City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland by Kevin Baker Page B

awaiting her lady’s maid.
    “We must, uh, fly, Your Majesty. Before he comes back!”
    She gazed coolly up at me, pausing from her work.
    “If he does come,” she said as imperiously as Queen Victoria herself, “you must deal with him.”
    I rushed over to help her, rudely shoving her things down into her trunk. She frowned at me, but finally pulled down the lid and locked it shut.
    “All right. It is ready.”
    “It can’t be done!” I gasped, staring at the enormous trunk. I lifted at one end, but all the heroic gestures in the world wouldn’t budge it. I could hear his steps in the hail outside.
    “Eugénie, my love, it’s almost time!” I heard his comfortable Bourbon drawl—employing both a name and a loving tone that astonished me. Eugénie, the old, exiled empress of France: Could she be doubly mad?
    I didn’t have time to reflect upon it. I secreted myself behind the door and swung my wooden saber down at his knees with all my might when he came through. He screamed and fell to the ground, clutching at his legs.
    “For the love a God, don’ murder me!” he begged—suddenly cut down to my size.
    I was a man of action now. I shoved the sham pistol into his lowered gut, then banged it up hard beneath his chin. Marconi swooned on the floor.
    “Let us fly,” I said bravely to my queen, whose eyes shone with adoration.
    Somehow, I managed to pick up the trunk, haul and shove it out the backstage door, and down an alley to Pearl Street. I was ready to drag it all the way out to Coney Island by myself, even if it tore my arms out of their sockets. Yet a block away, she placed a surprisingly soft, tentative hand upon my shoulder.
    “There’s a cab,” she said—and I was in no mood to argue, even though I knew it would take my last five dollars to get us out to Coney.
    “Where can I take you kiddies?” the coachman grinned down at us.
    I flipped a silver dollar up to him, ordered him to boost our trunk. He did as he was told, still smirking—though I fancied he shot an appraising glance over my Carlotta, or Eugénie, or whoever this strange, immaculate little doll was. I helped her up into the cab, her little hand small and cool and smooth in my palm.
    We took off, clopping at the usual lumber truck’s pace through the streets of lower Manhattan. I knew the cabbie would squeal—they always did—but I figured her Marconi would be reluctant to come out to my territory for her, and if he did I could handle him there.
    “Lower the curtains,” she commanded, inside the warm, leathered coach, and when I did she moved against me, put her arm through mine, lowered her head to that soft spot where the neck meets the shoulder.
    I sat there rigidly, stunned by what she had done. It was everything I had ever wanted, in that one, simple gesture of affection. I was afraid to move, afraid to hold her—afraid to do anything that might end the moment.
    Slowly, slowly, I laid my head against hers, crept my arm around her shoulders until I was actually holding her, like some strong and protective man, her body soft and pliant and trusting against my chest.
     
    “Are you all right?”
    “Yes. Is it really a palace?”
    “Yes. Or it will be. I promise.”
    The cab began to rise steadily, as we pulled onto the bridge over to Brooklyn. She sat up, and I pulled aside the curtain a little, to show her the traffic careening madly around us, even at this hour, automobiles and trucks and bicycles, all lunging avidly ahead.
    Far below, we could see the slips along South Street pier to our left, the harbor to our right—the ships with their running lights like lily pads in a shimmering night pond.
    “Will it be like this?” she asked, her eyes like pinwheels inside the cab, and for once she didn’t seem like a queen at all but a young girl, dreaming of married life and her own first home.
    “Better,” I told her, willing now to say absolutely anything she wanted to hear.
    “Better.”
     
    I was afraid that she