The Tea Rose Part 54

His memories were interrupted as he nearly crashed into a woman walking past him. Her head was down. "Sorry, guv," she mumbled as she shuffled past. "Didn't see you in the fog."

He caught a glimpse of red hair. He knew her. "Alice? That you?" She turned around. "Aye, it's me. Is that you, Sergeant? I can't see too well this evening."

Roddy drew a sharp breath. "Who did this?" he asked. "Punter."

"Just now?"

"Last night."

He steered her over to a street lamp and inspected her face. Her eyes were swollen to slits.

There was dried blood in the corner of one, more in her nostrils. Her cheek was mottled like bad fruit.

"Jaysus, Alice. You know him?"

She shook her head. "Never seen 'im before. Wouldn't 'ave gone with 'im, but 'e offered me a shilling. Looked like a ton: 'e did. When we got back to my room, 'e went barmy. Kept saying, 'I found you, I found you.' Beat me silly. Went on and on about rats, then pulled a knife on me.

Thought I was done for, I don't mind saying, but I made 'im see that there weren't no rats and' e calmed down."

"You should have those eyes looked at."

"Chance would be a fine thing, guv. I'm skint. Going to see your man down the Bells. 'Oping'

e'll give me a gla.s.s on the never. That'll take the pain away."

Roddy reached into his pocket and handed her sixpence. "Get somet'ing to eat first."

Alice tried to smile but winced instead. "You're all right, Sergeant." "Mind what I said. Get yourself some soup."

"I will. Ta, guv."

The h.e.l.l you will, Roddy thought, watching her go. You'll run right down to the Bells and drink it all. As the fog closed around her, he realized that even if Jack was dead, his spirit lived on in these mean streets. In the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'd beaten Alice. In the barman who would note her swollen eye~ and shortchange her. In the lads who'd taunt her and rob her of any remaining coins she had as she staggered home. In the hunger and misery of all the Alices and Lizzies and Maggies who shivered on street corners selling themselves for fourpence. In the callous brutality of someone like Bowler Sheehan who'd burned forty families out of their homes for a few quid. In the cold ambition of up-and-comers like Sid Malone who were only too eager to outdo him.

Roddy shivered, chilled by more than the fog. Suddenly he wanted to be in his bright, cheerful house. With Grace fussing over him and his supper warm from the oven. He turned and headed north. For home. And a brief night's escape from all of the unfinished business.

Chapter 59.

Nicholas Soames, New York's most celebrated art dealer and a darling of city society, leaned on his silver-topped walking stick and regarded his wife of ten years with a grin. Though she had asked him to come to the riverside that morning, to the cavernous brick building that housed TasTea's operations to see her latest project, she was now so caught up in her work she was completely unaware he'd arrived.

"The new machine is beautiful, Nick." she'd told him over breakfast. "Just breathtaking!

You've got to see it. Come after lunch. Promise you will!"

And he had, though he shouldn't have. These days, the smallest exertions brought on the pain.

He felt it now~tiny slivers of gla.s.s stabbing at his heart. Over the last two years his condition had worsened dramatically, but he'd managed to hide a good deal of his decline from Fiona. He knew that the truth would upset her, and more than anything in the world he wanted to shield her from unhappiness. She'd already had so much more than her share.

She stood about twenty yards away from him, utterly absorbed by the huge noisy contraption in front of her. Nick shook his head. Only his Fee could find this heap of clanking metal appealing.

He had absolutely no idea what it was or what it did; he only knew that she'd had it made in Pittsburgh for the astronomical sum of fifty thousand dollars and that she intended for it to do nothing less than revolutionize the tea trade. As he watched her, his smile-one made up of equal parts love, pride, and amus.e.m.e.nt-broadened, warming his pallid complexion. "Just look at you!" he clucked. She had looked so polished, so elegant, when she'd left the house earlier. Now she looked an absolute fright.

She had thrown her jacket over a stool as if it were an old dish towel. The sleeves of her white blouse were rolled up; there was a smear of black grease across one. Her hair was wild; strands had come undone from the neat twist she always wore. She was snapping her fingers unconsciously, talking to someone hidden by the machine. He could see her face in profile; her expression was lively and intense. How he adored that face.

As Nick continued to gaze at his wife, the machine suddenly rumbled to life, startling him.

He followed Fiona's gaze to its maw and saw that red TasTea tins were emerging from it in an orderly procession along a conveyor belt. Fiona grabbed the first tin and tore its lid off. She pulled out what looked like a tiny white bag and examined it.

"G.o.ddammit!" she shouted, her voice more American now than English.

She pulled out another bag, and another. Then she put her thumb and forefinger in her mouth and gave a piercing whistle. There was the sound of metal grinding and then the machine stopped.

