Page 52

December 6, 1880
Thursday
CONSTANCE STOOD AT THEsecond-floor window of the paper box factory, looking out over Mission Place and the junction of Worth and Park Streets, which comprised the heart of the Five Points slum. The window was filthy and fly-specked, but the grime helped conceal her presence.
Night was just falling, the cloak of darkness somehow heightening the squalor. At dusk, a shabby man had come by and lit the gas lamps along the streets—far fewer than in the wealthier districts to the north—and dull, flickering lights had also begun appearing in the windows of grogshops, brothels, gambling dens, flophouses. The feeble pinpoints of light daubed the shadowy doorways of the ramshackle lanes with additional menace. A light snow was falling again. Even in the enclosed space where she stood, the stench from beyond seemed to leak in—a vinegary admixture of decay, rot, and urine.
There was a soft sound behind her, the creaking of footsteps on wooden planks. Turning, Constance saw the heavyset man named Bainbridge, owner of the factory, along with a man she assumed must be the night watchman.
“Going to be here all night?” Bainbridge asked her in a rough voice.
She shook her head. “Just another hour, perhaps two.”
Bainbridge spat a stream of brown tobacco juice onto the floor. “Keep an eye on her,” he told the watchman, then—after muttering a few words under his breath—heaved his bulk down the stairway. More creaking of floorboards, then the slamming of the outer door. She stared down the watchman until at last he turned away to make his rounds, though not without glancing back suspiciously now and then in her direction.
Constance had realized she could not simply loiter around on the streets, looking for her younger self. She would immediately be taken for a streetwalker and annoyed, propositioned, or possibly even arrested. Instead she had chosen a different way to surveil the area. She had given Bainbridge a dollar in exchange for allowing her to take up a position overlooking the Points. She had dressed as a Bohemian, a painter, carrying a shabby portfolio with sketching carbon. She told him she wanted to observe the view before and after sunset. If she decided to proceed with a painting, she’d give him two dollars a week more. Bainbridge, a man who had no doubt been witness to every imaginable crime and deceptive practice, was naturally suspicious, but Constance had paid up front and—as she’d hoped—her story sounded just eccentric enough to be true. An hour earlier he’d set her up at the viewpoint she requested, warned her not to touch anything or speak to any of the workers, and left her to her vigil.
As the watchman’s steps receded, and his form grew indistinct behind the stacks of paper and half-assembled boxes, Constance returned to the window. She could not have asked for a better vantage point. The factory ran the westward length of Mission Place, with entrances on both Worth and Park Streets. To the left was the House of Industry, where the week before she had missed her older sister by the narrowest of margins. It was here that, as a child, she’d come in the evenings, leaving one of the half-dozen hiding places where she waited out the days, braving the nights to visit Mary at a basement window to get some illicit nourishment—a few pieces of stale bread, a half-rotten apple, or a few dry carrots—and a word or two of comfort.
Young Constance did not know that Mary had been taken by Leng. Eleven days had passed since the nine-year-old Constance had last seen her older sister through the bars of the workhouse window, but still she went, with gradually failing hopes. Constance vividly recalled going night after night to the window—chilled, starving, and wondering why Mary was no longer answering her rap on the glass. For a week, two weeks, three weeks, she had come looking for Mary, until at last she’d given up. She never saw her sister again. She had felt she was going to die of loneliness, cold, and starvation, until…
Constance knew all this beyond any doubt—because sherememberedit.
In this timeline, it would not be that way. Everything would change; andshewould change it. Their lives would be utterly different.
Constance could not look for the child during the day. The girl had too many hiding places, too many nooks and filthy cubbyholes, and it was impossible to remember which one she used on which night. The better strategy would be to wait here at the window, overlooking a place where she knew her own younger self—gnawed by hunger, still clinging to hope—would be sure to appear.
Murphy had parked his carriage and was waiting, with Rascal, on White Street, a few blocks north near the Tombs.
All was silent. The building’s night watchman was somewhere distant. Constance didn’t bother pulling out her pocket watch; she sensed instinctually it was eight o’clock. Four hours to midnight. Tomorrow would be December 7. In thirty-one days, Mary would be laid out on the operating table in Leng’s infernal laboratory and die, unless…
Suddenly she froze, her train of thought arrested by the sight of a girl who had just materialized from around the Baxter Street corner. Constance’s heart accelerated and she felt herself flush with a strange, alien emotion—not unlike what she’d experienced when she first saw Joe in his filthy cell—as she watched the little girl scurrying along the street, avoiding the whores, drunks, and thieves. She managed almost to remain invisible as she flitted from one doorway to the next: frighteningly gaunt, a figure so small and wispy it seemed she might dissolve into the falling snow. Constance stared, her mind temporarily paralyzed by a dreadful mingling of memory, fear, and horror, past and yet still present…
Then she tore herself away from the window and ran toward the stairway. The thin, waiflike creature had nearly reached the workhouse, and now, having seen her, Constance could not bear the thought of the girl slipping away again.
“Here, where are you off to in such a hurry?” the watchman barked as he approached from the shadows, certain she was making off with something. Constance shoved him aside, flew down the steps, opened the factory door, and ran across the mephitic commons to the workhouse, where the little girl was now stooping before a window that looked down into the basement kitchen.
“Constance!” she cried before she could help herself.
Hearing her name, the little girl leapt up, with a swiftness honed by self-preservation, and turned to flee. But already Constance was there, nearly bowling them both over, her arms grasping the girl’s terribly thin body.
“Constance,” she said. “Don’t be frightened.”
The girl wasn’t just frightened—she was terrified. She let forth a high keening screech of terror while Constance held fast, whispering.
“It’s all right, Binky. It’s all right.”
The child, surprised to hear this family endearment, still struggled pitifully.
“I’m your friend, I won’t hurt you…You’re safe now…”
Constance tried to keep her voice calm, but she realized she was choking with emotion as the little girl finally stopped struggling and looked up at her. Her face was smeared with mud, the filth obscuring her expression, but the look in her wide, white eyes was unmistakable—the pathetic look of fear and resignation.
Constance took a long, deep breath, and another, then reached out a hand to smooth the matted hair away from the girl’s forehead, careful to maintain her grip. Staring into that face,herface, temporarily took away her words. All she could do was look, and the little girl looked back.
Finally she found her voice. “Constance, dearest…I’ve been looking for you. Please don’t run. I’m here to help you. Mary sent me.”
At the mention of Mary, Constance could see a glimmer of hope in the terrified eyes.