City of Promise Read Free

generals. Even Mr. Lincoln himself. You can’t involve civilian populations without unleashing the worst inside any man, particularly in wartime.” Sherman’s march, he’d said, the policy of scorched earth, would give them all tacit leave to wreak havoc. No one listened. It was Dr. Turner’s celebrated medical skills the government prized, not his opinions on how to make war.
    Zac unfolded the letter and cleared his throat. Josh waited, knowing what was coming because he’d been told. Zac had gone to Josh with the dreadful news first. There were twelve years between the brothers but that moment they’d shared standing beneath Royal’s corpse had made them conspirators of a sort, contriving to make it easier on the others. No matter now.
    Nonetheless, the others seemed to know without being actuallytold. Even young Simon who was sitting at his mother’s feet, leaning against her knees. He was letting her stroke his hair; content for once to be her baby, though he was fourteen. And sixteen-year-old Goldie, perched on the arm of Papa’s chair with her embroidery hoop in her hand. She had not taken a stitch in many minutes.
    “My dear brother-in-law and friend,” Zac read. “Much as I hope for the success of our mission to burn New York to the ground, I also pray God that you and yours will somehow survive whatever turmoil we unleash. Not, I assure you, because it gives me any kind of perverse pleasure to tell you the terrible news that I have lost my darling wife and my precious three babies to the bayonets of Union soldiers . . .”

2
    I T WAS THE quality in her coming out through the needle. Each time Auntie Eileen inspected a piece of Mollie’s newly finished embroidery that’s what she said. “And,” she inevitably added, “I know quality when I see it.” Usually by then Eileen Brannigan would have spread the bit of lawn or cambric over her knee in order to inspect the tiny stitches that blossomed into an exquisitely formed flower or bird.
    On this occasion, with a log fire crackling brightly in her private sitting room and a winter snowstorm whitening the early December world beyond her windows, it wasn’t needlework Eileen was inspecting. She had her hand beneath her niece’s chin, tipping Mollie’s face to the gaslight so she could see it more clearly. “I know quality,” she said, studying the blue eyes surrounded by tangled dark lashes, and the cheeks that didn’t need pinching to be stained pink. “You’re not a great beauty, Mollie my love,” this while she pushed back a black curl escaped from the ribbon that tied the rest into place. “Your face is a bit too thin and sharp, and the rest of you is far too straight and angledto gain a man’s instant approval. You take some time to appreciate, no denying that. But for any as have eyes to see, the quality in you jumps straight out. She did that much for you, did Brigid Brannigan, for all her foolish willingness to have a bit of fun with never a thought for what would happen next.”
    This assessment of her origins was a story Mollie had heard repeatedly. Auntie Eileen had for a brief time been married to Brian Brannigan, the brother of Mollie’s mother. Just long enough, Eileen said, to cross with Brian and Brigid from the Old Country to the New. And for Eileen to be the one who buried them both within a year of stepping onto the pier at Castle Garden.
    Brian was taken by the yellowing fever, and his sister by the fever that all too often followed childbirth. Leaving on their own Eileen and the month-old infant Brigid had insisted on naming Mollie, though Eileen would have preferred something a bit more elegant and a bit less Irish. “I could have changed it since you were so young,” Eileen always said, “but it did not seem right. She loved you, Mollie, empty-headed though she was. Poor little fool fell into it on the boat. Put paid to all the grand plans to find her a husband in New York once we got ourselves settled. Though from