"Stuart!" she yelled. "They're still tearing! Every b.l.o.o.d.y one of them!"

Nick blinked in surprise as a head suddenly popped out from under a devilishly complex conglomeration of gears, plates, and tracks. It was Stuart Bryce, Fiona's second-in-command. She had hired him away from Millard's eight years ago.

"What?" he hollered. "I can't hear you! This sodding thing's made me deaf."

"It's the tension on the rollers, it has to be," she shouted, handing him one of the bags.

Another voice was heard from under the machine. Nick a.s.sumed it belonged to the pair of feet next to Stuart's head. "It can't be! We've adjusted the roller three times! "

"Then adjust them a fourth time, Dunne! You're the mechanic, aren't you?" Nick heard a snort of disgust, then: "It's not the rollers, Mrs. Soames. It's the stapling mechanism. The staple edges are tearing the fabric as the bags pa.s.s through."

Fiona shook her head. "The edges are too raggedy. The cut would be clean if a staple made it.

It's the tension, Dunne. The muslin's being pulled apart, not sliced. Now are you going to fix it, or am I?"

'I'd like to see you try."

Oh dear, Mr. Dunne, Nick thought, wrong move altogether. He took Fiona's jacket off the stool, folded it, and sat down to watch the fireworks.

Fiona stood there for a few more seconds, glaring at Dunne's feet, then picked up a wrench, crawled under the conveyor belt, and made for the center of the machine. Her skirt caught on a nail jutting from a floorboard. She yanked it. It tore. Nick flinched. Hand-woven Venetian silk.

Fashioned in Paris by Worth. Oh, well.

There was a good deal of grunting and cursing. A yelp. A few minutes of silence. A cry of triumph, then: "Start it up!" The monster rumbled back to life. Fiona came crawling back out of the maze of pipes and shafts. Nick saw that she'd managed to get grease on her cheek and that one of her hands was bleeding. Tins rolled out again. She dropped her wrench and grabbed the first one, hurriedly inspecting its contents. A grin lit up her face.

"Yes!" she cried, throwing it high into the air and laughing. "Yes! Yes! Yes! We did it!" As a hundred little bags rained down, she spotted Nick. With a squeal of delight, she picked one up and ran to him. She sat down on a tea chest and dangled the muslin bag-which he now saw was filled with tea-in front of him. The bag had a string attached to it by a tiny metal staple, and attached to the string's other end was a red paper tag printed with the words "TasTea Quick Cup."

"It's fabulous, my love. Just smashing. What on earth is it?" he asked, wiping the blood off her hand with his handkerchief. It had dripped over her fingers, onto her diamond wedding band and the stunning ten-carat emerald-cut diamond he'd given her for their first anniversary. He frowned at her hand. Rough, grimy, scarred in places, it belonged to a charwoman, a laundress, not the richest woman in New York. A woman who owned the largest, most lucrative tea concern in the country, as well as thirty-five Tea Rose salons and over a hundred high-end groceries.

Fiona pulled her hand out of his grasp, impatient with his ministrations.

"It's a tea bag, Nick!" she said excitedly. "It's going to modernize the entire industry! You just put one of these into a cup, add boiling water, steep, and you're done. No mess, no waste. No cleaning teapots or making more than you need."

"Sounds very efficient," Nick said approvingly. "Very American." "Exactly!" Fiona crowed, leaping to her feet. "It's all to do with saving time and effort, you see. 'A new tea for a new century!'

Like that? Nate came up with it. He wants to target young people-modern types who think tea is fuddy-duddy-and create a whole new market. Nick, you should see Maddie's sketches! One shows an actress in her dressing room having a Quick Cup. And there's a typist making herself a Quick Cup at work, and a student having one while he's studying, and a bachelor having one as he's shaving. And Nick, Nick ... listen to this: Nate's hired the composer Scott Joplin to write us a song. It's called 'The Hasty TasTea Tea Bag Rag'! A month now, everyone will be humming it and dancing to it. Oh, Nick can't you just see it?"

Fiona's incomparable eyes sparkled with blue fire. Her face was flushed. Nick, thought then, as he had on so many occasions, that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her pa.s.sion made her so. He found himself every bit as thrilled as she was about her latest invention.

She's always had that gift, he thought, an astonishing ability to make other people feel as excited about her ideas and projects as she was. It explained, in large part, her enormous success.

