Four flights of stairs they climbed of the high-shouldered building, which itself stretched upwards above the world of commerce below. The effort was repaid in full when arriving in their rooms she saw, across from them on the corner of Milk Street, the nestled campaniles of the Old South Meeting House; how they ascended like a pinnacled prayer to the steepled sky.
She knew she would love it here ‘on top of the world’, as she said to Lavelle. They had three rooms. One large, with two windows, for living in, and above that, two smaller rooms, each lighted by dormers, for sleeping. The larger one for herself and the girls, the smaller for Patrick. She had considered giving the three children the larger one, her taking the lesser room. But Patrick was of an age now.
It was close to everywhere. The Wharf and their warehouse, the Common, shops, churches, schools. The Old Corner Bookstore – which she had commenced frequenting before she left – now only a hen’s footstep away. Beneath their roost, on the next floor down, were commercial offices. Below that again, suppliers of mathematical instruments, while a sewing shop for ladies’ garments and a dye house occupied the street level of the premises.
She was grateful to Lavelle. He had gone to some trouble to find this place, knowing how much she preferred the rattle and hum of city life above the quiet of some numbing suburb. The frantic commercial life of ‘Hub City’, as Bostonians liked to call it, was rapidly devouring all available space here at its centre. She wondered how long it would be before trade and commerce would drive further out the dwindling number of inhabitants, like themselves. Where they now stood would soon enough fall into use as an instrument-maker’s den, or a sewing sweatshop. But while ever they could remain here, she knew she would be happy.
When she had thanked him again, Lavelle left and she began to settle them into their new home, high above the world of clarion calls and the street noise of Boston, far from the hushed valleys they had known.
Jacob Peabody made an exaggerated fuss of her when, the following week, she came to visit him at his premises on South Market Street across from Faneuil Hall. On top of the Hall’s domed cupola, its weathervane – a copper grasshopper – spun from side to side, busily welcoming her back.
Now Peabody, white-domed and wrinkle-faced, grass-hopped from behind his counter to welcome her, rubbing his hands on the white apron he kept on a peg, but which she had never seen him wear. ‘Ellen! Ellen Rua!’ he exclaimed, both arms outstretched, a bleak shaft of October sun diagonally lighting one eye and a flop of his white hair, vesting him with a kind of manic enthusiasm. He clasped her to him. He not being quite the match of her in height, her head ended up over the shoulder of his well-seasoned cardigan. In its wool the smell of salted hams, spices from the East, tobacco from the Deep South, all indiscriminately buried there.
‘Jacob, I’m going to reek of pork and spices just like you,’ she laughed. ‘Let go of me! Anyway, I thought it forbidden by your beliefs to sell certain things,’ she added, unable to resist poking fun at him. He laughed with her, held her back from him, the snow-white eyebrows arched, the canny eyes taking her in.
‘Ah, Ellen, you are as beautiful as ever. Weary from your travels, I can tell …?’ He paused. ‘And beyond that a certain sorrow …’ He had never changed, could tell everything and then never hesitated in its saying. ‘But underneath,’ he went on, ‘your spirit has not changed. Look at you, the first minute you are here flinging the beliefs of an old man in his face. It’s good to have you back – back home in Boston,’ he beamed. And he clasped her to him again in his pork and spice way.
It felt good to her to be back. And Boston was home. The sounds, the smells, the bustle of Quincy Market, the air spiced with possibility instead of the pall of oppression which hung over Ireland. And good old reliable but mischievous Jacob. He had been a tower of strength before she had left on her journey to Ireland.
He made her tea, Indian, from the Assam Valley, closed his door against the world and bade her sit. ‘I want to hear every word, Ellen,’ he emphasized. ‘I’ve missed the music of your voice – the Boston drawl has little music to it – as flat and as cold as the Quincy marble that built the place!’
Whatever about missing her, Jacob still didn’t miss any chance to snipe at his adopted city. Some day she’d ask him about that and Papa Peabody, as he called his father, and the change of name from something Jewish to Peabody. Whatever his origins, Jacob had built up a commodious store on South Market Street. It was frequented alike by well-heeled clientele from Beacon Hill, the literati of Louisburgh Square and Boston’s rising middle class. Always well stocked with the exotic and the oriental and anything in between, pickled gherkins to spiced Virginia hams, ‘Peabody’s’ did a thriving business.
When she and Lavelle had first arrived in Boston, they had decided that rather than she go to the factory gates and Lavelle to ‘build railroads to build America’, they would invest in some business. The wine had been her idea, after Australia – being all that she knew apart from potato picking in Ireland. She had written to Father McGauran, the chaplain she had befriended in Grosse Ile, with the idea that she could import French wine from French Canada. Through the old Seigneurie connections of the Catholic Church in Québec’s province, Father McGauran had found them Frontignac, Père et Fils, Wine Merchants, importers of vin supérieur de France.
Soon the deliveries came. Crates of full-bodied reds and clean-on-the-palate whites, from the châteaux of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Sparkling mousselet from the chilly hills and chalk caverns of Champagne. Darker – liqueured aromas too, matured in oaken barriques; coveted by angels in the deep cellars of Cognac. All signed with the flourished quill of Jean Baptiste Frontignac, their quality guaranteed with the red waxen seal of the French cockerel. At first, she had approached the Old English-style merchants of Boston – the Pendletons and Endecotts. Politely but firmly they had turned her away, astounded at her nerve, she only ‘jumped-up Irish and selling French wines!’
Finally, she had happened upon Peabody’s place. Although at the time uncertain of his motives – the way he had taken her hand, lingered over it – Jacob had taken a chance on her, when no one else would.
She too had taken a chance on Peabody, devising an ‘at cost’ agreement with the merchant. The terms by which it operated guaranteed that she and Lavelle would deliver him the finest of wines and brandies, at cost, taking no profit. Peabody, when he had sold their wines, would then split the profits with them. Further, she had convinced Peabody to give their wines a separate display from the rest, near the entrance, on shelves specially constructed by Lavelle. It had been a risk but it had worked and Jacob had opened a second such store.
As the story of her journey to Ireland unfolded, Jacob Peabody again held on to her hands, rubbing them underneath in the fleshy part, but not in the suggestive, wicked way that was normally his wont, but of which she took little notice. Now, he comforted her, his sharp eyes on her face watching, understanding.
It surprised her how much she opened herself up to Jacob. Not nearly so much had she to Lavelle. To this Jewman, who had changed his name to survive in Nativist Boston – a city as zealous in attitude to Jews as it was towards ‘papist Celts’ – but had closed his shop to listen to her story. When she had finished, it was as though a great weight had lifted from her.
Peabody waited before speaking. She had suffered much, more than most who had found their way here to the Bay Colony. But she had an indomitable spirit. Time and America would heal her loss, if she let them. She was angry now at the ‘Old Country’ and all it had inflicted on her. But that would pass. He hoped that, on its passing, it would not be replaced by the misbegotten love for their native land, so often the fruitful cause of insanity among the Irish here.
At last he spoke. ‘Ireland is behind you now, Ellen,’ he said tenderly, still stroking her hand, like a father. ‘A new life in the New World beckons. Try, not to forget, but to remember less. It works, Ellen, believe me,