day, over and over, an endless loop of guilt. He’d watched his only remaining sister almost destroy herself with sorrow, and was old enough to know they had both narrowly escaped a worse fate than being sent uptown after Maggie’s attack on the young Irishman. He wasn’t a child, either, to be babied by his older sister; he was tough (a Bayard Tough, after all), a street kid, and wanted nothing to do with this namby-pamby, hoity-toity, uptown fancy world with its money and its arrogant, confusing ways.
But he could still see Maggie’s haunted, wasted face in the weeks following the children’s disappearance. He could still see her bloodstained hands clawing at nothing after she’d been pulled off the Irish cousin. So for his sister, he stayed. He learned the fancy confusing manners, he figured out which fork was which, he learned to change the way he talked. He allowed himself to be dressed in hot, uncomfortable clothes, and to gaze longingly at the cool depths of the river but never to swim in it again.
“Did you work for Jacob also?” Genevieve’s brow furrowed.
Daniel shrugged uncomfortably. “It was Maggie who really worked for Jacob. As a maid. I …” Here Daniel paused. What exactly had he done for Jacob? Not much, actually. “I did the odd job or two, as required,” he settled on. “But mostly no, I didn’t work. Eventually I was sent to school, to Eton.”
Genevieve looked even more confused at