He remembered how, years ago, she'd convinced the Southern states to drink, TasTea. Her sales in that region had been dismal. She'd tried ads, discounts, and contests, but nothing seemed to spark interest. Her fellow tea merchants said the South was an impossible market to crack. People drank lemonade and punch and mint juleps. Few people drank tea; it was too d.a.m.n hot for it. Fiona had mulled these gloomy statements for weeks, racking her brain for a way to prove her compet.i.tors wrong. And then, one morning at breakfast, she'd impetuously poured the remains of her teapot over a gla.s.s of ice. If we can't get them to drink TasTea hot, we'll get them to drink it cold, She'd declared.

She'd tinkered and experimented until she'd perfected a technique for brewing a crisp, clear gla.s.s of iced tea, then she, Stuart, and a half dozen of her salesmen had marched on the South. They set up booths in cities and towns, flying banners that said, THIRSTEA? TRY A NICE COLD, ICE COLD TASTEA! They tirelessly handed out gla.s.s after gla.s.s of ice tea and coupons good for a nickel off a half-pound tin. Fiona charmed, cajoled, and strong-armed people into buying her tea and they found it every bit as bracing and refreshing as they found her. By the time she and her troops limped home three months later, they'd won the South handily. Nick didn't doubt for a second that she'd convince the whole country to buy her new tea bags, either.

Fiona was humming a ragtime tune now. Laughing, she grabbed his hands, pulled him up, and commenced a giddy quickstep. Nick followed her light .steps, keeping up with her perfectly, then stopped and twirled her around. As he did, a vicious pain shot through his heart, making him gasp. With a great effort, he managed not to clutch his chest.

Fiona stopped dead. Her smile was gone. "What is it?" she asked. "Nick, are you all right?

Tell me what's wrong. Is it your heart?"

He waved off her concern. "No, darling, not at all. It's my back, actually. A muscle cramp, I think. I'm getting so old and creaky, I must've pulled Something.''

Fiona's expression told him she didn't believe him. She made him sit down and started to fuss over him, but he rea.s.sured her that he was perfectly fine. He made a good show of ma.s.saging the muscles in the small of his back, confident the pain in his chest would subside in a minute or two. Fiona, unconvinced, was asking him whether he thought it might be a good idea to call Dr. Eckhardt when Stuart came over to say h.e.l.lo, accompanied by the mechanic, Dunne, a grizzled and cantankerous man, who~Nick learned - had come from Pittsburgh with the machine to make certain it worked properly once installed in its new home.

The discussion turned to the machine's capabilities and Stuart, giddy with plans for world domination, babbled on about output and distribution. Nick tried to steady his breathing, hoping it would quiet his heart. He had to get out of there. Quickly.

A sudden crunch of gears hurried Stuart and Dunne back to the machine.

Feeling as if a giant hand were squeezing his heart, Nick stood and lightly told Fiona that he had to go, too. He said he was expecting Hermione, the manageress of his gallery, to stop by with the weekly report. Hermione Melton was a young Englishwoman he' d poached from the Metropolitan Museum two years ago, after Eckhardt had told him he could no longer work. To his relief: he saw his hale-and-hearty act was working. The worry had receded from Fiona's face. He asked her if she would be home for supper. She said she would. He kissed her good-bye and sent her back to work.

The pain in his chest was paralyzing now. Slowly, he walked toward his carriage. He climbed in, leaned against the seat, and closed his eyes. When he could, he reached into his breast pocket, took out a small bottle, and extracted a white pill. It would calm the struggling organ that was heaving and flopping inside him like a beached fish. "Come on," he groaned, "do something.'!"

After what seemed like an eternity, his carriage pulled up outside the palatial Fifth Avenue mansion that he and Fiona shared. He climbed out and steadied himself against the bal.u.s.trade that flanked the front steps, his tremmbing hand blue against the white marble. The door opened. He looked up and saw Foster, his butler. He heard the man's customary welcome turn into a cry of alarm. "Sir! My goodness ... let me help you ... "

Nick felt his legs go weak as the pain in his chest exploded, engulfing him in a burning blaze of light. "Foster, get Eckhardt ... " he managed to gasp in the instant before he crumpled.

FIONA FINNEGAN SOAMES, her skirts gathered in her hand, picked her way carefully over the lattice of train tracks that separated her tea factory from West Street. A young night watchman, perhaps eighteen years of age, trailed after her.

"Can't I hail you a carriage, Mrs. Soames?" he asked. "You shouldn't be out by yourself. It's dark and there's all types about at this hour."

"I'll be fine, Tom," Fiona said, striding ahead of him, suppressing a smile at his concern. ''I'm in need of a walk tonight. Too wound up about the new machine."

"She's a beauty, ain't she, Mrs. Soames? One hundred bags a minute, Mr. Bryce told me. I ain't never seen anything like her."

"Indeed she is," Fiona said. She stopped suddenly and turned to face the lad. "Why is it she, Tom?" she asked.

"Beg your pardon, ma'am?"

"The new machine. Why is it a she, not a he?"

Tom shrugged. "Same reason a boat's a she, I guess. You never know what it's gonna do.

Sweet one minute, meaner than an old sewer rat the next. Just like a woman."

Fiona arched an eyebrow. "Is that so?"

Too late, Tom realized his mistake. "I ... I'm sorry, Mrs. Soames," he stammered. "I didn't mean nuthin' by it. I always forget you're a woman."

"Thank you very much!"

"I ... I didn't meant it like that," Tom said, hopelessly fl.u.s.tered now.

"You're awful pretty and all, Mrs. Soames, it's just that you ... you know what you want.

You're not all silly and fluttery. Batting your lashes and making like you don't know how to cross the street on your own. You know what I mean?" He took his cap off. "Aw, geez, Mrs. Soames, please don't fire me."

"Don't be silly," Fiona said. "Speaking one's mind isn't a firing offense here." She expected the boy to be relieved, instead he looked pained. "See?" he said. "You never know where you stand with a woman. If you were a man, you'd have tossed me out on my ear."

"Then I'd be a fool."

Tom's confusion deepened. "For what? Being a man?"

Fiona laughed. "That, too. But mostly for firing one of my best workers." The lad grinned.

"Thanks, Mrs. Soames. You ... you're all right."

"For an old sewer rat," Fiona added with a mischievous wink.

"Yeah! I mean, no! I mean~"

"Good night, Torn," Fiona called, stepping into the street.

As she crossed West Street, deftly dodging carriages, trolleys, and the odd automobile, she walked at her usual brisk pace with her head held high, her shoulders thrown back, her gaze direct and unshrinking. That directness-not just in her gaze, but in her speech, her demands and expectations, her entire manner-had become her trademark. She was known for her ability to see through the bl.u.s.ter and condescension of bankers and businessmen and cut through the false numbers and padded invoices of suppliers and distributors. The coltish uncertainty of her teenage years had vanished, replaced by an indelible, unshakable confidence, the kind earned from hard work and achievement, from battles waged and won.

As she reached the east side of the street, she turned to take one last look at her factory, pleased by what ten years of her labor had wrought-the huge red freight cars, each with the white TasTea logo emblazoned on its sides, and the ma.s.sive building rising above them. Behind the building were TasTea's docks, port to a fleet of moored barges standing ready to depart at dawn's high tide. Some would travel across the river to New Jersey, others northward to bustling Hudson towns: Rhinebeck, Albany, and Troy. Still others would sail farther yet, up the Erie Ca.n.a.l to Lake Ontario, where huge freighters waited to take TasTea to the bustling cities that lined the Great Lakes, ports of entry to the burgeoning north western states.

Most women would not find enchantment in a riverside factory, but to Fiona it was beauty itself. Worry wrinkled her brow as she thought about her new machine and what she hoped it would do. She had spent a fortune on it, and she would spend more still. On local and national ad campaigns, on packaging and promotions and new means of distribution. On every plan, scheme, and stunt she, Stuart, and Nate could dream up. Over the coming year, she would be shoveling money at this new venture. It had better work.

She took a deep breath and blew it out again. The frogs were on the move.

She'd long ago decided that "b.u.t.terflies" was too delicate a term to describe the feeling she got in the pit of her stomach when she undertook a new project. These weren't b.u.t.terflies she was feeling; they were big, heavy bullfrogs. She knew them well. They'd visited her when she'd first unlocked the door to her uncle's abandoned shop. And the day she'd ordered her first fifty chests of tea from Millard's. They were there when Miss Nicholson, long dead now, had sold her the building that would become The Tea Rose. They'd worried her when she and Michael opened the second Finnegan's grocery, on Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and every time she'd opened a new Tea Rose, be it in Brooklyn Heights, Baltimore, or Boston.

Nick could tell when she had them. He would fix her a pot of tea, steeped until it could strip paint. Just how she liked it. "Douse the little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds with this," he'd say. "Frogs hate tea."

At this stage of her life, she recognized the frogs as necessary evils, little green demons whose presence forced her to rethink obsessively all her a.s.sumptions and expectations, to streamline plans and expenditures, and in so doing, minimize the margins for error. She knew by now that she ought to worry only if the frogs didn't plague her.

They jumped and bounced now, but even their acrobatics couldn't dampen her enthusiasm for Quick Cup. Oh, the promise that new machine held! If Quick Cup did well in the United States, she would launch it in Canada and eventually England and France, too-markets ripe for a new approach to tea-and conceivably triple, even quadruple, her sales.